Hey everyone! Thank you all so much for watching the video. I wanna make a few clarifications here: Lore and World-Building do go hand in hand, but there's been a skew towards filling a world with as many details as possible and making them all work together by explicitly trying to connect everything. This sort of thing has a tendency to remove agency from the players existing in those worlds; When everything has an explanation, and somehow leads all the way back to a central point, you have a very high likelihood of a lot of those details flat out not being that important to justify the connections- or worse, TOO MANY details, that the plot gets lost in huge amounts of information. Too many cooks, that sort of thing. Worst of all, with all this information spelled out for you, there's no room for imagination. Your input loses power in the story being told, and the way you interpret its characters and events stops informing the narrative at play. When there's too many details, you end up being told how to feel about something, instead of being SHOWN something that can invoke a feeling out of you. I hope this clears up some of the misunderstandings the video might cause!
I just watched the new Mortal Kombat movie, and you look extremely similar to Liu Kang lol. If you got super ripped, you'd look identical. That's all I could think every time he was on-screen lol
I liked the video but I felt the lack of attention on character arcs. Especially when falcom games get brought up. In terms of lore and speculation, falcom games are dumpster fires. but the main appeal of the trails and preceeding series is character focused jrpg stories. The franchise was born with the idea of "text" being cheap, and novel length explinations and sprawl being a selling point. The lore has gotten progressively worse over the years in the franchise, but it's hardly ever been great either.
@@bugmom3879 I feel like with Kiseki the lore is really just there to drive the plot. Think about the Rivalries for example. The Divine Knights are literally one of the biggest aspects of Erebonian history, but really they're just a backdrop so Rean can get into a giant robot and beat the shit out of a bunch of other giant robots, lol. Basically nothing gets explained until it's relevant or will be relevant to something that happens in the future. Not that I mind, they're still great and I feel very at home in Zemuria, because the bonkers level of effort put into the NPCs make the world feel alive.
This conversation could go into an entire different direction if we start talking about horror stories and how not knowing what you're up against is MUCH scarier than knowing exactly what's going on.
YEAH! And I think that idea translate really well into other media too. I don't think you need to have a mystery on your hands to leave certain spaces blank.
I mean horror stories still need a good story even if the threat is a mystery or people are not even going to care about the characters or what happens
Personally I disagree. If I don't know what I'm up against I might feel confused, frustrated, apathetic and curious even but afraid? Not so much whereas if I know for certain that whatever I'm up against could and would so eagerly trounce me and it has the desire to along with being impervious to whatever I do or whatever comes its way with the reasonable expectation that it's not going to get bored- Then we're talking. Sure, I might not always know where they are or when it will appear next but that's okay. It just means I either have more time to prepare to last longer.. or shorter if its the type to delight in my suffering so as to deny it of its joy of the catch or that it has not found me and the fates are smiling upon me. Perhaps I'm just different in this regard but if I don't know what I'm up against, I just don't find it scary since there's always the chance, the hope that I could take it down with a throwdown. And that's why most of my horror stories involve the protagonists knowing what they're up against that way they also know they are completely helpless and may the fates have mercy of which they severely lack.
Imagine that the creature/sentient phenomena is actively fucking with you, giving you missinformation as toys with you ultimately to reveal the whole thing in your face just before brutally destroying your body.
Pokémon is a good example sometimes they have simpler plots But they have an ocean of lore that is really complex and fascinating that enhances the simpler stories and makes them more unique and fun
Although most of the lore is unexplained Like buildings you can’t access You are curious what’s in them and you will never know That’s part of the charm Part of his unanswered question aspect of the video
Four things: 1) Your video reminded me first and foremost of a time many years ago when I was writing a story (That I never finished) and getting absolutely frantic about filling out all of the "plot holes". The fear of being outed as a hack for having something unexplained or ambiguous in the text used to torment me day and night, until an acquaintance I had at the time told me "Don't fill out all of the holes. People need something to dream about". From that day on I worried a little less about inconsistencies in storytelling in general. *A little* less, because I am anxiety incarnated. 2) The second thing your video reminded me of is how I'm a fan of stories freaking ENDING. Stories going away, leaving loose threads behind, myseries unsolved, characters still coated in smoke and mirrors. Oral tradition is more or less dead in the modern world, and the next best thing is the act of wasting time, alone or with a friend, speculating and wondering about that guy, that piece of dialogue, that hidden meaning. But what a lot of modern media does is forcing the story to go on and on and on, making a thousand spin-offs about that guy, that piece of dialogue, that now not-so-hidden meaning, and that sucks. It cheapens entire worlds full of wonder. 3) Finally, your new video also reminded me of why I don't understand the obsession with "canon" in communities that are all about headcanons. Oh, the owners of this thing are not making this well-liked theory part of the official canon? It's a travesty! An absurd! Tell us the truth! Like, dude, you already have your version of the "truth" in a context where having your own version of it harms no one. Chill. 4) Great video, as always. :)
Thank you very much! I used to write short stories all the time when I was younger, and I learned a very similar lesson. The friend who'd always want to read my work would tell me how desperate they were to learn more about a particular character or location, and it dawned on me that a little mystery or something unexplained goes a long way to invest people into a story.
As a writer myself this is exactly how I feel. When delving into the worlds I create I'll go into detail on some aspects, but will never fully explain the trivial. For instance, one story I'm writing involves the protagonist being taken from his own world by an unknown divine entity and thrown into another as a way to restart his pitiful life. Of course I go into some backstory that lead to his subpar life, but I never fully explain it, and neither do I explain what this entity is. Only that it took pity on him and gave him another chance to make something of his sad life. And the new world itself is the same. I'll describe how each location looks, but never its full history. Although, I may sprinkle in some subtle hints for those invested enough to keep up.
Number 3 hurts me lol, Yuri fans in animanga fandoms coping and seething that their headcanon ships aren't the consensus are toxic as hell. They do the craziest shit over fictional characters like sending death threats and whatnot. Nothing against Yuri honestly, in fact I like it, but god damn does the community suck. I'm glad that forums in my favorite fandom are so traumatized by Yuritards and shippers in general from other fandoms that they actively gatekeep and ostracize them at the slightest hint of being into Yuri lol. Honestly extreme threats call for extreme measures, that's what happens when you build up such a terrible reputation. Shippers in general should probably go touch grass, but eh at least the normal ones are chill and don't send literal death threats lol.
Very well said! Missing the forest for the trees is the perfect analogy. I've become increasingly bothered by the word "lore" as it seems to be so often separated from the story or world as a whole. When codex pages and journal entries become a disintegrated collectable, I think the artifice begins to crack somewhat. The Elder Scrolls is an interesting example. It's not always particularly original (and certainly not a master of storytelling) but one day I decided to approach Morrowind like a historian rather than an adventurer. Spending hours traveling between libraries and comparing ancient religious texts unraveled a history that was compelling *because* of its inconsistencies. The books were all written by people in the fiction with various backgrounds, opinions, and motivations. I had to cross examine different accounts of the same event and make my own incomplete interpretation- much like the real world! Definitely one of the most rewarding lore-based adventures I've ever been on. - Stephen
Glad you liked it! I feel like there's a great comparison between Morrowind's and Skyrim's use of lore. I guess an important distinction I should have made in the video is how lore that inspires speculation is much better than lore that explains something entirely.
@@GCVazquez Oh yeah, for sure! In fact, I tried to apply my same historian lens to Oblivion and Skyrim but they presented story information in a very different, often frustrating way. Encouraging players to dig deeper is great fun-- overexplaining everything (and leaving nothing to dig for) isn't. - Stephen
@@FieldOfViewGameDesign commentaries on the mysterium xarxes can create a few interesting questions about the lore of the world. There is also theory the meridia was behind all the events of the game. But i agree that oblivion and skyrim doesn't prioritize playing the game in this investigative way. The main quests of the games don't cause you to ask these questions, being a fan of the world leads to this instead. they also seem to have decided that most players won't care or enjoy this aspect, so it isn't worth the trouble putting the time and effort into adding piles and piles of new text that directly relates to the main quest for the players to discover while doing the main quest. with the increase in learning the tes lore maybe tes 6 will bring back some of what morrowind had.
Great video, but I must disagree the lore of The Elder Scrolls is straightforward. When you dig just a little deeper than just playing Skyrim. You get met with books and stories written by people with subjective perspectives. There are literal Time-travellers that people call different names, becuz they don't know. I can't agree that it's removing an opportunity for speculation.
I think this is the first time I've ever heard tes or fallout to have boring/shallow lore and world building. And that's sort of the crux of a larger issue I have with this video: mystery, or lack thereof, doesn't make or break a world. Settings aren't worse off because we know more about them. And conversely, a setting with too little lore provided can feel flat and empty, so it's definitely a balancing act. But people are still discovering things in both Skyrim and fo4 more than a decade after the games have release, and the lore is as rich and deep as ever for both settings. Just because the games themselves may not be the best isn't a knock against the setting; it's a knock against the developers that took the franchises in poor directions and focused on a big explorable space rather than a smaller but deeper space.
The ambiguity is still mostly lost. Saying the timeline in wonky in well documented fashion, does take away the sense of mystery and wonder that is needed for a good world that the player wants to explore. Ok, everything happened all at once in a million different ways because time is fractured due to Dragon Breaks. I'm bored interacting in the games except for the fighting mechanics. This video never mentioned reading text, or wikis. It's about engagement and interaction a players has as they play the game. I love the Elder Scrolls lore but the games aren't hooking anyone in with the mystery of the world.
I agree with you on that. Skyrim for example is very morally grey everywhere and characters are often lying. I believe the lore books you read are even from individuals perspectives not concrete official set in stone happenings. If you read some of them you can see characters have clear biases.
@@andrewbryner2187 I think most Elder Scrolls fans agree that the dragon break was dumb. But I believe OP was talking about the general concept of the unreliable narrator, which the lore of these games does really well. And if you want to get hooked by it, I'd recommend playing Morrowind over Skyrim tbh.
I'm not quite sure what to make of this. While I agree that the theory-crafting side of fandoms miss so much of what a story actually has to say, as an outsider to both I don't see much appreciable difference between TLoZ's and Dark Soul's fandoms obsessions with lore. Both lead to an obsession with categorizing minutia, and when I talk to my friends interested in either series, they always highlight the /mechanical/ reasons for replaying, not story. My friend C. replays Dark Souls to see how far he can get with unusual builds, not to figure out the lore implications of Lord So-and-so dropping an Amulet of Questions, and my friend T. plays OoT to speedrun it, not to try and test if the number of steps from Lon Lon Ranch to Hyrule Castle matches up in BotW. On an entirely separate note, I'm not sure why you think Kingdom Hearts seems like such an obvious example of the problems you talk about in this video. Sure, it does give lore-dumps, but the storytelling focus is always on the characters, their conflicts and struggles. Maybe its just because I've never been interested in that kind of speculation, but learning, for example, WHY Lea and Isa were working together before they joined the Organization doesn't take away from the story I'm actually there to see, that of their alliance breaking down. Now that the lore question has pivoted to "What happened to the person they were looking for?" I'm not interested in speculating because the emotional journey of finding her is what the game's (almost certainly) going to focus on instead, and that's where my interest lies. The series is far more interested in the emotional beats of the story over the plot beats, so saying the plot beats & exposition by themselves are unsatisfying is kinda missing the point. It feels wrong to say "You're engaging with this piece of media incorrectly," but this criticism of Kingdom Hearts feels like saying Bloodborne is bad because there's too many stealth segments, and that the game would be better served focusing on other areas. The stealth in Bloodborne IS pretty shallow but its hardly omnipresent, and the game DOES focus on other areas, areas that it excels at, just as KH DOES have mysteries that really only serve to be explained in later games, but that's not the focus of the story, a story that's actually really touching if you engage with it on its own terms.
Yeah agreed, I hard disagree with this video, it feels more like he's saying 'I don't like unimportant lore in a story and therefore it is always bad'. I really don't see what harm it causes, the Lord of the Rings isn't less interesting because of the The Silmarillion, if anything the lore serves as great extra content for the fans who wanted to delve deeper. People speculate so much about Dark Souls and Zelda because they adore those franchises and crave new content faster than the creators can deliver it, and without anything to sink their teeth into they start making up new ideas. Of course people criticised the Zelda timeline, it's not like anyone was going to criticise the speculation when it wasn't even official, and when the timeline came about people had very high expectations- the audience cared far more about something the original creators never felt the need to explain, which is a completely different issue to actual lore existing in the story that people care about. I used to spend hours upon hours on Wookiepedia reading about obscure Star Wars lore, and then one day Disney threw it all out to reboot the francise, and now Star Wars feels empty and shallow. I absolutely want writers to give me hard facts about how exactly their universe works; the idea that 'I read to imagine' is ridiculous, if I want to image I'll sit down and write my own story. I love fictional worlds to explore what someone else has created, but the video seems to be saying writers should create less so I have to make up the lore for them... which is exactly the issue Zelda had, with the fans inventing timeline lore before the original creators, and this is seen as a bad thing. I feel like it would have been better if he'd defined exactly what he means by 'lore' before he began, it seems more like he doesn't like fandoms that invent lore that doesn't exist (which is understandable), and enjoys stories where you can imagine your own stories in the worrld that take place outside of the main plot, which can absolutely be done in any story I can think of with heavy world building and lore focus.
