Theme vs Game? Grind in Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland

I was fortunate enough to pick up a DS Lite on the cheap; something I have long been meaning to do. (Seems like someone who was uprading to a 3DS was thoughtful enough to keep their machine in relatively good nick.)

I've now assembled a small clutch of games, all of which I've dipped into a little. I'm really pleased with my choices and I fully intend to play each game to completion - with one notable exception.

Rummaging around in the discount shelves of my local CEX, Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland seemed like a truly epic find. I fished it out, grinning (and, I'm afraid, mentally playing the classic 'item get' phrase from Zelda). I checked the back of the box:

You play Tingle, (who just so happens to be my favourite side character from Majora's Mask - with perhaps the exception of the Happy Mask Shop Man) a thirty-something unemployed single male living on the fringes of society. One day, you are summoned by Uncle Rupee - the spirit of money, or perhaps greed - and are convinced to collect enough money to 'build' a tower to Rupeeland, a magical place where it's no work and all play. Your ticket to the ultimate escapist fantasy. As a symbol of your new life, you are invested with the clothes of a fairy and a hero; that familiar green garb from every Zelda, ever. Only snag is, to get to Rupeeland, it's going to take an awful lot of hard work.

I glanced at the price tag - which seemed surprisingly low. I tried to rationalise this to myself. Doubtless here was one of those quirky sleeper hits - too esoteric for the mollycoddled masses. Hah hah! They just don't understand art.
Now I know better.

OK! The problem I have with Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland is this: most of the elements that make its story meaningful also make it as dreary as my 9-5 and an absolute chore to play. And I'm not quite sure if that's entirely a bad thing.

WHAT I LOVE

The vibrant, quirky and quietly terrifying vision of life in Tingle's world is charming and moving. TRR is a capitalist's wet dream: a land in which money literally controls everything.

Heartfelt emotions are worthless unless they accompany an appopriate statement in rupees: after saving a guardsman's wife from dying, he thanks you tearfully, and, after a pause, confesses he knows that this means nothing unless he offers you cash. How much, he asks?

Memory is governed by money. The Hero of the first continent is commemorated with a huge statue not so much of his great deeds but because he had the foresight of charging anyone who used his services with exceptionally large sums of cash.

Lastly, and most importantly: money is life. Get knocked around by an enemy and you lose cash. Your bank balance replaces Zelda's classic health bar, and when it drops to 0, you die.

One of most compelling thing here is that Tingle starts the off in the world a loser, but an innocent - not governed by money until he makes a deal with Uncle Rupee and gets his circulatory system hooked up to his cashflow. He has to 'sell out' before he gets a hope of turning his life around. There's such a dark ambiguity to the whole arrangement - is the capitalist fantasy of Rupeeland what Tingle really wants? Is Uncle Rupee really an altruistic old soul - or is he some terrible evil spirit, fuelled by the cash you feed his tower? It's the same twisted ambiguity that I thought made Majora's Mask so great (e.g. Link's silent complicty in pretending to be a Zora's dead boyfriend so he could play lead guitar).

TRR also capitalises on one of my favourite things in games - the dissonance between the player and their persona. Tingle is more than happy to exploit the local residents for their cash, grinning uncontrollably when he reckons he's ripped someone off. Not once does he back down and say: "No, no! Please don't take any money for that medicine I gave your wife. It was no trouble. Think of it as a gift".

But can we really blame him? Everyone else in the game world seems to be all too keen to rip you off as soon as they can get the chance - from the townsfolk who charge you extortionate prices for information to the hired goons you have to pay to protect yourself from certain death - to Uncle Rupee himself.

Moreover, there's another tension here - what right does the player have to criticise Tingle? Quite likely living in the Western world themselves (rich enough to own a DS) their wealth and success are indirectly contingent on the continuing poverty and unhappiness of a much wider proportion of the population. Your fantasy has a price in blood.

All of this taken together constructs TRR a meaningful and novel satire of capitalist society.

There's more - I adore the characters that populate the game world. From Tingle to Chico the psychic fish seamstress to Chuckles the bodyguard clown to the bridge builder who does a pelvic thrust on top of a bridge when he finishes it (and looks like that biker from the village people). They each have a unique voice and their sprites have this slightly ungoverned, mismatching freeform feel.

And this is where a touch of tragedy comes into the game - all the characters in TRR have so much life and passion and yet their lives are completely and utterly dictated by money - the quest to keep getting more, and the boredom and the effort that this requires. So are you. TRR totally subverts the Mary Poppinsian idea that you can learn to enjoy even the most mundane tasks so long as they come in a pretty package. When you grind for money in TRR - despite the exploration, the vibrant worlds and the fun cast of characters - it's terribly and utterly dull.

THE WRONG KIND OF GRIND

And herein lies the trouble. It's entirely possible to make grind enjoyable (even if it is a sort of peverse enjoyment). It would have been entirely straightforward to make the grind in TRR more enjoyable - by making money more freely available, by letting you autosell all your item stock, by letting you harvest in-game items you'd encountered directly from one central location - but I can't help but feel that if the designers had done this, it would have diluted the impact of the story. Is the inescapable daily grind that most available jobs boil down to really so awful if every task you undertake becomes a piece of cake?

Ultimately, I was left with the prospect of playing a game whose mechanics I find detestable in order to experience a story I find wonderful.

And I refused. I switched the game off. Which was odd, I thought. In real life, I'm willing to make the sacrifice: most of my time spent doing something I'd rather not in exchange for the opportunity to spend time in a way that makes life meaningful to me. But in a game, in my free time, that was somehow unacceptable.


But hey, at least I got my money's worth.