I saw 3 jootubers in a row call Expedition 33 a 10 out of 10 game, and two of these guys are reputable.
One of them is just a random nobody, but that's what caught my attention. Even random nobodies with only 100 subs were calling this game a 10 out of 10. From what I've seen it's a 7 or 8 out of 10 when compared to jrpgs as a whole, but could be considered as 10 out of 10 when compared to modern day slop.
The OST is similar to Neir (both Neir games.), the gameplay & atmosphere is similar to Shadowhearts, Lost Odyssey & Final Faggotry X, The writing is similar to Xenoblade 3 except EX 33's writing doesn't suddenly turn into shit during the endgame. I also think that Ex 33 has much better metaphors & allegories.
I just wasted 16 hours watching that game Clair Obscur Expedition 33 and it has one of the best stories that I've ever seen in a video game. (I was like "holy shit!" when a guy gets decapitated right when they start the expedition.)
I wish I could elaborate further but I respect the story so much that it's best to go in blind.
I might buy the game since the gameplay is pretty hardcore and you can make all of the girls run around in panties (Even the guy can, and they gave him a huge bulge. If only one of the girls had 1980s style pointy protruding nipples bulging out of her swimsuit top lol. At least the girls in this game look like girls and even have attractive bodies.), it expands on the ring systems from Shadowhearts & the combat system from Lost Odyssey but you seem to spend the entire game trying to parry multiple hit animations and it looks far more mechanically advanced than an avg rpg game.
As for the plot, it's yet another one of those Jrpg gnostic allegories (except it's made by the French) although I don't think it was intentional. (The writers & dev team don't come across as spiritual to me. They're just typical pretentious artists.
A normal person would say that we're playing God and that is what's going on in this game's plot. It's basically a musical chairs of Demiurges. An artist though? They're too pseudointellectual to claim that they're playing the role of gods. They always have to make their art scribbles sound as if they're doing something profound lol.)
Everything about the plot reads like gnostic allegory, but I think it's simply that they were channeling the Gods when making this game. Damn near anything that we consider highly artistic generally has christian or gnostic traits because artists seem to be used as messengers to remind us of who we are, and where we came from.
(You may see me talk a lot of shit about Christians, but that's because I believe that most Christians are fake, and have no connection with God. They're just reciting stupid bible verses through rote memory, as if it were a school exam. As if God gives a shit about the material world. The Christian faith itself is solid. Most of the worshippers are just afraid of hell, when the modern concept of hell is based off of fiction. Actual hell is just a cold frigid place devoid of ideas and ideas equals gods, which means a complete absence of god.)
It seems that the intention for the game is to be a metaphor for the artistic process and there seems to be a weird plot of writers vs painters which I is represented as a full scale war, but it's background lore and I don't think I saw any writers being depicted as enemies. It was mainly painters fighting over the canvas. (Which in Gnosticism, the word Artist is another word for Demiurge, and the canvas is the material world.) It's revealed at the end of the game that it takes place in the early 1900s shortly after 1905, which is a year cluster that has historical significance in the occult world.
1901 is assumed to be when the previous great reset occurred. A lot of the history is fabricated, even a USA president (William McKinley) was assassinated during that era and a year after was when most of our globalized corpos were first established. (The implication is that they're just surviving companies from the old world, who 'suddenly' appeared as upstarts to eventually rise the global corpos that they are today. The lie is the rags to riches story. They always existed just to eat up the local culture, fairs & mom & pop shops.)
Again it's just a coincidence with this game, that it just so happens to align so much with forgotten ancient history and occultism because I truly believe that Gods do speak directly to Artists which is why the work of most Artists are generally the same. I believe that they're receiving instruction by the Gods, that artists perceive as their creativity.
I'm not doubting their creativity. I just noticed a link that a lot of their ideas sound like forgotten history & occult metaphors that most artists have never ever heard of, yet they all somehow intuited the same fucking shit at 'random'.
I'd be shocked if they weren't anything but typical Artfag types, but who knows? Lynch also played the part of a fool but I know enough about his films to know that he was just playing a role. (I'm of the opinion that he's far more intelligent than all of his detractors.) Lynch played The role of The Fool, which has a lot of occult significance through Tarot and is also one of Jung's Archetypes and Archetypes themselves are based off of Plato's Transcendent Ideas. (I believe the ideas themselves are just job titles that Gods adopt. Plato's version is that there's an actual ideal form of a table, dog, or woman, and that everything we see in our material world is just an imitation of that godly ideal. I agree, but I use the job application metaphor to represent how the shape of ideas gradually change & conform through & with the culture.)
The Role of the Fool is used as a tool to reveal the truth or reality to the King, or in our case, The world.
Which again, I think it's just coincidence.
This is exactly what I mean when I presume that Artists are corresponding with the Gods whether they realize it or not. The true artists tend to be granted occult knowledge that they all base their stories off of, even though from their perspective, they're simply expressing themselves and the ideas came from their mind.
Mind is consciousness and The All is Mind. The All is God.
David Lynch is a prime example of such, except I believe that he was self aware. Everyone says that Mark Frost is the one who studies occult & conspiracy theories but that's exactly why none of his works are interesting without David Lynch. Mark Frost is simply a materialist who read books. As such, he can't contemplate the Reality, the Actual Reality the same way that David Lynch could. This is why Mark Frost's interpretations of Twin Peaks are fairly shallow, come off like an episode of X-Files s and reads like that Drowned God game.
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Materialist always assume that Aliens are controlling everything, when Aliens didn't even exist as a myth until the mid 1940s to 1950s.
In Lynch's works, he shows to you how demons actually interact with the human world. Bob is basically a skinwalker, as are the other Black Lodge doppelgangers.
There's a theory I agree with that during the ending of Season 3, Coop & Laura where transported into our real world.
If this is what Lynch intended, it truly shows how much Lynch understood our reality,
"We live in a Dream, within a dream, but who is the Dreamer?" and it makes me sad that there really isn't anyone else out there like him in our modern era. Not in the arts anyway. The Arts just has plenty of Artists who can tap into the Gods but aren't self-aware of it like Lynch was. That's also why Lynch's works, especially Twin Peaks, does not have a happy ending at all.
He simply can't do that, because it doesn't reflect our reality. If you're living in this current dream, then you're actively taking part in a broken corrupted world that can't be fixed, it's only purpose is to torture all those who dwell within it.
The game Expedition 33 shows how that torture manifests through existentialism. While the game makes constant remarks about the fucked up world that they live within. You eventually learn that
their world is just a canvas that the lead male character's mom paints. The lead main character is actually just a tulpa.
Kinda like the Tulpas from Twin Peaks.
Sure, Lynch maintained that all of his works are just ideas, but Lynch is also a guy who shouldn't be taken literally at all.
