Killer7 SINdicate

[Krizzx]

I've come across a few awesome fucking games that were made using RPG makers in the past few years. I can't begin to tell you how much I fucking hate RPG maker games. Even more than shit made in Unreal Engine. Everything is so cookie cutter and effortless most of the time.

First is "Fear and Hunger"

Its a TRUE survival horror game that is built around mechanics. There are no levels or leveling up. No plot armor. This game is all about decision making and using attacks and items strategically. Mistakes and bad decisions are costly. I first found about this game when I saw a trailer for the sequel and thought it looked awesome. It is, but so is the original.





If you've never played it, you should. The creator is still adding content to Termina, thought, even though it came out years ago at this point.



The second game is one I played recently after seeing people recommended it for people who wanted something kind of like FEAR and Hunger.

"LISA: The Painful"

This is an interesting game. Its clearly Earthbound inspired, but unlike shit like Citizens of Earth, this isn't a shallow clone. Its a full featured original game that just takes inspiration. This game was apparently so awesome that it spawned an indie universe of fanmade games. Fanmade games that are actually "good". So far I've played and beat Lisa the Hopeful which honestly felt more like a sequel to LISA the painful than its actual sequel LISA: The Joyful. Its longer, more complex and even has more endings.






They also both have great music.

[AngelheadedHipster]

I can name a couple.

First of all is Wooden Ocean. It was super obscure until a relatively popular YouTuber made a video about it which is why it's only pretty obscure now. Not to put too fine a point on it, I've known about it for a couple years based on a random recommendation on 4chan that I'll forever be grateful for. Kinda hard to sum up. It's a meta fantasy rpg that's actually a gnostic science-fiction story but really it's an allegory for the creative process. It's hard to talk about what makes it good without giving away too much and maybe I already have but it's very fun. It has a labyrinthine level design and labyrinthine plotting. It's one of the few games that does a "meta" twist well. Mainly because it doesn't expect you to be particularly surprised by it. You'll probably figure it out before the protagonist does, it knows you probably will and a great part of the game is concerned with the "Well, what now?" that comes after it. It never falls into the cliche's you'd expect from that kind of premise.

You named Fear and Hunger so the logical other series to name is Black Souls. It's a dark fantasy reigmagining of fairy tales, in case of the first one and Alice in Wonderland, in case of the second one with some mechanics inspired by the Dark Souls series and also it's, kind of, a porn game. And yes, I know all of that sounds really edgy and cringe but it's surprisingly better than it sounds. The way it uses fairy tale motives is sort of the thing I'd expect Yoko Taro to do if he wasn't a poser. And it's a lot better designed than a lot of the actual Dark Souls game in terms of actual game making.

Right, and then there's the Disillusion duology. 1st Person games, inspired by old dungeon crawlers, inspired by the Indian afterlife/cycle of reincarnation. Also uses some really sick pre rendered 3D animated cutscenes that have kind of a 90's Adventure feel to it. Pretty light on actual gameplay compared to the other two game, there are some combar encounters but it's a lot closer to a walking simulator. But it does have a lot of personality to it, it does a good job of conveying this sort of dream like atmosphere where things are on the verge of making sense but you never quite get a handle on them. Visuals and exploration strongly inspired by LSD Dream Emulator. Actually has some direct homages to it. Like I said, very light on combat so it's a pretty easy going experience.

[Jack]

I'll post the best Rpg maker game of all time where both its sales & its ratings reflect it.
SYMPHONY OF WAR

It's my favorite and it barely even looks or feels like a rmaker game.
The gameplay itself feels more like a hybrid of Fire Emblem & Ogre Battle with the gameplay being much closer
to Ogre Battle, than even that of Unicorn Overlord. Which didn't play much like Ogre Battle at all. Overlord basically created its own genre and nothing else within the gaming landscape plays anything like Unicorn Overlord. The coliseum alone had me playing that game for hundreds of hours after beating it.

Unicorn Overlord was my fave game of last year though. I bought the special edition on Switch, have about 500 hours in it and I plan to eventually buy the PS5 version.

Symphony of War actually takes place in the same shared setting of Legacies of Dondoran & Deadly Sin

Symphony of War's aggro system is based off of the combat system that he designed for Deadly Sin except in SOW, the aggro system is applied to the Fire Emblem style battle map, rather than the individual combat skirmishes which have their own rule system that's based off of the formation system from Ogre battle but it's much more in depth than the formation systems used in the Ogre games.

I never played the original Deadly Sin but I can vouch for Deadly Sin 2
(I played it way back when it was free, before it was ever on Steam.) if you just want to play a more traditonal Jrpg instead of the strategy wargame Symphony of War.
DS2 is prob the closest I've seen to a Final Fantasy 6 style rpg made with rpg maker.
Great art & great music but zero replay value. Symphony of War has great aart & music but also has near infinite replay value if you buy the dlc which allows you to toggle the difficulty settings into your own customized mode.
You can fight against mirror versions of yourselves and infinity zombie armies which completely changes how the game is played. The story stays the same no matter what but the actual play mechanics are almost as varied as a fighting game due to how the difficulty sliders & toggles work.


What's funny about Dancing Dragon games, is that this guy was basically a reject among the rpg maker community. A lot of that community's most influential members (like that one dude who made those shitty but popular wannabe Silent Hill rpg maker games. He was the main guy insulting Dancing Dragon when I've never seen a game of that Silent Hill dude's that didn't delve within their subject beyond surface level. He made a game called Eldritch and it was about as puddle deep into Lovecraft as your typical LLovecraf vidya gaem.) would constantly insult Dancing Dragon's games as generic or mediocre that only stand out because of the gfx & music. He always gets clowned on for his writing style, but I really don't see anything wrong with the way he writes. He just has a very Christian-influenced writing style which you don't really see much of in the modern era so imo his writing style stands out for being one of the few who still bases their writing off of a Christian-Catholic Good vs Evil mindset. His plots revolve around keeping the faith in the Gods no matter how much it looks like that evil is winning.
Considering that his games are always fantasy based, I think its only fitting that most of his games are written around some 1980s perception of Christianity that just freely mixes christcuck doctrines into one giant slop (even the title of the game implies a connection to Book of Enoch but it really has nothing to do with Book of Enoch.) that makes for an interesting game.


It's funny to me because who the fuck even are his critics? I can't even remember their names but I do recall seeing them talk trash to him all the time but you look at Dancing Dragon now.
I don't think anyone else has made a Rpg Maker game on the level of popularity that Dancing Dragon has, nor has anyone made one as high quality as Symphony of War.
EDIT: I just figured it out. One of Dancing Dragon's main critics was the guy who made Backstage.
Backstage recently came to steam last year.

Backstage is another one of those games that was probably good during its era, but I've always hated it.
It has this weird auto combat system and the story delves deep into that psychological analytical
horror bullshit that's inspired by Silent Hill 2.
His other game at his Itchio page, "Lunar Tear" looks legit good though. I don't know why he didn't decide to sell that on Steam.
https://invisibleinc.itch.io/lunar-tear
Of course, I'm going to be interested in anything that somewhat resembles Phantasy Star.

A game that I thought was pretty fun is Splatterhouse Rpg
http://splat2k3.illmosis.net/
https://splatterhouse.kontek.net/2k3screens.html
It's Sega Genesis Splatterhouse games, as a freeroam open hub world horror rpg game and it really does feel like a horror game since only Rick is immortal. The rest of the humans that you can recruit will permadie if you're not careful and their zombie remains will follow & haunt you throughout the game.

I can think of some rpg maker games that were good during its era like Legion Saga a Suikoden wannabe which you can still get on Steam (but ain't worth it. It was only good back then coz it was free.)
https://crowbarska.itch.io/legion-saga
I can't find the steam page so here's the itchio page.

Or Alter Aila
https://www.rpgmakerarchive.net/2016/03 ... 3-rmn.html
which at the time was light years ahead of what anyone was doing within the rpg maker sphere (If you ignore the stuff that I was doing and you should since I never released anything. Shit I was doing though is so ahead of its time that it looks modern when compared to modern rm maker games. My design goal is to make something that doesn't even look or feel like a rm game. My current build looks even less like a rpg maker game.)

Ara Fell is another decent one which is also sold on Steam now.

Which again, I liked Ara Fell way back when it was free. I don't know if I'd actually pay for it.
I do like Deadly Sin 2 enough to buy it, and I did but it really has 0 replay value like most Jrpgs from the 16 bit era.

My personal 2nd fave after Splatterhouse is Hero's Realm
http://kentona.freehostia.com/
which is basically just Dragon Quest 3 & Final Fantasy 6 mashed together into a game
and it does a great job of creating a big open world-ish game that's an ode to the classics.
It has a skill system that resembles D&D which allows you to pick locks & shit. Hero's Realm feels like an official game, which is prob the best compliment that you could reserve for a rpg maker game.
I got up to the part where you get to play as all 4 or 5 of your parties at the same time but I quit the game by then because there was just so much going on. It had as much gameplay as a real game, which is rare for rpg maker games since for most rpg maker devs, the actual gameplay is just an afterthought.


I consider Symphony of War & Fear & Hunger Termina on their own level, distinct from other rpg maker games.

I've come across a few awesome fucking games that were made using RPG makers in the past few years. I can't begin to tell you how much I fucking hate RPG maker games. Even more than shit made in Unreal Engine. Everything is so cookie cutter and effortless most of the time.

The problem with unreal is that the games cost $70 - $120 to buy & play, plus tax for what amounts to a game that's little more than an asset flip of default assets. The shift to unreal is because it's cheaper than building your own in-house engine and modern programming staff is populated with fucking retarded Indians who barely speak or read English, and don't even know how to program their own engine anyway so we're stuck with the unreal asset flips because the modern work force doesn't have the ability to work with anything else.

Most Rpg maker games are made by barely literate monkeys who have a monkey see monkey do philosophy to game making. They saw a game they like do it, so they try to imitate it but don't understand how to.
The other half of Rpg Maker designers are literate but view game design as just another form of passive art like a movie. Novel is mostly passive, but I'd argue that novels are closer to video games because in both cases (or at least for most videogames, you can not progress with the narrative without the reader's own choice to individually read & comprehend the words that they've read to paint a moving picture within the canvas of their mind.
Soyny Cinematic video games and most movies do the exact opposite of this where interaction with the medium is extremely passive.

This 'literate' half of rpg maker game design will often have great visual & aural aesthetics but at the price of an actual playable game because these types generally don't understand or care about what a video game is.

Fear & Hunger is one of the few where the story is just as interesting & as esoteric as its own gameplay.
I swear that Termina seems to be referencing Junji Ito, most specifically Remina. Kinda like how the original game is referencing Golden Age Griffith from Berserk & The Eclipse. That Griffith character is also in Termina I think. I never made it that far though. I'm so used to normal shitty rpgs that don't even react to what you're doing, that over half of the cast gets killed before I make it to the 3rd day because Termina actually does calculate what you're doing & it reminds you that it's constantly watching you by punishing you through the deaths of the other survivors.
I talked about this game in the original forums, but I actually hate it. It's way too RNG based.
The sequel Termina, is one of the best Rpg maker games I ever played.
Every single aspect of its gameplay reflects a choice & consequences mindset and even the characters that you choose to play as have completely different play mechanics & strategies that they rely on.

Even the combat system is awesome. I often say that there's only 4 games out there that play like Resident Evil 4.
Resident Evil 4 Classic, Resident Evil 5, Godhand & .........
Fear & Hunger Termina, lol!
This is what a lot of RE4 haters don't understand about the greatness of RE4.
I don't understand how anyone can play RE4 classic and not understand just how tactical RE4's combat is.

The entirety of RE4's combat revolves around crowd management and you manage the crowd partly by the gun you use and where you choose to shoot your opponent. It's one of those games where simply going for the head isn't always the best option. Shit I'd argue that going for a head shot is a last ditch option, unless it's a gun that can pierce heads. In that case, try to blow up as many heads as you can. The most optimal position to shoot is slightly below the knee cap and above the shin. Once you master that, you can slow down enemies to where they fall on their knees leaving you enough room to navigate around them. go after the enemies behind them or initiate a melee attack prompt which functions as a crowd control AOE move. This shit even works flawlessly in the RE4 remake. I actually hated playing that game until I realized that the slightly below knee cap tactic still works in RE4 remake. (Re4 remake made the headshots fairly useless)

Why does crowd control matter so much in Fear and Hunger? Well on the surface it looks like you're only fighting 2 to 3 monsters at a time but you're actually fighting off an entire crowd of at least 10 enemies and that's for nearly every fight.
The rpg maker system can only spawn about 9 to 10 enemies per battle and that includes enemies who suddenly enter combat once certain conditions are met.
What Fear & Hunger does is register every single limb as an enemy combatant which creates this Resident Evil 4-like combat system where you shoot the legs to slow down the enemy shoot the arms to disarm the weapons of the enemy or go for the head shot or body to kill the opponent. Going for the body kill can instantly kill the enemy but their usually retaliate and attack you with their arms, legs & head right as they're falling to their death.


Fear & Hunger Termina feels far more strategic than your typical real time Survival Horror game. Not only do you have to worry about resource & ammo conservation like a real time survival horror, you're actually forced into battle due to the rpg maker origins so you can't just forever run away like a bitch. Fear & Hunger forces you to be confronted by your fears.
LOL the enemies will literally fucking rape you.

One of those crazy Farmer guys throat-fucked my mechanic chick (and she started to spit out or was choking on cum or something. She was incapacitated and couldn't move.) so the Jojo Mafia character I was playing as punched him in the dick and exploded it lol!
It's not just combat that revolves around choice & consequences but even the actions of your actual gameplay will completely change the story of the game.
I always recruit the mechanic babe in every playthrough.
When I first played Termina, I would always recruit mechanic bitch and then I'd try to look for the Jap dude because I assumed that if I found him quick enough, that I could spare him from getting his head cut off by the crazy Terrifer clown.

Speaking of that damn Terrifier clown. When I first played it, I got inside the main city where you need to go into a sewer just to reach it. Within that city near the church where the troon's daddy is a preacher at (I think.)
You'll get ambushed by the Terrifier clown. My badass Jojo guy & Mechanic babe were already armed to the teeth so we fucking kicked his ass, only for that fucking clown to randomly pull out a gun (after it looked like he was dead or weakened.) and then he one-hit killed my mechanic babe. BOOM! He shot her dead on the spot. I was like FUCK! and I started a new game because I was like the only playable survivor left not including the handicapped girl who can't join you if you let the Jap die since the Jap is the one who delivers her wheelchair to her.
I already saw Terrifier 1 before playing the game (the girl in that movie who gets shot over & over was really hot.) but I'm so used to rpg maker games being so low effort that I wasn't them to go all the way with its homages to horror movies & anime.

That's the level of interaction & thought that Termina put into this game. Your actions always effect something that happens later on in the game.

First of all is Wooden Ocean. It was super obscure until a relatively popular YouTuber made a video about it which is why it's only pretty obscure now. Not to put too fine a point on it, I've known about it for a couple years based on a random recommendation on 4chan that I'll forever be grateful for. Kinda hard to sum up. It's a meta fantasy rpg that's actually a gnostic science-fiction story but really it's an allegory for the creative process. It's hard to talk about what makes it good without giving away too much and maybe I already have but it's very fun. It has a labyrinthine level design and labyrinthine plotting. It's one of the few games that does a "meta" twist well. Mainly because it doesn't expect you to be particularly surprised by it. You'll probably figure it out before the protagonist does, it knows you probably will and a great part of the game is concerned with the "Well, what now?" that comes after it. It never falls into the cliche's you'd expect from that kind of premise.

That game has an interesting graphic style. What I like about a lot of these weird rpg maker games, is that the ones that have stories worth talking about, are usually the type of stories that you no longer see in gaming anymore after gaming got taken over by non-gaming financers.
Shadow Hearts is probably the last one I know of that didn't base its plot around popular anime or movies. At least the first 3 didn't (Koudelka, SH1, Covenant)
Shadowhearts 3 is animu as fuck but at least the art & music is still interesting. The music is the one aspect of the series that stayed weird throughout each game.

You named Fear and Hunger so the logical other series to name is Black Souls. It's a dark fantasy reigmagining of fairy tales, in case of the first one and Alice in Wonderland, in case of the second one with some mechanics inspired by the Dark Souls series and also it's, kind of, a porn game. And yes, I know all of that sounds really edgy and cringe but it's surprisingly better than it sounds. The way it uses fairy tale motives is sort of the thing I'd expect Yoko Taro to do if he wasn't a poser. And it's a lot better designed than a lot of the actual Dark Souls game in terms of actual game making.

All good horror has sexual elements like Alien, Hellraiser 1 & 2, and the Hellraiser 1 Reboot. (One of the only times that a horror reboot was actually good and marked the return of LEVIATHAN!)
I also include outright porn in this like Kite or Mezzo Forte. Much of Japan's live action 1980s & 1990s horror was basically just porn.

I posted both posters of the movie Organ, because I'm not sure which movie poster looks cooler.

This is the type of artistic style that Jap games used to use back when Jap game developers were Gen X & Boomers and based a lot of their works off of the hard lives they had as children shortly after the end of WW2.

Seeing the pics of that Black Soul game though. Goddamn it is cringe. It uses that moe blob style of anime. I was expecting a horror anime artstyle like Angel Cop or Ninja Scroll.

Elaborate more on Yoko Taro. I'm not that familiar with his games. The resident Taro fan amongst us doesn't want to post here.
I've only played two of Taro's games. Drakengard which is one of the worst games that I ever had the misfortune of playing and Nier Automata. A game that I try really hard to love but I can't. The game is so fucking boring & the writing is just anime noise imo. It's nothing like Shadowhearts or Classic Persona where you can clearly tell that they're both highly influenced by occultism & you'll gain more from the game's narratives if you're falmilar with what they're refrencing. Automata had that typical Anime writing style when they have surface level references to Western philosophy but in reality it's just anime melo drama about the tragic lives of anime dolls.

The only reason I kept Nier Automata (when my normal reaction to a shit game is to sell it.) is because 2B is fucking hot and I'll play that game every once in awhile just to admire her finely sculpted ass. (after pressing the suicide button since you can't actually see her butt unless you kill yourself.)
I bought Nier Automata and Tactics Ogre Reborn around the same time. Within that time frame, I've played through Tactics Ogre Reborn twice. I have not gotten passed a single playthrough of Nier Automata. I never even made it that far either because even the combat is kinda shitty.
I mean sure, Automata's combat is good when compared to crap like Witcher 3 but it's shit when compared to Bloodborne (which is mostly carried by its level design) or Ninja Gaiden 2.

[Krizzx]

Symphony of War looks interesting. I may give that a try. I've been playing Wooden Ocean. You definitely tell someone young wrote it the script, and the balance is all over the place very little explanation into the mechanics, but it is certainly original.

FEAR and Hunger Termina was suppose have received a lot of post games updates like part 1 did, but the creators hard drive apparently crashed and took most of the data with it. So, he had to restart from scratch. Apparently, its going to receive a whole 3 new areas, enemies and some other stuff, and eventually the other contestants are suppose to be playable. I saw that update like 6 months ago though and its been 2 years since it came out. This could just turn up being vapor where, but people have posted screens of the new shit.



Apparently this game has started becoming REALL popular. I think thats a bad thing. Given the extremeness of the content, people are more than like going to start pushing the creator to censor shit like he did with the tranny. Originally it was suppose to be this thing where Marina's dad cut his dick off as kid and forced him to be a girl, but the progressives started pitching a fit about the character representation, gender and shit. So, that part was depreciated from the games plot.



I mentioned this game a long time ago on the older site, but if no one has tried it, Hylics and Hylics 2 are pretty good. The game is honestly artfaggotry personified, especially the first one, but its fun and creative. The plot has no depth, but not about the plot. The first one only takes a few hours to more or less 100%. The second one about 7 or 8.





The creator was essentially an indie project maker that would make small games for indie development competitions and shit like that. Hylics was him taking all of his ideas from all his small projects and combining them into one game using all of them. The creator is unquestionably really creative. There is also a Hylics 3 that's been in development for a few years.

https://hylics.fandom.com/wiki/New_Hylics

I love the music in the second game.

