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yeah I'm a tone over plot kind of guy, often to a fault, and to me the tone of the ending felt spot on
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Mar 9, 2020 14:34
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Mr. Prokosch posted:Inland Empire gives you a time limit to solve the case and it's a lie. Maybe there was supposed to be a time limit but the devs removed it? This is sort of meta either way.
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Mar 9, 2020 15:40
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Jack Trades posted:I must be particularly stupid because I'm not sure what connection you're talking about. Can you spell it out for me? not going to spoil this because otherwise is going to be unreadable Disco Elysium does the thing where a literary thesis is repeated in "waves" rather than building up argument by argument to a final conclusion. So, you have constant references to the same thematic problem through different points of view. It doesn't take an hour into the game for the player to figure out that Harry is in a bad place at the moment regarding his life. So you play the game and you start figuring out what the hell happened to get this awful. At the same time that you are solving the case, Harry is also finding himself, or even better, discovering someone besides himself through the actions of the player. What fundamentally cracked Harry was heartbreak from his failed relationship. Dora, in the process, was transformed into Dolores Dei, the most holy figure in the recent history of Elysium, through flawed means of coping and dealing with that trauma. That is loving problematic, to say the least. How the gently caress you can carry on with life if your ex is the holiest person to ever live, and worse, with the added implication that is somehow your fault that it didn't work out? How a heart can deal with that much guilt? Who else, or what else, could be dealing with similar problems? The Deserter embodies the sheer tragedy of perpetuating our traumas. He couldn't loving bear the idea of the world going on after all that happened, he had to keep going. But for all his ideological rhetoric, he doesn't seem to realize that his justification was ultimately the greatest defeat possible: in his one-man "partisan war", he didn't bother to learn what could be done to actually help or assist the people of Martinaise or Revachol at large to carry on their revolution in different ways. In other words, he betrayed the revolution and his comrades not when he routed, but afterwards, when he started to act because of his guilt. Then you have the Pale. The Pale is the whole of the human past experience, or at least incorporates that into it. It is the Big Problem of the setting. The existential threat. What makes it even worse is that it is pleasant. The Paledriver loves it. Tiago, the church climber, left it all away to stay near the hole. The Paledriver closes her eyes and bam, she is enjoying great memories of different times and places where she can see things that are completely not possible in the present. "Why bother with all this, when we could become vapor?" Nostalgia. Harry goes along with his day, smells something like apricots, remembers a tender moment with Dora and in that moment, all is well, only to be destroyed emotionally in a few seconds later when the present nudges you back to it. Why keep living? Why not throw yourself into the Pale? Because you still can get to see the Phasmid. To do and see things that are pretty much miracles. Regardless of how things are with the world right now, there is space for the new. For hope. For different things. To walk away from ruin, to not surrender to the past, to stride forward into life as it is, to ultimately be able to leave into something new is the proposal that Disco Elysium challenges Harry with - and thus the player as well.
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Mar 9, 2020 18:10
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Thank you, this is uh, what I meant, except including the bits I felt like I was rambling about when I tried including them, bits I just forgot, and overall just more articulate. And yeah, most importantly, as you mentioned, the thesis is slowly introduced, and stated and repeated throughout then in the final act it sort of hammers home the more explicit thematic stuff. And I sort of mentioned it, but like you said, it really DOES say there is hope, it’s not a game that’s like ‘well we’re hosed, communism has failed, there’s no hope of that ever happening again so forget it. In fact, that’s what the communism thought cabinet description basically says, and it confused me the first time until shortly after that I realized it says something like ‘giving up would be the moralist thing to do!’, so at first glance it appears to present every political ideology with a similarly pessimistic tone, but clearly they’re taking the piss with that one. Au Revoir Shosanna posted:yeah I'm a tone over plot kind of guy, often to a fault, and to me the tone of the ending felt spot on Same, like every game I love is like this, including the one in my avatar, The Last Guardian, which if you haven’t played it, don’t read this and go play it, but the ending is super weird, especially compared to the rest of the game and has an incredible reveal at the end that made my jaw drop as it’s so unexpected. like, you drop into a weird futuristic alien throne room housing a futuristic or alien looking sphere with neon green patterns all over it and a metallic spiky looking black goo all over it to protect it if you go near it. It’s kind controlling all of the Tricos in this crater to go out and capture children to bring back to it and feed them to him for energy to continue it’s existence despite the population of the crater having been wiped out, most likely due to this kind of sacrifice ages ago, and you don’t know anything about it until literally the last 30 minutes or so of the game and you’re only told its name. You have to just infer all of that, but the