I recently completed Lucas Pope's Papers Please, thrice, to unlock all endings, and I'm convinced that it is probably the best game I've played all year. Many have praised the plot, but I think it is the narrative and lore that really makes this game exceptional as compared to cutscene-reliant triple As that are still hopelessly trying to imitate film.
2 weeks after completing it, what surprises me is how memories of the characters still linger, and it is even stranger when anyone who has played the game knows we, the Inspector, sometimes have but a few lines of exchange with these people. The more major characters, Jorji and Sergiu, are probably characters I will never forget despite their design being so plain, and their chracterisation and lines they say supposed to be nothing unique and unmemorable. The many side-plots, the prostitution ring, the couple escaping from war, the child murderer, and Elisa, oh Elisa, are epsiodes that will stay in my mind for a long time, ones that will make me exclaim "Ahhh..." when someone mentions them. What works, I think, is the consistency of characterisation, plot and world building (or lore, in some cases). In Papers, Please there are no backstories, flashbacks, because they will be redundant. Stories are opened to interpretation and imagination but I believe any human with a beating heart will imagine a tale that is grim and hopeless within each character and the plot in its entirety. The aesthetics with its gridded, grey and unpolished sight is intentional to create that impact, the lack of music to simulate the laborious work environment (and this world, in general) in all its dullness and sadness, and that mundane work that punishes you with the gritting sound of the fax machine citation at every mistake are all part of the world building. What the characters say do not have to directly relate to what is happening, but there is a strong consistent in the narrative between the characters and the world when someone tells you, please let me through, they will kill me if I go back to my country, or this man promised me and my sister work, but I think he is trying to sell us as prostitutes.
The manga in this article's title can be One Piece, Bleach, HunterxHunter or any long running manga series for all I care, but I chose Naruto because I hate it the most passionately. The majority of characters in many of these series are very much similar to each other, flat, typical and honestly falling into one "manga-character-trope" or another. That is not to say there are no interesting characters in these mangas, but even they suffer from how the ever expanding world that loses consistency with itself slowly detaches itself from the characters. To mitigate this issue, flashbacks are often used to reattach important characters to the world; but mangas have became overly reliant on this single method in introducing characters and their relation to this world. Sometimes the flashbacks do not even make sense, and other times they are just a dread to read as they drag out stories way too much. In recent One Piece chapters, I resonated with the backstory of Senor Pink and Law because their stories melded well with the circumstances they were placed into, but it was Bellamy, the character that did not have his own dedicated flashback chapter that left the greatest impact because his words and action was not only consistent with the current plot, but also previous plotlines in general and even the story of the main character. He became the anti-hero that Luffy did not become because he followed a different role model. In Naruto I had no idea what was going on from Shippudden onwards and everyone that appeared can be classified into a typical manga character category, and the story kind of got way out of hand to make any sense. Random characters get dropped in to supposedly incite emotions or something but I honestly didn't care because their existence made little sense in that world, they were equally uninteresting, and felt less like characters prepared for the story than last minute ass-pulls.
None of the characters in Papers felt like ass-pulls. If I had one complain, they could have been more often, more mixed around like having prostitutes from other rings pass u their cards later in the game (after the first ring is dissolved) without having any actual subplot relating to these special border-passers. Other than that, all the characters felt genuine and fitted well into the world without needing to say much. Elisa for me was the most surprising character. As the Inspector we were expecting to see her for days after Sergiu passes you the locket, she arrives shortly after without the proper documents to enter Arstotzka, but throughout my three runs I was never able to steel my heart to reject Elisa because of one line of dialogue she said. "Please, my family is dead, I only have Sergiu." I remember reading this line on screen and having to walk away from the computer immediately in attempt to dispel the heavy emotions brought out by this line. In the game we are about a month from the end of a long bitter war between two nations, the premise makes clear the circumstances Elisa was in, and there was no need to explain more.
What worked in Papers is how world building and characterisation perfectly complemented each other - characters can still be wacky and unique like how Jorji is in the game, but even he made sense in the world that Lucas Pope had set up and helps to strengthen the grim and grey theme holding the plot and world together. Such a world makes even the plainest of stock characters, the everyday person holding a forged document, feel understandable, believable and sometimes even relateable It is certainly not a lively world, but it certainly feels more alive than the Narutos out there.
I have an endless list of praises for Papers, Please I hope to post on this blog one day, but it will have to take time; the list is simply too long.
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