indigozeal

Good News: After finishing Vol. 1 of 999 Alterna yesterday, I decided to take a peek at spoilers for the story for Zero Time Dilemma, and...it's ridiculous. And I didn't expect any better, but this particular ridiculousness is so far up its own ass that it's incapable of really affecting anything: a bunch of dead-end time paradoxes that run in place and have no long-term significance for anyone. And I understand that Snake & Clover (& Lotus & Seven) aren't even mentioned. (Even the nightmare scenario of Virtue's Last Reward that features Clover is brushed off as a weird "tangent" universe that doesn't really happen kinda, rendering the second game a pointless diversion.) Which is incredibly negligent from a franchise perspective, but there's a bullet dodged. Plus, there seems to be a bit of dissatisfaction with how the sequel storyline panned out among some fans, so perhaps Zero Time Dilemma will help shuffle itself and Virtue's Last Reward off to irrelevance.

Bad News: Given Zero Time Dilemma's debut on the platform, Aksys announced plans today to release 999 on Steam in a "remastered" format, complete with voice acting. VA work on an established project is always a dicey prospect, of course, since the new voices may not match up what the characters sound like in your head - and I hope the word "remaster" doesn't mean that they're gonna use the sloppy art from the iOS port of the game. My real concern here, though, is that Aksys might feel compelled to redo 999's story & presentation to come in line with its Saw-inspired sequels (and, man, the bloodthirst in Zero Time Dilemma far surpasses even that of VLR - if you needed a close-up of someone bludgeoning a human being seventeen times with a fire extinguisher, then here you go). I'm sure we'll be getting EXTREME CLOSE-UPS of the Ninth Man's death, which was only described in game - and who needs deft, potently creepy prose when an on-screen bloodbath is so much more gratifying?
Plus, there's the prospect of the requisite "clumsy, shoehorned foreshadowing promoting inferior sequels" that's added to modern rereleases of classic titles with disappointing progeny (see: FF4 with After Years, Chrono Trigger with Cross). All told, I can't look forward to the Steam version of 999 becoming the "definitive" edition of the game - as it likely will, since it'll be the most accessible version going forward.

Weird News: When I first saw the Mira character, I noted her marked resemblance to Cynthia Velasquez: confident brunette Latina woman in control of her own sexuality sporting a raspberry top designed to showcase dark underwear. And then I learned that she's...a serial killer who removes her victims' hearts due to mommy issues. Y'know, if you're gonna crib so blatantly from Silent Hill 4, you could at least use your superior components to craft a better story.

ETA What in Blazes News: In looking up a few videos, I have to say: this game looks just awful visually. (Warning: kid, or kid robot, getting shotgunned in the head there.) The character model work is utterly atrocious. Nightcry gets slammed for poor graphics, but it's leaps & bounds beyond this.
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Everyone's busy with Zero Time Dilemma, so no one cares about 999 right now! Which makes it the perfect time to go on about the novelization of the 999...er, visual novel, 999 Alterna. (The first volume, anyway.) I see bits from the novel have already made it into the wiki, so someone's probably hit most or all of this, but for what it's worth, here're my reactions, as well as stuff I found notable.

NOTE: This document contains omega spoilers throughout for the 999 game, obviously. It also contains a Virtue's Last Reward spoiler in the entry for pg. 207, if anyone cares. (Note: No one should care about this.)

Also: This document has an extended mention of self-harm in it. It's at the pg. 183 entry.

The Vol. 1 synopsis is split into two parts on LJ due to the platform's space constraints. It should be all in one entry on my Tumblr.

( Read more... )
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I ran across this article yesterday, where the author was discussing reactions to a previous piece where she expressed disappointment in an MMO storyline. She had received a couple of replies that went along the lines of this one: "Well, I guess because I have really, really low expectations of the storytelling in any video game. In thirty-five years of playing them I can’t recall a single example that goes beyond the standard you might expect in an example of a middling genre narrative in another form and even that would be the exception."

My reaction was the same as hers: she asserted that she'd played a lot of games with great stories and therefore wasn't about to lower her expectations. Frankly, if you haven't encountered any good game stories yourself (particularly in "thirty-five years of playing"), I really have to wonder what kind of games you're buying.

