T w e n t y S i d e d

Note: This post is going to show both gore and nudity. Together. I’m going to share a particular screenshot from the game and I don’t want to undercut the point I’m making by censoring stuff out.

Just, you know, be aware of this if you happen to be reading at work.

Party!

Once BJ gets back from Venus, everyone throws a party. The team gets drunk and acts silly. It’s a fun scene and sort of hints at the stuff that goes on around the submarine while you’re off doing all the work.

Having said that, this is a really odd thing in terms of tone and story structure. This is like the rebels throwing a party just before assaulting the Death Star. This is the point where most stories bring our heroes low with self-doubt, personal loss, or internal conflict. Normally you’d expect the writer to remind us of the stakes, or even raise them. If the stakes have been large and abstract before now (the city is in danger) then this is where it would become personal (your partner / parents / dog is in danger) and vice versa. Maybe the writer would spend some time to drive home just how bad things have gotten. Show us how terrified the villagers are, or how much the hostages are hurting. Remind us of the personal drama that made our hero begin this journey in the first place.

This story hit the emotional low point at the two-thirds mark when BJ lost his head, and then we did the fetch quest to Venus. It’s fine to have an unconventional story structure if that’s what you need. Having a party at this point isn’t strictly wrong or anything. The rules of storytelling aren’t written in stone and having a party before a big battle is a real thing some people do to take their mind off the stress.

The problem is that we’re going into the last stage of the game and it doesn’t particularly feel like it. You can have an unconventional structure, but you still need to maintain the sense of tension that pulls an audience through a story.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Wolfenstein II Part 10: Party Time”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

To liberate the United States, BJ needs to hijack the Ausmerzer. To do that, he needs the control codes. To get them, he needs to go to VenusWait, so NOBODY on Earth has the control codes? Doesn’t anyone on Earth need the control codes to, you know, control it?. To get to Venus, he needs to disguise himself as an actor.

See, the Nazis are making a propaganda movie about the capture and execution of Terror Billy and the auditions for the title role are being held on Venus. So BJ poses as an actor and goes to Venus to audition to play himself. While there, he can steal the MacGuffin codes. This means we have to meet the film producer, who turns out to be Der Führer himself, Adolf Hitler.

Mr. Hitler

The Wolfenstein games have always had a weird relationship with Hitler. This is an action story, and action stories are generally a build-up to some final showdown between our hero and the ultimate embodiment of evil. This works really well in a story like Star Wars where the villain isn’t just the mastermind, but also a formidable foe for the protagonist to face off against. We can take the entire conflict of the two sides and boil it down to a fight between two people. This can take a large, abstract conflict and make it deeply personal. The problem is that this doesn’t work nearly as well when you’re making a story based on historical events, because the most powerful leader is rarely the most fearsome warrior.

Having BJ kill Hitler wouldn’t be particularly cathartic because in combat he’s just an old politician with a dumb mustache. On the other hand, it feels really strange to leave him out. Everyone’s first question will be, “So what about Adolf Hitler?” He might not be a good boss fight, but this series is built around the desire for lowbrow wish fulfillment / power fantasy, and bringing justice to one of the most hated figures of the 20th century fits right in with that sort of thing. On the other, other hand, we want to kill our villain at the end of the story for maximum emotional and thematic payoff, but the audience already understands that killing Hitler doesn’t magically stop the Nazi war machine or end the slaughter. Basically, the audience will naturally desire – and perhaps even expect – something which is going to be both implausible and unfulfilling as an end to the story.

Wolfenstein 3D handled this by putting Hitler inside a Mecha-suit to make him a more interesting threat, and his fight appeared at the end of the third chapter in a six-part story. The Hitler confrontation was a climax, but not the climax.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Wolfenstein II Part 9: Mister Hitler”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.