[AngelheadedHipster]

Elaborate more on Yoko Taro. I'm not that familiar with his games. The resident Taro fan amongst us doesn't want to post here.
I've only played two of Taro's games. Drakengard which is one of the worst games that I ever had the misfortune of playing and Nier Automata. A game that I try really hard to love but I can't. The game is so fucking boring & the writing is just anime noise imo. It's nothing like Shadowhearts or Classic Persona where you can clearly tell that they're both highly influenced by occultism & you'll gain more from the game's narratives if you're falmilar with what they're refrencing. Automata had that typical Anime writing style when they have surface level references to Western philosophy but in reality it's just anime melo drama about the tragic lives of anime dolls.

The only reason I kept Nier Automata (when my normal reaction to a shit game is to sell it.) is because 2B is fucking hot and I'll play that game every once in awhile just to admire her finely sculpted ass. (after pressing the suicide button since you can't actually see her butt unless you kill yourself.)
I bought Nier Automata and Tactics Ogre Reborn around the same time. Within that time frame, I've played through Tactics Ogre Reborn twice. I have not gotten passed a single playthrough of Nier Automata. I never even made it that far either because even the combat is kinda shitty.
I mean sure, Automata's combat is good when compared to crap like Witcher 3 but it's shit when compared to Bloodborne (which is mostly carried by its level design) or Ninja Gaiden 2.

I think Yoko Taro just sucks at writing any satisfying payoff. He has a distinctive visual style, that I admit is nice. 2B is an attractive design. A lot of the designs in his games look cool. But he hasn't written a single story that I felt was worth sitting through to the end. Which I think is particularly frustrating because that gameplay structure of "Do the same thing over and over again with minor variations for some additional context." calls particular attention of how incapable he is of actually constructing any sort of thesis out of his story's individual elements.

I haven't played the Drakengard games but I've played both Niers, although in reverse order. Aside from namedropping philosophers and philosophical concepts, which feels like a schoolboy trying to look smart more than anything, it's just that he sets up those concepts that look like they could go somewhere interesting and then never makes good on it. I actually like the general premise of Nier Automata's setting. You got those two groups of artificial lifeforms who are fighting a never ending proxy war in the name of the species who created them, both who have long gone extinct. That's a really solid premise. But then the game makes you do two different playthroughs that are largely the same to establish these points, both of which the player will probably figure out about two hours into the first playthrough and once they've been established it and you're wondering where it'll go from there, it pivots into some out of left field bullshit about an evil hivemind taking over the machine network instead of actually trying to resolve or properly engage with these contradictions it's set up.

I like the first Nier a bit more but it has similar problems. The whole basic setup, the semi-medieval fantasy world that's actually post apocalypic earth, the whole thing about a pandemic that humanity could only overcome by seperating their souls from their bodies, both of which eventually became independent and forgot about their original purpose and started trying to eradicate each other, that's all perfectly fine. But it does the exact same thing. It takes forever and makes the player do the same shit over and over again to reveal what it's actually about, which everyone actually paying attention will probably have figured out way sooner and then just ends without making much of a point.

I guess the anime melodrama is exactly what people like about these stories and I don't even have anything against that but it doesn't do anything for me when everything around it feels really half assed. The doomed romance between 2B and 9S where she has to kill him and make him lose his memory of her over and over again or Nier in the first game having to slaughter hundreds of souls and dooming humanity to save his sister, I get why that hits for some people. That kind of existential tragedy. But pretends to be about greater things and then fails to make anything of it.

Again, haven't played Drakengard. But from its summary, the entire Drakengard/Nier series is about God trying to wipe out humanity in various convoluted ways and humanity trying to persist. Which is another perfectly fine premise he doesn't take anywhere. You're probably aware of the anime series Texhnolyze from the early 00's. It's a reductive summary but it's also about a world in which mankind is at the verge of extinction and the main question it asks is whether prolonging its existence is ultimately worth it. People like to go on about how grimdark and hopeless and depressing it is, even though I never particularly saw it that way. Because the note it very decidedly ends on is "It's better to face death with dignity than to hold on to life at any price." which is a statement many people might not agree with but at least it's a statement, you know. The only note Yoko Taro manages to end a story on is "stay tuned" and by now I'm pretty sure there's just nothing to stay tuned for because there's nothing he actually has to say.

Agree with the combar. It's not bad by "Action RPG" standards, whatever counts as such, but I can just play Bayonetta 1 or Metal Gear Rising and get a tighter version of basically the same combat system. Hell, I've had Bayonetta installed ever since it came out on PC and I regularly start it up again. And whenever I do I think "Damn, I forgot how good this felt." I'd never do that with Nier Automata.

[anthony]

Sorry I don't really have anything to say about RPGmaker beyond being very impressed with Fear & Hunger, which we've already covered (I knew it before SuperCrypatchWolf made his shit video (which I will not watch)). But I'll go to bat for Taro since I'm here.

Do I endorse him as a writer? Not really, in the sense that I don't think he's good at constructing stories that work or go anywhere taken as stories.

Do I endorse him as an artist? Yes. Absolutely. Taken as a whole things he has created are fascinating and amazing. Even the words people say can seem compelling, if that's "writing", but I'd say it's more like using speech as another element of this 3D interactive scene-painting which I play his games for.



This is amazing. I love this. I beat most of Drakengard (didn't grind for the last ending). This game has a strong sense for melodrama and what is compelling on a base level. The drama is incoherently presented and barely stitched together into a plot, but the elements are all so strong they work just taken as episodes and scenes. I believe Taro even talked about his writing after 'NieR', how he starts at some idea, image, or sensation, something like a sad man standing over a body, then he'll kind of expand out from there. I believe it shows very much in how his games turn out. The desperate wounded prince bartering souls with a dying dragon, the android with the perfect ass coldly slaughtering clanky hopepunk robot peasants, the profanity spewing dickgirl's moment of emotional vulnerability.



Watching the game's opening cutscene makes it easy to conclude that this is how they made the game, and about all they solidly had in mind. Key images and rough feelings associated with them. Each character starts with a look and vague tone/impression they give off. Everything else is secondary, incidental, created around this key starting point.

The first Taro game I played was the original NieR, which I like a lot more than Automata.



Again, it's a game constructed around key impressions, scenes, moments. And thankfully I found one person on youtube who apparently understands this and put up a video demonstrating what the game is about. This scene. Specifically how he presents it. Starting in the home idyll area with a broader view and walking over to the point of interest.

Taro has talked for a while about wanting a "farming simulator" or some kind of simulation in his game. That exists in a limited form in NieR with a garden that grows according to your console's clock. Idiots (Taro "fandom") I'm sure took the statement as "lmao whacky genius goes hard saying nonsense", but if you appreciate the game as a mostly meaningless collection of impressions and scenarios it makes perfect sense. The weak point of his games has always been simple and repetitive action. I believe this element, despite its extreme simplicity, is most justified in NieR because NieR is also where he managed to successfully realise his decaying, dreamlike idyll fantasy. The episodes of brutal, grinding, moronic violence worked into and serving this experience of walking around the nice flat PS3 town listening to the girl sing at the fountain, this, like the pact with the dying dragon, is a scene that works so well it's its own justification.

Is coming up with a "scene" like that "writing"? Probably not, though he is the one coming up with the "scenario", as "writer" credits often get translated from Japanese. He's really more of a creative director and lead, that's where his strength is. These games arguably stumble in trying to bring all of these elements together rationally, drawing clear, lucid thematic lines through what's happening and being presented. But I don't mind, because I know it's all connected. Because Taro and his team came up with it. These games are tone-pictures. They're music. The obligation and expectation that they write coherently to and through this makes them look less accomplished than they are. You can be like me and simply choose not to mind.

NieR's world feels slightly schizophrenic, but in a very pleasing and dreamlike way. The layout of places is very nonsensical and strange. No real organic transitions. Grassland into sheer desert into seaside town. Scenarios are desired and considered their own justification so they're there. The haphazard world construction feels oddly fitting for the game's premise. A broken, fading world. The last fading elements of humanity living in the memory of the world that was.

Taro is not a conventional storyteller, but that doesn't mean he isn't one. You can't read him like a book. In fact you arguably can't really read this stuff at all. It will just fall through your fingers if you try to pin any of it down. I'm sure earnest and well-meaning fans have tried to study his works as existential or fatalistic. As far as that's present I believe it's just the aesthetic, spiritual, and even religious sensibilities of a fairly ordinary Japanese being represented without much thought in a primarily aesthetically justified work.

I've been saying for a while that this kind of sentimentally driven vague existentialism is all countless Japanese works will ultimately amount to if you're looking for a conscious point or meaning, and that this might even be the natural outlook of the Japanese. And that's clearly working fine for them. Aesthetically at least. They are a great culture of artists. Their read on the world may not be complete. Arguably they have lost their contact with the divine, or sacred. I've had it put to me by a Japanese person that their culture should be interpreted as naturally atheistic, and that these conclusions so much of their pop-art reaches should be taken as expressions of who they are. In particular the example he wanted to make a point of was TexHnolyze. Everyone is vaguely searching and then they all die. That's life. That's the world. How about that?

I think this spirit of making a game. Collected scenes and moods mostly allowed to just breathe and be themselves, worked best in the original NieR by far. Automata suffers from trying to be a video game. It's more linear, it's always prompting you to do stuff, there's no domestic side to the experience. You could spend a lot of time in a hard-run between points of interest in NieR, but the game had a lot of safe or neutral space in which this was the experience. "Fishing" is an insultingly twee grasping for a sense of "comfy" (or whatever rape victims are saying now), any game consciously trying to not be like the other girls and give you something to do other than shoot monsters as a bald space marine will crowbar fishing in somehow.

I don't know if I ever played a game where fishing felt more appropriate and fittingly integrated than NieR. It's very basic. But in a game that's all about disjointed episodes of activity forming complete pictures on their own, this big mercenary guy with a sword stopping to pull out a fishing pole feels perfectly at home.

And yes I played the original western Xbox release, meaning I had the big dad-NieR protagonist. I think the fact they would think to do that again speaks well for Taro as an artist. He doesn't care that his "plot" as far as that's a thing was made with the youthful protagonist in mind. It's a game about conveying images and feelings. And he's able to think about and meet a different audience. The mood of this entirely different protagonist not just design but premise into the same story, circumstances, and cast does not feel jarring or disjointed. Instead with a bit of subtle reworking it becomes its own complete image and feeling, distinct to the original.

Youthful NieR is building and establishing a life. Dad-NieR is settled into it. The context shifts the tone, but both work. People draw fanart of both NieRs because they created two compelling protagonists in one game. Pretty good for a work with no notable writing or point to its story.





I was feeling very incapable of enjoying or appreciating anything at the point in my life when I came across NieR. I was playing too many western games at what was obviously the low-point for the medium (Obama). Trying to look for what was prestigious or hardcore or actuallyquitegood. All just shit. Then i got this game for almost nothing and played it end to end. On-paper nothing about it is good, or should work. Maybe the music in isolation makes sense and can be praised. But what's even better than that? The music integrated into the rest of the game. Why I linked the fountain walkaround above rather than just the soundtrack.

Taro is incredible at arranging and constructing scenes, premises, and ideas that are compelling. And I think in his heart he has this idea of how to bring it all together in some way that feels spiritually in tune with what works best in his scenes. And I think he came closest to that in the original NieR. NieR is the closest we got to a game just about being in this world of beautiful scenes and arrangements just passing and happening.

[Jack]

Given the extremeness of the content, people are more than like going to start pushing the creator to censor shit like he did with the tranny. Originally it was suppose to be this thing where Marina's dad cut his dick off as kid and forced him to be a girl, but the progressives started pitching a fit about the character representation, gender and shit. So, that part was depreciated from the games plot.

That explains why the writing for the troon always felt off to me. The rest of the game is irreverent and nobody is off limits, but the troon is lacking any sort of edge, other then being an occultist.

Sorry I don't really have anything to say about RPGmaker beyond being very impressed with Fear & Hunger, which we've already covered (I knew it before SuperCrypatchWolf made his shit video (which I will not watch)). But I'll go to bat for Taro since I'm here.

Do I endorse him as a writer? Not really, in the sense that I don't think he's good at constructing stories that work or go anywhere taken as stories.

Do I endorse him as an artist? Yes. Absolutely. Taken as a whole things he has created are fascinating and amazing. Even the words people say can seem compelling, if that's "writing", but I'd say it's more like using speech as another element of this 3D interactive scene-painting which I play his games for.

I do generally agree with Angel's take on Nier Automata, it's basically the same exact shit I was thinking when I play it.
I'd like to see Angel's rebuttal. I have no skin in this game, because I just don't really know much about Taro. I don't think Nier is a bad game at all. I just don't think it's as good as its reputation leads one to believe. Most of the popular modern games that everyone seems to love, are just meh imo from RE4make, Persona 5, Neir Automata
The only other Taro game I played is the original Drakengard, dropped it after a few levels because everything about it from the music to the gameplay & the atrocious level design was just awful. The cutscenes look cool, but having cool dark twisted cutscenes isn't enough for me to stomach playing through the game. Yes I know the music is part of the experience but I'm still not going to suffer through it just because it's meant to be bad. I play video games for the actual gameplay part. I view the art aspect of a video game as a mixture of its rulesets and its art design.
I enjoy and replay Until Dawn & Disco Elysium because those are both 'storyfag' games that have solid rulesets that keep you interested in both the gameplay scoring aspect of the game, as well as the story artistic side of the game.

With Taro games from what I played, he doesn't seem to do that at all. He follows the Kojima style of artsyfartsy game where the gameplay and the story feel separate from each other. You can easily ignore the story or the gameplay, depending on which you preferred about his games. It's not a cohesive whole like Pathologic is where the arcady ruleset (as in the ruleset constantly reinforce your need to keep interacting with the game's systems, otherwise you die.) & the aural & visual aesthetics of the game work together to bring you an experience that you can't find anywhere outside of gaming. Even the story of Pathologic reinforces the arcade ruleset, helps contextualize the rules as part of the story which further immerses you into the experience, but you can't fully enjoy the experience of Pathologic without actually playing the game. It's not one of those games where you can simply watch a lets play to gain the full worth of the experience.


Killer7 is another such game, where the gameplay, storyfag & artfag shit all work together in unison to create an experience that could never be anything else but a video game. The gameplay, the story presentation & its surrealistic artistic design are all required to keep you entrapped in this insane world of a contract killer psychopath. (Although yes, I guess this does describe the original Drakengard, it's just the actual gameplay just isn't even passable.)
Killer7 was an original take on a light gun hybrid FPS that I haven't really seen anyone else tried ever since, not even Suda himself. I really don't understand why he keeps making shitty hack n slash games when he could just copy & paste passable FPS games since it's much easier to get FPS gameplay right. You just need to have good gun feedback, level designs & enemy placement.
Drakengard, although it is a satire of Dynasty Warriors, Star Ocean and Jrpg plots in general, I'd just rather play the games that it's making fun of. Yes I've always been amused by how the hero of such games are functionally homicidal maniacs with Drakengard being the only game of its ilk that's self aware that Jrpg/Hack N Slash heroes are somewhat psychotic and kleptomaniacs. I guess No More Heroes also fits that description, but I never played those games either. They look like shit, and I always pass them over even though you can buy NMH 1 & 2 on the Switch for $3 each. I'd just rather play a game that's actually good.

Games aren't like movies to where I can enjoy a movie purely for its artistic qualities, because a movie is passive but artistic movies generally feel like an experience that I actively take part in, where I can't get the most out of it unless I rewatch it over & over like a Lynch or Kubrick film, or Coherence. Coherence wasn't trying to be artistic I think, but it fits the criteria of being a movie that's as infinitely rewatchable as a Lynch film.
Kubrick is one of those visual directors to where I don't really consider him as a pure artist like Lynch was (Lynch did it all, draws, writes, directs, makes music, etc.) but Kubrick effectively uses the film medium to make a product that could only be done as a movie.

You're arguing for Nier's artistic integrity, but not so much its merit as a game, or rather that the art makes the game. I generally view games as a game first, art second.
Although I never played the original Nier, I don't believe that I'd have more fun playing that game, because it looks even more boring than Automata.

I think this spirit of making a game. Collected scenes and moods mostly allowed to just breathe and be themselves, worked best in the original NieR by far. Automata suffers from trying to be a video game. It's more linear, it's always prompting you to do stuff, there's no domestic side to the experience. You could spend a lot of time in a hard-run between points of interest in NieR, but the game had a lot of safe or neutral space in which this was the experience. "Fishing" is an insultingly twee grasping for a sense of "comfy" (or whatever rape victims are saying now), any game consciously trying to not be like the other girls and give you something to do other than shoot monsters as a bald space marine will crowbar fishing in somehow.

Base off of these comments, it does seem like you would like Resident Evil Village, since it does have a lot of down time of just breathing in the atmosphere, and it's an effective experience during the initial playthrough when you don't really know what's going on. There's like only 3 or 4 actual levels, the other 2 or 3 were directed more like a movie where it's building up the atmosphere. Although you'll might find it jarring that Village basically feels like a greatest hits of the Horror movie genre since it starts out like a pure nightmare, then it turns into a normal classic-styled inspired Resident Evil but with Insect Vampire babes, then it becomes a paranormal movie like The Exorcist, then after that it becomes a bit more Lovecraft inspired (Although the village settings of Village & the original Resident Evil 4 have always came off as Lovecraft inspired to me. You couldn't even tell if what you were seeing were actual monsters, or just very decadent, superstitious & primitive village people.) Then after that it turns into a John Carpenter survival horror movie like Prince of Darkness but mixed with his Vampires movie but in RE just replace the Vamps with Facially Human Werewolves. (As opposed to the traditional wolf inspired faces. I've seen pics of alleged werewolves that the Nazis killed during WW2, and they actually do look much closer to how Capcom depicts werewolves. I'm sure that's a coincidence though even though in real life Thule & Green Dragon society worked together trading secrets that they've obtained.)
Then finally RE Village turns into a Rob Zombie style industrial horror Silent Hill 3 inspired setting.

Some people find this jarring but I felt that the horror progression was steadily going up and down in terms of terror & horror with the extreme terror being at the beginning of the game & the castle with the slower moments being the more horrorific sections. There's a certain body horror scene that mimics the final conflict of Parasite Eve (where Aya's forced to run away.), except it's much more frightening due to the higher res graphics.
I enjoyed my time with Village just trying to figure the story out, I was under the assumption that it was some kind of nightmare world because it even starts with a fairy tale but as in usual RE fashion, the plot is actually just fucking retarded and once you find out what the plot is actually about, well for me I lost all interest in the game and only bothered to beat it because you don't learn what the plot is finally about until you reach the final boss and during the end of Chris Redfield's run n gun kill everything level.

Another plus that I could say for Resident Evil Village, is that it does a pretty good job of visual story telling.
You can tell through Chris Redfield's facial expressions & his erratic actions that the poor guy is suffering from an extreme case of shellshock (what PTSD used to be called, before the entire concept of triggering got reapropiated by imbecilic obese tumblrites) The ending of Village is sad, not due to what happened during the ending (which sure that's sad too I guess.) but because of the psychological trauma that you clearly see Chris going though. He's angry & sad as fuck and seem to be barely keeping himself together.

What's hilarious since it's a video game, you don't really hear about anyone talking about how Chris is basically triggered during the entire game, and gets even worse as the game goes on. Gamers has usual can only grasp what's going on whenever a video game directly tells them. That's why gamers are able to grasp that Metal Gear's Naomi Campbell is a stolen identity, since she directly tells you, but the Killer7 fanbase in general still have no fucking clue that Emir Parkreiner is also just a stolen identity when the entire Coburn Elementary level is basically spelling this out to you through various clues, including the tapes.
Even in real life this happens a lot. DOGE uncovered that there are people, over 300 years old who are collecting social security. The funniest one I saw, was a 9 month old collecting government grants. Like what the fuck, Americans don't even bother to try with their white collar crimes, since the gov just looks the other way lol.
Since it's real life, most people can interpret that this is just money embezzlement through stolen identity but if it were a video game, the 300 year old would be interpreted by the fans, as an immortal god, much like how Garcian Smith is interpreted.