I think, though, that the "video games are stoopid" reaction also stems from a failure to realize that good writing takes many forms. I think the people who complain that "there are no good stories in video games" are looking for the stereotypical idea of a Great Novel: a lot of writing and a lot of dialogue that's delivered straight-on by characters in the style of a play, featuring a great deal of SAT vocabulary & circumlocution and a very elaborate plot with a lot of developments that discusses Things of Great Importance (though not anything too weird; let's not get all freaky here). The problem with this - the first problem - is that the shift in medium also entails a shift in the way stories can be told. I don't agree that Dear Esther tells a great story, but I think reviewer Maxwell McGee hit truth when he noted in his review of the title: "video games allow for pacing and discovery that would be impossible to reproduce elsewhere." You can ignore the medium and take the straight visual-novel approach detailed above, but you're missing out on storytelling avenues interactivity affords you. The secondary problems are ones that involve underdeveloped tastes and a misunderstanding of proper execution: Great Novel stories aren't the only ones worth telling, and the Great Novel approach isn't always the best one for a given tale.

Resident Evil's plot, for example, is very standard straight zombie horror (and no one needs to mention the voice acting), but the "Itchy. Tasty." diary is a killer piece of storytelling. The diary is written in prose that's sparse, direct, and pedestrian—decidedly not what anyone thinks of as "great writing," but it'd actually hurt the story if the diary were more elaborately penned. The simple account derives its power from its prosaic everyman perspective - the author unwittingly detailing his loss of humanity, and how horrific events unfold around him in contrast to (or, really, as part of) the mundanity of his working environment: first, he's seething over coworkers who cheat at cards; then, the dogs he's paid to watch are strangely quiet; next, his best friend is waking him up in the middle of the night and telling him to put on a "space suit," and then he's uncomprehendingly watching blobs of his own flesh fall off his arm as he scratches it. The events are scarier because the character doesn't know the significance of what's happening to him; if he had been a more educated or knowledgable character, his story wouldn't have worked. The method by which the player initiates this tale - how it's nothing more than a diary hidden in the corner of an ordinary room, and the player just happens upon this big scare unannounced, in the course of routine investigation, also underlines the horror in a commonplace environment and the virtues of self-pacing & discovery McGee mentioned - as does how the narrative is preceded by you having to execute the diary's owner, who first appears as just another zombie. But then, every zombie here was a living, thinking individual before they turned, weren't they.

For another example, Neopets thingamabob Flight Rising has no plot, but the writers put a great amount of effort into their 120-charas-per-entry flavor text, and I always check it whenever I get a new item. There, the writing is used to worldbuild and to give the player an additional little reward for playing the game, acquiring items, and expanding their hoard. Gone Home is a game-length examination of how found documents can be used in aggregate to tell a story of a household. Baten Kaitos deserves recognition for its immensely likable playable characters, but it also does smart meta stuff with its themes and the player's perspective on events, to the point where it actually involves her in acting out those themes through her reactions to its plot twists - one of the game's major ideas is the need for forgiveness, and though it never states the parallels outright, the game has you go through your own crisis of trust as you come to terms with your viewpoint character after he betrays you - not just the other cast members, but you the player, who is a character in the game in your own right. Phantasy Star II lets the setting do its talking, revealing the truth about its dystopia in the contrast between the bright, crisp cheery colors of its world and the clinical coldness of your discoveries - the nameless bodies of the once all-powerful "scoundrels" you find in Shure; the floating aborted experiments in the Biosystems lab with their malevolent, glowing glares; the matter-of-fact, blink-and-it's-over horror of the reunion between Darum & Teim.

Then there're the examples of just plain straightforward good writing. Lunar has excellent character writing in Ghaleon. 999 has great character dialogue writing. A Dark Room goes crazy places from the most modest and unassuming of beginnings. Ib is a sweetly-told children's horror romp. Chrono Trigger is a zippy, breezy adventure through time that's loads of fun.

Ironically, a number of the examples of notably bad video game writing that come to mind for me revolve around attempts to take the Great Novel approach. Virtue's Last Reward is a poorly-written game because (among many other reasons, but this is a big one) the writers mistook good writing for a lot of writing, resulting in a poorly-paced narrative that tries the player's patience and insults her intelligence. The new Castlevania games are stupid because they believe a story is automatically quality if it's Grimdark & Serious, and because they have no sense of humor or fun about their material. (The above also applies to Chrono Cross, but Chrono Cross has so much wrong with it storytellingwise that I don't think triage is possible.) It's relatively simple to be impressed into submission by an overstuffed Victorian-novel tack and refuse to be wowed by anything else; it takes a bit of understanding of how stories work - or maybe just enough of an open mind to engage with the media you consume instead of dismissing it out-of-hand due to preconceptions about media & genres - to see brilliance elsewhere.
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I got called on GameFAQs "one articulate rasta." We have a new blog title!