child sacrifice to power the thing is pretty clear, but I love it because it’s just perfectly ambiguous, in that the conclusions different people might come to are all valid and like, my first thought was that the theme of the game was climate change- a meaningless cycle that is sacrificing the future generation to keep perpetuating the status quo which is so self serving that it either doesn’t realize because it’s an AI, or simply doesn’t care that everyone has either died or tried to flee the city. Sorry that was a lot more long winded than I thought it would be, but typically that’s the sort of video game story that has been the most emotionally impactful for me, and again it’s almost entirely due to the context of the story, but I really can’t think of any video game story that comes close to Disco Elysium’s, without the added asterisk of like ‘it’s good if you play the game’, whereas, Disco Elysium, as many others have said itt can basically stand in its own, and not just as a story that’s good for a video game, but a good story in any medium. imhotep fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Mar 9, 2020 |
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Mar 9, 2020 18:46
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Mr. Prokosch posted:Inland Empire gives you a time limit to solve the case and it's a lie. Sometimes Inland Empire gets super meta about things. Like when it tells you wiping the mirror will change your character portrait icon, in not so many words. It may be doing that again and talking about how long the devs expect someone to take on average.
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Mar 9, 2020 22:01
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Is this a visual novel? I've been going back and forth on it and am leaning towards yes. Most visual novels have some aspect that doesn't fit the VN archetype. 999 series is multiple play throughs and escape rooms. Phoenix Wright is point and click adventure and whatever the court stuff is. DE has some of the trappings of a RPG but compared to those other two series is less linear while at the same time being less of an actual game. There are fail states you can fall into, but for the most part, you don't really have to do anything to get to the end of the game other than talk to people. In those other two series, you actually have to do some sort of gaming in order to reach the end. So, if those are VNs, then DE must be, as well.
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Mar 9, 2020 22:03
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Disco Elysium is not a VN but it is, categorically, anime
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Mar 9, 2020 22:09
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DE is absolutely a visual novel.
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Mar 9, 2020 22:10
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Most mystery games that are any good qualify as visual novels, considering a VN nowadays is just any game without combat
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Mar 9, 2020 22:12
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Gonna go play my favourite visual novel, Solitaire
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Mar 9, 2020 23:29
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Wafflecopper posted:Gonna go play my favourite visual novel, Solitaire 
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Mar 9, 2020 23:37
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hell yea if you liked disco elysium, play ELIZA
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Mar 10, 2020 00:02
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Disco Elysium also fits the VN pattern of your agency being more in your reactions to events than changing the course of events.
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Mar 10, 2020 00:07
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The difference basically comes down to picking your stats and what you can level up which in turn affects what decisions you can make, but the way that you ‘fail forward’ in this game is also pretty different to most RPGs. So I’d say it’s like a mash up of both, like taking persona and making it a mussou game or something.
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Mar 10, 2020 03:26
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Jack Trades posted:Does Inland Empire ever lie to you? It's very obtuse with it's information but I think it always tells you the truth? Inland Empire goes out of its way to tell you the truth in the most useless way possible.
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Mar 10, 2020 03:27
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Idiot Doom Spiral posted:Inland Empire goes out of its way to tell you the truth in the most useless way possible. It's a pretty classic oracle. Gives you information that is 100% accurate but you can only understand it after the thing it predicts has already happened.
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Mar 10, 2020 03:44
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Epic High Five posted:Most mystery games that are any good qualify as visual novels, considering a VN nowadays is just any game without combat I'd say that a VN is a game that doesn't require skill-based gameplay. No jumping sequences, no combat, no stealth sections, no quick-time events, no puzzles that require precise inputs, etc. You can still fail at things, but you'll never fail because you weren't good enough at pushing buttons.
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Mar 10, 2020 06:57
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Au Revoir Shosanna posted:yeah I'm a tone over plot kind of guy, often to a fault, and to me the tone of the ending felt spot on Yeah, I felt like I shared a high five with the game at the ending. I liked how much was unanswered because the overarching theme to me was "why the gently caress WOULD you know everything? You're just a mouse in the same maze as everyone else. But what a cool maze."
