That end shot of her shadow "through the looking glass" is over a grid of tiles. Just like a chessboard, it even has *exactly* eight vertical rows. (And of course she is standing on the final row, as if she was just queened.)

"I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords" 😜

I really hope the next game isn’t open world. The games suit a more focused linear experience and I hope they solve the over/under leveling issue in Elden ring and the abstruse npc quest lines as I don’t like following guides

Padding: the video

You call it emotion but i would call it immersion. As risk and rewards happen for dark souls or demon souls you and your character start to feel like one. Death has a toll and you feel it, places makes sense, shortcuts are thematically and deaigned logically, everything on the game works toward immersion.The breach between charcter and player is shorten. Elden ring is the less immersive out of the rest of souls games. Runes are bointiful, exploration has little risk, traps become expectatitions rather than induce tension. As such you and the character stop being in synch, it takes you out of the game without realising it. Doesnt mean is not entertaining but the immersion is lost and has been something that has been less and less prioritized as each game happens. Is a shame and also think that they will never go back but makes me appreciate those older titles better. Good video btw.

The story is good, not great, but I think haven't heard such misguided criticism in a long time

Bump

I think Rom's fight might be a better view on the belly of the whale. The bloodmoon descending upends everything.

I think there is more of a grey area when it comes to exploration/completion than was discussed here. You can still have the emotion of exploration in either setup. I've played a few open world quest marker games where I've felt super immersed regardless of the quest checklist. In those cases I felt a greater sense of exploration and willingness to see what's around every corner than I have in some exploration heavy games that don't hold your hand. It depends

Bloodborne does sort of invert the beginning of the hero's journey. In literature, it's faux pas to end the story with 'it was a dream'; Bloodborne however begins the story with it. It also inverts 'deus ex machina' at the end by having the character not saved by a god but cursed by one or the character destroying a god.

Man i wish you would make the Ragnarok video. While this critique wasnt the most eloquent, it certainly brings up points no other video does. Someone needs to make a 2018 + Ragnarok story review, to really show how broken the writing of the Norse saga is, so many different points to touch on. In any case, great job, its sad that most people wont accept your criticisms of the game due to blind fanboyism.

Beautiful video. Reminds me of some of the story beats in Sanabi and how they also play with Romanticism. I'm not going to go into more detail here for spoiler reasons, though.

What is the music that plays at the start of part 1?

hi!! ik this is a bizarre question but i noticed and cant stop wondering, what fps is the gameplay footage in this vid recorded in? it looks sooo much smoother than native 60 but has next to no artifacts from resampling either, it looks great!

Most online game discussion misses the forest for the trees, focusing on surface level mechanics instead of the experience created. If ability gating is really defining then Pokemon is a Metroidvania

I'd watched this video before, but I had to spend days looking for it again when I started playing again. Gonna bookmark it this time.

I think it was interesting that there were 4 real characters witnessing John's artificial reality. That made it a bit more real, as the concept of real could be about if anyone else is witnessing it. As if something actually happens but leaves no trace, its realness is meaningless.

The REAL problem of nostalgia is its presence in politics. Politicians often weaponize it to appeal to older voters to drive their fears of change in an attempt to keep the status quo or worse -to drag us backwards!

Holy shit, This is one hell of a video man! I loved every minute of it <3

Horizon: The player is told where to go by characters that have more than five lines ofdialogue in service of a linear, coherent story. Elden Ring: I'm still playing it. Not to get every item to discern the story -- there isn't one. Picking up audio tapes to understand a game's story is universally known to be odious. Picking up every single item in Elden Ring etc etc? There IS a story. And it is really, really stupid. The Old Man and the Sea: An old man catches a huge shark, and it means a lot to him monetary and otherwise. The Old man uses a small boat, so the shark is tied to the side of the vessel. As the Old Man returns to land, his catch is picked apart until he has nothing to show for his accomplishment. If it takes more than three sentences to convey the skeleton of a story, it's bad. Anyone who wants to argue Miyazaki beats Hemmingway - there's a special place in hell for you, don't think I care.

I don't know how you saying they telling the story terribly.. cuz Faye voice in 2018 was soooooo much Better pictured than Ragnarok when we spent time with her! maybe you didn't understand the stoty the way it was! i lost my mother about a month before game release date and me and my father never been on good side! so when it was out i was living that story! the story is that journey! a god calling his child (boy) to a man calling his child (son) from a man to a god to learning to become a man again! I don't know you played last games or not but half of this games effect comes from the greek saga..then you understand the redemption arc of a god-killer monster to a teacher and father!

I felt the same with Elden Ring. While I still love it and has addicted me to explore every corner of it's world, the first time I started I was like "Ok, I am in a big open area with plains and nature where I can just go through all directions, what to do now?". it felt very generic contrary to Dark Souls very strict design, that is not linear but it's not full open either. It's semi-open with soft/hard blocks, and while it's a big interconnected world, everything is so tightly designed and so memorable that this worlds stays with you. Every area stayed in my mind with it's traps, enemy placements, strategies to take over, ptsd points where I kept dying, items and places of rest. It's hard to explain because one could say Elden Ring also has some of these elements. But there is something in video games that cannot be easily explained and quantified, two games might have the same exact elements on paper, but one is doing something different than the other that I can't put my finger to. It's of course what you said about emotion, but it's very subtle, I wouldn't even know how to properly reproduce it if I was task to design a game that has the same exact good elements that made game A successful. DS1 for me a masterpiece, everything else after still good (even DS2) but not being able to reach the og. Simiarly, when one tries to mimic the success of classics. The classics have their own soul and cannot easily be reproduced.

