"Inclusivity is an ongoing education for everyone, and nothing is set in stone." - Tim Schafer
Fun fact: God of War is on sale right now, but the SJWs are trying to stop it!
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.
Inoki Stomps Fools! Va11 Hall-a Faggot: He's such a Chad. I bet he fucks an Asian bitch every night. CapN Jack: Who the fuk These moFuggaz? :lol:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
wow.. we're sky high.. that shark we just jumped over is tiny.. we're so high right now (c)
Iwazaru wrote: ↑Sat Jul 30, 2022 11:38 am
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.
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.
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.
anthony wrote: ↑Sat Jul 30, 2022 8:54 am
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.
Yeah the cult aspect of Silent Hill is often overlooked within the West. They prefer to think of Silent Hill as a Christian Purgatory of sorts but the concept of Purgatory is Cathloic and even then the games don't even resemble Catholic Purgatory. It looks more like a David Lynch film. Dante's Inferno the videogame as edgy as it is, feels much more like Catholic purgatory to me. He's actually fighting through the depths of it and the many layers of purgatory as if it were an actual place. (Like how it's depicted in Doom 3.) SH2 fans think of purgatory as metaphorical and far more specific to psychological disorders rather than to sins. Dante's Inferno isn't even Christian canon lol.
SH's direction style is pure 90s style Gothic Industrial edge and David Lynch's movies have some of the rawest industrial sounds & imagery depicted in film.
What's ironic is that they overlook the Cult aspect because to most Westerners, when they think of cults they can only imagine Christian style doomsday cults (They do this specific style of cult in every game that has a cult. Most recent one I came across was Far Cry 5.) rather than one that functions as a small government that completely controls your entire life. The modern day SJW Woke dogma is the closest to this and it's recently came to light that the USA government actually was funding LGBT and Transgender entertainment in random 3rd world countries to further push a mindset that's not even the mainstream in the USA. USA is still a Blue Collar majority culture, it's just all of the Corpos are anti-Blue Collar and generally only push the values of the Coastal Elitist states.
It's just weird to me how SH's Cult is often ignored or viewed as a story device written for primitive minds when at the same time they like to think of SH as a Psychological horror derived from Christian purgatory.
If you notice, it's really only the Western made Silent Hill games that focus on armchair psychological philosophy.
IMO The Forbidden Siren games are basically an unofficial continuation of Silent Hill 1 and they're just as experimental as the original & have the same vibe as the original SH game.
It really makes me wonder why Konami skipped Silent Hill 1 (when SH1 is the one that sold the most) and remaked Silent Hill 2 instead but it's only fitting that SH2 remake was remade with all of its soul drained out because the internet popularity of SH2 mostly consists of people who have never played a Silent Hill game in their life. They only watch some cringe ass youtubers like Super Eyepatch Wolf or whatever and since he's a popular internet nerd, the other nerds latch on to what he says even though he constantly misunderstands (like Shenmue) most of the media that he reviews lol.
I highly doubt that Bloober team could successfully imitate the original SH anyway, which was a far more Japanese take on Western horror. They can successfully pantomime something that resembles SH2 to the naked eye or the tourist eye
because modern-day SH2 fans have never played SH2 before.
I see it happen all the time and it's now happening to Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, because most people have never played the original Ninja Gaiden 2. What modern fans label as 'Nostalgia' makes no sense because it's a fact that the original NG2 was much more aggressive and had way more enemies on screen and it really was represented as a full-scale war.
How does any of that imply nostalgia when it clearly shows that NG2 & NG2 Sigma have clearly different focuses and NG2 Black is just Sigma 2 modernized but with explicit gore to give it some superficial similarity to the original game.
This is the result of gaming not truly being viewed as an art, but as nothing more than a product.
