Chimera Squad Bonus: Credits Images

I love the credits in Chimera Squad.

I always like it when credits in a video game are more interesting than just a list of names and all, but Chimera Squad's credits are not just effortful, but are consistent with the game's own messages and themes, not to mention they have fun with the setting elements. Like a lot of Chimera Squad's narrative, the game doesn't really draw your attention to what it's doing, just expecting the audience to pay attention and think and notice stuff on their own. So... that's part of why this post exists; because I suspect a lot of players don't register this stuff at all, at least not consciously.

I'm going in the order the credits are displayed in-game, for reference.

Image the first! Two names, two people in Chimera Squad uniforms -a Sectoid and a hybrid. Hmmm. Production staff, deadlines in the background...

... and now six more names, and six figures.

Yeah, part of what the credits are doing is visually representing staff, though obviously in a loose way.

And this connects to -and contextualizes- the game's thematics and messages; that the staff are sufficiently serious about the 'the aliens are People Just Like Us' that they're willing to represent themselves as such aliens. There are humans used in these credits images -there's two in the one above- but they're noticeably outnumbered by the non-human representations.

I'm kind of curious what the process that arrived at these credits images was. This would be especially striking if it was something the entire team was pretty on-board with and actually providing input like 'I wanna be a Viper', vs being much less notable if it was just 'one artist came up with this and made it all without any input beyond nobody actively complaining'. (Which would still be notable, mind)

Conversely, it's a little sad to me that the 'design and gameplay' set isn't a pretty clear metaphorical depiction of what that subsection of staff were doing. (Is 'design and gameplay' really so difficult to imagine a visual representation of?) By contrast...

... 'engineering' in a video game context really means 'the people who get the underlying code to do what's needed and preferably to do so efficiently', but a depiction of the team doing work on a vehicle is a pretty straightforward way to symbolically represent the concept.

Especially since the game's APC probably did fairly literally require a fair amount of engineering attention.

Similarly, 'concept and narrative' gets represented as 'tons and tons of writing' -which, given how much text is new to Chimera Squad, is probably pretty literally accurate even if I presume paper per se wasn't heavily involved.

I also like that we've got a couple Mutons in this piece, one of which has glasses. Part of what's genuinely nice about Chimera Squad is it largely doesn't perpetuate various pop culture memes I find tiresome and inaccurate; a willingness to use the species a lot of people would characterize as 'dumb brutes' as people doing literature-type activities (Which a lot of pop culture attaches a bunch of dumb connotations like 'this is a Smart Person Activity that big, strong people would never have interest in') is notably consistent with this aspect of Chimera Squad's worldbuilding/writing/etc.

Character art and animation giving us an "It's ALIVE!" scene is also intuitive enough.

Do note that the entity they're 'bringing to life' is pretty clearly not acting as a representative of a staff member. 5 names, 5 people if you don't count it.

It's also interesting to me how non-specific the entity is -it's a humanoid entity with possibly three claws/hooked fingers per hand, but it doesn't look like anything in particular from Chimera Squad, nor for that matter from the rest of the Firaxis XCOMs.

This one case doesn't have the name count and the character count quite line up -there's 7 names, but 8 people in the shot... but, notably, one of these people is patterned after the Enemy Unknown in-game staff look. I'm guessing this is an artistic 'special thanks' or something of the sort, representing one of the staff from the first game.

Another Muton with glasses, note.

I'm kind of sad the in-game Muton graphics don't look as good as the credits' art. The Mutons in the credits are adorable, while I've noted how offputting the in-game art for Mutons is.

And of course 'level design and environment art' is the raising of a building -and indeed, even though City 31's infrastructure hits very much the same feel as XCOM 2's City Center art, it's pretty obvious a lot of the art for buildings is mostly or completely new. I wouldn't be surprised if this team genuinely did spend most of their time on the building frames and all.

Audio and FX is actually a pretty literal depiction of the kind of stuff such teams can get up to; blowing something up so you can record it to get a reasonably authentic 'something blowing up' sound.

Also, it's interesting to note we have a Viper here even though all the names look to be masculine. None of the Vipers in the credits look particularly feminine, mind, but I'm used to seeing evidence of pretty significant insecurity about gender and anything that could be argued as adjacent to it throughout pop culture. The fact that Androids keep being used to represent staff is similarly interesting -it's especially striking to me that the Androids pretty consistently get very expressive body language, like this Android laying on the floor.

