Like, I was taking a look to see if there were any sort of critical analyses of some pretty good AAA JRPG I played a while back, andβ
- "this game is about death, and how people respond to it"
- [Paragraphs of rambling about gameplay mechanics without trying to analyse the implications of them in the slightest?]
- "this antagonist faction represents despair and doomerism"
- Here Let Me Tell You About Scenery
And, like, yeah, this is worth talking about, but. What are games doing with their themes. Great, it's saying Wow This Is A Subject That One Should Think About, but what is the game suggesting we should change in our lives, how we engage with the world, or our politics? What biases have the creators brought in? How does the plot of the game potentially tie in with the hang-ups of the directors or even the execs at the publisher? What kind of extra geopolitical ramifications did the localisation team add to the game when they gave everyone from the pastoral, medieval country with lots of greenery Welsh accents, and then made the shitty little steampunk imperial power from a desert continent Scottish-coded? What should we be interpreting from the fact that the spoilers look distinctly like a grungy mid-'00s vision of Future America-Lead Humanity applied to the culture of the current-day US?
