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Has anything in video games affected your view on the world?
So I remembered this one time when a user who will not be named said something about a moment in a video game defining the loss of his childhood. This got me to thinking: does anyone else do this? And thus, this thread was born.
Me, personally? I associate Ganon's theme with overwhelming, all-consuming evil. Ganon may be a Saturday morning cartoon villain to some of you, but to my childhood self he was basically giant pig Darkseid. Part of this impression I have of Ganon is because-let's face it, I was terrible at A Link to the Past as a kid (I still am). His theme (especially the orchestrated version you hear while going up the stairs in OoT) still sends chills down my spine today.
What about you guys?
Comments
I associate my early like of the Alakazam line from Pokemon with a lifelong fascination with psychic and magic powers.
I'm not sure if that "counts" or not.
Also Yume Nikki sort of redefined what a game could be, to me. But I'm also not sure if that counts.
^ I'm not sure about that first bit, but that second bit counts. At least to me.
While there are lots of games with multiple endings, they usually depend on the choices you made somehow affecting other characters and things. Final Fantasy X-2 made it's three endings choices. Choices that you as the player must make in the role of Yuna.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that FFX-2 made me think a lot about choices, why we make them and who affects us when we do so.
To elaborate; If Yuna tries her hardest and (literally) goes to the ends of the earth, she'll get Tidus back. This doesn't involve just going to these places and helping the people there, it's about learning about them and their various life experiences. Yuna's actions affect them, but on a higher level they affect her. What does she learn? As a person, in which direction does she choose to grow. By going this route, surprisingly, she can still make her second choice, to let Tidus go. It all depends on how the player sees Yuna and what they decide she would do. The first choice looks to the games secondary couple for inspiration, Shuyin and Lenne. Lenne can be said to be in Yuna's exact situation (braving impossible odds to regain the past and start to move on). Others like Lulu and Wakka, who've returned home and have started living together (still getting past the many things that happened on Yuna's pilgrimage) and looking to the future, can also be said to be where Yuna draws her inspiration.
Expanding on the second choice, if Yuna doesn't do all this and the player merely completes the game normally, she doesn't get to make the first choice. She can only make the second and third. The second choice involves Yuna choosing to move on with her life without Tidus. In this situation, we can look at Yuna learning from all the Spirans who've picked themselves up, to the Youth League and the summoner Donna.
The third is the hardest to achieve (Yes, even harder than 100% completion), it has Yuna choosing to give up on Spira and let all the lifeforms on the planet die. Why would this be the hardest to achieve? Because Yuna would have to be in a serious state to accept these circumstances. In this scenario, the events that would have affected her most would be the Guado's decline, the increasing irrelevance of what she held dear her whole life, the end of Bevelle seen in a tragic light and especially the summoner Isaaru, who has fallen so far as to give guided tours through sacred land.
tl;dr Magic dress up makes fourteenwings think lots about decisions!
Demon's Souls holds within itself a lesson about hubris. In the game, it's your mission to slay the five Archdemons, each of which resides at the end of a long gauntlet of traps, monsters, mazes and lesser demons. The game has various starting classes to represent some different character archetypes, but I always intended to play as a knight, surprise surprise, and chose that class. Throughout the game I largely played according to the character, upgrading my stats and equipment to meet the theme. The character became a "faith" character, whose high faith stat allowed them considerable damage with blessed weapons, as well as moderate health regeneration from said blessed equipment, which I consider to be a pretty neat (and subtle) reference to Arthurian mythology.
One of the paths in the game is called the Valley of Defilement. It's infamous amongst Demon's Souls players for including one of the toughest sections in the game, as well as having a generally oppressive and disconcerting atmosphere. The whole place is a sad, ramshackle city built above a noxious swamp. It's easy to lose oneself in the horror and trial of that place, and I most certainly did; the process of progression became a matter of pure survival, a kind of rote calculation that kept my nerves on end at every turn. I didn't really notice it at the time, but I was so engrossed in the atmosphere and the fear that I began to lose my sense of self in there while playing, becoming something more like an automaton or a desperate animal. Something as conscious as a dodge was unthinkable to me, because avoiding damage and striking back during the opening were such fundamental rules of survival that they didn't need names. Going through that area enforced a kind of fearful singularity between myself and the game.
I was surprised when I finally came to the lair of the Archdemon. I couldn't see it at first. Initially, all I could see was a pack of the goblin-like denizens that populated the Valley of Defilement standing near a ledge, backs to me, with their arms raised in what looked like prayer. Before now, all I have experienced from them was trickery and outright aggression, so I killed some of them, just to be safe. But none of the others appeared to be reacting -- they were so convinced of their prayers that they were unaware of the world around them, or they would gladly suffer death to be heard. When the boss' voice over arrived -- notable, because few if any other bosses have dialogue -- I was startled to hear the voice of a young woman.