I like this 999 fic for its small scope, choosing to ignore VLR to deal with the aftermath of the first game for a couple of characters in a comfortable (?) slice-of-life vignette. Seeing Snake and Clover portrayed well here makes me even more aggravated that the original creators are going to compound the mistakes of VLR and fuck up Snake as well as his sister when the third installment inevitably gets made.

I'm not familiar with whatever the "YOGSCast" is, and this is another one of the "like, comment, subscribe" LPers - he even has a song at the end of his videos about it. But I've been watching the Cook, Serve, Delicious videos from this Nilesy, and he distinguishes himself by two traits: a) he's very good at just plain talking, and b) he has a relentlessly engaging and positve outlook. Also, he chose to main soup in CSD, of all things. That is hardcore.

The Soul of Dracula is an interesting fan game that poses the question: what if the Castlevania series had descended from the lineage of its arcade incarnation Haunted Castle instead of the NES classic? Like Haunted Castle, the visual style of The Soul of Dracula is grounded in dirt and mud, but it boasts an interesting variety of obstacles and careful level design and has a sharp sense of drama in a few places. That Frankenstein entrance!

Speaking of Castlevania: an examination of Pachislot laziness in recycling old Judgment footage.

I'm not sure it scans, but I applaud the effort: someone used Vocaloid to make a song about Mystic Ark out of one of its battle themes.

I'm not the biggest fan of Lufia II - I thought its story was done way better in the first game's fifteen-minute prologue - but this thread examining a ROM of the prototype is pretty good, if infested with a bit of jerkery and periodic spats over which SFAM emulator is best.

FF5 Amano artwork takes over a train station.

Bad finally, click at your own risk: not happy, but bewildered: I cannot believe someone made a porno DVD of a Flash animation of Nei seducing Eusis/Rolf in 2006.

Good finally: "I just want to play the bowling and the tennis!"
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Here's an interesting remix case study: where an original composition and its remix are used in the same scenario in two successive installments in a franchise. Both score their title's curtain-raising escape: "Unary Game," a slowly flooding cabin within a ocean liner in 999; "Ambidexterity," a ready-to-plummet elevator in Virtue's Last Reward.

"Unary Game" opts to grab the listener by the lapels immediately, announcing itself with an explosion of frantic energy. The composition alternates between periods of relative stillness dominated by a fast beat and a techno crackle in the background to a melee of wailing horns and techno spaz. The instrumentation includes elements - the pseudo-horns; metallic clanking - that recall the ambient noise of a freighter, emphasizing the danger of the setting in which the hero has found himself. It accurately sets the stage for waking up in a dangerous environment and immediately having to think both calmly and logically and fight for your life.

Its VLR remix, "Ambidexterity," also accompanies a life-or-death scenario, but instead of its forebear's wake-up burst of techno energy, "Ambidexterity" is quiet and controlled - a slow burn. While "Unary Game" alternated frantically between two modes, "Ambidexterity" is dominated and unified by its beat, the lead-in to and a near-constant presence throughout the composition. The beat is far more deliberate and far more at the forefront than that of "Unary Game", pulsing instead of galloping; while various disruptive elements - quick scats; dizzying stretches of synth; a siren taken from "Unary Game" - may enter onto and leave the soundtrack, they're more spaced out, more transient: they provide momentum to the piece but are robbed of power in their relative isolation, and they never gain the upper hand. It's musical code for a setting that's slow to reveal itself - like in "Unary Game," there's a mystery in progress and a threat present, but this environment isn't going to give up its secrets so easily.

