Killer7 SINdicate

[Jack]

This was originally posted at Nintendomination, but I figured the content of this part of the post did a decent job of explaining the differences in writing between Japanese & Western games. Japanese games generally follow a particular world view of a planet that makes zero logical sense, as the heroes attempt to break away from the world's oppressive systems, to forge destinies of their own volition. Many Westerners lampoon this writing style as "God is Evul!" "Kill God!" Which imo, is an inaccurate portrayal of Japanese writing. Japanese writing is mostly Buddhist-based, but some of them will dress it up with gnostic-leaning due to how similar both perspectives are.

Western writing follows a much more materialist perspective, when explaining away a world that makes zero sense by trying to make sense out of the nonsense through 'scientific' means. The end result is that the endings of Western games generally depict Man becoming One with machine to transcend humanity.
If Japanese games follow a heavily inspired Gnostic or Buddhist perspective, then the Western game is generally written from a Transhumanist & nihilistic-lens.

The typical videogame Western ending, usually looks similar to Far Cry 5's ending,

where it abruptly ends, with a philosophical one liner which is supposed to be thought-provoking, but it's actually just lazy writing and it doesn't conclude a single dispute from the entire game. It's basically real life, in the form of a videogame. Oh Joy! Some of us play videogames as escapism from real life, not to be reminded that real life is populated with shitty people, doing shitty things.

Back to the quote of yours that I deleted while deleting parts of the post that was about me.

In the games, they portray Lucifer as some kind of Sophia figure who only wishes for humanity to seek out wisdom & knowledge without the interference of demons & angels.

To be completely fair, the freedom that Lucifer promises in the Megaten games always seems to be a façade of freedom where you actually think yourself free because you’re “rebelling”, but you’re actually in bondage due to how your “rebellion” is happening under the terms of your master who only wished to use you as a pawn to wage war on a different master, lol. (Much like BLM/Antifa are actually empowering the state, by believing themselves free thinking rebels. When in reality Antifa are straight up agents operating for Blackrock.)

True freedom is usually achieved through a hero of humanity, Christ figure like the the big guy from Strange Journey. The “Chaos” endings are only chaotic in the eyes of humanity, where they stop perceiving the order of Yahweh and interpret that as “Chaos”, but it’s actually controlled chaos under the thumb of Lucifer which he only enacts in order to weaken his enemy.

I agree to an extent, but Shin Megatard 5's True ending clearly shows that they've combined as one, the Lucifer & the True Neutral Human endings. (no christ figure, unless you count Lucifer as one, I guess. It ain't no Jesus though.) They pretty much kick the badass Kuzunoha Raido lookalike to the curve just so they can suck Luci's dick & tits for the ending lol. As I've said before, Luci is basically the Goddess Sophia with how he's typically portrayed in SMT.


The retards who currently write SMT, clearly don't know what the fuck they're doing.
Previous SMTs, at least the original trilogy are all mostly faithful to the doctrines, dogma, mythos & rituals that these games are influenced around. Even down to the point where demons are interacted with via digital computer programs as reference to a contract by God which forbade demons the ability to directly interact with humans through the flesh.
The oldschool SMT games, did a lot of research. SMT5 just does whatever the fuck they think looks cool. So the story doesn't really hold up when compared to previous installments.

Fuck mang even Strange Journey seems to be referencing Admiral Byrd's travels into Antarctica which for him culminated in nukes being launched into space, to see if they could explode the "firmament".
SJ never made direct mention to the firmament, but SMT4 did.
https://megamitensei.fandom.com/wiki/Great_Cataclysm
Nukes being launched toward the "firmament" is an actual event that happened during the 1900s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fishbowl
(Wiki of course, makes zero mention of the firmament, which is the only reason why they fired nukes into the sky.)
https://medium.com/the-weird-closet/the ... 69a62264fc
The funny thing is, if this happened? Then how is outer space travel even possible if we can't even get past or explode the firmament? I'm only relating this within the context of a Shin Megatard game. I will not bother to elaborate in public, what I think it means or what SMT may be referring to.


