Wow no power fantasy feels as good as breaking the game of youtube and giving independent people money for things you enjoy watching - so crazy!!! (this is not a legally binding statement, any and all impression of enjoyment from watching an Architect of Games video is purely coincidental): www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames In Capitalism very few people have more power than elon musk - therefore... we must break him.: twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot
I love your channel, and I’m not just saying that to balance the scales of the universe by countering the other comment here made previous to mine. I always look forward to a new video by what I like to believe is a little black mage, separated from his family at birth. Searching for answers in the universe as to what his place is in this crazy, unforgiving world. That or you’re just a guy with an accent I enjoy listening to ranting about video games. Either way, thank you architect. Now if you’ll excuse me, I must deliver this sacred artifact to a sheep farmer I ran into outside my local tavern.
@@drgonzo123 cant stand someone voicing a opinion that is different than yours? his entire video works on the premise that the player enjoys difficulty, people like him are the reason games suck today because he cant understand there are other types of gamers other than mastery and competitive, insufferable devs that always think they know better than the player what fun is, that is why we will never have another game like skyrim.
@@colorpg152 I was totally just making a joke, nothing against you or what you said at all. But this is his channel, so I think he has the right to say whatever he wants. If it bothers you that much then why do you keep watching? There are so many RUclipsrs out there making gaming content that echo your sentiment about gaming, why waste your time here? I don’t really even care what his stance is, or agree/disagree with anything he talks about. I just find his content very entertaining. Sorry if you took my silly little comment the wrong way or felt like I was dunking on you. It was a complete joke, a nothing burger.
@@colorpg152 as for games sucking, I do disagree with that. There are so many games coming out these days it’s impossible to not find 100 games that fit what you’re looking for. Gaming has never been better, you just might need to step away from the AAA space and try more indies.
One thing I thought of during this video was the fact that Devil May Cry 5, despite being a game all about growing stronger than the foe you face at the very start, has zero damage upgrades for the player. More health? You got it. New moves? Absolutely. More damage? Not on your life. The reason for it is, if you could deal twice as much damage, that means you have half the opportunity to style on your foes. You'd be stronger, but feel weaker.
It's interesting because in some ways, the lower difficulties are actually harder for DMC - enemies dying faster means you can't continue the combo enough to consistently get SSS. It forces me to play defensively (doing perfectly timed dodges, parries etc. give quite a lot of style bar), which seems antithetical to the game that supposedly gives us a power fantasy through our execution of combo.
Don't forget that the greatest powerful abilities in the game such as Royal Release and Quad S and even Red Hot Night (or to a lesser extent the Devil Breaker Break Ages) if you want to cheese bosses directly require you to play masterfully to make use of them. Yes, you CAN cheese DMD Vergil with Red Hot Night to get an instant S Rank but it has such a long windup even that requires a few resets to pull off so it's still satisfying when you get it. It's partially why playing as Vergil isn't as satisfying, because the game just gives him flat out better damage and free invincibility all over the place, and like just doing a regular-ass combo string on the ground with him pushes you to SSS.
That actually makes a lot of sense to do it that way with games like DMC or Bayonetta. Wonderful 101 also did this to some extent. You didn't get physically stronger, but instead, was givin more ways to build your team and dish out damage
Funnily, I think this is something the Disgaea developers learned the hard way. Disgaea's an RPG series known for letting you grind and break the game to its limits, starting you off weak and asking you to find your own way to ridiculous heights. You go from dealing some 12 odd damage to one target, to billions across the entire map However, for Disgaea 6, the developers wanted to ease newer players who only played the story into the true endgame (where most of the meat is on the proverbial bone). So, to make it less intimidating, they multiplied all the numbers by 1,000 at the start of the game. What would normally do 30 damage in any other game deals 30,000 in Disgaea 6. Of course, EVERYTHING was scaled by this amount, so it didn't actually end up changing anything. The numbers got quite bloated early on and it ended up having the opposite effect. The power fantasy the Disgaea series is known for was lost for that game in particular - even I haven't gotten to the endgame of it yet because it just feels so dull (autobattle notwithstanding). It's an interesting anecdote I thought I'd see in this video because it's such a good story and I know Adam's shown Disgaea before, but ah well. here it is anyway
The greatest moment of power for me was having a god-run in Noita. In the sandbox roguelike, most runs only lasted around an hour for me, but just once, I had a run that lasted 7 hours. I traveled all throughout the map, one shotting bosses, and traveling to parallel worlds. Through alchemy I mixed up a healing potion that I could make loads of, and it was incredible
Noita really deserved more than a mention in this video. You go from doing single-digit damage and having 100hp to annihilating half the screen with auto-homing shots and being immune to half the damage types in the game. Your own ingenuity and understanding of the game is the biggest source of power, but on the other hand there is NO amount of power that will make you truly safe, so you keep pushing to get even more powerful. The game fully expects you to exploit and break its systems, even demands that you do so to prevail.
I can't believe you talked about the empowerment of breaking games without touching on progression skips or mastery of hidden mechanics. I never felt more powerful than when I managed to shinespark to Super Metroid's crashed ship to get the Gravity Suit early, effectively mastering shinesparking and walljumping in the process. For me I think that's the most fun way you can break a game!
I found one of the best power fantasy scenes is, ironically, one that makes little effort to make you feel powerful; the Don’t Fear The Reaper ending of Cyberpunk 2077. It’s especially satisfying if you’ve done the other endings and know how difficult taking the tower is. Yet with only one life you go in, bring down a small army, take down a legend, and claim the ending all by yourself. It’s unforgettable.