The contrasting use of their compositional elements contributes to the other big difference between "Unary Game" and "Ambidexterity": the latter never gives the listener catharsis. Like that elevator threatens to do, "Ambidexterity" just keeps going down and down, slowly building and building, without reaching a climax or outlet for its energy akin to the frenetic patches of the original "Unary Game." It's effective at setting the stage for something bigger, more dangerous and more profound and not as easily resolved. I'm in the minority that doesn't believe Virtue's Last Reward delivers on that promise, but you can't say that composer Shinji Hosoe didn't do his part.
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I did end up purchasing that passel of books from Amazon Japan through tenso.com's reshipping service. The shipment arrived today, and while shipping was very quick - four days from service payment to delivery - the packaging left a little to be desired. They reuse the same box in which Amazon.com sends your stuff, which is fine, but Tenso didn't quite put my package back together after opening it to check the shipment; the opening on the side was kind of hastily taped up, and the cellophane binding all the books together wasn't replaced or reattached where it'd been peeled away, so one of my Baten Kaitos novels was free to flop around in the box and get its cover folded in half. (The box was also kind of squashed, with another hole on the other side, though that could very well be a postal issue instead of Tenso's fault.) A minor loss, I guess, but it wouldn't have taken much in time or resources to prevent it. All the other books seem OK, though.

I did like how Tenso made the process of arranging for reshipping streamlined and professional, even if their handling of the physical merchandise is a bit lacking. They update you frequently on the status of your package, handle payment & reshipping requests through their website (even if you sometimes have to poke around a bit to find stuff), and give concrete reshipping deadlines depending on your payment date. Ultimately, it cost only about $20 more to get the package than it would have straight from Amazon, but it's a frustrating surcharge nonetheless. I guess Tenso's the only option, though, until Japanese game designers decide to make it legal for those overseas to read about their products.

Short stuff from the books:
- The Illbleed guide has a feature where it asked several staff members to list their favorite horror films, and I don't know why the most assuredly wretched little horror flick The Burning was such a sensation in Japan, but it seems to have been, as multiple folks on Illbleed's staff cited it as a fave. (So has Hifumi Kouno, the man behind Clock Tower.)
- The reasons cited by one Illbleed programmer as to why he liked three successive horror movies: "Nudity." "Nudity." "Tits."
- The 999 novels come in little silver slipcovers - cardboard silver slipcovers, granted, but a nice touch.
- Someone left their Lacus Clyne doujin idol card in one of my Baten Kaitos novels.
- I've spent, like, a minute looking at the Baten Kaitos novels, but from what I can tell, it seems to be one of those affairs where it just takes the dialogue straight from the game and brackets it with descriptive prose instead of expanding on the source material. Not many illustrations, either - about four per novel, of just-OK quality. A pity. (Oddity: the novel seems to be nonlinear, as "Life is so long when you live it..." etc. is actually one of the very first events, whereas the Castle Elnath attack is a good way through book 2. A lot of it must be structured around flashbacks.)
- The X-Files choose-your-own-adventure book based on the first-season episode "Eve," on the other hand, has no illustrations at all. Boo.
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I just now realized that the whole bit in the opening about Snake and Clover being siblings yet not looking anything alike was meant to prime you for Santa and June being siblings yet not looking anything alike.
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I was delaying posting this until I finished my reaction posts for the first half of Silent Hill 4. I'm not going to get back to that game in the next couple weeks, though, and I'd rather do one unbroken stream of commentary for it - so heck with it; let's get this out the door and take an accounting of the games I played in 2012.


Beaten:
Neo Angelique, PSP ("be an ordinary Aube Hunter" ending)
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, PSP via Dracula X Chronicles
9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, DS
Glory of Heracles, DS
Silent Hill, PSP via PSOne Classics
Mystic Ark, Super Famicom (via emulator)
Earthbound, SNES (via emulator)
Ib, PC (RPGMaker title)
Eternal Darkness, Gamecube
Silent Hill 2, Playstation 2
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Gamecube (finished main campaigns, all three characters; finished Orthanc w/ Gimli & secret character)
Resident Evil, Saturn (finished Jill w/Chris rescued; you gotta give me more notice than that to get Barry out alive, game)
Phantasy Star III, Mega Drive (x4, via emulator & save states - I've given enough to/done my non-assisted time with this game already)

Little stuff:
Slayin', PC (finished as Knight and Mage; end boss keeps killing me as Rogue!)
Home, PC

