A pleasant surprise, wouldn’t you agree, Zach? – Deadly Premonition

There was a week or so delay in my Final Fantasy XIII travels.  A game which I’d been dabbling in before FF 13 snuck up and consumed my attention to the exclusion of most anything else.  That game was the budget-level open world pseudo-survival-horror, Deadly Premonition. It was a bit of a fad among certain circles of the internet, for a while there, though it doesn’t seem to get a whole lot of attention any more.  As a budget game with lousy graphics and poor controls, it is worthy of note simply because instead of just disappearing into the aether, it instead galvanized some very heated and polarizing debate.  Depending on who you ask, it was terrible, phenomenal, or somewhere in between.

Quick links to subsequent articles:

1. Introduction and Awkwardness – Quick summary of the premise and basic combat
2. Open worlds for open minds – A little about the open world nature, and how it took me two tries to get into the game
3. Look with interest – A bit about how the story succeeds despite how bizarre it is
4. Talkin bout spoilers – A game with so many clues and foreshadowing can be hard not to spoil
5. Tips to make Deadly Premonition playable

I first became aware of the game by randomly stumbling across its thread on NeoGAF.  (Yes, I read NeoGAF.  No, I’m not proud, shut up.  I’ll never post there or anything, though, I promise.)  Shortly afterward, Destructoid had a post publicizing one of the game’s many interesting cut scenes.

Now, I’m kind of the personality type that is pretty easily roped in by the sort of underdog, underground, mainstream-just-doesn’t-understand cult hits.  When the big guys ignore or deride something, and a small passionate group sticks up for it, I just get the gut-level motivation to hop on board.  When it comes to my feelings after the fact, it can be hard to distinguish genuine enjoyment from self-justifications to smooth over the cognitive dissonance.  I say this to warn the reader to treat my comments accordingly.

I still did not actually pull the trigger on the game immediately.  What happened was this: in every little thing I read about this fascinating little game was mentioned how much inspiration it took from the TV show Twin Peaks.  So what I decided to do was not actually play Deadly Premonition but instead finally get around to watching that old TV show that I’d never gotten around to.

Pretty soon, I fell in love.

Pretty soon after that, I just had to play the game that was so inspired by the show.

The game has been described by many as being “so bad that it’s good.”  I think this is the best approximation for the average person who wants to know what the scoop is behind this game, but I also think that it is wrong.  When something is so bad that it’s good, you are enjoying it on a meta-level.  You are making good use of all that irony that was mined by adolescents in the 90s.  This game is good, and when it is bad it is bad for reasons that are obviously due to its budget.  When it is good, it is good because this game has more ambition in its left pinky than any other game I’ve played this generation, and a surprisingly large amount of it succeeds.

Unfortunately, when it is bad, it is bad in ways that are pretty easy to mock by your average dude.  It pretty much feels like a game that came out in 2002 in two big ways: the graphics and the controls.  It is also pretty weird, in both a Twin Peaks kind of way, and also in a weird Japanese anime kind of way.  So you’ve got a weird game, that on the surface makes no sense, has “bad” graphics compared to its peers, and the combat controls like crap (well, actually it controls exactly like Resident Evil but the Internet at large has a giant fucking blind spot on that sort of thing) and it’s easy to see why the game is mocked and dismissed by so many.  To be honest, I can’t even believe Microsoft allowed it to be released at all, it looks so old.

Thank goodness that they did.

I would probably have more to say about Deadly Premonition if it were fresher in my memory.  However, it felt like it would be a bit weird to switch gears mid-FF13, plus I wasn’t really clear on how FF13 centric Mike intended AMI to be, here.  So my plan here is to make maybe one or two more posts discussing my thoughts about this game.  I think it will segue nicely into my expected next gaming obsession, due in a couple of weeks.  This time around I think I’ll try and keep this as an index page for subsequent posts, just for posterity.

The bottom line is this: Deadly Premonition has the greatest menu screen of all time.  Of all time.

1. Introduction and Awkwardness – Quick summary of the premise and basic combat
2. Open worlds for open minds – A little about the open world nature, and how it took me two tries to get into the game
3. Look with interest – A bit about how the story succeeds despite how bizarre it is
4. Talkin bout spoilers – A game with so many clues and foreshadowing can be hard not to spoil
5. Tips to make Deadly Premonition playable