He just makes way too much sense when you look at him from an occult & esoteric perspective that imo he's just keeping what he knows hidden, behind the vehicle of art to maintain his 'idiot savant' facade or his Tarot role of The Fool.
He knows exactly what he's doing, especially with the dialogue that he gave for Monica Belluci.
I randumbly brought up Lynch because he was the purest example of a modern Artist, who was basically a spiritual medium of sorts.
I see that same spark from the Sandfall team who made Clair Obscur Expedition 33.
Not from the artists themselves (who imo just come across like a bunch of pretentious retards, just saying a bunch of gibberish that artists usually speak.) but from their actual art. Their art is amazing, and is one of the best examples of art in gaming that I've ever seen. I did say in a previous post that French works from the 1970s-2000s were the only works I've seen that compares to Jap art. I'm generally thinking of Gandahar (extremely occult & ancient history), Forbidden Planet, Moebius.
Clair Obscur is up there with the French arts of their past, but I also think that they surpass damn near every modern Jrpg. It feels like a true sequel to Final Fantasy, which hasn't had a real FF game since 10.
I doubt that the Expedition 33 devs are well read in anything esoteric, mystic or ancient.
They just simply had high resonance, high resonance attracts the gods which endowed them with ideas that are occult in nature, but from their perspective, they were just being creative. Anyone who is in close contact with the gods generally has high empathy, high creativity, and high humor. This game has large amounts of all 3.
(ideas themselves are representations of Gods. Tolkien ain't playing when he says that evil can't create.)
What really impressed me is how Expedition 33's story pulls no punches. Both of the endings are sad, and it's really just a manner of interpretation on which one you think is the better ending. At first I thought the game was going to be as bittersweet as a Shadowhearts game, but it goes way more hardcore than that.
You can even agree with the main antagonist's perspective, although I'd argue that the real antagonist is whomever decides to continue on with the delusion after finding out the truth (it's another one of those gnostic type of stories like Xenoblade, but it follows the dream model instead of computer simulation.) but even with that character, I can sympathize with their reasons.
It's the first time that I've seen in ages where a game had writing that's good enough to the point where you can't really point out who is in the wrong. Even with the delusional character, in real life I would probably just allow them to continue the charade even though my personal opinion sides more with the perspective of just moving on.
I'm only saying their or them instead of their actual sex to conceal the identities of the characters.
I'm impressed by how it's so well written that once you get to the main conflict, the person that you agree with will
generally reflect your age range. I'm early 40s (I'm slightly younger than Daredevil's Charlie Cox who also voiced one of the main characters of this game.) so I agree with the 33 yr old perspective.
I was a kid though, and I can fully empathize with the younger perspective that was shown. I don't agree with it, but I get it so the choice I'd make for that person would depend on what action I believed, would reflect more of my love.
Do I love this person more if I do what needs to be done and pull them out of the delusion regardless of how distraught they'll feel after I take them away from their happy delusion?
Do I love this person more if I allow them to dwell within this delusion even though it's slowly killing them in the base reality? I would probably pick the 2nd choice even though I believe it's wrong, but if I were caring for someone their happiness & comfort would come first.
Which yes I know, that's actually how we ended up with this shit world that we currently reside in. Way too many parents tried to keep their children happy, rather than actually parenting. You'll understand though once you see this character's predicament. I wouldn't want to live like that, and I wouldn't force a child that I look after for to continue living on like that if they didn't want to. I don't blame that character for choosing the dream, even though the tulpa version of a relative rebelled against the dream.
I was never a parent, but if I had kids. I'd imagine that I would take the same exact actions that the Parent did. The Parent's actions are somewhat similar to the 33 yr old, but not as forceful. The Parent actually allows a choice whereas the 33 yr old makes the choice for everybody and when that 33 yr old made the choice, the way the other party members looked at that character would make me feel so guilty, even If I knew that deep down inside, I made the correct choice.
The face the Asian girl makes at you is so distraught & despondent, she looks at you as if to say "I knew we couldn't trust you! You fucking betrayed us!" but instead of anger she just gives up, doesn't say anything and falls on her knees as she's dying. The game is filled with scenes like these, and it always feels well-earned.
It's a solid case of how multiple parties can have vastly different opinions but can all be correct at the same time.
The most logical choice would probably be the 33 yr old perspective, but the other choices rely on qualitative information & empathetic introspection so an actual solution could really only be made if the logical mind forcibly takes over.
During the ending, the family is reunited but the child no longer has the dream to keep them happy and the child (I keep calling this individual a child but the person is a young adult who looks young.) looks visibly sad, lonely and isolated.
You can't help but feel sad.
In the other ending, the child is reunited with everybody who died, but this is actually an illusion.
It's a dream within a dream and the dreamer is the relative who spawned a tulpa so that the tulpa could try to kill the dreamer. We see another tulpa version of that relative & we're shown a hint that the tulpa remembers everything, and will most likely rebel against the child.
We get a close up of the child's face which is revealed to be a bloody face, with eyes that are completely obscured with blood and the face is peeling off revealing parts of the skull.
This was the ending that the Parent was trying to prevent because the parent views it as their duty to keep their offspring safe and ensure a future for them, rather than just let them slowly die within their own fantasies.
What I just said but with spoilers, as I got rid of all of the "them, their, theys". These are ending spoilers but without any of the vague language that I've been using in this post.
It's a solid case of how multiple parties can have vastly different opinions but can all be correct at the same time. The logical choice would be Verso's perspective, but Alicia's relied on qualitative information & empathetic introspection so an actual solution could only be made if the logical mind forcibly takes over. Which is what Verso does. Both endings are sad, you feel like a complete asshole (You genocide an entire reality because it was just a simulation or dream painted on canvas. Lune truly looks like she wants to kill you but just gives up.) for doing what needs to be done if you side with Verso, but I don't blame Alicia for choosing to live in the dream, because her real life really does look painful. Renoir also has a point though that it's his responsibility to keep Alicia alive rather then to just let her rot away, simply because the simulation makes her happy.
What I also like is how the final bosses are in your team for most of the game.
The main conflict is differences of philosophical opinion where there is no correct answer, and it's a conflict that's built up with different characters throughout the game like with Sophie who's used as a story telling device to show to you the reality of their situation. She chose the path of acceptance, even though in reality she didn't actually accept her fate.
It was just a coping mechanism when being forced to know the exact time of her death. These aren't spoilers because it happens right when the game starts.
The only other spoiler I'd give, is that everyone who dies in this game, stays dead for the rest of the game. (Unless you get that ending where you continue the charade.)
There aren't any fake out deaths like most modern Jap games do. (Yakuza & Xenoblade being the worst offenders.)
A lot of gamers can't cope with the fact that multiple characters in your party die in Expedition 33, they'll even label it as 'bad writing' lol. No wonder why video games have such shit writing. Gamers label any story that doesn't constantly suck their dick, as bad. It sure explains why Fire Emblem plots are so fucking awful and constantly shower you with characters who praise you non-stop.