I feel like this also plays into why speedruns are so entertaining to watch. Since in speedruns the runners take control of the game and show their audience what is possible with total mastery over a game.
"What is the most powerful a video game has ever made you feel?" I created a rocket powered washing machine in Little Big Planet 2 that moved with such high velocity it outran the camera. Also gave a bot super powers that broke the frame rate.
Baldur's gate 2 as a sorcerer, was a constant power trip: you start with melf's minute meteors, then you get chain lighting, then Abi-Dalzim's Horrid Wilting. Then you kill a dragon with a level 1 spell.
Learning to wavedash in Celeste made me feel super powerful. The tutorial is in chapter 9 after completing every other level and it really feels like you unlocked the power to break the game by doing so
Golden berries in celeste ❤ They just make you feel so absurdly competent compared to when each screen felt impossible (I'm at 190 berries I'm not *that* crazy
@@stsenjoyer5650does that include the golden or do you just mean the regular? If you mean the golden, too, and are specifically referring to Ch. 9's, then yes, I agree whole-heartedly. Ch 8's, however, seems like the perfect pinnacle to your skill at the game (and to a lesser extent the B-side and MAYBE C-Side). Considering that reaching the peak was your goal the whole time, getting up there in one single go (I presume there's no checkpoints in Ch. 8, and please don't spoil me on that), knowing more about how the game works compared to your first attempt at it, is bound to feel just as good as when your novice self got up there the first time.
@@JonathanScarletThey definitely mean Chapter 9 golden, which is an insane achievement since it's basically a combined A-B-C side level, each longer and harder than anything else in the game. I mostly agree about chapter 8, except for the C-side. 8 C-Side screen 3 is such a gauntlet already that Screen 1 and 2 combined are faster and easier. Conceptually you're just slightly extending Screen 3 with a warm-up. Just practice screen 3 for a while until you can get 2-3 consecutive clears then try the whole thing. It's way less of an endurance challenge than 8 A or B deathless, much more a technical challenge
I absolutely love Risk of Rain 2, the best “power fantasy” example I can give is from my recent beloved fireworks build. You take artefact of command (you can choose items) then absolutely all white item you get should be fireworks (shoot homing missiles every time you interact with literally anything) and any red items you get should be I. C. B. Ms (all missile items shoot more missiles) and you can quickly get to the point where simply activating the teleporter fills the screen with fireworks, ranking your fps to an almost painful degree, killing absolutely everything on the map, including the teleporter boss ofc (Side note if you wanna do this make sure to get at least some movement items so you don’t die horribly, also make all your purple items safer spaces for obvious reasons, also also you can kinda take anything for your green items (hopoo feather), also also also your equipment can kinda be anything but make sure to swap to remote cafinator so your not useless against Mithrix)
I recently very much enjoyed a gamejam indy called Pseudoregalia. It's a small metroidvania with really fluid and fun traversal mechanics unlocked by collecting four or five powerups scattered throughout the map. What I really loved about it was that it was designed in such a way that you can collect any of the four in basically any order. You can "misuse" all of the powerups to, at least apparently, do things and go places you aren't meant to, scrambling up walls with the wall kick or using the slide to bounce over a wall. So throughout the entire game you often feel like you achieved something in a non-standard way. Which, as is pointed out in this video, gives a very satisfying sense of agency.
When you figure out a game combo and it starts breaking enemies. That's what makes games the most fun. Examples. Bug fable poison comp. Get everything together and start destorying bosses so fast the game can't keep up. Fire emblem anytime you can train in arena or nosurafu combo. Break enemy systems in Xenoblade Chronicles or such. It's all so much fun
Although there were probably more impactful, the moment that comes to mind for me is getting construction robots in Factorio. Suddenly, everything kicks in a gear and really starts going exponential, not limited anymore by your own set of hands.
You might argue that this can be dampened if you have a mod like Long Reach (which functionally make your placement range infinite), but I agree that being able to have robot that can place down your stuff for you (and far faster than you can switch items once they have enough speed) is a huge step up. And as Greenlandrobot says, once they can outpace even Behemoth bugs in replacing what's destroyed (including themselves, I hope!), then you're real golden.
Cinematic games never really make me feel powerful. They usually make me feel like I am just along for a ride. My biggest power phantasies usually come from mastering a game in some form or another. When you asked about it at the start, three things came to mind: Hollow Knight's Pantheon of Hollownest, Aria Low% in Necrodancer and Celeste's freaking 6b and 7b golden strawberries.
Very glad you used Territorial Rotbart as an example for games with fixed levels. I have a distinct memory of seeing him for the first time, seeing his high level, totally bricking it and running the other way. A mere 60 hours later and I was spanking him like it was nothing
"What is the most powerful a video game has ever made you feel?" For me, it's when in a stealth game, I complete a level entirely undetected, successfully stealthing my way past all the guards and hinders. I don't think that fits neatly into the kind of power fantasies this video describes, but for me, that is my favourite power fantasy in gaming.
games that let you alter the terrain are some of my favorite, going from this rugged landscape to nice efficient pathways and tunnels with maybe some farms set up always feels great
This is going to be a weird one, but for me, the biggest power trip I had was desining an invincibility machine in terraria. Learning all there was to learn about a bug/feature to move your character quickly, expanding on it with my own experimentation, decrypting strange I frame exploits that were powerful but impractical, and after weeks of theorising and experimenting finally figuring out the right blend of old and new tech to not only make said exploit practical, but make it reach its theoretical potential, that's not something I'll soon forget.
