Don’t tell my agent, but I took a break from editing my next book last night to finish Team Ninja’s Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, which is a video game adaptation of sorts of the Chinese novel Journey to the West, with a cute hacker standing in place of the Buddhist monk Tripitaka, a smelly otaku-type machinist as Pigsy, and Monkey represented by a cyber-warrior wanderer of postapocalyptic wasteland.

I was really impressed by how much I ended up caring about the characters of the game.  Granted, I don’t play video games very often, but when I do I’m seldom impressed by the emotional depth of the protagonists.  They often have a little too much snark, and not enough humanity, to feel like real people – as if they’re MST3K’ing their own lives.  For some reason, in this game, when characters lost something, I *felt* it.  I was surprised, saddened, moved by the way these people acted.

Granted, I have a deep loyalty to Journey to the West, and Monkey is one of my favorite fictional characters of all time, ever.  In spite of the broad liberties Enslaved took with this adaptation, I felt like the core character relationships remained unchanged.  Pigsy is a cowardly, sensuous brute; Monkey is smart, snarky, cocky, funny, and terrifying when angered; Tripitaka is a morally questionable (yet at the same time fundamentally moral) protagonist, and, in an extra-faithful homage to the original story, is frequently kidnapped or attacked by powers beyond her control.  But my wife, who doesn’t know Journey to the West at all, felt a similar connection to the characters.

Which makes me think about whether choice, which I often think of as a huge asset, is really all that essential in games.  Enslaved is sort of a rails-platformer: you, as Monkey, run from level to level, doing what Trip says you need to do in order to save her / help her in her quest.  You have no control over your goals, and the game doesn’t give you even the pretense of choice about your characters’ development.  Yet I cared – because I believed in these characters’ commitments to and feelings for one another, and I wanted them to experience some kind of catharsis.  For whatever reason, I didn’t need branching storylines, or one of a thousand different possible endings.  I wanted to see how this particular story ended.  And that’s what I saw.  Massive kudos to Alex Garland for the story, and to Andy Serkis (yep, that Andy Serkis) and Lindsey Shaw for making Monkey and Trip come alive.

Also, I got to beat up a large number of robots with a stick, which if that’s not part of your definition of a good time, then take a hike.