I unironically think it's just really a big thing nowadays to like Fromsoftware and hate TES no matter what (can't speak for Zelda, know nothing about it). Because I can also say "lol in Elden Ring we have no fricking idea about anything that's happened (because we don't) and we never have truly important stuff told to us in a story, and why write anything anyways if players are so obssessed with you they'll write everything for you in this very moment, right? and then let's compare that to all of the quests and interactive cities and books in Skyrim, where every big event, be it the Red Mountain eruption, the Civil War or whatever, is being actively explored and told to us by all these characters and books around us so that we can really see the impact of the world history apart from some vague environmental storytelling" , so what? This is comparing very different games with different methods of storytelling behind them, and I see no point in comparing them on a better/worse scale, except maybe just to say yet again "Fromsoftware good, Bethesda bad, duh"
This is really good. Whenever I read a fantasy book I always find myself wondering about the world outside the plot, then when the author explains the rest of world too much it is cool at first but it also eliminates mystery and wonder.
I like it when they only explain the stuff that's relevant to the plot, but it genuinely fleshes out the world in a way that a plot device or generic macguffin doesn't. If it's just worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding, it gets pretty tiring.
6:23 This might be true for most of the newly developed lore, but as soon as you go down the rabbit hole of TES lore (can only recommend Drewmora, Imperial Knowledge Epic Nate etc) the crazier the lore gets.
One of the first things that came to mind when you talked about having all the answers was The Expendables. In the first movie, it's made clear that the team has been around for many years, with many former teammembers. If we were shown a photo of the first team, it would limit the sequels since it would then say exactly who was on the team. Since they did not say who any of the former teammembers were, we got to meet three of them in part 3: Wesley Snipes, Kelsey Grammar and Mel Gibson.
...Ehhh, I'm gonna stick to encyclopedically combing lore tidbits, official or otherwise. It's fun. :P Also, I think there should be a distinction made between lore that fills out a world and lore than unnecessarily connects things and makes it feel smaller. In Star Wars, X-Wings are made by the Incom Corporation, a formerly Empire run corporation whose design team proceeded to defected to the Rebel Alliance with the starfighters. That's fun lore that nerds can categorize if they want, and casuals can ignore if they want. On the other hand, there are countless little tidbits in the only Legends timeline that involved the stealing of the Death Star plans. Suddenly it feels like everyone and their mother across movies, books and games was involved with the heist and it made the entire universe feel constrained.
I'm going to build a world off of the back of completely incorrect lore, meant to cause mental damage to those that try to make sense of it. It's the only way.
Ok so I must ask the question, what was the purpose of Tolkien's Silmarillion? That can be construed as just a lore book, couldn't it. Also what would be the difference between lore and a very detailed time-line?
This video reminds me a bit of the somewhat weird world building of CrossCode, a great action RPG with a pixel art style, which basically does some bits of worldbuilding for the world the story happens in, (which is basically an MMORPG) which then feeds back into the main story of the DLC. But it also does world building for a different game basically if the developer Radical Fish Games wanted to place their next game in the same universe. There are logs that tell a story about a big spaceship, exploring and analyzing stuff which makes it a bit clearer how far humanity has come in the "real world" of CrossCode and makes you wonder what the other characters do in their free time besides playing its MMORPG "CrossWorlds" and what their jobs could be like. It's something the devs never really intentioned, its director and main programmer even said in one of their dev streams that someone on the team wanted to write a bit of lore for the real world of CrossCode. He later showed him a bunch of those logs that don't really have an impact on the story of the game but at the same time was also so weird and interesting that they just kept it.
@@GCVazquez I just started, but I can confidently say that you REALLY have to play it. It has very awesome arpg mechanics. They are very refined and also add a lot of new stuff (Ex: The combo system that determines enemy drops; it made me spend an hour just "grinding" because the system is so fun). Also, the lore is very interesting and hooks you very fast. When I started playing I was actually wondering how much of the story was the in-in-game world and how much was the in-game real world
Another thing I think about when it comes to worldbuilding and lore is the question of whether it expands or diminishes the fictional space. Because it might not be so bad to have some answers, so long as they provide different points of view about the world, as well as new and interesting questions for fans to ask and answer for themselves. The Star Wars universe has a very complicated relationship with these two distinct approaches. To me, the best parts of all of the stuff that came out after the original movies are the ones where the universe is made to seem larger, filled with interesting people who each live out their own stories in the midst of all the galactic turmoil. The worst parts are the ones where everything just ties back to the handful of characters caught in the immediate vicinity of the Skywalker shenanigans and its preordained-by-destiny utmost importance to the entire universe. Similarly, a lot of lore-heavy writing, in the desire to be thorough and complete, will make everything for together nicely, leaving no loose threads. Sound great in principle, but loose threads are great for tying in new connections.
Yeah! I think answers are important- but I think too many answers leave no questions, especially if the answers are given before the person viewing the story can even ask them. Providing different perspective to view the world- like when a series of books or something jumps from character to character to show off how they see their setting- is a great way to flesh out a world without necessarily providing concrete answers, because it's literally a paradigm through which that character views the world.
I think on some level it's a natural inclination to be asked a question and want to answer it. But sometimes in the struggle to answer every question it starts to come off like Disney re-making their movies to address every minute criticism. I hope that story never gives way to apologia and that on some level we can just enjoy a story for what it is and get excited thinking about the parts we don't see.
This has explained to me so much about the kind of stories that I like. The fantasy book series Kingkiller Chronicles (all though flawed in a lot of ways) perfectly scratches that itch of fleshing out the world, but rarely doing it in an explicit way, rather through stories within stories, mentioned comments etc. It allows you to draw conclusions, it’s what makes it such an enthralling world to be in. Great video otherwise!
Thank you! I think that's a great way of building a world without bogging people down into minutia. Hinting at a legend here, dropping a line about a famous incident as a joke or aside there- these are ways to make people interested in the world, without giving them an encyclopedia to remember.
In terms of Zelda, I've recently started to see the older games as retellings of myths, old stories that are passed down through word of mouth to the era of Breath of the Wild. That would explain their inconsistencies, as they're all muddled retellings of similar events throughout time. It could even, should you be so inclined to see it this way, explain the vastly differing artstyles between games as the lens of those telling these stories. It makes BoTW and ToTK work a lot better imo, as they're so heavily focussed on having a world that is the ruins of dozens of old ones
Dark Souls has lost me because of its lack of story in the games. I was bored that I run to a location without any reason, kill everything without any reason und moved one in the hope that maybe a cutscene would be apear which explain what the meaning of all the thing is, that happened there. Its style, that I would need to build my own story with reading some text on weapons or other items isn’t suited for me. On the other side, I like the lore of Kingdom Hearts and that the lore expand with every game.
So, I went into this video expecting that I would feel like it's incomplete and missing the reason that _I_ worldbuild. And after watching it all the way through, I can say that I was correct. It's a great video for what you're trying to say. However I feel like it falls into a trap of assuming that all worldbuilding is meant to be for someone else. However that is not always the case. When I worldbuild, I like meticulously figuring out all of the details as to how this world functions. Because my worldbuilding is for my own enjoyment. I don't have a story I am trying to tell. I just wanna create a world which feels rich and lived in because that brings me joy and helps me learn. And likewise, When I choose to share that with people, I am not trying to make them guess all of the obscure details. I am simply sharing something I love and am passionate about. That joy of speculation which you talk about is how I feel about my own worlds. But the difference is that the ideas I like the most _are_ the truth. Because I can simply make it so.
You showed Trails for a large part of the video and I feel it actually defies what you're talking about. It's lore is absolutely fantastic and it contributes to the quality of its world building
A lot of details that work together don't necessarily equate to a lot of details that make for a compelling story. Sometimes a lot of details and a painstaking effort to connect literally every and any thing possible back to the main plot just bloats and over-complicates a pretty bland story about good vs evil.
Is your reply just speaking generally, or talking about Trails specifically? I can see it being either way and if it's Trails specifically, I can only wonder if we played the same games :P
@@aneonfoxtribute He didnt play them. The footage in the video comes from DrCullens playthrough and he happened to be around during the biggest loredump scene in all four CS games
@@aneonfoxtribute you missed his point, one of the main things he focuses on is that lore/worldbuilding shouldn't come in the way of the experience its not something that should be hamefisted to the player and the trails games are very guilty of that, sure there are a lot of optional lore that you can find out about, but a lot of its worldbuilding loses its charm when the story decides to shove it into the main narrative and to fully appreciate the series you need a lot and i mean A LOT of background ranging from different characters and lore making it near impossible for new players to get into it or appreciate it to its fullest unless they plan to spend 100s of hours into the series. there is no question that trails games have a very rich world and lore but the execution leaves a lot to be desired imo it fails at the basic concept of "show dont tell"
Kingdom hearts is one of the game series where the game explains too much that all mysteries are lost, while those that are not explained just feel like utterly nonsense
Another excellent video! The DQ example was spot on and I'm even gonna say about the other examples you gave. A part that got me into the Zelda series was the time line speculation but slowly I grew up and didn't care as much and realized it wasn't important because each game feels like a legend of it's own almost written by a different culture almost. With Kingdom Hearts I very much agree and replaying the games it's something you notice right away after 2, not to say there aren't character development and meaning to take from each game's story, but it feels like scratching the surface for a meaning which I personally felt with 3 especially since it felt like it was structured as a very long padding towards the final fight and doesn't feel like it want to properly end it's saga but rather rush to the end to get to new lore of the arc.
Thank you! ^_^ With Kingdom Hearts, I definitely feel as though the series just wants to barrel as fast as possible to new facts and lore without really giving any meaning to what it introduces to the story. A LOT of the characters in Kingdom Hearts can just stop showing up and it'd be fine and it would make sense and it'd be better- because when you want to reuse those characters, their return is that much more impactful!
@@GCVazquez Agree a lot with that, it also feel like some characters are just introduced only to be recycled later in order to give any meaningful ideas.
I like that the Zelda games are tied together, always have. The cyclical nature of the story has been a point of fascination since I first noticed it at a young age. But people put waaaayyy too much stock in it. I like that it's there, but other than a few games that very, very obviously connect together, it's nothing but a cool tidbit to me. There's so much more to those games that goes undiscussed by a huge part of the fanbase.
Speaking of Zelda, I view each game the same as an Ys game. In the Ys series, all of the games are canonically just the video game adaptation of a journal written by the main character Adol Christin, which may be exaggerated or have iffy veracity. What matters is the adventure. Zelda games literally have "The Legend of" in the title, so it really is like a different retelling of a legend. Like an oral tradition that changes over time due to the limitations of human memory. I honestly hate seeing it as a timeline, I have a feeling Nintendo never intended Zelda to have a real timeline. They just make games that are fun lol.
Yes, you've explained perfectly what I've felt about world-building and lore but could never put into words. It's not necessarily less is more, but rather mystery is more interesting than answers. EDIT: Thinking more about it, the most interesting part of skyrim for me was the dwemmer. All mystery, never saw them, all the player knew about them was their ruins and a few books in skyrim. That's the kind of lore that's interesting. Brillant, keep it up!
Glad you enjoyed it! I think some amount of answers is useful to get the ball rolling, and there are cases where having answers is great! I just think there's a skew lately to give too many answers for things that aren't all that important, and I think it distracts from things that should be.
Most of the Dwemer lore is not even from Skyrim, it was from Morrowind (and a bit from Redguard). The fact that the most interesting part of Skyrim was not even from Skyrim but rather copy-pasted from past games means that CG Positive has a point about how the lore-writing is getting worse with time.
@@JudasRose jezz... you completely missed the point of my comment... Im not complaining about the inclusion of Dwemer ruins in Skyrim. Of course they have to be there, for the very reasons you pointed out. I have no problems with this whatsoever. i was specifically talking about **LORE** in my previous comment. OP was saying that the most interesting lore in Skyrim was the Dwemer lore, but 90% of the cool lore stuff about the Dwemers were created by the writers of Morrowind a decade prior. Skyrim didn't add much to it: there are no new crazy twists or anything that changes the way how we interpret things in a major way. Why does that matters? Well, think about it for a minute: If the best lore in Skyrim is just, as i mentioned, "copy-pasted" from a previous game, doesn't that say a *lot* about Skyrim's writing quality? Doesn't that say a *lot* about how Skyrim's own new/original/unique lore is kinda weak? Doesn't that say a lot about Bethesda's current writing team? You don't have to agree or disagree btw, im merely explaining my point. i hope i made myself clear this time, english is not my native language.
This is an eye-catching title! In my writing, I'm guilty of structuring my world- building like Bloodborne's item descriptions. At times, I worry about these lore moments slowing the pace down, and so I'm learning to write characters placed throughout the world whose arc gives greater context to factions, history, etc. Kinda like NPCs!
I used to write (not well) and now I’m trying again, all I have to say is this video is f*cking gold. Absolutely eye opening on the open-ended aspect causing investment, I’ve always come up with my own ideas and I just assumed it was a certain type of person thing as I’ve always been good at assessing diegetic aspects while others are just visually tuned in.
Man, this reminds me of a moment from a game that I've been playing: Freedom Wars. It's not too well known but it is awesome! At some point they talk about a really powerful enemy that kills everyone he meets. It is brought up as this sort of mythical person with an awesome mech and that any encounter with him will end badly. He even kills off one of your allies and his team who were out in another mission (all offscreen). Then they present him entirely in a cutscene with no suspense as he wipes your entire team and decides not to kill any of you because... you parried one of his attacks and... he is impressed, I guess? It just made me lose all interest in what was, until that point, a great build up. Plus the mech was just a normal mech coloured red.
