So with life slowly but surely returning to normal (thanks to all of you that helped with my last post, things are slowly reaching "sane" and I'm doing things like eating and being happy for once) it's about time I dusted the old typefingers off to do some swordwords. What about, though? Between Four Job Fiesta, a rekindled interest in Fire Emblem Heroes, and falling deeeeep into Slay the Spire again, I haven't really played new things.
But then kusoge came up amongst the Telegram group, and I thought to myself: What qualifies a game as 'bad'? One friend posited that she only calls games bad if they're morally reprehensible, if they promote agendas or behaviors that are hurtful or hateful, like Postal or Super Seducer or any of those unashamed school shooting "simulators" out there. And that's a valid take - in fact, the reason I qualify kusoge with that moniker isn't so much out of Japanophilia, but because there's an ART to it, to making a garbage game, that you don't need to have if you're just making a bad game because you're a bad human being. David Cage makes bad games but they're technically and aesthetically amazing. LJN, on the other hand, made kusoge.
So instead the question is: what qualifies kusoge?
The way I see it, game quality is one of those polygon charts with multiple axes where something can be bad in many, many different ways. So let's go over my personal standards for games, which, again, are mine and may wildly differ in intensity or definition from your own.
Concept: This is where most of the aforementioned offensive games stumble most blatantly, but also where a lot of shovelware and even sincere games trip up. What kind of hook do you have to pull me into the game? What am I, as a player, doing in the game? You don't need to do amazingly here, or even anything at all - a cookie cutter game may not ever succeed in the way innovators often do, but that doesn't instantly qualify as a negative. On the other hand, a good concept can make players forgive a lot of other flaws, and an execrable concept can ruin you no matter how good your game is. This also extends to your ad campaigns - Daikatana was gutted just as hard by its claims that John Romero was going to make you his bitch as it was by just being boring as silt.
Narrative: This is obviously directly related to your concept but has a lot more to do with writing in games that have it (mostly RPGs and Adventure games, but more modern games have it too) and pacing/flow in all games. Is the plot easy to follow? It doesn't have to be a sweeping epic, it can be something like "oh now I'm in an ice world, the fire powerup will be really useful here, but next is a fire world so maybe I shouldn't use that as much". The logic behind Megaman's Robot Master stages and even their Weaknesses is just as much a narrative feature as the justification for Wily being the not-at-all-secret villain this time. If you fought Wood Man in a volcano with lava everywhere, it would break immersion and kind of make you wonder what the hell you're playing, which can be good if you're trying to deconstruct, but less good if you want something to be taken at face value.
Playability: How intuitive are the controls? How responsive are they? The former point is getting muddled in the age of twelve-button dual analog controllers, but it can easily be replaced by "how obtrusive/understandable is the tutorial". Can you figure out what the "jump" button is, and when you push it, do you in fact jump? Can you jump on a dime, or do you have to have a few frames of windup to do so? When you press a direction, does the game move in a direction you could understand?
Design: You figured out how to control your game. Good! Now, can you figure out the RIGHT WAY to control it? Does the game make it easy to figure out which way leads to progress? In a platformer, are jumps signposted accurately or do you have to make leaps of faith with trial and error? For that matter, how fair is it? Do mistakes feel like your own, or are you beat down with too-precise movements with too-imprecise controls, inaccurate hitboxes, or inability to figure out an obstacle's obtuse solution?
Graphics: How does the game look? This seems self-explanatory, but it's really a lot more intricate than you'd expect. It's important for the game to be aesthetically pleasing, most certainly, but it's equally important for the game to be cohesive and comprehensible. Do any assets stand out as clashing with the overall style? Can you tell the difference between an obstacle, an enemy, and the background? What about between the actual ground you move around on and a painted backdrop? Clarity of graphics is far more important than quality in most games.
Sound: Similar, but less intense than graphics. Are the sounds both cohesive and comprehensible? Are they aesthetically pleasing? That's actually more important here, because many people will mute a game they're unhappy with listening to, but audio cues can be incredibly important, especially in FPS games or survival horrors. But still, do the sounds make sense? Does a menacing enemy sound like a monster or a sack full of kittens? Is something far away quiet and muffled, and does it get louder as it gets closer? This applies to RPGs, too; you don't want a sword attack to sound like someone shot a gun unless your name is Squall.
