Gal Agiese

CW: Suicide

I have all these ideas for things to write about at 3 in the morning, which is pretty inconvenient as I really need to be sleeping.  So there are a couple of video game-related topics that I sketched out an outline of some half-decent essays on in my head, and now that I'm trying to motivate myself to actually write it seems pretty exhausting and I can't really bring myself to do it.  Instead I'm gonna start over with something super duper easy and quick.

One of the things I watch a lot of is tool assisted speedruns, been into them ever since Morimoto's SMB3 speedrun first went viral.  I like them for a couple reasons.  First is that "gamer personality", which in some cases can be pretty toxic, is attenuated.  I also like seeing games as software, as something other than entertainment.  One of the posts I was thinking about was talking about the early years of arcade gaming, the panic about "pac-man fever", the purpose-built machines, all of them extremely simple, that transformed quarters into the chance at a flow state, versus the games that offer simple power fantasies.  These games had no ending (that anyone knew about), no reward, just a gateway into another state of being.

Which is the opposite of what a TAS does.  It looks at a game as a problem to be solved optimally.  There's an extremely convoluted game called "King's Bounty" where you're supposed to find a cache of treasure, spending dozens of hours and going on an epic journey to learn the random location.  Or you can do what the TAS does, which is to manipulation that random location to be right under your spawn position, dig immediately, and win.

I also learn about games I wouldn't otherwise have known about.  One of the "starred" (highly recommended) games on that site is for a Neo-Geo game called "Magician Lord".  Video games do tend to involve varying degrees of surrealism, absurdity, poor translations (another bit in one of my head essays was going to talk about that weird thing where the people who put together the instruction book for the US Super Mario Bros 2 decided for some reason to make Birdo trans), and I revel in this sort of thing.

Which brings us to Gal Agiese, the villain of Magician Lord.  Here is a compilation of his appearances in the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOKRBCQTZDk

All he ever does in the game is trash-talk you, but all of his dialogue - which is all voice acted, in the typical style of voice acting of the era.  I don't know who it was who was asked to say these lines.  I think of Tom Baker raging during an advertising recording session at a company that quibbled about his pronunciation of the word "reparability" and wonder what he would have had to say about being asked to read the line "What imprudence, you human being!"

And that's just the first line!  At the end of the second level, Gal threatens you by saying "I'm destined just to die."  Excuse me, what?  Am I eavesdropping on your call to the suicide helpline?  Level three, he's less morose but still extraordinarily philosophical: "That power is powerless in our presence."  Level four is almost a coherent threat: "You, persistent guy. But your life ends right now." I mean, aside from sounding like the lyrics to a particularly sick italo disco jam not much wrong with that.  At least not compared to "Your are very dangerous. Be dead down here."  He opens the final fight by saying "Yes, I made a mistake."  I mean I have to respect Gal for that.  One of my pet peeves is people who just can't ever admit or take responsibility for their mistakes.  (OK yeah that kind of is most people most of the time.)

But in the end, it's not enough: Again changes to Hell.