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I forget when exactly it was mentioned, but at one point you mentioned how dark souls was supposed to have horseback riding but they could never get it to work right well, elden ring has horseback riding now they really do love to re-implement old scrapped concepts, don't they? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6pCyV7PnqI
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Jun 10, 2021 20:52
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Re-implementing scrapped concepts is essentially tradition for them at this point.
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Jun 11, 2021 17:14
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Sibyl Disobedience posted:Re-implementing scrapped concepts is essentially tradition for them at this point. https://twitter.com/antyherowow/status/1403086478436188161 (Gods' Grave was an area that figured into an early plan for Dark Souls III and probably ended up morphing into Farron Keep)
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Jun 11, 2021 22:55
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An interesting interview with George R.R. Martin that also mentions his involvement with Elden Ring: https://news.wttw.com/2021/06/16/george-rr-martin-talks-northwestern-writing-and-game-thrones I can't actually listen to the interview for some reason, but I've found a transcript of some of the relevant parts: George R.R. Martin posted:I've played some videogames. I'm not a big video gamer. But the game is called the Elden Ring and it's a sequel to a game that came out a few years ago called Dark Souls and it came out of Japan. [...] My work on it was actually done years ago: these games they're like movies, they take a long time to develop. Basically they wanted a world created to set the game in, they wanted world building as a big factor in fantasy and science fiction. You're not really talking about the characters and the plot, but the setting is almost as important as everything else: Tolkien's Middle Earth, Robert E Howard's Hyperborean age, the Foundation universe of Isaac Asimov [...] I worked up you know a fairly detailed background for them, and then they took it from there so really it's been several years since I've last seen them. But they would come in periodically and show me some monsters they'd designed, or the latest special effects, or the cool things, but the game has been very slowly developing and it's coming out in January I believe so I'll be as excited as everyone else to see it.
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Jun 19, 2021 20:46
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This structure is absolutely in line with how FromSoft operates. People treat them as auteur styled games revolving around Miyazaki, but the Design Works interviews very clearly state this is not how they operate.quote:Satake: This isn’t unique to Dark Souls. From Software’s titles often go thorough such amendments, although i’d call it more of a reconfiguration than an outright change. If some aspect isn’t coming together we’ll take it apart and think about how we can make it work. This can really give the artists a chance to flex their creative muscle. To put it another way it’s like were conducting a jazz session, but one to try and produce a superior experience. If an artist comes to us with an idea then we might suggest some something else before throwing it back. At times the studio almost feels like a live music session. GRRM is the composer who lays down the themes and structural elements of the pieces. The artist staff are the performers who have free reign to improvise around those themes. Miyazaki is the conductor who ultimately has to tie together all of that improvisation into a final, (relatively) cohesive production. One of the clearest examples of how this operates: quote:Nakamura: Right from the initial concept stages, when we were still working from key words like "ancient dragon", "chaos demon" and "undead" I thought long and hard about how to create something fresh and new for the people who played Demon's Souls At no point did Miyazaki lay out a precise image of the Gaping Dragon, as it's plainly stated that design "genuinely surprised and absolutely delighted" him. Instead, FromSoft has a design doc that touches upon the world building as distilled into themes represented by keywords. The designers and artists then have free reign to improvise concepts that are inspired by those keywords. Hence, the expectation that "Ebrietas used to be Kos, that must mean the direction of the game completely changed!" is ultimately misguided. Both Ebrietas and Kos would draw from similar sets of keywords, and the conductor simply decided that one solo fit better in Upper Cathedral Ward and another fit better at the end of Byrgenwerth. It's an absolutely fascinating design process, and I'm pretty sure I can identify where the scholar who brought this forbidden blood to FromSoft originated from.
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Jun 19, 2021 22:14
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It is extremely impressive, and very attuned to the necessities of game development. And they seem to be improving on it, too; for as complicated as some of their newer games' development cycles were, there was never really a second Lost Izalith. Though, another detail... "You would expect designs based around this theme to be either fat or have a huge mouth, but that's a little too predictable." Covetous Demon says Hi  In fact, I've seen it mentioned that the Japanese name of the Gaping Dragon shares a kanji with that of the Covetous Demon, and now I'm wondering if the Covetous Demon was intentionally designed as a lovely knockoff Gaping Dragon. Its backstory, like that of the Demon of Song, heavily reads like an in-universe fabrication to me as well.In light of recent events: Kentaro Miura also fits neatly into the list of composers providing important parts of the groundwork for all these achievements. Of course, if FromSoft connects Elden Ring to their established thematic field, we know what we can expect: https://twitter.com/Silent0siris/status/1403366360130981892
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Jun 20, 2021 23:09
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This offers a good opportunity for me to finally write up something I should have finished weeks ago. How do we interpret the purpose of the strange thematic repetition within these games. There's definitely a thematic resonance between the Gaping Dragon and the Covetous Demon around the "theme of greed." But why? One of the toughest things in FromSoft game is identifying anything remotely corresponding to either good and evil. A lot of the time everyone we meet and fight can feel like different shades of piteous or reprehensible. But I've made the argument in this thread that as much as the surface reading of Bloodborne paints Imposter Iosefka as a villain, I genuinely believe that FromSoft might consider her the heroine of the game. But this is something that only really leaks through if you read supplemental text like developer interviews, which I guess might upset some people, but it seems like there's nothing I enjoy more than a masterful multimedia mystery. So while they're operating on the same themes, how does FromSoft's writing appear to feel about Gaping Dragon and Covetous Demon. We don't have a ton of in-game information to go off of re: Gaping Dragon, so we'll focus on the Design Works Interview as being the primary source. First, as you pointed out, Miyazaki likes the Gaping Dragon design, and appears to be throwing subtle shade at the Covetous Demon Design quote:I'm also a huge fan of the Gaping dragon. I'd even go so far to say that the interview appears to venerate as well as sympathize with the Gaping Dragon: quote:It's part of an ancient race of mineral based life forms, existing since long before the emergence of mankind. Yet despite its superiority over us, its time has passed, and it finds itself alone in the world, the last of its race forced to survive in any way it can. As to what triggered this change, well the emergence of life corrupted it, it was warped by emotion and desire… quote:Yes, it was completely consumed with the desire to eat, so much so that it began to adapt, and the parts of it's body it no used such as it's head, began to retrogress. It no longer eats with it's mouth but takes food directly into it's body, but it had to change in this way in order to survive. Aside from eating It's lost any faculties it may have once possessed and has to survive in this desolate, harsh environment by eating anything he can. It simply did what it had to, to continue to exist. The Gaping Dragon is first described as being superior to us, and there's countless phrases that touch upon tragedy: "its time has passed," "it finds itself alone in the world, the last of its race forced to survive in any way it can," "it simply did what it had to, to continue to exist," "to survive in this desolate, harsh environment." These are sentiments of sympathy and pity. By contrast, nothing about the in-game descriptions of Covetous Demon could be said to be flattering. quote:Eating is an expression of desire. The Gaping Dragon's focus on food is framed as a survival mechanism in starvation conditions. The Covetous Demon, on the other hand, is unequivocally gluttonous. Even the visual designs reflect this in the Gaping Dragon's exposed rib cage versus the Covetous Demon's massive fat stores. This is also reflected in the alternate method for beating Covetous Demon, shooting down the pots in the room to serve as bait. The creature is so focused on eating that self defense doesn't occur to it, as opposed to the Gaping Dragon needing to eat anything it can find in order to merely survive. quote:There once was a man whose deep affections were unrequited. He transformed into the Covetous Demon, which only made him lonelier than before. It's not definitive because of how often FromSoft denigrates in text the characters that it venerates the most, but in the lack of any positive portrayals, "monstrous fiend" and "perversion of love" both paint an unflattering picture. It's also worth pointing out how much this story overlaps with Executioner Smough. Smough "ground the bones of his victims into his own feed, ruining his hopes of being ranked with the Four Knights," which along with Smough's appearance expresses the same sort of gluttony we see in the Covetous Demon's Design. Dark Souls 3 also describes Smough as being "the last knight to stand in defense of the ruined cathedral," which correlates to never leaving the queen. There's not a neat and tidy explanation that I can tie this all together with (for a whole variety of reasons), but it's worth pondering why Dark Souls returns to these motifs so often, but also appears to be constantly re-examining them in each iteration. I'm weird so this may not be a universal response, but it leaves me fascinated at the mindset of the person who first imagined this, and what these patterns meant to them. Another example of this is Lautrec, the murderous rear end in a top hat who kills our Fire Keeper Anastacia and absconds with her soul up to Anor Londo. But is it really that simple? In Dark Souls 3, we have Ringfinger Leonhard who re-enacts Lautrec's entire storyline. By mid-game we find him hanging around Rosaria, who is described as a "speechless goddess," similar to this way to Anastacia. And Rosaria is locked away in a room above Cathedral of the Deep, which geographically parallels Anastacia's position locked just above the watery abyss of New Londo Ruins. At a certain point Leonhard kills Rosaria, and just like Lautrec takes her soul to Anor Londo. Both leave behind Black Eye Orbs that we can use to invade them in Anor Londo and recover the stolen souls. And both Lautrec and Leonhard wield shotel's at the start, furthering even farther the parallel. But where it gets weird is that Lautrec is always portrayed as a poorly concealed villain. Leonhard, by contrast, or portrayed rather sympathetically: quote:Well, well, never expected to see you here. Felt sorry for the poor thing, in all her festering glory? And now you want to ravage her soul, as well. I sowed the seeds. I'll prune the mess. I, Leonhard, swear so upon my vows to the goddess. And is he wrong? Aren't both Rosaria and Anastacia prisoners of a tormented imprisonment? Isn't it a mercy at this point to free them by any means necessary? Maybe that's arguable, but certainly Leonhard appears to believe that he's doing the right thing in letter her soul finally rest. But the parallels get even weirder because character motifs appear to blend and merge with something approaching intent. Leonhard's Silver Mask offers this description: quote:In his youth, Leonhard suffered grave burns to his entire body. Nothing about this tracks with Lautrec, but it does track with Anor Londo's other golden resident, the Darkmoon Knightess: quote:Her brass armor serves to disguise this ghastly form. The question of identity is an infinitely peculiar one in the Souls series, and I think it's best not to underestimate how convoluted the reality these games portray actually is. But more than that, I think it's worth it to stop worrying so much about trying to establish some kind of canon interpretation of events, and spend more time wondering about the peculiarity of the mind (or minds) that conjured up this tangled mess of reinterpreted motifs, and ask ourselves the simplest of questions: "Why?"
