Between 1974 and 1977, Stephen King released three novels, each more popular than the last. Carrie at 272 pages; Salem's Lot at 480; and The Shining at 528. I include the page numbers, because they're telling of King's fame. With each book, he gained the respect of editors. They trusted his ideas because those ideas made them money, and so fewer people said no. Ideas equal money. No to ideas equals no money. Transitive property.
So, obviously, from time to time, with all those ideas, none of them being turned down, the genius' work becomes bloated. For Tim Schafer, the genius, the legend, the time is now with a game that's part RTS and part sandbox, part comedy and part rock show. But is any part fun?
Schafer, the video game auteur who along with Mr. King shares a love for the occult and bizarre, today releases his latest, Brutal Legend, the tale of Eddie Riggs, a roadie played by Jack Black. The character looks like the result of those late night talk show skits ("If actor married actress the baby would look like..."). 49% Schafer, 49% Black, 2% human growth hormone - that's Eddie Riggs.
The yarn unravels with Riggs, in true roadie fashion, leading the great rockers of a mythical world that looks like a heavy metal album cover (but bump-mapped.) Together, the gang seeks to dethrone General Lionwhyte and the evil Lord Doviculus (played by Tim Curry).
One can imagine that The Story of Eddie in Fantasy Land is personal to Schafer. Funnier than any game this year and more touching than most, the story plays out like a 3,500 page script that Schafer's been revising since he -- as I imagine it -- penned the outline on the cover of his high school English notebook.
Not that this is immature writing; rather it's a thing of Schafer's time. It's metal. Real metal, a type of godly music that according to the mythos of Brutal Legend was divined from the earth by the deities of rock at some point in the early 1970s. (Schafer was born in 67, so if we're to believe Freud, this is all one cosmic reach to recreate his childhood. Hey, Coppola's been doing it for decades.)
And this has all been a long walk to make this point: if you aren't a fan of metal, why care?
Because the most disappointing part of Brutal Legend is that it's just not much fun.The story is great. The voice-acting too. So is the art design. But the gameplay boils down to an average open world with all the average trappings. Side quests are generally little more than race and ambush missions.
Then there are the battles, a funky real time strategy (RTS) format. If you found console RTSs difficult with a good perspective, imagine the trouble playing one from a third-person perspective (that doesn't work).
By the end, I had turned the game to the easiest difficult setting so I could blast through the playable parts to simply enjoy the cut scenes.
I can't help, but feels so much of Brutal Legend was a mish mash of ideas. Some good. Some bad. No matter, they all made the cut. No one said no to Shafer. Well, Activision said, No. But then EA said, Yes. Go figure. Now, what we have is a bloated genre-defying mess.
There's an adage in television writing that goes something like, Write the joke around the plot, not the plot around the joke. It's the kind of sage, snappy advice thrown around a lot in a writer's room. I can't help, but feel Brutal Legend's development lacked that environment. One man, one joke. Everyone else just worked around it.