This game gave me hope that maybe there is someone out there who could actually write a Blade Runner for videogames.
What I like about the original Blade Runner is how it depicted Androids who were more human than human. Expedition 33 does a similar thing but with Tulpas. The game doesn't call them tulpas but that is basically what they are.
As I said all throughout this post, that game contains so many creative ideas that are occult but this is a specific case of just the artists doing it through serendipity. Had this game been made by Hironobu Sakaguchi then it definitely would've been intentional since he is somewhat well read on those subjects, and his games generally have spiritual & ancient history themes with FF6,7 and 10 being the most obvious. (Those are also the 3 most popular Final Faggot games.)
Ex33 feels, looks & reads like a game that Sakuguchi would've made, so the spiritual elements were probably the result of Frenchies imitating a Jap but with their French cultural sensibilities who in turn, was imitating Americans but with his Japanese cultural sensibilities lol.
anthony wrote: ↑Tue Mar 25, 2025 12:10 pm
The western fan interpretation/hallucination is now
in. Something that has the Silent Hill title on the screen with the trademark and everything.
In what people always wanted SH to be you can read the aspirations and anxieties of nerds of a certain era and moment (still largely true but evolved). Wanting it to be the
serious work that would vindicate video games. But an insecure and uncultured nerd's idea of what a vindicating and prestigious thing looks like, which means high school English anti-content.
It always annoyed me how nerds feel insecure about gaming unless it's celebrated by Novelist or Film makers.
How does that even make any sense? You don't ever see Film directors giving a mad fucking shit about what gamers think, or even what novelist think for that matter, and novelists simply don't give a shit at all about receiving any prestige from the visual arts.
But on which principle was SH2 remade? As far as I can tell it was lagging culturally and was done by people who thought it would be a worthy subject for a high school book report. Armchair psychology, trauma, and mental health taking front and centre. All women having their faces ape-ified to make sure that nobody accidentally enjoys anything.
What I find amusing is that in the occult circles, they're well aware that there's a war on beauty, and they basically say the same thing that I do, that it's a war against the gods due to how our traditionalist perspective of beauty is just a mirror image of goddesses.
https://daatdarling.substack.com/p/the- ... irect=true
https://daatdarling.substack.com/p/paga ... an-centric
https://www.youtube.com/@DaatDarling/videos
That cute Show White looking bitch is a zoomer but I've never seen anything written by a Millennial (Female or Male) that's anywhere near as informative as she is. Well there's Whitney Webb a 1990s millennial, but she's what I'd label as a purely intellectual materialist. Whitney is just an autist who is great at documenting organized crime which function as governments.
Unlike me, Daat is an actual Practitioner and unlike me, she doesn't use any weird metaphors about what Gods are. She just outright admits that the Gods are real. I don't give a fuck about that shit. I'm more into forgotten (or more accurately Apocryphal) ancient history. I actually didn't take this 'magic' bullshit seriously until last year where I was forcibly shown remote viewing between two entities. One is a pretty woman (Not the Green eyed girl. A different bitch.) and she allowed me to see from her perspective which was walking down through my hallway in the dark. I thought I was looking through my eyes, until I actually saw me when she materialized through the door lol and then my vision went back to my own with that slut standing in my room.
The other a red skin devil-looking thing and like Philip Jefferies I ain't going to talk about that. I don't think I was in danger or anything.
I think It just wanted to see how I react & to try to gain a reaction out of me (everything in this world is feeding off of your fear but they have 0 interest in you if you have no fear. The only thing I fear are exactly what Verso from Expedition 33 fears. Being the oldest & last survivor left of a previous societal paradigm.), but I was unafraid in both cases and I was just completely mystified and bewildered because I was seeing things that shouldn't exist. When that happens your mind does completely shut down for a second, because it's unable to compute the reality that's in front of them.
I would not be shocked if Lynch had experiences like this just by virtue of what he films.
Suda51 is able to imitate him, and judging from his Silver Case & FSR games. Suda does come across as a guy who either has some inside knowledge about the world, or he's simply just channeling it like how Expedition 33 seems to channel some of the same shit.
It's because of these experiences that I believe it's just science because these whatever the fuck these things are act like people who simply came from another world. (Like how Lynch depicts Dougie Jones, The Woodsman, Bob, Mike, etc.)
What ancient people referred to as a dream, to me just comes like a computer simulation. Not that there's really a difference, they both infer a play. A masquerade. The origin of the masquerade doesn't matter.
What matters is that you identified the incongruencies that doesn't add up with the cohesive whole.
In the final episode of Ghost in the Shell 2045, Motoko was actually trapped inside a looping false reality that only she saw through and eventually broke out of, and she identified it by looking at the inconsistent behavior of the people that she thought she knew. She was even told that the illusion didn't work on her because for her, she see's little difference between dream & reality. For Motoko, everything literally is mind since it's the only part of her that hasn't been Theseus shipped.
To me that's what the occult feels like. It doesn't feel magical. It feels more like an undefined science.
That and the stylisation makes them more memorable. Those games are a surreal, breathless spin-up of 24, Daniel Craig James Bond, Jason Bourne, Michael Bay, BIG stuff Americans took SERIOUSLY and largely FORGOT ABOUT by now despite that (or maybe because of, stupid vapid things stick easily for a moment). Cars exploding in streets, helicopter crashes, insane scale, noise, moral outrage, indignant confrontations, slick, elite villains in suits who talk down to the interloper. If you want to get what people were into in the early-mid Obama years, these games are accurate. They're just trying their best to make it far cooler by injecting new aesthetically oriented ideas and directions. Obamathrillers but cool.
I sure wish that American culture reverted back to that. Modern era Clown World culture is so tiresome. It's just the same annoying retards crying about capitalism and trying to shove communism in your face, over & over.
When communism is a dead dream from a completely different era but late 80s, 1990s Millennials are so fucking unoriginal that the only thing they know how to do is repackage dead ideas that failed in their era, and still fail today because neither commies or nazis have the answers for today's issues which are highly centralized around mass entropy which is managed by high tech & expedites the cultural decline.
That's what makes the 2020's Internet Nazi movement so hilarious. Dysgenic retards are trying to revive a religion that they could never imitate due to atropy. The modern youth have caused a competency crisis and no amount of pretending to be a strongman will automatically transform them into strong men.
That's what Communism & Nazis truly are, they're religious movements. A religion is simply a philosophy that you think is the undisputed truth.
Now I still haven't played 7 and 8 yet, will have to get back to you on those. I've seen some odd looking details. We'll see what it comes to.
I played 8, I already told you what I thought. I do agree with the Management post who claimed that 8 has much better combat than the Remakes, if only because it has competent basic fps combat which plays much smoother than the Remakes where you have to point a gun at a target for a second before shooting, if you want to achieve some decent dmg.