She asked me, politely, to leave and let her continue her work healing the sick. Investigating further, I found a path down the left side of the area, circumnavigating a pool of what looked to be blood. Towards the bottom, I was confronted by another knight; Garl Vinland, whose story ends here. He also asked me to leave, politely, but constrained by the mechanics of the game, I had no choice but to press on. Garl was exceedingly strong and resilient, but I still won, which earned me the right to observe who had initially been speaking in the female's voice. Of course, the boss health meter had been on the screen the whole time, so I knew my target was the "Maiden Astraea". She was sitting, peaceably, on a rock at the far end of the blood pool. I was too committed to my task, and to my in-game survivalist mentality, to pay much heed to her pleas for mercy. Without her bodyguard, she was entirely vulnerable, and I took her Archdemon's soul without any trouble.
Upon returning to the Nexus -- the central hub of the game, and arguably the only truly safe locale -- I found that the music had changed. It had never been upbeat, but it was peaceful enough. Now, there was a newfound sombreness to the whole area. There was just one thing I had to check. I walked back to the Valley of Defilement archstone (essentially a gate between the Nexus and the various other areas in the game) to check its description. Every time you reach a new waypoint in an area, which means defeating a boss, a new description is unlocked. So one has to kill Maiden Astraea to learn that she was healing the sick occupants of the Valley of Defilement and that she was the only glimmer of hope in an otherwise godforsaken hellhole.
You have to understand, I was committed to the role of a knight, but also manipulated by the circumstances of the game into a heavily survivalist mentality. In the Maiden Astraea battle, survivalism won against chivalry, in no small part thanks to the impossibility of retreat, but also because of my expectations of the area and my determination to see it through and put the Valley behind me. But the aftermath brought me a revelation about my own failures of consideration, and how, in a reflection of the chivalric code, I both succeeded and failed entirely in my mission in that one moment. The game doesn't give you the option of sparing Astraea, apart from turning off the console, but it still "won". It still forced me into a psychological state where I forgot that I was trying to stand for goodness and justice rather than being an autonomous killing machine, and my failure to react to that didn't give me the capacity to question the battle against Astraea until too late.
That's the memory that sticks with me from Demon's Souls. Uniquely, it's a game that forced me to fail the theme of my character by its means of real psychological manipulation. I was so easily led into extremist violence because I believed so heavily in the justice of my cause and was so overcome by visceral desperation, neither of which I questioned or analysed. So I took Astraea as my patron for the rest of the game, with her name at the back of my mind all the way until the end. A video game character can't forgive, among other things, but I'd like to think that I had earned forgiveness all the same.
@OP: Maybe subconsciously. Other than that, not really.
^^ dude
it's ok
we understand
Bioshock made me reconsider my views when it comes to ~free will~ and how we define it.
Does Fate/Stay Night count? Because it's examination of what constitutes right and wrong and the way it approaches pragmatism and idealism was eye opening for me.
There's also something about Majora's Mask, no matter how much you try you can't help everyone. God knows I tried.
The World Ends With You helped me learn to not sweat the small stuff and to not take for granted the people in your life that just want to help you.
I think Spec Ops: The Line has shown me how truly broken a person can get.
Pokemon taught me its okay to breed animals so that they're better at fighting each other.
Metal Gear Solid? Uh, lets just say even the best comradery can be broken.
I think what vandro said about Majora's Mask is a great point, but I feel like there may be another theme to the game as well.
During the credits sequence (after you beat the game with all the masks), you see basically every person Link has helped in the game and how their lives have been improved because of it. It seemed to me that those credits kind of showed how doing acts of kindness can add up and prove to have a continuing positive impact on people's lives even if individually they might be somewhat small and seemingly unimportant.
While the game definitely emphasizes the whole "Moon is going to crash and cause the apocalypse" thing as well, I wonder if seeing the people Link helped somehow feels better than just knowing that Termina was saved since you saw firsthand how troubled they were. Maybe the whole "saving the world" plot being common makes that part of the credits feel more unique. I am not really sure.
Armored Core: For Answer made me realize that genocide can be cool, fun, stylish and profitable.
I hated that game. I was sold some pretty fucked action and a story about class struggle and gladiator games and mecha. What I got was fun battles broken up by exposition and no proper story whatsoever.
The story is irrelevant in every Armored Core game.
You don't have to rub my dashed hopes and dreams in the face.