This was a fantastic video, GC! I began to feel this a lot recently as someone who has been trying to plan out a backlog of series I've not yet gotten to, only to find myself grasping at straws for where to start all in some strange attempt to improve my literacy with the many colors of this medium. I've played countless games in my wee amount of years and invested countless hours in the many games I hold dear as well, yet still have never charted into series as monumental as Persona, Final Fantasy, Metroid and Yakuza for instance. I feel these games fall outside the scope of what you were highlighting here as they mostly reside in their own spheres of "game by game" storytelling rather than being all stitched together, but the concerns are still palpable especially in a post-MCU era where you feel you gotta catch up on each prior entry to see the "whole" picture in order to even play the entry you found interest in in the first place. Not to say every game has to be Souls or Pokemon, but it does feel refreshing when an entry doesn't have to convolute itself further just to add onto the ever-teetering pile for especially lore-savvy fans. Now, to enjoy my Final Fantasy 15 experience in peace..... by not viewing the Archives ;)
Surely, Shadow of the Colossus has been brought up already, but because of how mysterious the world feels, it draws you in. Less is more. If more creators focused more on environmental storytelling, gameplay, and characterization, I'd say a game would turn out better (in my opinion). I think it must be super fun to think up a complex world, but the more you add the harder it can become to connect it all and generate intrigue. Great video, gave me a lot to think about myself!
On the one hand: I grow so, SO tired of people claiming Dark Souls is good worldbuilding. Or good *anything* narrative. There are *not* answers, to any of those questions being asked. There never were, and never will be. Someone isn't sitting on the truth somewhere, they did half to two-thirds the work of *making something* and then put it out into the world. It's *engaging* , to be sure. But engaging is not anywhere near the same as 'good' . Theorizing is fun, as the video notes. But I am *begging* people, read a book. Watch a movie. Attend a *puppet show* , interact with literally any media that *actually tells a story* . There's nothing wrong with enjoying the fundamental avoidance of real story that the Souls series does, but claiming it's better than having an actually-delivered narrative could be argued to be a sign of mental illness. Which I suppose is my problem with the video: a world where tons and tons of stuff is left of to speculation feels a whole lot less like an exercise in great creativity and narrative and more like somebody didn't feel like, or wasn't up to the task of, doing their actual job. But on that other hand. There is a sickness, among fans of any given fictional media. It's 'recent' in that its been ongoing for approaching a decade now, and a disease in that it fundamentally destroys the ability of anyone experiencing it to *enjoy* anything: people want *everything* explained. Not just want, *demand* . Is there a gap in an explanation of how two events interact? Clearly it must be a plot hole that unmakes the entire story. Is even a single detail left up to the viewer or reader's speculation? The author obviously made a catastrophic failure, proving that the armchair critic is correct about all the ways the story is terrible and they and only they (and the people who agree with them) are brilliant and pretty and so much better than the creator of the media they're deriding. This cancer is *everywhere* . If you want to know why so much media has been so bad, recently? This way of thinking has poisoned the creator-patron dynamic *so much* you could reasonably argue it isn't possible to create anything anymore without a very loud subset of people jumping screaming all over it in desperation to find any, any 'flaw'. And vocal minorities don't exist: the part of a group that gets heard is the only part that *matters* . So you're left with an audience that physically cannot enjoy media, because laying out every single conceivable detail and how they interact is not only impossible, it's also (as noted in the video) bad writing. And after a certain point, no matter how good a writer is, boring. There *is* a joy in getting to wonder about how things fit together when not everything is explained. All of the Star Wars media in the 1990s ran solely off of this concept; some of it very aggressively did not work, but the stuff that did was stunning. It's a weird place. I dislike and disagree with the...scale, of the video's thesis, I think? But the summation is provably true. It's just not the creator end driving that particular writing failure.
and yet a lot of massive series have very extensive lore communities. Why are you saying people don't enjoy media because of people speculating on lore? That is a way to get more enjoyment out of a medium. Recent media is not shit because of over explained lore. It's just shit writing. People don't want things upfront explained anyway. It's better if it is only hinted at. I have my own world building and stories. Most of it is just background information I will never reveal. It just helps me reason out my stories. If you're revealing everything to the audience as if they are reading it from Wikipedia you're doing it wrong.
I really agree, and I'm even willing to say I'm okay with a timeline existing between specific games. The minute they canonized this big timeline, I feel like Zelda got a lot less interesting. BY THE WAY, your username IS AMAZING.
This discussion struck a chord for me. Really great overview and analysis of how different styles of worldbuilding can affect the experience of seeing and hearing the story. A few examples outside the video game domain come to mind, but your mention of Dark Souls really hits on something I love about that series' worldbuilding. Every character has a different view of the world--some may be honest, while others are deceptive, or they may even have deeply-held convictions which they relate the the player as "exposition" but which later turn out to be false. But the coolest innovation, one that I think is uniquely possible in the gaming space, is the idea of the item descriptions, which seem to be handed down from some omniscient narrator. Of course, novels often have a third-person omniscient narrator, but reading every detail in a novel is not optional, nor is it based on achievement the way earning a video game item is. The author of a novel has chosen what information to give to you--you have only to read it. On the other hand, in other forms of visual media outside gaming (or even certain games, i.e. MGS), we can't always trust what's shown on the screen. How many times have you watched a character die in a series only to have them come back in a later episode with some flimsy explanation as to why the audience saw something different from what actually happened, or have a detail obviously re-shot in a later season to justify a retcon? In Dark Souls and the games it inspired, you accomplish something within this world, where the narrative is hazy and things aren't what they seem, and you're rewarded with a nugget of information from what we can assume is the game's most (or only) reliable source. That leaves space for speculation and mystery, avoiding the problem of exposition-dump characters and awkward explanations while giving us just enough "truth" to base our knowledge of the world upon. As always, keep up the great work.
I love this! Yes, the details provided are dubious, but the item descriptions are the closest thing to a fact we have in Dark Souls, and whether or not we trust that narrator will factor our view of the world. We're not necessarily placed in a mystery, but rather being asked to make our own conclusions about the world we live in. Whether its friend or foe or both.
Noticed my enjoyment of a book, anime or game would decline the more of the puzzle of the worldbuilding was filled in and I would only stay for the characters.
Dark Souls actually has an incredible amount of detail and answers, it just necessitates reading which most people cant be bothered to. People still want the answers, which is why lore channels for it who simply lay out what's already in game in well-written form are so popular. Id imagine zelda lore speculators are more disappointed with the lack of explanation for anything throughout the games and then Nintendo trying to put the issue to rest just for its own sake.
Why WOULDN'T all Dragon Quest games take place on the same planet? I mean, isn't that what all other fantasy franchises do, unless they introduce some sort of cosmic element?
Oh my god, I loved the video!!! As odd as it may sound, I would also say Kirby falls into this quite often as it used to go from giving small details about dark matter or the in-game bosses to, in games like Star Allies and a little bit of Super Kirby Clash, providing as many details about each character as they possibly could. It feels so boring when you know that everything, no matter how simple or complex, has some weird detail or plot element. Kinda off topic but your video made me passionate enough to say something. Definitely hitting that subscribe button.
I should add: I think your analysis of zelda and dark souls are both spot on. Player choice is a hot topic these days in game design, but so often it neglects the key element to make it stick, player JUDGEMENT. When players have to make judgement calls about whats good and whats bad, and they have limited or imperfect information, thats where the choices that they make become impactful. Anything else just becomes a matter of efficiency, and it gets forgotten. But the games that leave part of the process up to you, and force you to come to conclusions about the world theyve set up, those games are the ones that stick with, because you put a piece of yourself into the game. Overall really good video. I enjoyed hearing what you had to say 👍
12:40 Eiji Aonuma is the not the creator of The Legend of Zelda series. That title belongs to Shigeru Miyamoto. Aonuma is the current director for the series since Miyamoto passed the torch.
This has made me realise why I was so invested in the world of the game Destiny in the early days. The world and story were ambiguous, and like Dark Souls, was told and pieced together through flavour text of items found or lore entries. Imagination is sometimes better than the truth.
I think the insane success of the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise at least played some part in the modern trend of lore replacing narratives as well.
6:22 - "I'm pausing here because I've lost most of you" Nah nah, keep talkin' that's the realest shit yet. Two series I spent years adoring and have steadily seen lose all interest because the more I dug the less interested I felt- go on with their relevance to the topic at hand you're on a roll lol. 15:29 - there it is, forest for the trees. My brain was wrackin' for the phrase, lol. I really enjoy the games you brought up to explain your point in this. I know it's a rather specific case and isn't the end all, but it's hard not to look at Dark Souls endings as a win for the concept of less is more. I don't really want every game to be so vague that I'm left questioning the ending- a solid rewarding and understandable ending can feel fulfilling; Knowing exactly what you're doing and striving for it and then accomplishing it all that jazz. But DS ending has that special level of vagueness where on multiple playthroughs I felt like what the ending meant was different- that I understood it better now not because a character said "Hey :) Letting the flame die does this! :)" but because all the bits and bops I'd seen let me infer, guess, and build my own understanding. That shit's nice. Knowing my read on a game can be wildly different from someone else's because the game allows such a thing to happen either through incomplete pictures or interactions changing some outcomes or whatever really- people getting different reads on the same games spawns much more interesting conversation and just makes it more fun. Same with any form of media really, and the conversation always dies out if it turns out we all skipped a page in the book that spelled it out or we misidentified the character in a movie who did a thing which explains it all. Explanations aren't the worst, I mean being wrong and finding out is fine- but if the piece of media offers no set in stone answer you get a hell of a lot of, er, 'replay' lol, out of it. All said, great small talk, GC. Fun in general but also enjoyed the examples/demonstrations you offered for your talk. Have a good en.
playing on mankind's most powerfull feeling to push you forward, curiosity, is best way to make people not lose intrest in your world........so ironecly not making your world and filling it with gaps so people can fill them is the way to keep your media relevant. the most importent question tho is were to put them.
I don't think speculation around timelines and such particularly damages the Zelda series. I think that type of speculation is what emerges when someone enjoys the game so much that they feel the need to extend the content themselves. If the games themselves had permanently suffered from it then I would probably think differently, but the latest games have been some of the strongest in the whole series
The title made me wanna throw hands but the video represented my own thoughts very well. Although I will say that I started to disagree more with your statement on the Zelda timeline and afterwards. "What's known becomes mundane, but what remains a mystery is always a second chance to learn something new" this was very well said (as I've already talked about in a previous comment). Getting too much lore shoved in your face is very bad, but having no lore at all is even worse. It's a balance. To me getting fed small "crumbs of lore" every now and then only make me want to dive deeper into the world and draw even more connections trying to piece together and theorize over what is unknown (and it's also what makes you want to ask the questions in the first place). In my opinion, this is one of the things that Zelda does great. The Zelda timeline and the lore books like Hyrule Historia answer some questions but make you ask even more, for example "why do the Rito and Zora both exist in BoTW" or questions about the characters like the statue at 13:07. I definitely agree with a lot of and most of what you said, but I also think that you went overboard at the end. Early on in the video you came with the great example of a game master and how they will have written all of this lore down but only give out pieces of it. That is when I think lore is best. You need to give out lore and it is fun to learn about lore but you should also keep some a mystery. In the end, you almost made it sound like "trying to piece together who characters are or connecting geographical areas together" (13:05) is a bad thing which I really don't see how it is. Overall a VERY good video but you lost me a bit at the end, perhaps just because I didn't understand your thoughts correctly (I'd love to have them clarified). I'm sorry if I came off as rude with this comment, I can assure you that that was not the intention and I enjoyed the video a whole lot. I had originally written the comment way better and friendlier but accidentally hit cancel instead of post so this was a little rushed :( PS: I've written down that quote haha
Thank you for sharing your thoughts! On trying to piece things together: I think when doing those things in service to the story being told or the themes being talked about, it's really good! I also think its really fun to piece things together about stories you enjoy! But those things wouldn't happen if people wrote everything out for you, and I think the trend the industry is leaning towards is explaining everything away or pandering to those mysteries in order to capitalize how popular that stuff is. Its a turn from having those questions organically come about as a result of good world building. That's more or less what I meant in the Zelda section. I think the timeline stuff is fun to think about, but I also think it's taken the place of asking what each game is about. Fan theory discussion has eclipsed fan discussions about themes or feelings they had playing the game. I don't think every game is a puzzle to solve, if that makes sense? And I think Breath of the Wild kinda shows that Nintendo realized its important to let fan theory do its own thing rather than build a game around it, like with Skyward Sword.
Kingdom Hearts is probably the perfect game series to explain the core of this video lol. Even though I've played all 3 main games, I couldn't tell you the first thing about the world of Kingdom Hearts, maybe other than "Its a collection of Disney worlds". They draw everything out in so much detail that it's very difficult to process it all, and can barely understand anything. Kingdom Hearts had just about everything it needed to be great. Cool aesthetic, pretty cool battle mechanics for the time it came out, Disney characters that a lot of people love. It just didn't have good story telling.
