6 Games That Would Make Great Films

The Longest Journey

Out of all the gaming genres, the point-and-click adventure genre contains perhaps the greatest wealth of game-to-film candidates. Hell, it could be argued that the most successful game adaptation to date was Pirates of the Caribbean, as it is sometimes claimed to have been a total rip-off of Monkey Island. The reason these games often have highly engaging stories and lackluster gameplay is because the gameplay is almost completely unnecessary, it’s kind of only there so that what you have in front you still counts as a videogame, it usually just amounts to long bouts of arbitrary item-based puzzle solving: combine thing 1 with thing 2 to make thing 3 happen.

It’s hard to nail down exactly which one of these games would make the best film, Grim Fandango seems like it’s almost begging for Tim Burton to get ahold of it (as long as he stays well clear of the script, casting and everything that isn’t directing or production design) and Broken Sword could be a really gripping conspiracy thriller in the right hands but for my money the one that most deserves a new lease on life is The Longest Journey. On paper the story exists on ground well-trodden: a girl discovers that she can shift between the normal world (Stark) and a parallel, magical one (Arcadia) and it ultimately falls upon her to save both of them. As clichéd as that premise is, the world that the game painted was diverse and fascinating, featuring races like the Ent-like Venar, who have no concept of past or future. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of The Longest Journey though is the dialogue, which you could almost lift straight out of the game and put into a screenplay, it flows more naturally and engagingly than any other dialogue I’ve heard in a game before or since and it almost represents the gaming equivalent of A Song of Ice and Fire, a well recognized fantasy setting occupied by flawed, believable characters who behave as real people would, thus expanding the drama. The game hasn’t dated all that well but you can really see the potential in the world-design too, the decaying, patchwork futurism of Stark and the sprawling natural vistas of Arcadia, it’s a treasure trove of imagination just waiting to be tapped into.

 

Rule of Rose

Horror games are almost the polar opposite of point-and-click games for movie material because horror is actually a genre that gaming does better than cinema, even at this early stage. An interactive format is always going to induce fear better than a non-interactive one and if you ask me no film can match a game like Amnesia: The Dark Descent or Condemned in terms of pure, shittifying dread but then I’ve always been kind of a hard man to please when it comes to things like that, I don’t scare easily, which irritates me because it means I end up not getting anywhere near the same thrill out of a lot of things as all you lucky cowards, but I digress. Rule of Rose is an exception to all this because it has a unique, compelling story marred by buggy, tedious gameplay full of corridors and kitchenware. Perhaps most well known for the controversy it caused by allegedly being an interactive child abuse simulator (exclusively accused of this by people who had never played it, or any videogame ever), it was actually a thematically intriguing exploration of childhood development. It’s actually been compared to Lord of the Flies.

You play as Jennifer, a young woman who blunders into an old house and ends up in the custody of an isolated sect of disturbed children called the Red Crayon Aristocrats. As they toy with her, more light is shed on both their past and Jennifer’s and a dark, unsettling yarn is spun involving gender reassignment, child-abuse and dog murdering. There are some moments in Rule of Rose that are amongst the most disturbing, thought provoking narrative beats I’ve ever encountered and the whole thing is presented in a delightfully dingy 1930s England setting that evokes Grimm and Caroll with overwhelming us with either, I’d argue that it does a better job in that regard than even American McGee’s Alice. The difference there is that Alice is a well rounded, compelling game in every respect and Rule of Rose is just so broken in terms of gameplay that you really have to fight with yourself to get to the end. As a film it would fall into the same territory as The Orphanage, The Others and other such lovely, gothic fare, but it would be darker, more challenging and more daring. Films of that ilk are proven to get arses in seats and it would be a shame to let Rule of Rose be resigned to the appendices of gaming history as a sub-par survival horror that pissed off a few idiots.

 

Final Fantasy VI

Most of us would rather forget the first attempt to make a Final Fantasy movie; The Spirits Within was a plodding, boneless misstep that had virtually nothing to do with any game in the series. There have been various iterations since then, the most memorable being Advent Children: a continuation of Final Fantasy VII but nothing has ever really left a lasting impression. The problem with giving the cinematic treatment to virtually any FF game (or anything similar) is that they’re all just too damn long, it’s very difficult to condense more than 30 hours of play into 2 hours of viewing and even in the case of more recent ones where there is only about 2 hours worth of substantial story, said story is just too bizarre, convoluted and contrived to weave an engaging screenplay from. So far as I’m concerned, Final Fantasy VI remains the best candidate, you could make an epic film from Final Fantasy VI. As the story goes, some long past cataclysmic war almost tore the world apart as humanity tried to harness the power of ancient spirits, while everyone tried to rebuild technology in the aftermath a rift emerged between the empire and the common people. Years later a woman named Terra with mysterious powers is cut off from imperial control and joins up with the resistance.

FF VI had a much more steampunk-esque feel that ultimately carried into the rest of the series and nearly every other JRPG to date. There’s a massive, sweeping 3 hour epic (perhaps even 2) waiting to be coaxed out of FF VI, replete with drama, tragedy and a wealth of complex characters, you’d have to cut it down and move things around but once again all the key ingredients are present and LOTR proved that epic fantasy can be realized for screen more potently than ever before with the right amount of motivation and scale. If you ask me, FF VI could be the game adaptation that changes things, the one that breathes new life into them; all we need is someone to take on the challenge (AHEM. AHEM.).