Let’s talk for a moment here about Rockstar Vancouver’s Playastation 2 title Bully. I’m not going to be presumptuous, but I have the feeling someone over at that fine Vancouver establishment has played a few dating simulations in their time. Now, let me try and explain why I think that is.
It’s not because of the go-on-missions-and-smooch-girls thing, that really doesn’t factor in here. If anything the girlfriend system is a byproduct of the school setting and a precursor to GTAIV’s system of relationships. I think dating sims are involved because Bully has a clock.
The protagonists in the Grand Theft Auto games were, from what I can tell, insomniac speed freaks. You could stay up day in and day out, and complete missions from your equally-insomniac heroin-shooting mob bosses until the player got bored or needed to save their game. It sort of works in a GTA game, where we expect the criminals to never sleep and that nefarious deeds can happen at any point in the day. Without having played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and only four awkward car-crashing minutes of Grand Theft Auto IV I will say this: The clock in Grand Theft Auto games doesn’t mean anything. It’s a dial that takes up a modest amount of HUD space in exchange for letting you know when things are going to get dark.
Bully attempts to re-contextualize Grand Theft Auto’s features in a different setting. Machine guns and RPG launchers are turned into non-lethal spud cannons and bottle rocket launchers, though for the most part you’ll just be using a slingshot and prank items like stink bombs and Home Alone-style marbles. Mob bosses become clique leaders, corrupt cops become corrupt teachers and so on and so forth. The game doesn’t try to hide the implications of future criminal activity because of the social environment imposed on the students at Bullworth Academy. It’s actually a rather sympathetic view of delinquent activity: When you put together a bunch ofunmedicatedociopaths and hive-minded students with inept teachers you might get a few bad eggs out of the bunch.
But the clock. See, the clock makes a difference in Bully because your protagonist is only fifteen years old (at least that’s what the final chapter of the game’s main story told me, I had no idea prior). Teenagers are, apparently, not speed-freak mobsters and are incapable of staying up past 2:00 AM without passing out. Passing out means you lose some cash and wake up again in the morning wherever you were that night (or at least that’s how I remembered it, the experience was so harrowing I shan’t ever allow myself to stay up late again). So the game creates an internal schedule. You wake up in the morning, and all of your business has to be done by 2:00 AM, where at which point you should probably return to a bed (conveniently located next to a save point and the character’s wardrobe). Everyone else runs on a schedule too. Teachers and students won’t request missions during their school hours, and nobody will offer missions in the wee hours of the morning. This is where the dating sim thing kicks in.
That’s because Bully is a game that runs primarily on a schedule. You wake up and you have options: take a mission, go to class, earn some money, or explore. Class is a good idea, the bonuses will certainly be useful in taking up your other options. In between classes, you might have just enough time to start a food fight or take up a small money-earning errand, then it’s back to class again or play hooky. Taking on missions takes up time as well, fail once or twice and you’ve likely ran out of time for the entire day. In a way this makes a lot more sense than it ever did in the Grand Theft Auto games. Why would a mob boss allow a failing criminal to come back hour after hour and retry the same task in a single day? There are still holes in the logic (why don’t any of the mission-givers get tired of your ineptitude?) but at the very least giving them a day to breath gives it some internal consistency.
It’s not like failure is going to be a huge issue in Bully anyway, as the entire game is pretty easy. I retried missions all of about ten times, and most of those failures arose from accidentally running over a cop with my bicycle and getting promptly arrested (there are no “accidents” in Bully’s moral code, again with the criminal genesis thing).
So, everything you do in the game is on a schedule. Periodically check back into your room, sleep and return. The pattern is pretty familiar to anybody who has played a pre-Final Fantasy RPG or post-Final Fantasy dating simulation. The gist of it is that you only have a limited set of actions that you can perform in a single day before you’ve used up all of those actions. In RPGs this usually revolved around your health and magic, and at the end of a long grind session you had to return to an inn or whathaveyou and rest. Dating sims applied the same logic, but simplified the actions themselves. One “day” might consist of just one event with a person before the “day” ends and you have to start the process anew. This gameplay hook is in itself pretty gratifying. It creates a rhythm of action-reward-do action a little better-bigger reward-etc. that is inherently addictive. The key to making it good is to make each of those “actions” you take in a “day” substantial. RPGs fail and succeed to whatever extent it feels like your characters grew in stats that day or if the rewards (money, equipment, fancy-pants items) lived up to the work. Persona 3 manages to pull it off pretty effectively, using a transparent take on the dating-sim daily routine while adding in a competent dungeon-crawling element that is intimately linked to whatever you do in the more dating sim-y parts. At night you slay evil hellspawn, and in the day you perform little actions that make your hellspawn beat up the evil hellspawn a bit better (not too much, not too little) each time.
