u/H358

I just finished Small Saga, an indie turn based RPG which got ported to Switch on Friday, inspired by animal centric stories like Secret of NIMH. And I found it to be a delightful experience from start to finish.

It tells the story of Verm, a mouse on a quest for revenge training to kill a god…

The god in question being…the exterminator that killed his brother. The game knowingly leans into the JRPG escalation to fight god, and puts a different spin on it through its smaller runtime and minature of rodent colonies across London, and the way the various species interact not only with each other but also with humankind.

It condenses the adventure and character growth of an RPG into a really compact, satisfying adventure. All the characters are extremely likeable and get satisfying exploration in only 8 hours. And it’s extremely gratifying how unabashedly queer both the main and supporting cast are. Though I think the humour is going to be a matter of taste. I think the extremely contemporary humour with characters calling each other ‘soft boi’ and ‘twink’ in this low fantasy NIMH esque setting will be fairly subjective but it clicked with me.

But behind the slightly Tumblr core humour the game is quite adapt at juggling multiple tones and extremely direct in its depiction of overcoming facism, struggling with the desire for revenge, and the difficulty of tearing down and rebuilding a broken system. All while celebrating queerness at every turn. And this is all bolstered by gorgeous pixel art and an excellent soundtrack.

The game uses turn based combat with no random encounters and no experience points. Battles are pretty much only limited to mandatory encounters and level ups are given at specific plot milestones, allowing you to spend and reallocate an increasing number of skill points to build your characters. This makes progression extremely slick and free of repetition, with gameplay upgrade tied to the story and character development. That being said, it’s also incredibly easy. This new Switch ports adds a hard mode and arena battles to address the original criticism of its low difficulty. I’d say hard mode brings the combat up to an acceptable level of challenge. I did have to somewhat think about my turn economy and some fights are legitimately challenging. But even then, it’s still exceedingly gentle. I’d say if you’re even remotely familiar with RPGs, play on hard mode for a gentle but still engaging experience with the combat.

This really is one of those games where the only real negative is that I was hungry for more. Which honestly is the best complaint to have. I would love to see a sequel where this team can flex their muscles with more resources and a longer runtime. But this is still a wonderful project that I can see becoming a frequent cozy replay.

So yeah, play Small Saga, it’s less than 10 hours, only about 15 quid and I can’t recommend it enough.

Full disclosure: I like Sonic the Hedgehog. It’s something of an easy punching bag but it’s got more good games than bad, and, at least as far as platformers go, it’s got a really fun and memorable cast. A big part of why a lot of people have nostalgic memories of this series was that it often tried to tell larger than life stories that you might not expect of a platformer.

The actual quality of the writing can be debated. But it made the series easy hyperfixation fuel.

But there are times that the series has punched above its own weight in ways that I think have blown up in its face. We could talk about the Archie comics implementing weird homages to WW2 poetry but my primary example comes from the games.

Let’s talk about GUN and why I hate almost everything about how they’re written and what the stand for.

The Guardian Unit of Nations or GUN, are introduced to the series in Sonic Adventure 2. They’re a kind of mishmash of the US military and the United Nations. And our first impressions are decidedly not great. They’re introduced mistakenly arresting Sonix due to a case of mistaken identity, and are one of the primary antagonists. Sonic spends as much time shaking the cops and military off his trail as he does figuring out Eggman’s latest plot. GUN are reactionary, trigger happy soldiers who fuck everything up even when they’re seemingly doing the right thing and are completely useless against Eggman.

This only escalates when we get into the backstory. So it turns out GUN were funding the development of weapons of mass destruction on a space station. Including the Eclipse Cannon. Y’know. The thing Eggman uses to hold the world to ransom. More than that, when the experiments went in a direction they didn’t like (leading to the creation of Shadow). They storm the ARK, cover up all evidence and kill almost everyone aboard, including a child.

So yeah, GUN aren’t just incompetent. They’re fucking evil. And I actually like that. Sonic always had a streak of environmentalism, of nature vs technology. And with human civilisation becoming part of the story in Sonic Adventure, having Sonic either prove more competent than the cops or the military, or even making them outright villains, tracks with the series’ brand of ‘anti-authoritarianism for kids’. Plus, the ending of the game becomes a question of whether Shadow can put aside his hatred of humankind to save the Earth. GUN are the worst of humanity and he has to decide if he’ll wrote off the whole world because of them.

