malvasia bianca

Just to get a disclaimer out of the way: a friend of mine was the primary game designer / writer on Quartet, so I’m definitely not an unbiased player of the game.

Quartet is a game made by a bunch of SNES-era JRPG geeks. Which isn’t a genre that I actually have much experience with: I didn’t start playing console games until the Nintendo 64 era, and I haven’t gone back to play very many SNES games. In terms of SNES JRPGs, I played and enjoyed Chrono Trigger; I played some of Final Fantasy VI and, I think, basically enjoyed it until I got to a dungeon that was annoying enough that I quit the game. (So I guess I wasn’t enjoying it all that much.) I probably wouldn’t have even been aware of Quartet if I didn’t have a friend working on it, and I certainly wouldn’t have played it; but I’m glad I did play it.

The title of the game comes from the fact that there are four introductory chapters, each of which introduces a pair of characters; you can play those in any order, and then their plots come together for the rest of the game. The first chapter that I played was for the character Ben; I’m glad I started with that one, because it’s genuinely funny in an understated way that I’m not used to seeing in video games. And it also walked a difficult line of acknowledging that a lot of what happens in video games is, objectively, ridiculous while simultaneously acknowledging that, while we’re playing the game, we’re affirmatively choosing to treat the game’s world and rules seriously.

The other three introductions weren’t as impressive, but I thought two of them were solid RPG introductions: people thrown into trouble in a way that did a good job of drawing me into the situation, I enjoyed the characters’ personality, and I liked seeing different parts of the world in the different intros. The fourth one didn’t work so well for me: a soldier in an army, realizing that the army in question is doing some genuinely bad stuff. Which is fine, but I’ve seen enough stories like that (whether in games or books or movies or whatever), and it’s not a genre that I’m drawn to in general. I do feel like JRPGs probably spend more time interrogating soldiers, armies, and war than other genres do, though, so I’m open to the possibility that Quartet is in conversation with the broader genre in ways that I would find interesting if I were more familiar with the genre.

Then the characters came together after the intros; the plot got more generic after that. Not in a particularly bad way or anything; a band of plucky heroes trying to save the world is basically par for the course for RPGs, after all! So it kept me moving; and I liked the mechanics and the pixel art. You certainly don’t have to be an SNES JRPG expert to play the game: I’ve got some amount of resource optimization instincts, and resting locations are frequent enough that I ended up almost never using items at normal difficulty. If you’re not used to that sort of resource optimization, normal difficulty will still probably be fine (you get a good amount of free items, after all, and there are shops!), and there’s an easier difficulty as well if you just want to follow the plot. And I imagine if you really like to dig into mechanics you’d probably enjoy the harder difficulties and taking the choice of accessories for the characters more seriously than I did.

I’m also genuinely curious about where the art style fits into the genre lineage. I’m used to games with 2D pixel art that signpost boundaries clearly but also relatively gracelessly. So I appreciated Quartet being more organic in that regard: e.g. it was being a little less clear if a break between trees was big enough for you to move through it, and items were sometimes a little more nestled away than I’m used to, though not in a way that made me paranoid that I was missing things if I didn’t explore every pixel. But I also suspect that that’s something that later SNES games frequently did? I could be wrong, though; at any rate, it seemed well done, I liked both looking at and wandering around the world.

Another aspect of Quartet that I really appreciated is that it kept on moving along: I’m used to RPGs having tons of padding, but with Quartet I was finishing chapters and moving the plot along at a regular pace. The details of that changed in the last chapter of the game: the other chapters are short, self-contained, and linear, whereas the in the last chapter the game basically said “okay, we’re about to end the game, and if you want to to just finish the game, then great, but if you want to see more, we’ll give you a bunch of side quests to finish”. (There weren’t any side quests before that point.) There’s one side quest for each character, one bigger side quest that pulls more threads together, and a few side quests that were either fetch-questy stuff or much more difficult and presumably intended for New Game Plus. I skipped the quests in those last categories; totally fine that they’re there, though, they’re just for people who want to dig deeper into the game than I did.

But I did the other classes of side quests, and I’m glad I did. In particular, there was one that had me happier about the game’s discussion of armies doing bad stuff: I won’t go into details, but it does a decent job of putting you in a situation where there are genuine emotional pulls to behave in a way that you’re not so sure about from a broader point of view. And then one of the characters in your party says “nope, I’m just not willing to be part of this”, and disappears for the rest of that side quest.

Which is great! It’s far too common for games to ask you to make big moral choices, for those choices to not necessarily be ones that should be naturally made by the player character, and for the choices to show a complete lack of nuance. But Quartet sidestepped that trap neatly: you don’t really have to make big choices, you can see the individual motivations and misgivings of the primary character you’re following in that sidequest, and there’s this other character who nicely presents the point of view that you don’t actually have to be at all comfortable with what’s going on.

So that’s the side quests; and then, after an amount of time I was happy with, I went and finished the game. Which was a pleasant enough ending; the difficulty ramped up a little more than I was expecting, so that was one of the few places where I had to retry a boss battle, but after thinking more about the game’s systems and how to use the items that I’d been mostly ignoring, I beat on my second try. (It would be nice if games could get away from big bosses having three forms, though.)

And then, again, the game surprised me in a similar way to what I described above. I was totally expecting a Mass Effect 3-style ending, but nope: not only did I not have to make a big choice, what the game ended up with was a much better decision for how the next steps of the future of the world might proceed than in the vast majority of RPGs that I’m used to.

So, Quartet: it’s good. I suspect that, if you liked SNES JRPGs back in the day, you’ll like this too. Even if you’re no more familiar with them than I was, though, the pacing and difficulty are such that the game is totally accessible. (I probably spent around 25 hours playing it?) And the writing is surprisingly good: the overall plot is a little generic, but the sentences are good, there were multiple times when the details about the overall plot surprised me, and I ended up rather fond of multiple of the characters.