The first 5 minutes remind me of what happened to Faust in Guilty Gear Strive. This is a character that had been for the past like 15 years a comical relief, a cartoon-physics doctor that was goofy and always wanted to help. When the latest installment of the franchise released in 2021 he had been redesigned to look like a zombie and no explanation was given. People speculated about this for months on end. What could have happened to Faust? What turned this character into a husk, a shadow of his former self? Well, a year later "Another Story" released. A 47 minute animation that showed a story that happened at the same time as the main game's. Another Story showed what happened to Faust... He kept a magic door open for too long and became so exhausted that his soul left his body. Yes, as lame as that sounds.
You should play Rain World. Rain World is known for being brutal because it doesn't tell you anything or hold your hand. You are never taught about most of the game mechanics, even, and you're driven to figure it out yourself and rewarded for experimentation. There is deep lore, but chances are you won't even know a tenth of what already ambiguous lore you can find by the end of the game.
Im currently working on my own story and have only been working on plot and after that I started working on world building after the whole story finshed by making two separate stories that happen 40 years after the main one discussing what happened and how it affected the world one side is around what happened the other side hates what happened
I picked Trails of Cold Steel IV specifically because it's trying to make 20 characters relevant party members and desperately trying to make any and every one of its many, MANY details massively important. Even if it succeeds in connecting it, that's massive bloat. That's way too many things and people to be aware of and care about all at once. The information they are working so hard to make equally important cannot share the spotlight; people are going to forget things, forget characters are even in the scene. I don't like that choice in storytelling.
The only way I can think of to avoid giving too much information is about the world I create is to keep the series for it short and away from the mainstream. That or I can just learn more creators of the "Avatar: the Last Airbender" series to see how they maintain their mysteries and wonder while continuing said series.
I suppose it depends on if you prefer to know the lore or speculate on the lore. Though, the people who prefer to know the lore also love to speculate about the lore, as you can never know everything. . . Mostly because it's never "done" being written.
I think that it all depends. Going to far into the speculation and lore can cause an unsatisfactory experience. It all goes back to questions and answers. Some questions need to be answered that is what drives a story. But some it is better not to answer. Much like role playing games, sometimes it is the players that need to find or come to the answer on their own. I think that is the most important take away. I believe both are needed to have a good story.
I would say that Dark Souls is the exception to the case, given that the elements of the games that, according to the criteria of this video, would be mere references, winks, or individual pieces of information that lead to speculation, have a relationship with each other and have more to do with the game's unique way of telling its stories. Carthus, Astoria, Mirra, Carim, They are all lands that have their presence in the saga as individual places, that have nothing to do with the main story, each one has its own history, conflicts and its influence in other parts of the game, this is see more in 3, where the world is so ravaged by the flame that time and space are distorted, but there's a clear effort to give everyone a background completely separate from the main story (link the flame), that if it is worldbuilding.
Of course, there are things in the saga that play the role of giving speculation, in the way that Zelda does, for example, the fact that painted worlds exist and there are many common topics between Fromsoftware games (Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, Demon Souls), gives rise to think that all fromsoftware games are worlds painted by painters, and since very little is known about them or even how they have that power, it leaves room for interpretation.
If fans of a story start a conversation about it by dumping all the lore and narrative significance onto me, I fall asleep. I much prefer finding all this out myself, or at least choosing to think about it over being told
A massive problem with games (and people who talk about them) lore dumping is how quickly it breaks that "show, don't tell" rule visual media tends to have.
I completely agree, and often talk about that specific thing. I feel like mysterious worlds, worlds without all the answers given to the players, truly feel like they belong to us. Sure, Team Cherry could explain every little thing there is in Hollow Knight but what would be the point? And I know this is about books, but I really liked Phillip Pullman straight up admitting he didn't know the answer to a question a fan asked him about his own world. Sometimes even the creator doesn't have the answer, and it's up to the player, viewer or reader to figure it out. Or not. And it makes the entire world that much more compelling. Great video, I loved it!!
Sometimes it isn't even about it being a mystery. Sometimes it's just not entirely relevant to someone telling a story! I think people forget that not every question we have about a world is particularly important or relevant. Knowing the answer to them is neat, but not entirely meaningful to the story itself. And thank you! ^_^
I disagree about the elder scrolls, at least its "deep lore". Scratch the surface and you discover a rabbit hole of mysteries that fans have been speculating about for nearly 20 years. Stuff like the Disappearance of the Dwemer, who actual events at red mountain, Lorkhan's true plan, the nature of the universe, etc.
I get that; the secret of chim and all that are super interesting, but those games aren't about those mysteries. Like with the Dragon Quest worlds all being the same one, knowing about Chim or the dreamer doesn't really matter to the main quests of those games.
@@GCVazquez I mean, even at their best, the main quests are the least important part Bethsda open world games. The really important part is imersing yourself in those worlds, and a very important thing for that is making that world feal lived in, a place at least pretends to have history as rich as our own. and you can't have that without the lore.
@@HighPriestPlays The gods also exist and affect the world. It makes sense to have information on massive things in the history of the universe because the entities that are part of it all can be studied directly and even communicated with.
I have to say that I disagree with your assessment regarding Zelda. I'd argue Zelda does an excellent job of leaving things up to the player's imagination. Each game tells a cohesive narrative, but also leaves the player with plenty of unanswered questions and those questions only multiply when you consider the implications for the rest of the series. Zelda's overarching "narrative" has always been player driven. It's not about creating a wiki article like most of the other games you talked about here, it's about the cooperative creative process of gluing puzzle pieces together that were never intended to fit together. It goes beyond the official intended narrative and takes on a life of its own. I was watching this video nodding my head and thinking about how Zelda's worldbuilding, like Dark Souls, is driven by mostly by mystery and fan speculation. So when it suddenly turned to Zelda being accused of being too concerned with being encyclopedic it caught me off guard. It's interesting to see someone have just the total opposite takeaway. Regardless this was a fantastic video.
The Zelda timeline was fun *because* it made people argue about it over the internet. It can be fun turning a game into a historical debate. I think the main problem is that game developers sometimes go too far and add just that little bit too much detail that ends the conversation. The real power of world building is shown when you put the game down and can have a discussion with an actual person.
I think when it started overtaking what the games themselves were about was when I stopped caring about the timeline. Connecting those games doesn't change what those games are about, or the emotions they carry within them. It just means they exist in a specific order. Like it's a fun conversation don't get me wrong, but I think Zelda is a series with way too much heart and meaning in each game to reduce conversation about each one to "where does it fit on the timeline?"
@@GCVazquez I don't really see any of the heart, meaning or emotions you're talking about in the Zelda games. They're well made games, but there isn't really much in the way of feelings. Link himself is made to be a blank puppet for the player to control, Zelda is a plot point at best and most of the supporting cast are lucky to have one dimension to their personality.
@@connordarvall8482 then I guess my next question is: why care about the lore behind any of it? Why care about a timeline for a series of games that, in your eyes, mean nothing? What's the appeal other than being able to prove you know something over someone else?
@@GCVazquez There is no appeal to being able to prove you know something over something else. I guess it's the same thrill that drives archaeologists and scientists to do their jobs. You get the urge to pick up many pieces of relevant data, put them together and see what kind of picture it paints. Where games become part of it is when you can see the pivotal points in the worlds history from a first-hand perspective. The conversation around the game is also fun as others may interpret the lore differently and you can contrast and compare the interpretations for a completely new image of the game's world. It becomes bigger than what it ever could be as a stand-alone experience and in the case of a clever developer, allow for a starting point for even more ambitious stories.
I think the connection mainly lies in DQM: Caravan Hearts where you play as Keifer who gets transported to DQ II's world, leading some people to think that VII's world is actually a parallel world of DQ 1, 2, 3.
So in 7, the world gets flooded and the islands get disappeared into the ocean. In 8, your ship is lodged in the center of a canyon, and the moonshadow elf mentions how it was an ancient ship used back when the water level was much higher. You can also use the maps of 7 and 8 and with some tweaking they look VERY similar. Little things like that give a lot of credence to the idea, but again: it's just an idea! Nothing confirmed or seriously set in stone.
“The truth is boring”, 100% this! I find this happens in tv series and films as well. The mystery is what makes some things great, getting answers sometimes kills my interest completely. I really dislike when people bring up the Zelda “”””timeline”””” because it so obviously wasn’t thought of before when the games were being made and was just an after thought in a book without any reasonable explanation. Now some fans follow it like dogma and talk about these games as if there really is a shared connection when in reality that connection is only there to sell copies of a book. The developers of the games don’t even pay attention to it at all.
What I find funny is how this obsession with lore has only gotten worse with time - to the point of people actually complaining about good stories because they don't have enough "lore". A good example of this would be an anime called Kekkai Sensen, which is essentially a supernatural episodic show with action involved. Most people say that it doesn't have a story (despite its episodic nature) because very little of the world is explored outside of what we get from character dialogue. We're essentially fed just enough information to understand the scenarios as they come, develop and end in a way which tells that episodes story. This makes it more of a "slice of life" anime with action added on top, which disappoints people who love a lore dump. But it's also a really smart form of story telling as it structurally gets across the point that the characters of this story see all this supernatural action as a part of their daily lives - uninteresting and quite normal - and therefore have no need to delve deeper. The show is all about characters and how they grow as people DESPITE their crazy lives. Sorry for the rant btw, you nailed this topic!
I agree with the main point of the video, but to say that Morrowind doesn't have speculative lore that ties back to the main plot and the motivations of characters is simply untrue. Granted, it may arguably be the ONE game in the entire series that does it correctly but i still feel the need to mention it.
This just feels like favoring a classic game just because it's a retro game. Virtually everything seen in Skyrim can be traced back to Morrowind, posts made by Kirkbride, or something even older. Skyrim doesn't state anything as factual any more than those did. A theme in TES from the very beginning is that every narrator is unreliable and you can choose to accept whatever is said and form your own canon.
Having fun is great! But I think a lot of the fun to be had (and fun you have had in the past) is informed by the gaps left in a story or world. Imagination is powerful, and I think we discount imagination when we ingest media too much.
@@GCVazquez yeah, to some extent. Most people think that since certain information is relayed to you, there’s nothing left to imagine. There’s all kinds of things to imagine even if it’s not canon. My friend Tobromancer made a funny video about what would happen if Vergil beat Nero in DMC5. Then you have the multiple universes spawned from Undertale. Idk where I’m going with this 😄
@@GCVazquez Oh yeah, you know, Yakuza reviews are how I found your channel, I bet loads of people would notice the inevitable Yakuza 0 review, whenever that is.
@@wacky-physics7506 Should be out in a month or two probably! What's great about the Yakuza videos is they usually take longer to make, so finally being comfortable with making smaller content like this has been really good for my creativity.
So basically: Story > connectivity of minute details, and reserve space for speculation. Was expecting more in depth discussion on lore building vs world building, but these are useful keys of information in their own right Great pieces of advice.
Oh yeah, I won't dunk on classic Fallout. Those games are actually great examples of good lore in world-building. They're DESIGNED for you to miss out on things your first playthrough, or just not know all the pieces of something, or anything arbitrary and unimportant.
![On Worldbuilding: Fictional Histories [ Tolkien | Handmaid's Tale | Game of Thrones ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/RbnzAJXW0Sw/mqdefault.jpg)
Hey everyone! Thank you all so much for watching the video. I wanna make a few clarifications here: Lore and World-Building do go hand in hand, but there's been a skew towards filling a world with as many details as possible and making them all work together by explicitly trying to connect everything. This sort of thing has a tendency to remove agency from the players existing in those worlds; When everything has an explanation, and somehow leads all the way back to a central point, you have a very high likelihood of a lot of those details flat out not being that important to justify the connections- or worse, TOO MANY details, that the plot gets lost in huge amounts of information. Too many cooks, that sort of thing. Worst of all, with all this information spelled out for you, there's no room for imagination. Your input loses power in the story being told, and the way you interpret its characters and events stops informing the narrative at play. When there's too many details, you end up being told how to feel about something, instead of being SHOWN something that can invoke a feeling out of you.
I hope this clears up some of the misunderstandings the video might cause!
I just watched the new Mortal Kombat movie, and you look extremely similar to Liu Kang lol. If you got super ripped, you'd look identical. That's all I could think every time he was on-screen lol
@@jmarra07 are you sure it's this video? I'm not on camera for this one lol
@@GCVazquez It's your most recent video so I figured it was your best chance of actually seeing the comment lol. You look alike in general terms
I liked the video but I felt the lack of attention on character arcs. Especially when falcom games get brought up. In terms of lore and speculation, falcom games are dumpster fires. but the main appeal of the trails and preceeding series is character focused jrpg stories. The franchise was born with the idea of "text" being cheap, and novel length explinations and sprawl being a selling point. The lore has gotten progressively worse over the years in the franchise, but it's hardly ever been great either.
@@bugmom3879 I feel like with Kiseki the lore is really just there to drive the plot. Think about the Rivalries for example. The Divine Knights are literally one of the biggest aspects of Erebonian history, but really they're just a backdrop so Rean can get into a giant robot and beat the shit out of a bunch of other giant robots, lol. Basically nothing gets explained until it's relevant or will be relevant to something that happens in the future. Not that I mind, they're still great and I feel very at home in Zemuria, because the bonkers level of effort put into the NPCs make the world feel alive.
This conversation could go into an entire different direction if we start talking about horror stories and how not knowing what you're up against is MUCH scarier than knowing exactly what's going on.
