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.
[quote]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.[/quote]
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.
[quote]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.[/quote]
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.
[quote]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 [i]was[/i] 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.[/quote]
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.
[quote]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.[/quote]
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.)
[quote]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. [/quote]
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.
[quote] 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?[/quote]
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, [quote]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.[/quote]
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.
[quote]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.
[/quote]
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.