Taro has talked for a while about wanting a "farming simulator" or some kind of simulation in his game. That exists in a limited form in NieR with a garden that grows according to your console's clock. Idiots (Taro "fandom") I'm sure took the statement as "lmao whacky genius goes hard saying nonsense", but if you appreciate the game as a mostly meaningless collection of impressions and scenarios it makes perfect sense. The weak point of his games has always been simple and repetitive action. I believe this element, despite its extreme simplicity, is most justified in NieR because NieR is also where he managed to successfully realise his decaying, dreamlike idyll fantasy. The episodes of brutal, grinding, moronic violence worked into and serving this experience of walking around the nice flat PS3 town listening to the girl sing at the fountain, this, like the pact with the dying dragon, is a scene that works so well it's its own justification.

Do you believe that his games would be better as just adventure games without any action or as an adventure type of game that has a consistent ruleset that you can interact with which could change the trajectory of the plot depending on how well you influenced actions through the play mechanics? (Similar to what Until Dawn & Disco Elysium do.)

For me personally, I just find his games to be really fucking boring so I don't give a shit how artistic they are.
Even then, I don't believe that he does a good job of using the gaming medium as art, because what he seems to do is construct the gameplay seperately from his artistic expression. In fact, there's nothing unique about his gameplay at all so it basically lives and dies depending on how much you love his story or art. I actually never even really noticed how artistic his games are, because I have a limited experience with his games.

I just assumed that Taro was another one of those Japanese guys, like Square Enix (the entire corpo) who attempt to make games that are psychologically & philosophically profound, but just came off like some manchild who doesn't consume anything but anime. Yes I'm describing Motomu Toriyama, but I could easily be describing everyone from modern square like Tetsuya Nomura. Nomura is a classic case of an artist, who doesn't know how to write at all but I guess his writing is passionate enough that his garbage does have fans. (I love his art whenever he's drawing realistic shit like Parasite Eve, but his writing is just fucking gibberish to me.)
Toriyama is basically M. Knight Shylaman without any skill or intelligence, in that they both seem to think that the twist matters more than anything in a narrative. M. Knight actually knows how to write proper build up & tension.
Motomu Toriyama is just random anime noise, his characters speak philosophically, there's plenty of world building that goes nowhere, and the endings for his stories make no fucking sense. Which is funny because honestly, ending the Lightning trilogy with Lightning living in France wouldn't be bad at all, had he been going for some kind of Dark City Gnostic story, but that's the problem, Toriyama is obviously a man who doesn't read anything at all, he basically just wikis his shit. Kinda of a similar complaint that I have with most Western game writers.

Game writers are shit in general because you can tell from the way that they write, that they don't redraft their stories at all. Real writers will redraft their story about 40 times, even I do and I never learned how to write. I'm just naturally good at it (In reality I simply believe that Gods or Ideas are speaking through me, using me as a vessel, which honestly is what I believe most real artists are doing. I specify real, because I don't consider most modern Marxist postmodernist art, as actual art. What those people do is basically just money laundering.), because writing stories is similar to writing music, you have to keep a rollercoaster-like flow of rhythm where there's at least 2 or 3 climatic scenes that are built up through the entire run time with each climax leading to the next bridge or story arc until you finally reach the end of the final 3rd act where the stories or melodies all finally connect together in unison to deliver the final product or message that it was building up towards the entire time.

Game writers don't do that shit at all. I don't believe that they even know how to. They just write random unrelated events where the hero just does shit, and then they do some other shit, which led to more shit they do and then they finally do some shit after finding 4 or 5 magic McGuffins that ends the story but the story ends with some philosophical quote because game writers think that the quote bookends the story, but all I'm thinking is where the fuck is the story? I can't end a book when I didn't even see a book. All I saw was a dude's wage slave task list, made as a story for a game.

It's just some faggot doing tasks, as if he were a butler even though game plots are generally written as if you're the chosen one but you never feel like a chosen, since everyone in the game treats you like a bitch telling you what to do, and the hero is always a compliant loser who does exactly what everyone tells him to do lol.

I'm not saying that this is what Taro does, I'm just saying that this is what I assumed he was like because from the two games of his that I have played, the writing really did seem to be random like a Square Enix writer and Automata & Drakengard are both Square Enix games.

I actually take back all of the negative shit that I've said in the past about Xenoblade 1, it took me awhile to finally understand why that game's plot is so widely beloved. It's one of the few games where the chosen one, actually does feel like a chosen, even though you can make the argument that he's just a lucky expendable pawn who also happened to be chosen by another outsider from the sim. The important part is that Shulk doesn't feel like a typical videogame character just following wage slave tasks, most gamers can relate with Shulk because he wants revenge on those fucking machines that killed his bitch! While revenge isn't new in gaming, the way his story is told is unique within the context of gaming, because he never feels like a passive wageslave cuck, but he also never feels like a badass. He just feels like a realistically written protagonist with easy to understand motivations and his party are also written in a realistic manner to where they feel like an actual family supporting each other and none of them cause drama with each other, which is exceedingly rare in gaming lol. (In a normal game, Melia & Fiora would've completely shattered the dynamic of the crew but Melia is actually mature and steps aside, and allows herself to keep her love for Shulk as a secret, even all the way up to Xenoblade 3 which takes place hundreds of years in the future lol.)

Taro is not a conventional storyteller, but that doesn't mean he isn't one. You can't read him like a book. In fact you arguably can't really read this stuff at all. It will just fall through your fingers if you try to pin any of it down. I'm sure earnest and well-meaning fans have tried to study his works as existential or fatalistic. As far as that's present I believe it's just the aesthetic, spiritual, and even religious sensibilities of a fairly ordinary Japanese being represented without much thought in a primarily aesthetically justified work.

I guess his writing style is basically like Kabuki, over dramatic spectacle told through visual flair.
Actually that describes most Japanese crap really, and the anime medium is basically an extension of kabuki theater in terms of writing style. (from anime, video games to their live action. Stuff like Yakuza / Like a Dragon is a mixture of all 3 and also has plenty of exaggerated Kabuki influenced eccentricities.)
In Kabuki, you're not supposed to react to the actual writing, you're reacting to a combination of the visual & aural expression and the dialogue itself is highly stylized and not meant to be interpreted as a traditional story.
Nier does have great music. I don't think anyone can deny that. It's just it's another one of those Japanese products where you're given a completely different impression of what the game actually is, based off of the fans' reception.

I wasn't expecting anything like Planescape torment, lol. I came into Nier Automata expecting something like Chrono Trigger, a game where the plot is constantly moving forward with fun & interesting scenarios as it crescendos into a satisfying end.
What I got was something much more existential and well, I had basically the same exact opinion as Angel's. I felt the background lore was far more interesting than the character drama.

They are a great culture of artists. Their read on the world may not be complete. Arguably they have lost their contact with the divine, or sacred. I've had it put to me by a Japanese person that their culture should be interpreted as naturally atheistic, and that these conclusions so much of their pop-art reaches should be taken as expressions of who they are. In particular the example he wanted to make a point of was TexHnolyze. Everyone is vaguely searching and then they all die. That's life. That's the world. How about that?

I find that Jap's perspective repugnant, but I do have a constant pattern of deferring to what the Japanese culture as a whole believes in.
I don't agree with his perspective, but I'm also outdated and comport more with Edo-like perspectives
like I mentioned in one of the first post I wrote when I came back to taunt people around here. (I stuck around because hey. it hasn't been taken over by Satanists yet. LOL yes that actually happened with some other communities I made & used to run, I eventually got replaced by pretty Satanist larper sluts. One of the whores even married the motherfucker who was managing the ship while I was away kek.)
As I was saying,

Japs have a saying called Utsushiyo。
Which refers to the projected world, or what the Vedics would call, Maya.
It basically means that they view the base reality as a simulated projection.
So in this case, their arguments & beliefs wouldn't focus on simple object, oriented, goals,
which is a characteristic that a Monotheist belief system would have
since they're universalist systems that are designed for cultural expansion.

A lot of my beliefs are Japan-centric but this guy who I presume is a native, and not a lowly outsider mix breed like I am, is claiming that Japs are actually Atheists. (An opinion that many Plebbitors share.)
Sure I'd defer to him, because he's my 'greater' or more accurately he's above me in the hierarchy, but I don't agree with it.
Japan is the land of Eight Million Gods or at least I thought so. I don't see how the hell they're atheists unless he's just using the word Atheist in response to Nicene Creed Christianity, which seems to be most peoples' interpretation of what they believe spirituality is.
It's ironic because Nicene Creed isn't spiritual at all, it's materialist, where spirituality is used as some kind of ATM card much like how SJWs use 'Virtue' as a form of social credit.
Real spirituality is the actual metaphysical reality, beyond the material.

A lot may have changed in Japan, but when I live there back in the 90s & early 2000s, they were still bulldozing houses to prevent hauntings. They legit believed in other realms where entities & the spirit dwell.

If what he saying is true, then it's ironic to me because in the USA, products such as Shin Megami Tensei & Xenoblade are viewed as ultra Japanese, but both of them share a lot of qualities which are not atheistic in my opinion.
Although sure he's saying that any spiritual merit that could be derived from Jap products is merely the result of their creativity, and the spiritual aspects are merely inspiration.
I guess, but I don't really buy it.

There is an immense Nihilistic quality to a lot of Japanese products, such as the movies made by Takeshi Kitano or Takashi Miike, but I always assumed that this extreme nihilism came from a Buddhist influenced perspective, rather than one of just pure abject Atheism.
Buddhism can be interpreted as Atheist (Buddhism can be literalized as just a constant movement of energy, similar to how Gnosticism can be secularly perceived as Carl Jung philosophy.), but judging from what you said, I don't think he inferred that they're philosophically Buddhist either.

Is this nihilistic perspective that he has, is this is personal belief or what Japan believes as a whole?
It just doesn't make sense to me that all this time, Japs are really just pantomiming high spirituality and doing a good job
of mimicry but ultimately what this Jap motherfucker is actually saying, is that they're nothing but Monkeys who simply imitate what they see, and do so in a highly creative way but ultimately they don't fucking understand what they're imitating at all, lol!
That's fucking hilarious! I'm not doubting him, but my estimation towards Japan... has greatly plummeted.

I already have a low opinion of Millennial Japs & younger, since most of them don't know their own fucking history (and I parody the fuck out of it in my Heretic Hydra setting through the Kagura society that's my version of Japan's Society 5.0,
but this is something else and makes me realize that I've been living my life according to some delusion of what I thought Japan is? They're literally just materialist monkeys flinging their poo at each other until they come across a fire that they're mystified by, to the point that they recreate the fire so well that I mistook the sparks of that fire for sparks of knowledge & spiritual enlightenment but in reality they're just fucking braindead monkeys who randomly oooggaa booooga their way into success just through sheer imitation, that they call their creativity.

Hah hah what a fucking joke. I already had a low opinion of younger modern Japs for knowing next to nothing about their own damn history & culture (So many retarded Japs where trying to second guess me about Yasuke until even the government of Japan sided with views similar to what I said.), but if what this Jap says is true about Japanese as a cultural whole, are actually just a bunch of Atheists expressing their individuality through art.
What it does is make me realize that they're an entire nations of fucking morons who simply lucked their way throughout the entirety of their whole history.
The thought of that is quite humorous, and well may actually be true.

It means that the Japanese are really good at maintaining an ersatz image that it even fooled me for over 30 something years and I even fucking grew up in Japan as a teen to an adult lol.
It's funny because it really could go either way. It helps explains why Japanese culture is basically just an imitation of other cultures that they absorbed, but personalized through that unique distinct Japanese touch that only the Japs are capable of doing. Koreans often make products that just feel like an imitation of American pop culture but with slanted eyed people. Chinese often make extremely nationalistic products that are basically just bigger budgeted version of the same style of jingoistic movie that most 3rd world countries produce.
Japanese often make unique & artistic products that (really only French products from the 70s-90s could compete with in terms of artistic creativity.) I erroneously believed was highly spiritual but in reality it's just dumbass Japs pantomiming some beliefs & philosophies that they took an interest in.
Basically, they're mindless Monkeys who learned how to talk through pavlovian behavioral patterns, to the point that it
looks like they know what they're saying. In reality they're just responding to external factors that they were enticed by,
and are merely going through the motions of expressing themselves through the vehicle of art.
Any meaning that could be derived is actually unintentional, and is just the end result of their individuality since the arts
is one of the only places that a Jap can fully self-express themselves without worry of either guilt or shame.

I was feeling very incapable of enjoying or appreciating anything at the point in my life when I came across NieR. I was playing too many western games at what was obviously the low-point for the medium (Obama). Trying to look for what was prestigious or hardcore or actuallyquitegood. All just shit. Then i got this game for almost nothing and played it end to end. On-paper nothing about it is good, or should work. Maybe the music in isolation makes sense and can be praised. But what's even better than that? The music integrated into the rest of the game. Why I linked the fountain walkaround above rather than just the soundtrack.

I find it interesting that you call that era Obama, because I instinctively believe that the modern era is the worst era of gaming, but this isn't so because Fromsoft & Team Ninja exist.
While they both also existed during the Obama era, Obama era gaming was a time when bosses became a thing of the past and gaming was structured more around dumbing down everything about the game. Japanese games in general were shit, because gaming as a whole was also shit.
Modern gaming is actually far more hardcore than Obama era is, simply due to Fromsoft, whose popularity is mostly the result of Obama era gaming because Dark Souls & Demon's Souls were completely unlike anything from that period of gaming, they actually felt arcade games somewhat and even retained a semblance of its difficulty curve.
Modern Team Ninja are basically the crew who make an even more hardcore rendition of Fromsoft games, but divorce it completely from FromSoft's artistic sensibilities so the actual art of Team Ninja soulslikes is very generic and imitates Souls games as a pure gameplay experience. The actual gameplay is good though and far more complex than anything that Souls has ever done.

In the Obama era, you couldn't even really play a proper Jrpg because none of them really existed unlike in the modern era where there's at least a few big budget turn based jrpgs. I can't really think of a single big budget turn base game from the Obama era, not even from Square unless the Lightning Saga games count as turn based.

[anthony]

Sorry I don't really have anything to say about RPGmaker beyond being very impressed with Fear & Hunger, which we've already covered (I knew it before SuperCrypatchWolf made his shit video (which I will not watch)). But I'll go to bat for Taro since I'm here.

Do I endorse him as a writer? Not really, in the sense that I don't think he's good at constructing stories that work or go anywhere taken as stories.

Do I endorse him as an artist? Yes. Absolutely. Taken as a whole things he has created are fascinating and amazing. Even the words people say can seem compelling, if that's "writing", but I'd say it's more like using speech as another element of this 3D interactive scene-painting which I play his games for.

I do generally agree with Angel's take on Nier Automata, it's basically the same exact shit I was thinking when I play it.
I'd like to see Angel's rebuttal. I have no skin in this game, because I just don't really know much about Taro. I don't think Nier is a bad game at all. I just don't think it's as good as its reputation leads one to believe. Most of the popular modern games that everyone seems to love, are just meh imo from RE4make, Persona 5, Neir Automata
The only other Taro game I played is the original Drakengard, dropped it after a few levels because everything about it from the music to the gameplay & the atrocious level design was just awful. The cutscenes look cool, but having cool dark twisted cutscenes isn't enough for me to stomach playing through the game. Yes I know the music is part of the experience but I'm still not going to suffer through it just because it's meant to be bad. I play video games for the actual gameplay part. I view the art aspect of a video game as a mixture of its rulesets and its art design.
I enjoy and replay Until Dawn & Disco Elysium because those are both 'storyfag' games that have solid rulesets that keep you interested in both the gameplay scoring aspect of the game, as well as the story artistic side of the game.

I think you may be misinformed on the nature of Drakengard. Going to respond to everything you said about it here. Collectively you seem to have accepted the retarded /v/ goes hard human interpretation that the game is bad unpleasant and retarded on purpose to teach you that violence is bad. That is very fucking stupid and I have not seen any evidence that that was the intention.

You can call me crazy if you want but I actually found Drakengard pleasant to play. Like sprinting back and forth across fields to do errands in NieR I found the steady, rhythmic killing fields of Drakengard compelling. It forms a complete picture. I'm not enjoying disharmony or ugly chaos. I simply find it pleasing. The nature of the music is a giant meme. It's nowhere near as chaotic or as much of a cacophony as the internet will tell you.



This track is unnerving, because it's the pre-battle theme. It's all anticipation, buildup, dread, perhaps. The moodscape of someone who may actually be about to die horribly, but it's also very compelling music. I believe that they tried to capture the spirit of that, and make it beautiful. Something you will want to listen to.



I also adore the Mission Select theme. I don't think this is horrible. I am not experiencing an actuallquitebrilliant moment of ludonarrative harmony because all of this is shit and war is shit (I am not playing video games with guns and swords on the covers constantly because I believe that). I am enjoying myself. I like how it all sounds. Also the soundtrack has two pieces of key cover-art, and they're both stunning. Devoid of real meaning. Just incredible juxtaposition and realisation of premise. Beautiful young women in vaguely modern clothes presented in vaguely dark fantasy scenes.

You also say that this is satire, but I don't see it and I haven't heard of it. As far as I can tell it's just sincere and awkwardly executed melodrama. As you say, probably not drafted thoroughly. A production riding on passion rather than professional finish. I don't get the impression that this game feels it is above other Japanese fantasy games. And I don't believe it does anything to make a reasonable person assume that. The gamer mass might think so, but they're retarded so who cares? They're wrong about everything. Assume the popular meme interpretation of every game is the opposite of the truth. You'll be right more often than wrong, I'm sure.

With Taro games from what I played, he doesn't seem to do that at all. He follows the Kojima style of artsyfartsy game where the gameplay and the story feel separate from each other. You can easily ignore the story or the gameplay, depending on which you preferred about his games. It's not a cohesive whole like Pathologic is where the arcady ruleset (as in the ruleset constantly reinforce your need to keep interacting with the game's systems, otherwise you die.) & the aural & visual aesthetics of the game work together to bring you an experience that you can't find anywhere outside of gaming. Even the story of Pathologic reinforces the arcade ruleset, helps contextualize the rules as part of the story which further immerses you into the experience, but you can't fully enjoy the experience of Pathologic without actually playing the game. It's not one of those games where you can simply watch a lets play to gain the full worth of the experience.

It's funny, I always believed that Kojima did this kind of thing exceptionally well. My interpretation of Metal Gear, which shouldn't strike anybody here as too out there, is that it's a game about freedom, power, and human thriving. This story being presented as a game is fundamental to the point. That we want to have fun. We want to challenge ourselves. Be all we can be. Snake is depressed when he's not soldiering because the warzone is liberating and stimulating like nothing else in his life. We buy Metal Gear because like Snake we find ordinary life boring. Liquid says "you don't know what this shit is about, this isn't your conflict, you came here because you enjoy it", Snake can't answer him and neither can we.

And the trajectory of the development of these games over time was to become more free, more liberating, more stimulating, by giving you more power to do stuff, exert control over your environment, be liberated by the opportunities afforded by the battlefield, and constrained by the ZOGshit that in the 21st century is imposing itself upon the last holdouts of free men.

Metal Gear's point is so simple and so fundamentally bound to what mere "games" are that any addition of depth, anything more fun, is simply that much more to the point. If you're a true warrior the battlefield is liberating, it makes you free, you're a happy human animal because if you can think it you can do it and we inherently enjoy testing ourselves and overcoming. The proof is in Metal Gear sales and lasting success.

Perfectly clean and easy story and game harmony. Any game that takes this angle, which is just lying there to be picked up by anybody with the balls, it will achieve harmony and aesthetic elevation. Even westerners have picked up on this before. Halo: CE and Farcry1+2 are also doing this very directly (but gamers are blind cattle so they can't tell despite decades of attempted failnalysis).

Death Stranding I also found quite nice as another game-treatise on freedom, with social/online elements integrated in funny ways. Now as a game-system is every last element a justified thematic inclusion? No, probably not. But the premise and what you're doing broadly line up and support each other enough for me to call the game an outlier success. Not hard when no decent scale western game since Obama has really bothered (are Russians westerners? You tell me.).

