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Topic	Exdeath Plays Every Game in the GotD 2020 Contest Part 2 (ft FO:NV, Ghost Trick)
Evillordexdeath 03/16/21 2:14:12 PM #218:	BetrayedTangy posted... Yeah Bastion's ending was really cool. It actually left me thinking about for a day or two after. I also found it pretty funny when Dark Souls sort of went with a similar concept in its endings. Oh yeah, haha, I guess they are a little similar. There's also some parallels in Owlboy, another story-focused indie game I really liked. LinkMarioSamus posted... All these short games and long games juxtaposed against each other must make for some interesting whiplash! I think it's nice. There's a certain comfort to having the short games to almost unwind with in between the long ones. Lightning Strikes posted... Dont worry weve got like four big RPGs and open world games back to back now so thatll be a bit more consistent! That's true, it's long games until the end of 2011 now, between 20ish hour RPGs like Deus Ex and (possibly) Dark Souls and true behemoths like Skyrim and Minecraft. Final Analysis: Bastion What I thought of Bastion: A good story-driven game, with some minor gameplay issues Would I play it again? Sure, it would be nice to see the other ending. Did it deserve to lose round 2? If anything it should've gone further. Video games are a young medium, and people are only starting to explore the possibilities they bring to the art of story-telling. A lot of developers still make the mistake of treating them like books or longer films, locking all the character development and lore behind long cutscenes or text scrolls. The real trick is to somehow integrate the game mechanics and the story, and I think more games are consciously doing that these days. I recently started up Doki Doki Literature Club, for example, and I thought it was nice how the game takes away your save files to help drive home the feeling that its most tragic story moment could not be undone. Bastion sort of does a similar thing, but what it chiefly accomplishes with its particular style of narrative is that the story and the gameplay can almost always play out at the same time without interrupting one another. There is quite a hefty amount of contextual dialog based on your moment to moment gameplay choices, but it doesn't really effect the broader story. It's still a more elegant approach than most games manage, although the one major downside of it is that you have to go through a lot of repeated dialog if you get a game over and have to restart a full level. The game's narrative structure is purposely limiting - apart from what we can glean from the visuals as the Kid walks along and fights, all the information we have is from the inherently biased perspective of one of the characters, Rucks. One of the most clever moments comes at the very end, when the game finally lets you break away from that perspective, just for a moment. As purposeful and well-used as it is, that limitation has its downsides, with the biggest one being that a lot of the storytelling is essentially done through exposition dumps. It might have been more effective if the character backstories were shown rather than told to us by Rucks. All minutia around the story devices aside, the core of this narrative is really very good. There's a lot of nuance to the characters and their feelings - we as the audience can sympathize with everyone, even if Rucks and Zulf have some heavy sins to answer for. One of the major themes is reconciliation, shown in the conflict between the Ura and Caelondia, and how hard it was for them to let go of their past war, but is personified by the characters of Zulf, an Ura orphan who was raised by a Caelondian missionary, and the Kid, who has the most important choices for the fates of both peoples in his young hands. But I think the most central theme is atonement, which is housed in the idea of the Bastion itself. There are a lot of people out there who have done things they wish they could take back. I have mine. That desire is expressed in the "restore" function of the Bastion, which is essentially a time travel device intended to undo one calamitous mistake, but it leaves the possibility that everything will just repeat itself again, because in truth you don't get to take things back. The only real way to atone is to accept what happened and try to move on, and to do the right things going forward - that's why I picked the evacuation ending. --- I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 19/129 Currently Playing: Deus Ex: Human Revolution <cite>Evillordexdeath posted [p:951771813] in Exdeath Pl... [t:79138705]...</cite> <quote>BetrayedTangy posted... </cite> <quote>Yeah Bastion's ending was really cool. It actually left me thinking about for a day or two after. I also found it pretty funny when Dark Souls sort of went with a similar concept in its endings.</quote> Oh yeah, haha, I guess they are a little similar. There's also some parallels in Owlboy, another story-focused indie game I really liked. LinkMarioSamus posted... </cite> <quote>All these short games and long games juxtaposed against each other must make for some interesting whiplash!</quote> I think it's nice. There's a certain comfort to having the short games to almost unwind with in between the long ones. Lightning Strikes posted... </cite> <quote>Dont worry weve got like four big RPGs and open world games back to back now so thatll be a bit more consistent!</quote> That's true, it's long games until the end of 2011 now, between 20ish hour RPGs like Deus Ex and (possibly) Dark Souls and true behemoths like Skyrim and Minecraft. Final Analysis: Bastion What I thought of Bastion: A good story-driven game, with some minor gameplay issues Would I play it again? Sure, it would be nice to see the other ending. Did it deserve to lose round 2? If anything it should've gone further. Video games are a young medium, and people are only starting to explore the possibilities they bring to the art of story-telling. A lot of developers still make the mistake of treating them like books or longer films, locking all the character development and lore behind long cutscenes or text scrolls. The real trick is to somehow integrate the game mechanics and the story, and I think more games are consciously doing that these days. I recently started up Doki Doki Literature Club, for example, and I thought it was nice how the game takes away your save files to help drive home the feeling that its most tragic story moment could not be undone. Bastion sort of does a similar thing, but what it chiefly accomplishes with its particular style of narrative is that the story and the gameplay can almost always play out at the same time without interrupting one another. There is quite a hefty amount of contextual dialog based on your moment to moment gameplay choices, but it doesn't really effect the broader story. It's still a more elegant approach than most games manage, although the one major downside of it is that you have to go through a lot of repeated dialog if you get a game over and have to restart a full level. The game's narrative structure is purposely limiting - apart from what we can glean from the visuals as the Kid walks along and fights, all the information we have is from the inherently biased perspective of one of the characters, Rucks. One of the most clever moments comes at the very end, when the game finally lets you break away from that perspective, just for a moment. As purposeful and well-used as it is, that limitation has its downsides, with the biggest one being that a lot of the storytelling is essentially done through exposition dumps. It might have been more effective if the character backstories were shown rather than told to us by Rucks. All minutia around the story devices aside, the core of this narrative is really very good. There's a lot of nuance to the characters and their feelings - we as the audience can sympathize with everyone, even if Rucks and Zulf have some heavy sins to answer for. One of the major themes is reconciliation, shown in the conflict between the Ura and Caelondia, and how hard it was for them to let go of their past war, but is personified by the characters of Zulf, an Ura orphan who was raised by a Caelondian missionary, and the Kid, who has the most important choices for the fates of both peoples in his young hands. But I think the most central theme is atonement, which is housed in the idea of the Bastion itself. There are a lot of people out there who have done things they wish they could take back. I have mine. That desire is expressed in the "restore" function of the Bastion, which is essentially a time travel device intended to undo one calamitous mistake, but it leaves the possibility that everything will just repeat itself again, because in truth you don't get to take things back. The only real way to atone is to accept what happened and try to move on, and to do the right things going forward - that's why I picked the evacuation ending. --- I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 19/129 Currently Playing: Deus Ex: Human Revolution</quote> ... Copied to Clipboard!
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