At the heart of it, there’s comparatively just not a lot to do in a game-day of Bully. The classes, in fact, might be the meatiest parts. The minigames involved in each one are just short enough and just challenging enough that the reward feels just right, and unlike the missions your classes aren’t confined to the restrictions of the clock (for the most part), so no matter how long you take in a game of dodgeball it will only be one and a half game-world hours. The missions themselves, by contrast, earn you a little bit of money, some entertaining character interaction/dialogue, and “respect points” that amount to nothing more than “now the assholes that I took the mission from won’t pester me as I walk around town.” Now this wouldn’t really be that big of an issue if the in-game money had any in-game value. I’m racking my brain here and in the nooks and crannies of this game I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but here’s just about everything you can do with cash:
1) Buy clothes
2) Buy haircuts
3) Play carnival games
4) Play arcade games
5) Buy supplies
6) Bribe the occasional kid in a mission
Let’s go in reverse order here. Six is hardly ever an issue, and even if you can’t cough up the tiny amount of money it takes to bribe a kid you could always beat them up in Bully’s delightful The Warriors-style combat engine (which is in all likelihood the highlight of the game). Five is hardly ever an issue, as after completing some of the Chemistry classes you can get every item you could possibly want for free from your dorm room (even the overpowered bottle rocket launchers and potato cannons). Three and four sort of solve themselves: They’re not very fun. The carnival games yield some rewards – more clothes and funny hats – but by their own merit they aren’t very fun.
So that leaves us with character customization. At one point in the third chapter of Bully’s five-act show I had over $500 of game-cash running around from doing missions and the occasional odd-job (lawn-mowing is just as boring in a videogame as it is in real life, it would seem). With nothing to do, I cleaned out the in-game clothing stores of anything that seemed interesting. There were some gems, shirts and hoodies and pants that could make my character look like a thug or a jock or a hipster asshole, even some jackets and shirts that were lifted from the GTAIII and Vice City protagonists. Other than finding ironic and silly ways to dress my lil’ thug with a heart of gold there wasn’t much to do with all that in-game money that the protagonist seems to care about. This blows a hole in the entire game-day structure and makes it infinitely less rewarding to continue your daily tasks. Its not like Bully needed to have customizable player stats or a double-jump move that you could “buy” from a local gym or multiple combat styles that you could train in at a local dojo, just something to make the in-game money mean something. Hell, just copy Final Fantasy 8’s Triple Triad card game or something equally addictive and unrelated to the main plot and you’re set.
Bully fails as a videogame for only being as fun as your conscience will allow it to be. Nothing in Bully is more fun than it sounds (or sometimes as fun). There is no shortage of things to do: starting food fights, riding roller coasters, playing carnival games, shooting assholes with your slingshot, going on a paper route, racing bicycles, playing dodgebgall, whatever. But the amount of fun you’ll have with these activities is likely determined by how cool you thought they were when I listed them right there. There’s not a whole lot of snap or crunch in any of the gameplay of these portions in of themselves. Playing the shooting gallery game at the carnival is less satisfying than the training mode of just about any console FPS, playing dodgeball requires infinitely less thought and skill than a game of Kunio-style Dodgeball on the Neo-Geo, and bike racing is… well that’s actually about as good as any bike racing game will get actually. Your mileage will vary entirely on how cool you think it is to be a teenager rebelliously doing all of these things in a “living, breathing” game world that you actively run around in all the time. In that regard, Bully is more of an RPG than anything that I’ve listed here so far. The more you role-play the protagonist, the more fun you’ll likely be having (because I certainly didn’t have my opinion of food fights change after seeing them in Bully).
Where Bully doesn’t fail is in the dialogue and character interactions themselves. Your classmates and teachers are all ridiculous caricatures with flashes of truth amongst all of the PG-13 character development. Hearing the protagonist’s rival blame his problems on “western civilization” as a whole is relateable, ridiculous, hilarious, and depressing. The way the game skirts around and addresses teenage sexuality with its feminine characters is equal parts Saved By the Bell and “wait did they just imply…” Some of the best dialogue actually comes in the form of conversation snippets that can be heard as you wander around campus. Jocks and preps say dumb and obnoxious ha-ha sorts of things, and your nerds will talk about.. . their moms, I guess, but amidst it all you might hear something about one of the teachers or another character in the game. This is the closest the game comes to doing something really interesting with the videogame medium, by allowing the player to pick up on clues within the environment and through game-player interaction actually develop their own concept of characters and places without being told what to think by any of the other narrative outlets.
These little narrative flourishes (along with that delightful reimagining of 16-bit brawler combat) are probably the high points of the Bully experience. Everything else in the game is a competent (but never excellent) facsimile of activities that sound daring and exciting within the context of the game’s setting but never really deliver on the fun. What this amounts to is a game that features both a panty raid and a sweaty perverted gym teacher, and interacting with the latter is way more interesting than playing the former. How that came to be is sort of incredible in its own right, but a bit of a travesty too.