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Jun 21, 2021 02:19
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It would probably be difficult to find a single character in the series who only appears once, by various meanings of the term "appears". There's always a direct equivalent, both comparison and contrast; and frequently the same character serves as equivalent to multiple others. Like how Leonhard is also obviously modeled after Lucatiel; or how Oceiros is Seath in the role of Vendrick. And even the player character can participate, dressing up as all these other characters or as combinations of them, sometimes even getting the opportunity to turn into someone else entirely (except in Sekiro, but that one generally seems like a – successful – attempt to translate Soulsborne storytelling into the environment of a more conventional character-driven plot structure).
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Jun 22, 2021 22:13
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Carpator Diei posted:It would probably be difficult to find a single character in the series who only appears once, by various meanings of the term "appears". There's always a direct equivalent, both comparison and contrast; and frequently the same character serves as equivalent to multiple others. Like how Leonhard is also obviously modeled after Lucatiel; or how Oceiros is Seath in the role of Vendrick. And even the player character can participate, dressing up as all these other characters or as combinations of them I want to take a moment to talk about how important this ending is. In the Soulsborne games, we aren't going on our own journey. We're reliving the journey of the heroes that came before us. One of the more mundane theories I have is that the first half of Dark Souls 1 is us reliving Vendrick's rise to power. The first bell of awakening represents him taming the dragons. The second bell of awakening represents him finding Nashandra. The journey to Anor Londo represents him crossing the sea to the kingdom of the giants, and it is there that he acquires the flame that Nashandra coveted as represented by the Lordvessel. Our reiteration of has no importance on its own. We're certainly not saving the world. We're engaging in a ritual. When we defeat the heroes of old we claim their souls. And also their clothes much of the time. We gain the right to imitate them. To mimic them. To become their heir. The same thing Oceiros is doing. Arguably the same thing Imposter Iosefka is doing. By symbolically reliving their lives, we are claiming the right to usurp their flames. In the context of my grander theory, it's a rather powerful message . I just find myself agreeing more and more to Genichiro, which probably wasn't an intended outcome. Yet here we are.
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Jun 22, 2021 23:28
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Episode 33 (DS1-10): Seath Deposed Dark Souls is a story told from stitched together fragments of memory. As a result, our impact on the world as players is negligible at best. What happens instead is we cross certain thresholds during our play and time warps around us, and there's no place in Dark Souls that provides better evidence for this than the Duke's Archives. Because the Duke's Archives tells the story of Seath being deposed in three parts, and it does this through the shifts in ecology in each section. We find the opening section full of Crystal Soldiers:  We also encounter a single Channeler:  We are explicitly told that the Channelers serve Seath: Six-Eyed Helm of the Channelers posted:Helm of the Channelers, sorcerers that serve Seath the Scaleless. The six eyes arranged in two vertical columns compensate for Seath's lack of sight. Robe of the Channelers posted:Robe of the Channelers, sorcerers that serve Seath the Scaleless. Even after the onset of Seath's madness, the "snatchers" as they were often called, ventured to far lands to find suitable human specimens. And given the fact that the Channelers work in conjunction with the Crystal Soldiers, including buffing the soldiers through their Trident dance, and the crystalline nature of their appearance, it's safe to assume that the Crystal Soldiers also serve Seath. At the end of this section, we encounter Seath. It doesn't go well for us. https://i.imgur.com/e6KPfa7.gifv But the context suggests that it doesn't go all that well for Seath either. Upon reviving, we find ourselves in a prison cell. This foreshadows the way we get into Hypogean Gaol early in Bloodborne, which is especially interesting since for that to happen, we need to die to a specific enemy who is also called a Snatcher. The central mistake people make when interpreting this area is the assumption that the Man Serpents are in service of Seath, but it's actually pretty clear that they deposed Seath. To break out of the prison, we kill a woefully incompetent guard and take its key:  It's worth keeping in mind that the Man Serpents in Sen's Fortress are also repeatedly depicted as comically inept, repeatedly positioned in such a way to get wrecked by all the traps in the Fortress. Of particular note is the other Man Serpent in the game resting in this position who does so in the path of an oncoming boulder. Anyway, the description of the key: quote:The Archive Tower, once a trove of precious tomes and letters, became a prison after the onset of Seath's madness. The serpent men who guard the prison know not the value of what they hide. In the basement of the tower are the writhing "mistakes" of the terrifying experiments which were conducted there. We mistakenly assume that Seath became insane and turned his Tower into a prison, when it actuality, Seath was deposed and was seething about it, hence why Seath disappears from the Duke's Archives entirely after defeating us. The Man Serpents are disrespecting Seath's creations. They "know not the value of what they hide," and the scare quotes around "mistakes" implies a disagreement over whether they are, in fact, mistakes. In truth, the "mistakes" are loyal to Seath, and what we see occurring in this area is their prison riot. Once we break out of the jail, a Man Serpent sounds the alarm https://i.imgur.com/wbU6Vsr.gifv But here's the interesting thing: while the alarm is sounded the Man Serpent AI changes. They ignore us and instead run to the top of the zone. https://i.imgur.com/r5xImi8.gifv They release the "mistakes," the Pisaca in order to try to deal with us, but they clearly cannot control the Pisaca and fear them far more than they fear us. And theoretically, the reason the Serpent Men go up is that the Pisaca cannot climb ladders. When the alarm is off, the Man Serpents return to prioritizing normal aggression towards us, and the Pisaca remain passive in their open cage. Jumping ahead a couple games, the Man Serpent concept shows up again in Archdragon Peak. I don't have time to dredge up my footage, but in the Ancient Wyvern fight we have to run a gauntlet of Serpent Men in order to execute the plunging attack necessary to take the Ancient Wyvern down. But instead of defending the Wyvern, I'd argue that the Man Serpents have set up the ramparts in order to swarm the Wyvern, and our role in the encounter symbolically is trying to beat them to the kill. So I'd argue that the Man Serpents overthrew Seath from their archives and were responsible for turning it into a prison. If we look at our fellow prisoners, they are Seath's Crystal Soldiers, and Seath's Channelers are entirely missing from this area. When dealing with a rebellion, the Man Serpents attempted to release Seath's creations in defense, but the incompetent Serpents could not control them. Hence, when we leave this area for the final segment of the zone, Seath's Channelers are back in control along with their Crystal minions. The key is to look at who is being imprisoned in this area. We have Seath's loyal Crystal Soldiers. We have Seath's creations, the Pisacas. And then we have Big Hat Logan, who has absolute reverence towards Seath: quote:The tomes stored in these Archives are truly magnificent. A great pool of knowledge, the fruits of superior wisdom and an unquenchable desire for the truth. Some would say Seath had an unsound fixation... But his work is a beautiful, invaluable resource. All progress demands sacrifice. And I certainly bear no antipathy for that wonderful scaleless beast. It's clear to me that what we're seeing here is a progressive narrative of Seath being thrown out of their library by the Man Serpents. They then has their loyal minions reclaim it, as they resume operating it through their channelers while hidden in the Crystal Cave. It's such a delightful exercise in environmental storytelling, and I didn't even begin to pick up on it until this last playthrough. Sibyl Disobedience fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Jul 7, 2021 |
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Jun 29, 2021 02:02
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The Man Serpents in Archdragon Peak are also associated with the running theme of attempting to become a dragon, a theme that seems like a weird tangent to the dichotomy of slaying or riding dragons. It's present in all three Dark Souls games, and I'm pretty sure it's never explained why people are so eager to be dragons, which stands out because Dark Souls dragons honestly aren't all that amazing; it's as if Byrgenwerth's attempts to ascend to the status of Great One got misplaced into an environment without actual Great Ones so that only the form of these procedures remains, devoid of content (or maybe the ascension attempts in Bloodborne are actually exactly as arbitrary and without rational grounds as the draconification attempts; after all, the Pot Nobles in Sekiro and their obsession with turning into carps already seem like a deliberate parody of the whole thing).