Played, not finished:
most of the NES Mega Mans, Gamecube compilation - I had part of a separate post all typed up about this, but long story short: I discovered I don't really have the patience anymore for try-try-again platforming bullshit of any stripe. I enjoy the Robot Master stages but lose interest in the Wily levels. I haven't finished a single game, sadly.
Lumines II, PSP
Every Extend Extra, PSP
Metroid, NES - Yeah, about this. I made another go at Metroid this summer and actually made considerable progress over my earlier attempts. I hit a complete wall, though, at Kraid - I must've gone at him an Arino level of times and can't really beat his (frankly ridiculous) pattern. I thought more energy tanks might help (I had three), but I soon learned that to find the other energy tanks in Metroid, you have to shoot walls. All the walls. Every inch of all the walls - and there's nothing that differentiates wall sections that might hold items from those that don't. I mean, there're 100 to 1000 wall tiles per room, and I've uncovered about 60 rooms to date. I could look up the answers - but I've uncovered so much on my own that I feel (stupidly, I know) that resorting to an FAQ at this point would be giving up, even though the game is patently unfair. So I'm at an impasse where I'm too stubborn to get help but won't progress on my own. Bah.
Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon, PSP
Girl's Garden, SG-1000 (but you can never finish this)
Silent Hill 4: The Room, PS2



Best: Silent Hill 2 by a wide mile.
Symphony of the Night is a good runner-up. Honorable mention goes to Ib, a neat small game with strong art design that does a lot in its limited space.

Worst: Objectively, it's probably Phantasy Star III, but I knew all about that going in. And at least it's trying. In some parts. Kind of. Earthbound, on the other hand, was an aggravating and frustrating play experience that didn't deliver on its vaunted charm and humor and had open contempt for the player. Second was Glory of Heracles, a big "why bother?".

Surprisingly Good: Ib takes the cake here, a sprightly little game that's smarter and more elegant that it ever had to be. Girl's Garden also figures in: '80's arcade games weren't supposed to be outright pretty, and "girls' games" weren't supposed to be actually good. On the LP front, I'll steal from the Something Awful thread and note that MODE, an FMV dating/party/conversation sim where the positive/neutral/negative tone of your responses rather than a formal dialogue tree dictates story development, is in the Deadly Premonition framework: a game that arrests your attention with sheer, seemingly-amateur bizarreness but gradually betrays legitimate quality and stimulating originality.

Miscellanea: 999 is very good, compelling and tense with likable characters and great music. That said, it's gotten a Deep Space Nine/Firefly-type fandom that aggressively proselytizes, and its flaws - the pseudoscience; the demand for excessive replays; how the final twist is kind of a leap too far - are shortsold. Eternal Darkness finishes strongly and has some good environments at the end but is rarely scary and kind of stupid for most of its length. I'm making peace with Silent Hill as time goes by, but I'd put in the "interesting curiosity" basket before the "classic"; its attempt at a story hinted at, not directly told, is done miles better by its sequel.

I can't really think of a single moment or place in Home that I can point to as a standout, but its commentary on how the choices available to the player must work to form a coherent narrative deserves recognition.

Great characters: James Sunderland and all his entourage. Angela in particular - despite all her mental scars, it's she who goes to her fate with eyes wide open. The J.D. plotline, what I got to play of it, was done refreshingly well, taking the revelation of J.D.'s true nature and going from there instead of ending with it - examining what it meant for this truly kind person to be an artificial, created being, and how he consequently felt apart and "different" from the rest of society despite all his warmth and good cheer because of it. I didn't finish the game or even get up much past his intervention in the plot, but I can't overlook Silent Hill 4's Walter Sullivan: he who has done the unspeakable, has had the unspeakable done to him, who within himself contains multitudes and paves a bloody trail in his quest for eternal love and safety.

Making room for 999 and its wealth of contradictory descriptors for the best of its cast. Snake: intelligent, given to cheerfully smutty remarks, omnicompetent yet still overconfident, devoted in all humility to his sister. Lotus: a techie, a mom, a coward, a shrewd thinker, a romantic. Clover: At first an innocent ball of genki; later a deep brooder who takes duty and proactivity to impressive lengths. Seven: a consummate professional, a gregarious goof, a physical force, yet more often than not the smartest man in the room.