Your case for Pathologic isn't incorrect at all. And the game deserves praise for building novel systems to support a novel premise. But the stock game premises became stock for a reason. All war games are doing the same thing. All of your rules, systems, and inputs serve the premise and aesthetic drive of the thing. Kill or die. And Kojima did this in a far more clever way than his competition.

Games aren't like movies to where I can enjoy a movie purely for its artistic qualities, because a movie is passive but artistic movies generally feel like an experience that I actively take part in, where I can't get the most out of it unless I rewatch it over & over like a Lynch or Kubrick film, or Coherence. Coherence wasn't trying to be artistic I think, but it fits the criteria of being a movie that's as infinitely rewatchable as a Lynch film.
Kubrick is one of those visual directors to where I don't really consider him as a pure artist like Lynch was (Lynch did it all, draws, writes, directs, makes music, etc.) but Kubrick effectively uses the film medium to make a product that could only be done as a movie.

You're arguing for Nier's artistic integrity, but not so much its merit as a game, or rather that the art makes the game. I generally view games as a game first, art second.
Although I never played the original Nier, I don't believe that I'd have more fun playing that game, because it looks even more boring than Automata.

The essential line I would draw in assessing these things is the one you draw in film, I'd just do that for everything. Am I actively engaging with and getting something out of this? Is my appreciation active?

You seem like you may be taking playing a "game" as an inherently active thing. I disagree. Have you ever watched a depression-vlogger game channel on youtube? You might be stunned if you see how low one's level of brain activity can get while playing a game. My mind lights right the hell up while I'm watching 'Full Metal Jacket' because it's an extremely rich and thoughtful movie. There's something new for me to take in and bounce around inside my head every second. The same is true of my favourite games. 'Dead Rising' something similar is going on in my head.

If you sit me down and get me to play a few rounds of a game I can tolerate but I don't care a lot about, World of Tanks if we're online, or I'm just playing some crap Obama TPS, what's going on? Probably not a lot. Though, this is me, I can make a lot happen in my head, actively think about anything. I can think about the creative and productive forces behind some boring piece of crap like 40k: Space Marine if I want to study some industry history. But it's not a richly stimulating work in which I'm engaging with the deliberate wilfully expressive elements. And it's not pleasingly beautiful either.

I'm listening to the Drakengard soundtrack as I write this, and this track just came on.



God, what a beautiful game. This raises further questions on your framing. If I really enjoy running across the giant barren fields listening to this and killing 500 guys who look exactly the same, is this an experience of artistic quality? I'm largely just lost in the sounds and the experience. Though I'll often go lucid and contemplate the production of something as strange as these giant flat fields.

What is "passive", what does it mean to be a passive audience? Simply not holding a controller? Personally I don't even think I'd draw a line between intellectual and sensory pleasure. You're either getting a high of stimulation, or merely a low novelty suppression of boredom. I might not be able to think as deliberately and produce as many words on Drakengard as I could Full Metal Jacket, but inside I'm firing in response to each.

Base off of these comments, it does seem like you would like Resident Evil Village

It's funny, just a day or two ago I tried that game. My computer can't quite run it. I played Resident Evil 7 to completion before that and had an absolutely fantastic time. I like all of the Resident Evil games. I do really appreciate the fine details and inhale/exhale pace of the more adventure game ones but they're all great to me. RE: Village will get its turn. This computer is about ready to be retired.

Taro has talked for a while about wanting a "farming simulator" or some kind of simulation in his game. That exists in a limited form in NieR with a garden that grows according to your console's clock. Idiots (Taro "fandom") I'm sure took the statement as "lmao whacky genius goes hard saying nonsense", but if you appreciate the game as a mostly meaningless collection of impressions and scenarios it makes perfect sense. The weak point of his games has always been simple and repetitive action. I believe this element, despite its extreme simplicity, is most justified in NieR because NieR is also where he managed to successfully realise his decaying, dreamlike idyll fantasy. The episodes of brutal, grinding, moronic violence worked into and serving this experience of walking around the nice flat PS3 town listening to the girl sing at the fountain, this, like the pact with the dying dragon, is a scene that works so well it's its own justification.

Do you believe that his games would be better as just adventure games without any action or as an adventure type of game that has a consistent ruleset that you can interact with which could change the trajectory of the plot depending on how well you influenced actions through the play mechanics? (Similar to what Until Dawn & Disco Elysium do.)

For me personally, I just find his games to be really fucking boring so I don't give a shit how artistic they are.
Even then, I don't believe that he does a good job of using the gaming medium as art, because what he seems to do is construct the gameplay seperately from his artistic expression. In fact, there's nothing unique about his gameplay at all so it basically lives and dies depending on how much you love his story or art. I actually never even really noticed how artistic his games are, because I have a limited experience with his games.

I don't think I'd change a thing. These games are strange, happy accidents of the circumstances of their production. It lends them so much of their character and charm. I don't believe there is any kind of quantifiable relationship between the "game" parts of Taro's work and the rest, but I know I wouldn't appreciate either much in isolation. I greatly enjoy them together. Broadly, I would say that I like the idea of a domestic JRPG. I like the first NieR. I like Taro's speculative comments on what he'd like to do. I like Atelier. I like Recettear. Specifically I like Taro's mechanical/action approach to domesticity. How he wants you just kind of physically running errands. That's an odd thing for a game to make you do. It's what I remember about NieR. This has no name. It's all a delicate balance. Careful, if we name it we might kill it.

I just assumed that Taro was another one of those Japanese guys, like Square Enix (the entire corpo) who attempt to make games that are psychologically & philosophically profound, but just came off like some manchild who doesn't consume anything but anime. Yes I'm describing Motomu Toriyama, but I could easily be describing everyone from modern square like Tetsuya Nomura. Nomura is a classic case of an artist, who doesn't know how to write at all but I guess his writing is passionate enough that his garbage does have fans. (I love his art whenever he's drawing realistic shit like Parasite Eve, but his writing is just fucking gibberish to me.)
Toriyama is basically M. Knight Shylaman without any skill or intelligence, in that they both seem to think that the twist matters more than anything in a narrative. M. Knight actually knows how to write proper build up & tension.
Motomu Toriyama is just random anime noise, his characters speak philosophically, there's plenty of world building that goes nowhere, and the endings for his stories make no fucking sense. Which is funny because honestly, ending the Lightning trilogy with Lightning living in France wouldn't be bad at all, had he been going for some kind of Dark City Gnostic story, but that's the problem, Toriyama is obviously a man who doesn't read anything at all, he basically just wikis his shit. Kinda of a similar complaint that I have with most Western game writers.

There is still something to be said for this approach, even if I agree with everything you're saying about writing. There is an opposed extreme. Writers who are all process, refinement, editing, proper structure, rules, hit your beats. You order a novel and these guys will deliver with perfect punctuality. And probably nothing they do will ever seriously resonate. I'll elaborate more below.

Game writers are shit in general because you can tell from the way that they write, that they don't redraft their stories at all. Real writers will redraft their story about 40 times, even I do and I never learned how to write. I'm just naturally good at it (In reality I simply believe that Gods or Ideas are speaking through me, using me as a vessel, which honestly is what I believe most real artists are doing. I specify real, because I don't consider most modern Marxist postmodernist art, as actual art. What those people do is basically just money laundering.), because writing stories is similar to writing music, you have to keep a rollercoaster-like flow of rhythm where there's at least 2 or 3 climatic scenes that are built up through the entire run time with each climax leading to the next bridge or story arc until you finally reach the end of the final 3rd act where the stories or melodies all finally connect together in unison to deliver the final product or message that it was building up towards the entire time.

My respect and appreciation of good writers has grown a lot lately, though I still don't think I've fundamentally changed how I think about art. I have come to respect process a great deal.

I am Halo: Combat Evolved's strongest soldier in the world. I believe there's no competition. In trying to finally answer to my satisfaction the question "who wrote Halo?" (several people) I found a lot of interesting comments from the non-Bungie general professional "writers" who Microsoft brought in to support the project. Editors, manual-producers, etc. One of these guys, Eric Nylund, said something what you just wrote reminded me of. He said "Writing is re-writing". Eric Trautmann, the editor Microsoft brought in to do-over the final in-game script and compile their "story bible" fucking hated Bungie, which I found very funny to hear about, considered them completely unprofessional and retarded, said he had to save their work on the production end (quite likely true), made some big key contributions (again probably all true), and I respect his and Nylund's contributions immensely. I don't think the Bungie team could have brought it all together without them.

But where are these guys now? As far as I can tell Trautmann's biggest achievement since editing work for Halo (which he hates with a burning passion) is writing the Army of Two tie-in comics. While Eric Nylund, who strikes me as an extremely nice guy, writes more Zelazny-influenced mythology sci-fi but struggles to find commercial success.

Do you see where I'm going? Who are the real writers here? Bungie's internal guys were a bit like Nomura and Toriyama. If it's cool they're doing it. But their work is a mess. Nylund and Trautmann bring it together into a finished AAA product. Who in this equation is God speaking through(you may think God is not speaking through Halo, but you'd be wrong)?

Of course ideally the skills and the focus and the passion and vision are all flowing through one man, or team or whatever, but we're a sick culture and we've been actively suppressing talent, human quality, sanity, excellence, and brilliance for decades now. Anything good won't be cultivated and what we build is sterile, lacking its appropriate cultural base. Choose your player. Trautmann's grumpy boring pointless professionalism, or the Bungie office frat-house zoo where nobody will EVER finish ANYTHING on time without a gun to their head. And of course, since this time we've also managed to basically kill Bungie with no equivalent replacement emerging. Culture dies a bit more all the time.

Game writers don't do that shit at all. I don't believe that they even know how to. They just write random unrelated events where the hero just does shit, and then they do some other shit, which led to more shit they do and then they finally do some shit after finding 4 or 5 magic McGuffins that ends the story but the story ends with some philosophical quote because game writers think that the quote bookends the story, but all I'm thinking is where the fuck is the story? I can't end a book when I didn't even see a book. All I saw was a dude's wage slave task list, made as a story for a game.

It's just some faggot doing tasks, as if he were a butler even though game plots are generally written as if you're the chosen one but you never feel like a chosen, since everyone in the game treats you like a bitch telling you what to do, and the hero is always a compliant loser who does exactly what everyone tells him to do lol.

I'm not saying that this is what Taro does, I'm just saying that this is what I assumed he was like because from the two games of his that I have played, the writing really did seem to be random like a Square Enix writer and Automata & Drakengard are both Square Enix games.

All pretty true, and again, I won't really defend Taro's work on the execution of its writing. Instead I would say it's a game where the divine touch reached parts of it, but definitely not the finish of its storytelling. But listen to them and tell me they're not touched. I feel this way about many works. It's very hard to land a complete production.



Touched. If it's possible for a work to be touched this is. Does the game bring it together? No. But I still would not and could not correct, fix, or rebuild it. The way it came together is what it is.

Taro is not a conventional storyteller, but that doesn't mean he isn't one. You can't read him like a book. In fact you arguably can't really read this stuff at all. It will just fall through your fingers if you try to pin any of it down. I'm sure earnest and well-meaning fans have tried to study his works as existential or fatalistic. As far as that's present I believe it's just the aesthetic, spiritual, and even religious sensibilities of a fairly ordinary Japanese being represented without much thought in a primarily aesthetically justified work.

I guess his writing style is basically like Kabuki, over dramatic spectacle told through visual flair.
Actually that describes most Japanese crap really, and the anime medium is basically an extension of kabuki theater in terms of writing style. (from anime, video games to their live action. Stuff like Yakuza / Like a Dragon is a mixture of all 3 and also has plenty of exaggerated Kabuki influenced eccentricities.)
In Kabuki, you're not supposed to react to the actual writing, you're reacting to a combination of the visual & aural expression and the dialogue itself is highly stylized and not meant to be interpreted as a traditional story.
Nier does have great music. I don't think anyone can deny that. It's just it's another one of those Japanese products where you're given a completely different impression of what the game actually is, based off of the fans' reception.

Pretty often I'm telling people to think of video games like a novel form of theatre. Good way to mentally reorient people.

Why are they doing it that way? Because that's how they're doing it.

Which way is the enemy base? Down.

They are a great culture of artists. Their read on the world may not be complete. Arguably they have lost their contact with the divine, or sacred. I've had it put to me by a Japanese person that their culture should be interpreted as naturally atheistic, and that these conclusions so much of their pop-art reaches should be taken as expressions of who they are. In particular the example he wanted to make a point of was TexHnolyze. Everyone is vaguely searching and then they all die. That's life. That's the world. How about that?

I find that Jap's perspective repugnant, but I do have a constant pattern of deferring to what the Japanese culture as a whole believes in.

Now for this whole section of you responding I'll just have to say it's hard to accurately carry over someone else's entire worldview as a third person so I won't tell you I have him perfectly captured and can't answer for him. You're taking an awful lot from not much. This particular guy is half-American, largely sees Japanese culture as an other thing relative to the west which he understands like a native, rather than something he can just unconsciously breathe. He is Japanese, but consciously so. So perhaps not an average person. Also I don't know if he'd appreciate me saying all this about him but it's down now and I don't redraft because I am an id-driven artfag when I write my posts.

A lot of my beliefs are Japan-centric but this guy who I presume is a native, and not a lowly outsider mix breed like I am, is claiming that Japs are actually Atheists. (An opinion that many Plebbitors share.)
Sure I'd defer to him, because he's my 'greater' or more accurately he's above me in the hierarchy, but I don't agree with it.
Japan is the land of Eight Million Gods or at least I thought so. I don't see how the hell they're atheists unless he's just using the word Atheist in response to Nicene Creed Christianity, which seems to be most peoples' interpretation of what they believe spirituality is.

At least largely this, if not completely. He does not like Christianity. Also he's kind of on board with the idea of spirits and such, or at least not opposed. He's not going to get out ghostbusters tools to prove spirits don't exist. I think it's more about not being Christian or comparable. Okay now I'm done speaking for someone else's spiritual life and beliefs. I'll drag him in here if this issue demands more litigation.

Is this nihilistic perspective that he has, is this is personal belief or what Japan believes as a whole?
It just doesn't make sense to me that all this time, Japs are really just pantomiming high spirituality and doing a good job
of mimicry but ultimately what this Jap motherfucker is actually saying, is that they're nothing but Monkeys who simply imitate what they see, and do so in a highly creative way but ultimately they don't fucking understand what they're imitating at all, lol!
That's fucking hilarious! I'm not doubting him, but my estimation towards Japan... has greatly plummeted.

I already have a low opinion of Millennial Japs & younger, since most of them don't know their own fucking history (and I parody the fuck out of it in my Heretic Hydra setting through the Kagura society that's my version of Japan's Society 5.0,
but this is something else and makes me realize that I've been living my life according to some delusion of what I thought Japan is? They're literally just materialist monkeys flinging their poo at each other until they come across a fire that they're mystified by, to the point that they recreate the fire so well that I mistook the sparks of that fire for sparks of knowledge & spiritual enlightenment but in reality they're just fucking braindead monkeys who randomly oooggaa booooga their way into success just through sheer imitation, that they call their creativity.

Hah hah what a fucking joke. I already had a low opinion of younger modern Japs for knowing next to nothing about their own damn history & culture (So many retarded Japs where trying to second guess me about Yasuke until even the government of Japan sided with views similar to what I said.), but if what this Jap says is true about Japanese as a cultural whole, are actually just a bunch of Atheists expressing their individuality through art.
What it does is make me realize that they're an entire nations of fucking morons who simply lucked their way throughout the entirety of their whole history.
The thought of that is quite humorous, and well may actually be true.

It means that the Japanese are really good at maintaining an ersatz image that it even fooled me for over 30 something years and I even fucking grew up in Japan as a teen to an adult lol.
It's funny because it really could go either way. It helps explains why Japanese culture is basically just an imitation of other cultures that they absorbed, but personalized through that unique distinct Japanese touch that only the Japs are capable of doing. Koreans often make products that just feel like an imitation of American pop culture but with slanted eyed people. Chinese often make extremely nationalistic products that are basically just bigger budgeted version of the same style of jingoistic movie that most 3rd world countries produce.
Japanese often make unique & artistic products that (really only French products from the 70s-90s could compete with in terms of artistic creativity.) I erroneously believed was highly spiritual but in reality it's just dumbass Japs pantomiming some beliefs & philosophies that they took an interest in.
Basically, they're mindless Monkeys who learned how to talk through pavlovian behavioral patterns, to the point that it
looks like they know what they're saying. In reality they're just responding to external factors that they were enticed by,
and are merely going through the motions of expressing themselves through the vehicle of art.
Any meaning that could be derived is actually unintentional, and is just the end result of their individuality since the arts
is one of the only places that a Jap can fully self-express themselves without worry of either guilt or shame.

Now I made a whole big thread on my forum about this. I called it 'anime sentimental existentialism'. In response to critiques of certain animes and popular Japanese works I feel like I see repeated pretty often. That a work seems to be dealing with our greater relationship with the world, and just kind of ends on some good feelings. My first point is that the fact you would expect anything more from such a work goes to show that they at least feel like they're being honest and serious about them. You don't get mad when an episode of CSI fails to resolve the human condition.



And second, if the stock life goes on we look at the horizon ending is just the extent of things, is that really a problem? You sound like you're suggesting there's potentially some great disillusionment to be had here, but frankly I don't see what it is you want that you're losing. What do you think they're channeling when they make all of these things you love? Do you think one has to be an esotericist to be a great artist? Honestly having read a lot of your posts I think you may believe that, and you may even be onto something. But I think that perspective does clash with the reality of how most Japanese pop-artists think and generally seem to be.

There are only so many esotericists in the world. Have you ever read an author's statement in a manga? Most of them sound like deeply quaint, almost simple people(in the best sense possible).

I personally see the religiosity of the Japanese less as a natural atheism, more of a general human just so attitude that's probably the higher civilisation default provided you are spared contact with Abrahamism. There's a bit of mystery and enchantment everywhere, but you're perfectly capable of not thinking about it for the most part, and there's a lot beyond we can speculate on. Secrets and layers of order and meaning in which you can lose yourself, but most probably won't feel compelled to.

Going by the standards you imply here I'm inclined to think you must believe there are no worthy cultures, at most only initiated orders where human existence takes on value.

I was feeling very incapable of enjoying or appreciating anything at the point in my life when I came across NieR. I was playing too many western games at what was obviously the low-point for the medium (Obama). Trying to look for what was prestigious or hardcore or actuallyquitegood. All just shit. Then i got this game for almost nothing and played it end to end. On-paper nothing about it is good, or should work. Maybe the music in isolation makes sense and can be praised. But what's even better than that? The music integrated into the rest of the game. Why I linked the fountain walkaround above rather than just the soundtrack.

I find it interesting that you call that era Obama, because I instinctively believe that the modern era is the worst era of gaming, but this isn't so because Fromsoft & Team Ninja exist.
While they both also existed during the Obama era, Obama era gaming was a time when bosses became a thing of the past and gaming was structured more around dumbing down everything about the game. Japanese games in general were shit, because gaming as a whole was also shit.

Games in this era were looking for new justifications. The aborted direction was aesthetically justified works. The "moviegame". That project stalled out because the moviegames that didn't really resist you and just drove forward were terrible. But where we went wrong was blaming the "gameplay" for this. Yeah, ducking behind a low wall to fire your assault rifle at guys as they pop-up is boring. But only one game of that generation was designed with that in mind as a central justifying experience. The first one.

These games were skeletons with no bodies. That was the problem. You can use a hollowed out, de-gamed game as the "game" in your video game if you want. But if you're going to do that, it should be because you have something really cool to show people and you don't want winning or losing a game to get in the way and distract them.

The problem with the Obama movie game, was simply that they were bad movies. We removed the game, but once that was gone there was nothing else to do. Gamedev carried on making genuinely pointless, irredeemable works. It is simply impossible to give a reason why one should bother playing American games from this era. Just look at them. They look like jokes now. Conflict: Denied Ops. Battle: Los Angeles.

I should say, there were great simple moviegames. I liked a few. Shellshock 2 I think was a fantastic one. Not a compelling shooter mechanically in the slightest. Braindead simple. But a compelling game about shooting guns? Absolutely. Because it's aesthetically channeling 28 Weeks Later, one of the coolest, most visceral films of the 2000s. And crossing it with the Vietnam War, a historic moment I find utterly fascinating. To me it's incredible. Completely justified work. I've played it several times.