YEAH! And I think that idea translate really well into other media too. I don't think you need to have a mystery on your hands to leave certain spaces blank.
that's probably why resident evil 7 switched things up so much, and introduced something like Blue Umbrella
I mean horror stories still need a good story even if the threat is a mystery or people are not even going to care about the characters or what happens
Personally I disagree. If I don't know what I'm up against I might feel confused, frustrated, apathetic and curious even but afraid? Not so much whereas if I know for certain that whatever I'm up against could and would so eagerly trounce me and it has the desire to along with being impervious to whatever I do or whatever comes its way with the reasonable expectation that it's not going to get bored-
Then we're talking. Sure, I might not always know where they are or when it will appear next but that's okay. It just means I either have more time to prepare to last longer.. or shorter if its the type to delight in my suffering so as to deny it of its joy of the catch or that it has not found me and the fates are smiling upon me. Perhaps I'm just different in this regard but if I don't know what I'm up against, I just don't find it scary since there's always the chance, the hope that I could take it down with a throwdown.
And that's why most of my horror stories involve the protagonists knowing what they're up against that way they also know they are completely helpless and may the fates have mercy of which they severely lack.
Imagine that the creature/sentient phenomena is actively fucking with you, giving you missinformation as toys with you ultimately to reveal the whole thing in your face just before brutally destroying your body.
My favorite quote by me "Lore is not a story. Lore is the foundation upon which your story needs to be built."
Slow clap*
Homie said quote by me😂🤣
I think lore can enhance a story whether it’s a good story or a thin one
Pokémon is a good example sometimes they have simpler plots
But they have an ocean of lore that is really complex and fascinating that enhances the simpler stories and makes them more unique and fun
Although most of the lore is unexplained
Like buildings you can’t access
You are curious what’s in them and you will never know
That’s part of the charm
Part of his unanswered question aspect of the video
Four things:
1) Your video reminded me first and foremost of a time many years ago when I was writing a story (That I never finished) and getting absolutely frantic about filling out all of the "plot holes". The fear of being outed as a hack for having something unexplained or ambiguous in the text used to torment me day and night, until an acquaintance I had at the time told me "Don't fill out all of the holes. People need something to dream about". From that day on I worried a little less about inconsistencies in storytelling in general. *A little* less, because I am anxiety incarnated.
2) The second thing your video reminded me of is how I'm a fan of stories freaking ENDING. Stories going away, leaving loose threads behind, myseries unsolved, characters still coated in smoke and mirrors. Oral tradition is more or less dead in the modern world, and the next best thing is the act of wasting time, alone or with a friend, speculating and wondering about that guy, that piece of dialogue, that hidden meaning. But what a lot of modern media does is forcing the story to go on and on and on, making a thousand spin-offs about that guy, that piece of dialogue, that now not-so-hidden meaning, and that sucks. It cheapens entire worlds full of wonder.
3) Finally, your new video also reminded me of why I don't understand the obsession with "canon" in communities that are all about headcanons. Oh, the owners of this thing are not making this well-liked theory part of the official canon? It's a travesty! An absurd! Tell us the truth! Like, dude, you already have your version of the "truth" in a context where having your own version of it harms no one. Chill.
4) Great video, as always. :)
Thank you very much! I used to write short stories all the time when I was younger, and I learned a very similar lesson. The friend who'd always want to read my work would tell me how desperate they were to learn more about a particular character or location, and it dawned on me that a little mystery or something unexplained goes a long way to invest people into a story.
As a writer myself this is exactly how I feel. When delving into the worlds I create I'll go into detail on some aspects, but will never fully explain the trivial. For instance, one story I'm writing involves the protagonist being taken from his own world by an unknown divine entity and thrown into another as a way to restart his pitiful life. Of course I go into some backstory that lead to his subpar life, but I never fully explain it, and neither do I explain what this entity is. Only that it took pity on him and gave him another chance to make something of his sad life. And the new world itself is the same. I'll describe how each location looks, but never its full history. Although, I may sprinkle in some subtle hints for those invested enough to keep up.
hmm I can make a quote out of this: "A grate story is when It hasen't been told or solved... to a degree"
Number 3 hurts me lol, Yuri fans in animanga fandoms coping and seething that their headcanon ships aren't the consensus are toxic as hell. They do the craziest shit over fictional characters like sending death threats and whatnot. Nothing against Yuri honestly, in fact I like it, but god damn does the community suck. I'm glad that forums in my favorite fandom are so traumatized by Yuritards and shippers in general from other fandoms that they actively gatekeep and ostracize them at the slightest hint of being into Yuri lol. Honestly extreme threats call for extreme measures, that's what happens when you build up such a terrible reputation. Shippers in general should probably go touch grass, but eh at least the normal ones are chill and don't send literal death threats lol.
Very well said! Missing the forest for the trees is the perfect analogy. I've become increasingly bothered by the word "lore" as it seems to be so often separated from the story or world as a whole. When codex pages and journal entries become a disintegrated collectable, I think the artifice begins to crack somewhat.
The Elder Scrolls is an interesting example. It's not always particularly original (and certainly not a master of storytelling) but one day I decided to approach Morrowind like a historian rather than an adventurer. Spending hours traveling between libraries and comparing ancient religious texts unraveled a history that was compelling *because* of its inconsistencies. The books were all written by people in the fiction with various backgrounds, opinions, and motivations. I had to cross examine different accounts of the same event and make my own incomplete interpretation- much like the real world! Definitely one of the most rewarding lore-based adventures I've ever been on.
- Stephen
Glad you liked it! I feel like there's a great comparison between Morrowind's and Skyrim's use of lore. I guess an important distinction I should have made in the video is how lore that inspires speculation is much better than lore that explains something entirely.
@@GCVazquez Oh yeah, for sure! In fact, I tried to apply my same historian lens to Oblivion and Skyrim but they presented story information in a very different, often frustrating way. Encouraging players to dig deeper is great fun-- overexplaining everything (and leaving nothing to dig for) isn't.
- Stephen
@@FieldOfViewGameDesign commentaries on the mysterium xarxes can create a few interesting questions about the lore of the world. There is also theory the meridia was behind all the events of the game. But i agree that oblivion and skyrim doesn't prioritize playing the game in this investigative way. The main quests of the games don't cause you to ask these questions, being a fan of the world leads to this instead. they also seem to have decided that most players won't care or enjoy this aspect, so it isn't worth the trouble putting the time and effort into adding piles and piles of new text that directly relates to the main quest for the players to discover while doing the main quest. with the increase in learning the tes lore maybe tes 6 will bring back some of what morrowind had.
Great video, but I must disagree the lore of The Elder Scrolls is straightforward. When you dig just a little deeper than just playing Skyrim. You get met with books and stories written by people with subjective perspectives. There are literal Time-travellers that people call different names, becuz they don't know. I can't agree that it's removing an opportunity for speculation.
I think this is the first time I've ever heard tes or fallout to have boring/shallow lore and world building. And that's sort of the crux of a larger issue I have with this video: mystery, or lack thereof, doesn't make or break a world. Settings aren't worse off because we know more about them. And conversely, a setting with too little lore provided can feel flat and empty, so it's definitely a balancing act.
But people are still discovering things in both Skyrim and fo4 more than a decade after the games have release, and the lore is as rich and deep as ever for both settings. Just because the games themselves may not be the best isn't a knock against the setting; it's a knock against the developers that took the franchises in poor directions and focused on a big explorable space rather than a smaller but deeper space.
The ambiguity is still mostly lost. Saying the timeline in wonky in well documented fashion, does take away the sense of mystery and wonder that is needed for a good world that the player wants to explore. Ok, everything happened all at once in a million different ways because time is fractured due to Dragon Breaks. I'm bored interacting in the games except for the fighting mechanics. This video never mentioned reading text, or wikis. It's about engagement and interaction a players has as they play the game. I love the Elder Scrolls lore but the games aren't hooking anyone in with the mystery of the world.
I agree with you on that. Skyrim for example is very morally grey everywhere and characters are often lying. I believe the lore books you read are even from individuals perspectives not concrete official set in stone happenings. If you read some of them you can see characters have clear biases.
@@andrewbryner2187speak for yourself, the world is the biggest factor why people play those games.
@@andrewbryner2187 I think most Elder Scrolls fans agree that the dragon break was dumb. But I believe OP was talking about the general concept of the unreliable narrator, which the lore of these games does really well. And if you want to get hooked by it, I'd recommend playing Morrowind over Skyrim tbh.
I'm not quite sure what to make of this.
While I agree that the theory-crafting side of fandoms miss so much of what a story actually has to say, as an outsider to both I don't see much appreciable difference between TLoZ's and Dark Soul's fandoms obsessions with lore. Both lead to an obsession with categorizing minutia, and when I talk to my friends interested in either series, they always highlight the /mechanical/ reasons for replaying, not story. My friend C. replays Dark Souls to see how far he can get with unusual builds, not to figure out the lore implications of Lord So-and-so dropping an Amulet of Questions, and my friend T. plays OoT to speedrun it, not to try and test if the number of steps from Lon Lon Ranch to Hyrule Castle matches up in BotW.
On an entirely separate note, I'm not sure why you think Kingdom Hearts seems like such an obvious example of the problems you talk about in this video. Sure, it does give lore-dumps, but the storytelling focus is always on the characters, their conflicts and struggles. Maybe its just because I've never been interested in that kind of speculation, but learning, for example, WHY Lea and Isa were working together before they joined the Organization doesn't take away from the story I'm actually there to see, that of their alliance breaking down. Now that the lore question has pivoted to "What happened to the person they were looking for?" I'm not interested in speculating because the emotional journey of finding her is what the game's (almost certainly) going to focus on instead, and that's where my interest lies. The series is far more interested in the emotional beats of the story over the plot beats, so saying the plot beats & exposition by themselves are unsatisfying is kinda missing the point.
It feels wrong to say "You're engaging with this piece of media incorrectly," but this criticism of Kingdom Hearts feels like saying Bloodborne is bad because there's too many stealth segments, and that the game would be better served focusing on other areas. The stealth in Bloodborne IS pretty shallow but its hardly omnipresent, and the game DOES focus on other areas, areas that it excels at, just as KH DOES have mysteries that really only serve to be explained in later games, but that's not the focus of the story, a story that's actually really touching if you engage with it on its own terms.
o.o
Yeah agreed, I hard disagree with this video, it feels more like he's saying 'I don't like unimportant lore in a story and therefore it is always bad'.
I really don't see what harm it causes, the Lord of the Rings isn't less interesting because of the The Silmarillion, if anything the lore serves as great extra content for the fans who wanted to delve deeper. People speculate so much about Dark Souls and Zelda because they adore those franchises and crave new content faster than the creators can deliver it, and without anything to sink their teeth into they start making up new ideas. Of course people criticised the Zelda timeline, it's not like anyone was going to criticise the speculation when it wasn't even official, and when the timeline came about people had very high expectations- the audience cared far more about something the original creators never felt the need to explain, which is a completely different issue to actual lore existing in the story that people care about.
I used to spend hours upon hours on Wookiepedia reading about obscure Star Wars lore, and then one day Disney threw it all out to reboot the francise, and now Star Wars feels empty and shallow. I absolutely want writers to give me hard facts about how exactly their universe works; the idea that 'I read to imagine' is ridiculous, if I want to image I'll sit down and write my own story. I love fictional worlds to explore what someone else has created, but the video seems to be saying writers should create less so I have to make up the lore for them... which is exactly the issue Zelda had, with the fans inventing timeline lore before the original creators, and this is seen as a bad thing.
I feel like it would have been better if he'd defined exactly what he means by 'lore' before he began, it seems more like he doesn't like fandoms that invent lore that doesn't exist (which is understandable), and enjoys stories where you can imagine your own stories in the worrld that take place outside of the main plot, which can absolutely be done in any story I can think of with heavy world building and lore focus.
I unironically think it's just really a big thing nowadays to like Fromsoftware and hate TES no matter what (can't speak for Zelda, know nothing about it). Because I can also say "lol in Elden Ring we have no fricking idea about anything that's happened (because we don't) and we never have truly important stuff told to us in a story, and why write anything anyways if players are so obssessed with you they'll write everything for you in this very moment, right? and then let's compare that to all of the quests and interactive cities and books in Skyrim, where every big event, be it the Red Mountain eruption, the Civil War or whatever, is being actively explored and told to us by all these characters and books around us so that we can really see the impact of the world history apart from some vague environmental storytelling" , so what? This is comparing very different games with different methods of storytelling behind them, and I see no point in comparing them on a better/worse scale, except maybe just to say yet again "Fromsoftware good, Bethesda bad, duh"
This dude, GC...he gets it.
I try to at least!
This is really good. Whenever I read a fantasy book I always find myself wondering about the world outside the plot, then when the author explains the rest of world too much it is cool at first but it also eliminates mystery and wonder.
I like it when they only explain the stuff that's relevant to the plot, but it genuinely fleshes out the world in a way that a plot device or generic macguffin doesn't. If it's just worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding, it gets pretty tiring.
6:23 This might be true for most of the newly developed lore, but as soon as you go down the rabbit hole of TES lore (can only recommend Drewmora, Imperial Knowledge Epic Nate etc) the crazier the lore gets.
One of the first things that came to mind when you talked about having all the answers was The Expendables. In the first movie, it's made clear that the team has been around for many years, with many former teammembers.
