The Simple Respect of Love
Being something of a turbo-nerd in life meant that RPGs were always incredibly important to me. I remember at age six trying desperately to figure out how to delete a save on a used copy of Pokemon Platinum from GameStop. A task during a time, for me, pre-internet and without a guide is certainly not for the faint of heart. I was stuck at Will and had no idea what was going on, and for some reason I was so determined to get it to work I forced my poor Dad to take me back to GameStop two days later and ask the guy how. My love for Pokemon never ceased, but I cannot compare that experience to playing Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door for the first time.
To kid me TTYD felt like a dream come true. A companion turn-based RPG with comedy elements was like a sign from something beyond begging me to play it. It felt familiar yet brand new. The beautiful environments, world-building, and the witty dialogue; it was all so enthralling. To this day, TTYD is one of my favorite games. So can you believe that to this day, I have never finished TTYD.
At some point in my childhood, my family lost most of our possessions. Among those was my copy of TTYD. It wasn’t exactly the era where we could afford to replace a game that rare, and I was still too young to know of alternative ways to play it, so I never did. Instead, I eventually watched a playthrough of TTYD. At this point, I’ve probably watched hundreds. I could recount almost everything about TTYD, but I never made it further than the second world.
A version of that experience exists with me, but I have lost that initial satisfaction. This experience is common, games are expensive and numerous, and time is limited, etc. But I love TTYD. It never really sank in how much I missed that experience until I found a small indie game with a lot of spark.
Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling is a love letter to a game I loved. From its art style to its gameplay to its dialogue and even audio, it oozes the charm of the original TTYD. This is something it wears on its sleeve. Yet Bug Fables maintains its distinct voice.
The game is not necessarily for an adult audience it keeps its mostly family-friendly charm, but there’s a certain edge or roughness to Bug Fables. The combat is at times, very challenging, and the puzzles can be clunky to control, which can cause additional challenges. Its writing varies from perplexing to parse through to gut-busting-ly hilarious. It’s a game you really should experience for yourself. It’s not the perfect game, it’s honestly not quite even caught up to the level of TTYD, but I love it.
I finished Bug Fables. It took far longer than it should have, spanning around three full years of my life, but I finished it. I realized two things while playing Bug Fables that led me to finish it.
I became bored somewhere around the midsection and figured I had better things to do.
I loved Bug Fables, and art isn’t just its low moments. It was possible this would blow over.
So, I pushed through the tedium. That was easier said than done. There were elements of playing that I genuinely didn’t enjoy in the moment. There are grind-y bits, and a lot of backtracking that sometimes feels fun and occasionally feels frustrating. Things are left unclear in similarly contradictory ways, but I pushed forward and discovered I was enjoying myself again.
It ebbed and flowed. Some sections of Bug Fables were jubilating and interesting, others perhaps not as much. Considering it now, I would give Bug Fables a; "I loved and enjoyed the experience out of it is the best thing ever made" (because I am unsure how I feel about rating systems. See my next blog for that). In the final analysis, though, I enjoyed Bug Fables more.
By respecting MoonSprout Games enough to continue experiencing the game as they intended, I gained more from the experience. I became incredibly invested in the characters of this world. The mechanics of the game, once tedious at times, became like the rhythm of music. I really can recommend Bug Fables.
But I recommend experiencing things for yourself more and respecting the things you love. It can be hard to treat things like video games with respect and love. Developers create games with these things woven into their dna. The developers behind a game, the people who worked on it, respected it enough to see through a vision.
It is not hard to imagine the process of developing the game or following through on anything similar. Our experiences are only 50% of what the creators put into that experience. The other 50% is on the one engaging in the experience. The respect to follow through, to accept the piece as its whole.
I, of course, cannot write this blog about respecting the time of games without acknowledging the many ways our modern society treats or mistreats our time. As mentioned briefly in my previous blog (read here!) our capitalist system favors some forms of time use over others based on our monetary values. But there is more than just a monetary element to how I felt Bug Fables was not worth my time. There exists a cultural aspect to these things as well.
I was already several years behind the curve on Bug Fables. We exist in an age with something of a social media arms race to always be as ahead of the curve as possible. All one needs to be involved in this arms race one must be the first to watch or even the first to see before something comes out via leaks. In my field of work, remaining up-to-date on what's happening in video games is considered a near must-do.
But this is a constructed view of relative value. I have been recommended countless video games in modern memory. Now I'm left without being able to see their cultural impacts at all. I had no interest then, and it seems the “sands of time” agree with me. Maybe they will see a resurgence, as media often does when overlooked, perhaps they not, but more importantly I wasn't pursuing those experiences.
I wanted the Bug Fables experience. To be transported back to the game I loved in my childhood. I wasn’t. I had a new experience that wore its inspiration as a badge of honor but wasn’t afraid to say its own thing, be its own thing. At times my idea of what that should be clashed and I thought maybe less of it than it deserved. But I continued to respect it because it was an experience I began and one worth fulfilling.
After writing this blog, I intend to play TTYD remaster and officially be able to say I have experienced TTYD myself. Maybe I won’t feel any differently, maybe it’ll change my entire perception of itself, Bug Fables, and this blog and I’ll have to post an apology about how wrong I was. But now I have developed the respect to go back. Sure, I’m behind the curve on TTYD or even it’s remaster by several years. Maybe I’ve even seen it, but have I tried to get 100% out of the experience yet? I would argue I haven’t.
Engage in the media you want because you want to. Love the media you want because you love it. But most importantly, remember to respect it as it respects you. Do not give up on experiencing something as it should be because of preconceived notions of what you should be doing, when, and why. Finish games, shows, movies, books. Follow through on the things you respect, give back to life what it gives to you and you may realize that what comes back to you is more than you could initially imagine.