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Jun 30, 2021 11:08
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Carpator Diei posted:The Man Serpents in Archdragon Peak are also associated with the running theme of attempting to become a dragon, a theme that seems like a weird tangent to the dichotomy of slaying or riding dragons. It's present in all three Dark Souls games, and I'm pretty sure it's never explained why people are so eager to be dragons, which stands out because Dark Souls dragons honestly aren't all that amazing It's a bit more complicated than that. Both in-game and in interviews, some dragons are treated reverentially. The catch is that they're all dying or dead. quote:Waragai: I remember you said that to me when I was working on the zombie dragon. Originally it was covered with maggots, but you told me that I needed instead, to try and capture the sadness of this great creature as it marches towards extinction. quote:Miyazaki: I'm also a huge fan of the Gaping dragon. It's a little different to the other dragons in the world, It's part of an ancient race of mineral based life forms, existing since long before the emergence of mankind. Yet despite its superiority over us, its time has passed, and it finds itself alone in the world, the last of its race forced to survive in any way it can. Big Hat Logan posted:The tomes stored in these Archives are truly magnificent. A great pool of knowledge, the fruits of superior wisdom and an unquenchable desire for the truth. Some would say Seath had an unsound fixation... But his work is a beautiful, invaluable resource. All progress demands sacrifice. And I certainly bear no antipathy for that wonderful scaleless beast. Old Paledrake Soul posted:Soul of the ineffable It's the imitation dragons that the game expresses a disdain for. Whether it's the way it describes the Man Serpents in Archdragon Peak: Ancient Dragon Greatshield posted:The painting is the result of an exquisite but painstaking technique. Lingering, undying traces of the ancient dragons can still be seen in their descendants, the man-serpents, though they have fallen far from grace. Or Oceiros and the similarly themed rejects in the Irithyll Dungeon: Soul of Consumed Oceiros posted:Oceiros went mad trying to harness his royal blood for a greater purpose, leading him to the heretics of the Grand Archives, where he discovered the twisted worship of Seath the paledrake. Or Nashandra's treatment of the Ancient Dragon: quote:That thing is a prop, a false deity. Don't be fooled, my Undead. Any contempt this series shows towards dragons is typically reserved for shoddy forgeries, and if we're drawing parallel's to Sekiro, Genichiro's ultimate ending is illustrative of a larger theme that seeking to replace your heroes is a fool's errand. No reason not to extend that to dragons in Dark Souls and Great Ones in Bloodborne.
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Jul 2, 2021 18:53
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Now that you mention it, I'm pretty sure none of the Dark Souls games actually features a genuine Archdragon / Everlasting Dragon, except maybe the one in Ash Lake (and that one doesn't really look like any of the other dragons). Even the mighty Midir is specifically referred to as merely a "descendant of Archdragons". Another thing: I found this essay on parasite symbolism in Bloodborne that has some interesting observations.
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Jul 4, 2021 19:29
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quote:There’s no point trying to work out unsolvable problems quote:Doors that shouldn’t be opened are awfully tempting, aren’t they? Undeath of the Author: Velka Dark Souls is a tomb. In the tradition of Don Quixote, stated inspiration for the character Lucatiel of Mirrah, the entire Souls series is a grand, literary experiment in metafiction. And when you put the pieces together, any metafiction interpretation revolves around the repeating theme of a world built from the corpse of a dying god, with the most central variant of the myth revolving around the series' anonymous and now very dead creator, Seath. That is to say that the entire Soulsborne series is a memorial for an actually-existing, nameless person. Old Paledrake Souls, Dark Souls 2 posted:Soul of the ineffable But I wasn’t content leaving things at that. I wanted to attempt soul reconstruction surgery. So I endeavored in the most sacred of rituals in all of gaming: clipping out of bounds. Look, I was instructed to link the flame, but no one ever precisely defined the boundaries. That one’s on you, FromSoft. Blame yourself or god. Through the application of symbolic resonance, I think I’ve triangulated the trajectory of Seath’s travels through three decades of influence in the video game industry, and the tale is rapturous. It’s a story both terrible and beautiful in equal measure. And it demands to be seen. Blasphemy or not. Like I said last time, you can learn a lot about a pharaoh by the objects they choose to be buried with, and following this has taken me somewhere I never thought I’d be going back to: the Final Fantasy series. Treasure Hunting It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice, but referential structures to the Final Fantasy games are everywhere in Soulsborne. The first one that caught my eye was how the rat fight on the scaffolding at the top of Bloodborne’s Research Hall was reminiscent of Final Fantasy 6’s Opera House scene, complete with a Maria of sorts below them.   I chalked this up to fun nostalgia. Probably just a fan or two on the dev team. But earlier in the Hunter’s Nightmare, we find Laurence the first Vicar resting in a pose inspired by the famous sculpture, the Pietà.  Final Fantasy 6 references this same motif in its final boss battle. The third phase features two figures engaged in the same pose, and Maria is the Japanese name for the female of the pair.  To take Bloodborne’s DLC to even weirder places, the inexplicable giant sunflowers in the Living Failures’ boss arena might be a reference to Radical Dreamers, Squaresoft’s 1996 text adventure sequel to Chrono Trigger. Which is honestly the weirdest, most obscure connection, and I probably wouldn’t bring it up if it weren’t so bizarre and unique.   These cross-series motifs extend outside of Bloodborne of course. In Dark Souls 2 you can collect Rat Tails for the Rat King Covenant. This is a reference to the repeating Rat Tail item in the Final Fantasy series. In the first game you give one to Bahamut to upgrade your job classes. In Final Fantasy 4, the Rat Tail that eventually allows you to get a Dwarven Smith to forge Excalibur. This connection to dwarves offers an explanation as to why the Gyrm are in Dark Souls 2, and why they appear to have an allegiance with the Rat King Covenant. Then there’s the Dark Souls 3 cover art. That’s a fun one. It’s running off the same sand-slipping through-fingers motif as the Cloudsea Djinn art featured in the splash screen of the PSP Final Fantasy 1 remake.  And then there’s the names. Beastclaw Jozef is a summoned helper we find in Bloodborne Chalice Dungeons. Who is he in the context of Bloodborne? Couldn’t tell you. But in terms of Final Fantasy he is a reference Josef from Final Fantasy 2, especially given the claws used by both characters. Dark Souls 1 has Undead Prince Ricard, which is the name of yet another Final Fantasy 2 character, Ricard Highwind (and yes, also the main character of FromSoft’s Echo Night, but if I’m correct this is a reference game that has been going on for a very long time). And then there’s Final Fantasy 2's Maria. Obviously we have the already mentioned inhabitant of Bloodborne’s Astral Clocktower, but the more interesting reference is in Déraciné. There we have the character Marie paired with Rozsa, giving us slight linguistic mutations of both the lead female characters of both Final Fantasy 2 and Final Fantasy 4. But Déraciné wasn’t the first FromSoft game this pairing shows up. We see it in Dark Souls 3’s Rosaria, Mother of Rebirth. We also find this naming pattern in the Rosmarinus weapon of Bloodborne. And on the topic of Rosmarinus, one of the most memorable places we encounter in Bloodborne is in the fight against Edgar, Choir Intelligencer who wields it against us in Nightmare of Mensis. If we treat this as a Final Fantasy reference, this becomes Edgar Roni Figaro of Final Fantasy 6 wielding his iconic Bio Blaster. And y’know, not gonna lie, I marked out a bit at this one.  Then there’s Magerold of Lanafir in Iron Keep of Dark Souls 2. A weirdly disconnected character from most of the lore. But his armor pretty strongly resembles Locke Cole’s merchant garb in Final Fantasy 6.   And maybe you consider that a bit of a stretch visually, but Magerold’s dialogue contains a big tell: quote:I'm mainly a treasure hunter, you see. I'm only a merchant on the side.  