Perfect, Unexpected Translations
Some Things Change
I’ve been on the Gears of War bandwagon for the better part of a decade. There’s just something wonderful about a gritty world, full of gray tones, inhabited by a bunch of sad humans and mad subterraneans beasties, using guns with chainsaws attached. Is it the simple, focused narrative (when it pops up between firefights)? Is it the feel and the punch of the wild firearms used throughout? The muted aesthetic, punctuated by bursts of radioactive gasoline and deep blood? The, and I can never stress this enough, chainsaws attached to assault rifles?
Maybe that’s why I was so excited to try out Gears Tactics (2020) from The Coalition; because it was unabashedly and truly still Gears, just in a different form. Whereas the main series is a third-person, cover-based shooter, Tactics is, true to its name, a turn-based tactics game: players use planning, strategy, and unique class abilities to turn the tide of battle, not quick reflexes and hand-eye coordination.
After a disastrous toe-dip into turn-based tactics with XCOM 2, you would think that tactics-style games would be a pretty hard no from me. But Gears Tactics bridged that divide by using the familiar against the new, by translating what I knew into a different form. And they’re not the first ones to do.
Wars and Tactics
Gears Tactics excels at such a shift in gameplay by being part of an established universe. Everything that players remember from Gears of War’s traditional iterations is here in spades. The feel and sound of the weapons, the frequent perspective shifts to over-the-shoulder, the classic movement (roadie-running and sliding into cover), the gruff and grizzled voice delivery, the brutal executions, and, of course, the comically exaggerated gibbing and bodies falling apart when defeated. When developers put all of those familiar elements at the forefront, it helped to soften the transition of new mechanics and new gameplay.
That same shift worked so well because, due to all of those elements, Tactics felt like a Gears game in more than just name. The tactics players would use could be seen in gameplay from the traditional Gears games: running up to execute an enemy with a chainsaw, even if it put you in harm’s way; unloading an entire chain of gatling gun shots into an area to keep enemies down; ducking and weaving around cover to get close enough to use a shotgun; or sacrificing a grenade to prevent reinforcements from crawling out of the earth.
In a series so defined by doing one game style really well, Tactics is a welcome addition. Players familiar with the Gears world see that those same elements that defined the main series translated perfectly into the tactics-genre, seamlessly bridging the gap between two starkly different gameplay genres.
Guns and Gab
Shooters to tactics is one shift, but the most stark shift may belong to the Borderlands series. Once only an open-world first-person-shooter defined by hilarity, absurdity, and more guns than you can shake a fist at, Borderlands translated their entire vibe and world into an episodic narrative. Working with Telltale Games, Borderlands picked up the gun-obsessed, brightly colored, absolutely bonkers world they’d created and jammed it into something that fits in next to The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us.
The style and vibes of the worlds remained intact. The hypercorporate governing powers behind the main games’ arsenals on full display. The game pivoted, not necessarily away from the familiar action, but into the goings-on between the bombast and thrill happening in the main entries. Whereas players control super-powerful Vault Hunters, like soldiers and psychics, in the main entries, now players control comparably comparably mundane con artists and a company workers. Quick-time events and narrative decisions replaced strategy and firearm preference. Dialogue replaces bullets, and intrigue replaces traditional challenge. There are plenty of familiar elements on display (both in aesthetic and characters), but it feels right. It feels natural. It feels like just another perspective in the world of Borderlands, just with less of an overt gun fetish.
Horror and Terror
Resident Evil underwent a dynamic shift in 2004 with the release of Resident Evil 4. But, if you’re like me, that might’ve been the first Resident Evil you ever played. Let’s work through the traditional perspective first.
Anyone who played Resident Evil up to 2004 had certain expectations of the series: players control their characters like a tank (forward, backward, turn, aim), ammunition is precious, enemies are sponges for punishment, inventory space is limited, and everything wants you dead. Everything in the original Resident Evil entries were staples and hallmarks of horror. Thinking of it objectively, it’s surprising how many similar facets moved from the “old” entries to Resident Evil 4.