It's humorous how a game like Persona, which used to be about occultism, also has a lot of plots (P1, P2 IS & P2EP anyway) which revolve around government cover ups.
It's fucking funny just how deep video games used to be when I was a kid. Now granted, it's just Japanese games that were deep, for the most part. Some Western games such as Deus Ex are about the same subject matter, but DX uses a far more American-Libertarian Science Fiction Materialist means to define & explain away the subjects. I feel that Jap games are far more accurate, because Jap games generally try to reference old world belief systems, as dogma that's still practiced by Elites.

For one thing, Jap games rarely end with you plugging-in & erasing your entire identity into a fucking computer to be one with a Communist Utopia pushed forth through the Technological Singularity as the good ending.

That was the 'best' ending for both Deux Ex 1, & Deus Ex Invisible War. (The other two aren't even worth talking about. None of them are that philosophically deep.)
Compare that with Japanese games, where the ending is generally depicted as the humans freeing themselves from the prison planet free from death cult Gods who do not deserve their respect.




I actually tear up a bit when I play through some of these Jap games. The Western equivalent of these types of stories, just tell me that the writers themselves, don't really know what they're even fucking writing about to begin with because The Answer to their Problem, is always unsatisfactory. Western video games always end with trading one slave morality for another form of oppression, and they parade it around as a moral virtue. AYY LMAO!

DX1's true ending was kinda cool though.

It's somewhat portrayed as a Christ-like figure Awakening. I still consider it as bad though, because you're replacing human spirituality with machines. DX2 showed, that JC Denton is just a Benevolent Oppressor.
I only link to DX games coz every other Western game I can think of just as shitty ass Cliffhanger endings like the Legacy of Kain series. Or they jsut have generic endings where the villains die like Abe's Oddysey. (Which is about the same exact themes as DX, Xenogears/Blade & Shin Megami Tensei)
Edit:
Planescape Torment's Ending.

Again I'm not a fan. You're basically repenting for the sins of your past life.

Legacy of Kain's ending has potential, but it basically ends right where a game like Xenogears/Xenoblade or Shin Megami Tensei would begin.


Seriously, I think a lot of Jap games just whoop the shit out of Western writing for the most part because Jap games actually build up to the ending and they almost always end on a high note. Showing that they fully understood the conflict that they were writing about, and not huffing a bunch of hot air up their assholes, which is what Western video game writing often feels like to me.

I can go on forever listing a bunch of Jap games that successfully elaborate & conclude upon the dilemmas that their games were chronicled around. For Western games, I can only think of Deux Ex & Planescape Torment of doing something similar but the conclusions are not satisfying at all. It's as if they don't even give a shit about writing an ending.


Western games are known worldwide for having much better writing than Japanese gaming, but imo Western just have better written rhetoric. The substance is generally lacking, for which they make up for, by being much more verbose while not really saying anything substantial.

With Western games, I often find that the journey is far better than the end destination.
I used to accept that, but after putting up with nearly 2 decades worth of shitty ass Western gaming endings where the journey is supposedly the entire point. I've just about had it, because if they can't be bothered to come up with a proper ending, then why the fuck should I bother buying or playing their games?

About the best ending I could think of, from a Western game is Mass Effect 2, but even that's just a cliffhanger.

(to a fucking terrible game and an even worst ending, Mass Effect 3.)
I'm struggling to come up with a single Western game that has an ending that's even at Jap gamings' level.
Notice how I don't even bother to list endings from the Metal Gear Solid series or Resident Evil 2 classic and what not. Of course those games had great endings, but my point is that MGS-caliber endings are quite common within Japanese video games.
Fuck I could go on forever just randomly listing and name dropping random Jap games and every single one of them has a conclusive ending that you can tell was being built upon throughout the entire narrative.



