Strange Gaming Diaries: Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling, by Moonsprout Games

paper mario: the thousand year door was a childhood favorite of mine, as it was for a lot of folks of about my generation! and in general I look back on the gamecube era very fondly...it was a point at which nintendo was comfortable enough to let developers take their own weird swings at old foundational franchises, giving us things like mario strikers, metroid prime, the shadow pokemon series, and a bunch of other games the likes of which you'll rarely see these days.

of course, this shift was ephemeral. these days, nintendo exercises much more rigorous brand control and has sanded down some of the eccentric flourishes from long-runners like mario party, the mario rpg series, and very infamously, paper mario. every time a modern paper mario game has been revealed, a whole wave of people hope that it will exercise the same innovations and charisma of the initial trilogy, then succumb to disappointment when it inevitably doesn't.

uninformed readers may be wondering why I've devoted the first two paragraphs to a different video game from the one in the title, but informed ones will know that bug fables is very, very, very blatantly a realization of the thousand year door's legacy.

it's got action commands, it's got two-dimensional sprites in three-dimensional environments, it's got a badge system, it's got a cooking system based on recipes of either one or two items, it's got side quests from all throughout the game world posted on a bulletin board, and it's got a challenging optional side dungeon where you fight a bunch of waves of enemies and receive rewards at every interval of ten. it is based on the thousand year door so comprehensively that it's frankly admirable!

but the game has one major benefit that its predecessor didn't; a static main cast of heroes who all regularly contribute to conversation and talk with each other! the character writing is thus on much stronger display throughout the story, and the protagonists are able to undergo arcs that span the entire game rather than needing to be contained within a single chapter like all the partners but vivian (the best one) had to manage in paper mario.

the story is simple, being the kind of fairly archetypal story about a plucky band of heroes drawn together by circumstance I've seen before, but it's told with heart and enthusiasm that still made things hit at all the right moments. I may be one of the biggest proponents I know for stories that are impenetrable and bewildering, but this game is largely able to balance familiar archetypes with believable characterization and a constant sense of forward momentum.

I'll also admit to being fairly charmed by the fact that this game was really obviously written by people who are giant anime nerds and kept writing in little quirks like characters exclaiming "oi!" which feel ever so slightly stilted until you realize that's a thing people do in anime. some people might consider that a knock against the writing but once I realized what was happening my one piece loving ass was fully on board

what really surprised me, though, was how the combat in the game led to much more dense strategizing than I was expecting! for starters, your ability to hit enemies with different physical positioning is split up evenly across your three-person party. barring the use of special moves or other resources, kabbu is the only one who can flip over enemies, vi is the only one who can hit airborne enemies, and leif is the only one who can hit burrowing enemies.

this, the turn relay system, and the many bonuses and drawbacks you get from things like positioning or elemental weaknesses mean that there's a lot of moving parts to every combat encounter, and you end up shifting your tactics and prioritizing different party members on a moment-to-moment basis. during some fights keeping leif alive is the top priority, but other times you might need to rely on kabbu's defense-piercing attacks. not only is it engaging on a mechanical level, it's a neat way to convey the sense of teamwork between the team, and got me more invested in them!

I also want to take the time to talk about some story reveals for these characters that hit me pretty hard, and for that, we'll need to...

⚠ ENTER THE SPOILERZONE ⚠

I mentioned before that bug fables's story is broadly simple, but there are a lot of beats in between that really took me by surprise for how nuanced and intimate they got. queen elizant II is set up in a way that makes her seem like she's going to end up being a twist villain, with a faintly authoritarian vibe and scattered remarks that she's been the cause of some diplomatic tensions and rather unpopular political decisions.

but as the story goes on, it's revealed that although the queen's insistent desire for the sapling is to save her mother, she also genuinely does care for her people and is just struggling to fill the role of a beloved leader that left her kingdom too soon. none of the problematic things she's done are disproved; they're just flaws that the character acknowledges and tries to overcome through the story.

vi's character also had a similar impact which really impressed me. she's a spunky teenager who's out on an exploring team because everyone back home told her she couldn't do it and wasn't willing to support her, and she's here to prove them wrong! it's a classic archetype, and so when we were told that we were going to the bee kingdom where vi comes from, I was expecting the usual suite of stern disapproving authority figures and underdog gumption.

but after no small amount of vi talking about how people from the bee kingdom are snobby and basically the worst, it's revealed that most of the bee kingdom is actually very nice, and that their expressions of hesitation were being viewed as haughty dismissal by a petulant girl with a chip on her shoulder.

even the one person she actually gets into some nasty arguments with, her sister, is someone vi is also very unkind to for no good reason! her whole character arc is her realizing that she's been wrong in her judgment of a lot of her family, and that she owes it to them to make amends. leif downright gives her a line that absolutely blew me away:

Something may happen tomorrow, or even today. And then, you won't be able to say sorry.

god, leif is such a fantastic character. not only am I delighted that the concept of cordyceps in a world with sapient bugs was wrung out for all the narrative potential it had, but the personal drama with leif's conflicted sense of identity, being torn apart between the fact that he's a bunch of fungus puppeting around a dead body and yet feels responsible for doing right by those that person felt were important? that's the kind of dense and tragic character arc I wouldn't even expect from a game explicitly aiming at way higher narrative weight classes.

leif undergoes dysphoria towards his insect body. he grapples with feelings that he doesn't deserve to have the kind of happy life that the original leif was denied in his death. he knows he shouldn't exist, that the circumstances of his existence as a lab experiment were abominable, and is challenged to try and find meaning in what he nevertheless has. there were moments of his story that genuinely moved me in ways I never would have possibly expected from the cute bugs game.

if anything, the fact that bug fables is super transparently an homage to the thousand year door is all the more reason why I love it. we really do live in a time where not only can a tiny development team recreate beloved classics like the thousand year door, they can make a game that's actually the thousand year door but better in basically every way.

it makes me excited to try and find more games in the vein of my childhood favorites (still looking for something to scratch the pokemon itch...) and relieved that the torch of inspiration is being picked back up after being fumbled so hard by the names we once looked up to. maybe never getting a good paper mario game ever again is okay. maybe that in particular isn't really ever what we needed.

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