Modern gaming is actually far more hardcore than Obama era is, simply due to Fromsoft, whose popularity is mostly the result of Obama era gaming because Dark Souls & Demon's Souls were completely unlike anything from that period of gaming, they actually felt arcade games somewhat and even retained a semblance of its difficulty curve.
Modern Team Ninja are basically the crew who make an even more hardcore rendition of Fromsoft games, but divorce it completely from FromSoft's artistic sensibilities so the actual art of Team Ninja soulslikes is very generic and imitates Souls games as a pure gameplay experience. The actual gameplay is good though and far more complex than anything that Souls has ever done.

In the Obama era, you couldn't even really play a proper Jrpg because none of them really existed unlike in the modern era where there's at least a few big budget turn based jrpgs. I can't really think of a single big budget turn base game from the Obama era, not even from Square unless the Lightning Saga games count as turn based.

Yes Dark Souls reminded people that a "game" could be compelling. Again, there was no active reason to play basically any western video game at this point. Because we shed the "game", and also had literally nothing else. No good writers were being let in, not a single artfag in site. Just engineers making increasingly frictionless clones of what already existed for no reason beyond inertia.

Western games are still dogshit, but now you have to roll away from the "boss"'s attack or his sending your ass back to a checkpoint. Still not justified. I would still rather play Shellshock 2 again than Horizon: Forbidden West.

What's missing here, and good for you not even thinking of it, is multiplayer gaming. God what a mess. Talk about aesthetically unjustified experiences. What I said earlier about man's capacity for low-engagement stimulation. Call of Duty multiplayer. That's where all the blood went. Once we discovered that there was nothing else to do. Nobody who thinks like an artist survived by 2008.

Oh yeah, I meant to show you. My favourite youtuber was a Call of Duty guy. If you want to appreciate what a low mind makes of video games and the world, look at this for a while.



Not an artistic experience. Not a gamer. Plenty of people sit down just to spiritually and mentally die in front of video games every day.

[Jack]

I think you may be misinformed on the nature of Drakengard. Going to respond to everything you said about it here. Collectively you seem to have accepted the retarded /v/ goes hard human interpretation that the game is bad unpleasant and retarded on purpose.

Doubtful. How could I be misinformed when that is my legitimate thoughts, that it's one of the worst action games that I ever played. You act as though this were an aberration, an insane assertion when it's just common sense amongst action hack n slash fans. I didn't say that Ninja Gaiden Black is shit, I said Drakengard is shit. There's a wide gulf of difference between the two.
You make it sound that one can only reach to the conclusion that DK is shit, through over-socialization. When I know that's not the case, I played that game before most of modern internet even existed. I played Drakengard back in Japan when I was in my 20s during 2003 or 2002 whenever it was made.
I was playing DW4 with a group of friends during the year that both DW & DK released and it does come across like a parody of Dynasty Warriors especially since DW was popular within mainstream Japanese culture during the early 2000s. They're both basically hack n slash war games, it's not uncommon to compare the two.



We have different interpretations of what the "Art" of a game is, you think of art as a collective expression that is presented through the multimedia of a video game. I view the Art of a game as the performance, similar to how one would judge the artistry of a Ballet Dancer or the sweet science of a Boxing match.
What are video games? They're primarily about problem solving. If I'm not interacting with systems to solve a problem, then what am I actually doing? How is it any different from watching a movie, other then movies generally have better writing & cinematography than videogames.

A game is just a ruleset. The entire game is built around its ruleset, which is how a game should be.
A game should still be entertaining even when divorced from art assets, which is secondary to the ruleset.
This is the artistry of the game, how well it can combine art assets that are wrapped around the gameplay to conceal the objective fact that a game does not exist without the ruleset. The ruleset is the Soul and the core-identity of the game, they're a performance first, traditional art merely helps to sell the game to guide toward the main attraction which is the gameplay.
I have a lot of fun playing games that are basically nothing but calculator number crunchers like Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Nobunaga's Ambition, which have barebones art assets but why does that matter when the core game does what it sets out to do? It represented warfare & politicking through nothing but text & number, with the ruleset governing
the possibilities and limitations of the game.

That's what a real game is, you focus too much on the traditional art assets, and mistake the art assets as the game. No the game of Drakengard is a barely functional hack n slash that plays like a stereotype of what people assume Dynasty Warriors played like. This is easy to see for anyone who is not enthralled by Drakengard's art assets. Drakengard without gfx or art assets would just be a generic 3d hack n slash game (which it already was) because there's nothing that stands out about how Drakengard plays.

A game of Tetris would still be fun, even if you completely obscure that you're actually playing a game of Tetris by replacing the blocks with soldiers or demons and have a video playing of a random badass or huge titty woman that represents your character who is presented as shouting commands at the soldiers fighting the demons or cyborgs, with said soldiers
standing in formations that resemble Tetris blocks, when seen from a bird's eye view.
Said solders are animated as fighting and killing the demonscyborgspiratesninjas whenever you've initiated a tetris line that plays an animation of the demonsetc. dying as they represent the blocks that you've cleared.

This would still work as a game, because the core ruleset of Tetris already corresponds to the need of the gamer to solve constant problems every second with the tension and speed of the match reflecting how well the player can navigate through the problems that constantly surface as the player eventually runs out of space once the blocks (which are represented as random enemies) fill the screen and initiates a game over.
That's video game design. The art supplements the game, but it does not make the game. The art assets can make the game in very specific circumstances such as with Dragon's Crown, which is a very average beat em up, but everyone seems to love it because the art & music are so good that most people are willing to overlook that Dragon's Crown doesn't hold a candle to Golden Axe or its inspiration the Capcom D&D games.
DC does a successful job of creating an anime inspired dark fantasy to the point that it feels as if you're actually living in that world. The average gamer will not care or even notice that Dragon's Crown has somewhat shitty gameplay because it's one of the few cases where people are willing to buy the game just for the art and music.

You can call me crazy if you want but I actually found Drakengard pleasant to play. Like sprinting back and forth across fields to do errands in NieR I found the steady, rhythmic killing fields of Drakengard compelling. It forms a complete picture. I'm not enjoying disharmony or ugly chaos. I simply find it pleasing. The nature of the music is a giant meme. It's nowhere near as chaotic or as much of a cacophony as the internet will tell you.

I had those same exact opinions back when it first came out in 2003/2002, that's pre modern internet. I don't recall youtube or v existing, not that it matters because I don't pay attention to game videos or what reddit & 4chan nerds say.
I have ears. If it's hurting my ears, it generally means that it's bad. The music is terrible for an action game.
The songs you linked to are what I would call a prelude. It's not an actual song, it's build up. The real song is what you hear when you start a stage and have to hear the same damn loop for nearly 30 minutes. That's fucking torture.
This is the song that I remember hearing and the group I was playing with in Japan, we were all laughing at it.


You need to take into context of when Drakengard was made. You don't strike me as someone who played it when it just came out, because you're completely ignoring Drakengard's immediate competition and seem to be judging it as if it existed in a bubble outside of the PS2 early 2000s library. Drakengard was shit back then, and it's still shit now.
The sure wasn't the fucking case back in the 2000s. Shadow of Rome? Yeah I can understand why some would like that game. It's competent.
This is what a real action game looks and sounds like from the same era as Drakengard.



This is Drakengard's direct competitor during the era of DK's release window, Dynasty Warriors.

It's just generic heavy metal, but who cares it's badass and still maintains an intense atmosphere. That's the type of music that I was expecting to hear when I first played Drakengard over 20 years ago. I think even Berserk was released in Japan around this time frame and I recall enjoying that game far more than Drakengard. I remember Berserk being boring, but it felt like a competent action game.
Shadow of Rome is way better than Berserk (Rome seems somewhat inspired by Berserk) but the stealth bullshit killed that game.

You also say that this is satire, but I don't see it and I haven't heard of it. As far as I can tell it's just sincere and awkwardly executed melodrama. As you say, probably not drafted thoroughly. A production riding on passion rather than professional finish. I don't get the impression that this game feels it is above other Japanese fantasy games. And I don't believe it does anything to make a reasonable person assume that. The gamer mass might think so, but they're retarded so who cares? They're wrong about everything. Assume the popular meme interpretation of every game is the opposite of the truth. You'll be right more often than wrong, I'm sure.

It sure came across like satire to me, especially if you played Dynasty Warriors right before it. Even Tomonobu Itagaki the guy who made Ninja Gaiden often makes fun of Dynasty Warriors as just a genocide simulator where you mindlessly kill hundreds of braindead enemies. Drakengard is the same thing, but it barely has a combo system and shows no pretenses of being a valiant hero unlike DW.
You act as if Drakengard were this unique misunderstood game as if it were self evident, when it was just a generic hack n slash back in 2003 when it came out because games of that style were a dime a dozen during that era due to the Dynasty Warriors craze that was sweeping Japan at the time.
Even if Drakengard had not come out during a fad, I doubt that it would've faired better because nothing stands out about DK other than its art assets. I've always been intriqued by the DK cutscenes, but I'm not going to suffer through the game just to watch the cutscenes. The game is barely serviceable.

It's funny, I always believed that Kojima did this kind of thing exceptionally well. My interpretation of Metal Gear, which shouldn't strike anybody here as too out there, is that it's a game about freedom, power, and human thriving. This story being presented as a game is fundamental to the point. That we want to have fun. We want to challenge ourselves. Be all we can be. Snake is depressed when he's not soldiering because the warzone is liberating and stimulating like nothing else in his life. We buy Metal Gear because like Snake we find ordinary life boring. Liquid says "you don't know what this shit is about, this isn't your conflict, you came here because you enjoy it", Snake can't answer him and neither can we.

MGS1 maybe, but only MGS1. That's the only MGS that's paced well, the cutscenes never feel intrusive and they add to the tension. In later MGS games, it barely ever feels like a Wetwork Op anymore because you have grown ass retards like The Boss moaning on the battlefield about loyalty and adapting to the geopolitical climate that changes the alliances of the people you know, which sure I understand that Hideous Kojima needed to waste about a fucking hour in the beginning of the game just forcing us to watch The Boss whine like a baby about simply doing the job that she's hired to do, otherwise it wouldn't feel as shocking when she later betrays you about 8 minutes later, even though in-game we just fucking met her LOL!

Metal Gear's point is so simple and so fundamentally bound to what mere "games" are that any addition of depth, anything more fun, is simply that much more to the point. If you're a true warrior the battlefield is liberating, it makes you free, you're a happy human animal because if you can think it you can do it and we inherently enjoy testing ourselves and overcoming. The proof is in Metal Gear sales and lasting success.

Perfectly clean and easy story and game harmony. Any game that takes this angle, which is just lying there to be picked up by anybody with the balls, it will achieve harmony and aesthetic elevation. Even westerners have picked up on this before. Halo: CE and Farcry1+2 are also doing this very directly (but gamers are blind cattle so they can't tell despite decades of attempted failnalysis).

You've been completely charmed by Big Boss's rhetoric. Big Boss wasn't searching for freedom. He was searching for purpose. He was losing his identity because he was living in a world where war changed how battles were fought and people with his skillset are no longer needed.
His purpose is killing, for him and all those similar to him which is why he established Outer Heaven. That's always been the hypocrisy of Big Boss.
He cosplays as a revolutionary but the reality is that he's just a Neoliberal Ultracapitalist who disguises his war profiteering by appealing to survivor's guilt.

The moral conflict of MGS is that it's a game about war veterans from the Nam era who are losing their place in a modern high tech society that no longer needs their talents. This is what kills their purpose, the reason why they exist.
So what Big Boss does is exactly what our Elites always do, starts a conflict and then sells himself as the solution that you need.
After his 'death', Big Boss lived on as an ideal for all aging warriors to aspire to,
Big Boss's story would've been perfect had it only been MG,MG2, & MGS3 because he was a much more effective character as a ghost from the past who still influences the future.

Metal Gear's overall conflict is far more relevant now, because it's about gradual entropy which leads to the competency crisis that is affecting the entire world right now precisely due to the death or aging out of Big Boss's era (Boomers), & Snake's generation (Gen X), which causes a huge power vacuum because Millennials (Raiden) just aren't mentally ready to take on the responsibilities that the previous two left behind.
The previous two eras have been left behind due to globalized smart tech, so Raiden's dilemma is that he has to train for wars that are completely unlike the wars that the previous gens fought.
Raiden is just the transitory state between the previous gen and whomever the incoming gen is, and it doesn't matter who comes after Raiden because that's pretty much where MGS & Revengeance ends.
It was only concerned about the plot that plagued Big Boss's era and Solid Snake's attempt to correct those sins.

And the trajectory of the development of these games over time was to become more free, more liberating, more stimulating, by giving you more power to do stuff, exert control over your environment, be liberated by the opportunities afforded by the battlefield, and constrained by the ZOGshit that in the 21st century is imposing itself upon the last holdouts of free men.

Your case for Pathologic isn't incorrect at all. And the game deserves praise for building novel systems to support a novel premise. But the stock game premises became stock for a reason. All war games are doing the same thing. All of your rules, systems, and inputs serve the premise and aesthetic drive of the thing. Kill or die. And Kojima did this in a far more clever way than his competition.

How do these systems work with Kojima's cutscenes? They don't, they basically exist in separate worlds. One is the overwritten Kojima movie, the other is the game, the rulesets that you interact with. To Kojima's credit, he's actually good at making games unlike most of his Western imitators like Last of Us who completely forget that games are meant to revolve around problem solving, whereas in Last of Us, the gameplay portion is just that chore that you're forced in to. Kojima understands that a game is basically nothing but problem solving which is why his games steadily up the ante with a constant slew of scenarios that test your problem solving skills.

The original MGS actually felt like an arcade game because there were clear rules to how the stealth worked, and once mastered it played like a lightning fast Ninja stealth game.
MGS2 still had a solid stealth rule set and is the most complex stealth system of the MGS games but is not fun to play because of all of the unneeded codecs. I really don't need to hear Jack's bitch constantly reminding me about the day they met or her birthday or whatever the fuck.
Yes I understand the point, he's supposed to be us, and he has a naggy girlfriend just like in real life.


You seem to be so enamored by Kojima's cutscenes that you're willing to let it slide that the cutscenes and the game seem to exist in different dimensions. Have you ever noticed how the game world completely stops every time Metal Gear characters decide to pontificate with each other for over 30 minutes to an hour?
This is not a cohesive whole like how one would describe Deus Ex or Pathologic. Games such as Resident Evil 4 have constant tension even during the cutscenes and whenever it gets to a talking head section, their exchanges are brief.
RE4 feels like a wetwork op and is much closer to the James Bond inspiration that MGS3 was going for.


How does MGS5 get bigger or more free as you say it is? Well, because it dropped most of the movie part to the point where all you do is interact with the game. To its credit, the base game is good and can tide you over to the next cutscene. I don't have a problem that MGS5's cutscenes are so minimal. I'm just stating that it's a much more coherent game than the 3 that preceded it, because the actual ruleset portion is no longer fighting to share time with the narrative.
It only became bigger or more free, because it got rid of some of MGS's core identity.

I don't have a problem with that, but you make it sound as if MGS5 got to this point naturally when what it did was increase the time that you play the game, and decrease the time that you spend watching the movie.
The hospital scene during the beginning was effective though and I wish there were more of that, but this would also collide with the bigger more free game that it set itself out to achieve.

The essential line I would draw in assessing these things is the one you draw in film, I'd just do that for everything. Am I actively engaging with and getting something out of this? Is my appreciation active?

You seem like you may be taking playing a "game" as an inherently active thing. I disagree.

I am. As I said earlier in the post, the art assets are just a supplement to the game.
Adventure games aren't passive like a movie. You're actively making decisions in a game like Disco Elysium or Until Dawn.
With a game like Disco Elysium, you are creating the story based off of your actions which are limited by your stats.
An action version of this emergent story telling is something like Left 4 Dead where the entire gameplay loop basically is a movie, but it's a movie told through action. That's generally what I thought the future of gaming would look like, basically just arcade games but recontextualized as movies that correspond to its genre like Left 4 Dead.

Instead they got lazy and followed the Kojima formula where the movies exist in a separate designation from the gameplay portion.
Something like Cyberpunk 2077 is probably a mixture of both approaches because the gameplay does tell an emergent story but there's also plenty of cutscenes that are almost as long as MGS cutscenes but I don't notice as much, maybe due to how the dialogue is nowhere near as bad as Kojimbo's.
In Cyberpunk I constantly feel immersed even when they're just talking for over 15 minutes because the dialogue, the music, the atmosphere of the game create a verisimilitude that feels as though I'm interacting with a world that's reacting to me. It's an illusion but it does a good job of immersing me within the setting that I'll forget that I'm basically just interacting with rulesets and systems that are hidden by the art assets.

Have you ever watched a depression-vlogger game channel on youtube?

I don't even fucking know what a vlogger is. I'm old mang, I may look as young as the Zoomers but I'm not going to adopt their culture. I only pay attention to their thots.

My mind lights right the hell up while I'm watching 'Full Metal Jacket' because it's an extremely rich and thoughtful movie. There's something new for me to take in and bounce around inside my head every second. The same is true of my favourite games. 'Dead Rising' something similar is going on in my head.

If you sit me down and get me to play a few rounds of a game I can tolerate but I don't care a lot about, World of Tanks if we're online, or I'm just playing some crap Obama TPS, what's going on? Probably not a lot. Though, this is me, I can make a lot happen in my head, actively think about anything. I can think about the creative and productive forces behind some boring piece of crap like 40k: Space Marine if I want to study some industry history. But it's not a richly stimulating work in which I'm engaging with the deliberate wilfully expressive elements. And it's not pleasingly beautiful either.

All you're saying is that movies emotionally move you like how video games can also emotionally move you.
Did you have to interact with Full Metal Jacket to gain your emotional release? No you did not, because the movie did it for your since that is the job of a movie to grip you through its visuals, writing & aural aesthetics.
Games can have those qualities but without the interaction part, how is it a game? Games revolve around problem solving
With a game, you need to interact with it in order to initiate some emotional stimuli.
I say some, because it's not the same as a movie.

Alien & Blade Runner are in my top 3 fave movies list, (which is amusing because I hate most Ridley movies and those are the only two from him that I like.) While Alien Isolation can achieve the same emotional highs as Alien, Isolation does so through its gameplay, your interaction with its rulesets.
With the Alien movie, it does it for you but it keeps you engaged with well paced script & mystery.
I'm never going to see a game that reached Blade Runner's climax (I've played the Blade Runner game, it's shit.), because there aren't any games out there that made me care about the possible fate of a character like how Rachael does.
It's just not possible because real writers just don't write video games, unless it's a hobby of theirs.

It's how Chris Avellone is able to stand out, he's like the one game writer who seems to have actually read a book and actually understood it. I know this because I played Planescape Torment and I was impressed by some of the occult knowledge that the characters were speaking and I was laughing at Morte's reactions who imo seems to be the voice of Avellone within that setting, because all Morte does is talk shit.

God, what a beautiful game. This raises further questions on your framing. If I really enjoy running across the giant barren fields listening to this and killing 500 guys who look exactly the same, is this an experience of artistic quality? I'm largely just lost in the sounds and the experience. Though I'll often go lucid and contemplate the production of something as strange as these giant flat fields.

We're having different conversations. You structure your arguments around what is art, when I believe that my initial comment about Taro, didn't say about the art. It's irrelevant to me if I don't even like the game.
I have a similar mindset as Electric Underground

& Icycalm (Oh how I loathe to say his name but the motherfuckers around here seem to love him, so I have to put up with him lol. And peeps magically forget that he's the one who started shit with me.)
in that all three of us are much older & view arcade game design, as gaming at its purest form.
This vid is interesting

because he's elucidating about the arcade merit of Demon's Souls which I never noticed
until he pointed it out, but it also shows to me what that's actually one of the only Souls games that I like. I didn't notice that it's due to its arcade sensibilities.

