The Stack

The story of Immortal Defense is told through the monologues that introduce each level. At the beginning, these serve as mission briefings, but this function drops off over the course of the game. The story and the gameplay are pretty much separate, as in most games, but few games make a virtue of it the way ID does. If you’re pushing on through the levels regardless of what you’re told is happening in the world, well, the player character is doing the same. Like you, he’s isolated from the in-fiction consequences of his actions. We’re going to be pushing deep into spoiler territory here.

At the beginning of the game, the player character, Subject K, has his mind catapulted into the psychedelic cosmic realm of Pathspace to defeat an imminent alien invasion. The game has six chapters; the invasion by the Bavakh armada is defeated at the end of chapter 1. There’s still no known way to get your mind back into your body at that point, which leaves K isolated from humanity. There’s mention of years passing between levels, time that you’re not aware of. K’s daughter, unborn at the time that he started the mission, grows up and has a daughter of her own. And how do they relate to K? There’s talk of how you’re a hero, a legend. Your alien Pathspace mentor, Pul Wat Aa, is actually worshiped as a god by his people, and it’s not hard to see that down the road. But there’s one thing they never openly acknowledge: they also regard you as a weapon. A weapon that has to be cajoled and manipulated, but still, a highly effective weapon, and one that it would be a waste not to use. And everyone, on multiple sides, wants to use you: for a while, most of the mission briefings seem to be of the form “Why did you do X? Y is more important!” By chapter 5, the granddaughter is asking K to destroy incoming vessels that haven’t been identified yet, just in case they turn out to be hostile. They naturally turn out to be a peaceful scientific expedition by your allies. Even after you learn this, you keep on destroying further expeditions from the same source. The question is raised: why do you keep on doing this?

For the player, the answer is a combination of “because that’s how you advance the plot” and “because there’s nothing else to do”. For K, it’s a bit more complicated, but probably includes the latter. At the end of chapter 2, Aa betrays you and your planet is destroyed, leaving you as a defender with nothing to defend. This begins the revenge-obsessed phase of the game, a phase that lasts for a very long time and involves a number of rash and counterproductive acts on K’s part, as he refuses to let war die down. But what else is there for him to do?

The destruction of your planet also raises a mystery: your body was on that planet. Without it, how is it that you remain in Pathspace? K’s disembodied mind is referred to on multiple occasions as a “ghost”, and that starts to seem literal here. The mystery is in fact quickly solved: a number of your people, including the granddaughter, escaped the destruction, and eventually return to bring new life to the planet through nanotechnology — the same nanotechnology that they’re using to keep themselves alive indefinitely. This gives you something to defend once more, but at the same time, it seems too good, too perfectly wish-fulfilling for K, who regrets never getting a chance to meet his daughter in person. And indeed it all turns out to be a delusion. This is the reason that K destroyed those science fleets: they threatened to discover the truth. But even once this is undeniable, the hallucination of the granddaughter (whose name we’ve never learned) intriguingly argues that the delusions of an immortal are more enduring than mere flesh, and therefore more real. And it’s hard to argue with that from K’s perspective. Everything else around him is going to spend the bulk of eternity dead no matter what he does, including his fellow Pathspace defenders who are still dependent on their physical bodies.

It all reminds me a bit of the second volume of Tezuka’s Phoenix, in which, about halfway through the story, one of the characters is granted immortality. Suddenly the story takes a step back, and all the human conflicts that drove it up to that point fade in importance, as years pass, and millions of years. Something similar happens here, with thousands of years passing between levels, and the old factions and alliances disappearing and being replaced with new things that you’re no longer even given a chance to keep track of. The only thing that remains constant is K’s tenacious and pointless defense of his dead world. By the end, he’s descended into full-bore Jack Torrance insanity, to the point that I have to wonder if the final levels, in which all the boss monsters of the past return in large quantities, are supposed to be “real” at all, or just more hallucinations. (You have to wonder when one of the last ships types introduced is called the “:P”.)

Patrick Dugan wrote of the ending:

“I love you grandpa” is a piece of text that haunted me, leaving me shaken with wonder and existential horror, for hours after I finished the game.

And while I was skeptical on reading that, I have to agree: seen in context, as the last word going into the final mission, it’s devastating. But it isn’t really the last word: at the end of every chapter, there’s a bonus round in a simulation run by Jamesh, the inventor of Pathspace technology, and the final chapter is no exception. Here at the end, his words are a return to rationality, a frank discussion of what you’ve done and his own role in making it possible. And that final step back is the really masterful touch. The author of this game has thought about what it all means, and he wants you to think about it too.

In the official FAQ, the author states:

I put [K’s obsession with goals] into gameplay terms by making the last campaign of the story a direct challenge to the player: the missions are getting harder, K is becoming obviously crazier and crazier, and the player understands that there’s no point in world of the game to what he’s doing. The player can “win” in a perfectly acceptable way by just ceasing to play in those final moments: he can set the game aside, never pick it up again, and that means that K has come to his senses and abandoned his efforts.

