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Lately I’ve been thinking about endings. A natural trend, as my summer draws to a close, my temporary residence at home finishes, and the conclusion of my undergraduate education looms in the distance.
Regardless of those endings, however, I’ve noticed a trend among the media I’ve consumed in this all-too-brief vacation, ranging from Plants vs. Zombies, which kicked off my break gaming in early June, to Uncharted, which presumably ended it last week (stay tuned).
It spans games, movies, and books, and crystallizes an issue I’ve long suspected submarines my own writing.
There’s something in the creative process that makes the genesis of a concept the most exciting portion of its creation. It is in the beginning that an idea seems the freshest, before the toil of development wears at its sheen and looming self-doubt dulls its brilliance.
In the embryonic stages, a work stays most unfailingly focused on its primary theme. The expansion of a concept can often dull its impact by layering on extraneous elements that do nothing to enhance it, but rather distract from the original point of the work.
These downfalls are clear in both Plants vs. Zombies and Uncharted.
While Plants vs. Zombies is not a complicated game, it is a complex one: while its play mechanics are basic, new items and zombies are constantly added as the game progresses.
The swiftly expanding repertoire of weapons and enemies keeps the game fresh to a degree, but often to the detriment of the core experience introduced early in the story.
There are many zombies that, rather than requiring a clever tactic or manipulation of the environment, simply make necessary a particular item, and to hell with the player if that item is forgotten on the item select screen.
This additional layer of difficulty does little to enhance the game, and instead makes certain rushes, particularly those with ten different zombie types, an exercise in frustration.
The fundamental third act breakdown of Plants vs. Zombies, though, is its final level, on the roof of the player’s house.
While its adventure begins in a simple yard environment that makes planting quick and painless, the conclusion requires players to use flower pots to enable planting, an extra step that adds to the frustration of complexity building throughout the game.
What’s more, many of the player’s strategies will suddenly become nearly worthless, as the sloped roof renders horizontal attacks, which comprise most of the player’s arsenal, ineffective.
There’s a small portion of the roof that is flat, but it’s too small an area for the advanced tactics needed to destroy the game’s most powerful adversaries, who storm this setting in frenetic fashion at the finale.
Uncharted has similar problems in its third act, as the elements that make it unique fade toward oblivion. The conceit of Uncharted is that Nathan Drake, the protagonist, is an everyman Indiana Jones, a man who cracks wise, kicks ass, and displays a modicum of vulnerability.
By the end of the story, however, the developers had apparently forgotten this: Drake evolves into an unstoppable killing machine, mowing down hordes of enemies to get closer to his ends.
His wit recedes, and what’s left is a tale that’s more Temple of Doom than Raiders of the Lost Ark, verging from comedy and light-hearted adventure into all-out action.
That shift also harms the gameplay of Uncharted, as the stealth and exploration that define Drake die away and are replaced by loads of repetitive gunplay.
While the combat is undeniably fun and buttery smooth, it’s largely dependent on an excellent Gears of War-esque cover mechanic to compensate for Drake’s inadequacy as a fighter and marksman.
When the cover elements vanish, what’s left is a mad scramble to survive and gobble up enough ammo to flail to the finish. Further, the awesome climbing sections, reminiscent of Prince of Persia, become few and far between, and their variety is sorely missed.
Ultimately, what I’m starting to wonder is why it’s so difficult for any work to sustain its excellence toward a close, having seen so many, including Plants vs. Zombies and Uncharted, fail at it this summer. (Wedding Crashers, The Time Traveler’s Wife, and Freakanomics come to mind).
It’s a plague I’ve fallen prey to myself: my conclusions are traditionally weak, and the finishes of my fictional works are often their most criticized sections.
Some works manage to stay brilliant from beginning to end: Flowers for Algernon, for example, is a novel that depends on its ending to deliver the emotional blow the rest of the story portends.
Hopefully, in time, I’ll be able to decipher their secret, and craft more complete, compelling works as a result.
But I can’t say this summer has done much to convince me.