I wouldn't have a problem with that but fans of these modern remakes like to portray themselves as purveyors of high art
or some other pretentious bullshit when the reality is that they couldn't care less about art since they never seem to give a shit when a Corpo skinwalks a classic game & rip out all of its soul so it can be mass marketed to modern audiences. That sounds far more like the definition of selling out in my opinion but what more could be expected when modern celebs are constantly shilling product 24/7. Gone are the days of real artists formerly known as Prince who thought of his art as paramount and never allowed anyone or any corpo to recycle, mass produce or tarnish his work.
He was a classic style music artist in that he produced albums that told an entire story using each of the songs as chapters. You don't see music artists like that these days, at least not many at his skill level anyway. Modern artists generally just make 2 or 3 singles and then fill the rest of the album with mindless generic filler and even the singles themselves usually have no substance are basically a catchy jingle with lyrics that do nothing but remind you to consume, and don't forget to consume!
Which sure, such a celeb wouldn't exist in the modern era. The fact of the matter is, a figure like Prince would be an extremely divisive figure, almost as divisive as Trump because modern culture is more about appeals to the consensus, and the consensus is an inoffensive never-ending flood of "it wasn't good, it wasn't bad, it just exists" products, mass produced at bi-yearly intervals to constantly drip-feed you with that sugar high that modern consumers so desire.
It's crazy to me how modern-day morals are shaped by whatever aligns with Corpos or is advantageous to Corpo elites.
Corpos did a damn fine job of turning movies & gaming into their own sectarian religions because I recall just how annoying the audience was for Silent Hill 2 remake, where you were treated as if you were an heretical apostate because you weren't eating the over priced $70 default factory setting asset flip.
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.
Modern USA lacks Principality and the closest that they have to a Principality figure is Trump, so their values tend to clash between those who are offended by his New Yorker tone (these people call themselves Liberals), and those who impotently try to imitate his brashness (these people call themselves Conservatives. American Liberals & Conservatives are neither Liberal or Conservative. They're some kind of fucked mix of Progressive & Libertarian & Trump is only nominally Conservative because he's trying to bring the world back to the 90s back when the USA & Japan were the only two countries who practically ruled over everyone through strong soft power.) but don't understand that he's implementing a political strategy by bullying the crap out of politician nerds, which works in his favor because Politics is just Hollywood for ugly people. So it makes sense that a reality show host who's tangibly related to Hollywood could easily bulldoze over wannabe Hollywood who have losers like Mitch McConnel or Nancy Pelosi as the motherfuckers who have never went away since the 80s in place of Hollywood's Tom Cruise or Jennifer Connelly who have been Hollywood mainstays since the 1980s. At least in Hollywood's favor, Jenny is still pretty & Tom Cruise still makes good action movies.
USA during its height of media domination (1900s - early 2000s) still had many writers who wrote about the old world. The world that existed prior to WW2, and they were still writing about that world as late as the 1990s. 2000s was a transition phase which mostly just recreated late 90s counter culture or in the case of The Sopranos it actually started in the late 90s but ended during the late 2000s transition phase into our current world.
What you'll notice about writing from pre 2010 is how the nostalgia often revolved around eras of civilization before it reached its decline whereas modern nostalgia revolves around the plastic entertainment that Millennials consumed during the 80s & 90s back when they were children. Nostalgia has always been prominent within entertainment but nostalgia used to revolve around how humans used to live. (Much of the Mafia genre is nothing but nostalgia for an era back when Italians weren't legitimized as part of the American corpo government yet.)
It wasn't until the 2010s that we entered bizarro world or clown world where writing began to revolve around a Millennial perception of the 1940s & 1950s (that they've only experienced through 1980s entertainment.) and WW2 itself as the original sin, and it being used as the origin of the modern world because writing is now headlined by Millennials who unlike their Boomer & Gen X counterparts, have basically lived their entire lives doing nothing but consume content so they do nothing but recreate the content from the 1980s, but they do so disrespectfully by trying to deconstruct everything when they don't even understand what they're trying to deconstruct. (It's worse now in the 2020s, because Millennials have finally gotten around to remaking games by deconstructing it.)