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Mar 10, 2020 10:26
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Khizan posted:I'd say that a VN is a game that doesn't require skill-based gameplay. No jumping sequences, no combat, no stealth sections, no quick-time events, no puzzles that require precise inputs, etc. so all those LucasArts and Sierra adventure games were VNs?
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Mar 10, 2020 12:03
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I've never played a visual novel but it only takes five seconds on google image search to see that Disco Elysium does not meet the previously established definition of a visual novel (and I don't mean because it's not anime). I mean it might literally be a "visual" "novel" in the same sense that basically any game where you play a character is a "role-playing" "game", but VN is seemingly a genre defined solely by its conventions, basically none of which DE follows. I'd call it a role-playing adventure game if I had to differentiate it from your average RPG.
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Mar 10, 2020 13:04
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Yeah I thought VNs are more defined by UI and visual perspective conventions and not so much by presence or lack of mechanical systems.
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Mar 10, 2020 13:13
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Love the analysis but hate open spoilers being thrown around in the thread.
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Mar 10, 2020 13:22
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Can someone clear something up for me? I feel kind of stupid because I don't quite understand the nature of the competition between Precincts 41 and 57. When you first talk about it Kim says that it's about who has to police Martinaise and that he volunteered as the representative to spoil it, which to me meant that he intended to show up and do a good job to gently caress over his precinct because winning meant they'd get jurisdiction over Martinaise, which they don't want. But when you tell him you think Precinct 41 sent you as a joke to gently caress with 57, Kim says he thinks both precincts would prefer a win. So... it's not about who has to police Martinaise? Why wouldn't they find someone better than Kim (who himself admits he isn't 57's finest officer, though he's selling himself short)? Sorry if I'm missing something obvious.
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Mar 10, 2020 16:50
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Adventure-RPG works for me.Arist posted:Can someone clear something up for me? I feel kind of stupid because I don't quite understand the nature of the competition between Precincts 41 and 57. When you first talk about it Kim says that it's about who has to police Martinaise and that he volunteered as the representative to spoil it, which to me meant that he intended to show up and do a good job to gently caress over his precinct because winning meant they'd get jurisdiction over Martinaise, which they don't want. But when you tell him you think Precinct 41 sent you as a joke to gently caress with 57, Kim says he thinks both precincts would prefer a win. So... it's not about who has to police Martinaise? Why wouldn't they find someone better than Kim (who himself admits he isn't 57's finest officer, though he's selling himself short)? Sorry if I'm missing something obvious. It seems vague and stupid from both characters' perspectives, but I think you're overstating it- it's a petty pissing match with no real (or at least realistic) expectation of an outcome from either side besides solving what should probably be an open and shut case, though I get the impression Kim is considered reliable at the very least Like most interdepartmental rivalries there's not really much logic to what they do.
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Mar 10, 2020 16:54
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Adventure-RPG works for me. Ah, okay, that works.
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Mar 10, 2020 16:54
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Ghost Leviathan posted:It seems vague and stupid from both characters' perspectives, but I think you're overstating it- it's a petty pissing match with no real (or at least realistic) expectation of an outcome from either side besides solving what should probably be an open and shut case, though I get the impression Kim is considered reliable at the very least Like most interdepartmental rivalries there's not really much logic to what they do. If you dig deep into Kim's history, you find out he is also a joke at the local precinct. This may be related to his race, but also his past assignment infiltrating a group of pinball players.
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Mar 10, 2020 16:58
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My guess would be that Martinnaise is considered a shithole that neither district really wants to consider 'theirs', but neither wants to cede territory to the other, so the response is basically a wash. Of course, the 41st sent their 'human can opener' in theory with a crack team of detectives, who just went completely off the rails because he's a highly experimental human being, so who knows whether they expected it to be over by dinner or to make a dog's breakfast of it. The interesting thing is that the case has a lot of red herrings both for the characters and the audience, and only really the Evrart brothers have even the full context to put together what actually happened without doing all the research the protagonist does. (Though a player who knows both video game and mystery tropes is probably going to figure out pretty quickly that the most inaccessible spot at the beginning will obviously be the final area of the game.) And what throws everyone off in the end is that the culprit is a person very few people had any idea even existed, whose motives and method were almost entirely out of their context, and the game itself has extremely few clues as to their existence, equipment and motivation, which are easy to miss with the other background flavour, and the murder was basically a spur of the moment crime of passion that happened to be conducted as a precise assassination. Overall it breaks a lot of whodunnit rules, but also has a realistic touch in that figuring out what happened is simply a matter of continuing to investigate until you've ruled out every other possibility. Cpt_Obvious posted:If you dig deep into Kim's history, you find out he is also a joke at the local precinct. This may be related to his race, but also his past assignment infiltrating a group of pinball players. Then that might be a common theme that both of them are considered jokes by their precinct, but also competent at their jobs. In the case of the protagonist, specifically at their job.