LP-wise, Dietrich Troy and the revelations about him in the true ending, crystallized in one perfect scene, the one on the bike. (I know supergreatfriend's Spy Fiction LP was from 2011, but I just got into it last year.) Shadows of the Damned's Garcia Hotspur: "I'm a Mexican, Johnson, not a Mexican't." (Yes, I know that line was stolen from a movie, but it fits Hotspur best.) MODE's Mohawk mobster Riel Attaychek is an infuriating conversationalist but a kind of fascinating jerk. He seems to genuinely like people and have a healthy roll-with-the-punches outlook on life but is nonetheless abrasive, self-absorbed, and materialistic, which is an interesting and refreshing choice for a game's Guide to Inner Wisdom.

Great Moments: Silent Hill 2: "I got a letter." The opening walk. Angela on the staircase. "...It's all the same once they're dead!" Mary's ending monologue in the Leave ending. Pretty much everything from rowing across the lake onward.

Ib: The doll room. Eternal Darkness: The final battle. 999: Safe ending: The laugh, and the transformation afterwards. Glory of Heracles, of all games: The death where you learn the truth about the Heracles situation, which I thought was the one graceful note in an empty game.

Silent Hill: The arrival of Kaufmann in the ending, where a tertiary character oversteps the boundaries of his role and changes the entire game, and the jokey end credits. Silent Hill 4: Looking out the peephole during Apartment World, which signals a drastic change in Henry's participation in the narrative. Look into the abyss...etc.

LP greatness: Spy Fiction: The scene on the motorbike, and the ending revelation/confrontation. Shadows of the Damned: I'm not sure this falls into greatness, but I was stricken by the backstory of the songstress Justine, who remolds herself through supreme force of will in response to social mores that aren't even there. It's tragedy and triumph all at the same time, and I'm still not sure what to make of it - except that it's very Suda. MODE: Again, not sure if it's great, but learning what the DOMEs did in the second MODE stream was memorable, and participating in SGF's stream itself was great.

Great places: The Myst-like outside of Silent Hill 4's water prison. Ib's art gallery, and the style of the "town" near the end. Silent Hill 2's fog-covered walk and last location. Mystic Ark's still and silent Myst-like hub island, and its awesome world 6. (Lotta Myst goin' around, but there're far worse visual references.)

Great music: Well, nothing's going to top this.

Most fun: Knocking down ladders atop the Hornburg in Helm's Deep in The Two Towers. Running back 'n' forth poppin' enemies with your little pixel sword in Slayin'. Swinging the sparkly Jewel Sword, or happening across the Valmanway and wondering "what's this?" just before you activate your Win Button in Symphony of the Night. Taking out enemies with one whack of Silent Hill's mighty emergency hammer, particularly after all the skin-of-your-teeth fighting in the first half of the game. Executing spell overkills in Glory of Heracles and getting back more MP than you doled out for it. Dropping blocks to "Regret" or "Black Tambourine" in Lumines II. Romping around collecting purty flowers in Girl's Garden. Navigating Ib - the neat visual puzzles, what artworks you'd encounter next, combined with frequent save points, made playing a delight.

Lessons learned: I am always right and should not second-guess myself when I've decided it's time to cut my losses from a title. Earthbound.

That's it for 2012! Will 2013 be even better? (Spoilers: ehhh.)
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About a year after my initial playthrough, I recently had the opportunity to experience 999 again through supergreatfriend's weekly stream. It helped me appreciate the characters anew, and I did note on this runthrough that the game does drop generous hints about its central plot gimmick through its other bits of pseudoscience, which makes its underlying storyline seem a little (a *little*) less daft and scattershot. It did, though, cement my reservations about the ending being too clever by half in some respects, and though we didn't hit it, the coffin ending is still a big middle finger of hate to the player. It's kind of unfortunate, in a way, that the title's held in such unquestionable high regard; despite its achievements, it has a few significant flaws that should not be encouraged, which the sequel seems to have only compounded.

But that's not why I'm here. Through watching this second run, it occurred to me that there seems to be an optimal path to take through the game's endings in unfolding its plot and mystery, where each successive ending directly builds on the revelations of the previous:( Cut )
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I've been spoiler-searching Virtue's Last Reward and have so far discovered that the plotline features:

- clones
- robots
- robot clones
- terrorists
- viruses
- time travel
- future selves
- past selves
- alternate-dimension selves
- virtual-reality selves
- soul travel
- Mars

It's like an alien happened upon Axe Cop as its first encounter with this thing you humans call "literature" and seized upon it as a model of coherent storytelling.
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