You sound like one of those PS1 or PS2 era kids (this would include xbox, gaycube, etc.), so your idea of what a game is was shaped from that environment. To where attention to the ruleset takes a back seat to the art assets, when said art assets are actually part of a different medium. They can combine together to create a video game but if not synergized, well most people will just clip the movie section of the game and then ignore the game. That's why both of them need to work in tandem as a cohesive whole.

For me I view Super Metroid as the artistic synergy between arcade game design, and 'art'.
Something like Demon's Souls is probably the modernish version of that game design style.

That Angel dude did talk about Taro's merits as an artist. That's an argument you should have with him.
Me I'm just like, "ok bruh. You like the game. Good for you. It's still shit."
You know that Xed guy (he told me not to say his name, but I think he'd make an exception for this.)
does actually like Taro's games to almost as passionate a level as you do, so it's a shame that you can't have that convo with him. At least not in public around here, since he doesn't seem interested. He doesn't read my fucking posts either, so I have to just deal with his assumptions.

What is "passive", what does it mean to be a passive audience? Simply not holding a controller? Personally I don't even think I'd draw a line between intellectual and sensory pleasure. You're either getting a high of stimulation, or merely a low novelty suppression of boredom. I might not be able to think as deliberately and produce as many words on Drakengard as I could Full Metal Jacket, but inside I'm firing in response to each.

You talk about games as more like a drug, to reach stimulant sensations.
The older crowd, Icy, Electric guy, me, we view games as a performance + art. I personally couldn't care less about the emotional satisfaction from a game. I'm only interested in solving problems.
It's this key ingredient that separates gaming preferences between older & younger players.
Even Melonie Mac claims that a game is just problem solving, and it's shocking that she's smart enough to figure that out lol but she's fucking 40 yrs old anyway. So it probably just comes with the territory.

I don't need an emotional high from my games. I just want to kill shit. Now how that's done, doesn't really matter to me since I can kill a lot of shit in a Strategy Romance of the Three Kingdoms game, to turnbased like Tactics Ogre, or just pure normie shit like Marvel Rivals. I judge the games by how well they implement the rulesets, the rulesets are how we interact with the game. It's what makes something like Until Dawn a game, even though it's about 97% movie.
With something like Until Dawn, I change the mindset from killing shit, to how long can I survive while suffering all of these morons in the game? With something like Darkest Dungeon it's I just want to kill shit and how long can I survive while suffering these morons in my party?

My directive or goal changes depending on the concept of the game. I don't play games to feel emotions, I play them to temper or refine my decision making skills.
I just view it as another form of exercising.

I am Halo: Combat Evolved's strongest soldier in the world. I believe there's no competition. In trying to finally answer to my satisfaction the question "who wrote Halo?" (several people) I found a lot of interesting comments from the non-Bungie general professional "writers" who Microsoft brought in to support the project. Editors, manual-producers, etc. One of these guys, Eric Nylund, said something what you just wrote reminded me of. He said "Writing is re-writing".

And that's just common sense amongst writers. The more you reread a story, that more that you start to see relationships that you could expand upon or rearrange. Within gaming, you'll be forced to change or rewrite the story around when you realize that the characters don't work as a game squad or party, even though said squad could've had excellent synergy had it been a movie where it's normal for supporting cast to simply support the 1 or 2 leads. Film writing is structured by how much you can limit the budget. Music writing is based around how much story you can tell with as few words as possible.
The only reason I even bothered to concede to Rake and agree with him when he labeled me as an artist is because he told me that a lot of the shit that I say about the gods & ideas & how we're used as vessels, sounds like convos he's had with his art professor.
He also brought up an interview that David Lynch had where Lynch said what I also say that "we live in a dream."
I'm literally saying that, as did Lynch.
When I think of the word artist, I just think of Marxist Hipsters who smear their own shit on the wall, but I can concede to the artist label if artists are actually what he thinks it is, like his professor or David Lynch.
Those who can correspond with the divine.

But where are these guys now? As far as I can tell Trautmann's biggest achievement since editing work for Halo (which he hates with a burning passion) is writing the Army of Two tie-in comics. While Eric Nylund, who strikes me as an extremely nice guy, writes more Zelazny-influenced mythology sci-fi but struggles to find commercial success.

Do you see where I'm going? Who are the real writers here? Bungie's internal guys were a bit like Nomura and Toriyama. If it's cool they're doing it. But their work is a mess. Nylund and Trautmann bring it together into a finished AAA product. Who in this equation is God speaking through(you may think God is not speaking through Halo, but you'd be wrong)?

I don't see why it matters what they're doing. What's Amy Hennig doing? Nothing. What's Avellone doing? Also nothing.
That's not indicative of their skill. I'd argue it's because of their skill which is the reason why they don't get work, because Corpos only want to hire Tumblr fan fic writers who are much easier to bully around and also underpay.
Last I checked, writers are always under appreciated in both hollywood & videogames. Music is the only medium outside of books, where writing is somewhat valued to a point.
However writing is the most important part, it's what gives the property life, it's personality. Its soul.
That's why nobody likes modern Star Wars or MCU. The writing is shit.

You misunderstand what God is, because we're all emanations of God.
God is just consciousness and Gods are ideas. A god is basically a title or a job, and geometric avatars adopt that title. This is how we have multiple gods of war who are distinct & connected to their local culture. They're the same god or job application, it's just each world culture sees a different shape or interpretation that's based off of the local culture.
All of these gods originate from one god, as that's the source of creation.

Do I think that God is within Halo? Well it's a story filled with plenty of Christian allegory, but no I don't think it's saying a damn thing about God, or what our reality is. It just does what anime does and names various objects after Christian lore.
Matrix 2 & 3 did something similar and only the original Matrix did an ok job of explaining what our conflict is and even much of the dialog between Trinity, Morpheus & Neo were clever allegories of the reality outside of the perimeter. And no, it's not machines that Neo was connected to. It's much closer to how its depicted in the The 13th Floor, simulations within simulation.

Of course ideally the skills and the focus and the passion and vision are all flowing through one man, or team or whatever, but we're a sick culture and we've been actively suppressing talent, human quality, sanity, excellence, and brilliance for decades now. Anything good won't be cultivated and what we build is sterile, lacking its appropriate cultural base. Choose your player. Trautmann's grumpy boring pointless professionalism, or the Bungie office frat-house zoo where nobody will EVER finish ANYTHING on time without a gun to their head. And of course, since this time we've also managed to basically kill Bungie with no equivalent replacement emerging. Culture dies a bit more all the time.

This is what the real flood is. A flood of Indians lol. (That's a joke, but it's much closer than Halo's flood which seems to combine the locust showers from China to symbolize an end of the world.)
This is basically the conflict of MGS, ramplant decline but with nobody of merit to replace it, because we live in a bioleninist society where only those who spout correct opinions are allowed to fail upward.

All pretty true, and again, I won't really defend Taro's work on the execution of its writing. Instead I would say it's a game where the divine touch reached parts of it, but definitely not the finish of its storytelling. But listen to them and tell me they're not touched. I feel this way about many works. It's very hard to land a complete production.

Yes you love the music. Good for you, but I process that as art asset. Just because a piece of music came from a game, doesn't make it the game. Most composers are freelance and don't even work for the company that made the game. Why would I consider the art asset as the game when it's just a supplement? The game is the whole, not the sum of its parts.
Now I know what movie critics must feel like when ever they try to explain to gamers what art is, because from what I'm seeing, it seems to be a much too liberal definition of what defines a game as art.

You like an art asset, but that's not the soul of the game.
It can and does help the game, but the soul is the ruleset. Which is just passable. Without the ruleset, there is no game. It's just a series of images & music, which yes can be interpreted as stand alone pieces of art, but I'm not making a statement about the art assets. I'm talking about the actual game. Which is shit, and I'm not sure why I need to change my mind about it being shit when I already thought it was shit over 20 years ago.
Your argument is look at this piece of art, give it chance. You're not convincing of the merits of the game. You're just pointing out that it has art assets that you appreciate. You're not actually talking about the game, in fact you seem to be ignoring the game.
It's similar to how mathematics basically is reality without the supplemental art assets (all of the imagery that we're seeing right now. We're simply the assets obscuring the mathematics.), the golden ratio is the formula that builds this reality. These are the building blocks, a game's rule set is the skeleton of the game.

I'm old, I don't have time to play every shit game. I'm not going to waste my time to play a game, because it has a piece of art. Especially since it's mostly just the music, story and gfx that everyone loves. I could just longplay that on youtube.
This is why it's important for a game to be equal parts arcade & art like Super Metroid, Strider or Demon's Souls. Sure you can enjoy separate aspects of its art assets outside of the game, but it's only when you play those games that you truly experience what they are, and it's an experience that can't be found outside the domain of gaming.

Now for this whole section of you responding I'll just have to say it's hard to accurately carry over someone else's entire worldview as a third person so I won't tell you I have him perfectly captured and can't answer for him. You're taking an awful lot from not much.

Because I'm telling you common Japanese belief systems which I believe make it impossible for Japs to be classified as Atheists. Who's ever heard of an Atheist monarchy? That goes against the entire concept of monarchs. Even a constitutional ceremonious one.

8 Million Gods is culturally ingrained within the japanese psyche.
This is how they perceive reality, it's what makes them what they are.
It's why their entertainment is the way it is. It makes no sense to me for they to process logic
as simply
"Just trying to figure life out, and then they die."
That doesn't sound Japanese. Japanese don't give a fuck about death and this is enveloped
within their culture from seppuku to the kamikaze,
Kurosawa to Kitano from film, & even to their folktales such as the 47 Ronin.
Their folk tale heroes are depicted as killing themselves or willingly allowing themselves to be ritually slaughtered in order to maintain face for the daimyo that they failed to protect.
Once the flame has died out, they accept the incoming inevitable, and don't even bother to try and change their fate.

This particular guy is half-American, largely sees Japanese culture as an other thing relative to the west which he understands like a native, rather than something he can just unconsciously breathe. He is Japanese, but consciously so. So perhaps not an average person. Also I don't know if he'd appreciate me saying all this about him but it's down now and I don't redraft because I am an id-driven artfag when I write my posts.

Well he's an outsider, just like me. So it means that I don't have to take his opinion seriously. I would only have to follow the social order if it were an actual Jap.
There's many different degrees of outsider. This guy imo looks, feels and acts like a native, but even he's considered an outsider and isn't allowed to enter some Japanese establishments.

Now I made a whole big thread on my forum about this. I called it 'anime sentimental existentialism'. In response to critiques of certain animes and popular Japanese works I feel like I see repeated pretty often. That a work seems to be dealing with our greater relationship with the world, and just kind of ends on some good feelings. My first point is that the fact you would expect anything more from such a work goes to show that they at least feel like they're being honest and serious about them. You don't get mad when an episode of CSI fails to resolve the human condition.



And second, if the stock life goes on we look at the horizon ending is just the extent of things, is that really a problem? You sound like you're suggesting there's potentially some great disillusionment to be had here, but frankly I don't see what it is you want that you're losing. What do you think they're channeling when they make all of these things you love? Do you think one has to be an esotericist to be a great artist? Honestly having read a lot of your posts I think you may believe that, and you may even be onto something. But I think that perspective does clash with the reality of how most Japanese pop-artists think and generally seem to be.





There are only so many esotericists in the world. Have you ever read an author's statement in a manga? Most of them sound like deeply quaint, almost simple people(in the best sense possible).

It's not like I ever expected anything out of Hellsing, which has some occult elements but is obviously just about random cool shit because that's all it is.
What a lot of Japanese produce does do is retain callbacks to ancient history from Ghibli to One Piece.
These callbacks exist not due to esotericism, but due to their national character.

A Japanese who practices & believes in Buddhism doesn't make them esoteric, it makes them Japanese.
Buddhisim is as common in Japan as Christianity is to the USA.
I don't expect Japs to be esoteric, when Buddhism is their dominant religion.
I assume that Japs have merely retained ancestral memory through the traditions & rituals of their culture
which is passed down the generations through their 2 dominant religions, which in itself functions as an historical blueprint of who they
are and who they came from with the Royal family being a constant reminder that they are the same children of the sun and have bowed before the same
monarchs since nearly the beginning of their founding. I say nearly, because the witch Queen Himiko predated the Japanese royal family, who I feel
is still relevant to the Japanese cultural identity because Hime's existence helps explain this weird dichotomy that Japan has between the native culture of Japan that she represents and Chinese/Proto-Korean people that represent the royals with the admixture between these two groups leading up
to the people who inahabit the land of today.
They believe this world, the waking world is transitory and the shapes that Japanese behavior and conduct.

They embodify the saying "Live within the world, but not of it".
That explains their isolationist culture, that explains their self-segregation even when amongst other Asians.
The Chinese have a similar behavior pattern. For the most part, the Chinks actually ignore the world. Or at least the world outside of their sphere of influence.

A culture that's shaped by the alleged divinity of their monarchs, doesn't strike me as one that I'd label as Atheist.
It's a statement that makes no sense to me, because Japs are far too ritualistic to be labeled as anything Atheist.
Pantheist sure. Agnostic? Somewhat, but Atheist? Much of their behavior that could be described as Atheism just looks like Buddhism to me.
Buddhism can't be categorized as Atheist because they do actually believe in other worlds.


You'll never see a Black man like Denzel Washington ever coming out of Africa, because the cultural psyche of Denzel
is mostly shaped by his American Evangelical beliefs, which is why he culturally blends in with the White American culture of the 1950s-2000s.
He's unmistkably American, because he processes logic like a typical American Zionist.
The religion shapes the cultural mindset.

And second, if the stock life goes on we look at the horizon ending is just the extent of things, is that really a problem? You sound like you're suggesting there's potentially some great disillusionment to be had here, but frankly I don't see what it is you want that you're losing. What do you think they're channeling when they make all of these things you love? Do you think one has to be an esotericist to be a great artist? Honestly having read a lot of your posts I think you may believe that, and you may even be onto something.

I believe that Japanese evolved separately from White people but were also able to obtain a higher civilized culture. Hearing that they're Atheist makes me laugh because it indicates to me that Japs are just dogs imitating gods.

I'm not saying that Huwites are gods, but I am saying that much of the arts that they are responsible for attributed to them is due to the favoritism of the gods which granted them glory. Since the 15th or 16th century, Japan was the one other country who also seemed to be children of the sun. It seems authentic, but they're actually just pretending. How does life & society progress if you only know how to imitate?

But I think that perspective does clash with the reality of how most Japanese pop-artists think and generally seem to be.

Have I done that? I don't believe so.
I never expected anything out of Hellsing and works similar to it. Those works are obviously just the pure individualized creativity of some fat Jap neet. Only one I could think of is One Piece but One Piece as well as Ghibli actually are recognized within occult communities (which to my estimation seems to be several million. They're not that rare, they're just rare within the videogame community because vidya gaems are homogenized and you're only allowed to be a faggot.) as having a possible connection to the past.
It's not due to some hidden ancient knowledge. It's just cultural artifacts that Japan has retained through their culture. They're the only culture left in the world, that still lives somewhat like the old days which is why the Eurocuck Union, UN and the Open Society are trying their hardest to flood them with Indians, so no reminders of the past of who we are can remain.

You're equating Buddhism to esotericism, which it is but not within a Japanese context.
A lot of the Jap entertainment that I'm into, they're definitely into something.
Cozy Okada & Kazuma Kaneko, I would not be shocked if they were Golden Dawn, because the shit they do is pretty fucking demonic.
Masamune Shirow, a fat nerd but he's well researched in both military affairs and esotericism and if you see his timeline which connects all of his manga (including his hentai lol) under a single chronological time line, depicts a society, our society that starts out as a cargo cult. Except his version has Friendly Reptilians whereas I believe that the ancients were just White bearded humans.

Chainsaw man, this is obviously just creativity, but it's well researched and utilizes aspects of the occult to build a fun narrative around.

Going by the standards you imply here I'm inclined to think you must believe there are no worthy cultures, at most only initiated orders where human existence takes on value.

In the modern era? Of course not. We only have one globalized culture that pretends to be multiple nations, because that's part of the play, the ritual.
I look down on all those who join an order. I consider myself an errant. I'm just passing through. The affairs and their stupid made up politics and histories don't matter to me. The entire world is fake and it's constantly trying to force you into their fake conflicts of false binaries.
You always have the choice, to not engage. Our monetary system is fake. Over 35 trillion dollars in debt and that's just the fake digital number. The world total of our paper money only amounts to about 2 billion dollars which further shows to you just how fake and rigged the game is. It's not actually possible to be a billionaire, unless that's the role you're chosen to play because everything is digital and easily trackable

Games in this era were looking for new justifications. The aborted direction was aesthetically justified works. The "moviegame". That project stalled out because the moviegames that didn't really resist you and just drove forward were terrible. But where we went wrong was blaming the "gameplay" for this. Yeah, ducking behind a low wall to fire your assault rifle at guys as they pop-up is boring. But only one game of that generation was designed with that in mind as a central justifying experience. The first one.

Judging from the name of the thread, I was expecting a Blobert post.
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/members/blobert.8256/

I view that era as the death of game design. Arcade is no longer viewed as the default and that era destroyed most of the arcade design blueprints, because arcades expect you to actually have a life or at least get one eventually. The corpos who currently control gaming want you to treat gaming as a religion and as your life so they bank on their $150 retail Grand Theft Auto 6. Gaming is worse than drugs at this point.

The problem with the Obama movie game, was simply that they were bad movies. We removed the game, but once that was gone there was nothing else to do. Gamedev carried on making genuinely pointless, irredeemable works. It is simply impossible to give a reason why one should bother playing American games from this era. Just look at them. They look like jokes now. Conflict: Denied Ops. Battle: Los Angeles.

I still need to respond to your other post. What I wanted to remark upon in that other thread was how Obama era culture was characterized by Anti-Terrorism which was also reflected within the pop culture. It's funny, because you don't hear any of that shit any more.
Now it's either Antifa or Maga terrorists which is weird to me because those Middle Eastern terrorists were real, but they got replaced with fakeness.

What's missing here, and good for you not even thinking of it, is multiplayer gaming. God what a mess. Talk about aesthetically unjustified experiences. What I said earlier about man's capacity for low-engagement stimulation. Call of Duty multiplayer. That's where all the blood went. Once we discovered that there was nothing else to do. Nobody who thinks like an artist survived by 2008.


Not an artistic experience. Not a gamer. Plenty of people sit down just to spiritually and mentally die in front of video games every day.

Multiplayer games can be an enthralling experience when played at a high level and that's not reducing the game. That's what a game is, its soul is the play mechanics. They're the closest things to arcades that we have left, where you're rewarded with your skill. Not many games these days reward skill. I used to be in top 100 in several hero shooters and even used to have psn fan communities. What's shocking is a lot of hot girls took part in that and made me realize that several bitches in my team, including the captain are girls. I would even get hit on by some bitches from the opposing team and they'd made orgasm sounds, just because they love the sound of my voice.

Modern era is nothing like that anymore since everything is extremely moderated. All I hear are gay sounding Zoomers cussing me out, they basically sound like Riley from Boondocks.

[anthony]

I think you may be misinformed on the nature of Drakengard. Going to respond to everything you said about it here. Collectively you seem to have accepted the retarded /v/ goes hard human interpretation that the game is bad unpleasant and retarded on purpose.

Doubtful. How could I be misinformed when that is my legitimate thoughts, that it's one of the worst action games that I ever played. You act as though this were an aberration, an insane assertion when it's just common sense amongst action hack n slash fans. I didn't say that Ninja Gaiden Black is shit, I said Drakengard is shit. There's a wide gulf of difference between the two.
You make it sound that one can only reach to the conclusion that DK is shit, through over-socialization. When I know that's not the case, I played that game before most of modern internet even existed. I played Drakengard back in Japan when I was in my 20s during 2003 or 2002 whenever it was made.
I was playing DW4 with a group of friends during the year that both DW & DK released and it does come across like a parody of Dynasty Warriors especially since DW was popular within mainstream Japanese culture during the early 2000s. They're both basically hack n slash war games, it's not uncommon to compare the two.