D&D was made as a tool, but setting-writing obviously comes with a lot of character and conclusions. If it didn't, then The Woke would feel no need to mess with it so much. As you say, no more edgy settings. You can use tabletop to largely hand people a story, even beyond the implications of the world. A friend of mine put together a pretty interesting writeup on both the history of D&D, and leading that into a look at the work of James Edward Raggi IV. Creator of the 'Lamentations of the Flame Princess' RPG system.
You're welcome to join us on our forum where we talk about this, your contributions to the discussion would be very welcome, but no pressure of course.
I don't even like poasting at my own forum, because I just fucking hate internet in general. I'll check it out though.
If there's anything I think I could add, I'd might post. I generally don't like posting though because internet retards always obsessively collect everything that you post just so they can collect everything you say and then talk shit about you through their secret clubhouses, discords or whatever gay shit that the nerds are using these days.
Back in my era you had to use IRC which weeded out retards in early internet.
That's how I used to trade Jap tapes back in the early 2000s. You met some interesting people through that shit, because a lot of these guys weren't nerdy at all, and were usually gangsterish or some kind of shady shit, but they understood high-tech nerd shit.
It's funny though how the actual nerds & geeks are in reality normiefags or tourists who don't actually know how to use tech. They rely on premade apps like fucking twitter or bluesky and the only thing truly nerdy about them is the pop culture that they consume, which is usually just video games, comics & anime, but they like the butchered mainstream form of vidya, comix & anime.
The case we kind of go into in that thread is the character of creators informing their constructions. D&D was made by guys who fought in Vietnam, read uncensored Lovecraft, generally had a far more grounded and hardened view of the world. As you say, nu-writers, who are now in charge of these projects, think conflict is when someone says something unwoke on reddit and has to be banned.
I did not know that. Funny how American comic books also originally had a military background but from World War 2 vets, and once those guys finally died, everything they built became woke, gay and fucking lame.
In the broad aesthetic impressions and intentions behind old D&D there is something akin to the Robert E. Howard drive. The picture of reality that emerges. And in nu-D&D, there's fucked up woke reddit impressions all over. Point made in the thread is largely backed up by accompanying imagery made for different modules and eras. Clearly different spirits at work.
It's going to suck ass once Conan becomes public domain. He'll meet the same fate as the Cthulhu Mythos.
Plebbitors making it fucking gay & lame and they force out all of the real fans who don't conform with the "death of the author media literacy" new-canon.
I haven't seen John Wick 3 and 4 beyond one action scene, and I get what you'd find appealing. Sort of like Hotline Miami (an aesthetically oriented action game, like Max Payne 3) it aspires to be maximalist but also readable. You can tell what's going on and how John Wick is winning. I think that gimmick gets old, but it's something. And more than most video game action sequences have unfortunately.
John Wick 1 is the only actual attempt at a movie and was the only one that kinda sorta functioned like an actual criminal syndicate. The rest of the JW movies just look more like some kind of Freemason imitation, or what they think the freemasons are. JW1 was the only good one, but my fave are 3 & 4 because they're just pure crazy action. Wick actually gets his ass kicked all the time and the fun for me is to see what gimmick he'll use to gain an upper hand. He's basically Rocky, his best skill is getting hit in the face.
I think JW2 is the only meh movie, but a lot of people consider JW2 as the best because it also tried to actually tell a story. It just wasn't a good or interesting story lol. JW3 & 4 drop all pretenses of story and is basically just a live action video game. The combat is hyperstylized like a John Woo film, but lacks the stories of John Woo. Wick does try to imitated the symbolism of Woo, but overall it's like who cares? It has some of the craziest stunts that I've ever seen put on to film. John Wick 3 & 4 is basically action porn and the writing & motivations even reads like porn.
You get more out of the John Wick films if you're a fan of action games. You already mentioned the Hotline Miami influences, but these movies even reference Ninja Gaiden and The Warriors (both the movie & the game.)
It's crazy seeing video game gameplay being redone as live action action scenes.
Gamers were accepting the most boring Gears of War ripoff garbage that generation. All they needed to do was get a "duck behind cover" button and a spread of basic guns to headshot with all games. And instead they made the diving gun-fu arcade God Hand with Guns system.
What's ironic is that during its era, Gears of War at high level play didn't revolve around cover at all. You merely used to cover to wall bounce between cover but you only used the cover for movement as you run around and auto shotty everyone as if it were a Doom game. Doom 2016/Eternal is what put the final nail in GOW's coffin because why go through the extra steps to just run around & shotgun everyone in 1 hit when you can simply run around & shotgun in a Doom a game.
The true boring ass pop-a-mole cover shooter is actually Uncharted or Last of Us, where you really do nothing but just hide behind cover like a faggot. I don't believe either game had a wall bounce mechanic to make it less boring.
Like Yakuza I think Resident Evil is probably getting very self-referential and fan-service oriented. But the light I see on the horizon is Silent Hill F. The way they announced that game struck me as a very deliberate "we are our own culture and set of sensibilities, and when you buy our things it is your duty to meet us, not our duty to meet you" to the collective West. The content warning on F contains no apologies. Rather it suggests you as a Westerner may not be fit to appreciate what you are about to see. Which I think is perfect.
A lot of Silent Hill fans hate it, because it has nothing to do with Silent Hill, lol.
It's like they forget that it's the cult of Silent Hill that's been the main source of evil in SH1,3 & 4.
F does look interesting, but not $70. No game is $70 to me. Part of what makes Clair Obscur Expedition 33 so appealing to me besides its gameplay, music and story is that it only cost $50, which is the absolute price that one should ever pay for a video game. $60 is pushing it, but somewhat tolerable. 70 is hell no but now we're in an era where $80 and over is the new normal. Why the fuck would I spend that much on a video game when I could get the entire Alien movie franchise just buying one $25 package. Sure there's only 2 movies worth watching but those two movies put together is about 4 hours of entertainment. Modern games barely have 4 minutes of entertainment within their 488 hours of pointless busywork gameplay, where I'm told that I'm not a real gamer because I don't like to play games that feel like busywork.
I don't even like to work so why would I pay $80 to work?
I imagine that after several West-oriented failures we may have passed the high-tide of Western influence and orientation in big Japanese gaming. They may have picked up that our industry is tainted on the production and reception end by ideologues to the point we cannot be trusted as a creative influence or customer base.
I just see Japan getting completely taken over by the Open Society. Anything cool from modern Japan is most likely an aberration that made it past Japan's American HR team who are for some reason directly employed inside of Japan lol.
I saw 3 jootubers in a row call Expedition 33 a 10 out of 10 game, and two of these guys are reputable.
One of them is just a random nobody, but that's what caught my attention. Even random nobodies with only 100 subs were calling this game a 10 out of 10. From what I've seen it's a 7 or 8 out of 10 when compared to jrpgs as a whole, but could be considered as 10 out of 10 when compared to modern day slop.