Just prior to meeting Magerold, during the fight against Mytha, the Baneful Queen, we can summon Jester Thomas to assist in the fight, who, given that his armor can be bought from Magerold, is almost certainly a Kefka reference. I can keep going. In Darkroot Forest we encounter genderbending Pharis, likely a play off of Final Fantasy 5’s Faris, a female pirate captain who disguised herself as a man. A similar motif of a female soldier disguising herself as male shows up in Dark Souls 2’s Lucatiel. But looking for possible naming games takes us to Chrono Trigger and the character Lucca Ashtear. Drop the Ash and apply that infamous L-R switch and we have Lucatiel. You’re sure to be in a fine haze right now, but don’t think too hard about all this. Individually, none of these examples are proof that Dark Souls and Final Fantasy are connected, but collectively, they establish probable cause for further investigation. The Creator When we find references to other pieces of fiction inside a work, we initially assume that this simply reflects an author paying tribute to their inspirations. However, if we’re willing to consider that Dark Souls is a memorial to a deceased game designer, it’s a small logical jump to the possibility that these games also include a tribute to this person’s contributions. So if our goal is to link some flames, the obvious thing to look for is narrative parallels showing up within the Final Fantasy series in roughly the same time frame as Demons’ Souls. Specifically, we want to find things that look like memorials, but we’re also looking for evidence of genderqueer elements. As I mentioned, Dark Souls is full of trans themes, and if they’re showing up in multiple memorials within the same time frame, well, that’s a narrative convergence that’s extremely unlikely to be coincidental. So in 2008, approximately the same time that Seath’s hypothetical death was proving to be a terrible inconvenience for the development of the Souls series, Squaresoft released Final Fantasy IV: The After Years. It was a pretty perplexing choice of game development, being a mobile only episodic sequel to a seventeen year old game. But it’s existence makes so much more sense to me now. In the After Years, the final boss is known as the Creator, an all-powerful being on life support who is responsible for the the entire game world. quote:You are all a part of the process...the output of the evolutionary plan conceived by the Crystals I created. In other words, this is all my work... The Crystals, the Maenads, and this new moon. This is why I am called the Creator! And if we're expecting meta-textual elements, it's especially useful that the Creator metastasis as an ability, which is the development of secondary malignant growths at a distance from a primary site of cancer, as cancer is one of those underlying themes in Bloodborne: Surgical Long Gloves posted:When a cancer is discovered, one must pinpoint its location, reach in, and wrench it from the host's bosom. Black Church Set posted:Most Healing Church hunters are elementary doctors who understand the importance of early prevention of the scourge The Creator is revered within the game as the master of the true moon, with the original FF4’s moon described as “having nothing” on the Creator’s. Potentially relevant given the association of Gwyndolin with the Darkmoon covenant, as well as Bloodborne concluding with a fight against the Moon Presence. So we have something here that could be functioning as a memorial to someone who would have to be rather revered to be referred to as “the Creator.” But the thing that stood out to me were the boss graphics, because this poo poo is a transition timeline, a series of pictures designed to showcase the progress of a gender transition:  The effect is even more stark in the iOS version:  They literally gave the boss a chest covering in its final form to conceal the now female presenting nipples. Something...noteworthy, is up here. Secret Betrayal Things really started to come together once I added Nier: Automata to the mix. Midway through the game, we receive a side quest to venture into a dark canyon and put down the Lord of the Valley. And then, when we finally encounter the Lord, things get weird. Yes, weird even for Nier.  After fulfilling this request and turning in the quest, we leave the area only to proc a conversation between the two main characters about the nature of death. quote:9S: Souls and heaven, huh? Do either of those things exist? At this point, a sad music track starts playing as the player climbs out of the canyon, giving this entire exchange far too much poignancy for a simple side quest. I felt the first time I encountered this that something of significance was occurring here, and I think I know what it is now. At the top of this climb is a cave that houses one of Emil’s precious memories, and also a plain treasure chest. But once you find a way to connect the symbols, everything falls into place.  In the back corner, we have the Lunar Tear, a flower strongly associated with the intersex character Kainé from 2010’s Nier Replicant.  But it’s the Dragoon Lance in the chest that really takes things to an interesting place, because if we’re willing to entertain the possibility that Nier is capable of talking about Final Fantasy, then the Dragoon Lance points us right back to Final Fantasy 4 and the character Kain.  So my belief at this point is that Kainé’s secret, Kainé’s actual secret, is that she is an authorial self-insert for the creator of Final Fantasy and Dark Souls. One of many self-inserts, as it turns out. That whole self-insert thing might seem weird to you, but it’s actually far and away the easiest thing to explain about this whole mess. Anyway, Kain. Yet another self insert. Which explains why the Kain event in the phone game Final Fantasy: Record Keeper was titled “Pride Wakens.” And as for Dark Souls and Seath, well, if we’re looking within Final Fantasy for the identity of an individual who betrayed their own, Kain is the obvious choice.  But surely it’s absurd that Final Fantasy could have been created by a trans woman (or an adjacent non-binary/intersex identity). There were no signs! https://i.imgur.com/yLr4M0E.gifv Sentiments like this aren’t a new addition; they’ve been there for decades.  It’s just that the more recent titles can get away with being a bit more overt about it. Now that I’m actually looking back, trans themes are all over the Final Fantasy series. Some of them overt, like Flea’s dialogue in Chrono Trigger--many of them much more veiled-- but the fact of the matter is, for these themes to be showing up so consistently, someone had to have a personal investment in them. Someone with clout. Like a Creator. And within Final Fantasy, Nier, and Dark Souls we have three series in the same timeframe that feel like they’re holding a funeral for an irregularly gendered individual. This can’t be a coincidence. Our kind doesn’t typically get that much attention, much less reverence.   https://i.imgur.com/9nXfhRv.gifv [img]https://lpix.org/4086784/24 - Thank you[Creator].png[/img] Meaningful Symbols So faced with this burgeoning mystery, I did what many other people are doing right now: tried the free trial of critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy 14. After all, the FF14-Nier crossover raid concludes with Kainé’s theme combined with the iconic Final Fantasy bridge crossing theme, so FF14 seems likely to have some relevance. ...but wow, did I hit the mother lode.   One of the first things I noticed in Final Fantasy 14 was that one of the major currencies were Tomestones of Allegory. Since what I’m hunting here is essentially one giant allegory, that seemed relevant. Because what I’m doing here is delving into a decades-old mystery.  Searching for an individual whose name was struck from the annals of history.  A defector who was deemed unworthy of commemoration, but whose friend created a commemoration in secret.   Their presence was deemed vulgar and inflammatory, so it had to be recorded obliquely in ostensibly unpolitical works.   Something that the censors failed to spot, allowing us to appreciate the true message.   Waiting for a time when the church has fallen out of favor and the truth can prevail.  And all it takes for us to find that truth is deciphering a copious use of allegory. [img]https://lpix.org/4086794/34 copious_use_of_allegory[small].png[/img] I’m not doing anything here but just taking the text literally. Seeking the source of Ricard’s monomyth. Transposing the ideas around. Trying to return the masterpiece to its original glory. It’s like glimpsing into the mind of the Creator. Oh, and look who’s there standing in the background.  Something miraculous has happened here, and to get to the bottom of it, we need to perform an exercise in translation. To properly translate something, you need to understand how the author thinks. As an Astrologian quest puts it, quote:Someone closely attuned with that aether can, in a sense, link themselves with others, feeling their joy, feeling their pain. Scholars of the soul call this empathy. Crystal-gazers and card-readers call it the wheel of fortune. We astrologians call it collective unconsciousness. A translation is a process of inductive reasoning, where we reverse engineer the motivations behind the language of a text. Sometimes this involves the cold logic of pattern recognition. Sometimes this requires being able to feel the emotional intent behind various inclusions. To empathize with the author. There’s a passage from the book Godel, Escher, Bach about the concept of decoding systems that I find useful when thinking about this sort of translation: quote:When you confront a formal system you know nothing of, and if you hope to discover some hidden meaning in it, your problem is how to assign interpretations to its symbols in a meaningful way.  I think the Squaresoft of the early 90’s is our ruined civilization. Something happened there. From Zeal in Chrono Trigger to Zanarkand in Final Fantasy 10 to Amaurot in Final Fantasy 14, the Square’s games became obsessed with civilizational collapse, and of course, both Dark Souls and Nier are no stranger to those themes. Meanwhile, if we’re searching for an allegorical anchor, we have an interview with the head honcho expressing the sentiment, “I hated Square. The whole business part of it.” Given a loathing for "the whole business part," if we're searching for allegory, it becomes relevant that in Chrono Trigger, the thing that brought ruin to the kingdom of Zeal was the Mammon Machine. Or that the initial villain of Final Fantasy 7 was the Shinra Electric Power Company, when Squaresoft's parent company at the time was Den-Yu-Sha, a power line construction company. These things being allegorical isn't exactly a huge logical leap. Which makes it all the more interesting that at this point of time emerges a repeated theme of major feminine figures being betrayed, imprisoned, and generally treated like poo poo.  