I just played through Doom 2016 the other day, and I find it interesting that the weapon that feels the most powerful is NOT the BFG. It is a screen clearing weapon that feels very boring to use - I don't have to aim it, or even know about half the demons I kill with it. My favorite weapon is the minigun with the turret mod and the ultimate upgrade that prevents it from overheating. The Baron is the toughest basic enemy in the game; it takes whittling one down with shotguns and rifles over some time to bring one down. With the turret minigun, I can stare one down, and fill it with lead before it can do anything to me. It feels far more visceral than the BFG, and still takes enough skill and courage to use to feel earned.
I still love the type B lanius cruiser in FTL, because I discovered you can use the teleporter to extract brainwashed enemies. Kidnapping the enemy one by one and suffocating them within my own ship isn't terribly powerful, but it's nice because it's an inobvious use of your tools.
Bravely Default: - have everyone with Time Mage's passive "Hasten World" to regen 4 BP per turn - Valkyrie's Super High Jump every turn (uses BP, but you're getting 4 a turn so it's infinite) - while in the air from Super High Jump, all enemy attacks miss - to ensure you go first (to jump in the air), equip Ninja main job - to maximize damage, Dual Wield Axes
In a game in general, the most powerful I've ever felt is a close contender between two incidents, one in a friendly rules game of Magic the Gathering, and another in a modded run of Europa Universalis 4. Since I've is a tabletop game and the other is a video game, I'll count them separately. In that one moment of MtG, I was playing Agaistín three of my cousins, and it was everyone for themselves, no teams. I had both Chandra Nalaar and Liliana Vess on the field, and had been building up to use both of their ultimate abilities on the same turn. With Chandra, i wiped one of my cousin's entire field, with Liliana I raised all creatures from all graveyards onto the field under my control. My cousins _never_ let me get away with that again after I won that game. In EUIV, I was playing Japan. I'd united the islands within fifty years, and so 8 went for China and Korea. Very little hard made me feel quite as powerful as, after a series of wars, with hundreds of thousands men dead in each one,, finally standing victorious, seeing Japan stretch across the map, controlling all of China, Korea, and Manchuria.
I played the noise update of pizza tower recently, and the way he cheats around most of the level gimmicks made him feel so much more powerful, the pig cops having no negative effects on him, a certain spoiler for fake pep, and phase 3 of the final boss in general. Kinda surprised the game wasn't mentioned it at all here! Also getting a godrun in Streets of Rogue where the items and mutators I find synergize very well. For example, my robot win where I got into a very bad situation near the very end and had enough healing beer (42 of them) saved throughout the run to survive gave me such a rush!
Terretorial Rothbart from XBC series, and similar out in the open super boses, are power fantasy done so damn well. You usually run into them super early, and get friggen destroyed. You then have to run/hide from them if you see them again. They are super strong, stronger than end game bosses, so its post game content, but when you finally get revenge, you feel like a god.
I used to get bored, and want to know what would happen if I got as good as I possibly could. I had done the mastery thing on a game or two. Failed at it in others. Grinded as much as I could. So I just figured out how to break programs with whatever I could find. Cheat Engine. Modding. Even writing scripts. Frankly it’s the best game I ever played. And makes you imagine how you could make something new, after seeing that it was not actually all that fun to be overpowered. The fun is always getting overpowered.
Back when the Ringed City DLC came out for Dark Souls 3, I spent a lot of time helping people fight Midir. At some point in that process, I came to the realization that I just *knew* Midir. How to move, where to place myself, to attack, dodge, do everything perfectly to smash himù in the face with a big sword. It was more of a dance than a fight, you could say. That was really one of those "feeling powerful" moments, despite technically being quite the opposite, since a couple wrong moves would be the end. One of the many reasons I love those games, those feelings come despite everyting Similar thing happened with the Sisters of Battle from the Hollow Knight Godhome DLC fights. Just perfection to realize that you can do that dance
Midir gave me problems after 2 days of trying i finally beat him in a fight that felt like it lasted an hour because i was super careful. The sister i beat on the second try though and never lost again in further playthroughs , they just clicked very fast for me.
It's always fun when a game is open enough to let you experiment on builds and find the best way to defeat foes. I'm fine with games that have numbers with levels but give us the freedom to learn Every part of the game to really have fun
It might not be quite applicable, but finally being able to pull off a sicc combo in the heat of combat (that I practiced a lot beforehand in a training environment) and beat your opponent with it in RUMBLE makes me feel super powerful. Since it's a VR fighting game, it means you're actually performing the techniques correctly and with the right timing using your own body. For a couple moments you'll feel like frickin Toph, Grandmaster Earthbender... until you accidentally launch yourself out of the arena with a miscalculated punch.
The most powerful I've ever felt playing a game came from reaching the wizard/special mode in a (virtual) Theater of Magic pinball machine in The Pinball Arcade. I felt like I was, even if just for a few moments, triumphing in an unexpected way over a machine that was designed to try and make me fail. The knowledge that that moment would be forgotten save for three initials and a high score made it all the more exhilarating.
Everything in that game feels like rebellion: either you're beating the tyrants who make the rules, or you're rebelling against having to do that by just running around playing the MMO instead.
I love that you included footage from Terra Nil; that game's demo helped me survive a really awful hospital stay in the middle of 2021, and the game, itself, is deeply meaningful to me, gorgeous in terms of graphics, and the sheer feeling of *power and control* over the world it gives me is so amazing, and the main purpose of that power and control is to make the planet better for everything that lives there? It's amazing!
Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope has a lot of really cheap ways to do massive damage if you pick the right character/spark combos. For example: Rabbid Mario has pretty insane damage, with trash range. He has the game's interpretation of a melee weapon, which allows him to attack ALL enemies within a semicircle in front of him, rather than getting to aim at one enemy from a distance. You can easily deal with his range issues by equipping him with one specific Spark - equippable Rabbid-Luma hybrid characters that all have some ability when used - which attracts all enemies within a certain range to his location. This Spark is also incredibly powerful when used with Rabbid Rosalina's ability to put enemies in stasis for one turn. She can do it to 1-3 enemies using her first dash on a turn, but also has an ability to do it to all enemies within a relatively short range. A relatively short range which is less of a problem when you can bring every enemy within a much larger range directly to her location. Best of all is combining all of these abilities into one. First you can use another character equipped with a spark that increases damage for all allies nearby. Then have Rabbid Mario call enemies to him and punch them. Then have Rabbid Rosalina and your third member attack, then Rabbid Rosalina freeze them. Nothing can move for the turn, so you immediately get to attack with all 3 characters again, and freeze at least one remaining enemy using Rabbid Rosalina's dash. Assuming they didn't already all die at some point in this process - for random encounters just getting to the point of Rabbid Mario punching them is enough.
Rabbis Rosalina is absolutely busted in that game. I upgraded her crit chance to max and then put on a Spark that increased her crit chance even more. So her crit chance was 100% and she shot I think 18 bullets. Pair that with a Spark that passively increased weapon damage, a Spark ability that can increase all damage, and and upgrade where you deal extra damage on an enemy you froze with her, she could easily halve if not one-shot late game bosses.
My ultimate power fantasy moment has to be from Monster Hunter 4u. There are two specific boss fights that gave me this feeling. The first has to be Dalamadur, a mountain sized snake, with a mouth large enough to swallow a town, so long that when you are at his face, you can see his tail on the other side of the mountain, half a mile away from you, and there you have you, your hunter, striking this leviathan with what might as well be a prickly rose thorn, but slowly and surely you whittle this giant down, until you hear proof of a hero start playing, and as the big brass horns shout the voices of victory, you scale the mountain until you look down on the serpents head, leap off, then strike the final blow, planting your sword in the head of the might black dragon Dalamadur. The second is the walking calamity of tar and gunpowder, Gogmazios. At the doorstep of the guild, you fight this towering skyscraper of a dragon, dripping with scorching tar and the weapons of all who came before you, but failed at slaying this behemoth. But unlike all those who have failed at slaying this dragon, you cannot run, you cannot hide, if you fail, society will fall to this disaster. So you and your companions face this monster, so large you need to scale buildings to even have a chance at hitting him somewhere it would even remotely hurt, carrying these heavy cannon balls only to tickle him, shooting these lances of arrows from your ballista, only to add to the pile that is already there. But after some time, avoiding the hellfire and fury, you can loosen the weapons and tar that has been shielding him until now, and that is the time to strike, as a monster slaying spear called the Draginator that once failed its task, falls down to the ground, poised to fulfilling its long lost purpose, by striking true and piercing this dragon. These are both really hard optional super bosses that not all would play, and since its from one of the classic Monster Hunter games, they werent spoiled, nor were there any guides or content creators showing these fights off, unlike how it is now. When you finally slayed these monsters, you did it on your terms and it was your victory. I dont know if they were objectively harder fights then the modern Monster Hunter super bosses, or if i was just worse at the games back then, but i can say for sure that no game so far has given me the blend of huge boss fights that was as threatening as these two were, yes Bayonetta and Metal Gear rising had the scale, but the threat wasnt there, you were given the spectacle on a platter and you could lean back and enjoy the show, and games like Dark Souls, Elden Ring and modern Monster Hunter have the threat, but there are no bosses so large and spectacular that climbing the environment around you were mandatory to even stand a chance. There is more in the power fantasy moment indeed, and i hope that Dragons Dogma 2 and Monster Hunter Wilds has some boss fights fit for this yearning of slaying something so large and dangerous as Dalamadur and Gogmazios.
I have two moments I want to mention. First was my first test of Assimilator Colossus in Stellaris - in essence, pulling a Borg on an entire planet with a Death Star-esque supership. It was indeed a sensation of achieving a level of invulnerable dominance and cool in a 'kid with a magnifying glass' way. The other was in Age of Wonders: Planetfall. Got caught out of position and 2 solid midgame armies attacked me and I only had provincial garrison to defend. Thanks to effective utilization of tactical operations (effectively spells), couple good rolls in clutch moments and (ab)use of no healing cap I had wiped them to a man. I had felt like a god, because I managed to pull through an impossible victory thanks to a one-in-a-milion combination of luck and skill.
Re: the end recommendation of Quinn's Quest, I would also recommend Notepad Anon for his RPG reviews touching on "yes, but what do you actually *do*" and "This thing says 'Just Wing It lmao' HOW often?"
One that comes to mind, is Starwars The force unleashed. Having you play the first level as an unstoppable Darth Vader, against the wookies, which we know are the good guys. Was a awesome way to make you feel powerful, yet understand you're not "cool". Also... any game that in the final battle, you have the assistance of all the friends and allies you've made throughout the game, just give me chills. Because you feel all that work pay out, doesn't matter the final battle is easier because of it.
A.."recent" one that comes to my mind is NG+ in Sekiro. My playthrough took weeks with breaks of self reflection in between to unlearn Dark Souls and get into the flow of this new system. Then after finally beating Isshin going straight into new game+ I was beating the everloving shit out of Genichiro on top of Ashina castle within an hour or two and a wave of "Oh how far I've gotten" came over me.
