Alliance Alive, Gameplay Successes, and Storytelling Failures

I have been enjoying Alliance Alive recently. The combat system feels like big improvements over SaGa Frontier and even Legend of Legacy, but the storytelling component needs some help.

There’s a lot going on! It has unique characters, distinct cultures, and world-altering conspiracies, but it feels like everything interesting happens off camera. My characters always felt like they were racing to hear about a story that happened somewhere else. 

This game originally hyped its connections to Suikoden, and I'll admit that it has improved on some aspects of that series over the past (checks notes) you know what? Never mind how long it’s been. 

The combat system is nuanced and rewarding. Every character can use every skill, and their abilities improve when they get used more frequently. It’s more than just picking fight off a menu or working towards an arbitrary EXP goal; you are encouraged to make thoughtful choices about the roles that you want each party member to perform.   

Your characters also build skills faster when the stakes are higher, which actively encourages players to seek out more powerful enemies and hunt rare monsters. As a whole, the system works to deliver victories that feel more meaningful, making it less like grinding and more like seeking out new challenges for sharpening skills.

However, the base building felt like a giant step backwards. You literally built bases, placing identical structures in interchangeable locations on the map, but they had no effect on the story. In Suikoden, new recruits unlocked new areas of your castle and opened up different functions in the game. In Alliance Alive, you just fill a bunch of empty rooms with NPCs who have a single line of dialogue. 

The entire story felt like a sequence of empty locations waiting to be populated with something interesting. NPCs traded speech bubbles with the lead character on the screen, and different members of the party had their own personalities — serious, silly, inquisitive, or wary — but it was rarely reflected in their surroundings.

It’s the opposite of the storytelling that you see in a game like Dragon Quest XI. Those stories force the player to use specific characters at different points of the game so that they can explore an environment that reflects their struggles. (Think of Erik confronting his own greed as he explores the fortress made of solid gold, or Sylvandro leading his post-apocalypse parade into a town that’s plagued by a dancing curse.) 

Any member of the party can take the lead in Alliance Alive, which means that each location has to support several different interpretations. Is the player leading a quest for vengeance? A mission of scientific inquiry? A race to recover lost artifacts? There are so many possibilities that the designers can’t commit to any specific emotions. Everything is presented with an identically accommodating blandness. 

I second-guessed a lot of my story choices, trying to figure out whether I was supposed to experience exchanges as something serious, funny, sad, or silly. I kept asking whether it would play better with different lead characters. And then I wasted a lot of time re-loading different scenes to find out that it didn’t. 

The big cutscenes weren’t much better. There were so many characters in each sequence that none of them ended up being memorable. Marketers have a cliché that describes this phenomenon: when you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one.

It ended up being like the paradox of immersive gaming: you have to remind the player that they’re in a game if they want to feel like they’re making choices that matter. In this case, if Alliance Alive told more narrowly focused stories, its world might have felt more expansive.

How to Regression: Dragon Quest XI

Back in May, I read an article about handling a crisis. It started with a bunch of quotes from high-performing leaders and CEOs who declared that things had never been better for them. 

Then it warned everyone to expect rough times ahead: 

“for many, the first weeks of managing a crisis feel extremely meaningful and energizing. But when I revisited the same leaders a few weeks later, they reported that something had happened to their energy and to the way their team was collaborating. The adrenaline-fueled pace of the initial crisis response began sputtering. Problems became more complex and exhausting. The varnish started to crack. The glory faded. Fuses were short. 

What explains this shift? In my experience as a psychologist and executive advisor, I’ve found that crises follow a rough pattern: Emergency. Regression. Recovery.”

After almost six months of dealing with a global pandemic and ongoing economic uncertainty, I’m seeing a pattern that looks more like this: Emergency. Regression. Recovery. Regression. Recovery. Regression. Recovery. Regression. Recovery. (Repeat until death.)

The good news is that Dragon Quest XI has done a fantastic job of accommodating my regression phases and my recovery phases. Minor spoilers after the image.

On the one hand, this plays like a completely new game. The DS versions of earlier installments in the series are old games with new graphics. This one feels like a modern game taking place in a more immersive environment, paying tribute to the rest of the series. 

It tells a compelling story that builds up to the main confrontation. It introduces a mid-game plot twist that strengthens the villain, and then it expects you to work your way back up to the showdown with the Lord of Shadows in the Fortress of Fear.

And even as I played through all that, I worried that I had missed something. 

This series has three keys for the player to find: a thief's key, a magic key, and an ultimate key. And Dragon Quest XI establishes that the ultimate key exists, because it walks you past an ultimate door on your way to collect other necessary items for defeating the Lord of Shadows.  

I worried that I was doing something wrong. Parts of the story left loose ends that didn't make much sense. Had I forgotten something? Would this "Fortress" be revealed as a sham, or another plot twist? Eventually, I pushed through the last battle. 

And that was it. The game is won, the world is saved, roll the end credits. 

As a stand alone game, it kind of works? It provides a complete experience, even if it was an oddly disappointing one. I wondered whether my expectations were unrealistic, and maybe I need to make my peace with the fact that tastes have changed. 

But the sense of something missing had bothered me, so I went back to work on the post-game content. That's when the game served up another story, and I realized that the end credits are the equivalent of a mid-game plot twist — they've hidden a traditional Dragon Quest experience behind a full JRPG. And it was clearly planned that way because you only find the ultimate key after you've started playing through the post-game story. 

It's a clever design. People who are new to the series get a fresh experience that familiarizes them with characters and concepts found elsewhere in the Dragon Quest universe. But the series mainstays also included for the die-hard fans, and they're left in a place where they won't interfere with rest of the experience.

NOTE TO SELF: Hello, me from the future! Remember how 2020 was completely nuts? This post title was chosen because it's the weekend before the "staff action" kicks off, and TikTok continues to be a thing under discussion.