Undertale had pretty good writing, but I’m just a plebe, and all these obscure games you are talking about are completely unknown to me.
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This reminded me of Captain Blood which I haven’t played but I think has been written about at length on some iteration of SB at some point. Alien speech is transcribed as ideograms with single-word translations and you have to piece together what they’re saying from context and talk back to them in the same way.
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i don’t mean to nitpick or start a flame war over a subjective disagreement but nier was kind of the negative impetus for thinking about this anew recently. nier is a game that “has a lot of writing” in the sense i defined of lots of moments of expressive character differentiation, setpieces involving a lot of text, plot beats and scenarios, etc., but imo it’s really clumsy and hackneyed in its actual nuts and bolts writing, and i feel like so much of the appeal of the game on a textual level comes from its gestalt texture in your mind after the fact, rather than the success of its actual writing and its deployment. there’s lots to be said for filling things in on your own, of course, but while playing nier i often felt like i was doing that because the game was so riddled with awkward cliches and laziness that my headcanon for the characters became preferable to their actual dialogue… and there’s a lot of things i love about that game! it’s beautiful, crunchy, atmospheric, the music is gorgeous, etc., but i feel like the actual writing is mostly composed of the jrpg equivalent of those “sad story, like if u cried :'(” facebook memes.
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Nier is everything I like in game stories; distant observer powerlessly watches world move on without them, energetically, heroically useless…but it doesn’t snap into place for me and I’m still not entirely sure why.
It has incredibly bright sparks of writing but it could do with a condensing, or maybe it would be better served with a SNES or PSX level of fidelity.
The Quintet games hit on similar themes but much harder for me even despite their garbled translations.
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excuse u
yes
what is this screenshot from? i love it. also, what quintet games do you recommend? i’m loosely familiar with a few but have never actually played one other than shenmue(? wikipedia says they were involved but that’s the first i’ve heard of it).
Terranigma
There are three core Quintet games dealing with their eschatonic and buddhist themes: Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma. The Actraisers are related but deal more in power and don’t dig as deep.
Terranigma is easily the best but far too long for its own good, has the most translation issues, and loses snappy combat in a Secret of Mana-esque tendentiousness. It has the best music. Play it if you have 35 hours to play a 15 hour game. I cried more at the ending than any other game; the beauty and archetypal power of many of the scenarios strikes me dead.
Illusion of Gaia is why I love Angkor Wat. It has the most characterization but they use the childlike sprites in the same way as Earthbound, to shock you when they express adult feelings and emotions like suicidal depression. Early on, you are orphaned when your grandparents evolve into ghosts because the chaos moon is approaching~~~
Soul Blazer is fast and simple and more episodic. It has a lighter treatment but still structures episodes around the nature of souls, of a life well lived, and accepting death. It has the best slap bass sample of these games
I never heard that about Shenmue, as far as I know some shell of Quintet aptly named Shade released the unsouled PSX Granstream Saga and then faded away. Wikipedia cites, “development support?” on Shenmue, maybe by tracing individual credits? I imagine they were doing contract work post-Granstream.
Wow, what a Wikipedia sentence:
However, around 2000, release of games that contained characteristic Quintet themes declined.
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Digital: A Love Story and Analogue: A Hate Story
All the really good IFs (someone who plays IFs will have to expand on this).
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christine is a lovely friend and i’m excited about her new game 
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I don’t think I ever got around to Analogue but I really really loved Digital. I didn’t know she was making a new one so that’s exciting.
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holy cow I’ve played it and read Chris Crawford jealously praise it but I never knew the plot of Captain Blood:
The titular character of the game is a 1980s video game designer, Bob Morlock, who had picked “Captain Blood” as a nickname in tribute to the film starring Errol Flynn of the same name. Morlock develops a new video game about aliens and space travel. While testing for the first time his new project, he becomes warped inside the spaceship of the very game he had designed. Soon after, Blood is forced to go into hyperspace mode and, due to an incident, gets accidentally cloned 30 times. For 800 years, Blood tracks down every clone, as each one took a portion of his vital fluid. When the game begins, Blood has successfully disintegrated 25 clones but he needs to kill the last five clones who turned out to be the most difficult to track down or he will lose his last connections with the human species.
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after analogue she made the extremely excellent ladykiller in a bind (the metal gear solid of lesbian eroge vns), and is now working on an rpg called get in the car, loser, a roadtrip game with a combat system hyper-iterating on the one from final fantasy xiii.
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this is also the plot of silent hill 4
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grand theft auto iv was the first game I played where the characters sounded like actual human beings do, instead of writers trying to recreate some idea of a hollywood performance or goofy melodrama. just the kind of normal weirdos you run into in life being themselves in an slightly exagerated cartoon crime world. I’m convinced all the game critics who complained about the “bad” writing or dumb characters in the game either had no friends growing up or only ever tried to hang out with people like themselves. anyway the way the game is this long meandering thing and the way rockstars world design is just as much about a sense of place in the places as the characters have a sense of personhood in the persons that where a lot of other games even if they’re good, they end up going in one ear and out the other with me, this one sticks in my mind almost like real places and people I’ve known.
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parker how did Red Dead 2 and its devotion to Deadwood end up sitting with you?
I put it off til I get a better videocard
fair
- Yes
- Not at all
0 voters
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oh cool! i got her into making videogames sorta (we started as enemies)
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