mistressofmuses (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mistressofmuses) wrote2022-09-05 11:16 pm
mistressofmuses) wrote2022-09-05 11:16 pm
Entry tags:
In which I talk too much about video game morality
Day two of hangouts:
Fortunately fairly uneventful for Taylor's day on-call.
Finished "Halfway Through the Woods" and also read "School Belles". Only one Alice & Thomas short story (as yet) left.
Mom and Taylor started The Sandman a few days ago when mom got back from NM, so I watched episodes 5 & 6 with them. Happily, I really liked both of those episodes, so if I'm going to rewatch some random ones, those were good ones.
We played quite a bit of Nier: Replicant. We got the "A" ending, and are now on basically a new game +, with extra scenes and such.
So, I went into it already mildly spoiled for the twist. (Taylor I think told me about it back before we played Nier: Automata several years ago, since the original had some frustrations about playing it, so we didn't want to do so at the time.)
So... the plot is a bit convoluted, but it's fairly clear that the "semi-generic fantasy RPG" setting is actually also deeply post-apocalyptic, which isn't a spoiler - it's pretty obvious from the timeskip between the prologue and the main story, to say nothing of some of the areas you explore and other major plot events. (As a side note, that is MY SHIT right there. Love it.) What *caused* that apocalypse is a bit less well known, except in hints about horrific disease and such.
Most of the game is spent fighting "shades", which are the catch-all for the various shadow-y enemies you face. The protagonist is singularly focused on wiping them out, as he blames them for his sister being kidnapped away from him.
The actual spoiler is: When the horrible disease was in danger of wiping humanity out, the last-ditch solution was, essentially, to split human bodies and souls. The souls could be kept safe, while the bodies became empty husks called "Replicants", preserving humanity's genetics until the disease could be cured and the souls would be safe to return to the Replicant bodies.
You and the rest of the people you've been dealing with throughout the game are the Replicants, supposedly-soulless... and the shades you've been killing are the detached souls of the "real" humans. (With delightful fridge horror at like... the small shades you kill that drop items like coloring books.)
So, you find this out at the end, that hey, this has kind of been a big oops, and the Replicants seem to be developing souls of their own, but the shades are also souls that you've been indiscriminately murdering! Some of the shades ARE horrible murdering dickbags, but a lot of them are just innocent people.
On the replay, you get to actually read the shades' dialogue, which before was unintelligible, and also get new scenes of the various bosses you fight. A lot of this is very much driving home that you are killing innocent things. One of the bosses that appeared to summon smaller enemies to swarm you actually has dialogue begging those smaller shades to retreat because they're going to be killed and its trying to protect them.
Like... the theme is very much "hey, you're the real monster!" And it's good! It's well done! It's super impressive HOW different the scenes read between the original assumptions of what's happening vs. the newer context. It draws a lot of deliberate parallels between the protagonists and how they're treated vs. the things the groups of shades are doing.
But I've been spoiled (in the "given everything I want" sense, not the "know what happens" sense) by games like Zero Escape, where you're stuck in a timeloop with the express purpose of learning from your previous attempts, and using that information to progress, and ultimately (hopefully) to get a good ending.
Where this... lets you know that you're being the monster, but (at least so far) gives you no real opportunity to do anything to change it. You're locked into making the same choices, even as you know what you're doing is terrible. I'm so much a "being mean is not nice" player, this is a struggle for me, haha. (And also doesn't allow you to avoid other tragedies that you as the player now know are going to happen.)
Now, I have NOT looked into spoilers for all the various endings for the game. I don't think it has 26 different endings the way Automata did, but I know there are at least a few. I DO hope that we finally get to have some sort of "good" ending where we aren't basically genocidal monsters! We'll see.
I'm definitely enjoying the game, and the twist hits the way it should imo. I just want to fix my characters' mistakes, because that's what I always want to do, ha.
Fortunately fairly uneventful for Taylor's day on-call.
Finished "Halfway Through the Woods" and also read "School Belles". Only one Alice & Thomas short story (as yet) left.
Mom and Taylor started The Sandman a few days ago when mom got back from NM, so I watched episodes 5 & 6 with them. Happily, I really liked both of those episodes, so if I'm going to rewatch some random ones, those were good ones.
We played quite a bit of Nier: Replicant. We got the "A" ending, and are now on basically a new game +, with extra scenes and such.
So, I went into it already mildly spoiled for the twist. (Taylor I think told me about it back before we played Nier: Automata several years ago, since the original had some frustrations about playing it, so we didn't want to do so at the time.)
So... the plot is a bit convoluted, but it's fairly clear that the "semi-generic fantasy RPG" setting is actually also deeply post-apocalyptic, which isn't a spoiler - it's pretty obvious from the timeskip between the prologue and the main story, to say nothing of some of the areas you explore and other major plot events. (As a side note, that is MY SHIT right there. Love it.) What *caused* that apocalypse is a bit less well known, except in hints about horrific disease and such.
Most of the game is spent fighting "shades", which are the catch-all for the various shadow-y enemies you face. The protagonist is singularly focused on wiping them out, as he blames them for his sister being kidnapped away from him.
The actual spoiler is: When the horrible disease was in danger of wiping humanity out, the last-ditch solution was, essentially, to split human bodies and souls. The souls could be kept safe, while the bodies became empty husks called "Replicants", preserving humanity's genetics until the disease could be cured and the souls would be safe to return to the Replicant bodies.
You and the rest of the people you've been dealing with throughout the game are the Replicants, supposedly-soulless... and the shades you've been killing are the detached souls of the "real" humans. (With delightful fridge horror at like... the small shades you kill that drop items like coloring books.)
So, you find this out at the end, that hey, this has kind of been a big oops, and the Replicants seem to be developing souls of their own, but the shades are also souls that you've been indiscriminately murdering! Some of the shades ARE horrible murdering dickbags, but a lot of them are just innocent people.
On the replay, you get to actually read the shades' dialogue, which before was unintelligible, and also get new scenes of the various bosses you fight. A lot of this is very much driving home that you are killing innocent things. One of the bosses that appeared to summon smaller enemies to swarm you actually has dialogue begging those smaller shades to retreat because they're going to be killed and its trying to protect them.
Like... the theme is very much "hey, you're the real monster!" And it's good! It's well done! It's super impressive HOW different the scenes read between the original assumptions of what's happening vs. the newer context. It draws a lot of deliberate parallels between the protagonists and how they're treated vs. the things the groups of shades are doing.
But I've been spoiled (in the "given everything I want" sense, not the "know what happens" sense) by games like Zero Escape, where you're stuck in a timeloop with the express purpose of learning from your previous attempts, and using that information to progress, and ultimately (hopefully) to get a good ending.
Where this... lets you know that you're being the monster, but (at least so far) gives you no real opportunity to do anything to change it. You're locked into making the same choices, even as you know what you're doing is terrible. I'm so much a "being mean is not nice" player, this is a struggle for me, haha. (And also doesn't allow you to avoid other tragedies that you as the player now know are going to happen.)
Now, I have NOT looked into spoilers for all the various endings for the game. I don't think it has 26 different endings the way Automata did, but I know there are at least a few. I DO hope that we finally get to have some sort of "good" ending where we aren't basically genocidal monsters! We'll see.
I'm definitely enjoying the game, and the twist hits the way it should imo. I just want to fix my characters' mistakes, because that's what I always want to do, ha.
no subject
no subject
(That was the case with Nier: Automata, too.)