I have to say this is wrong-headed. From a player’s perspective, abandoning a pre-scripted story in mid-game doesn’t change what happens in the gameworld any more than stopping reading a novel before the ending changes what happens in the world it describes. Even losing a mission, which in theory could allow the Bavakh invasion to succeed, doesn’t seem like something that happens in the “real” story of the game. There are games where the sense of what really happens is flexible, but this isn’t one of them. But as the same FAQ says, “I’m still on the fence about this–which is why you can also achieve a certain kind of victory by finishing.”

Apparently there’s a seventh chapter, set in “Hellspace”, that only becomes available if you complete every mission with a 100% survival rate. I imagine I’ll try for that eventually, but I’ll be surprised if it adds anything significant to the story. Pleasantly surprised, but surprised.

I’ve acquired the airship that inevitably appears in every Final Fantasy. In this installment of the series, the inevitable airship is owned by one Setzer, a notorious gambler and ne’er-do-well with a sideline in abducting attractive young opera singers. Still, the moment he’s mentioned, it’s completely clear that he’s destined to join the good guys. It’s clear because of the way he’s introduced: like all the playable characters, you get a brief scene of him standing against a black background with a few lines of text summarizing his character, and then you get an opportunity to change his name from the default if you like.

I wonder how many players actually take advantage of the renaming option? It seems like it would just create confusion. If I were to change Setzer’s name to something else — Jasque, for example — I’d still have to remember that Jasque is really Setzer whenever I talk about the game with anyone else or read online hints or anything like that. I guess that’s essentially what I ran into when I gave individual names to all my pokémon, but that strikes me as different. Those things didn’t have personalities. Setzer is a distinct character, with an author who isn’t me.

At any rate, Setzer’s in my party now, and has quickly taken over the Han Solo role. This part was previously played by Locke, the party’s thief, but his qualifications are merely that he’s a rogue with a heart of gold, whereas Setzer is a rogue with a heart of gold and his own ship.

But what about the attempted abduction of Maria, the opera singer? Surely kidnapping someone in the middle of a performance is more the sort of thing you’d expect from a deformed sociopath in a mask than from a charming rogue! Well, maybe. At one point before the performance an entity known as Ultros forges a letter from Setzer, hoping to mislead the heroes, so I had some suspicion that he might have also forged the letter announcing Setzer’s attempt to take Maria away (which, when you come right down to it, is a pretty stupid thing to write). But after consulting various wikis, I have to conclude that it’s not so.

Who is this Ultros character? When I first saw him sneaking around the opera house, my only thought was that he was a goofy-looking purple spider. But once I engaged him in battle, and got his full character portrait rather than the squashed-down 16×16 version, he turned out to be a goofy-looking purple octopus. Apparently I already encountered him once, but had completely forgotten about it, even though it had to have occurred less than a week ago. An octopus as a boss monster at the end of a river travel sequence is forgettable; the same octopus sneaking up into the rafters of an opera house and threatening to drop a four-ton weight on the prima donna is somewhat less forgettable.

To fully appreciate the situation, you have to understand that the opera content is played more or less straight, and is actually pretty impressively staged, given the 8-bit theatre. The music is convincingly impassioned and operatic, and even though the arrangement is for videogame console, it conveys enough to let us imagine the orchestra that should be playing it. A synthesized approximation of a singing voice accompanied by lyrics on the screen tell us a story taken from the gameworld’s history, one which I have a sneaking suspicion is going to tie into the main plot at some point. Like the overplot, it’s a story of the injustices of conquest. But even without the octopus around, there’s the matter that it’s all being done by 16×16 super-deformed sprites that emote, to large extent, by jumping around. During the normal course of play, I accept this as just a part of the medium, but here, the whole presentation has changed enough for the strangeness, the incongruity of form and content, to call attention to itself again.

It all reminds me a little of Osamu Tezuka, the renowned “god of manga”. Tezuka’s comics often addressed serious themes, but he never forgot that he was ultimately a professional doodler. His characters were always these softly rounded caricatures, their gestures often ludicrously exaggerated. And whenever he felt things were getting too heavy, he’d throw in some gratuitous visual silliness to break the tension, most often the sudden appearance of a “hyoutan-tsugi”, which is something like a patched-up gourd with a piglike snout. Sometimes he’d suddenly have a multitude of them suddenly rain from the sky and bounce off people’s heads. Tezuka basically created the Japanese animation industry; as such, he’s indirectly responsible for the style of much of today’s imported Japanese culture, including Final Fantasy. Tezuka died when the Final Fantasy series was still in its infancy, so we’ll never know what he would have thought of what it became. But I think he would have approved of Ultros.