Crytpic Signals - Doodle Chapmion Island Games

  

Doodle Champion Island Games

 

This review is a bit of a departure, since the Doodle Champion Island Games is a video game, rather than a tabletop RPG. It's a free-to-play in-browser game made in a collaboration between Google and Studio 4°C. The release of the game coincided with the start of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, and the game itself casts the player as an aspiring athlete who travels to an island of champions to test her prowess. The game art reminds me of the 16-bit pixel art from the SNES era, and features very brief cut scenes with anime-style animation at key moments. The reason I've chosen this to review though is that it's a fun little sandbox, and there are some elements to it that I think are worth pointing out.

 

The setting of the game is the eponymous Champion Island, which has a vaguely asterisk-shaped eight-legged map. The first "leg" is the dock where the player character, Lucky the Cat, arrives on her boat. Each of the other seven legs is home to one of the island's seven champions and others who live in that area. There are rugby-playing oni, a tengu who loves table tennis, a skateboarding tanuki, and an owl sitting atop the climbing mountain. There are beaches, a volcanic peninsula, and a bamboo forest, and the cosmopolitan Tanooki City which has the largest and most diverse group of residents on the island. At the center of the island are statues depicting the champions and trails - marked by signs and helpful NPCs - that lead to each leg of the island.

 

The ostensible goal of the game is to challenge each of the seven champions in their chosen sport and best them, winning a scroll and your likeness on the appropriate statue at the center of the island. But the arenas, marked by red gates, are all right at the entrance to their respective legs. You have to go only a little further in to each leg to find the dojo for that sport, where you can meet the champion and get advice about how to play. If all you do is go to the seven arenas and win the seven sports, the game is quite quick, and a little disappointing. There's an animated cut-scene the first time you challenge the champion, showing off their prowess, that reminds me of the animations in Mega Man. There's another after you win the match to show them graciously passing you the scroll of victory. Although they're not combat, these are boss fights, but these contests are much less than half the game. 

 

The real pleasures here are exploration and interaction. The island is beautifully drawn, and it has secrets to discover. Not every place can be accessed initially. There are four teams with clubhouses hidden on the island. If you join one, you can get inside their clubhouse, but you can only choose one. The NPCs vary greatly in terms of their dialogue. Some basically serve as signposts to tell you where you are or where a path leads. Some give you a glimpse of their inner lives. All over the island are kappas who just say "Kappa!", but there's one intelligent kappa who gives you a little speech about loneliness. And some NPCs can give you quests. 

 

The way they do this is by telling you about a problem they're having. If you want, you can volunteer to help, and they'll tell you how. Some quests are fairly simple, like the royal arrow collector who wants help picking up arrows, or the grandfather who wants help catching up to his granddaughter who keeps jogging ahead. Other quests require you to go visit a specific other person - maybe you met them once already, remember them, and can go back, or maybe the quest gives you a reason to go meet them. In a few cases, you'll go back and forth several times before you're done. Some quests unlock new parts of the island, in particular, more difficult versions of the sports, with matches that are longer or have higher scoring requirements and opponents who play harder. And interestingly, some quests are nested. Finding enough driftwood to help the artist make a statue, for example, requires you to find the hidden beach, the bakery, and the hot springs, along with several others. You can earn trophies, kept in a trophy house near the center of the island, for helping people, but the real incentive is the satisfaction of figuring something out and putting it right. If I could make one change to the game, I'd remove the trophies, though I suppose they are a staple of contemporary video games.

 

I made a comparison to Mega Man earlier, but unlike that game, where you can visit the levels in any order, but they're much easier if you find and complete the secret correct order, nothing in Champion Island pushes you to visit the legs in any particular order, or to finish everything in one before visiting another. In fact the nature of the quests encourages you to wander, explore, and revisit. In both video game terms and in D&D terms, the game is level-less. Nothing is too hard to try it first, and nothing gets easier simply because you've been playing for awhile. You the player might get better, especially at the sports, but Lucky the Cat never gets faster or stronger. It creates a radical openness that I'm not sure you can really replicate in any D&D-like game where characters level up and get stronger over time. 

 

The other difference between Champion Island and other sandbox adventuring sites is that there's no combat. You never have to fight anyone - there are no guard blocking off certain areas, no guardians protecting treasure, no dragons to slay, no wandering monsters harrying you just for existing within the space. I'm not sure the game could remain so open if you did have to fight. The closest analog to combat are the sport-matches where compete against the champions. But like everything else, these are totally optional. I called them boss fights earlier, and perhaps it would be fair to say that these are the closest things to dragons to slay - you want to win the scroll and earn your face on the statues, I guess, but the main reason to play the sports is for the enjoyment of the activity itself, the excitement of competition. In certain versions and editions of D&D, combat is like this, a kind of mini-game, the way the sports are. It may advance a goal, but players also seek it out and spend time on it because they find it enjoyable. It's a contest with clear conditions of victory and loss, it has its own distinct rhythm, and it uses rules that aren't necessarily part of the rest of the game. In most versions of D&D, combat is really the only mini-game, while Champion Island has seven. 

 

The quests are one area where the game could be made more complex and more interesting, although probably at the cost of its generous, forgiving tone. There's no real way to fail a quest in this game. Some NPCs need to be convinced of this or there, but there's no way to accidentally or intentionally turn them against the thing you're supposed to convince them of. You can always try again. Quests might be uncompleted, but they'll never be uncompletable. The tabletop setting doesn't really lend itself to unlimited tries though, or to NPCs who'll happily repeat your last conversation every time you leave the room and reenter it. Although it contradicts the tone of this game, consequences for failure would make succeeding at the quests feel more meaningful.

 

 

This post originally appeared on Bones of Contention.