Flower — Watch How I Soar

Although development costs are rising and it’s getting harder for AAA studios to make money in the industry unless the words “Call”, “of” and “Duty” are on the cover of their game, this has not stopped smaller studios from developing unique and interesting games for both the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360.  Last week, I talked about Rainbow Moon, the RPG developed by SideQuest Studios and published by EastAsiaSoft on the PS3.  I am pleased to say that this only scratches the surface of what’s available.

Flower is the second game from thatgamecompany, and it’s very impressive for a game from a studio with only one published title under its belt.  The game is controlled mainly by tilting the PS3 controller around, and it works very well.  You can debate all you want about motion control, but if it’s done well, it can feel natural and right.  Flower feels natural and right.  Despite the fact that Sony felt the need to create the PlayStation Move controller, the original PS3 controller had a limited but still useful motion control scheme already in place.  Although I’d only played one single PS3 game before Flower that made use of it, it didn’t mean that the console needed so-called better motion controls.  thatgamecompany somehow created a motion control masterpiece before the Move controller was even released.

Although Flower looks more like a work of art than a game, it functions as both.  There’s a clear objective, and although the game doesn’t tell you what that objective is, it’s not hard to figure out what you’re supposed to do.  You are the wind, and your objective is to bloom flowers.  It may not sound like much, but the execution of this simple idea is amazing.  As you tilt your controller, it tells the wind which direction to blow.  Certain portions of the game automatically move you forward but for the most part, you’re able to control the wind in all directions on all three axes with little trouble.

Flower is full of scenery porn.  There are levels that take place in large, expansive fields that gradually bloom as you open up the flowers along your path.  Levels also feature gradually increasing amounts of abandoned relics from a modern civilization; these are also restored by blooming the flowers around them.  The entire game feels like one of those pro-environment games that an organization like Greenpeace would endorse, but without an overly preachy message.  In fact, with the lack of a textual or spoken story, Flower is about as pro-environment as a time-lapse video of a sunflower would be, and is just as beautiful as a hike in the mountains of British Columbia.  Nature is a powerful force indeed.

The game is aurally beautiful as well.  The soundtrack, composed by Vincent Diamante, is largely orchestral and ambient, and the flowers themselves produce a musical tone when they bloom that remind me of wind chimes.  Different flowers produce different tones, and the end result is a symphony of wind and petals.

These days I’ve been disappointed in the music I’ve heard in RPGs.  It seems like composers aren’t able to create the same kind of music that they used to, nothing’s very memorable these days.  For example, I would not purchase the soundtrack to Last Rebellion.  Final Fantasy XIII may be an exception, but the sequel is not; the only reason I own the soundtrack to Final Fantasy XIII-2 is because my copy of the game came with a copy of the soundtrack.  Well, the soundtrack to Flower is a soundtrack worth owning, I’m happy to say.

Flower is a game that can be finished in one sitting, and yet it doesn’t feel like you’re being cheated.  Replay value is high: you can choose to rush through the first time and then go back and see how many flowers you can bloom the second time and then look harder for more of them the third time, and so on.  There are hidden flowers in each level that, once bloomed, enhance the city you can see in the menu screen.  There are trophies you can earn for doing certain things in each level in the game.  There is just so much to do in Flower that it’s easy to want to play the game over and over.

First with flOw and then with Flower, thatgamecompany showed that they were good at coming up with games that were out of the ordinary and could still engage the player and show them the beautiful kind of experience that the current generation of consoles should’ve been able to deliver, but that AAA developers just haven’t been providing.  For every Resonance of Fate and NieR out there, there are many more games like Too Human and White Knight Chronicles.  You’ve got shooters whose idea of realism is to paint everything brown and grey; you’ve got RPGs that are supposedly so big that they must be “to be continued”, except that the second part takes another year or two to make and is just more of the same (and that’s if it does get made); you’ve got games in every genre that require multiple patches so that they can finally function in the way they were intended and all of these games require years to make because you’re supposed to be able to see the pores on Enemy Soldier #45’s face.

Not so with Flower.  Flower doesn’t try to push the PlayStation 3 to its limit, nor does it try to look as realistic as it could.  My review of Faery: Legends of Avalon showed that I can enjoy games that aren’t as beautiful as a Final Fantasy game, but Flower is easily as beautiful as a Final Fantasy game without trying to be photo-realistic.  It’s like that song by One Direction about the girl who is beautiful because she doesn’t know that she’s beautiful.  Well, Flower is the same way.  It’s beautiful without being vain about it.  Some developers like to draw your eye to their work as if they’re saying, “See what we did here?  This waterfall is a million polygons and glitters like real water when combined with the lighting effects we used.  Now focus o
n it during the entire cutscene because we don’t think that you’ll be able to get enough of it!”  Yeah, well, you’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you.  Flower likes to show whole fields coming into bloom, but it’s not so much a case of “See what we did here?  Worship us!” and more a case of “See what you did through your actions, player?  You are awesome and you should feel awesome.”

In fact, now that I mention it, Flower is pretty much Okami without the combat or the sumi-e art style.  You don’t even need to draw shapes on the screen to bring back the power of nature to the world in Flower.  All you need to restore entire fields of flowers is to rustle the grass with wind.  If you enjoyed saving Japan but didn’t like the brush system of Okami, Flower is the game for you.

Flower is a very good independently-developed game for the PlayStation 3.  It’s reasonably priced, beautiful, and contains enough replay value that it won’t get old after one sitting.  A finer experience you’ll not be able to easily find, this generation.

Flower, along with thatgamecompany’s other PS3 offerings, flOw and Journey, will be re-released as the Journey Collector’s Edition on August 28, 2012

Screen shots taken from thatgamecompany’s official site