For instance, In Final Fantasy 14 we have Titania, the explicitly nonbinary King of the Faeries of Il Mheg, locked in their castle to halt the spread of the light and the end of their world. quote:Why? Why did you imprison us? Such boredom...such tedium have we suffered. It is unfair! Unfair! Come. Come and play with us... But this is still ostensibly a Dark Souls thread, so how does the Souls series connect to this? Well, I think there’s a reason FromSoft got into making games in the mid-90’s, concurrent with the fall of old Squaresoft. A moment when that scholar at Byrgenwerth brought the forbidden blood to Cainhurst Castle, you might say. I suspect there’s a very specific reason why the scythe-wielding Rurufon of FromSoft’s Shadow Tower: Abyss has this dialogue.  (The headfake with the first linebreak is glorious.) Because every great one loses a child and then yearns for a surrogate. Seath may have betrayed their own, but that betrayal was a two-way street, and I suspect it all stems back metaphorically to a single moment in narrative space.  An Orphaned Generation It’s likely that you’re still extremely skeptical at this point, but I’m honestly just riffing off of what FromSoft president Hidetaka Miyazaki told us himself: https://twitter.com/itsExari/status/1302316368570843136 Which leads me to the absolutely tantilizing possibility that at the center of all this is a transgender individual who dreamed up Dark Souls to turn herself into a revenant so she could complain about 1990’s Squaresoft from beyond the grave.  To be a bit more serious, if anyone remotely matching this existence actually existed, they are my hero. The person who single-handedly dragged me into video game storytelling in the first place, and then years after I had given up on it somehow dragged me back in again with Bloodborne. They’re the only person who ever told a story that I genuinely related to, and discovering that they may have actually existed compels me to attempt to tell their story. As Lucatiel puts it: quote:Loss frightens me no end. Loss of memory, loss of self. I, more than anything in the world, want them to be remembered,so I’m going on my own quixotic journey to put the pieces of their life back together. Dusk, DS1 posted:It's just that, I wish to know the truth. And no one, not even loving Elizabeth, will tell me. The Emerald Herald told us in Dark Souls 2: quote:Bearer of the curse, seek misery. For misery will lead you to greater, stronger souls. Kainé posted:She gave me the strength to deal with this goddamn mutant body!  Well, I’ve sought out misery, and I think it’s led me to the greatest, strongest soul of all. An unfathomably brilliant individual who shaped the course of video game history for over three decades entirely from the shadows. And she was one of our own. https://i.imgur.com/HWSjjVe.gifv Many of you won’t get why that last part is so important to me. There’s a passage in the book Detransition, Baby about the lack of elders in the trans community. Here’s the author’s summary of that section: quote:Elephants have a culture: It’s a matriarchal culture. Elephants are also huge—they have a lot of power. They have a lot of emotions. It’s the mothers who teach young elephants how to behave, how to not lash out, because if an elephant lashes out, it creates a lot of destruction with just one swing of that trunk. So elephants spend a lot of time learning from elders how to control themselves. Actually knowing this creator existed would have meant a lot to me growing up, but even not knowing about them and also not understanding myself, their stories resonated with me in a way I’m only fully piecing together decades later. There are so many fan theories out there about this or that character being trans. In Final Fantasy 7 alone we have Cloud, Aerith, and even Sephiroth. But the thing that sucks is that so many people feel the need to preface these theories with “obviously, this probably wasn’t intended by the writers, but…” No, gently caress that. The Creator was one of our own, and so of course these stories are ours. That doesn’t mean the characters themselves have to be canonically trans. It’s genuinely a great thing if those stories resonate with cis people too. Because that makes them shared stories, and maybe that shared space can help us learn to better empathize with each other. But for this to happen, it’s necessary to establish that the trans readings are not merely fan theories. They were the genesis. The first step on this journey will be going back to the Age of the Ancients and deciphering how the very first of these games were made, and rebuild that history with a handful of new assumptions: 1. There’s at least one major contributor missing from official history 2. They were some variant of transgender 3. They were forced out in the early 1990s 4. Their design philosophy was carried over to both the Souls games as well as the Nier series 5. Nearly everything is an allegory It’s a set of assumptions that has completely changed the way I look at video games in the most wonderful of ways. I am in complete and utter awe. Something actually beautiful has taken place here. The patterns are too intricate to have arisen purely by chance, and I’m confident that I’m not imagining them. For one, I’m nowhere near imaginative enough to come up with something like this on my own. I’m also frankly far too cynical. So with that said, we need to start back at the beginning. It’s the stretch of the story that I like to call:  
Sibyl Disobedience fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Aug 10, 2021 |
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Aug 9, 2021 20:40
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i think fiction can reference gender without it being part of an interlocking intergenerational conspiracy involving a trans person youve made up in your head, and id really like it if you could stop pursuing this line of 'logic' because its utterly deranged and unhealthy (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) Endorph fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Aug 12, 2021 |
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Aug 12, 2021 05:55
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and also almost all of your premises are flawed. likequote:I think the Squaresoft of the early 90’s is our ruined civilization. Something happened there. From Zeal in Chrono Trigger to Zanarkand in Final Fantasy 10 to Amaurot in Final Fantasy 14, the Square’s games became obsessed with civilizational collapse, and of course, both Dark Souls and Nier are no stranger to those themes. quote:The Lost Decade (失われた十年, Ushinawareta Jūnen) refers to a period of economic stagnation in Japan caused by the asset price bubble's collapse in late 1991. this is just one example of many. all of your 'facts' have extremely obvious explanations and then you just sorta handwave or ignore them to move onto your own fanfic. like, i realize and empathize with the lack of huge trans creatives or trans people in your early childhood, but this doesn't uplift these games, they do them a disservice. they weren't made by people trying to implant coded messages for you, and only you, to figure out that all pointed to your personal trans absolution, they were people making games that spoke to their own current circumstances. what you got out of them isn't somehow invalid even if the creators weren't trans, you don't need to invent some mythical ur-trans to be allowed to invest in them emotionally.
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Aug 12, 2021 06:04
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Sibyl Disobedience posted:Square stuff So...I almost wonder if it would be worth like, looking at the credits for early Final Fantasy games and cross-referencing them with the credits of some of From's output, and seeing if there's any crossover there.
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Aug 12, 2021 08:18
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Endorph posted:but this doesn't uplift these games, they do them a disservice. Though I will say that connecting this whole train of thought to how the socioeconomic situation in contemporary Japan shaped those games' image of a stagnating society would be extremely interesting. Carpator Diei fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Aug 12, 2021 |
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Aug 12, 2021 09:09
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Carpator Diei posted:I think you're being extremely uncharitable in general here, but this is what I particularly take issue with. As someone who mostly suspends opinions on the unnamed-creator thesis (mostly because I feel like this thesis is something so personal that it doesn't depend on anyone else's approval), this thread in general is legitimately the best interpretation of themes and storytelling methods in videogames I've ever encountered, and I don't think that hinges on whether the premise behind it is correct. To be more precise, it's the first interpretation of the FromSoft games I've found that, by my estimate, really takes these games seriously as works of art, with all that this entails. Agreed. Regardless of truth or correctness, reading this thread is both entertaining and interesting.
