/lit/ - Literature

>>12454465
>I for one think the world needs more Cyans, Gaus, and Terras, and less Kefkas, Edgars, Cids, and Gestahls.
i do as well. this is the part of that game that gives the shivers. it's like listening to classical music (which is about the only way i have of explaining the feeling of reading Whitehead also). it's not all about one insanely catchy melody, like a pop song with a killer guitar riff or sample or whatever. there are themes within themes, motifs, and key changes. the plot itself comes very near to being like music: there is a story being woven, but it's not All About the climax. the climax is just peak intensity, a logical consequence of what has been laid down before it. what really gets you are the minor characters, the details, the side-pieces.

oh yeah, and another thing: no fucking *irony.* no need for modernism, in-jokes, satire, any of this. and it doesn't become cloyingly sentimental either. it doesn't have to get Super Dark to be able to tell its story - the darkness is there in spades, already, in a sense. but it also doesn't have to make a spectacle of itself either. as such there is room for absurdity - Ultros, for instance, or Siegfried - but you don't ever feel like the designers are *manipulating* you. the Opera House sequence is justifiably famous, and it features Uematsu's beautiful score, which is always just perfect. but this is in the end just another moment, among a ridiculous array of moments. like Metal Gear, it's one of these mysterious creations that somehow gets entirely beyond our expectations for a game, and at the same time makes us realize how much we actually want our own expectations for cinema to be *thwarted* as well. you can...do this? you can blow up the world? you can show a suicide attempt? you can just...end it there? like that? but -

that is my absolute definition of success in aesthetics: it raises possibilities for a medium you didn't know were there. it is very much the same thing for philosophy, imho. it doesn't just answer your questions, it raises the possibility of asking questions you didn't know were possible - and then you immediately realize were there the whole time. that's how it is with this game. it gives you a more perfect rendering of your *own* world. our world is very much like that one - and, much like the characters in it, we take a lot of it as Just Being How Things Are. but that is what separates the NPCs from the PCs. the PCs are *more fucked up,* but being fucked up alone is not sufficient. it qualifies for antagonist, or anti-hero status. the really interesting characters are the ones who get even beyond that, a thing for which there is no template. neither they nor the world are saved at the end. nobody gets saved. salvation isn't an option.