If we were shown a photo of the first team, it would limit the sequels since it would then say exactly who was on the team. Since they did not say who any of the former teammembers were, we got to meet three of them in part 3: Wesley Snipes, Kelsey Grammar and Mel Gibson.
A new video in only 3 weeks what a blessing
Woah has it really only been three weeks?! I thought it's been a month!
...Ehhh, I'm gonna stick to encyclopedically combing lore tidbits, official or otherwise. It's fun. :P
Also, I think there should be a distinction made between lore that fills out a world and lore than unnecessarily connects things and makes it feel smaller. In Star Wars, X-Wings are made by the Incom Corporation, a formerly Empire run corporation whose design team proceeded to defected to the Rebel Alliance with the starfighters. That's fun lore that nerds can categorize if they want, and casuals can ignore if they want.
On the other hand, there are countless little tidbits in the only Legends timeline that involved the stealing of the Death Star plans. Suddenly it feels like everyone and their mother across movies, books and games was involved with the heist and it made the entire universe feel constrained.
I'm going to build a world off of the back of completely incorrect lore, meant to cause mental damage to those that try to make sense of it. It's the only way.
I like this kind of counter culture approach!
You explained perfectly what I felt about TLoZ but could never actually explain myself. Great video!
Thank you! :D
Ok so I must ask the question, what was the purpose of Tolkien's Silmarillion? That can be construed as just a lore book, couldn't it. Also what would be the difference between lore and a very detailed time-line?
This video reminds me a bit of the somewhat weird world building of CrossCode, a great action RPG with a pixel art style, which basically does some bits of worldbuilding for the world the story happens in, (which is basically an MMORPG) which then feeds back into the main story of the DLC. But it also does world building for a different game basically if the developer Radical Fish Games wanted to place their next game in the same universe. There are logs that tell a story about a big spaceship, exploring and analyzing stuff which makes it a bit clearer how far humanity has come in the "real world" of CrossCode and makes you wonder what the other characters do in their free time besides playing its MMORPG "CrossWorlds" and what their jobs could be like.
It's something the devs never really intentioned, its director and main programmer even said in one of their dev streams that someone on the team wanted to write a bit of lore for the real world of CrossCode. He later showed him a bunch of those logs that don't really have an impact on the story of the game but at the same time was also so weird and interesting that they just kept it.
I really gotta play CrossCode!
@@GCVazquez I just started, but I can confidently say that you REALLY have to play it. It has very awesome arpg mechanics. They are very refined and also add a lot of new stuff (Ex: The combo system that determines enemy drops; it made me spend an hour just "grinding" because the system is so fun).
Also, the lore is very interesting and hooks you very fast. When I started playing I was actually wondering how much of the story was the in-in-game world and how much was the in-game real world
@@GCVazquez You absolutely do! I can also recommend its DLC that they released last month :D
Another thing I think about when it comes to worldbuilding and lore is the question of whether it expands or diminishes the fictional space. Because it might not be so bad to have some answers, so long as they provide different points of view about the world, as well as new and interesting questions for fans to ask and answer for themselves.
The Star Wars universe has a very complicated relationship with these two distinct approaches. To me, the best parts of all of the stuff that came out after the original movies are the ones where the universe is made to seem larger, filled with interesting people who each live out their own stories in the midst of all the galactic turmoil.
The worst parts are the ones where everything just ties back to the handful of characters caught in the immediate vicinity of the Skywalker shenanigans and its preordained-by-destiny utmost importance to the entire universe.
Similarly, a lot of lore-heavy writing, in the desire to be thorough and complete, will make everything for together nicely, leaving no loose threads. Sound great in principle, but loose threads are great for tying in new connections.
Yeah! I think answers are important- but I think too many answers leave no questions, especially if the answers are given before the person viewing the story can even ask them. Providing different perspective to view the world- like when a series of books or something jumps from character to character to show off how they see their setting- is a great way to flesh out a world without necessarily providing concrete answers, because it's literally a paradigm through which that character views the world.
I think on some level it's a natural inclination to be asked a question and want to answer it.
But sometimes in the struggle to answer every question it starts to come off like Disney re-making their movies to address every minute criticism. I hope that story never gives way to apologia and that on some level we can just enjoy a story for what it is and get excited thinking about the parts we don't see.
Exactly! Couldn't have put it better myself.
This has explained to me so much about the kind of stories that I like. The fantasy book series Kingkiller Chronicles (all though flawed in a lot of ways) perfectly scratches that itch of fleshing out the world, but rarely doing it in an explicit way, rather through stories within stories, mentioned comments etc. It allows you to draw conclusions, it’s what makes it such an enthralling world to be in. Great video otherwise!
Thank you! I think that's a great way of building a world without bogging people down into minutia. Hinting at a legend here, dropping a line about a famous incident as a joke or aside there- these are ways to make people interested in the world, without giving them an encyclopedia to remember.
In terms of Zelda, I've recently started to see the older games as retellings of myths, old stories that are passed down through word of mouth to the era of Breath of the Wild. That would explain their inconsistencies, as they're all muddled retellings of similar events throughout time. It could even, should you be so inclined to see it this way, explain the vastly differing artstyles between games as the lens of those telling these stories. It makes BoTW and ToTK work a lot better imo, as they're so heavily focussed on having a world that is the ruins of dozens of old ones
Dark Souls has lost me because of its lack of story in the games. I was bored that I run to a location without any reason, kill everything without any reason und moved one in the hope that maybe a cutscene would be apear which explain what the meaning of all the thing is, that happened there. Its style, that I would need to build my own story with reading some text on weapons or other items isn’t suited for me.
On the other side, I like the lore of Kingdom Hearts and that the lore expand with every game.
So, I went into this video expecting that I would feel like it's incomplete and missing the reason that _I_ worldbuild. And after watching it all the way through, I can say that I was correct. It's a great video for what you're trying to say. However I feel like it falls into a trap of assuming that all worldbuilding is meant to be for someone else. However that is not always the case. When I worldbuild, I like meticulously figuring out all of the details as to how this world functions. Because my worldbuilding is for my own enjoyment. I don't have a story I am trying to tell. I just wanna create a world which feels rich and lived in because that brings me joy and helps me learn. And likewise, When I choose to share that with people, I am not trying to make them guess all of the obscure details. I am simply sharing something I love and am passionate about. That joy of speculation which you talk about is how I feel about my own worlds. But the difference is that the ideas I like the most _are_ the truth. Because I can simply make it so.
Underrated comment.
You showed Trails for a large part of the video and I feel it actually defies what you're talking about. It's lore is absolutely fantastic and it contributes to the quality of its world building
A lot of details that work together don't necessarily equate to a lot of details that make for a compelling story. Sometimes a lot of details and a painstaking effort to connect literally every and any thing possible back to the main plot just bloats and over-complicates a pretty bland story about good vs evil.
Is your reply just speaking generally, or talking about Trails specifically? I can see it being either way and if it's Trails specifically, I can only wonder if we played the same games :P
@@aneonfoxtribute He didnt play them. The footage in the video comes from DrCullens playthrough and he happened to be around during the biggest loredump scene in all four CS games
@@Haloschien1 Oh really?
@@aneonfoxtribute you missed his point, one of the main things he focuses on is that lore/worldbuilding shouldn't come in the way of the experience its not something that should be hamefisted to the player and the trails games are very guilty of that, sure there are a lot of optional lore that you can find out about, but a lot of its worldbuilding loses its charm when the story decides to shove it into the main narrative and to fully appreciate the series you need a lot and i mean A LOT of background ranging from different characters and lore making it near impossible for new players to get into it or appreciate it to its fullest unless they plan to spend 100s of hours into the series.
there is no question that trails games have a very rich world and lore but the execution leaves a lot to be desired imo it fails at the basic concept of "show dont tell"
Kingdom hearts is one of the game series where the game explains too much that all mysteries are lost, while those that are not explained just feel like utterly nonsense
Yep!
Another excellent video! The DQ example was spot on and I'm even gonna say about the other examples you gave.
A part that got me into the Zelda series was the time line speculation but slowly I grew up and didn't care as much and realized it wasn't important because each game feels like a legend of it's own almost written by a different culture almost.
With Kingdom Hearts I very much agree and replaying the games it's something you notice right away after 2, not to say there aren't character development and meaning to take from each game's story, but it feels like scratching the surface for a meaning which I personally felt with 3 especially since it felt like it was structured as a very long padding towards the final fight and doesn't feel like it want to properly end it's saga but rather rush to the end to get to new lore of the arc.
Thank you! ^_^ With Kingdom Hearts, I definitely feel as though the series just wants to barrel as fast as possible to new facts and lore without really giving any meaning to what it introduces to the story. A LOT of the characters in Kingdom Hearts can just stop showing up and it'd be fine and it would make sense and it'd be better- because when you want to reuse those characters, their return is that much more impactful!
@@GCVazquez Agree a lot with that, it also feel like some characters are just introduced only to be recycled later in order to give any meaningful ideas.
I like that the Zelda games are tied together, always have. The cyclical nature of the story has been a point of fascination since I first noticed it at a young age. But people put waaaayyy too much stock in it. I like that it's there, but other than a few games that very, very obviously connect together, it's nothing but a cool tidbit to me. There's so much more to those games that goes undiscussed by a huge part of the fanbase.
Speaking of Zelda, I view each game the same as an Ys game. In the Ys series, all of the games are canonically just the video game adaptation of a journal written by the main character Adol Christin, which may be exaggerated or have iffy veracity. What matters is the adventure. Zelda games literally have "The Legend of" in the title, so it really is like a different retelling of a legend. Like an oral tradition that changes over time due to the limitations of human memory. I honestly hate seeing it as a timeline, I have a feeling Nintendo never intended Zelda to have a real timeline. They just make games that are fun lol.
Yes, you've explained perfectly what I've felt about world-building and lore but could never put into words. It's not necessarily less is more, but rather mystery is more interesting than answers.
EDIT: Thinking more about it, the most interesting part of skyrim for me was the dwemmer. All mystery, never saw them, all the player knew about them was their ruins and a few books in skyrim. That's the kind of lore that's interesting.
Brillant, keep it up!
Glad you enjoyed it! I think some amount of answers is useful to get the ball rolling, and there are cases where having answers is great! I just think there's a skew lately to give too many answers for things that aren't all that important, and I think it distracts from things that should be.
Most of the Dwemer lore is not even from Skyrim, it was from Morrowind (and a bit from Redguard). The fact that the most interesting part of Skyrim was not even from Skyrim but rather copy-pasted from past games means that CG Positive has a point about how the lore-writing is getting worse with time.
@@JudasRose jezz... you completely missed the point of my comment...
Im not complaining about the inclusion of Dwemer ruins in Skyrim. Of course they have to be there, for the very reasons you pointed out. I have no problems with this whatsoever.
i was specifically talking about **LORE** in my previous comment. OP was saying that the most interesting lore in Skyrim was the Dwemer lore, but 90% of the cool lore stuff about the Dwemers were created by the writers of Morrowind a decade prior. Skyrim didn't add much to it: there are no new crazy twists or anything that changes the way how we interpret things in a major way.
Why does that matters? Well, think about it for a minute: If the best lore in Skyrim is just, as i mentioned, "copy-pasted" from a previous game, doesn't that say a *lot* about Skyrim's writing quality? Doesn't that say a *lot* about how Skyrim's own new/original/unique lore is kinda weak? Doesn't that say a lot about Bethesda's current writing team?
You don't have to agree or disagree btw, im merely explaining my point. i hope i made myself clear this time, english is not my native language.
I'm so happy you're making videos again!!
Glad you like them!
This is an eye-catching title! In my writing, I'm guilty of structuring my world- building like Bloodborne's item descriptions. At times, I worry about these lore moments slowing the pace down, and so I'm learning to write characters placed throughout the world whose arc gives greater context to factions, history, etc. Kinda like NPCs!
I used to write (not well) and now I’m trying again, all I have to say is this video is f*cking gold.
Absolutely eye opening on the open-ended aspect causing investment, I’ve always come up with my own ideas and I just assumed it was a certain type of person thing as I’ve always been good at assessing diegetic aspects while others are just visually tuned in.
Man, this reminds me of a moment from a game that I've been playing: Freedom Wars. It's not too well known but it is awesome! At some point they talk about a really powerful enemy that kills everyone he meets. It is brought up as this sort of mythical person with an awesome mech and that any encounter with him will end badly. He even kills off one of your allies and his team who were out in another mission (all offscreen). Then they present him entirely in a cutscene with no suspense as he wipes your entire team and decides not to kill any of you because... you parried one of his attacks and... he is impressed, I guess? It just made me lose all interest in what was, until that point, a great build up.
Plus the mech was just a normal mech coloured red.
I love Freedom Wars! Kinda hope we see it on PC someday.
This was a fantastic video, GC! I began to feel this a lot recently as someone who has been trying to plan out a backlog of series I've not yet gotten to, only to find myself grasping at straws for where to start all in some strange attempt to improve my literacy with the many colors of this medium. I've played countless games in my wee amount of years and invested countless hours in the many games I hold dear as well, yet still have never charted into series as monumental as Persona, Final Fantasy, Metroid and Yakuza for instance. I feel these games fall outside the scope of what you were highlighting here as they mostly reside in their own spheres of "game by game" storytelling rather than being all stitched together, but the concerns are still palpable especially in a post-MCU era where you feel you gotta catch up on each prior entry to see the "whole" picture in order to even play the entry you found interest in in the first place. Not to say every game has to be Souls or Pokemon, but it does feel refreshing when an entry doesn't have to convolute itself further just to add onto the ever-teetering pile for especially lore-savvy fans. Now, to enjoy my Final Fantasy 15 experience in peace..... by not viewing the Archives ;)
I think I really needed this reality check for my own writing so thank you
Very well put. Thank you for making this video.