Millennials recreate classic content exactly like how a Corpo would and strip out the soul of the entertainment that they consumed by trying to make games or movies filled with nothing but the content that they enjoy so modern entertainment feels as if it's 100% made out of sugar which in turn dumbs the story down to a level that man-children can enjoy but only man-children love it. (even actual kids think modern 30-40 yr old Millennial goyslop is cringe.)
Corpos love this recent writing style because it takes no effort to recreate. You don't have to understand the psychological mindset of the character, you simply have to copy the archetypes but you make it 'different' by subverting it.
Naturally the original audiences of the movie or gaming ip would be upset by this because Archetypes are basically Gods and you don't subvert gods. You can try but people as whole realize that something feels off about it because it no longer relates to human experience. What modern entertainment is, is big budget fan fiction written by fans for the fans but ironically it seems that fans generally have the most surface value comprehension of the films & games that they claimed to be fans of.
I notice this a lot with Final Fantasy. The FF games used to revolve around Civilizational Historical Resets based off of real world history with FF6's War of the Magi & FF7's Meteor & (the monsters called https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/We ... _creature) ) Weapons being the most upfront depictions of what the FF games used to be about (FF7 Meteor & Weapon are referencing a real life historical pattern where an outsider planet or satellite invades our world which for some reason causes the appearance sky beasts called The Phoenix that have often been described as Dragons who destroy any or all of society that get in the way but are really just trying to counter the outsider entity.) , but now in days FF is partly just a bunch of old Jap dudes trying to parade around early 2000s Japanese pop culture that not even the Japanese give a shit about anymore (they're more into K-pop), and fan fiction written for the fans which results in Final Fantasy 7 remakes looking more like a tsundere gay romance between Sephiroth & Cloud when in the original games the gay undertones were nearly non-existent and Sephiroth was written more like a metaphorical dragon or (Moby Dick) whale that he must slay to achieve his full sense of self.
USA used to be the best at writing about the unlimited potential of humans. Part of the problem is that most good writers just base their fiction off of their real world experiences, but modern millennial writers don't really have any experiences that don't involve them posting at 4chan or Reddit. Modern Millennials generally write about how Humans are the real monsters and how the world would be much better without humans. (It's a reflection of Millennial self-loathing.)
Borderlands is a classic example of Millennial Plebbit writing. Every Saints Row after 2 is too. I tried replaying Saints Row the Turd but it's extremely cringe because you can clearly see from the writing that it's still half way stuck in between the Edgy offend everybody Gen X / Old Millennial late 90s early 2000s humor and the modern day Core Young Millennial Safe Edgy Reddit style lolsorandumb brand of writing. Saints Row 4 went 90/10 towards the modernized Safe Edgy direction. That 10% of non-reddit is that Saints Row 4 still pretended to be somewhat of an ode to gangsta culture.
The Yakuza Like a Dragon games have went full blown Reddit too but it handles it a bit better. (They even cast the lead character with a popular Plebbit youtube celeb Yeonyay who can't act worth shit. That's def a localization thing since Sega does the same thing in Japan but with their own localized e-celebs & vtubers.)
In the latest game Infinite Wealth, nearly the entire game is goofy redditor bullshit but it still pays tribute to the Jap underworld culture that it always revolved around, it's just to modern Western ears it sounds woke because there's a random Korean woman who took over a segment of both the Korean & Chinese underworld of Yokohama who's also bossing around & stomping on an underling named Utamaru, whom imo is based off of the real world's Utamaru from the Japanese rap group called Rhymester. It looks exactly like him, but he's just comic relief in the game. In real life, he's a more political type of mc and past Yakuza games featured the music of his lead mc bandmate Mummy D.
What I'm getting at is that although Yakuza games no longer feature the Japan underworld subcultures as prominently as it once did (With Yakuza 6 being the one that melded all of them into a single game & even included Takeshi Kitano & Anri Okita who was arguably the most popular pornstar of her era.) the games still references the culture but they do it in a nuetered way that doesn't clash with Reddit's faggy American values. (Of which I'd argue aren't even American but an American Leftist's perception of the progressive utopia that they think Europe is.) It's also true that women within the underworld have stepped up in recent years and have taken over large aspects of the Jap underworld culture & they control it like a King, similar to how Seonhee is depicted, because they do a much better job at appealing to men than jap men did. It's like the opposite of what the West does where in the West, they've completely hijacked traditionally male entertainment to conform more with female sensibilities & what they call LGBT culture.
