Post-Game Saudade Childhood’s Endings

“Please don’t be sad.”

I was in elementary school when I first watched the ending of Magic Pengel: The Quest for Color. It is a Playstation 2 RPG in which players take the role of a Doodler, artists who control paint fairies known as Pengel, and draw Doodles that come to life and engage in rock-paper-scissors based tournament combat. Despite the game having shortcomings in its core combat system, and its fairly simple storyline, it still manages to stand out as one of my favorite games. Not just for the 3D character drawing and stat system, as robust and intelligently designed as it may be, but for the feeling of emptiness it left with me after completing the game.

Growing up isolated, no other videogame invoked loneliness in me stronger than the world left behind in Magic Pengel’s ending; intentional or not.

Pluses

While the mechanics of replay bonuses may have circulated in video games before 1995, it wasn’t until the seminal release of Chrono Trigger that these mechanics would have a commonly accepted name: New Game Plus, often shortened as NG+. In the specific context of Chrono Trigger, NG+ is used to give players the opportunity to carry over their characters’ stats, items, and abilities into a fresh game state.

Narratively, this can be interpreted as the titular player character, Chrono, being sent back in time with newfound experience to defeat the main antagonist Lavos, allowing Chrono to explore new possibilities in the form of Chrono Trigger’s multiple endings. However, what NG+ can also be seen as is an ultimate escape from something inevitable in games with save files: the exhaustion and death of game content.

Writing // Hughe Vang, UCSC ‘19

Illustrations // Reno Rivera, UCSC ‘19

With NG+, Chrono lives on forever, experiencing ending after ending, yet will never find himself in a world where time stops until the player themselves stop. Instead, it moves on forever, cycling on itself, the player able to experience the world endlessly in flow. Chrono is made eternal alongside a world ever changing, even if such change is simply a reversal of outcomes. However, for other games, a more sobering immortality awaits their player characters, in worlds left devoid of change, of discovery.

Towers

While many games would go on to iterate on NG+ and the concept of cycles, such as Demon’s Souls and its successors, others would also reject these mechanics in favor of post-game content; gameplay scenarios accessible after clearing the main story of the game. Often times, this comes in the form of singleplayer games that have a strong multiplayer component, in order to allow friends the ability to play together, even if at disparate levels of progress.

A popular example of vast post-game multiplayer is the Pokémon franchise, famous for its design emphasis on trading Pokémon and sharing the experience of the game with others. For years, the series allowed only one save file per copy of each game, presumably to prevent easier circulation of rare Pokémon among the player community. Thus, to delete the game is often a commitment; a painful one at that.

If you are a child who wants to continue playing the game after completing the main objective, and feel a deep connection to your progress and save data, you are given very difficult decisions.

You could transfer your Pokémon to another game or storage application, which cost money (and probably an argument with stingy/confused parents or guardians).

You could also delete your data and play the game over with a new file, given you have the heart to delete your Level 100 favorites.

You could ALSO wait patiently for the next version of Pokémon to be released, though the wait could take years, and also you wouldn’t be able to know if your favorite features from the current game will stay intact.

In middle school, when I first played Pokémon Diamond, I chose the easiest option: complete the post-game storyline, then play through the endless challenge of the Battle Tower.

Along with completing the Pokédex, the Tower is the last meaningful content to complete in a playthrough of the game.

The Battle Tower features gauntlets of randomly determined opponent trainers that you can battle with alone, with friends, or with NPC allies. I played a good while along and with the NPC characters, but eventually it gets stale. You recognize the reused lines that characters give every battle, and realize all the fights you encounter feeling the same, unlike the hand-designed content of the main game.