Coding: Quite simply, programming a game is hard, and some of the most successful games imaginable are poorly coded messes held together with duct tape and the dreams of overworked Japanese salarymen. This is less about "how bad is your programming", and more about how well you can cover it up. Does your game run as expected for 99% of players, only to fall apart when attacked by rigorous edge cases that only happen if you're a speedrunner, game tester, or![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
xyzzysqrl? Or do you have to be careful to lead the player into a 'safe zone' because if they don't do things in that order, suddenly the final boss forgets his name and your mom marries a goat? In the worst case scenarios, you get things like Sonic 06 and Cheetahmen, where the casual player finds an unplayable mess and a skilled technical player like a speedrunner or game archaeologist has to weave their way through to find something actually like how the devs intended.
Honestly, most games fail in one or more of these categories, at least to some degree. Not every game is crap, though, and even crap games can be good. Thus, my personal benchmark for a kusoge is that a game has to have a blatant, noticable (to the player) lack in four or more of these areas. That's a 5/10, a 50%, quite simply a failing grade.
For a few examples!
An important fact to remember, though, is that something can be trashy and still be enjoyable. Kusoge is not bad, and a lot of them have their own charm, be it in legitimate awe-inspiringly poor quality or in being able to appreciate a game in spite of its faults.
Never be ashamed of liking kusoge, and don't take the name kusoge as a criticism levied towards people who enjoy a game. The developers could have done better, but that's on them, not on you.
But then kusoge came up amongst the Telegram group, and I thought to myself: What qualifies a game as 'bad'? One friend posited that she only calls games bad if they're morally reprehensible, if they promote agendas or behaviors that are hurtful or hateful, like Postal or Super Seducer or any of those unashamed school shooting "simulators" out there. And that's a valid take - in fact, the reason I qualify kusoge with that moniker isn't so much out of Japanophilia, but because there's an ART to it, to making a garbage game, that you don't need to have if you're just making a bad game because you're a bad human being. David Cage makes bad games but they're technically and aesthetically amazing. LJN, on the other hand, made kusoge.
So instead the question is: what qualifies kusoge?
The way I see it, game quality is one of those polygon charts with multiple axes where something can be bad in many, many different ways. So let's go over my personal standards for games, which, again, are mine and may wildly differ in intensity or definition from your own.
Concept: This is where most of the aforementioned offensive games stumble most blatantly, but also where a lot of shovelware and even sincere games trip up. What kind of hook do you have to pull me into the game? What am I, as a player, doing in the game? You don't need to do amazingly here, or even anything at all - a cookie cutter game may not ever succeed in the way innovators often do, but that doesn't instantly qualify as a negative. On the other hand, a good concept can make players forgive a lot of other flaws, and an execrable concept can ruin you no matter how good your game is. This also extends to your ad campaigns - Daikatana was gutted just as hard by its claims that John Romero was going to make you his bitch as it was by just being boring as silt.
Narrative: This is obviously directly related to your concept but has a lot more to do with writing in games that have it (mostly RPGs and Adventure games, but more modern games have it too) and pacing/flow in all games. Is the plot easy to follow? It doesn't have to be a sweeping epic, it can be something like "oh now I'm in an ice world, the fire powerup will be really useful here, but next is a fire world so maybe I shouldn't use that as much". The logic behind Megaman's Robot Master stages and even their Weaknesses is just as much a narrative feature as the justification for Wily being the not-at-all-secret villain this time. If you fought Wood Man in a volcano with lava everywhere, it would break immersion and kind of make you wonder what the hell you're playing, which can be good if you're trying to deconstruct, but less good if you want something to be taken at face value.
Playability: How intuitive are the controls? How responsive are they? The former point is getting muddled in the age of twelve-button dual analog controllers, but it can easily be replaced by "how obtrusive/understandable is the tutorial". Can you figure out what the "jump" button is, and when you push it, do you in fact jump? Can you jump on a dime, or do you have to have a few frames of windup to do so? When you press a direction, does the game move in a direction you could understand?
Design: You figured out how to control your game. Good! Now, can you figure out the RIGHT WAY to control it? Does the game make it easy to figure out which way leads to progress? In a platformer, are jumps signposted accurately or do you have to make leaps of faith with trial and error? For that matter, how fair is it? Do mistakes feel like your own, or are you beat down with too-precise movements with too-imprecise controls, inaccurate hitboxes, or inability to figure out an obstacle's obtuse solution?