Glad you enjoyed it!
This is exactly what 343 failed to realize with the forerunners.
I whatched this without realising that I already saw it. I have like no memory of the first time
Ah that's perfect it means you get to watch it like brand new all over again!
Excellent video! Never thought about this before.
Glad you enjoyed it!
I never considered that about Zelda. This was a deep and interesting look at these games
Thank you!
Surely, Shadow of the Colossus has been brought up already, but because of how mysterious the world feels, it draws you in. Less is more. If more creators focused more on environmental storytelling, gameplay, and characterization, I'd say a game would turn out better (in my opinion). I think it must be super fun to think up a complex world, but the more you add the harder it can become to connect it all and generate intrigue. Great video, gave me a lot to think about myself!
I've been letting down the side on views since yakuza 2. This is my vow to watching everything I've missed GC. Your content is top tier
On the one hand: I grow so, SO tired of people claiming Dark Souls is good worldbuilding. Or good *anything* narrative. There are *not* answers, to any of those questions being asked. There never were, and never will be. Someone isn't sitting on the truth somewhere, they did half to two-thirds the work of *making something* and then put it out into the world.
It's *engaging* , to be sure. But engaging is not anywhere near the same as 'good' . Theorizing is fun, as the video notes. But I am *begging* people, read a book. Watch a movie. Attend a *puppet show* , interact with literally any media that *actually tells a story* . There's nothing wrong with enjoying the fundamental avoidance of real story that the Souls series does, but claiming it's better than having an actually-delivered narrative could be argued to be a sign of mental illness.
Which I suppose is my problem with the video: a world where tons and tons of stuff is left of to speculation feels a whole lot less like an exercise in great creativity and narrative and more like somebody didn't feel like, or wasn't up to the task of, doing their actual job.
But on that other hand.
There is a sickness, among fans of any given fictional media. It's 'recent' in that its been ongoing for approaching a decade now, and a disease in that it fundamentally destroys the ability of anyone experiencing it to *enjoy* anything: people want *everything* explained. Not just want, *demand* . Is there a gap in an explanation of how two events interact? Clearly it must be a plot hole that unmakes the entire story. Is even a single detail left up to the viewer or reader's speculation? The author obviously made a catastrophic failure, proving that the armchair critic is correct about all the ways the story is terrible and they and only they (and the people who agree with them) are brilliant and pretty and so much better than the creator of the media they're deriding.
This cancer is *everywhere* . If you want to know why so much media has been so bad, recently? This way of thinking has poisoned the creator-patron dynamic *so much* you could reasonably argue it isn't possible to create anything anymore without a very loud subset of people jumping screaming all over it in desperation to find any, any 'flaw'.
And vocal minorities don't exist: the part of a group that gets heard is the only part that *matters* . So you're left with an audience that physically cannot enjoy media, because laying out every single conceivable detail and how they interact is not only impossible, it's also (as noted in the video) bad writing. And after a certain point, no matter how good a writer is, boring.
There *is* a joy in getting to wonder about how things fit together when not everything is explained. All of the Star Wars media in the 1990s ran solely off of this concept; some of it very aggressively did not work, but the stuff that did was stunning.
It's a weird place. I dislike and disagree with the...scale, of the video's thesis, I think? But the summation is provably true. It's just not the creator end driving that particular writing failure.
and yet a lot of massive series have very extensive lore communities. Why are you saying people don't enjoy media because of people speculating on lore? That is a way to get more enjoyment out of a medium.
Recent media is not shit because of over explained lore. It's just shit writing.
People don't want things upfront explained anyway. It's better if it is only hinted at.
I have my own world building and stories. Most of it is just background information I will never reveal. It just helps me reason out my stories. If you're revealing everything to the audience as if they are reading it from Wikipedia you're doing it wrong.
Zelda Timeline is the worst. Just the absolute worst. As a fan theory its fun anything more is stupid
I really agree, and I'm even willing to say I'm okay with a timeline existing between specific games. The minute they canonized this big timeline, I feel like Zelda got a lot less interesting. BY THE WAY, your username IS AMAZING.
This discussion struck a chord for me. Really great overview and analysis of how different styles of worldbuilding can affect the experience of seeing and hearing the story.
A few examples outside the video game domain come to mind, but your mention of Dark Souls really hits on something I love about that series' worldbuilding. Every character has a different view of the world--some may be honest, while others are deceptive, or they may even have deeply-held convictions which they relate the the player as "exposition" but which later turn out to be false. But the coolest innovation, one that I think is uniquely possible in the gaming space, is the idea of the item descriptions, which seem to be handed down from some omniscient narrator. Of course, novels often have a third-person omniscient narrator, but reading every detail in a novel is not optional, nor is it based on achievement the way earning a video game item is. The author of a novel has chosen what information to give to you--you have only to read it. On the other hand, in other forms of visual media outside gaming (or even certain games, i.e. MGS), we can't always trust what's shown on the screen. How many times have you watched a character die in a series only to have them come back in a later episode with some flimsy explanation as to why the audience saw something different from what actually happened, or have a detail obviously re-shot in a later season to justify a retcon? In Dark Souls and the games it inspired, you accomplish something within this world, where the narrative is hazy and things aren't what they seem, and you're rewarded with a nugget of information from what we can assume is the game's most (or only) reliable source. That leaves space for speculation and mystery, avoiding the problem of exposition-dump characters and awkward explanations while giving us just enough "truth" to base our knowledge of the world upon.
As always, keep up the great work.
I love this! Yes, the details provided are dubious, but the item descriptions are the closest thing to a fact we have in Dark Souls, and whether or not we trust that narrator will factor our view of the world. We're not necessarily placed in a mystery, but rather being asked to make our own conclusions about the world we live in. Whether its friend or foe or both.
Omg how am I only just now finding this channel?
Noticed my enjoyment of a book, anime or game would decline the more of the puzzle of the worldbuilding was filled in and I would only stay for the characters.
Dark Souls actually has an incredible amount of detail and answers, it just necessitates reading which most people cant be bothered to. People still want the answers, which is why lore channels for it who simply lay out what's already in game in well-written form are so popular. Id imagine zelda lore speculators are more disappointed with the lack of explanation for anything throughout the games and then Nintendo trying to put the issue to rest just for its own sake.
Why WOULDN'T all Dragon Quest games take place on the same planet? I mean, isn't that what all other fantasy franchises do, unless they introduce some sort of cosmic element?
Oh my god, I loved the video!!!
As odd as it may sound, I would also say Kirby falls into this quite often as it used to go from giving small details about dark matter or the in-game bosses to, in games like Star Allies and a little bit of Super Kirby Clash, providing as many details about each character as they possibly could. It feels so boring when you know that everything, no matter how simple or complex, has some weird detail or plot element.
Kinda off topic but your video made me passionate enough to say something. Definitely hitting that subscribe button.
Wow thank you! ^_^
I should add:
I think your analysis of zelda and dark souls are both spot on. Player choice is a hot topic these days in game design, but so often it neglects the key element to make it stick, player JUDGEMENT. When players have to make judgement calls about whats good and whats bad, and they have limited or imperfect information, thats where the choices that they make become impactful. Anything else just becomes a matter of efficiency, and it gets forgotten. But the games that leave part of the process up to you, and force you to come to conclusions about the world theyve set up, those games are the ones that stick with, because you put a piece of yourself into the game.
Overall really good video. I enjoyed hearing what you had to say 👍
12:40 Eiji Aonuma is the not the creator of The Legend of Zelda series. That title belongs to Shigeru Miyamoto. Aonuma is the current director for the series since Miyamoto passed the torch.
He may have been the father, but he weren't the daddy.
There is a ton of speculation in Eldersrolls lore. From the Skyrim Civil war to the creation of the Aurbis. Topics are still debated to this day.
This is so informative and I think I was butting up ageast this wall with my own writing. Thank you for this.
This has made me realise why I was so invested in the world of the game Destiny in the early days. The world and story were ambiguous, and like Dark Souls, was told and pieced together through flavour text of items found or lore entries. Imagination is sometimes better than the truth.
I think the insane success of the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise at least played some part in the modern trend of lore replacing narratives as well.
6:22 - "I'm pausing here because I've lost most of you" Nah nah, keep talkin' that's the realest shit yet.
Two series I spent years adoring and have steadily seen lose all interest because the more I dug the less interested I felt- go on with their relevance to the topic at hand you're on a roll lol.
15:29 - there it is, forest for the trees.
My brain was wrackin' for the phrase, lol.
I really enjoy the games you brought up to explain your point in this.
I know it's a rather specific case and isn't the end all, but it's hard not to look at Dark Souls endings as a win for the concept of less is more.
I don't really want every game to be so vague that I'm left questioning the ending- a solid rewarding and understandable ending can feel fulfilling; Knowing exactly what you're doing and striving for it and then accomplishing it all that jazz.
But DS ending has that special level of vagueness where on multiple playthroughs I felt like what the ending meant was different- that I understood it better now not because a character said "Hey :) Letting the flame die does this! :)" but because all the bits and bops I'd seen let me infer, guess, and build my own understanding.
That shit's nice.
Knowing my read on a game can be wildly different from someone else's because the game allows such a thing to happen either through incomplete pictures or interactions changing some outcomes or whatever really- people getting different reads on the same games spawns much more interesting conversation and just makes it more fun.
Same with any form of media really, and the conversation always dies out if it turns out we all skipped a page in the book that spelled it out or we misidentified the character in a movie who did a thing which explains it all.
Explanations aren't the worst, I mean being wrong and finding out is fine- but if the piece of media offers no set in stone answer you get a hell of a lot of, er, 'replay' lol, out of it.
All said, great small talk, GC. Fun in general but also enjoyed the examples/demonstrations you offered for your talk.
Have a good en.
Hope the KH fans don’t hurt you. Awesome video
Great video as always my dude. Great points as always
Appreciate it!
playing on mankind's most powerfull feeling to push you forward, curiosity, is best way to make people not lose intrest in your world........so ironecly not making your world and filling it with gaps so people can fill them is the way to keep your media relevant. the most importent question tho is were to put them.
YES! Part of world-building is not...building it in some places!
Not knowing everything about lore as a writer, as a creator and as a viewer is perfectly okay and healthy
I don't think speculation around timelines and such particularly damages the Zelda series. I think that type of speculation is what emerges when someone enjoys the game so much that they feel the need to extend the content themselves. If the games themselves had permanently suffered from it then I would probably think differently, but the latest games have been some of the strongest in the whole series
The title made me wanna throw hands but the video represented my own thoughts very well. Although I will say that I started to disagree more with your statement on the Zelda timeline and afterwards. "What's known becomes mundane, but what remains a mystery is always a second chance to learn something new" this was very well said (as I've already talked about in a previous comment). Getting too much lore shoved in your face is very bad, but having no lore at all is even worse. It's a balance.
To me getting fed small "crumbs of lore" every now and then only make me want to dive deeper into the world and draw even more connections trying to piece together and theorize over what is unknown (and it's also what makes you want to ask the questions in the first place). In my opinion, this is one of the things that Zelda does great. The Zelda timeline and the lore books like Hyrule Historia answer some questions but make you ask even more, for example "why do the Rito and Zora both exist in BoTW" or questions about the characters like the statue at 13:07. I definitely agree with a lot of and most of what you said, but I also think that you went overboard at the end. Early on in the video you came with the great example of a game master and how they will have written all of this lore down but only give out pieces of it. That is when I think lore is best. You need to give out lore and it is fun to learn about lore but you should also keep some a mystery. In the end, you almost made it sound like "trying to piece together who characters are or connecting geographical areas together" (13:05) is a bad thing which I really don't see how it is.
Overall a VERY good video but you lost me a bit at the end, perhaps just because I didn't understand your thoughts correctly (I'd love to have them clarified). I'm sorry if I came off as rude with this comment, I can assure you that that was not the intention and I enjoyed the video a whole lot. I had originally written the comment way better and friendlier but accidentally hit cancel instead of post so this was a little rushed :(
PS: I've written down that quote haha
Thank you for sharing your thoughts! On trying to piece things together: I think when doing those things in service to the story being told or the themes being talked about, it's really good! I also think its really fun to piece things together about stories you enjoy! But those things wouldn't happen if people wrote everything out for you, and I think the trend the industry is leaning towards is explaining everything away or pandering to those mysteries in order to capitalize how popular that stuff is. Its a turn from having those questions organically come about as a result of good world building.
That's more or less what I meant in the Zelda section. I think the timeline stuff is fun to think about, but I also think it's taken the place of asking what each game is about. Fan theory discussion has eclipsed fan discussions about themes or feelings they had playing the game. I don't think every game is a puzzle to solve, if that makes sense? And I think Breath of the Wild kinda shows that Nintendo realized its important to let fan theory do its own thing rather than build a game around it, like with Skyward Sword.
@@GCVazquez Yeah that makes sense, and I generally agree. Thanks for the reply!