In Japan, it's simply women who understand how to appeal to men (the dominant market) through the use of female sexual domination & feminine allure that attracts men to the product.
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.
At least that's better than what passes for video game conversation now, where everything revolves around 'media literacy' but the literate part in media literacy is really just a pretentious way of saying "I fucking made it all up."
I think the Xenoblade games are fairly deep but I can't actually talk about those games to anybody because the majority of the English-speaking fanbase views it as some kind of Tranny metaphor which doesn't even exist inside of the games. It's usually just the Western voice actors or youtube celebs reading into things that aren't even present within the actual game.
This ends up creating a divide with the 'fans' and the creator of said products to the point where the creators are forced to make a product based off of the internet fanbase's fiction.
Modern day Resident Evil is a result of that but it's one of the more successful cases because the change to a more serious gritty tone fully alligns with how serious millennials view themselves. It's always been something that I found amusing about fans of video game horror. They seem to always portray horror as if it were meant to be an intellectual genre of fiction so they'll often say shit that makes no sense to horror fans, such as "How can I take a horror seriously if half the women are naked?" I see this comment a lot within gaming horror fanbases, most notably reddit & youtube.
It makes no sense to me because the fans of horror movies are much less full of themselves and are self aware that horror is trashy irreverent entertainment.
Although I have noticed that even horror movies have started to censor themselves to appease the so-called internet masses (are they really the masses when internet only shows you the opinions of Reddit & Youtube nerds? They almost always think the exact opposite of what real life normal people think.)
Just look at how raunchy & provocative the horror of Terrifier 1 is when compared to Terrifier 2 & 3.
Terrifier 1 depicts a well endowed naked girl getting split open in half which wouldn't be out of place in 1970s horror like "Don't Go In the House", the 2 sequels actually have toned down violence & zero nudity now and its partly due to listening to the criticisms of The Consensus (IMO The Consensus is just the Corpo-Approved sensibilities masquerade as
the will of the fans when said fans come from 2 to 3 places only, Reddit, Youtube & Twitter.)
It's almost as neutered as modern day Mortal Kombat.
If you bring this up, you get retards telling you "JUST WATCH PORN!" Completely missing the point that products have their own inner culture. Horror itself as a genre has always been an irreverent genre that targeted against everybody & tried to offend as many people as possible.
When you defang a horror product of its fangs, what you get is just a Corpo-approved product that's interchangeable with non-horror movies. What even is the fucking point of genres now when every single game or movie is being made to appeal to one huge milquetoast audience who have no convictions they just want some passable entertainment that they play in the background and pay little attention to, to help pass the time of their miserable lives in between wage slave sessions where they have to undergo their work ritual once again so that they can waste even more of their nearly-worthless money on equally as vapid entertainment that they don't even remember watching because it's all of the same inoffensive Corpo-Approved souless garbage.
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.
Yeah pretty much, but it's all forms of media now. Even books & novels are fucking garbage because you can't write a modern book without going through the Sensitivity Reader censors first and you have to fucking pay for Sensitivity Readers with your own money. You're paying Corpos to destroy your product until its tame enough to be sold for mass consumption lol.
I was once thinking of doing a novel trilogy route until I was made aware that modern books are just as sanitized & censored as film & gaming are. Even Boardgames are extremely censored these days and each game seems to have a token tranny (Dead of Winter expansion pack. https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/p ... of-winter/ ) or Black gay couple in a medieval fantasy setting (Aeon's End https://indieboardsandcards.com/our-games/aeons-end/) now. Which is fucking bizarre to me. It's a damn boardgame. You'd be thinking that at least boardgames would be devoid of the modern era Open Society bullshit which exists to destroy a country's local culture by assimilating it into a Universalist ideology. Not unlike Christianity prior, which is also a universalist ideology, but one that is approved by right wingers while the woke dogma is a left wing universalism approach.