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Mar 10, 2020 17:12
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I took away that Kim was not well liked due to his race/stoic personality (so they made him go to Martinaise and partner with a maybe corrupt, maybe lovely guy no one else wants to deal with from those fuckers at 57) but he is also competent and reliable (which is important because this was still a murder case with serious political implications. I think neither side necessarily wants to police Martinaise but more importantly they don't want to gently caress things up there.
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Mar 10, 2020 17:41
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Neither side cares much, but there's also the fact that neither side wants to lose face by letting the others win. So both sides sent somebody skilled but also expendable. Kim the pseudo-outcast and you the utter burnout. If their guy wins, then yay they won. If they lose, though, they can just blame it on the personal failings of their officer and not really have to acknowledge that they were beaten.
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Mar 10, 2020 17:50
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The 41 didn't just send Harry. They sent the Harry Squad. And then Harry got into a week long bender.
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Mar 10, 2020 17:57
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Didn't the pissing match only start when the Harry squad had already bowed out. Otherwise Kim got there super loving late considering it should have been solved by then.
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Mar 10, 2020 18:54
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Hwurmp posted:Disco Elysium is not a VN but it is, categorically, anime But Disco Elysium is good?
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Mar 10, 2020 19:01
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GlyphGryph posted:Didn't the pissing match only start when the Harry squad had already bowed out. it's never really unpacked but maybe racism isn't the reason 57 doesn't respect Kim, it's because he can't drive halfway across town in the time it takes other cops to show up, mostly solve a case, violently melt down their entire lives and undergo a drug-induced egodeath A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Mar 10, 2020 |
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Mar 10, 2020 21:03
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It might also be a question of how homophobic Revachol is
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Mar 10, 2020 21:10
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Nosfereefer posted:But Disco Elysium is good? yes, disco is blood
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Mar 10, 2020 21:33
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The title screen is a view of Martenaise from The Deserter's vantage point. Pretty cool.
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Mar 10, 2020 21:37
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Here's something I've wondered for a bit after finishing. Why does Ruby think Harry is on the take from a notorious criminal? When you ask at the end, everyone emphatically tells him no, absolutely not, you're definitely not crooked. Ruby had definitely heard of him though, and knew his reputation. Did she just hear about the whole human can opener thing and draw the wrong conclusion?
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Mar 10, 2020 22:13
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Glagha posted:Here's something I've wondered for a bit after finishing. Why does Ruby think Harry is on the take from a notorious criminal? When you ask at the end, everyone emphatically tells him no, absolutely not, you're definitely not crooked. Ruby had definitely heard of him though, and knew his reputation. Did she just hear about the whole human can opener thing and draw the wrong conclusion? you should call your precinct up and ask them about this, imo. I believe you can also ask Kim about it
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Mar 10, 2020 22:15
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Glagha posted:Here's something I've wondered for a bit after finishing. Why does Ruby think Harry is on the take from a notorious criminal? When you ask at the end, everyone emphatically tells him no, absolutely not, you're definitely not crooked. Ruby had definitely heard of him though, and knew his reputation. Did she just hear about the whole human can opener thing and draw the wrong conclusion? She's a paranoid drug runner who listens to too many rumors.
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Mar 10, 2020 23:13
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:it's never really unpacked but maybe racism isn't the reason 57 doesn't respect Kim, it's because he can't drive halfway across town in the time it takes other cops to show up, mostly solve a case, violently melt down their entire lives and undergo a drug-induced egodeath he just can't help tooling around in his very cool car
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Mar 11, 2020 00:19
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