Graphics: How does the game look? This seems self-explanatory, but it's really a lot more intricate than you'd expect. It's important for the game to be aesthetically pleasing, most certainly, but it's equally important for the game to be cohesive and comprehensible. Do any assets stand out as clashing with the overall style? Can you tell the difference between an obstacle, an enemy, and the background? What about between the actual ground you move around on and a painted backdrop? Clarity of graphics is far more important than quality in most games.
Sound: Similar, but less intense than graphics. Are the sounds both cohesive and comprehensible? Are they aesthetically pleasing? That's actually more important here, because many people will mute a game they're unhappy with listening to, but audio cues can be incredibly important, especially in FPS games or survival horrors. But still, do the sounds make sense? Does a menacing enemy sound like a monster or a sack full of kittens? Is something far away quiet and muffled, and does it get louder as it gets closer? This applies to RPGs, too; you don't want a sword attack to sound like someone shot a gun unless your name is Squall.
Coding: Quite simply, programming a game is hard, and some of the most successful games imaginable are poorly coded messes held together with duct tape and the dreams of overworked Japanese salarymen. This is less about "how bad is your programming", and more about how well you can cover it up. Does your game run as expected for 99% of players, only to fall apart when attacked by rigorous edge cases that only happen if you're a speedrunner, game tester, or
xyzzysqrl? Or do you have to be careful to lead the player into a 'safe zone' because if they don't do things in that order, suddenly the final boss forgets his name and your mom marries a goat? In the worst case scenarios, you get things like Sonic 06 and Cheetahmen, where the casual player finds an unplayable mess and a skilled technical player like a speedrunner or game archaeologist has to weave their way through to find something actually like how the devs intended.Honestly, most games fail in one or more of these categories, at least to some degree. Not every game is crap, though, and even crap games can be good. Thus, my personal benchmark for a kusoge is that a game has to have a blatant, noticable (to the player) lack in four or more of these areas. That's a 5/10, a 50%, quite simply a failing grade.
For a few examples!
- Sonic 06 is a kusoge because its story is a hackeneyed mess, it controls horribly even for a 3D platformer, enemies frequently hitbox-scam you and shoot you from offscreen, a lot of times you're left wandering around in a hub that is Entirely Too Large or looking around for the direction the devs WANT you to go in a level, and the times where you know WHERE to go, it's a crapshoot as to if you clip through the ground anyway. (4/8 total 'fail' scores - narrative, playability, design, coding)
- Dark Souls, despite my raging hateboner for it, is not a kusoge. Everything is bland and greyed out, and the difficulty curve is basically a brick wall, but the skill ceiling is incredibly high and very rarely are you thrown into a situation where you can't get your bearings. In addition, the whole thing looks cohesive, even if it's too dark (hurr hurr) for my personal tastes, and the sound design is top notch. (1/8 or 2/8, depending on if you count half-points - for graphics and design alike)
- The Elder Scrolls games likewise are not kusoge - they may be coded almost as poorly as Sonic 06, but they make up for that by using their open worlds as their selling point, which counteracts it. In addition, even if the graphics are dated, they're still cohesive (as long as you keep mods away) and the sound design is again on point. In addition, they're good narratively in the same way Tolkien books are - maybe not in the sense of telling a story, but the amounts of worldbuilding and minutiae is simply astounding. In addition, while it's easy to get lost, it's not nearly as easy to put yourself in an unwinnable situation, especially since wandering around is a good way to get yourself stronger. (2.5-3/8, full fail-points in coding and playability, half-point in graphics)
- King's Knight, on the other hand, falls into the kuso umbrella despite being scored by Nobuo Uematsu: Not only is the game horribly balanced with 3/4ths of the playable characters being godawful, but it's unbeatable if any one of them die, and you have no way of finding this out until the actual final stage of the game. It also had a lot of trouble differentiating hazards from powerups, threw in power-downs, and then proceeded to not tell you what the hell was going on at all. (4/8 in playability, design, concept, coding)
An important fact to remember, though, is that something can be trashy and still be enjoyable. Kusoge is not bad, and a lot of them have their own charm, be it in legitimate awe-inspiringly poor quality or in being able to appreciate a game in spite of its faults.
Never be ashamed of liking kusoge, and don't take the name kusoge as a criticism levied towards people who enjoy a game. The developers could have done better, but that's on them, not on you.
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