I think one of my favorite power fantasies in any game is actually a board game - Aeon's End. It's a cooperative deckbuilding game that pits you against a Nameless - a giant, titanic monster that can and will kill you. Every single one feels like an uphill battle, and my win rate even after nearly 30 full games is still around 50%. However, the best feeling in this game is looking at the cards in your deck, looking at what the Nemesis is doing, and going "Hold up. I think we can actually win this." It's similar to a lot of Soulsborne power fantasies in a way, where you're able to understand your opponent and refine your strategy to overcome impossible odds.
To me a huge power fantasy was in Baldur's Gate 3 the whole House of Hope area. You come into the home of a devil - an insanely powerful lawful evil being who can do pretty much anything for anybody as long as the price is right (usually their soul). You spend some time sneaking around, possibly destroy some contracts, free a poor victim of his who had been tortured by him for centuries and then as you're almost out of his place, he returns. And with him comes "Lives, all mortal lives, expire" an absolutely epic song and a pretty challenging fight against him.
I remember playing Skyrim. Killing dragons with ease, destroying bandit camps without even having to look at my healthbar, fighting 4 bears at the same time with a simple iron sword!....and it suuuuucked! It was so freaking boring! The second I got powerful enough to where literally nothing was a challenge (Happened the second I got a weapon tbh...I am not sure that game is not made to be played on normal difficulty) Now, when I cranked the difficulty up (ahm...and added a few mods) and the enemies actually started feeling like a threat it started to feel like a proper power fantasy game. Slowly making my character stronger, being really happy that I found some loot that was just a tiny bit better than my current loot, barely managing to take down a bear with half of my potions gone and another quickly running towards me was way more interesting and fun! Adversity and overcoming said adversity is needed for me to really enjoy the game. I am not especially good at games, but I still want to be challenged. Doesn't have to be a soul game level difficulty, but it needs to have something for me to overcome, otherwise I wont be invested in the game in the slightest.
Personally I feel most powerful when a game stops being a challenge and becomes an exercise in creativity, instead of "how do I beat this?" you go to "in which way do I want to deal with this"
This is so well put. I was trying to think of why Hades gave me a power fantasy and it's exactly this. First few runs I needed Athena to even get to Meg. Eventually as I got better, I could make insane combos work even at high heat. What a game!
A short hike is genuinely a top 5 game of all time for me. It’s such a nice and comfy game and the pay off for making it all the way to the top and gliding down is super fun and makes you feel really cool.
mine was in Arma 3, where i only play drone operator for two of my friends on the field. Finding every threat for them, assisting them, playing along to help them make well timed operation, that is a very good feeling. You are the eyes in the sky, and it's so powerful.
The most powerful I have ever felt in a game was glitching my way as fast as possible through Portal (yes I mean speedrunning). You talked about feeling like breaking a game makes you feel powerful, but actually breaking the game made me feel like mastering the game quite literally. You control something that at first had you follow its rules. Of course it will not work for every game, but the way the speedrunning community still is breaking the game even more makes for a very powerful feeling. Great video!
*Being in control* feels so good. This year, Automaton missions in Helldivers 2 gives me the best power fantasy. I can weave around enemy detection range and destroy their bases with a well-placed stratagem. Instead of persevering with the odds stacked against me, I can and will flip the table, make any tree or boulder yell "For Super Earth" out of nowhere, get over with whatever I need to do at that location and get the Hellmire out of there before enemy dropships even arrive. When I clean half of the map, pick up super samples, and rendezvous with the rest of the team in one piece, that's when I was in peak performance at planning when, where, and how to start a fight.
When you mentioned Balatro, i remembered that one my most exciting moments in Magic The Gathering was when I striked a player with 210 damage points using a combo with non modified Riders of Rohan precon commander deck. Especially because I was playing against non-precon high power decks.
I think the single most powerful moment I had in video games was, when I first unleashed the Megiddo special ability of the Sol Blade from Golden Sun 2, which is basically launching a miniature sun at an enemy. This thing was so mindboggling to me as a kid that I still remember it vividly, even though I've seen much "better" graphical spectacles by now.
I'm kinda fascinated by how we differently define 'power fantasy'. From what I tried of Balatro, it never made me feel powerful per se, what it made me feel was clever, and I think of that as a different thing. If the goal is power specifically, I still think some spectacle is needed. I'm glad you mentioned the idea of power by comparison though, because when I was thinking about it that seemed to me the key point, at least one that games might miss. The games that came to mind when you put forth the question at the beginning were Helldivers 2 and Furi, and both of them have kind of a curious mix: glorious visuals, capable but vulnerable player characters, and impressive enemies for them to go against. And I think that's an important part, if the enemies don't feel capable, it starts to feel too little like glorious success, and kinda like you're bullying the NPCs. Also, for me at least, controlling a character that's intuitive to control and fun to play is an important part. I think there's something to be said for a character who feels capable even when you're getting your butt kicked, as a way to keep the feel of power.
From the beginning, Disgaea is a tactics rpg that gives you tools to become overpowered. The level cap being 9999, and letting you dive into your items/equipment to increase their power and bonus effects. But they also give you bonus levels to challenge how broken you are by fighting broken enemies right back. lol
I think a rather unnoticed example of this subject is Bravely Default, and how, through the job and skill systems, allows you to set up party configurations that can do insane things to the classic JRPG turn based combat systems. Half the fun I had in that game was figuring out how to perform absolutely insane, game breaking combos, and it was glorious seeing them come together
It's funny, listening to you describe Balatro just sounds exactly like the experience of playing Queen's Blood from FFVII Rebirth. Beating the computer player and then spending the next 5 minutes without cashing in just to further play every single card in your deck to win by a 100 to 0 landslide was the biggest power fantasy in that entire game to me.