(At least in theory. The execution of this character arcin terms of writing is a bit spotty but tangents).

Unfortunately, pretty much every Sonic game after this decides that GUN should actually be the good guys, leading to my least favourite story beats in the entire series.

Their next major appearance is in Shadow the Hedgehog. Where they’re opposing the Black Arms’ invasion of Earth and…failing miserably. Their Commander seems more concerned with satiating a grudge against Shadow than protecting his country. So far, so GUN. Except, something weird starts happening. The other characters, happily work with GUN. They see them as good guys defending the Earth. That commander gets a tragic backstory where he was also on the ARK and knew Maria. But blamed Shadow instead for some reason.

Ok, putting aside how bullshit of a retcon this is, how there was no suggestion of this guy in Adventure 2 and how the reasons he grew up to work for GUN are never detailed or explored, the reason this sucks is that the purpose of it is obvious. The Commander gets a totally unearned redemptive moment where he ‘forgives’ Shadow (even though Shadow really should be the one doing the forgiving and the only reason he isn’t bringing this up himself is that can’t remember anything), and by the next game, Sonic 06, Shadow is WORKING for GUN.

The Commander only exists as a character to give GUN a redemption that they do not deserve. And Shadow joining GUN is treated as a personal growth moment and act of forgiveness, ignoring that GUN have now gotten off Scott free for every despicable thing they did in the series.

The series once had the guts, even as a kid’s story, to actually frame the military as corrupt and villainous. Only for every game after it to do a 180 and proudly declare they Support The Troops, no matter how unearned that switch-up is.

Eventually GUN faded into the backgrounds as the series took a more back to basics approach to stories. But in recent years, as new writers have started digging more into the series’ continuity again (which I’m happy about on the whole), it’s also meant dragging up things that perhaps should have been buried.

Between Shadow Generations and the Chaotix Casefiles, GUN are back, still the good guys, and Shadow is still working for them. No one ever addresses the evil shit they’ve done, or expresses any doubt about working them.

And sure, while there is room to discuss copaganda and the like in kids’ media (a topic sparked up again by Sonic’s cop dad in the movies) at the end of the day, this is Sonic the Hedgehog, the embodiment of camp and dumb cheese. Why does this mattter? Because, poor taste aside, now that GUN are no longer villains, they’re now the worst thing they can be. Boring.

GUN in SA2 served a purpose in the story and were a new kind of threat. Now they’re a generic military who only exist to give Shadow something to do.

At this point, the movies remain the only modern Sonic media to remember that GUN were…y’know…the bad guys (and even they pull their punches in that compared to the games, by framing it more as a few bad apples in charge and that plenty of other GUN troops are well meaning or outright penitent.

So yeah, GUN sucks. They’re the single worst part of the series’ story and a textbook example of kids’ media biting off more than they could chew only to backpedal like cowards. At best, they’re a boring faction, that lost what made them interesting. At worst, the series took an aspect of their setting with actual bite and sanded it down, going from anti military to pro military over just a few games.

So I finally decided to bite the bullet and dip my toe into Trails. I picked up the original Trails in the Sky last year, played it for a few hours, really enjoyed the vibe and characters, but got distracted by other games (Xenoblade X came out on Switch almost immediately afterwards). I tried the demo for the remake when it dropped and while it looks gorgeous and the combat feels better, I definitely felt something was…off about the dialogue. At the time I couldn’t pin down what it was. Maybe it was the voice direction, maybe I could just tell that Stephanie Sheh and Johnny Yong Bosch had aged. But something about the script felt off and a bit more grating, even though I had no pre-existing attachment to either script.

It was only later that I heard about the localisation changing hands and the effort to make the remake’s ’more accurate’ and it definitely explains a lot of what I felt going through it. Even just from playing both game’s prologue, Estelle came off a lot more charming in the original than the remake.

I picked up the OG version again yesterday, and I’m hoping to stick with it and play more. I’ll probably get to the remake too eventually. Just a shame because the main thing friends praised to sell me on Sky specifically, was the dialogue and character interactions, so it’s a bit unfortunate that takes a hit in the remake despite the improvements elsewhere.