TLDR: Japanese games show to you the philosophy that the game is built around by having the characters live out their struggles. Fei Fong Wong & Aya Brea from Xenogears & parasite Eve are solid examples of such.
Western games generally just talk about their philosophy through talking heads. Chris Avellone has this writing style and he does it every single fucking time, lol. (Planescape Torment, Knights of the Republic 2, Fallout New Vegas, etc.)



Kax posted this lady before and what I found amusing is that the reason why she loves video games are for the story. Sure she's an avid reader of novels, but she prefers gaming because it feels as if she's living out what she's reading rather than just imagining it like with a book.


Yet when you look at the games that she loves for the story, they're all Japanese games. And it's not even the typical Jap shit like Metal Gear Solid or Resident Evil. She goes in deep with the Jrpgs. (Which do have deeper plots than most. Classic Persona is one of them.)
Some of the games she plays for the story, I've never even played before such as Neptunia, which I always thought was a hentai game but she fucking loves Neptunia's story & plot.

[AngelheadedHipster]

I rather liked Bloodborne. The way it depicted the downfall of a society felt like a more sophisticated version of what the Bioshock games are doing. The first Bioshock's approach to the collapse of a utopian city had that very video gamey approach to it, where there was one important man who basically single handedly created the city of Rapture and the philosophical foundation it was built on until he became corrupted by another single man who just wasn't willing to play by the rules. It did its best in trying to be a story about a place, but in the end, there just had to be a guy you get to shoot in the face and a bunch of children you get to save and so on. It fell short of its potential. And that's saying nothing about Infinite, which devolved into complete nonsense, in addition to just being a rubbish game.

Bloodborne takes a similar setup, you got the protagonist who lives through the downfall of a city and gets to learn about its history and why exactly it turned out the way it did. You don't interact much with the people who created Yharnam and made it what it is, but as you explore it with only a very vague personal goal in mind, you learn about all the different people and factions and all their personal agendas and the sinister things they did to realize them. It creates this tangled web of mad science experiments and occult rituals. The way it all started off with a group of scholars seeking transcedence who then fashioned themselves a church to assume control over a society to experiment on its citizens. And how that church eventually split into different factions like the Choir or the School of Mensis, the latter of which is this secretive sect that abducts people at night to utilize them in their rituals. In addition to that, there are the eldritch gods themselves who are suggested to have their own feuds and plans which are incomprehensible to mere mortals, adding a sense of "as above, so below". Almost literally, looking how the different realities are shown to be layered on top of each other. You get what starts off like a highly cliché gothic horror themed setting, unfolding into into a centuries long history of feuding secret societies, mad science experiments and communion with incomprehensible godlike entities. The game decided to keep the actual character motivation practically to a minimum, outside of having the protagonist look for something or someone referred to as "paleblood", so it really manages to be a story about a place more than a story about people.

[Deep]

I did beat Disco Elysium for the second time, and I get quite a bit more out of the game, exploring different parts of the world and getting new quests and such. I didn't made my communist part (unfortunately) by the end of the game, but oh well, at least I talked to the bug. Generally, I do like the overall game, but there are few gripes about it with me, that I cannot withstand. First one - is the last story part with conclusion. As if five writiers didn't knew better how even end story after the big fight and just made up some ending from leftovers. I can't imagine that this is was their initial endresult for player to find out. With a detective story like that, having ending like that is just...doesn't feel right to me. Some dumbasses defend it as if "in real life it could've happened"-bullshit, which I don't buy at all. Having such a ktp-eqsue story, just to throw it all away. But that doesn't matter now. Another gripe is that role-play isn't as robust as you'd think. In most of dialogue options you can't pick what you want. Instead is just what game thinks of what main hero would think at the current moment, which is not what player might be thinking at the moment. With such things, its doesn't really matter what route you'll pick to upgrade at all, or what thoughts to explore, since it most of the time would lead to the same 4 options that you'd had before. You can save-scum all of the dice rolls with bunch of clothers and drugs, so it's pretty much the same for all of the players.