What comes to mind right away is the absolutely epic boss fights in Final Fantasy 16 and some of the fights in my playthrough of Stellar Blade. Getting every parry off while chaining long combos together is great. When you manage to do it all without taking any damage... That's so much fun! I agree with your reference to Death Stranding, too!
I feel the need to mention incremental games and their prestige systems: usually to get stronger in those you need at some point to start over, repeatedly. This lets you face the earlier challenges increasingly quickly as you get stronger while still slowing down at the end as you tackle new challenges.
Persona 5, being an introvert student with a big social circle living in the attic of a coffee house, with a succesfull academic life, more money to spend than i could need, and aby possible romntic interest avaible to me is not seeking or being seek by anyone. With a complete heroes journey to achive my desired personal futur...
The single run in The Binding of Isaac Rebirth that I went on a power trip with was also a run that I lost. At this point I unlocked Mom's Heart, but I hadn't progressed past that point. I had a really good run as Azazel with alot of health, so I decided to use the sacrifice room in one of the Caves/Depths floors to warp to The Lamb, a boss I was nowhere close to unlocking at the time and almost killed it. I only lost because I never refilled my health. Isaac is the one example that comes to mind when I think of breaking games.
To answer the original question of which games made me feel most powerful with two examples I don't think were mentioned in the video: Warframe and Cyberpunk. In both cases, the early levels were a struggle, but as time goes on, your character gets exponentially stronger, both within the fiction of the game and mechanically, AND you gain mastery as a player, and the game's flow (=movement) enables you to express that mastery in absolutely spectacular ways. In both games, you pretty much end up being a speedrunner.
On my favorite things about game design RUclips is when RoR2 is mentioned, for one of its many brilliant design choices, and the video Creator unerringly puts a track from the wonderful soundtrack in the background
Getting my first god run in noita which lets you completely break the boundaries of the game by going to parallel worlds. Stack up thousands of health. One shotting every boss I came across after spending hundreds of runs afraid of them. Just to die to a speck of polymorph while traveling at light speed
My greatest power fantasy was in Everquest, coming back to Qeynos Hills on my human SK after reaching max level on my unholy steed and enacting revenge on the kill stealing Guard Nash. It was both cathartic and made me feel like such a badass.
Great point on getting a one-up on the game, I think the best feeling is genuinely outsmarting the game rather than an intentional "game break". Sandboxes can allow this, but in some games that are actually buggy and exploitable, I find discovering gamebreaking bugs exhilarating.
The most cracked I’ve ever felt was in Risk Of Rain 2, stacking corrupted Lensmaker’s Glasses giving me a 10% chance of auto-killing enemies on each shot, with the Commando who has dual SMGs. Basically auto-killed every enemy I saw in a huge purple explosion by the end of the run. Few games have let me feel like I’ve completely abused their systems like that before lol
The most powerful I've ever felt was a few times in Octopath traveler 2. Between the castti nuke, slowly building up to 1 shot all the normal battles, the temenos coercion chain and 1 shotting every ending boss, the game is excellent about giving you the feeling of limitations and then allowing you to break them an *awesome* ways!
Top 3 Power Moments for me would be... * The end sequence of Metroid Dread, where you get the Hyper Beam and the ultimate suit * Elden Ring, facing off against Praetor Rykard with the Serpent Hunter * Dark Souls 1, getting the Balder Swag Sword and just breezing through the latter half of the game at 40 Dex (including a good chunk of the DLC).
I am _incredibly_ surprised you didn't mention Warframe, because it's pretty much the exact same thrill as Balatro; taking a normal movement shooter, and twisting the mechanics and numbers until you're a walking god.
The games that make me feel the best are games like arma reforger and tarkov. Leading a push, lighting up a transport truck stocked full, ambushing a group of enemies that never knew I was there. Things like these are why I play games.
the most empowering moments for me have been the dialogues in mid-late game elden ring. the explicit acknowledgment of the game that you are going further than everyone else.
Before watching past 3 minutes: I'd like to say my experiences with Powerful feelings in games come from fun. If I'm enjoying myself whether the game is easy or not, it's a good sign. If the game is just hard enough to keep my attention, but still engaging enough to make me want to keep playing, that's a good sign. Then, when it cranks up the difficulty, whether I can match it or not, I'd still enjoy it. And if I can surpass that difficulty curve, even better. I'd say my two examples are Sephiroth in Kingdom Hearts 2 vs 1, and Skyrim as a whole. Skyrim is easy: if you level too quickly, the game will become punishingly difficult, and you'll have to grind your stats up. Contrarily, doing the latter early can have you breeze past the game regardless of level. However, since most of the joy from Skyrim comes from immersion, not combat, I never feel like I'm wasting time, even on repeat playthroughs. For Sephiroth, the answer is a bit stranger. Most people agree that KH1 had a much harder Sephi fight than KH2, but I'd argue it's less rewarding. For one, getting to KH1 Sephi is a slog. The KH1 Hades cup is more tedious than anything else. For Sephi himself, he just feels unfair, even compared to some tougher bosses. KH2 Sephi is much easier, but still no mean feat to defeat, and more importantly, feels like you can go at him from multiple angles. KH1 Sephiroth practically demands you fight to his tune, then punishes you for it. KH2 has smoother controls and the fight itself can be taken on in multiple ways, rewarding experimentation. When you beat KH1 Sephi, it feels very "finally", but with KH2, I get the sense of "I did it". That being said, grain of salt: I prefer easier games, and those who love more challenging titles will likely have the opposite response, as they're looking to overcome difficulty regardless, where I prefer having some level of control or self-expression in my games. Baba is You is a great game for this btw.
