Monday, May 12, 2008
In the strategy game Shogun, war isn't just hell, it's also a great movie.
Jul 26, 2000 | Now I know how Kambei Shimada felt when his battle plans went awry.
But unlike Shimada, the calm tactical genius from "The Seven Samurai," I'm not lucky enough to at least have Toshiro Mifune giggling and going uncontrollably hog wild on bandits with his 7-foot no-dachi sword. In my riverside battle from Shogun: Total War, the new strategy game from Electronic Arts, I'm stuck with a squad of unworthy samurai archers -- men with no honor.
The archers are supposed to hold a key bridge long enough for my main forces to cross another bridge, then swoop upon the enemy's right flank to devastating effect. Instead, the enemy's heavy cavalry are thundering down on my archers, fast -- but rather than holding, my archers are wheeling around and fleeing the bridge altogether. Clear of the bridge, they keep running, up the nearby foothills; presumably returning to their farms, or joining the ranks of ronin -- the masterless samurai.
If my grievous lack of face seems inordinately keen -- and it is -- it's because Shogun isn't a typical real-time strategy (RTS) war game, with touches of Japanese history merely sprinkled about for flavor. Shogun's designers have imbued every aspect of the game interface with the sensibility of ancient Japan, arguably the most aesthetically elegant in world history.
Information windows incorporate traditional wood prints of warfare. Even the strategic troop icons evoke the small, colorful cards from hana fuda, the Japanese gin rummy. On the battlefields, this realization of feudal Japan is breathtaking. As if the wood print master Hokusai himself were their visual advisor, the game's battles are evocatively staged, sometimes on lush, steep hillsides, sometimes in the midst of swirling fog or driving rain. Flurries of men in ornate armor clash, accompanied by a thunderous soundtrack of taiko drums, shakuhatchi flutes and Japanese battle chants. In some battles, the fields are arrayed with thousands of soldiers, all individuated and displayed within the same frame.
This unity of mise-en-schne contrasts starkly with most historically based RTS games, such as Microsoft's Age of Empires, in which the "history" mostly seems like costume and props; a kind of grade school diorama overlay imposed on a genre first created in Peter Molyneux's Powermonger, and then expanded in Sid Meier's Civilization and Blizzard's Warcraft.
What Mike Simpson and his development team have done is remodel an entire culturally unique era in the form of a computer strategy game -- and at the same time, re-conceive that genre as a fully cinematic experience. From a Westerner's perspective the effect is like being placed within the color-saturated world of Akira Kurosawa's "Ran." Or rather, in the role of a character who'd comfortably fit within that film. And while your daimyo (clan leader) doesn't endure King Lear-like domestic strife, his struggle to unite the nation is just as savage.
Shogun has some problems -- there are a few unsatisfying gameplay idiosyncrasies and seamless play requires a high-powered computer. But as an experience, Shogun succeeds as something much more ambitious than a compelling strategy game: It shows how a medium besides film can evoke the experience of war -- and the kind of artistry someone like Kurosawa brought to it. Who knows? For historically minded dramatists, games may even turn out to be a superior medium to film.
The prospect of strategy games supplanting their movie analogs couldn't come sooner, because it looks like the glory days of great war films are long past. Costs have grown too high and the production process has become too corporatized. The film industry shows little patience for the historical accuracy or conceptual breadth inherent in a computer game like Shogun. Perhaps aspiring filmmakers who'd attempt Kurosawan heights would do better to switch mediums now.
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