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Aug 12, 2021 12:29
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Endorph posted:i think fiction can reference gender without it being part of an interlocking intergenerational conspiracy involving a trans person youve made up in your head, and id really like it if you could stop pursuing this line of 'logic' because its utterly deranged and unhealthy This post sucks rear end sorry to say
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Aug 12, 2021 14:45
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I appreciate the condescension masked as concern, but I assure you, I'm doing about as well as one could hope in 2021. That being said, I don't mind adversarial examinations, so I'll give this an honest response.Endorph posted:and also almost all of your premises are flawed. like First of all, it's pretty reductive to assume that every piece of media coming out of Japan between 1991 and 2021 has to be solely about the Lost Decade. If you want to do a literary analysis on how twenty years of economic stagnation influenced the creation of Dark Souls, that'd honestly be pretty cool. But you haven't. Calling something an "obvious explanation" because you've heard of an event and can cite the first line of a wikipedia article is just lazy. Now, with me doing that work for you (because I was eventually headed in this direction anyway), the Lost Decade as a sole explanation doesn't fit the narratives in question. Two of the earliest examples, Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 7, have environmental disturbances as one of the major triggers of societal collapse. Given that the Lost Decade was driven by the collapse of an asset bubble, environmentalist concerns don't play into it at all. Thus, even if the Lost Decade is an influence, it cannot possibly be the only one in play. But the biggest problem is that the Lost Decade is just that: a decade. Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 7 were both in development in 1994, and while I can't find the citations offhand, the scripts for both would have been in progress as early as 1992. No one at that point would have known what the long-term impacts of the asset crash would be at that time, and most people's lives would probably not have been that drastically effected until at least a few years later. But a person who would have been highly sensitive to the asset price drop would be an asset owner. A tycoon spooked at the loss of their paper wealth, and frantically looking for ways to recover. Given that, it's pretty fascinating that from Final Fantasy 5 onwards, we have a particular breed of minor villain show up repeatedly in the series: Final Fantasy 5: King Tycoon convinces you to kill the guardian of the Earth Crystal and complete the disruption of the crystals as a balancing force in the world, and culminates with the floating ruins of an ancient advanced civilization crashing out of the sky. Final Fantasy 6: Owzer: the richest man in Jidoor, an avid art collector, and morbidly obese (a detail I didn't pick up from the sprite-work as a kid). While he's not a villain in FF6, his actions endanger the party. More interestingly, Final Fantasy 14 iterates on this concept, with Vauthry, one of the most utterly irredeemable characters in the entire game, who is a child of privilege running an artist commune city where insufficiently productive workers are literally thrown into the ocean. Chrono Trigger: Queen Zeal uses the aforementioned Mammon Machine, which culminates in yet another floating advanced civilization crashing into the earth. Final Fantasy 7: Shinra shouldn't require more explanation at this point. Final Fantasy 8: NORG: "a wealthy Shumi (who) is vain, selfish, and cowardly." He funds the creation of the Garden, but eventually undermines the mission of the Garden by diverting all of its purposes to fill his own pockets. Also visually coded as obese. edit: forgot one more Final Fantasy Tactics: Algus/Argath is a lovely little noble with total contempt for peasants who he sees as beneath him. The Ivalice raid in Final Fantasy 14 expands on this character by calling him "a weak and petty noble who believed that his blood entitled him to power." His raid fight involves giving the players orders they must follow in order to avoid a penalty, a reference to the insufferable judge system in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. That said, the rigid enforcement of rules show up both in the story for NORG in FF8: "Garden Faculty serves as NORG's authority within the Garden, enforcing rules and exerting pressure on Cid when needed." As well as the Vauthry storyline in FF14: "Oh you dim, deluded child... Have you ever paused to consider what it takes to maintain such a paradise in this barren, broken world of ours? The guarantee of safety and stability. The knowledge that if one only abides by the rules, one has naught to fear." As I mentioned, the director of the series at the time of Final Fantasy 5 is quoted as saying, “I hated Square. The whole business part of it.” This suggests that he ran into opposition over creative control with someone who had even more power than he did, like, say, a financier. So if we take the text relatively literally, someone who was funding the company likely got spooked by the asset price collapse in 1991 and demanded more creative control over the series in order to seek immediate profitability. And the storywriters made that an increasingly more overt element in the narrative as the financier's power waned. It's both the most literal read of the collective narratives and the most functional at explaining what we do know about the direction of the series. And y'know, if people want to pathologize me for performing the forbidden witchcraft of textual analysis, there's nothing I can do to stop them. With that said, I'm just taking the stories at face value and seeing where that leads me. The unavoidable result is that, not once but twice Final Fantasy games have featured individuals known as "the Creator" with androgynous or actively shifting gender appearances. This coincides with similar themes showing up in other games at the same time, and I want to see where this leads. And yeah, I have a sudden, unexpected emotional investment in this now. I feel like I have a duty to be honest and upfront about that. It was, in no way, what I was looking for when I started, but it became unavoidable due to multiple narrative inclusions I've brought up earlier in the thread. This particular thread hits home, because the unhealthy thing about me is how much of my life I've lost to letting myself be bullied out of spaces whenever I share anything I'm actually passionate about. So the extent of my investment in the "Creator" narrative isn't some absurdity that there's a coded message meant specifically for me. It's that if there really was someone who matches this description behind the scenes, they were less of a coward than I am, and I admire them for that. Vandar posted:So...I almost wonder if it would be worth like, looking at the credits for early Final Fantasy games and cross-referencing them with the credits of some of From's output, and seeing if there's any crossover there. I have a policy of trying to not tie known individuals into this as much as I can avoid. There's also a particular textual reason why I think more than one individual might have stayed anonymous. That being said, one of the mysteries about Dark Souls 3 was how Filianore appears to be a reference to the 1985 OVA Angel's Egg and what that means for Dark Souls. If we posit that Dark Souls has a connection to Final Fantasy, well, those two works are chronologically adjacent, and that's taken me to places I really, really wasn't expecting. But while there is a specific person involved with both, this isn't about them. Rather, it's about the unexpected place the thematic overlap between the collective works takes things. I also want to thank you all for coming to my defense. It really does mean a lot to me. Sibyl Disobedience fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Aug 15, 2021 |
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Aug 14, 2021 23:18
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I assure you the thing I am criticizing is not you doing textual analysis. Like that recurring bit about the random rich dudes in FF games is a totally valid and kind of interesting read. I just object to inventing a person out of whole cloth. Like, look, if we're talking about text, what about the fact that the FF4 after years creator and the FF legend creator have different names in Japanese? FF Legend is かみ, Kami/God, and TAY is クリエーター, Kureita, or literally the english word Creator. You could say the FF Legend staff told them to translate God as Creator, but then why not write the name as Creator to begin with if they were trying to make some sort of veiled statement? And if they were trying to make a veiled statement, why wouldn't they keep the Japanese name of the FF4 TAY boss the same as the FF Legend boss? Is this secret information something only English speakers are allowed to piece together? Isn't it more likely that the name 'Creator' in FF Legend was just born of an attempt to get around Nintendo's religious censorship policies at the time, and the use of 'Creator' in TAY was entirely unrelated? And also FF Legend isn't even an FF game, it's a SaGa game that was rebranded as FF in the west. There's no actual connection between these two entities other than them both being androgynous deities in Square games, which is an extremely common theme in Japanese media in general. Off the top of my head, just from games, there's Despair Embodied from DMC2, Izanami from Persona 4, like 17 Super Robot Wars bosses, the entire final boss gauntlet from Soul Nomad and the World Eaters. Square is a Japanese company that makes big RPGs that often end in in fights with deities, divinity and androgyny are pretty linked in Japanese mythology. I'm just not seeing, at all, how you get from that to conspiratorial thinking about a secret person who was erased from the jedi archives. Like, if they don't actually have to be Final Fantasy games, and they don't actually have to have to be named the same thing, they just have to be androgynous deities or deity-like figures in square games, your theory has to loop in The World Ends With You, Xenogears, Parasite Eve, and, iunno, Racing Lagoon.