Looking back as an older person makes me see the appeal of challenges such as Nuzlocke runs, in which players commit to simulating permanent deaths to their party. These sorts of challenges are ephemeral and force players to restart and renew their playthroughs of the game. They feel the same endearment they do as a normal playthrough of Pokémon, but avoid the stagnation of the post-game content, where your attachment grows while nothing changes in return. But that’s not how these games were designed to be played; there are many incentives given, such as real world event-exclusive Pokémon and multiplayer modes, that encourages players to maintain their save files for long periods of time after the games’ ending.

Having never completed the Battle Tower and returned to my player’s hometown, their mother unchanged from the start of the game, I stopped playing Pokémon Diamond.

Homes, Returned to Dust

A relative gave me Magic Pengel over a decade ago. In many, many ways, Magic Pengel’s structural make-up is very similar to Pokémon, the only difference being Pengel’s drawing mechanic substituting for Pokémon’s catching mechanic. You are able to draw Doodles, trade Doodles, and battle against friends with Doodles. It makes sense, then, that Magic Pengel would share the same problem of post-game content exhaustion like Pokémon.

In Magic Pengel, the player character finds themself in a kingdom in which color gems, the main resource used in drawing Doodles, are treated as currency and taxes. However, despite the inclusion of the player as a character, the plot of the game centers not around them, but around the orphans Zoe and Taro. The goal of the game is to participate in Doodle tournaments to help pay off Zoe and Taro’s debt to their homeland. Should the player fail, the siblings will be forced to leave their home. Throughout the game, the siblings also work towards finding their lost father, the famed Doodle artist Galileo, and uncover a deep conspiracy within the kingdom in the process.

Revisiting the narrative today, I realize that there are a few weaknesses that I hadn’t noticed as a kid. From details such as Zoe being unable to use Pengel due to lacking purity of the heart, despite much more sinister characters holding this very ability, to moments of grating voice acting, the game would have probably been much less impactful had I played the game as an adult now.

But despite this, even as a child, the fantasy of the game left a strong impression on me as an mortifying premonition of the housing crisis’ and rampant capitalism that we experience in our present day reality. And from this attachment, I felt invested in the plight of these characters. As sappy as it may be, I had truly believed that I was Zoe and Taro’s only friend, in a world that had alienated them from their ability to contribute to society. I wanted to help them reclaim their rights to their homeland.

This feeling is what devastated me during the ending of Magic Pengel.

After the final boss, the kingdom’s reign falls, the debt now cleared. Despite a harrowing and deadly final act, the game ends on a positive note, every protagonist surviving the end of the game. It was set up to be a happy ending. Zoe and Taro wouldn’t have to worry about eviction anymore. They would stay around and cycle through their 3 dialogue lines indefinitely forever, right?

“I’m so glad we became friends. Take care,” Zoe says during the credits. Galileo never having appeared, the orphans left to go find their lost father in the world beyond the game.

Saudade

In Portuguese and Galician, saudade is a word that expresses melancholy and longing for things lost that may never return. I imagine that I may not be the only one who experiences this in video games; at its most common form, it’s the feeling that occurs when a game loses its magical quality, when the seams give away to the machine underneath. This is what each iteration of Pokemon eventually ends up becoming; unless you become devout in competitive play, you reach a point in which the world stops moving and progressing, and you are left with no choice but to start anew, whether with a new file or the next entry in the series.

What made Magic Pengel special is its own simple variant on saudade. Every time your player character wanted to create a Doodle, the most fundamental mechanic of the game, you would talk to Zoe and Taro. They help you manage all the essential functions of the game, including saving the game. No matter how you feel about their characters, they are a permanent feeling fixture of the game; symbols of familiarity and safety.

But it is during the post-game where saudade is most felt, where the home once greeting you with friends is now empty and lonely. You wonder how your friends are doing, knowing that they will never return home. Will they ever find their father? Will they ever send letters to you? And you gently weep, knowing that things have changed irrevocably, that they can never remember you, because it is a game, and games are machines that never grow beyond their bounds. And it is being trapped in these bounds that makes us imagine and long for possibilities, for infinite game worlds, that will never exist.