Someone named Tevis Thompson wrote an essay called Saving Zelda about what was wrong with Zelda and what could make it right. It sparked some interesting discussion in the Demon's Souls shared play thread. What's Zelda got to do with Demon's Souls you ask? Nothing really. But the author pointed to that game as an example of a modern game which used its world to tell the story. And about how exploration is more meaningful when you don't know the rules up-front. And, some other cool stuff which his essay communicates better than I can.
Anyway, Mr. Thompson and the artist behind Braid now have a Kickstarter project open for funding. It's not a game, but a comic book, exploring the themes from the essay, among other things.
It sounds intriguing, well, to me anyway. I think of a game which combines the solid, fundamental gameplay and rich world of a Souls game, combined with the charm and sense of wonder of a Zelda title and my head explodes (in a good way you know). This project is a comic book, not a game, but still. It certainly sparks the imagination.
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I found some older work by the artist involved and it was, how shall I put it, less than impressive. Still, it's the story I'm really interested in. Still hopeful.
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Well this came out a few months back, and it was pretty underwhelming. The visuals were very well done. But instead of the polemic I expected, about how to save Zelda from its creative rut, all I got was juvenile identity politics about oppressed women. This whole mindset, embarrassingly revealed in the recent Gamergate dust-up, seems to be more prevalent in younger minds. Perhaps the writer, whose name escapes me right now, will have something more interesting to say in a few years.
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That's a pity, I'm usually pretty impressed with Tevis Thompson's work. When it's a Kickstarted project that disappoints it's always a little worse, because you sort of feel like you directly assisted something that turned out to be less than you hoped for.
Reading back through this thread and Tevis' original article got me thinking about how Zelda and Demon's Souls were similar, at least insofar as that first experience with each was new and thus un-repeatable. I was... I don't know, maybe twelve years old when The Legend of Zelda came out, and its breadth was a revelation when paired with the action-RPG flavor of play. Even the big PC RPGs of the time were mostly turn-based, so Zelda combined elements of all the things that were most enticing about different genres.
Demon's Souls was similar. For some reason it always made me think of the old arcade classic Gauntlet, despite the obvious dissimilarities. Something about the vastness and challenge and general sense of getting your ass kicked on a regular basis, maybe. I never finished Demon's Souls and wandered away from it after maybe 80 obsessive hours, yet looking back what strikes me most is that despite all those hours I was still pretty ignorant about Souls... stuff. Things remained opaque and mysterious well into Dark Souls, at which point something finally clicked and I less like a stranger in a strange land.
Just thinking back to finishing Zelda and being presented with the Second Quest, in which the world was simultaneously familiar and alien, makes me think of the time I spent chasing my tail in Demon's Souls. Which is not a complaint! That was some fantastic tail-chasing. But it did create a situation where I went into Dark Souls without even the slightest expectation of actually finishing the game, or even making much progress.
Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.
I'm probably being a little harsh in my criticism, since I backed it and was ultimately disappointed. He does explore the theme of groups doing the same thing as they've always done, even after the original reasons for doing it are forgotten. That in itself is ripe for exploration. But the setup was too long and the payoff too slight. I'll reiterate that the visual part was just lovely.
I think our experiences with Demon's Souls and then Dark Souls are similar. I actually finished Demon's Souls, but I get a strange sensation when thinking about that and realizing how ignorant I was of "Souls" in general. As if to say "how in the @#$% did I actually finish that game?!" Demon's Souls was truly a strange, magical and inscrutable beast but I adored it. That carried over to Dark Souls. But I got so immersed in that game and sifted through (almost) every bit of it, I can scarcely relate to my old, pre-Souls sensibilities.
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It was just the same with me. Meho wrote about it at around the same time other praise was really beginning to pile up, which led to some preconceived notions on my part -- Demon's Souls was brutally hard and inscrutable, not something you really needed to "understand" in order to enjoy, etc. etc.
Rather than helping clarify, wikis served to reinforce the idea of how little I knew. I was allowing myself to maintain a belief about my place in the world of Demon's Souls, and I never got past it. It carried over to Dark Souls, which I nearly stopped playing five minutes in.
The press had all focused on how it was "harder." Well, it's easy to add difficulty to a game if you just make the systems unfair -- and it certainly seemed unfair when I ran into Asylum Demon before I found a weapon. In actuality Dark Souls was helping break down old mental barriers. Right at the outset it teaches you that no challenge is exactly as it seems up front, and that solutions will present themselves if you look. That was the first key to the first lock on the door to understanding.
You can only get that feeling of discovery once per universe, so enjoy it while it's happening because it's awesome. STALKER had it. Dark Souls had it; for all the people who started with Dark Souls 2, that probably had it. Zelda had it. It's a rare treat!
Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.
I'm pretty certain I'd heard the name Second Quest tossed around somewhere before, but I don't think I knew it was a work of Tevis Thompson. Interesting.
I'm hot and cold with his writing to be honest. Saving Zelda was an essential essay, and there's other good ones too; particularly his essay about Sonic helped me realize and accept that being a Sega Genesis owner in the '90s (as opposed to the SNES) I was exposed to shittier games in general, Sonic chief among them. The fact that he ranks Demon's Souls (alongside Minecraft which I've never played) as the best game of the past six years obviously draws my attention, but he too frequently bangs his drum about how he "hates gamers" and would rather associate with people who play Candy Crush, which is apparently the best game of 2013 or whatever year it came to be, 'cause like, they just don't care man, or whatever, ya know? That's such a cringe-worthy statement and generalization. "Gamers" don't meet for coffee and bagels once a month to chit chat. It's just people, dammit. We're all just people. Ugh.
If being wrong's a crime I'm serving forever
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