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Aug 15, 2021 15:07
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I think what Sibyl has done, in finding a shape of a possible anonymous creator in the negative spaces of these games, is far more interesting than a simple "look at this explicit motif that kept showing up." Even if the shape-of-a-person she's found ends up being a case of pareidolia, the shape is still there and I think it's still well worth considering why and how. And it's not like professional/academic textual analysis isn't already full of speculation and analysis just like this. (I also doubt that comparing credits lists would be all that useful even if it was done. I'm sure that even if the people involved in forming this person-shaped-hole never directly worked together, there's a pretty decent chance they knew each other anyway just by virtue of working in the same relatively small and specialized industry.)
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Aug 15, 2021 15:51
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My issue isn't speculation or trying to fill in the negative spaces, my issue is the ways it's manifesting. Talking about how this imaginary person is an 'inspiration who didn't previously exist' is kind of odious when literally, trans people did work in the Japanese games industry in the 90s and created things that are relevant to this day. It's just that op doesn't care about Star Cruiser and Thunder Force II, they care about Final Fantasy. It's kind of burying stuff that provably exists and the stories of real people for the sake of bringing it to something you're already invested in. It'd be like if I said black people didn't work in the film industry in the seventies but fortunately I have a theory that proves that Star Wars was actually written by a black woman.
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Aug 15, 2021 16:15
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I mean, if you have articles or anything about the trans folks involved in those games I'd love to see them! I'm having trouble finding much myself since they seem to both be somewhat obscure, and at least with Star Cruiser most of the google results are focusing on a new Disney ride of some kind. However, I do find it a bit disingenuous to claim that this single, pretty niche thread on a fairly low-traffic forum is somehow creating harm or taking away from promoting actual trans creators (nevermind that Sibyl is herself acting as a trans creator in this space). There's nothing stopping you from posting in here or making your own thread about confirmed trans creators who worked in 90s Japanese video games (I'd love to see it if you or someone else did make one!). Both that historical information and this analysis can exist at the same time and contribute to each other. I haven't seen Sibyl do anything like claim that there were no other trans people making games back then, and I don't think she's trying to bury any actual, confirmed person's work with her analysis. (Also, you probably didn't do it intentionally, but be careful using 'they' pronouns when you're referencing a trans woman and know for a fact that she's a trans woman. I'm pretty sure (please correct me if I'm wrong, Sibyl) that Sibyl just uses she/her. I'm only pointing this out because it happens A LOT that people try to delegitimize trans women's identities by using 'they' and 'this person' language instead of 'she' and 'woman.')
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Aug 15, 2021 16:48
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I mean, I'm using they/them because I don't know anything about OP's identity. I'd also prefer not being lectured at about what happens to trans women. Trust me, I'm intimately aware. And I don't think this thread has any outsized reach or anything, but that doesn't mean the thoughts expressed can't be toxic or damaging, even if it's just to your own world view.
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Aug 15, 2021 17:47
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I'm trans, too. I also don't know anything about your background (though I assume you're also trans?) which was why I pointed it out. I also assume you haven't read much else of this thread if you didn't pick up that Sibyl is trans from just the past two pages of posts. If you look back, there are a lot of other trans folks in this thread who find her analysis compelling -- that doesn't mean everyone has to feel the same way about it, but it doesn't mean she owes changing/erasing her entire analysis to suit everyone's scruples either (if such a thing were even possible, and it's not). If you're finding the discussion and analysis happening here unpleasant, it might be better to spend your time and energy elsewhere. (I'm not going to post any more about this since it's Sibyl's thread and I don't think this conversation will yield anything productive as it currently stands.)
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Aug 15, 2021 18:25
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DurianGray posted:I think what Sibyl has done, in finding a shape of a possible anonymous creator in the negative spaces of these games, is far more interesting than a simple "look at this explicit motif that kept showing up." Even if the shape-of-a-person she's found ends up being a case of pareidolia, the shape is still there and I think it's still well worth considering why and how. The why and how is that culture reproduces itself across time and space through different people. Trying to suss out some person behind the scenes who doesn't exist only diminishes the creative effort of people who actually exist. People who already are deeply underappreciated because their efforts are largely attributed to your name-as-a-brand directors like Kojima and Miyazaki despite the fact that games are made by multiple teams of people. Sibyl Disobedience posted:And y'know, if people want to pathologize me for performing the forbidden witchcraft of textual analysis, there's nothing I can do to stop them. With that said, I'm just taking the stories at face value and seeing where that leads me. The unavoidable result is that, not once but twice Final Fantasy games have featured individuals known as "the Creator" with androgynous or actively shifting gender appearances. This coincides with similar themes showing up in other games at the same time, and I want to see where this leads. I want to be clear here: this is not textual analysis. This is some youtube level taping together of symbols/tropes to create a metanarrative. Pointing at something and drawing a line to another thing is not analysis, it's a TVTropes page. Additionally, as stated by Endorph, the analytic perspective has been completely Anglocentric by failing to take into account that you're reading English language interpretations of a thing, not the thing itself.
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Aug 15, 2021 20:33
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Well I'd say there's quite a lot of textual analysis in here, but there's probably not much of a point in dragging out this discussion, so here's something on the topic of dried-up water: Turns out there are unused lily-pad graphics in Lost Izalith, implying that the area was initially designed as a huge swamp, https://twitter.com/king_bore_haha/status/1412828773200789506 As pointed out in that tweet, the visual style of the ruins and the dragon butts would fit a swamp look extremely well, and a swamped city would be appropriate as the area after Blighttown. Perhaps the insect theme of DS1's Chaos was more pronounced at that time. Though I wonder how the Demon Ruins fit in; those very much seem like they were designed as a lava cavern from the start.
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Aug 16, 2021 18:43
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Endorph posted:I assure you the thing I am criticizing is not you doing textual analysis. Like that recurring bit about the random rich dudes in FF games is a totally valid and kind of interesting read. I just object to inventing a person out of whole cloth. It's not out of whole cloth. I don't know where you jumped into this thread--and some of the confusion might be on me because organization is not my strong point even in the best of times--but the post you're responding to exclusively is a continuation of this earlier post laying out why I believe the text of Dark Souls suggests it's a memorial to an actually existing person. If you have criticisms of the logic I used to get there, I am open to considering them, but even if you disagree with my reasoning I'm certainly not "inventing [it] out of whole cloth." I can only answer for my actual crimes, not my imagined ones. I suspect you're also drastically misinterpreting my motivations. I didn't start this thread over a year ago with the intent to conjure up the existence of some individual to make me feel better. I had been working on an interpretation that Dark Souls was a metanarrative about having to throw away unworkable game designs for one and a half years when I realized that something far more personal seemed to be going on, at which point I threw away around 120 pages worth of work and started over. This isn't a flight of fancy. It's actually really inconvenient for me. The older interpretation was so much safer. But I now think it was incomplete enough to be wrong. So with that said, here's some answers to your more specific criticisms: quote:And also FF Legend isn't even an FF game, it's a SaGa game that was rebranded as FF in the west. The most likely origin for both the SaGa and Seiken series were as a way for Squaresoft to experiment with unproven game designs or more unconventional storytelling without diluting the main brand of Final Fantasy, possibly stemming from FF2j's leveling system being a bit...rough. That separation would have been more of a branding strategy than any kind of creative firewall. If you go back through the cast of Final Fantasy Legend/Makai Toushi SaGa there is only two people who don't have a credit in a mainline series game (by a pretty informal count, maybe I missed one or two). It's extremely unlikely that it's not considered part of the broader creative tradition. For instance, Final Fantasy 13 gave its final boss an instant death vulnerability as a tribute to Legend's SawbBug. The Four Lords questline and raid series in Final Fantasy 14 is also almost certainly a reference to Final Fantasy Legend, as Legend used all four of them as bosses. quote:There's no actual connection between these two entities other than them both being androgynous deities in Square games, which is an extremely common theme in Japanese media in general. What's going on with TAF's Creator is not androgyny. The middle form is androgynous, but the first and last (2nd and 4th, technically) are not androgynous. If androgyny were the only piece of symbolism I was working with then the list of possible connections would be impossibly broad, but the prime candidates are all 1) explicitly gender non-confirming in some fashion, 2) show evidence of suffering from a degenerative disease, 3) show up in the time frame of 2008-2011. The FFL Creator doesn't fit this criteria and isn't strictly speaking an integral part of anything, but if the Final Fantasy series specifically was willing to use metareferential characters in 2008, it had to have started somewhere. quote:Like, look, if we're talking about text, what about the fact that the FF4 after years creator and the FF legend creator have different names in Japanese? FF Legend is かみ, Kami/God, and TAY is クリエーター, Kureita, or