There doesn’t necessarily have to be shrinkage, but the POV of the conflict needs to be from inside the body.
Final Fantasy Legend II / SaGa 2
The remake.
SaGa: Emerald Beyond
Elite Beat Agents, “La La”
Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story
Wonderful 101 has one level where you shrink down into somebody’s body and fight alien viruses.
Microsurgeon
Does Psychonauts count. The mind is surely in the body
Gears of War 2 has you spent a lot of time inside a giant city destroying worm thing.
there’s a Jabu-Jabu’s Belly dungeon in Oracle of Ages but of course it’s not nearly as visceral. i remember it being a huge assache that i got stuck on every time i replayed the game because it does Water Temple raising/lowering water level puzzles in top-down 2D aargaghgagh
also there’s Clanker’s Cavern from Banjo-Kazooie
thread shoulda been posted yesterday lol. furries know
this is the entire plot of Microcosm for the Sega CD. half the levels look like you’re in the guy’s asshole
the microcosm level I think about all the time though is the one where you have to chase a submarine through his blood stream because they’re trying to fly into his aorta and fucking explode to kill him
a - all right, let’s get in the belly
b - better get in the belly
c - come on everyone, get in the belly!
Always Be Consumed
starfox adventures has a boss fight where you get swallowed up to attack the dinos weak spot in its stomach
(at 2:45)
and so does its prototype, dinosaur planet
(at 1:10)
probably the least fantastic journey because youre just there in a stomach to hit its weak spot for massive damage
dodging all the stomach acid in dante must die mode one of my most hated video game memories and the kind of thing i would never bother with today
I think there’s multiple God of War games where you go inside a mythical beast
This concept aaaalways creeped me out. I just found the entire thing super disgusting, so, pretty unwelcome when it would pop up in games.
One exception was Lifeforce, a game where a planet-sized living Unicron-like orb set course for your world like Hellstar Ramina and you had to take Vic Viper in to blow up his brain. The graphics were too unrealistic to really be that gross to me, so I loved it. They hadn’t cracked goopy blood tech yet:
Lifeforce / Salamander
(sorry it’s the version with the irritating arcade voiceover)
Some particularly striking moments were 1:40, when you just burrow through a wall of muscle tissue for like a mile to reach its heart. Geeeah. Also thought 2:58 was pretty cool in that the “enemies” were antibodies and blood cells, actually felt like a good reason there would be a bajillion enemies to blow up in a shmup.
I sort of imagined the midboss at 4:20 to be some kind of symbotic organism that had grown just what it needed to efficently kill better than everything around it - arms, a brain, and an eye.
Lastly, 8:49 delivers on the premise a lot by letting you fly through its veins at speed, with the blood cells, maybe going into the brain past the blood-brain barrier. Immediately was clear what this was supposed to be, which is pretty impressive. I just liked how it seemed as if you were blasting through this thing’s body at speed to kill it and save your world, with some sense of immediacy.
There’s actually an anime to this game I started and fell off of watching. Does not really go into the bio aspect of this as much as the radically different solar and temple sides.
Breath of Fire II
One example of an inner body quest hitting at a real unwelcome time was my first playthrough of BoF2 when I was a kid. I remember my tongue like hanging out of my mouth in mortified disgust as I had to squish-squash my way through the goopy innards of the queen:
(25:35)
Fuggin… gaping sphincters and pulsing walls and everything… ugghh…
I’ll get into this more in my upcoming hit thread BEASTS but I was pretty charmed by how the random encounters you had in here were like germs and viruses and tapeworms and whatnot, with eyes inexplicably attached. The cartooniness helped. But, also raised a bunch of questions in young Mothra’s mind like “so like there are thinking, sentient creatures down here with faces?” making me sort of headcannon that microscopic life in this magical world was radically different than our’s, in that maybe creatures are manifestations of magic and thus don’t need to make scientific sense, etc etc. I did NOT have a good time up in these guts is my point.