The OST is similar to Neir (both Neir games.), the gameplay & atmosphere is similar to Shadowhearts, Lost Odyssey & Final Faggotry X, The writing is similar to Xenoblade 3 except EX 33's writing doesn't suddenly turn into shit during the endgame. I also think that Ex 33 has much better metaphors & allegories.
I just wasted 16 hours watching that game Clair Obscur Expedition 33 and it has one of the best stories that I've ever seen in a video game. (I was like "holy shit!" when a guy gets decapitated right when they start the expedition.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaZrrh11WtE
I wish I could elaborate further but I respect the story so much that it's best to go in blind.
I might buy the game since the gameplay is pretty hardcore and you can make all of the girls run around in panties (Even the guy can, and they gave him a huge bulge. If only one of the girls had 1980s style pointy protruding nipples bulging out of her swimsuit top lol. At least the girls in this game look like girls and even have attractive bodies.), it expands on the ring systems from Shadowhearts & the combat system from Lost Odyssey but you seem to spend the entire game trying to parry multiple hit animations and it looks far more mechanically advanced than an avg rpg game.
As for the plot, it's yet another one of those Jrpg gnostic allegories (except it's made by the French) although I don't think it was intentional. (The writers & dev team don't come across as spiritual to me. They're just typical pretentious artists.
[img]https://i.postimg.cc/DyjVLBZ5/Ex33.webp[/img] A normal person would say that we're playing God and that is what's going on in this game's plot. It's basically a musical chairs of Demiurges. An artist though? They're too pseudointellectual to claim that they're playing the role of gods. They always have to make their art scribbles sound as if they're doing something profound lol.)
Everything about the plot reads like gnostic allegory, but I think it's simply that they were channeling the Gods when making this game. Damn near anything that we consider highly artistic generally has christian or gnostic traits because artists seem to be used as messengers to remind us of who we are, and where we came from.
(You may see me talk a lot of shit about Christians, but that's because I believe that most Christians are fake, and have no connection with God. They're just reciting stupid bible verses through rote memory, as if it were a school exam. As if God gives a shit about the material world. The Christian faith itself is solid. Most of the worshippers are just afraid of hell, when the modern concept of hell is based off of fiction. Actual hell is just a cold frigid place devoid of ideas and ideas equals gods, which means a complete absence of god.)
It seems that the intention for the game is to be a metaphor for the artistic process and there seems to be a weird plot of writers vs painters which I is represented as a full scale war, but it's background lore and I don't think I saw any writers being depicted as enemies. It was mainly painters fighting over the canvas. (Which in Gnosticism, the word Artist is another word for Demiurge, and the canvas is the material world.) It's revealed at the end of the game that it takes place in the early 1900s shortly after 1905, which is a year cluster that has historical significance in the occult world.
1901 is assumed to be when the previous great reset occurred. A lot of the history is fabricated, even a USA president (William McKinley) was assassinated during that era and a year after was when most of our globalized corpos were first established. (The implication is that they're just surviving companies from the old world, who 'suddenly' appeared as upstarts to eventually rise the global corpos that they are today. The lie is the rags to riches story. They always existed just to eat up the local culture, fairs & mom & pop shops.)
Again it's just a coincidence with this game, that it just so happens to align so much with forgotten ancient history and occultism because I truly believe that Gods do speak directly to Artists which is why the work of most Artists are generally the same. I believe that they're receiving instruction by the Gods, that artists perceive as their creativity.
I'm not doubting their creativity. I just noticed a link that a lot of their ideas sound like forgotten history & occult metaphors that most artists have never ever heard of, yet they all somehow intuited the same fucking shit at 'random'.
I'd be shocked if they weren't anything but typical Artfag types, but who knows? Lynch also played the part of a fool but I know enough about his films to know that he was just playing a role. (I'm of the opinion that he's far more intelligent than all of his detractors.) Lynch played The role of The Fool, which has a lot of occult significance through Tarot and is also one of Jung's Archetypes and Archetypes themselves are based off of Plato's Transcendent Ideas. (I believe the ideas themselves are just job titles that Gods adopt. Plato's version is that there's an actual ideal form of a table, dog, or woman, and that everything we see in our material world is just an imitation of that godly ideal. I agree, but I use the job application metaphor to represent how the shape of ideas gradually change & conform through & with the culture.)
[b]
The Role of the Fool is used as a tool to reveal the truth or reality to the King, or in our case, The world.[/b]
Which again, I think it's just coincidence.
This is exactly what I mean when I presume that Artists are corresponding with the Gods whether they realize it or not. The true artists tend to be granted occult knowledge that they all base their stories off of, even though from their perspective, they're simply expressing themselves and the ideas came from their mind.
Mind is consciousness and The All is Mind. The All is God.
David Lynch is a prime example of such, except I believe that he was self aware. Everyone says that Mark Frost is the one who studies occult & conspiracy theories but that's exactly why none of his works are interesting without David Lynch. Mark Frost is simply a materialist who read books. As such, he can't contemplate the Reality, the Actual Reality the same way that David Lynch could. This is why Mark Frost's interpretations of Twin Peaks are fairly shallow, come off like an episode of X-Files s and reads like that Drowned God game.
https://www.paradisehotel51.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=354
Materialist always assume that Aliens are controlling everything, when Aliens didn't even exist as a myth until the mid 1940s to 1950s.
In Lynch's works, he shows to you how demons actually interact with the human world. Bob is basically a skinwalker, as are the other Black Lodge doppelgangers.
There's a theory I agree with that during the ending of Season 3, Coop & Laura where transported into our real world.
If this is what Lynch intended, it truly shows how much Lynch understood our reality,
"We live in a Dream, within a dream, but who is the Dreamer?" and it makes me sad that there really isn't anyone else out there like him in our modern era. Not in the arts anyway. The Arts just has plenty of Artists who can tap into the Gods but aren't self-aware of it like Lynch was. That's also why Lynch's works, especially Twin Peaks, does not have a happy ending at all.
He simply can't do that, because it doesn't reflect our reality. If you're living in this current dream, then you're actively taking part in a broken corrupted world that can't be fixed, it's only purpose is to torture all those who dwell within it.
The game Expedition 33 shows how that torture manifests through existentialism. While the game makes constant remarks about the fucked up world that they live within. You eventually learn that [spoiler]their world is just a canvas that the lead male character's mom paints. The lead main character is actually just a tulpa.[/spoiler] Kinda like the Tulpas from Twin Peaks.
Sure, Lynch maintained that all of his works are just ideas, but Lynch is also a guy who shouldn't be taken literally at all.
He just makes way too much sense when you look at him from an occult & esoteric perspective that imo he's just keeping what he knows hidden, behind the vehicle of art to maintain his 'idiot savant' facade or his Tarot role of The Fool.
He knows exactly what he's doing, especially with the dialogue that he gave for Monica Belluci.