The main character controls like a tank: you can only move forward and backward, turn, and aim (with a little bit of give for moving slightly to the side); ammunition is precious, especially as enemies still take a beating to go down; inventory space is still limited, even as the six-to-eight slots of old were upgraded to an adjustable grid; and everything still wants you dead. For as revolutionary as certain elements of RE4 were (free, laser-targeted aiming; over-the-shoulder gameplay perspective, instead of fixed-angles), it was still just a translation of everything the series had set up before. But whereas the old series excelled in horror, Resident Evil 4 pivots towards terror.
By Resident Evil standards, horror is long-form: anticipatory, suspenseful, uncertain. Round a corner, BLEH, a zombie! How much health do you have left? Depends on how heavy of a limp your character has! Make your best guess, champ! Should you save your game in exchange for a precious Ink Ribbon item? Maybe you can push a little further. Maybe. Resident Evil 4 deals in the short-form, in terror: overwhelming players with mass amounts of enemies, balancing the limited resources available, encounters with screaming, chainsaw-wielding baddies, tense quick-time events before the market became saturated with them. To balance out the onslaught, Resident Evil 4 does away with the Save Game mechanics of its predecessors, sprinkling in checkpoints throughout the experience for ease of trying again. It recognizes that its power is in the sudden jolts, the rapid spike of cortisol and anxiety, not the slow-burn tiptoeing of its predecessors. Getting you back to those jolts as quickly as possible puts it in its strongest position.
And even when you think about it backwards, as a player who started with RE4 and experienced the earlier installments afterwards, it still tracks, just in reverse. Familiar, but different controls; rare, precious ammo availability; enemies who beg avoidance over engagement; limited inventory space; everything wants you dead, including crows. Crows! Nature’s perfect goth friend, now more bloodthirsty than ever.
Regardless of which direction you play the games, they translate seamlessly from one form into the other, and that, in and of itself, is impressive enough.
2D and 3D
Super Mario Bros. (1985) set the standard for platforming games, home video games, and, arguably video games as a whole. It was simple to pick up and learn (its first level being touted as one of the most effective tutorials ever created), challenging for all range of players, and whimsical in both aesthetic and sound design. So, Nintendo kept betting on the sure horse. Super Mario Bros. 2 (1988) and 3 (1990), Super Mario Land (1989) and its sequel (1992), Super Mario World (1991). Same vibe, same style, slightly different hardware (or understanding of hardware) each time. Here’s your level, go right until you reach the goal, godspeed, you wild plumber.
And then the Nintendo 64 happened.
Three whole dimensions of movement. Three whole dimensions of world. Three whole dimensions of Mario. So they made the leap into something inexorably different, and perfect nonetheless.
The aesthetic was easy: Mario games are always bright and colorful (hardware-permitting), and had underlying feelings of whimsy to them. Yes, there was the challenge of completing a level, but everything getting to that end felt no less fanciful. Just take what worked and make it 3D. Musically, similar principle: just get the same guy who did the originals (Koji Kondo) on-board again. And it’s Mario, so he’s gotta jump, right? Just make him jump in 3D. Easy peasy.
The gameplay is where the difference is most stark: there are worlds, or levels, but players aren’t just bum-rushing it to the end. Each world contains a number of Power Stars that are hidden away behind special enemies, puzzles, or challenging platforming sections. Players couldn’t brute-force their way through a level with the right power-ups. They had to stop, think, and properly explore every inch of the various worlds to overcome its various riddles, or survive its gauntlets. They had to be cautious, but also, at times, quick. There was no time limit, unlike its predecessors (Yoshi’s Island notwithstanding). Players could afford to explore, get lost, and discover something new and unexpected. It set the standard for Mario’s 3D adventures, because it was, at its core, a perfect translation.
Super Mario 64 was something completely different, seemingly necessitated by the jump from two-dimension pixels the three-dimensional polygons. It translated exactly what it needed to in order to welcome a new generation of players to the Mario world, while still inviting its original base back for another adventure.
Some Things Stay the Same
There are plenty of reasons for games to make a jump to something different. Maybe developers saw it as a challenge, of trying to bring what worked so well previously into a different gameform. Maybe it was the next logical step, lest the old formula grow stagnant and stale. Maybe advancements in technology necessitated an “adapt or die” sentiment. Maybe, sometimes, publishers just see a good opportunity to profit from a different target demographic. But whatever the reason, the translations between what was and what it became are fascinating to watch. With the entire medium of gaming changing as rapidly as it is, I’m excited to see what new iterations and translations await on the horizon.