Other than that, game leaves a good impression. I think that 90% of the fun is just deep voice over of hero's thoughts. And exploring the world in the game, which is pretty much the same to what I have outside of my window irl.

P.S. I didn't know where to post, so I'll just leave it here. I guess it fits the topic.

[anthony]

I think I might be the only white person who understood Silent Hill. And by that I mean 1 and 3, which are the only ones which seem meaningfully connected as one story. Going to recycle some stuff I wrote on /v/ here to explain. Then I'll go into some more general stuff on "writing" and story quality.

Silent Hill reading

I take Silent Hill to be a story mostly inspired by Stephen King and Brian De Palma, who both made a lot of work about suppressed and brutalised youthful vitality violently reacting against society. The first game is kind of like Carrie from the point of view of that one sympathetic teacher who tries to help. Silent Hill is a backwards shithole place full of backward narrow minded assholes, and Alessa's potentially far more radiant and sensitive self suffered badly for this. First rejected and spurned and then mercilessly tortured and instrumentalised by her peers and those with power over her who were meant to be her guardians, she's a potentially exceptional human being totally crushed and not allowed to flourish at all by her surroundings.

By some freak twist of nature she's able to will herself into a second chance at life, in which she's rescued by a passing good samaritan Harry, who respects what's best in her and is able to provide an environment in which she's apparently able to start becoming what she could have been. Then she gets her funny sense of incompleteness and an urge to go to Silent Hill, where, now empowered by Harry's support, she's able to turn things around and attempt to liberate herself from the spiritual prison that Silent Hill and its people were to her original incarnation.

Harry doesn't really get what's going on but of all the places he could go in his attempt to rescue her he finds himself fighting through a school and a hospital. The whole town was spiritually an evil hellscape hostile to the human soul, but these places were focuses. Places where ones human nature will come under the most focused assault. They're natural focuses in these kinds of stories. The school in Carrie, doctors and hospitals in The Fury and Akira, etc.

Silent Hill is a game about an evil closed system society that's hostile to the human spirit having its cycle broken by positive intervention from outside. Harry and Cybil, a father and a good cop, break into this town system and disrupt the activities of the old corrupt guardians, a religious authority figure and a doctor, who were deliberately cultivating misery for self-serving ends.

We blast through institutions of control and repression and finally tear the whole damn town apart to find Alessa/Cheryl and shoot the town's cursed bullshit project in its face to end the madness. It's too late for Alessa, but in victory over the old system there's at least the possibility for new life to new flourish without their poisonous intervention. Alessa hands Harry Cheryl before finally being allowed to die.

I think from this understanding of Silent Hill 1 it's easier to appreciate Silent Hill 3. If Silent Hill is a bad society that harms the humanity of its finest members, then Harry's intervention and raising of Heather is like a test. Silent Hill turned Alessa into maimed lobotomy patient human battery for their evil schemes. At the start of SH3 after 17 or so years of his influence Heather by contrast looks like a happy and flourishing teenage girl. She's genuinely and healthily very fond of Harry, also independent and well adjusted. Her dress and manners suggest confidence, she doesn't appear to lean into conformity or to be a maladjusted weirdo prude or anything.

The sudden introduction of Silent Hill into her life is a kind of third chance for her soul. Last time she was moulded by it, hobbled out the gate, never really stood a chance. But now she's a product of a supportive and open upbringing, a genuinely strong and independent person capable of standing on her own. The machinations of silent hill force her to face horror, pain, grief, spiritual and psychological manipulation, but Harry's win over the town is a lasting one. Just by being good to her he's raised the kind of person who's open and strong and clever enough to stand up to everything the town throws at her and come out on top. She faces the painful truth of her past, confronts and overcomes those who would use and abuse her, successfully mourns and emotionally processes her experiences and comes out the other end the same fundamentally good, open and happy person she was going in.

