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| more, because I left out some things I wanted to talk about by Rafiki 07/10/2025, 9:14am PDT | ||||
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| Which is mostly just more griping about the story.
I can't get over the rug pull of trying to get you emotionally invested in the survival of Lumiere only to have that whole plot tossed aside and refocused on two people being depressed and wanting to live in a fantasy land. There's a conversation between two characters about the harsh reality of the world they live in. One of them was a teacher and she talks about a 6-year old girl in her class whose parents taught her that, because of the death countdown, when she turns 12 they're both going to die and she'll only live to be 21. See, this is the kind of world building I can get behind and I think it's the best conversation in the game. Put characters in a situation and have them discuss / confront the implications of it and show their reactions to it, instead of most video game world building which is autistic amounts of detail about Darth Vader's suit. They could have also had moments reflecting on what happens when a population steadily gets younger and education and wisdom are lost. Do they get more ignorant and immature, or do young people grow up faster out of necessity? Who knows! A teenage girl is angsty she was maimed and just wants to die in escapism. The inhabitants of this world appear to actually be intelligent and have free will. It's made perfectly clear that the canvas world can continue to exist on its own without its creator to direct it, and the people (IF I CAN EVEN CALL THEM THAT) age and learn and reproduce and raise families and have emotions and form memories and make discoveries and seemingly everything intelligent beings are capable of doing. Hey, what's the relationship between god and man in this situation vis-a-vis god just deciding to destroy them for personal reasons? What are the ethics and morality of that? Who cares! The painters create and destroy all the time, *snap*, whoopty fuckin' doo, don't think about it. A sad old lady misses her son, etc., etc. Hey, since the people can form memories and pass on knowledge, the canvas has been around for decades since the son's childhood, there's a case to be made for keeping the canvas alive to retain memories of the dead son. The world can be recreated, but there's an actual in-game conversation that explains that creations are only formed from the knowledge of the creator so recreations will never be a perfect replica of the original. This actually makes logical sense. As an analogy, it's like if you wrote a journal every day of your life, the journal was destroyed, and then someone who read it rewrote it from what they could remember. They might be able to capture a lot of the content, but a lot of details and the uniqueness of your personality and voice would be lost. Now imagine if that journal was a living, breathing world that contained beings that possessed a memory of you and you personally affected events in that world. How important is it to keep that world alive? That's an idea that might be worth exploring, but instead we'll have the dead son's avatar beg for death because reasons and the player will decide whether to make that happen or let a sad girl live in a fairy tale because she hates life. I hate most game writing because it's either bad fan-fiction, pretentious art games that feel like sitting through a college freshman creative writing class, or Nintendo storybooks. On the rare occasion that someone actually manages to present something even mildly interesting, they either self-conciously undermine it with Joss Whedon quips because they're afraid to take themselves seriously or it's like this game where they whiff so hard that I'm left screaming at them like Apu, all, "WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?" |
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