One can argue the credits are all a big gag or something, I suppose, but it's interesting to me regardless, among other points being another example of not cleaving to the usual stereotypes. (In this case: 'robots are basically just humans with low affect')

I also just love how everyone in this shot looks like they're having a blast. (So to speak)

UI gives us prototyping UI concepts on a holographic board -there's layers here- but this bit is striking to me for the part where the number of figures only matches the 5 names if we count the Gremlin. That's implicitly associating personhood to a representation that isn't even humanoid in appearance! This is a rarity in pop culture; just deviating from a human-ish body plan is often sufficient for a story to stop treating an entity as a person. (I sometimes even see this from fiction simultaneously arguing that dogs or some other common pet animal are people, which is a conjunction I always find baffling)

The Muton being dressed like they're ready to go jogging or something is also something I like, in a manner consistent with the values stuff -that a lot of stereotyping involves only understanding a set of people through a fairly narrow lens of experience. As an example that's more funny than anything else, it's not unusual for children to find it mindblowing to encounter one of their teachers outside school; the idea of their teacher doing anything other than teacher things is literally unimaginable for these kids. A lot of stereotyping is exactly that type of thinking, and one of the more subtle ways pop culture often contributes to bigoted thinking is by conspicuously never deviating from such expectations.

Though I am curious as to why this piece in particular has the one human not in a variation on the Chimera Squad uniform. (Though this ties back to my curiosity as to what the process for this entire thing was) 

Quality Assurance of course gives us symbolism about 'bugs', where software bugs are getting represented by Chryssalids while the QA team looks on in horror and tries to squash them.

I'm not sure whether it's intentional, but I like the image of the Muton QA member winding up to squash bugs looking dangerously likely to wreck the PC itself, with this possibly being what the rest of the QA team is reacting with horror to. It depresses me how often gamers act like bugfixing is trivial to do and trivial to do without creating other problems -in reality, what underlies a bug isn't necessarily obvious even to the people familiar with the relevant code, and while some bugs really are as straightforward as 'fix the typo in the code and it will work perfectly', plenty of bugs aren't so straightforward. Obvious solutions can have knock-off consequences, and sometimes those consequences can be worse than the bug itself!

So this image of winding up to squash All The Bugs and possibly destroying the computer in the process, whether or not that's really intended as a read, works pretty well for me.

Oh, and it's worth explicitly pointing out here that the Chryssalid treatment here is consistent with how the writing treats Chryssalids as the one species we're not going to treat as People.

I'm kind of curious why this bit of art is like the viewer is stumbling into The Marketing Cave. Is the Firaxis marketing department just genuinely cave-y? Or was it more 'not sure how to visualize marketing in one image'?

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While I'm here, some final thoughts on Chimera Squad;

As a 'pure game', I think Chimera Squad is an interesting experiment, but with erratic design and some key things dragging down the fun factor. If this were all there was to talk about regarding it, I'd rate it pretty low, to be honest, and probably wouldn't have done this series at all.

As part of the Firaxis XCOM franchise, though, I think it's remarkable how well it handled the duties of respecting the integrity of the series while also managing to be its own interesting entry; there's a lot of games out there that are perfectly competent in a general sense, but are disappointing or downright confusing because they're ostensibly a sequel but basically entirely ignored what came before, or technically are using familiar characters/locations/mechanics but handle them so differently they're unrecognizable, or otherwise don't really maintain franchise integrity -or at the opposite end, they maintain franchise integrity by 'playing it safe', only sticking to what's been done before, at which point why bother checking it out? Just go replay what you already know you like if a new entry is going to be very safe More Of The Same. That Chimera Squad balanced these as well as it did is genuinely on the unusual side, especially when you consider it was an experimental side-game.

And of course as I've been reiterating in this post, I'm very pleasantly surprised by how Chimera Squad is so coherent on the philosophical point of Embracing Diversity. I've spent decades despairing at how regularly pop culture presses Embracing Diversity as an explicit message but then has numerous elements implicitly saying the opposite, or putting sharp boundaries on what's inside the umbrella of Diversity We Don't Think Needs To Be Killed On Sight, or otherwise doesn't really cleave all that strongly to the explicitly stated message. This is in fact probably the most remarkable thing about Chimera Squad...

... and for this reason in particular I am, on the whole, very positive on the game, regardless of how clunky it is as a game.

I'm glad to have played it, and talked about it, as much as I have.

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And that's everything I'm doing with Chimera Squad, finished at last!

Next big project is, as I've said on the Patreon, Doom Roguelike, but up very next is going to be a small project covering Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun. It'll just be 7 posts, specifically..

See you then.