The game's tone and presentation is rather dark, but it ultimately takes an optimistic view. Human potential is going to keep surfacing, and the world can't crush every flower. Japan loves these stories, and America used to before its spirit got so broken it couldn't even imagine better worlds anymore.

Silent Hill's western reception interests me because it allegedly has so many fans, but all of this just bounces off. I've never seen anybody point out the obvious cultural influences (which are mostly American), any talk of what the game has to say about character and environment, you ask the average Silent Hill "fan" what these games are about and they'll say it's about an evil town that sends you to the twilight zone and there's also a cult. No appreciation for any deeper intentions possible. These people can't even conceive of the possibility of artistic intention. Everything is an accident, or random cool or stupid shit thrown together for the hell of it. People who call themselves Silent Hill fans get mad at me when I tell them what I think the games are about. Not in a "fuck you it's not this it's actually about..." way, they're just mad I'm saying it could be about anything but the most superficial reading possible.

Video game audiences are for the most part wilfully ignorant and incurious people who see the point of video games as being a low engagement form of media lacking depth. It's some kind of sick, psychotic delusion that one could actually discern intention, representation, a communicated understanding of the world by thinking about what we're presented with. To me loving video games, or art, or Silent Hill, naturally entails a desire to know it better. To think about it and fully appreciate the richness of its creation. This was a deliberately constructed work top to bottom.

This is quite arguably less of a "gamer" problem and more of a general human quality problem. Art can be an aesthetic high, or an anaesthetic low. I want to get as much experience as possible from the things I engage with, while many others want enough to palliate themselves against the shitness of their lives, or just to serve as idle and novel distractions in lives defined by placid flatness. The insult in looking deeper I think, is implicitly telling someone they're a dullard practicing the aesthetic equivalent to hammering in nails with microscopes.

The reason I say all of this is that I believe that good writing, or storytelling, is actually quite common in video games. And I agree with what has been written in the thread so far that most games that aspire to simply be well written are boring empty crap (Planescape, pretty much every western AAA title made since 2008, etc) and that Japanese games work because they're a complete understanding of the world expressed through writing, visual and sound direction, played engagement, the whole picture. The problem I see is the fundamental problem of western society, that it's de facto illegal to form a coherent and complete picture of the world because any attempt at doing so will touch on too many things we've come to consider taboo. The true nature of violence, power, survival, quality, hierarchy, it's all off limits. How is anybody meant to create or end any kind of satisfying story with this in mind? It figures that the default western ending is some vague quote and a general suggestion of "well isn't that all fucked, and then life just goes on... Aren't we profound? Also trans rights."

One is only allowed to believe and affirm that the world is a meaningless jumble of chaos... and we're also tyrannised by nonsensical communist taboos which only serve to promote human wretchedness and fence off and forbid all fields of human activity which have the potential to go anywhere interesting because of the danger that human vitality learning to assert itself again would pose to the kind of person who's into communism.

I don't think I'm ranting here. This I think is the key. Japanese games are interesting and "well written" because they reflect worldviews untainted by our society's dominant anti-values. I'll come back to this thread to post some examples of how so many games I consider "well written" are affirming values and ideas which wouldn't be tolerated if our guardians of culture were smart enough to see what they're doing.

[Iwazaru]

Silent Hill's western reception interests me because it allegedly has so many fans, but all of this just bounces off. I've never seen anybody point out the obvious cultural influences (which are mostly American), any talk of what the game has to say about character and environment, you ask the average Silent Hill "fan" what these games are about and they'll say it's about an evil town that sends you to the twilight zone and there's also a cult. No appreciation for any deeper intentions possible. These people can't even conceive of the possibility of artistic intention. Everything is an accident, or random cool or stupid shit thrown together for the hell of it. People who call themselves Silent Hill fans get mad at me when I tell them what I think the games are about. Not in a "fuck you it's not this it's actually about..." way, they're just mad I'm saying it could be about anything but the most superficial reading possible.