Although reading further in to this ancient post you wrote, it seems that you already pointed that out lol.
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 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."
I'm just reaffirming that the cultural mindrot has a much larger influence than we think. It's everywhere now although it's been recently discovered that USAID was actually funding this shit on a worldwide level lol.
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.
D&D isn't meant to be literature. It's just a series of rulesets that you build a story around, using the world building that they provided for you. The story is supposed to be created as a joint effort between the dungeon master & the players.
That's why Neverwinter Nights was considered good back in the day, because it was one of the truest depictions of the relationship between the dungeon master & the player in the form of modules which were created to continue the ongoing adventures of your created character.
I agree with your point but D&D was never meant to be The Hyperborean Age of Conan. D&D intentionally has no story because that story is whatever the DM & players came up with based off of the rules of the game & the roll of the dice.
Although I'm making it sound gayer than it is, D&D is basically just a dungeon crawler that can have story and most of the retards online only care about the story part of D&D which is why modern D&D has also been nuetured. They don't even have races now ayy lmao. I always roleplayed as a Half-Elf because it's basically what I am in real life. Someone who somewhat has similar values as Whites, but different enough to the point where I'm in my own genre or culture.
Now I can't even roleplay as myself because I have to pretend that I'm completely elf or human or completely asian or white when I'm neither. I represent something completely different but I do align myself with the values of both with the jap side having more of an influence since I actually lived in the country before. Weird though, because transgenders get to have their own identity which I argue isn't even as common, nor is it rarely grassroots. Western troon culture is almost always pushed from the top down by Corpos)
You can't even have edgy settings in D&D anymore like Ravenloft because it offends women or some shit. Funny how women never said anything back then, and it's really just fat nerdy women (or possibly most likely troons) doing all of the whining.
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.
When I tried to replay Disco Elysium, I got bored because I decided to play it straight up as a Feminist Communist because the game kept making fun of me every time I made a feminist comment. I mean sure, I agree with the game's mindset that male feminists are sexual predators who know nothing about what it means to be a woman, but I find it fucking hilarious how even a game made by commies wants to distance itself from male feminist types, when that's practically half of the game's audience lol.
DE also doesn't really understand what a modern day Monarchist is (not that it matters. It's a commie game. Why the fuck would they care?), but I can't even blame them because we have retards like John Doyle & Nick Fuentes claiming to be Monarchists but they're unironic retards who genuinely want a Catholic Theocratic Monarchy. Such retardation could only exist on the internet because they don't live in real life and propose governments that solve no modern day issues of real life.
Cyberpunk 2077 at least had Goro Takemura who was a damn good example of the Imperialist mindset. His logic sounds exactly like my pops, in that they may agree with you that the corpo gov is shit, but will also make it clear to you that the world is even worse without their order & influence. A modern day monarch is just a type of corpo like Elon Musk, but one where his corporation is king.
Disco Elysium mostly had internet retards as the face of their fascists, but I legit thought it was funny because it's an accurate portrayal of internet fascists & nazis. They really are a bunch of retards who claim to want to have a king but at the root of their issues is their lack of success with women.
I also liked how Disco Elysium portrayed Neo-Liberals as the most evil. (They basically just laugh off the Monarch/Fascists as jokes which they are.) They're the ones behind the Military Industrial Complex and the MIC are the only ones in the game who are depicted as extreme psychopaths which reflects what real life Military Special Forces are. They're just professional killers who can single handedly destroy entire countries with just 3 to 7 men.
Videogames have rendered obsolete most of genre fiction in literature, as they have rendered action movies obsolete.
80s action movies sure, but I'd still much rather watch a John Woo or John Wick movie. John Wick 3 & 4 feel as if I'm watching through a hardest difficulty longplay of an action game but there are no modern action games that resemble the insanity that goes on in Wick films because modern action games are basically just brain dead Call of Duty shooters or Action rpgs like Soulslikes.