I randumbly brought up Lynch because he was the purest example of a modern Artist, who was basically a spiritual medium of sorts.
I see that same spark from the Sandfall team who made Clair Obscur Expedition 33.
Not from the artists themselves (who imo just come across like a bunch of pretentious retards, just saying a bunch of gibberish that artists usually speak.) but from their actual art. Their art is amazing, and is one of the best examples of art in gaming that I've ever seen. I did say in a previous post that French works from the 1970s-2000s were the only works I've seen that compares to Jap art. I'm generally thinking of Gandahar (extremely occult & ancient history), Forbidden Planet, Moebius.
Clair Obscur is up there with the French arts of their past, but I also think that they surpass damn near every modern Jrpg. It feels like a true sequel to Final Fantasy, which hasn't had a real FF game since 10.
I doubt that the Expedition 33 devs are well read in anything esoteric, mystic or ancient.
They just simply had high resonance, high resonance attracts the gods which endowed them with ideas that are occult in nature, but from their perspective, they were just being creative. Anyone who is in close contact with the gods generally has high empathy, high creativity, and high humor. This game has large amounts of all 3.
(ideas themselves are representations of Gods. Tolkien ain't playing when he says that evil can't create.)
[b]
What really impressed me is how Expedition 33's story pulls no punches. Both of the endings are sad, and it's really just a manner of interpretation on which one you think is the better ending.[/b] At first I thought the game was going to be as bittersweet as a Shadowhearts game, but it goes way more hardcore than that.
You can even agree with the main antagonist's perspective, although I'd argue that the real antagonist is whomever decides to continue on with the delusion after finding out the truth (it's another one of those gnostic type of stories like Xenoblade, but it follows the dream model instead of computer simulation.) but even with that character, I can sympathize with their reasons.
It's the first time that I've seen in ages where a game had writing that's good enough to the point where you can't really point out who is in the wrong. Even with the delusional character, in real life I would probably just allow them to continue the charade even though my personal opinion sides more with the perspective of just moving on.
I'm only saying their or them instead of their actual sex to conceal the identities of the characters.
I'm impressed by how it's so well written that once you get to the main conflict, the person that you agree with will
generally reflect your age range. I'm early 40s (I'm slightly younger than Daredevil's Charlie Cox who also voiced one of the main characters of this game.) so I agree with the 33 yr old perspective.
I was a kid though, and I can fully empathize with the younger perspective that was shown. I don't agree with it, but I get it so the choice I'd make for that person would depend on what action I believed, would reflect more of my love.
Do I love this person more if I do what needs to be done and pull them out of the delusion regardless of how distraught they'll feel after I take them away from their happy delusion?
Do I love this person more if I allow them to dwell within this delusion even though it's slowly killing them in the base reality? I would probably pick the 2nd choice even though I believe it's wrong, but if I were caring for someone their happiness & comfort would come first.
Which yes I know, that's actually how we ended up with this shit world that we currently reside in. Way too many parents tried to keep their children happy, rather than actually parenting. You'll understand though once you see this character's predicament. I wouldn't want to live like that, and I wouldn't force a child that I look after for to continue living on like that if they didn't want to. I don't blame that character for choosing the dream, even though the tulpa version of a relative rebelled against the dream.
I was never a parent, but if I had kids. I'd imagine that I would take the same exact actions that the Parent did. The Parent's actions are somewhat similar to the 33 yr old, but not as forceful. The Parent actually allows a choice whereas the 33 yr old makes the choice for everybody and when that 33 yr old made the choice, the way the other party members looked at that character would make me feel so guilty, even If I knew that deep down inside, I made the correct choice.
The face the Asian girl makes at you is so distraught & despondent, she looks at you as if to say "I knew we couldn't trust you! You fucking betrayed us!" but instead of anger she just gives up, doesn't say anything and falls on her knees as she's dying. The game is filled with scenes like these, and it always feels well-earned.
It's a solid case of how multiple parties can have vastly different opinions but can all be correct at the same time.
The most logical choice would probably be the 33 yr old perspective, but the other choices rely on qualitative information & empathetic introspection so an actual solution could really only be made if the logical mind forcibly takes over.
During the ending, the family is reunited but the child no longer has the dream to keep them happy and the child (I keep calling this individual a child but the person is a young adult who looks young.) looks visibly sad, lonely and isolated.
You can't help but feel sad.
In the other ending, the child is reunited with everybody who died, but this is actually an illusion.
It's a dream within a dream and the dreamer is the relative who spawned a tulpa so that the tulpa could try to kill the dreamer. We see another tulpa version of that relative & we're shown a hint that the tulpa remembers everything, and will most likely rebel against the child.
We get a close up of the child's face which is revealed to be a bloody face, with eyes that are completely obscured with blood and the face is peeling off revealing parts of the skull.
This was the ending that the Parent was trying to prevent because the parent views it as their duty to keep their offspring safe and ensure a future for them, rather than just let them slowly die within their own fantasies.
What I just said but with spoilers, as I got rid of all of the "them, their, theys". These are ending spoilers but without any of the vague language that I've been using in this post.
[spoiler] It's a solid case of how multiple parties can have vastly different opinions but can all be correct at the same time. The logical choice would be Verso's perspective, but Alicia's relied on qualitative information & empathetic introspection so an actual solution could only be made if the logical mind forcibly takes over. Which is what Verso does. Both endings are sad, you feel like a complete asshole (You genocide an entire reality because it was just a simulation or dream painted on canvas. Lune truly looks like she wants to kill you but just gives up.) for doing what needs to be done if you side with Verso, but I don't blame Alicia for choosing to live in the dream, because her real life really does look painful. Renoir also has a point though that it's his responsibility to keep Alicia alive rather then to just let her rot away, simply because the simulation makes her happy.[/spoiler]
What I also like is how the final bosses are in your team for most of the game.
The main conflict is differences of philosophical opinion where there is no correct answer, and it's a conflict that's built up with different characters throughout the game like with Sophie who's used as a story telling device to show to you the reality of their situation. She chose the path of acceptance, even though in reality she didn't actually accept her fate.
It was just a coping mechanism when being forced to know the exact time of her death. These aren't spoilers because it happens right when the game starts.
The only other spoiler I'd give, is that everyone who dies in this game, stays dead for the rest of the game. (Unless you get that ending where you continue the charade.)
There aren't any fake out deaths like most modern Jap games do. (Yakuza & Xenoblade being the worst offenders.)
A lot of gamers can't cope with the fact that multiple characters in your party die in Expedition 33, they'll even label it as 'bad writing' lol. No wonder why video games have such shit writing. Gamers label any story that doesn't constantly suck their dick, as bad. It sure explains why Fire Emblem plots are so fucking awful and constantly shower you with characters who praise you non-stop.
This game gave me hope that maybe there is someone out there who could actually write a Blade Runner for videogames.