I was referring to the idea that the game is a satire. You can think it's a bad action game (or action game system more specifically) if you like, but I think the idea the game is attempting to play off of its peers as a joke or in an ironic way is an oversocialised one. The game is very straight. It never calls the protagonist's actions or motives into question in any serious way. The scale of the carnage is acknowledged, but if anything to take it more seriously. The protagonist is killing thousands of people. That is not a joke. We are supposed to take him seriously as a killer of thousands. The game was revised into a winking joke by insecure Amerislaves who giggle with discomfort at the idea we could take the passion of a mass murderer seriously.

We have different interpretations of what the "Art" of a game is, you think of art as a collective expression that is presented through the multimedia of a video game. I view the Art of a game as the performance, similar to how one would judge the artistry of a Ballet Dancer or the sweet science of a Boxing match.
What are video games? They're primarily about problem solving. If I'm not interacting with systems to solve a problem, then what am I actually doing? How is it any different from watching a movie, other then movies generally have better writing & cinematography than videogames.

Video games are multimedia. They're made of all the things you talk about in this post. There is an art to "game" elements of multimedia video game art, and there's an art to integrating or balancing these games against the other elements. It's an art as opposed to a science. Video games are arguably primarily about "problem solving" in the same sense that cinema is fundamentally about editing and sequencing together images. But of course many, if not the vast majority of films do not lean on that primary medium-defining element. Many films are arguably not that different from reading a book. Still we watch them rather than reading books. The techniques of cinema are secondary or supporting elements in many beloved films. No value judgement there. That's just how movies came to be.

A game is just a ruleset. The entire game is built around its ruleset, which is how a game should be.
A game should still be entertaining even when divorced from art assets, which is secondary to the ruleset.
This is the artistry of the game, how well it can combine art assets that are wrapped around the gameplay to conceal the objective fact that a game does not exist without the ruleset. The ruleset is the Soul and the core-identity of the game, they're a performance first, traditional art merely helps to sell the game to guide toward the main attraction which is the gameplay.

You're insisting on a place of primacy for the "game" element of any given video game as a matter of course. Of course, the term 'video games' suggests this should be the case rather strongly, which is why I don't like it. I still use the term 'video game' to describe these things as total works, but then refer to the 'game' element within that as its own thing rather than the implied centre which all the rest is supporting.

There are countless games in which the main attraction is obviously not the "gameplay".

Back to the subject of this thread, I've started playing Omocat's 'Omori'. An RPGmaker game. Omocat interests me a lot as an artist for many reasons. What's interesting about Omori is that it started out life as a kind of webcomic, and her plan was to expand it into something more like a manga. Only she then came to think a game might serve the premise better. The "game" element, the part you can figure out and get better at, is a kind of Mario & Luigi RPG game about character-synergy that plays off of the emotional dynamics between the main cast, because in this game "status" effects of JRPG tradition are present but as the "moods" of characters engaged in battle.



It's kind of cute, sort of fun to play around with and see what synergies and combos you can find to get this group of friends to emotionally riff on each other to power each other up. That's a neat idea, and all right as a JRPG inspired battle system thing. But the game does not exist so that I can appreciate this game they've made. And there's no way I'd play this game divorced from the context of the greater video game. And that's not a failing on Omocat's part because, as I said, the genesis of this project predates its integration of "game" elements. This is a late-coming secondary element. The core of the work is Omocat's cast of characters, their inner lives, interpersonal dynamics, and the story of this point in their lives. I'm "playing" Omori for that. The game is only of interest to me as far as it is another expressive element.

This game's "soul and core-identity" is gloomy crayon-scribbles of Omocat's shota-OCs crying. The game is here to help sell the thing and guide the experience towards its main attraction which is emotionally tortured youth. There is only so much "game" in Omori, lots and lots of cutscenes, text, little novel scenarios in which you won't be touching any RPGmaker battles for long stretches of time. It's an adventure, a succession of things happening. Episodes of activity, humour, excitement and general interest. Probably aspirationally structured to be more like an anime or a manga than a video game.

Omori is primarily inspired by and aspires to be what you call "traditional art". And the "game" element of the "video game" medium is subordinated to that end. It has a role to play.

I have a lot of fun playing games that are basically nothing but calculator number crunchers like Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Nobunaga's Ambition, which have barebones art assets but why does that matter when the core game does what it sets out to do? It represented warfare & politicking through nothing but text & number, with the ruleset governing the possibilities and limitations of the game.

I also greatly enjoy plenty of pure games. But I think you've picked odd examples.

I believe that Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Nobunaga's Ambition, Koei games in general, are created to actually aesthetically sell their premises. But what they do is they use deliberately abstracted forms to realise these premises because they can work this abstraction as an art and achieve a limited kind of perfection, or at least great success, in giving you an experience of a thing that also works as a complete game that can be learned, enjoyed, and mastered as a thought out whole. A comparison that I'm always drawing is how Western strategy games tend to build simulations until they hit a failure state and go bust, and just call that the game. Making a very unpleasant and unsatisfying experience. There's no art to it. Just a pile of stuff. Autonomous numbers bouncing off of each other which don't feel like a world or a self-justified system. Just an incomplete synthetic world.

Making a complete game system is in my opinion a much better way at realising the spirit of a world, a time, place, premise, setting, whatever, than trying to actually recreate it in a computer until you inevitably hit a wall of impossibility because we can't yet create worlds on a wire.



The premise at the very least informs and inspires the games. I don't think they came up with completely abstracted systems and then completely arbitrarily decided to implement them into games about Nobunaga and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

That's what a real game is, you focus too much on the traditional art assets, and mistake the art assets as the game. No the game of Drakengard is a barely functional hack n slash that plays like a stereotype of what people assume Dynasty Warriors played like. This is easy to see for anyone who is not enthralled by Drakengard's art assets. Drakengard without gfx or art assets would just be a generic 3d hack n slash game (which it already was) because there's nothing that stands out about how Drakengard plays.

I know what the "game" is. The "game" part of Drakengard I don't appreciate in isolation. But it doesn't exist in isolation so that doesn't matter. The way that it plays I believe is compelling, taken together with the rest of the work. Perhaps moreso than if it were a perfect clone of a "game" system which is far more compelling, if taken in isolation.

I don't view Drakengard as a collection of secondary elements which I take as individual art pieces. The visuals, the soundtrack, the cutscenes, etc. I only really appreciate it all together as one complete "video game" experience that you play. I would not recommend a longplay. I believe it's most interesting if played with.

A game of Tetris would still be fun, even if you completely obscure that you're actually playing a game of Tetris by replacing the blocks with soldiers or demons and have a video playing of a random badass or huge titty woman that represents your character who is presented as shouting commands at the soldiers fighting the demons or cyborgs, with said soldiers
standing in formations that resemble Tetris blocks, when seen from a bird's eye view.
Said solders are animated as fighting and killing the demonscyborgspiratesninjas whenever you've initiated a tetris line that plays an animation of the demonsetc. dying as they represent the blocks that you've cleared.

This would still work as a game, because the core ruleset of Tetris already corresponds to the need of the gamer to solve constant problems every second with the tension and speed of the match reflecting how well the player can navigate through the problems that constantly surface as the player eventually runs out of space once the blocks (which are represented as random enemies) fill the screen and initiates a game over.
That's video game design. The art supplements the game, but it does not make the game. The art assets can make the game in very specific circumstances such as with Dragon's Crown, which is a very average beat em up, but everyone seems to love it because the art & music are so good that most people are willing to overlook that Dragon's Crown doesn't hold a candle to Golden Axe or its inspiration the Capcom D&D games.
DC does a successful job of creating an anime inspired dark fantasy to the point that it feels as if you're actually living in that world. The average gamer will not care or even notice that Dragon's Crown has somewhat shitty gameplay because it's one of the few cases where people are willing to buy the game just for the art and music.

Yes big titty soldier commander Tetris would still fundamentally work because Tetris works. But big titty soldier commander might be a premise better served or realised by another style of game. In the particular case you propose, painting an arbitrary layer of aesthetic dressing over a completely solved and completed game, yes we could say that the art assets are supplementing the game.

But this isn't a real example. If this is "video game design", how these things are actually done, we'd expect plenty of ready examples. We do have the old arcade tradition, but this class of 'video game design' was left behind eagerly even by most Japanese around the time of the PS1 I believe. And I believe that was a very good thing. New aesthetic premises demand new types of games to frame and support them. And game elements losing their place of primacy allows for all manner of more interesting (to me) works to be created.

And I think this is most connoisseurs of video games now. In it for "the art". "Game" purists I would say are quite rare.

Though at the same time, because westerners are retarded about video games, this doesn't lead to us getting lots of cool artfag stuff. As I already said I believe most games made in the west simply have no primary appealing element that justifies the existence of the thing or should warrant a serious person paying any attention to it. Endless "sims" and "light strategy" games about a premise that might be kind of cool. Made with no vision or form or finish. Just endless abandoned half-simulated worlds made for their own sake. That's the front page of Steam.

Itch is better, more like a western analog to the PS1 catalog. Cheap, low entry mostly derivative artfag spam, some of which is bound to be interesting. At least they aren't bogged down making games they don't want to make and don't understand. They have an image or an idea and the project is built around and driven by that.

You can call me crazy if you want but I actually found Drakengard pleasant to play. Like sprinting back and forth across fields to do errands in NieR I found the steady, rhythmic killing fields of Drakengard compelling. It forms a complete picture. I'm not enjoying disharmony or ugly chaos. I simply find it pleasing. The nature of the music is a giant meme. It's nowhere near as chaotic or as much of a cacophony as the internet will tell you.

I had those same exact opinions back when it first came out in 2003/2002, that's pre modern internet. I don't recall youtube or v existing, not that it matters because I don't pay attention to game videos or what reddit & 4chan nerds say.
I have ears. If it's hurting my ears, it generally means that it's bad. The music is terrible for an action game.
The songs you linked to are what I would call a prelude. It's not an actual song, it's build up. The real song is what you hear when you start a stage and have to hear the same damn loop for nearly 30 minutes. That's fucking torture.
This is the song that I remember hearing and the group I was playing with in Japan, we were all laughing at it.

I really like this track. I think it's striking. There's no science to what makes for fitting "action game" music, or a science that says Drakengard is an action game. It's "Drakengard".

Shadow of Rome is way better than Berserk (Rome seems somewhat inspired by Berserk) but the stealth bullshit killed that game.

I loved Shadow of Rome when I played it (well after its time). I took it to be a game that aspired to be an experience of Rome. Which is why you don't just play as Agrippa ripping peoples' heads off for the entire game. You play as Augustus so that he can walk through the streets and just see Rome, and his story so much more than "stealth". He's caught in a conspiracy. The 'Stealth' is a simple contrivance to give him something to do other than be a Shenmue protagonist, and it's treated as a contrivance. It's played as a joke. Creeping around through the same room multiple people are in is fucking stupid. So he has to resort to various Tom & Jerry antics to get around these people. It's very consciously playing with "stealth game" convention to mess with the idea of a guy having some "action" thing to do other than directly fighting. Shamelessly a "game" with rigid and unrealistic rules, which look absurd in a realistic context.

I really appreciated the Augustus half of the game. Most of which isn't a "stealth game". He's your non-violent PS2 Rome experience.

You also say that this is satire, but I don't see it and I haven't heard of it. As far as I can tell it's just sincere and awkwardly executed melodrama. As you say, probably not drafted thoroughly. A production riding on passion rather than professional finish. I don't get the impression that this game feels it is above other Japanese fantasy games. And I don't believe it does anything to make a reasonable person assume that. The gamer mass might think so, but they're retarded so who cares? They're wrong about everything. Assume the popular meme interpretation of every game is the opposite of the truth. You'll be right more often than wrong, I'm sure.

It sure came across like satire to me, especially if you played Dynasty Warriors right before it. Even Tomonobu Itagaki the guy who made Ninja Gaiden often makes fun of Dynasty Warriors as just a genocide simulator where you mindlessly kill hundreds of braindead enemies. Drakengard is the same thing, but it barely has a combo system and shows no pretenses of being a valiant hero unlike DW.
You act as if Drakengard were this unique misunderstood game as if it were self evident, when it was just a generic hack n slash back in 2003 when it came out because games of that style were a dime a dozen during that era due to the Dynasty Warriors craze that was sweeping Japan at the time.
Even if Drakengard had not come out during a fad, I doubt that it would've faired better because nothing stands out about DK other than its art assets. I've always been intriqued by the DK cutscenes, but I'm not going to suffer through the game just to watch the cutscenes. The game is barely serviceable.

I'm sure it was better understood on the whole at launch than it is now. There isn't much to get wrong. It's a game about moods and impressions. You either find playing it striking or you don't. It is terribly misunderstood, but only by people who feel like they should appreciate it but don't, who then make up baseless gibberish on esoteric artistic intentions because their idea of good justifying elements in art is stuck in high school English.

What stands out about DK to me isn't any individual part (though those parts do stand out), but it's the whole experience coming together that I admire.

It's funny, I always believed that Kojima did this kind of thing exceptionally well. My interpretation of Metal Gear, which shouldn't strike anybody here as too out there, is that it's a game about freedom, power, and human thriving. This story being presented as a game is fundamental to the point. That we want to have fun. We want to challenge ourselves. Be all we can be. Snake is depressed when he's not soldiering because the warzone is liberating and stimulating like nothing else in his life. We buy Metal Gear because like Snake we find ordinary life boring. Liquid says "you don't know what this shit is about, this isn't your conflict, you came here because you enjoy it", Snake can't answer him and neither can we.

MGS1 maybe, but only MGS1. That's the only MGS that's paced well, the cutscenes never feel intrusive and they add to the tension. In later MGS games, it barely ever feels like a Wetwork Op anymore because you have grown ass retards like The Boss moaning on the battlefield about loyalty and adapting to the geopolitical climate that changes the alliances of the people you know, which sure I understand that Hideous Kojima needed to waste about a fucking hour in the beginning of the game just forcing us to watch The Boss whine like a baby about simply doing the job that she's hired to do, otherwise it wouldn't feel as shocking when she later betrays you about 8 minutes later, even though in-game we just fucking met her LOL!

I consider MGS3 the low-point of the series on pretty much every point. It is where the melodrama gets the most strained, the game is most awkwardly integrated and harmonising with the rest, its positive following seems the most deluded, it's the least fun to replay, the one I find myself thinking about the least. It's the least well realised and weakest executed Metal Gear by far.

Every other game I think balances everything it's trying to do quite well as a complete experience, leaning more or less into being a game. MGS1, 2, 4, and V I think are all around excellent. 3 I still respect for its ambition. Expanding Metal Gear's story backward, and turning his old trashy stock villain turned haunting effigy into a deeply sympathetic human we see go through a very personal and melodramatic story (far moreso than anything involving the heroic Solid Snake). It's really excellent. Just it's the game that grasps and doesn't reach everything it has in mind. The infamously cut short MGSV feels like a more fully realised work to me than MGS3.

Metal Gear was always a multimedia military sci-fi opera, the "wetwork" "game" worked in to support this. Kojima's background is in old PC adventure games and he's always been that kind of artist. In an old Japanese PC game you can kind of do a lot of different things mostly in a very primitive way, and they got a lot done with that. Pictures, text, music, simple games. A video game tradition with a not particularly firm foundation in video games. Far closer to simply being a straight multimedia environment/scene. I'm never going to say he has to primarily be making a game for his projects to work. MGS4 is less of a game than MGS3, and I think it came together far better. It's a weird high tech science-fiction OVA with very short, very fucking refined and ambitious game sections which seemingly exist primarily to give you an overwhelming sense of future-shock. If you play that game now it still feels like a vision of the future.



How did they think of this trailer? Western fps games didn't look like this in 2005. They barely look like this in 2025. It looks more like Insurgency or Escape From Tarkov than anything we could play when they were developing this. He predicted the future and subverted it. That's how far ahead of the curve this whole project was. The trends and aesthetic premises on display existed 20 years ago, but most people were blind to them. If we weren't we would have made a game that felt like this then. A few years later we got Modern Warfare 1, which feels like a shartmaxxed American failure to be this.

But MGS4 isn't a failure. Metal Gear Online went to show the game system was fantastic, they just didn't care to build the game around it. The whole thing was shamelessly overengineered and underimplemented. Which adds to the future-shock and thematically reinforces the premise of Metal Gear, that the possibilities of a battlefield are an overwhelming world of freedom.

Metal Gear's point is so simple and so fundamentally bound to what mere "games" are that any addition of depth, anything more fun, is simply that much more to the point. If you're a true warrior the battlefield is liberating, it makes you free, you're a happy human animal because if you can think it you can do it and we inherently enjoy testing ourselves and overcoming. The proof is in Metal Gear sales and lasting success.

Perfectly clean and easy story and game harmony. Any game that takes this angle, which is just lying there to be picked up by anybody with the balls, it will achieve harmony and aesthetic elevation. Even westerners have picked up on this before. Halo: CE and Farcry1+2 are also doing this very directly (but gamers are blind cattle so they can't tell despite decades of attempted failnalysis).

You've been completely charmed by Big Boss's rhetoric. Big Boss wasn't searching for freedom. He was searching for purpose. He was losing his identity because he was living in a world where war changed how battles were fought and people with his skillset are no longer needed.
His purpose is killing, for him and all those similar to him which is why he established Outer Heaven. That's always been the hypocrisy of Big Boss.
He cosplays as a revolutionary but the reality is that he's just a Neoliberal Ultracapitalist who disguises his war profiteering by appealing to survivor's guilt.

Killing isn't an arbitrary choice. War is freedom. He wouldn't start selling dragon dildos if Kaz convinced him there was more money there. Money is not inherently corrupting, despite what gamer culture will tell you. Japanese video games have been making money for a long time. Like Hideous Kojima, Big Boss brings in money to subsidise and share what he believes is worthwhile in life. Kojima will make more great video games about the human condition if you give him money. Big Boss will liberate more men with the power of war.

Viewing war as freedom and liberation and an end in itself is a revolutionary stance. Far more so than believing governments should give more money to poor people.

The moral conflict of MGS is that it's a game about war veterans from the Nam era who are losing their place in a modern high tech society that no longer needs their talents. This is what kills their purpose, the reason why they exist.
So what Big Boss does is exactly what our Elites always do, starts a conflict and then sells himself as the solution that you need.
After his 'death', Big Boss lived on as an ideal for all aging warriors to aspire to,
Big Boss's story would've been perfect had it only been MG,MG2, & MGS3 because he was a much more effective character as a ghost from the past who still influences the future.

Liquid Snake was born in 1972. He is the thematic centre of Metal Gear Solid, which was made to stand as a complete work with no sequels as the end of Metal Gear. Beyond the Vietnam comment, yes, this is about technology dehumanising the first, last, and most complete arena of human excellence. Combat reduced to pieces handled by technicians. The heroes and villains at the centre of Metal Gear have always been warriors more than soldiers. Excellent people who find joy and completion in the challenges of violence and combat.

Big Boss (and those who seek to succeed him) are not merely pragmatic rent-seekers. Their struggles are ennobled and rendered tragic by their genuine concern for human flourishing, along cruelly aristocratic rather than egalitarian principles, yes, but still concern. The concern is that a world in which a man cannot become a warrior is one in which life can only become increasingly not worth while. This is hammered over and over again in MGS1. That Solid Snake was miserable and depressed before Shadow Moses and took the job to be a warrior again, not because he understood or believed in the mission. Liquid Snake is also fighting for the sake of being a warrior. But the difference between them is that Liquid is fighting for a world that will affirm and spread his values, while Solid is fighting to suppress them. They are the same, but Solid is manipulated into killing the only way of life he finds bearable. He tells himself that he is sublimating and resolving his desires, but the fact he comes back for more every sequel goes to show he is wrong. His only way out is death. Life really does have nothing else to offer him.

Metal Gear's overall conflict is far more relevant now, because it's about gradual entropy which leads to the competency crisis that is affecting the entire world right now precisely due to the death or aging out of Big Boss's era (Boomers), & Snake's generation (Gen X), which causes a huge power vacuum because Millennials (Raiden) just aren't mentally ready to take on the responsibilities that the previous two left behind.
The previous two eras have been left behind due to globalized smart tech, so Raiden's dilemma is that he has to train for wars that are completely unlike the wars that the previous gens fought.
Raiden is just the transitory state between the previous gen and whomever the incoming gen is, and it doesn't matter who comes after Raiden because that's pretty much where MGS & Revengeance ends.
It was only concerned about the plot that plagued Big Boss's era and Solid Snake's attempt to correct those sins.

