Grim Fandango is a point and click adventure game, with a play style that at times, can border on pixel hunting (a common trope within games, where you have to find the right, tiny area to click to progress), particularly if you use the new point and click controls, over the original tank controls.
We discover the story through the occasional cutscenes, which show up rather rarely, usually as a 'reward' once you've completed an area or story segment - and more often, the story is developed through talking to the other, non-player characters.
Every one of these characters are interactable, and not just a stock standard background characters - Grim Fandango has taken an approach to the game that could be considered 'if they're not interactable, they're not included'.
The game forces us to interact with these characters, at least to an extent, as a lot of the characters give clues to puzzles, or will progress the story upon interaction (ie. talking to a 'dying' Glottis will prompt him to think of a way to customize the cable car, leading you back to Rubacava).
For every interactable character, you are offered four initial dialogue choices, three of which will often open new question options, and one of which just ends the conversation. To progress a puzzle or story segment, you will be required to talk to people - however, you are not 'required', per say, to exhaust all possible dialogue options with them. It's entirely possible to navigate any of the conversations in game, asking the fewest questions possible - but odds are, unless the player knows exactly which lines are the correct lines for the solution, you will wind up running through multiple conversation branches. Often whether you want to or not (personally, I find it enjoyable to try every option the game offers, but this is in no way mandatory).
But could the game have developed and pulled off such a story without any of these characters?
Firstly, from a technical standpoint, no, seeing as many of the characters progressed the story and puzzles - and with no one there to talk to, or interact with, the game would stagnate.
Storywise, you also couldn't extract the characters from this game and expect to uphold the story - because Grim Fandango is incredibly character based. The story makes the ideas, and strengths of the story clear through how certain characters are portrayed.
Each and every character is written to be intrinsic to the games world, and the narrative we are following.
Manny, for example, is written to be likeable - by the player, that is. He's rough around the edges, a little seedy - but he's the underdog. The guy beaten down and wrongly stuck with an injustice. So maybe he's not a great person to a lot of the other characters in the game. But his personality is written to make the player like him, in order to spur their motives to help him in his quest. Similarly, characters such as Hector are written to be disliked by the player - he's sleazy, he's bad, and there's no reason for the player to sympathise with him at all. He's the villain, plain and simple.
You take these characters from the story, and what is left of the plot? With no Manny, we have no one to stop Meche from getting sucked into the same gambit as all of the other Number 9 ticket holders. With no Meche, Manny would be stuck in the same job, day after day, never getting anywhere. With no Hector, there would be no mystery in the first place, and Manny would be working off his debt, fair and square.
Manny, in particular, is a very interesting character, as it is he that the player is offered sole control of for the entire game - but even through the dialogue choices we are offered, and how the player plays the game does not influence his character enough to be able to reduce him to an 'avatar'. Jessica Aldred (2013) describes characters as entities which "take on strong, fictional identities that
are recognizably separate from those of their players." (p. 357). Going by this measure, each and every single interactable AI within Grim Fandango, are characters of their own, and not merely methods of completing the game, or options to develop our own avatar. All of them, be it Manny, or Glottis, or the group of worker bees down by the docks, showcase enough of their personalities and identities, even in the most minute amounts of required interaction.
Grim Fandango's characters are so instrumental to the plot, that to even remove a single one from the narrative, would stop the story completely.
- Jessica Aldred. 17 Dec 2013 ,Characters from: The Routledge Companion to Video
Game Studies Routledge. Retrieved from http://animation.onlearn.co.nz/pluginfile.php/2711/mod_resource/content/0/Characters.pdf
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