What I like about the original Blade Runner is how it depicted Androids who were more human than human. Expedition 33 does a similar thing but with Tulpas. The game doesn't call them tulpas but that is basically what they are.
As I said all throughout this post, that game contains so many creative ideas that are occult but this is a specific case of just the artists doing it through serendipity. Had this game been made by Hironobu Sakaguchi then it definitely would've been intentional since he is somewhat well read on those subjects, and his games generally have spiritual & ancient history themes with FF6,7 and 10 being the most obvious. (Those are also the 3 most popular Final Faggot games.)
Ex33 feels, looks & reads like a game that Sakuguchi would've made, so the spiritual elements were probably the result of Frenchies imitating a Jap but with their French cultural sensibilities who in turn, was imitating Americans but with his Japanese cultural sensibilities lol.
[quote=anthony post_id=4825 time=1742904653 user_id=196]
The western fan interpretation/hallucination is now [i]in[/i]. Something that has the Silent Hill title on the screen with the trademark and everything.
In what people always wanted SH to be you can read the aspirations and anxieties of nerds of a certain era and moment (still largely true but evolved). Wanting it to be the [i]serious[/i] work that would vindicate video games. But an insecure and uncultured nerd's idea of what a vindicating and prestigious thing looks like, which means high school English anti-content.[/quote]
It always annoyed me how nerds feel insecure about gaming unless it's celebrated by Novelist or Film makers.
How does that even make any sense? You don't ever see Film directors giving a mad fucking shit about what gamers think, or even what novelist think for that matter, and novelists simply don't give a shit at all about receiving any prestige from the visual arts.
[quote]
But on which principle was SH2 remade? As far as I can tell it was lagging culturally and was done by people who thought it would be a worthy subject for a high school book report. Armchair psychology, trauma, and mental health taking front and centre. All women having their faces ape-ified to make sure that nobody accidentally enjoys anything.
[/quote]
What I find amusing is that in the occult circles, they're well aware that there's a war on beauty, and they basically say the same thing that I do, that it's a war against the gods due to how our traditionalist perspective of beauty is just a mirror image of goddesses.
https://daatdarling.substack.com/p/the-demonization-of-venus-and-the?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
https://daatdarling.substack.com/p/paganism-should-reject-human-centric
https://www.youtube.com/@DaatDarling/videos
That cute Show White looking bitch is a zoomer but I've never seen anything written by a Millennial (Female or Male) that's anywhere near as informative as she is. Well there's Whitney Webb a 1990s millennial, but she's what I'd label as a purely intellectual materialist. Whitney is just an autist who is great at documenting organized crime which function as governments.
Unlike me, Daat is an actual Practitioner and unlike me, she doesn't use any weird metaphors about what Gods are. She just outright admits that the Gods are real. I don't give a fuck about that shit. I'm more into forgotten (or more accurately Apocryphal) ancient history. I actually didn't take this 'magic' bullshit seriously until last year where I was forcibly shown remote viewing between two entities. One is a pretty woman (Not the Green eyed girl. A different bitch.) and she allowed me to see from her perspective which was walking down through my hallway in the dark. I thought I was looking through my eyes, until I actually saw me when she materialized through the door lol and then my vision went back to my own with that slut standing in my room.
The other a red skin devil-looking thing and like Philip Jefferies I ain't going to talk about that. I don't think I was in danger or anything.
I think It just wanted to see how I react & to try to gain a reaction out of me (everything in this world is feeding off of your fear but they have 0 interest in you if you have no fear. The only thing I fear are exactly what Verso from Expedition 33 fears. Being the oldest & last survivor left of a previous societal paradigm.), but I was unafraid in both cases and I was just completely mystified and bewildered because I was seeing things that shouldn't exist. When that happens your mind does completely shut down for a second, because it's unable to compute the reality that's in front of them.
I would not be shocked if Lynch had experiences like this just by virtue of what he films.
Suda51 is able to imitate him, and judging from his Silver Case & FSR games. Suda does come across as a guy who either has some inside knowledge about the world, or he's simply just channeling it like how Expedition 33 seems to channel some of the same shit.
It's because of these experiences that I believe it's just science because these whatever the fuck these things are act like people who simply came from another world. (Like how Lynch depicts Dougie Jones, The Woodsman, Bob, Mike, etc.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8-KTdNdizE
What ancient people referred to as a dream, to me just comes like a computer simulation. Not that there's really a difference, they both infer a play. A masquerade. The origin of the masquerade doesn't matter.
What matters is that you identified the incongruencies that doesn't add up with the cohesive whole.
In the final episode of Ghost in the Shell 2045, Motoko was actually trapped inside a looping false reality that only she saw through and eventually broke out of, and she identified it by looking at the inconsistent behavior of the people that she thought she knew. She was even told that the illusion didn't work on her because for her, she see's little difference between dream & reality. For Motoko, everything literally is mind since it's the only part of her that hasn't been Theseus shipped.
To me that's what the occult feels like. It doesn't feel magical. It feels more like an undefined science.
[quote]
That and the stylisation makes them more memorable. Those games are a surreal, breathless spin-up of 24, Daniel Craig James Bond, Jason Bourne, Michael Bay, BIG stuff Americans took SERIOUSLY and largely FORGOT ABOUT by now despite that (or maybe because of, stupid vapid things stick easily for a moment). Cars exploding in streets, helicopter crashes, insane scale, noise, moral outrage, indignant confrontations, slick, elite villains in suits who talk down to the interloper. If you want to get what people were into in the early-mid Obama years, these games are accurate. They're just trying their best to make it far cooler by injecting new aesthetically oriented ideas and directions. Obamathrillers [b][i]but cool[/i][/b].[/quote]
I sure wish that American culture reverted back to that. Modern era Clown World culture is so tiresome. It's just the same annoying retards crying about capitalism and trying to shove communism in your face, over & over.
When communism is a dead dream from a completely different era but late 80s, 1990s Millennials are so fucking unoriginal that the only thing they know how to do is repackage dead ideas that failed in their era, and still fail today because neither commies or nazis have the answers for today's issues which are highly centralized around mass entropy which is managed by high tech & expedites the cultural decline.
That's what makes the 2020's Internet Nazi movement so hilarious. Dysgenic retards are trying to revive a religion that they could never imitate due to atropy. The modern youth have caused a competency crisis and no amount of pretending to be a strongman will automatically transform them into strong men.
That's what Communism & Nazis truly are, they're religious movements. A religion is simply a philosophy that you think is the undisputed truth.
[quote]
Now I still haven't played 7 and 8 yet, will have to get back to you on those. I've seen some odd looking details. We'll see what it comes to.[/quote]
I played 8, I already told you what I thought. I do agree with the Management post who claimed that 8 has much better combat than the Remakes, if only because it has competent basic fps combat which plays much smoother than the Remakes where you have to point a gun at a target for a second before shooting, if you want to achieve some decent dmg.