Max Payne 3 & Resident Evil 6 came the closest to being like Wick but ironically they're both rejected by modern gaming audiences and a lot of Zoomers honestly believe that Resident Evil 6 nearly killed the RE franchise (when for the longest time it was one of the best selling REs.) because none of them are old enough to remember how dead RE was during the original RE3 and the wait for RE4. The future of Resident Evil was looking to go the way of Code Veronica, a series of games that still sells due to a loyal fanbase but is no longer a trend setter.
RE is an interesting series, because it's an obvious Corpo design by committee creation that somehow always has its finger on the pulse (Even RE 6, that game was well loved during its era so long as you ignored the raging internet nerds) and will completely change its identity to fit in with the kids of its era. People my age (I'm turning 42 in a few weeks.) love Resident Evil 4 and RE 5 and at least like RE6's Mercenary mode. Younger people, including the younger people who played the original Resident Evil games as 5 year olds (I was 13 when it first came out.) aren't as into RE4, because they're too young to remember the days back when games revolved around mechanics. The younger people seem to think of gaming as more akin to movies. People in my age group, we grew up with crazy ass action movies like John Woo so when late 1990s (The Matrix) & early 2000s media consisted of nothing but John Woo like action that was during the height of influence of my age group. Younger people are more boring, they want everything to be gritty, realistic & down to earth to match how boring and devoid of personality they are (LOL! It's a generalization but it's mostly true. You don't see anyone like me amongst the Zoomers or younger Millennials.)
so Resident Evil got rid of its Conspiracy Techno-Thriller focus that it had since RE2 and replaced it with a more grounded Walking Dead inspired grittiness that's all the rage with the kids during the mid-2010s & 2020 era.
The irony of it all is that it was Resident Evil 2 remake that spearheaded RE's current identity when it was RE2 classic which originally had the John Woo influence that modern audiences hate because most of them were too young to see his Chow Yun Fat movies.
Although John Wick is like a much more insane & crazy version of Woo.
Inoki Stomps Fools! Va11 Hall-a Faggot: He's such a Chad. I bet he fucks an Asian bitch every night. CapN Jack: Who the fuk These moFuggaz? :lol:
I remember stating myself that video games are the greatest form of the entertainment medium and were better than movies on the old forum despite everyone else disagreeing.
Video games inherit the potential and capability of all previous forms of the medium. You can literally create a movie within a video game. Even live action, but not vice versa. You can present a video game as a book, but not vice versa. They are the highest form of art. Whether or not they are used a such is another story, but no form of media allows the story telling and interactive potential of video games.
Writing in video games has taken a nose dive in the last decade with everything become corporate and uniform. Writers aren't allowed to be creative or original, because that doens't vibe with marketing. Everything is so risk averse that the plots end up being stale and unremarkable to keep from upsetting any one spectrum of the potential audience ultimately creating a game that no one is unremarkable.
Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2 have some great writing. The resent new game in the franchise, Avowed, apparently does not. It has been sterilized from its predecessors. Elex, from Piranha bytes, also had an interesting story. Its a shame the trilogy will never be completed since the developer has shut down after the poor performance of Elex 2.
If you haven't checked it out, "Know by Heart" from Ice Pick Lodge has a great story. Its a game in set in the late U.S.S.R. period in the 90s about some old friends getting together to reconnect with something derailing their plans. I won't spoil it. Its not a long game but worth playing. Its what became of the Bachelor's story from Pathologic 2 since they ran out of money and couldn't finish the Bachelor and Aspity path.
Woah!!! After checking their releases, it appears that not only did they release another game using the ideas from the Bachelor's route called "Franz"(One I will probably never touch because its mobile garbage) but apparently they are FINALLY doing the actual Bachelor's route as Pathologic 3. I feel a bit cheated, because it was suppose to eventually come to people who bought Pathologic 2, but I suppose this is better than nothing.