My favorite power fantasy is still Final Fantasy V, the jobs opens so many possible parties and just using the absolute best one makes you literally unstoppable. I love this game so much
Even the voice lines in titanfall 2 make you feel like a badass. You ever heard that “we’re outnumbered 3 to 1 pilot”? But you see your core is almost online so you just fight like mad, doing whatever it takes to take them down with you until eventually your Titan is screaming “EJECT. EJECT. EJECT” at you. It’s really rare that you win, but god it’s exhilarating and even taking down 2 makes you feel like you’re one of those legendary pilots on the frontier that turns the entire tide of a battle
I just started replaying Age Of Mythology (2002) and those games I feel have a great power fantasy balance. First time on hard and they keep throwing attacks at you while you're trying to grow an army to overwhelm them before they overwhelm you. It's quite thrilling to feell powerless and annoyed and then stomp them with lots of army that you worked hard to get and mantain I'm too anxious to play online but the campaign and random maps are a blast
Some of my favorite moments in games are when you get a rouglike run SO good, that it actively starts to lag the game. You've become so powerful that your power has transcended the game itself and is now causing the very hardware you are playing on to beg for mercy. RoR2 can let you do this stuff, and what makes it fun is that it's not all of the time. A God run only comes very rarely (at least for me), so it's extra special when it happens.
The most powerful I've felt lately is making my own Path of Exile builds and learning crafting. Finally getting that one build that deletes the entire screen, or that one build that can stand in the middle of 100 enemies, or that one build that has 10x more damage that all of your other ones just does it for me.
Noita (mentioned at 15:20 as an example of games where the power fantasy comes from breaking the game) does something really special. The Noita devs made a genius design decision for preventing you from acclimatizing too much to being all powerful after "breaking the game". In the game there is a pink liquid (Polymorphine) in the game that is really hard to get rid of or avoid completely which temporarily turns you into a defenseless sheep that will get one hit killed no matter how much HP you have accumulated or how many imunities you have collected. This means that the further into your game breaking run you go, the more powerful you become, but at the same time with the threat of loosing it all from stepping in 1 pixel of Polymorphine makes the tension of loosing it all ever present. This is just something I have never seen another game do.
I think for me, the most important part of the 'power fantasy' is when the triumphs come more from the improvement of my own skill as a player than from anything the game gives me as a mechanical advantage. Fighting Games are an extreme example of this, especially when played against the same set of friends/rivals: there are no buffs, there are no new moves, there are no health/armor/damage/weapon/whatever upgrades. You go into every match with exactly the same toolbox as anyone else going into that match with the same character. Whether you win or lose, that progression to the reward, is all on your personal skill and knowledge of the game. While you touched on it a bit with player agency and building ridiculous combos of items/powers in roguelikes, I think the idea the the player themselves is getting better at the game, instead of merely having gotten more mechanical enhancements within the game, is one of the key differences that makes some games engaging and rewarding while others ...not so much, even if both are providing similar levels of spectacle and "power".
The most powerful I've ever felt in a game was stumbling across some ridiculous synergies and strategies in Slay the Spire. I feel like it's a good example of everything you said, because you start out weak and vulnerable to the point where almost every combat could kill you. But then the pieces fall into place in just the right way and now you can stomp on enemies way stronger than you ever thought possible. And it's all because you were so clever (and lucky).
A game is like to mention that got me thinking about something similar is Supraland, a sort of metroid prime spriritual successor of a 3D metroidvania, and at the end of its game it does something I think is very cool Once you’ve collected every coin that exists in the game, you can purchase a super jump that makes your regular jump height almost go to the world ceiling. This lets you go anywhere you want, see anything, and even go some places that aren’t normally possible, but all this is only allowed once you’ve already proven you’ve mastered the game I even would go as far as to say I think more games should do this, or at least I wish they did, because cracking the game wide open and getting I see whatever you want is a great reward for loving a game so much you 100% it
For me it really comes down to your choices in a game leading you to power, either exactly because you can use your knowledge of the game to make optimal choices or because your choices require you to put in some work to earn that payoff. For example this could be knowing that sticking with an underpowered weapon or character will pay off in the long run because after a certain point they will become stronger, basically the Magikarp Power trope. Another great thing is power at a cost, such as taking on a certain risk or vulnerability, but then finding ways to overcome that. Like maybe for example there is a trait or perk during character creation in an RPG that gives you certain advantages but comes with a serious weakness, but you can later craft magical armor to negate that weakness, so you are left with only the positives. Probability-manipulation to try and steal control of a game's randomness also feels immensely powerful. That is what made Isaac with his D6 my favorite character in the Binding of Isaac, because under the right circumstances you can reroll the random items you find over and over until you gain really powerful ones. This is also a good example of a Magikarp power because the D6 doesn't do much for you early on, but later on with the right support items allows you to easily stack powerful passives. (generally the Binding of Isaac is great for power fantasies) Overcoming early game struggles is why I love to play Rimworld modded to start with nothing, not even Research, because the early game will be hell but each new unlocked research has such a huge impact in what I can do and how I can overcome these struggles. Building your first freezer and being able to stockpile food can be amazing. Being able to abuse gameplay mechanics, which work as intended, by using them in clever ways can also be fantastic. For example in the first Dark Souls there was this strategy of intentionally applying a weak poison to yourself, because while it would mean your HP is constantly drained at a slow rate, it would prevent you from being afflicted by a much stronger poison that would drain your HP much more rapidly. There are so many examples and ways in which games can make you feel powerful, though imo it has absolutely nothing to do with being cinematic, in fact I personally really dislike games which try to make you feel like a badass because you are essentially watching a movie but press a button here and there. I want my feeling of power to be solely focused on the gameplay, fancy graphics to go along with it are just a bonus. That's why "boring but practical" is a good trope. Like in Deus Ex (any really) you can find all kinds of fancy weapons, from high grade military to futuristic scifi stuff, but ultimately your humble pistol, which you can pick up within minutes of gameplay, with its great modding capacity and plentiful ammo will be able to carry you through basically the entire game if you know what you are doing. Mods, cheats and exploits ruin this of course. That's why I'm always a bit disappointed when the Spiffing Brit makes a video about a game but it relies on a mod or exploit instead of just showcasing a clever or unintentional tactic to break the game. Ah well, I'm rambling. But power fantasies in games, through gameplay, is one of my favorite video game design things. I actually remember I stopped playing Binding of Isaac because they patched out too many of the cool ways you could break the game and nerfed stuff that was just introduced in the (then) latest DLC which felt like a scam, you bought a new DLC to get these fancy, cool, new powerful items and then they all get nerfed after a weak. Though if I'm not mistaken the last DLC re-introduced a lot of brokeness.