The title alone is worth a like. 👍
OMG YOUR BACK!!!! STAY FOREVER YOUR CONTENT IS AMAZING
Kingdom Hearts is probably the perfect game series to explain the core of this video lol. Even though I've played all 3 main games, I couldn't tell you the first thing about the world of Kingdom Hearts, maybe other than "Its a collection of Disney worlds". They draw everything out in so much detail that it's very difficult to process it all, and can barely understand anything. Kingdom Hearts had just about everything it needed to be great. Cool aesthetic, pretty cool battle mechanics for the time it came out, Disney characters that a lot of people love. It just didn't have good story telling.
The first 5 minutes remind me of what happened to Faust in Guilty Gear Strive.
This is a character that had been for the past like 15 years a comical relief, a cartoon-physics doctor that was goofy and always wanted to help.
When the latest installment of the franchise released in 2021 he had been redesigned to look like a zombie and no explanation was given.
People speculated about this for months on end. What could have happened to Faust? What turned this character into a husk, a shadow of his former self?
Well, a year later "Another Story" released. A 47 minute animation that showed a story that happened at the same time as the main game's.
Another Story showed what happened to Faust...
He kept a magic door open for too long and became so exhausted that his soul left his body.
Yes, as lame as that sounds.
It absolutely is but people are allowed to be wrong
Are you talking about yourself
You should play Rain World. Rain World is known for being brutal because it doesn't tell you anything or hold your hand. You are never taught about most of the game mechanics, even, and you're driven to figure it out yourself and rewarded for experimentation. There is deep lore, but chances are you won't even know a tenth of what already ambiguous lore you can find by the end of the game.
You must have played a lot of Bloodborne, because this is very Insight-ful.
Im currently working on my own story and have only been working on plot and after that I started working on world building after the whole story finshed by making two separate stories that happen 40 years after the main one discussing what happened and how it affected the world one side is around what happened the other side hates what happened
I am going through the Trails of series and wonder how it fits into this conversation? You had some Trails of Cold Steel gameplay.
I picked Trails of Cold Steel IV specifically because it's trying to make 20 characters relevant party members and desperately trying to make any and every one of its many, MANY details massively important.
Even if it succeeds in connecting it, that's massive bloat. That's way too many things and people to be aware of and care about all at once. The information they are working so hard to make equally important cannot share the spotlight; people are going to forget things, forget characters are even in the scene. I don't like that choice in storytelling.
The only way I can think of to avoid giving too much information is about the world I create is to keep the series for it short and away from the mainstream. That or I can just learn more creators of the "Avatar: the Last Airbender" series to see how they maintain their mysteries and wonder while continuing said series.
I suppose it depends on if you prefer to know the lore or speculate on the lore. Though, the people who prefer to know the lore also love to speculate about the lore, as you can never know everything. . . Mostly because it's never "done" being written.
I personally disagree with a lot of stuff in this video, but its so well presented that I can't help but love the video. Great stuff as always.
I appreciate that!
I think that it all depends. Going to far into the speculation and lore can cause an unsatisfactory experience. It all goes back to questions and answers. Some questions need to be answered that is what drives a story. But some it is better not to answer. Much like role playing games, sometimes it is the players that need to find or come to the answer on their own. I think that is the most important take away. I believe both are needed to have a good story.
Couldn't agree more!
Eloquently put, man. 👏
Hey man, just wanna remind you that you are amazing. Keep on playing positive!
I would say that Dark Souls is the exception to the case, given that the elements of the games that, according to the criteria of this video, would be mere references, winks, or individual pieces of information that lead to speculation, have a relationship with each other and have more to do with the game's unique way of telling its stories.
Carthus, Astoria, Mirra, Carim, They are all lands that have their presence in the saga as individual places, that have nothing to do with the main story, each one has its own history, conflicts and its influence in other parts of the game, this is see more in 3, where the world is so ravaged by the flame that time and space are distorted, but there's a clear effort to give everyone a background completely separate from the main story (link the flame), that if it is worldbuilding.
Of course, there are things in the saga that play the role of giving speculation, in the way that Zelda does, for example, the fact that painted worlds exist and there are many common topics between Fromsoftware games (Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, Demon Souls), gives rise to think that all fromsoftware games are worlds painted by painters, and since very little is known about them or even how they have that power, it leaves room for interpretation.
If fans of a story start a conversation about it by dumping all the lore and narrative significance onto me, I fall asleep. I much prefer finding all this out myself, or at least choosing to think about it over being told
A massive problem with games (and people who talk about them) lore dumping is how quickly it breaks that "show, don't tell" rule visual media tends to have.
Couldn’t agree more! (For GC and the algorithm)
Thank you! :D
Just what I needed
An exception to this could be Tolkiens work. He described in detail the whole world in its lore.
phenomenal video, really interesting topic!
Thanks so much!
I completely agree, and often talk about that specific thing.
I feel like mysterious worlds, worlds without all the answers given to the players, truly feel like they belong to us. Sure, Team Cherry could explain every little thing there is in Hollow Knight but what would be the point?
And I know this is about books, but I really liked Phillip Pullman straight up admitting he didn't know the answer to a question a fan asked him about his own world. Sometimes even the creator doesn't have the answer, and it's up to the player, viewer or reader to figure it out. Or not. And it makes the entire world that much more compelling.
Great video, I loved it!!
Sometimes it isn't even about it being a mystery. Sometimes it's just not entirely relevant to someone telling a story! I think people forget that not every question we have about a world is particularly important or relevant. Knowing the answer to them is neat, but not entirely meaningful to the story itself.
And thank you! ^_^
I disagree about the elder scrolls, at least its "deep lore". Scratch the surface and you discover a rabbit hole of mysteries that fans have been speculating about for nearly 20 years. Stuff like the Disappearance of the Dwemer, who actual events at red mountain, Lorkhan's true plan, the nature of the universe, etc.
I get that; the secret of chim and all that are super interesting, but those games aren't about those mysteries. Like with the Dragon Quest worlds all being the same one, knowing about Chim or the dreamer doesn't really matter to the main quests of those games.
@@GCVazquez I mean, even at their best, the main quests are the least important part Bethsda open world games. The really important part is imersing yourself in those worlds, and a very important thing for that is making that world feal lived in, a place at least pretends to have history as rich as our own. and you can't have that without the lore.
@@HighPriestPlays The gods also exist and affect the world. It makes sense to have information on massive things in the history of the universe because the entities that are part of it all can be studied directly and even communicated with.
I have to say that I disagree with your assessment regarding Zelda. I'd argue Zelda does an excellent job of leaving things up to the player's imagination. Each game tells a cohesive narrative, but also leaves the player with plenty of unanswered questions and those questions only multiply when you consider the implications for the rest of the series. Zelda's overarching "narrative" has always been player driven. It's not about creating a wiki article like most of the other games you talked about here, it's about the cooperative creative process of gluing puzzle pieces together that were never intended to fit together. It goes beyond the official intended narrative and takes on a life of its own.
I was watching this video nodding my head and thinking about how Zelda's worldbuilding, like Dark Souls, is driven by mostly by mystery and fan speculation. So when it suddenly turned to Zelda being accused of being too concerned with being encyclopedic it caught me off guard. It's interesting to see someone have just the total opposite takeaway. Regardless this was a fantastic video.
The Zelda timeline was fun *because* it made people argue about it over the internet. It can be fun turning a game into a historical debate. I think the main problem is that game developers sometimes go too far and add just that little bit too much detail that ends the conversation. The real power of world building is shown when you put the game down and can have a discussion with an actual person.
I think when it started overtaking what the games themselves were about was when I stopped caring about the timeline. Connecting those games doesn't change what those games are about, or the emotions they carry within them. It just means they exist in a specific order. Like it's a fun conversation don't get me wrong, but I think Zelda is a series with way too much heart and meaning in each game to reduce conversation about each one to "where does it fit on the timeline?"
@@GCVazquez I don't really see any of the heart, meaning or emotions you're talking about in the Zelda games. They're well made games, but there isn't really much in the way of feelings. Link himself is made to be a blank puppet for the player to control, Zelda is a plot point at best and most of the supporting cast are lucky to have one dimension to their personality.
@@connordarvall8482 then I guess my next question is: why care about the lore behind any of it? Why care about a timeline for a series of games that, in your eyes, mean nothing? What's the appeal other than being able to prove you know something over someone else?
@@GCVazquez There is no appeal to being able to prove you know something over something else. I guess it's the same thrill that drives archaeologists and scientists to do their jobs. You get the urge to pick up many pieces of relevant data, put them together and see what kind of picture it paints. Where games become part of it is when you can see the pivotal points in the worlds history from a first-hand perspective. The conversation around the game is also fun as others may interpret the lore differently and you can contrast and compare the interpretations for a completely new image of the game's world. It becomes bigger than what it ever could be as a stand-alone experience and in the case of a clever developer, allow for a starting point for even more ambitious stories.
What does DQVII have to do with the other games?
DQ7 has some references from the previous games iirc. I haven’t beat it yet but it does have references from the previous games.
@@bradleyhead7113 I played it before I played the original trilogy, but it didn't seem to any direct connections.
I think the connection mainly lies in DQM: Caravan Hearts where you play as Keifer who gets transported to DQ II's world, leading some people to think that VII's world is actually a parallel world of DQ 1, 2, 3.
So in 7, the world gets flooded and the islands get disappeared into the ocean. In 8, your ship is lodged in the center of a canyon, and the moonshadow elf mentions how it was an ancient ship used back when the water level was much higher. You can also use the maps of 7 and 8 and with some tweaking they look VERY similar. Little things like that give a lot of credence to the idea, but again: it's just an idea! Nothing confirmed or seriously set in stone.
@@GCVazquez I never heard that before. I thought the islands were always islands. Also, the maps don't look similar.
Beautiful video which reinforces my beliefs.
Glad you enjoyed it!
“The truth is boring”, 100% this! I find this happens in tv series and films as well. The mystery is what makes some things great, getting answers sometimes kills my interest completely.
I really dislike when people bring up the Zelda “”””timeline”””” because it so obviously wasn’t thought of before when the games were being made and was just an after thought in a book without any reasonable explanation. Now some fans follow it like dogma and talk about these games as if there really is a shared connection when in reality that connection is only there to sell copies of a book. The developers of the games don’t even pay attention to it at all.
Just wanted to say that I love this video!
What I find funny is how this obsession with lore has only gotten worse with time - to the point of people actually complaining about good stories because they don't have enough "lore".
A good example of this would be an anime called Kekkai Sensen, which is essentially a supernatural episodic show with action involved. Most people say that it doesn't have a story (despite its episodic nature) because very little of the world is explored outside of what we get from character dialogue. We're essentially fed just enough information to understand the scenarios as they come, develop and end in a way which tells that episodes story. This makes it more of a "slice of life" anime with action added on top, which disappoints people who love a lore dump. But it's also a really smart form of story telling as it structurally gets across the point that the characters of this story see all this supernatural action as a part of their daily lives - uninteresting and quite normal - and therefore have no need to delve deeper.
The show is all about characters and how they grow as people DESPITE their crazy lives.
Sorry for the rant btw, you nailed this topic!
Mysteries can be part of the experience!
I agree with the main point of the video, but to say that Morrowind doesn't have speculative lore that ties back to the main plot and the motivations of characters is simply untrue.
Granted, it may arguably be the ONE game in the entire series that does it correctly but i still feel the need to mention it.
I agree about Morrowind actually! My statement about Bethesda games was more about relatively recent titles.
@@GCVazquez i figured as much, fair enough i suppose.
This just feels like favoring a classic game just because it's a retro game. Virtually everything seen in Skyrim can be traced back to Morrowind, posts made by Kirkbride, or something even older. Skyrim doesn't state anything as factual any more than those did. A theme in TES from the very beginning is that every narrator is unreliable and you can choose to accept whatever is said and form your own canon.
I just wanna have fun. Any information I learn is most likely going to be used as a failed conversation starter
Having fun is great! But I think a lot of the fun to be had (and fun you have had in the past) is informed by the gaps left in a story or world. Imagination is powerful, and I think we discount imagination when we ingest media too much.
@@GCVazquez yeah, to some extent. Most people think that since certain information is relayed to you, there’s nothing left to imagine. There’s all kinds of things to imagine even if it’s not canon. My friend Tobromancer made a funny video about what would happen if Vergil beat Nero in DMC5. Then you have the multiple universes spawned from Undertale. Idk where I’m going with this 😄
Goated video. You're underrated mate
Appreciate it! Thank you
@@GCVazquez fr bro you're gonna blow up
My personal theory is that breath of the wild takes place in the warriors universe
next yakuza review when?
Should be my next upload!
@@GCVazquez Oh yeah, you know, Yakuza reviews are how I found your channel, I bet loads of people would notice the inevitable Yakuza 0 review, whenever that is.
@@wacky-physics7506 Should be out in a month or two probably! What's great about the Yakuza videos is they usually take longer to make, so finally being comfortable with making smaller content like this has been really good for my creativity.
So basically:
Story > connectivity of minute details, and reserve space for speculation.
Was expecting more in depth discussion on lore building vs world building, but these are useful keys of information in their own right Great pieces of advice.
super helpful!
That comment about Fallout was a bad touch until I realized you were talking about Bethesda Fallout lmao
Oh yeah, I won't dunk on classic Fallout. Those games are actually great examples of good lore in world-building. They're DESIGNED for you to miss out on things your first playthrough, or just not know all the pieces of something, or anything arbitrary and unimportant.