T w e n t y S i d e d

This week I want to cover a few different topics, with my comments on each.

The Crones of Crookback Bog

The Bloody Baron got more press, but to me personally, Geralt’s interactions with the Crones (and the even more mysterious being they deposed, so mysterious that fans usually refer to it as just “the thing in the tree”) are the highlight of Velen.

For those that don’t know, the Crones are the beings Anna Strenger went to for help when she was pregnant with the Baron’s child. They’re three… things. Witches? (Demi)gods? Former Druids? It’s not clear, but whatever they are, they’re powerful and extremely unsettling.

This, to me, is top-notch character design. Even after having seen this scene before, playing it this time creeped me out all over again – the wicker cage thing over Brewess’ face, the twitchy, almost insect-like movements of Weavess, the profoundly obscene way that she strokes the severed legs she has strapped to her belt, Whispess’ necklace of severed ears… and the music, too. Even going back to the orphanage after the quest is over, hearing the music makes me nervous. (Here’s a link if you feel like listening.) The game’s composer is a man named Marcin Przybylowicz, and as Nobuo Uematsu (composer for the Final Fantasy series) is celebrated for his work, so should Przybylowicz be if you ask me. Eastern European folk music is rich ore to mine, and he mines it well. I think more of this game’s unique mood comes from its music than people realize.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher 3: The Good Ladies and Keira Metz”

Bob Case MrBtongue is the Pele of complaining about videogames and will soon be the Garrincha of complaining about TV shows. You can find his Youtube channel at youtube.com/user/MrBtongue.

Last week, I had intended for this post to cover some of the game’s side content. I’ve since changed my mind – some of topics I wanted to discuss about that I’ve decided to put on hold until after I covered the main Velen quests.

The “Bloody Baron” sequence of events includes the multi-step quests “Family Matters” and “Ladies of the Wood,” which together see Geralt piece together the story of how exactly local warlord Phillip Strenger’s family was torn to pieces and came to various kinds of tragedy. It got oodles of acclaim – it won a Golden Joystick award for “Best Gaming Moment,” and both PC Gamer and Kotaku did write-ups on how it was made.

I’m of several different minds about this whole sequence. I’ve praised the Witcher games in the past for being “realistic” (in the literary sense of the word, not the literal sense), and this video covers the core of that argument if you want to know it in more detail. The Bloody Baron story meets many of my own informal criteria for realism: a believable messiness, an emphasis on the personal, events that are relatively small in scale in comparison to their surroundings, and characters who at least occasionally confound our dramatic expectations. And, broadly speaking, I like literary realism.

So I was surprised to find myself uneasy with this quest. It’s my personal – though relatively casual – belief that every good story has a moral. In some cases the moral is up-front and obvious, like with an Aesop’s fable, and in some cases the moral is complex and squirrelly enough that it defies conventional methods of explanation and can only be glimpsed through fiction. Put another way, even in literary realism, which tends to resist pat value judgments, stories are trying to say something about the world. And my personal reading of what the Bloody Baron sequence is trying to say is that the behavior of the titular character is at least partially excusable, and that perhaps the Baron shouldn’t be considered a villain at all.

Let’s look at that behavior. Our first direct contact with the Baron’s existence is at the inn we’re sent to to locate the Emperor’s spy. The village surrounding the inn is being terrorized by the Baron’s men, to the point where parents are disguising their daughters as boys in hopes of sparing them from being raped. Geralt has an encounter with them in the inn itself, and you can either fight them or talk them down.In a bit of reactivity I didn’t know the game had until recently, fighting them gets you banned from the Baron’s fort at Crow’s Perch, and you have to sneak in through a cave that leads to the bottom of the fort’s well.

Now I don’t necessarily mean to say that a commander bears full culpability far all the actions of his men in a situation like this, but surely he bears some. It’s not as though the Baron thinks the soldiers under his command are angels. In his first conversation with Geralt he says that they’re “good at pulling up the floorboards to find a peasant’s last sack of grain,”Or something like that, those may not be his exact words. so he’s apparently aware that at the very least his men are taking food from desperate people by force.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher 3: The Bloody Baron”

Bob Case MrBtongue is the Pele of complaining about videogames and will soon be the Garrincha of complaining about TV shows. You can find his Youtube channel at youtube.com/user/MrBtongue.