The games never successfully make a case for Big Boss as a sinner, beyond his muddle-headed worship of The Boss leading him into incoherence. Ultimately Liquid's brutal purity is the best standing position expressed in the series, probably followed by Solidus and Armstrong who are more conciliatory variations with more faith in and respect for normal people.

Liquid was going to get the last word in the series in MGSV's final act, which would have been "It's not over yet." And it's not over. I'm here. And MGSV is about imparting the values of Big Boss through an experience of becoming him. Mission accomplished. I will consecrate my heart to Hitler and anime.

Raiden never really fights a new class of war. If anything his war becomes something far older and simpler, especially by Revengeance. He doesn't have to deal with hypersocialised meta-reality nanobot AI programmed viruses, in Revengeance he's a samurai feuding with other samurai. Guys with swords fighting to the death over ideological disagreements. But again, like Solid against Liquid, Raiden is confronted with superior ideological coherence and purity.

Metal Gear Solid 4 was going to end with Solid and Otacon being executed by the US Government/Global Community/ZOG for their weird maverick terrorism stuff. Still spiritually goes there. And Revengeance ends with Raiden convinced by Armstrong that his own desires are the only legitimate reason to fight, and presumably he's now, in his own way, on track to realise Armstrong's dream of ending a world of professionalised and institutionalised conflict for one of personal ones.

And the trajectory of the development of these games over time was to become more free, more liberating, more stimulating, by giving you more power to do stuff, exert control over your environment, be liberated by the opportunities afforded by the battlefield, and constrained by the ZOGshit that in the 21st century is imposing itself upon the last holdouts of free men.

Your case for Pathologic isn't incorrect at all. And the game deserves praise for building novel systems to support a novel premise. But the stock game premises became stock for a reason. All war games are doing the same thing. All of your rules, systems, and inputs serve the premise and aesthetic drive of the thing. Kill or die. And Kojima did this in a far more clever way than his competition.

How do these systems work with Kojima's cutscenes?

They're rhetorical and demonstrative explorations of the same premise. The cutscenes aren't about something fundamentally different to the "gameplay". The "game" of Metal Gear is thoroughly integrated into the premise of the series, but it's not everything. Again, old Japanese PC adventure games. Video games can do basically anything. Kojima goes back and forth as he pleases. Sometimes more game. Sometimes more movie. I also think it's important to read the text stuff, supplements, weird menu extras, all of it is integrated and serving the whole.

They don't, they basically exist in separate worlds. One is the overwritten Kojima movie, the other is the game, the rulesets that you interact with. To Kojima's credit, he's actually good at making games unlike most of his Western imitators like Last of Us who completely forget that games are meant to revolve around problem solving, whereas in Last of Us, the gameplay portion is just that chore that you're forced in to. Kojima understands that a game is basically nothing but problem solving which is why his games steadily up the ante with a constant slew of scenarios that test your problem solving skills.

Kojima also simplifies things, and introduces new problems primarily to serve as aesthetically driven sequences or interactive narrative rather than problems that exist for the sake of solving. MGS1 ends with an extremely simple turret section. He doesn't make anything which could truly be called pointless, but the point of the game parts is not always to be playing a game.

The VR Missions and modules, and MGSV's replays and side missions, those are game for the sake of game. He clearly understands the appeal, and with his team can create brilliant little challenges and make an art of that. But it's not a primary concern within the primary Metal Gear experience. Again, they overengineer their games to create this excellent sense of freedom that the whole this is about.

The games are more than a sensational statement on freedom. They're total multimedia works in which the games are a part. But they also know the game systems are fun so they give you these sideshows to enjoy them as literal decontextualised wireframe abstractions in some cases.

The original MGS actually felt like an arcade game because there were clear rules to how the stealth worked, and once mastered it played like a lightning fast Ninja stealth game.
MGS2 still had a solid stealth rule set and is the most complex stealth system of the MGS games but is not fun to play because of all of the unneeded codecs. I really don't need to hear Jack's bitch constantly reminding me about the day they met or her birthday or whatever the fuck.
Yes I understand the point, he's supposed to be us, and he has a naggy girlfriend just like in real life.

Last time I played MGS2 I really appreciated how it's MGS1+, simple, clear rules and systems at play, which you can totally dominate. You can move through MGS2 like a shark through water in the open sneaking by guards sequences. MGS2 has VR missions if you really, really like playing it as a game with no Rose and Colonel. I personally appreciate it as a game a lot but am only so interested in that part. Over the course of a playthrough I see about as much as I'm interested in, paired with my interest in seeing the rest again too.

You seem to be so enamored by Kojima's cutscenes that you're willing to let it slide that the cutscenes and the game seem to exist in different dimensions. Have you ever noticed how the game world completely stops every time Metal Gear characters decide to pontificate with each other for over 30 minutes to an hour?
This is not a cohesive whole like how one would describe Deus Ex or Pathologic. Games such as Resident Evil 4 have constant tension even during the cutscenes and whenever it gets to a talking head section, their exchanges are brief.
RE4 feels like a wetwork op and is much closer to the James Bond inspiration that MGS3 was going for.

I can turn this around. The rules of reality bend when we enter game sequences. What are meant to be superhumans suddenly have tunnel-vision and are retarded. But I accept that because the game is running on its own rules, not trying to recreate reality in a PS1. And the cutscenes and codec calls also run on their own rules. And Metal Gear goes back and forth between presenting itself in different forms, traditions, and sets of conventions. And I think it works because of the thematic and narrative consistency. Most of these games I believe are actually paced well as they shift between freeing you up to play and tying you down in watching and listening.

How does MGS5 get bigger or more free as you say it is? Well, because it dropped most of the movie part to the point where all you do is interact with the game. To its credit, the base game is good and can tide you over to the next cutscene. I don't have a problem that MGS5's cutscenes are so minimal. I'm just stating that it's a much more coherent game than the 3 that preceded it, because the actual ruleset portion is no longer fighting to share time with the narrative.
It only became bigger or more free, because it got rid of some of MGS's core identity.

I don't have a problem with that, but you make it sound as if MGS5 got to this point naturally when what it did was increase the time that you play the game, and decrease the time that you spend watching the movie.
The hospital scene during the beginning was effective though and I wish there were more of that, but this would also collide with the bigger more free game that it set itself out to achieve.

Game and cutscene never "fought" in Metal Gear. There was simply only so much to do with the game systems. I believe that in every case the desired balance was achieved. Maybe they wanted to do more in 4 since that one was so complex, but it's openly on the record that these games were cutting finished gameplay sequences because they didn't like how they fit into things. Like the tanker-escape from MGS2. Frustrating, not fun, they decided to wrap the sequence without it. Not a competition, each piece is weighed for whether it fits the whole they're going for.

MGSV is arguably far more coherent than 2,3 and 4 (though I'd say maybe only more so than 3) because its technology allows it to more thoroughly realise what these games were working towards all along, which was a free experience of a battlefield as liberation. The older games had to carefully parcel out episodes of free movement, play, and exploration through game sequences that everything else Metal Gear had going on. I think the game/cutscene/codec balance was significantly geared around this effect, making you appreciate the game by rationing it. Keeping you from hitting the limits of their game system in one playthrough.

If there was incoherence in this game about freedom and liberation through action, it was that its action could only be so liberating and free. In MGSV it became technically possible to free you up and let you play to the point they felt confident enough to really take off the reins and let the game run at your pace (mostly). That is a great thing. And I think a game like this was always in the cards for Metal Gear, it was just a question of technology.

The freedom wasn't shedding Metal Gear's identity. It was fulfilling it. The games were always about freedom but were stuck expressing that through abstract systems running on hard rules and limits that only felt free as long as they kept a lot of direct control over your experience.

The essential line I would draw in assessing these things is the one you draw in film, I'd just do that for everything. Am I actively engaging with and getting something out of this? Is my appreciation active?

You seem like you may be taking playing a "game" as an inherently active thing. I disagree.

I am. As I said earlier in the post, the art assets are just a supplement to the game.
Adventure games aren't passive like a movie. You're actively making decisions in a game like Disco Elysium or Until Dawn.
With a game like Disco Elysium, you are creating the story based off of your actions which are limited by your stats.
An action version of this emergent story telling is something like Left 4 Dead where the entire gameplay loop basically is a movie, but it's a movie told through action. That's generally what I thought the future of gaming would look like, basically just arcade games but recontextualized as movies that correspond to its genre like Left 4 Dead.

"Creating a story" is meaningless without the context created by what you're calling the "art" elements. We can mentally strip Drakengard or Metal Gear down to wireframes and contrived challenges if we like, but we can't do that to Disco Elysium or Until Dawn.

Instead they got lazy and followed the Kojima formula where the movies exist in a separate designation from the gameplay portion.

Some idea simply work better that way. All in the game is one way of doing things. Hard divisions between game and other modes of presentation is another. I'm not going to call either better because there's no real limit to what you can do in either case or any other. All mediums have infinite expressive potential.

Something like Cyberpunk 2077 is probably a mixture of both approaches because the gameplay does tell an emergent story but there's also plenty of cutscenes that are almost as long as MGS cutscenes but I don't notice as much, maybe due to how the dialogue is nowhere near as bad as Kojimbo's.
In Cyberpunk I constantly feel immersed even when they're just talking for over 15 minutes because the dialogue, the music, the atmosphere of the game create a verisimilitude that feels as though I'm interacting with a world that's reacting to me. It's an illusion but it does a good job of immersing me within the setting that I'll forget that I'm basically just interacting with rulesets and systems that are hidden by the art assets.

I really hate appeals to "immersion". What's engrossing is so subjective. It's an art not a science. If you just say you found something engrossing, fine. But it's not a science. I can say "I found my preferred thing more engrossing" and then we're deadlocked.

My mind lights right the hell up while I'm watching 'Full Metal Jacket' because it's an extremely rich and thoughtful movie. There's something new for me to take in and bounce around inside my head every second. The same is true of my favourite games. 'Dead Rising' something similar is going on in my head.

If you sit me down and get me to play a few rounds of a game I can tolerate but I don't care a lot about, World of Tanks if we're online, or I'm just playing some crap Obama TPS, what's going on? Probably not a lot. Though, this is me, I can make a lot happen in my head, actively think about anything. I can think about the creative and productive forces behind some boring piece of crap like 40k: Space Marine if I want to study some industry history. But it's not a richly stimulating work in which I'm engaging with the deliberate wilfully expressive elements. And it's not pleasingly beautiful either.

All you're saying is that movies emotionally move you like how video games can also emotionally move you.
Did you have to interact with Full Metal Jacket to gain your emotional release? No you did not, because the movie did it for your since that is the job of a movie to grip you through its visuals, writing & aural aesthetics.
Games can have those qualities but without the interaction part, how is it a game? Games revolve around problem solving
With a game, you need to interact with it in order to initiate some emotional stimuli.
I say some, because it's not the same as a movie.

I'm saying movies intellectually move me. And that because of my natural inclinations I can intellectually move myself to pretty much anything, but that can get tiresome. Particularly rich and intelligently or passionately assembled works have a lot they're bringing out to meet me with. And if they're smart enough to do that they're often also emotionally moving.

Full Metal Jacket is rather entertaining and intense if you just watch it, but it really comes to life if you can appreciate its own esoteric subtext. Kubrick is always saying things about the world. It's a work that becomes far more gratifying if I interact with it. But even then, I have to question the extent to which truly passive viewing is even possible.

Beyond that, the question of "how is it a game?" is just a language issue. Again, I call the whole works "video games" because that's the recognised term. But I consider the "game" proper to simply be a part of these whole works. Imposing no minimum obligations of any kind.

And games can absolutely get emotional stimulation out of me before I've touched the controller.




The way Evergrace 2's title screen iterates on the motif's of the first game's opening screen and entire soundtrack is so beautiful it brought tears to my eyes.

There's a lot of potential gratification to get from any given game, and I don't discriminate. Just because we call these things "video games" that doesn't mean the video game is or should be the most compelling part. And I've played many games, games don't interest me too much after a certain point. I think I probably am better at appreciating games as games than most people, but I believe that video games have always had a serious problem with the game part being the weak link. They're meant to be such an easy thing, but I really find that they aren't. Maybe that's a particular me problem because I'm so actively interested in the other parts. Those generally being why I'll pick up any given game.

Japanese games are generally much better at making good games and thoughtfully integrating them, and a lot of this obviously owes to their drawing upon arcade tradition. But in the multimedia era games can do a lot more. The best of course are good games and more. And in the West what we mostly got was retards ashamed of their "video games" looking like games, but they were also bad at every other form of media so we just got pointless void-works where every part is filler with no justifying element that could provide any serious gratification.

Broadly the arcade rules are correct and should be the general purpose model for how to build your game element unless you have some really particular idea which will work better in a whole work with everything else you're doing.

Alien & Blade Runner are in my top 3 fave movies list, (which is amusing because I hate most Ridley movies and those are the only two from him that I like.) While Alien Isolation can achieve the same emotional highs as Alien, Isolation does so through its gameplay, your interaction with its rulesets.
With the Alien movie, it does it for you but it keeps you engaged with well paced script & mystery.
I'm never going to see a game that reached Blade Runner's climax (I've played the Blade Runner game, it's shit.), because there aren't any games out there that made me care about the possible fate of a character like how Rachael does.
It's just not possible because real writers just don't write video games, unless it's a hobby of theirs.

Alien Isolation is boring capeshit "fan" work (in the worst sense possible) beyond the novelty of the 3D set-design and hiding from the alien for 15 minutes. Ridley Scott's 'Alien' is a film with far deeper conceptual roots than are obvious just taking in the first film alone. Scott is a very thoughtful, intelligent, and well educated man. He's driven by a lot of complex aesthetic and thematic associations and connections which he draws upon to give his work such rich visual character, and it's how he's able to appear to be channeling so much while not necessarily saying a lot.

Alien as a series of films was in a unique position of being handed off to artists other than its original creator, and receiving several interesting and justifiable variations and new iterations through that process. But when Scott finally came back with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant he made it clear that there was always more going on. Alien is another overengineered work with deeper roots than were visible in the original work.

Alien and Alien: Isolation are works which achieve the same thing if you like how they look on the barest visual level, you like the premise of the Alien as a spooky chitinous serial killer in space, and you like conventionally staged horror "scares". The finer points of Scott's construction, which are arguably something deeper than this "emotional" level you're talking about, aren't translated or preserved. They probably could have been, just Alien: Isolation is a very boringly written game. If you really found yourself liking Alien: Isolation then you're also probably capable of really enjoying sterile pastiche crap like 'Alien: Romulus'. But you say you only enjoy two Ridley Scott films, which suggests you're far more discerning.

Are you going to tell me that Alien: Isolation is a more emotionally moving work than 'Gladiator'?

It's how Chris Avellone is able to stand out, he's like the one game writer who seems to have actually read a book and actually understood it. I know this because I played Planescape Torment and I was impressed by some of the occult knowledge that the characters were speaking and I was laughing at Morte's reactions who imo seems to be the voice of Avellone within that setting, because all Morte does is talk shit.

I tried that game and found it very boring and difficult to like. RPG writer voice is a painful thing to me.

All of the most obviously literate and intelligent people I've come across writing video games are Japanese. Avellone just has old school gen-x 'professional' sensibilities and attitudes about everything. Eric Trautmann brain. Only instead of comic shit his instinct is to write tabletop campaign DEEP POLITICS. WOAH FUCK THE FUCDSFKGING MNERCHANT"S GUILD ARE PAYING OFF THE THIEVEESSESQA TO CONSPIRESRA AGAINST TTHE BAAROONN ASOOO FUCKINGGRWFGTEWEG GREEY AAAAAAAAAASFDSGHIQWUNBQWJBNOUVHWE

Amusingly, as much as he hated them, the old Bungie team are among the most self-evidently literate and most informed by literature guys in the history of gaming. Halo is Iain M. Banks and Roger Zelazny. Also I hear Myth was inspired by 'The Black Company'. They're informed by literature, which they obviously enjoy and take a lot from, but feel absolutely zero compulsion to drop neurotic status signals about. It's just there if you know what to look for.

Avellone has always felt very LOOK AT ME I'M WRITING THIS GAME HAS WRITING. Bungie's old games were at least as dense in ideas, probably far more so, just they're content to leave things at that. Not everything is said through "game", but instead through the total work, including game. While Avellone just writes shit boring RPG worldbooks inside his atrocious "games" (I hate CRPGs more than Obamashooters).

God, what a beautiful game. This raises further questions on your framing. If I really enjoy running across the giant barren fields listening to this and killing 500 guys who look exactly the same, is this an experience of artistic quality? I'm largely just lost in the sounds and the experience. Though I'll often go lucid and contemplate the production of something as strange as these giant flat fields.

We're having different conversations. You structure your arguments around what is art, when I believe that my initial comment about Taro, didn't say about the art. It's irrelevant to me if I don't even like the game.

Tell me, how do you feel about the "game" of Planet Escape: Torrent. Are you going to pull the Disco Elysium and tell me choose your own adventure novels are tight, compelling gameplay again?

I have a similar mindset as Electric Underground

& Icycalm (Oh how I loathe to say his name but the motherfuckers around here seem to love him, so I have to put up with him lol. And peeps magically forget that he's the one who started shit with me.)
in that all three of us are much older & view arcade game design, as gaming at its purest form.
This vid is interesting

because he's elucidating about the arcade merit of Demon's Souls which I never noticed
until he pointed it out, but it also shows to me what that's actually one of the only Souls games that I like. I didn't notice that it's due to its arcade sensibilities.

I won't watch these, but I've tortured myself with Electric Underground before. I wrote an angry textwall under one of his videos, let me find it.



I can be found somewhere under this video, which I found offensively stupid. But the thing has almost 5000 comments now, so I suppose I might be lost to time there since youtube is unsearchable garbage.

Yes, the souls games are perfectly fun as games. Very solid in construct, robust input-reaction consistency. Link to the Past made me think a lot of the Souls games. But I don't really know what "arcade" means beyond a certain point, beyond "game which is built to be a very sensible and robust challenge enjoyable for its own sake". If you just like smashing yourself against a contrived challenge you can probably enjoy every single Armored Core and Souls game. But of course I enjoy all of From's games. Even the ones which fail as games. And in their best games I still enjoy those older and weirder From "art" parts.



'Armored Core' contains a lot of work from the same composer who worked on the 'Evergrace' games, and he's doing a lot of the same things here. Extremely distorted vocal samples, heavy repetition and motifs. Kind of affected 'indigenous' sounds and impressions.




And visual motifs and broad aesthetic fascinations that existed in From's work in Evergrace return far more elaborately realised in Elden Ring.

There is so much to appreciate here. And I think From want us to appreciate it all. Summons basically function as a "win" button in boss fights. I don't think they wanted us bogged down. The arcade robust responsiveness is there, but you're also free to play the very not-arcade multiplayer game (or arguably more arcade than has existed since arcades) and have player-2 win everything hard for you.

You sound like one of those PS1 or PS2 era kids (this would include xbox, gaycube, etc.), so your idea of what a game is was shaped from that environment. To where attention to the ruleset takes a back seat to the art assets, when said art assets are actually part of a different medium. They can combine together to create a video game but if not synergized, well most people will just clip the movie section of the game and then ignore the game. That's why both of them need to work in tandem as a cohesive whole.

They're not a part of a different medium, because I'm encountering them in video games. They're a part of this one.

You would be correct if you said that I primarily encountered video games as multimedia rather than as games, but I don't think that owes to formative experiences. The first games I played were on a Nintendo 64, and these were games loaded with game stuff. But I just always gravitated towards messing with games, exploring them, and just taking in everything they were doing. When I got online you'd never find anybody saying anything but that games were about gameplay and disregard for gameplay was destroying everything.

You could say the N64 was already compromised, that its games weren't primarily ruleset driven, and that's largely true. It's not like space invaders. I can just disregard the game and not be kicked out of it for my impudence. But that's also true of the 'Souls' games, and is how I enjoyed them.

If I'm missing something essential you can tell me. I'd really rather not watch another 'Digital Underground' video but I will if I really have to.