Killer7 SINdicate

[Krizzx]

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

First is "Fear and Hunger"

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





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



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

"LISA: The Painful"

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






They also both have great music.

[AngelheadedHipster]

I can name a couple.

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

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

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

[Jack]

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Krizzx]

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

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



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



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





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

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

I love the music in the second game.

[AngelheadedHipster]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[anthony]

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

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

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



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



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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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

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

[Jack]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[anthony]

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

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

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

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

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

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



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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

Which way is the enemy base? Down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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