literally the english word Creator. You could say the FF Legend staff told them to translate God as Creator, but then why not write the name as Creator to begin with if they were trying to make some sort of veiled statement? And if they were trying to make a veiled statement, why wouldn't they keep the Japanese name of the FF4 TAY boss the same as the FF Legend boss? Is this secret information something only English speakers are allowed to piece together? Isn't it more likely that the name 'Creator' in FF Legend was just born of an attempt to get around Nintendo's religious censorship policies at the time, and the use of 'Creator' in TAY was entirely unrelated? Just to get this out of the way, I don't think they were trying to make a veiled statement. I have no guarantee that any of this was ever intended to be communicated to the audience, and I often feel like I'm trespassing. It's also certainly the case that any motivation is not uniform amongst all the theoretical participants. As for the word choice, it didn't occur to me to even bring this up as strict linguistic carryover is so rare in Soulsborne that it struck me as unremarkable. That said, you're correct that Nintendo almost certainly would not have allowed "God" as a translation, but there are possible reasons that 'Creator' might have been the preferred interpretation, or became the preferred interpretation over time. 1. Due to the constraints of the Gameboy cartridge space, the original Japanese script might have been done in an extremely minimalist format and therefore preferred the condensed storage space of Kami. Once the game as a whole was done, the translator would have known precisely how much space they had to expand into English without going outside of the cartridge restraints, and this might have allowed a degree of interpretive freedom that the initial script did not have. 2. This is admittedly purely speculative, but I do wonder if the attitude towards katakana loan words changed over the two decades that separated the two games. Are 2008 audiences more broadly familiar with English than 1988 audiences? Did loan words in fantasy writing gradually become a sort of exoticism as the medium developed? This is just idle curiosity on my part, so you don't have to treat it as a serious answer. 3. Given the emerging Gnostic influences within the tradition, "Creator" might have become favored over time for its connotations. Within the dualism of gnosticism, there is "a distinction between a supreme, transcendent God and a blind, evil demiurge responsible for creating the material universe, thereby trapping the divine spark within matter." The use of "God" in these branches of media often applies to warrior gods like Gwyn who are not creators but rather conquerors of the universe, and in Gwyn's case a maintainer of the flame. Hypothetically, this dualism might be behind the Red and Blue moons of Final Fantasy 4, with Zemus serving as the demiurge from the Red Moon. In this context, "Creator" would be the preferred word to contrast with the death drive deity Zemus/Zeromus. But as for the simplest explanation from my estimation...suppose you're making a game to honor someone's memory as they're dying from cancer. You're reworking one of their characters as part of the tribute, but that character has more than one identifier. The most obvious thing to do is go to them and ask them which one they prefer. Sometimes the messages contained in these games aren't intended for the player. But in any case, while none of this is ultimately that important, it's still kinda fun because language just might be the centerpiece of the entire puzzle.
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Aug 18, 2021 21:40
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So do you honestly, legitimately believe that there is a mysterious hidden trans games developer being referenced across decades worth of Japanese media? This isn't just some experimental fanfiction pulling together unrelated threads from various games for fun? You are reading an awful lot into inaccurate English translations of Japanese text, and you seem to have shockingly little understanding of actual Japanese culture and history, judging by how you immediately dismiss things like the lost decade which were a massive influence on Japanese media, and you're interpreting all Japanese androgynous or gay-coded characters from the perspective of a modern western person in 2020 rather than by how those tropes were viewed decades ago in a foreign country. You're also making wild leaps of judgement based on incredibly simple and common tropes like damsel in distress and evil business tycoons and assuming they're references to other specific uses of those tropes in other games when it's convenient for your narrative. You could just as easily say that the gnostic demiurge in Aeon Flux, as an androgynous godlike entity, must also be a reference to this same mysterious hidden figure. The concept of a god being neither or both genders is literally thousands of years old and is an idea still being used in media across the world.
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Aug 19, 2021 07:37
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Sibyl Disobedience posted:It's not out of whole cloth. I don't know where you jumped into this thread--and some of the confusion might be on me because organization is not my strong point even in the best of times--but the post you're responding to exclusively is a continuation of this earlier post laying out why I believe the text of Dark Souls suggests it's a memorial to an actually existing person. If you have criticisms of the logic I used to get there, I am open to considering them, but even if you disagree with my reasoning I'm certainly not "inventing [it] out of whole cloth." I can only answer for my actual crimes, not my imagined ones. there is absolutely nothing in this post that suggests the fanfiction you wrote about an unnamed developer is real. maybe others but i legitimately do not think i can subject my self to another one of these posts; they drag in quotes from completely unrelated literature and games in ways that makes me think you have the vague understanding of what an argumentative essay is without fully comprehending its execution. you've conjured up a life story for a complete stranger you know literally nothing about based on a single interview where the details given were she wanted a certain hairstyle in the game before she left her job for an unspecified illness. your speculation is to the point where i am uncomfortable by proxy with your steadfast assurance that your completely baseless theory is reality. it is legitimately concerning to see people applauding that post and talking about how revelatory it is and how much sense it makes. i would be curious to know specifically what made sense to them and what makes this real to them. I am completely baffled.
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Aug 20, 2021 21:12
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Sibyl Disobedience posted:
i have friends of friends who worked on the translation for sekiro and the reason why this happens is bc miyazaki gives them the script to tl at the last possible moment and usually its full of archiac japanese
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Aug 20, 2021 21:15
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So I'm genuinely curious: What caused a ton of people who have never posted in this thread before to suddenly pop up over the past week and decide to just start trashing the hell out of the thread and Sibyl?
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Aug 20, 2021 21:21
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i got linked it bc someone knew it would make steam fly out of my ears lol
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Aug 20, 2021 21:24
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fun hater posted:i got linked it bc someone knew it would make steam fly out of my ears lol
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Aug 21, 2021 01:49
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I absolutely love these kinds of deep dive readings into games, especially for games like Dark Souls where the explicit story telling is a bit light on details and heavier more on atmosphere. Consider me subscribed.
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Aug 21, 2021 03:52
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Sibyl Disobedience posted:To take Bloodborne’s DLC to even weirder places, the inexplicable giant sunflowers in the Living Failures’ boss arena might be a reference to Radical Dreamers, Squaresoft’s 1996 text adventure sequel to Chrono Trigger. Which is honestly the weirdest, most obscure connection, and I probably wouldn’t bring it up if it weren’t so bizarre and unique. I want to pick this one up because I think this is symptomatic with the overall problems I see with this theory. You're claiming Bloodborne and Final Fantasy may be related because there are so many links you think are there, and that while each are small, taken as a whole they point to a link. But all of your links are like this one here. Bloodborne has "inexplicable" sunflowers and this may be a reference to an obscure and extremely unsuccessful Satellaview text adventure from 1996. Except Bloodborne's sunflowers aren't inexplicable at all, they're all over the game and they're usually blue and called moonflowers. Because the moon is evil in Bloodborne and so there's a vastly more obvious solution there of just taking sunflowers and subverting them into moonflowers because the moon has taken over and created eternal night during the Hunt. If you wanted to read further into it, there are cultural and metaphorical meanings for sunflowers that are significantly more plausible as an influence for Bloodborne. Fukushima had thousands of sunflowers planted on it in 2011 for both symbolic and practical reasons (sunflowers help to absorb radiation). The sunflowers in Bloodborne are present at the site of a terrible experiment gone wrong. You could say I'm just nitpicking one small element, but I think it shows the flaws in taking this 'analysis' seriously, because it's all just a massive gish-gallop of throwing so many implausible connections at once that it overwhelms the reader.
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Aug 21, 2021 07:26
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CountryMatters posted:I want to pick this one up because I think this is symptomatic with the overall problems I see with this theory. You're claiming Bloodborne and Final Fantasy may be related because there are so many links you think are there, and that while each are small, taken as a whole they point to a link. They’re technically called “lumenflowers” but yes they’re in multiples locations over Bloodbone and are clearly a moon-themed subversion of sunflowers. Even the arena with the massive plants is called the “ Lumenwood Garden” by the lamp. They’ve also spread to the Nightmare Frontier and can be found illuminating the caves there. E- I guess I shouldn’t assume they spread there. They might have originated from the dream lands. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Aug 21, 2021 |
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Aug 21, 2021 19:25
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I was enjoying this project at the start back when it was about exploring the thematic connections between SoulsBorne games. I don't really know what this is about anymore.
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Aug 21, 2021 21:03
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