Inspired by simultaneously playing through Majora’s Mask and Kingdom Hearts which feature two of my alltimers, Clock Town and Traverse Town
both of them loom larger in my memory, cuz of course they do. Everything feels bigger when you’re a kid. i still love all their little details and how “homey” they feel. i love how all the named residents of Clock Town and their daily schedules create a place that feels lived in. i love how Traverse Town has all these intimate spaces where you can imagine people would go about their daily lives if they weren’t being harangued by soul-stealing shadow monsters (and the perpetual nighttime is a cool bonus, love a Dark City)
also wanna celebrate Majula it’s such a comforting little hub. love the sense that people are eking out something like a living within a desolate, cursed land where they’re all barely staving off becoming mindless zombies. Hearing the Majula theme makes me want to replay Dark Souls 2 like nothing else (it should be apparent that the music is a really important facet of my favorite game towns)
there are several awesome towns in Morrowind (Vivec, Ald’ruhn, Seyda Neen and Sadrith Mora are all really cool and memorable too) but Balmora was my fucking home in that game. I took Caius Cosades’s apartment and made it my own place (to store piles of alchemy ingredients and glass swords in)
i know i named this thread for Silent Hill but i havent actually played enough of those games to really speak on it so someone else ought to… it just felt like a good thread title
it’s well documented that i love a nighttime city, but the earliest specific example i can think of that i loved is one that might be a surprise: lumina from legend of mana
If I think about just the midgar part ff7 is nearly a twin peaks tier work for me. I think maybe I haven’t even really realized myself until recently, because the more dragon quests I play the more I think how great ff7 is.
i cant believe i didnt mention Midgar. i just played thru disc one the other day and Midgar fucking rules. Wall Market by itself has more personality than whole entire games
Junon, Nibelheim, Costa del Sol and Cosmo Canyon all rock too. Rocket Town!! Wutai!!! many kickass towns in FFVII
I’ve only played a little Final Fantasy VIII (rectifying that as soon as i finish VII!!) but Balamb has some serious vibes too. the PSX FF trilogy has such a commitment to creating unique, lived-in feeling pre-rendered places
the PS FF games all have great vibes in their cities, but they don’t have much going on in them outside of midgar, since they’re just your typical JRPG pit stops. I really like how FFIX tries to ameliorate that a bit by having your party split up and fuck around in the towns. don’t remember much about it outside of that, but it’s pretty much the only thing I like in that game.
my favorite JRPG town is probably parm from grandia. it’s where the game starts and it’s pretty big for a JRPG city. it’s kind got that steambot chronicles ghibli-light steampunk thing going for it. the game makes you spend a lot of time there, pretty much the only ‘lets go on an ADVENTURE’ jrpg that actually roots you somewhere before you leave. the contrast between parm and new parm is how the whole vibe of the game works, you really feel like you’re doing something consequential by leaving home.
for more meaty stuff, the town in pathologic/2 (and presumably 3) is like most of the appeal of the game. it’s surreal, hostile, consistent in how it operates, dour, and alive. big enough to matter and impede you, but not pointlessly sprawling.
athkatla in baldur’s gate 2 is dense, varied, and fairly alien for a dnd setting. you always have to decide whether or not you’re going to follow the rules and who you’re going to listen to. everywhere you go feels like it unfolds into it’s own little mini rpg, but it still feels like a full, proper interconnecting city.
god Martinaise is also a fucking good one i knew i was forgetting. i would absolutely chill in the Whirling-in-Rags. hangoutitude is a major factor in my favorite towns and it’s off the charts there
im also remembering i wanna shout out Palm Brinks from Dark Cloud 2/Dark Chronicle for again creating a space that’s ultimately gamey and small, but that feels like a vast and lived-in city. low-key one of the greatest strengths of the Dark Cloud games, for as much as they’re remembered as these kinda mid dungeon crawlers with too many side activities, is that they have really detailed and beautiful home environments that reflect the personalities of the people who live in them. like in Dark Cloud you are technically (re)building the towns to suit your own preference, but every individual house you recover is handmade and packed with small personal details. You have the mostly pointless option to go into first-person mode and walk around in them and it’s worth doing to see all the easily missed flavor going on in each abode
it’s barely even a well it’s just a big stupid hole in the ground that you jump into to die. grumble grumble
Majula is a pretty cool town except for the big stupid hole you have to walk around every time you step out of your nice house with a giant book and mean skeletons in the basement and the worst pigs of all time who are always gruffling in the corner nextdoor
fun fact there’s a well early in King’s Field: The Ancient City (sister game to Dark Souls 2 and my favorite/the best King’s Field game/my favorite PS2 game) that will kill you if you try to jump down it at first, but if you come back to it when you have enough HP you’ll barely survive the drop and find cool secrets down there
Also fun fact there’s a well in Firelink Shrine in Dark Souls that will just fucking kill you every time lol there’s nothing down there nice try idiot. why would you even jump down a well what kind of goober are you
i actually think you should always be able to jump into at least one well in a videogame and find secrets there, just like you should always be able to find a secret cave behind a waterfall. These are my gamer values
Dragon Quests eventually realized that every well should potentially hold a secret. but not all of them do. sometimes you climb down into a well and go “huh, there’s just a bunch of water here, lame”
Matango from Secret of Mana is a mushroom people town within a cave. It has amazing music and you hear this weird reverby distant version of the music as you approach.
