feotakahari (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
feotakahari) wrote2020-12-10 06:52 am
feotakahari) wrote2020-12-10 06:52 am
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Fiction for Utilitarians: Last Scenario
Say hello to my favorite hero:
Last Scenario is a game about heroes, and also a game about politics. Every country in the game has leaders who want something, and every country has heroes who (theoretically) serve the leaders. After all, if the people won’t fight or die for a leader, they’ll fight for a hero instead. There’s a hero of loyalty, a hero of vengeance, a hero of blind obsession with gaining more and more power . . . But ultimately, none of them can be heroes in the way the storybooks say, because all of them have something they value more than doing the right thing.
And then there’s Hilbert. Poor, sweet, naive Hilbert, who thinks heroes shouldn’t be that way, so he isn’t. He won’t fall to greed or corruption. Plenty of heroes won’t. But neither will he fall to the voices that tell him he’s doing the right thing just because he’s doing the thing that benefits them personally. At one point or another, every country in the game wants his head on a pike, but that’s a small price to pay for saving people, isn’t it?
Look, I love Ender Wiggin with all my heart. But Ender Wiggin never had a real chance as a hero. That’s kind of the point of his book. Hilbert is what happens when a Utilitarian hero doesn’t have the deck stacked completely against him. Just 90% against him, aiming for 95%. (I mean, his name is Hilbert. Becoming a hero was always going to be a challenge.)
As a game, I’d say Last Scenario is a very good book. There’s nothing bad about the gameplay mechanics. It’s perfectly serviceable. But there’s no aspect of it that I’d say works better in gameplay than as a story, and it certainly didn’t need to be so stupidly hard why the hell. If you don’t feel like ramming your head against the difficulty cliff, there’s always Let’s Plays: https://screencappery.livejournal.com/187913.html
Last Scenario is a game about heroes, and also a game about politics. Every country in the game has leaders who want something, and every country has heroes who (theoretically) serve the leaders. After all, if the people won’t fight or die for a leader, they’ll fight for a hero instead. There’s a hero of loyalty, a hero of vengeance, a hero of blind obsession with gaining more and more power . . . But ultimately, none of them can be heroes in the way the storybooks say, because all of them have something they value more than doing the right thing.
And then there’s Hilbert. Poor, sweet, naive Hilbert, who thinks heroes shouldn’t be that way, so he isn’t. He won’t fall to greed or corruption. Plenty of heroes won’t. But neither will he fall to the voices that tell him he’s doing the right thing just because he’s doing the thing that benefits them personally. At one point or another, every country in the game wants his head on a pike, but that’s a small price to pay for saving people, isn’t it?
Look, I love Ender Wiggin with all my heart. But Ender Wiggin never had a real chance as a hero. That’s kind of the point of his book. Hilbert is what happens when a Utilitarian hero doesn’t have the deck stacked completely against him. Just 90% against him, aiming for 95%. (I mean, his name is Hilbert. Becoming a hero was always going to be a challenge.)
As a game, I’d say Last Scenario is a very good book. There’s nothing bad about the gameplay mechanics. It’s perfectly serviceable. But there’s no aspect of it that I’d say works better in gameplay than as a story, and it certainly didn’t need to be so stupidly hard why the hell. If you don’t feel like ramming your head against the difficulty cliff, there’s always Let’s Plays: https://screencappery.livejournal.com/187913.html