[quote]
D&D was made as a tool, but setting-writing obviously comes with a lot of character and conclusions. If it didn't, then The Woke would feel no need to mess with it so much. As you say, no more edgy settings. You [i]can[/i] use tabletop to largely hand people a story, even beyond the implications of the world. A friend of mine put together a pretty interesting writeup on both the history of D&D, and leading that into a look at the work of James Edward Raggi IV. Creator of the 'Lamentations of the Flame Princess' RPG system.
You're welcome to join us on our forum where we talk about this, your contributions to the discussion would be very welcome, but no pressure of course.[/quote]
I don't even like poasting at my own forum, because I just fucking hate internet in general. I'll check it out though.
If there's anything I think I could add, I'd might post. I generally don't like posting though because internet retards always obsessively collect everything that you post just so they can collect everything you say and then talk shit about you through their secret clubhouses, discords or whatever gay shit that the nerds are using these days.
Back in my era you had to use IRC which weeded out retards in early internet.
That's how I used to trade Jap tapes back in the early 2000s. You met some interesting people through that shit, because a lot of these guys weren't nerdy at all, and were usually gangsterish or some kind of shady shit, but they understood high-tech nerd shit.
It's funny though how the actual nerds & geeks are in reality normiefags or tourists who don't actually know how to use tech. They rely on premade apps like fucking twitter or bluesky and the only thing truly nerdy about them is the pop culture that they consume, which is usually just video games, comics & anime, but they like the butchered mainstream form of vidya, comix & anime.
[quote]The case we kind of go into in that thread is the character of creators informing their constructions. [b]D&D was made by guys who fought in Vietnam[/b], read uncensored Lovecraft, generally [b]had a far more grounded and hardened view of the world.[/b] As you say, nu-writers, who are now in charge of these projects, think conflict is when someone says something unwoke on reddit and has to be banned.
[/quote]
I did not know that. Funny how American comic books also originally had a military background but from World War 2 vets, and once those guys finally died, everything they built became woke, gay and fucking lame.
[quote]
In the broad aesthetic impressions and intentions behind old D&D there is something akin to the Robert E. Howard drive. The picture of reality that emerges. And in nu-D&D, there's fucked up woke reddit impressions all over. Point made in the thread is largely backed up by accompanying imagery made for different modules and eras. Clearly different spirits at work.[/quote]
It's going to suck ass once Conan becomes public domain. He'll meet the same fate as the Cthulhu Mythos.
Plebbitors making it fucking gay & lame and they force out all of the real fans who don't conform with the "death of the author media literacy" new-canon.
[quote]
I haven't seen John Wick 3 and 4 beyond one action scene, and I get what you'd find appealing. Sort of like Hotline Miami (an aesthetically oriented action game, like Max Payne 3) it aspires to be maximalist but also readable. You can tell what's going on and how John Wick is winning. I think that gimmick gets old, but it's something. And more than most video game action sequences have unfortunately. [/quote]
John Wick 1 is the only actual attempt at a movie and was the only one that kinda sorta functioned like an actual criminal syndicate. The rest of the JW movies just look more like some kind of Freemason imitation, or what they think the freemasons are. JW1 was the only good one, but my fave are 3 & 4 because they're just pure crazy action. Wick actually gets his ass kicked all the time and the fun for me is to see what gimmick he'll use to gain an upper hand. He's basically Rocky, his best skill is getting hit in the face.
I think JW2 is the only meh movie, but a lot of people consider JW2 as the best because it also tried to actually tell a story. It just wasn't a good or interesting story lol. JW3 & 4 drop all pretenses of story and is basically just a live action video game. The combat is hyperstylized like a John Woo film, but lacks the stories of John Woo. Wick does try to imitated the symbolism of Woo, but overall it's like who cares? It has some of the craziest stunts that I've ever seen put on to film. John Wick 3 & 4 is basically action porn and the writing & motivations even reads like porn.
You get more out of the John Wick films if you're a fan of action games. You already mentioned the Hotline Miami influences, but these movies even reference Ninja Gaiden and The Warriors (both the movie & the game.)
It's crazy seeing video game gameplay being redone as live action action scenes.
[quote]Gamers were accepting the most boring Gears of War ripoff garbage that generation. All they needed to do was get a "duck behind cover" button and a spread of basic guns to headshot with all games. And instead they made the diving gun-fu arcade God Hand with Guns system.[/quote]
What's ironic is that during its era, Gears of War at high level play didn't revolve around cover at all. You merely used to cover to wall bounce between cover but you only used the cover for movement as you run around and auto shotty everyone as if it were a Doom game. Doom 2016/Eternal is what put the final nail in GOW's coffin because why go through the extra steps to just run around & shotgun everyone in 1 hit when you can simply run around & shotgun in a Doom a game.
The true boring ass pop-a-mole cover shooter is actually Uncharted or Last of Us, where you really do nothing but just hide behind cover like a faggot. I don't believe either game had a wall bounce mechanic to make it less boring.
[quote]
Like Yakuza I think Resident Evil is probably getting very self-referential and fan-service oriented. But the light I see on the horizon is Silent Hill F. The way they announced that game struck me as a very deliberate "we are our own culture and set of sensibilities, and when you buy our things it is your duty to meet us, not our duty to meet you" to the collective West. The content warning on F contains no apologies. Rather it suggests you as a Westerner may not be fit to appreciate what you are about to see. Which I think is perfect.
[/quote]
A lot of Silent Hill fans hate it, because it has nothing to do with Silent Hill, lol.
It's like they forget that it's the cult of Silent Hill that's been the main source of evil in SH1,3 & 4.
F does look interesting, but not $70. No game is $70 to me. Part of what makes Clair Obscur Expedition 33 so appealing to me besides its gameplay, music and story is that it only cost $50, which is the absolute price that one should ever pay for a video game. $60 is pushing it, but somewhat tolerable. 70 is hell no but now we're in an era where $80 and over is the new normal. Why the fuck would I spend that much on a video game when I could get the entire Alien movie franchise just buying one $25 package. Sure there's only 2 movies worth watching but those two movies put together is about 4 hours of entertainment. Modern games barely have 4 minutes of entertainment within their 488 hours of pointless busywork gameplay, where I'm told that I'm not a real gamer because I don't like to play games that feel like busywork.
I don't even like to work so why would I pay $80 to work?
[quote]
I imagine that after several West-oriented failures we may have passed the [i]high-tide[/i] of Western influence and orientation in big Japanese gaming. They may have picked up that our industry is tainted on the production and reception end by ideologues to the point we cannot be trusted as a creative influence or customer base.[/quote]
I just see Japan getting completely taken over by the Open Society. Anything cool from modern Japan is most likely an aberration that made it past Japan's American HR team who are for some reason directly employed inside of Japan lol.