I guess russian fans faired pretty good in this context. For example, SilentPyramid's analysis texts were perhaps cringey, but she always payed attention to everything including official info from lost memories book and interviews.

http://forbidden-siren.ru/guides/SH_PA_english.rar

Though somebody from this forum criticized it for "teh mechanics of the setting" approach, which i never had any problems with cause its one of steps in well-made world building.

Anyway, as someone who "lived through" SH games in mid2000s, nowodays i try to STAY AWAY from any discussions, theories, whatever about the series, because 99% of that just leads to facepalm at best.

[anthony]

I guess russian fans faired pretty good in this context. For example, SilentPyramid's analysis texts were perhaps cringey, but she always payed attention to everything including official info from lost memories book and interviews.

http://forbidden-siren.ru/guides/SH_PA_english.rar

Though somebody from this forum criticized it for "teh mechanics of the setting" approach, which i never had any problems with cause its one of steps in well-made world building.

Anyway, as someone who "lived through" SH games in mid2000s, nowodays i try to STAY AWAY from any discussions, theories, whatever about the series, because 99% of that just leads to facepalm at best.

I'm inclined to agree that this isn't particularly good, even if some good and impressive work went into it. Lots of attention to symbols used and the history of them and associated concepts and so on. But this treatment basically reduces Silent Hill to a D&D setting. I don't really see any appreciation of artistic intent in this. This is a very autistic kind of analysis. There's no real insight to be gained here that will enrich the experience of Silent Hill. It's basically a description of everything in the game top to bottom. It's an encyclopedia of things which mostly aren't real. Reading this one could get the impression that Silent Hill was formed by someone playing mad libs. Seen at this level nothing really means anything. It's all just accrued novelty and set dressing for generic adventure stuff.

World building has always disgusted me because it's basically toy-fiction. In the past good writers have generated worlds from the seeds of ideas they wanted to express and imagine realised. John Lange spends a lot of time explaining the politics and social structure of Gor because he wants you to contemplate the Nietzschean principles this society works on. I don't think he would understand the point of building a world just for stuff to happen within it. If you want to write about swordfights just do it. The point of fake politics is to explore real ideas. Jack Vance describes certain bits and pieces of his Dying Earth world in great detail, but never for the sake of completing a total coherent picture. It's simply aesthetic exercise. It's because he has ideas which are cool and fascinating which he wants to play out. The Dying Earth isn't a puzzle to be solved, it's an excuse to throw around fantastical concepts and language.

The abomination that is D&D world building I think grew out of a cargo culting of the particulars of worlds built by men like Vance and Lange. Some people the ideas and artistry are lost on them, or they simply don't care, but they become fascinated with the minutiae of the mechanical workings of things which aren't real. That's basically what I see happening here. Someone memorising the name of every city in Gor without wondering why someone would create Gor. Someone working out the Magic System of Dying Earth with no regard for Vance's gift for language or adventure.

I frankly can't understand why anybody would give a shit about Silent Hill if not for the aesthetics (it looks and sounds excellent and unique) or the human perspective expressed within it (one which has been successful many times in the past, and even since). Without these elements we get the document linked above. An encyclopedia of things which aren't real.

[Isness]

I think videogames open the door for a more "suggestive" kind of worldbuilding than popular fantasy and sci-fi are able of. I think most vidya that is praised over the writing are praised, precisely, for the worldbuilding: Deus Ex, arguably the least controversial choice of "well written game", is a great example of this. But left to the story alone, I don't think many would care, vidya is not good for narrative in my opinion but it can be very good precisely for this. You can merely "stumble" into the details of the world as would happen in real life, you can take it through many different ways other than being explained to you, and you don't have to be sit down and talked to by the author.

Videogames have rendered obsolete most of genre fiction in literature, as they have rendered action movies obsolete.