Are you alive?!🥲

Souls games have never been remotely like metroidvanias outside of DS1. I guess Souls games have been dead since DS2 and Bloodborne.

You are onto something ngl

I love Gothic horror 💀👻🖤🧛🌹⚰

I just see this video now and now it completes the puzzle in my head why new god of war was kind of a miss for me. Seems like many people miss the point about GoW and Kratos it that he is a tragic character and I do agree more with original vision of the story and even SolePorpoise's version of how story of norse Kratos could've be and also would made for far better story and made more sense. In my opinion as Kratos being a greek tragedy hero and being who he is, his story cant really co-exist with that fuzzy "heartwarming" father-son story that the game tries to depict with some conflicts just comming from "just because" and not because Kratos is ragnarok level threat and every god knows it and as we have ragnarok game now and that story just stumbles uppon it self even more as all murder of gods is forgiven by their family because of the "plot" and the "message of forgiveness" with no real consequence following up. That just doesnt go hand it hand with og games world and story setup. This god of war is not god of war, its is different game entierly that just have the mask of god of war because as it seems to me that devs didnt wanted to take the risk and make different title, but we get the usual "riding on IP name that is already espablished and loved and probably will be forgiven and still bring on da moneh if we fail". And now that this mumbo jumbo writing got greenlight because "matured" majorities lack of father figure in their life or something and now we wait till the Egypt setup where Kratos becomes an old whitebearded sage dad and Loki will try to please his father and try to be a good boy son, but will fail for no reason and then mingle with nordic afro-american giant self insert from sweet baby inc ceo herself or devs wont get funding for the game. Ah what a time to be alive.

Thanks

Missing you dude, hope all is well with you

Only recently got to the game, and was interested to hear someone elses thoughts on it (after I finished it) it's definitely a very emotional story, I can't say I cried, but it managed to tug on my heart strings harder than I thought it would. it was a great journey that I can recommend to anyone.

Back in the 2010s, people weren’t crybabies over the past

"My wish? Well, I want to replay To The Moon... All over again."

I appreciate that you took the time to create this essay with lots of interesting points and insights but I just have to fundamentally disagree with your definition of exploration. Your definition seems to be very narrow, artificially confined to a very specific risk-reward balance, that just so happens to fit perfectly for metroidvanias but ignores the many facets exploration can take beyond being tied to a particular experience of risk. Imagine the most casual, slice-of-life combat-less type of game, one of those with cozy aesthetics and so forth, with an open, unmapped world. You are, for example, a photographer and your gameplay consists of photographing wildlife and plants in a relaxed way. You have to un- and discover the world and the paths yourself. You are not guided to the animals and plants that you want to photograph but there is zero risk of survival or combat involved. You can’t get stuck like in DS, perhaps it even has mechanics of convenience like fast travel, but you have to explore the world in the literal sense of the word to find your photography targets. Here exploration is not driven by a sense of dread and fear of survival, it is propelled by the opposite emotion: the active joy of discovery and finding things. It is a completely different feeling from DS, yet it makes no sense to me to not call it exploration. It is just exploration with a very different goal and feeling. By defining exploration the way you do, you don’t allow to use it in the literal, “common-sense” sense of the word. You add very specific meanings to the word, that are not intuitive and artificially turn it into a “technical” term that is limited to certain playstyles, beyond what is reasonable in my eyes. It seems like this definition primarily serves your particular point instead of serving the idea of exploration itself. I completely agree that ER feels different from DS. It is also completely understandable to not be a fan of its brand of exploration. But ironically, as much as I love DS and BB, I never felt very connected to their take on exploration, precisely because I felt like I was exploring gameplay levels and not an actual world. I love DS and BB. I love the challenge, I love finding shortcuts, I love the risk and I love fighting my way through enemies to reach that well-deserved safe spot and give my mind a rest. But as I said, it felt like fighting my way through a level. The perception that I am in a level and not in a world is obviously highly subjective. Other players may experience this aspect of the game completely differently. It is not objectively good or bad in any way and it is completely legitimate to enjoy this type of exploration. But it is just that: a type of exploration. Not The One type of exploration. With all its flaws the open world exploration is what I enjoy most in ER because now I feel like I actually explore, well, a world. That is just the type of exploration I in particular enjoy the most. The fact that that I can choose to engage with enemies or not is what makes it feel more “realistic” to me (in the sense of being “in a world”), leading to a much stronger sensation of immersion. With DS and BB, as much as I adored the settings (BB has one of the best game aesthetics I have ever experienced), at some point they started to feel like window-dressings or stage props forming the (stylish) background of my ongoing journey on defined paths (whose order I could often choose but they were still pre-defined) with new enemy hordes to slaughter until I reached the next boss, so that I could continue on one of the paths to fight new enemies to get to a boss and so on. ER feels like a world that is very hostile but I have much more freedom to decide how to engage with it. Do I take it head-on to test myself or do I want to avoid it? Do I want to partake in the aggression or do I want to immerse myself in the scenery, find new spots and landscapes to marvel at? Virtual “sightseeing” is just as much a type of exploration. All in all, it allows for more “roleplaying” and experiencing the world the way you want to. But as I said, this too is just one type of exploration. It is not The One type of exploration either, it is not any more legitimate than the risky exploration of DS. It evokes a different feeling. And it is perfectly ok to not like this feeling. But in my eyes it is not correct to say it is not exploration, only because it is not the same type of exploration as you have in DS. Both games tackle explorations from different angles.