All good points -- I do think it reveals in some games mentioned, like God of War, that they were designed with the higher difficulty levels in mind. I recently completed a hard mode playthrough of that game and every little stat boost and bonus felt so satisfying because the fights are so hard. I think pattern recognition also becomes a part of this build up. Sure, your POWER might be about as high from the start as it ever will get, but your SKILL and knowledge of the enemies is what improves. Especially when you go up against Sigrun and finally after thirty tries know her patterns well enough to pull off essentially a no-damage kill. Brilliant. But I only felt this when going back and playing on the harder mode.
A time I felt super powerful was when I had mastered Ultrakill’s mechanics enough to P-rank one of the hardest levels. It so much connected wasn’t the spectacle for me, it was the skill I had finally obtained
One of my favorite ways to create power fantasies is to reuse an early game boss as a regular enemy in the late game - especially if the boss was really tough. You remember how many tries it took to finally beat the Capra Demon, so you feel how far you've come when you take them down in two hits towards the end of the game.
I think the first time I ever felt truly powerful was back in the days of Daggerfall. I picked up magic early because it trivialised a lot of things(locked doors? There's a spell for that. High walls to climb over? There's multiple spells for that. Impossible dungeon layout? Believe it or not, but there's a spell for that too). But when you unlock custom spells it becomes OP. The spells cost in MP and gold is determined by INT, meaning spells that boost INT even temporarily super useful for just making new even more powerful spells cheaper and easier to cast. Then you can scale spells off level, which is weak in the early game, but actually very effective since enemies don't scale as ridiculously fast as the player's power does. The end result is that by the end of the game I had a spell that cost 30MP, but blasted an explosion of multiple elements dealing about 800 damage, restored my health by 200% of the damage dealt, and then just in case they're resisting magic it lowered their magic/elemental resistances. Nothing could withstand more than a couple of blasts.
Wow no power fantasy feels as good as breaking the game of youtube and giving independent people money for things you enjoy watching - so crazy!!! (this is not a legally binding statement, any and all impression of enjoyment from watching an Architect of Games video is purely coincidental): www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames
In Capitalism very few people have more power than elon musk - therefore... we must break him.: twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot
why does this channel always manages to post the exact opposite of what i think, god i hate this american difficulty/pride obsessed mindset
I love your channel, and I’m not just saying that to balance the scales of the universe by countering the other comment here made previous to mine. I always look forward to a new video by what I like to believe is a little black mage, separated from his family at birth. Searching for answers in the universe as to what his place is in this crazy, unforgiving world. That or you’re just a guy with an accent I enjoy listening to ranting about video games. Either way, thank you architect. Now if you’ll excuse me, I must deliver this sacred artifact to a sheep farmer I ran into outside my local tavern.
@@drgonzo123 cant stand someone voicing a opinion that is different than yours? his entire video works on the premise that the player enjoys difficulty, people like him are the reason games suck today because he cant understand there are other types of gamers other than mastery and competitive, insufferable devs that always think they know better than the player what fun is, that is why we will never have another game like skyrim.
@@colorpg152 I was totally just making a joke, nothing against you or what you said at all. But this is his channel, so I think he has the right to say whatever he wants. If it bothers you that much then why do you keep watching? There are so many RUclipsrs out there making gaming content that echo your sentiment about gaming, why waste your time here? I don’t really even care what his stance is, or agree/disagree with anything he talks about. I just find his content very entertaining. Sorry if you took my silly little comment the wrong way or felt like I was dunking on you. It was a complete joke, a nothing burger.
@@colorpg152 as for games sucking, I do disagree with that. There are so many games coming out these days it’s impossible to not find 100 games that fit what you’re looking for. Gaming has never been better, you just might need to step away from the AAA space and try more indies.
One thing I thought of during this video was the fact that Devil May Cry 5, despite being a game all about growing stronger than the foe you face at the very start, has zero damage upgrades for the player. More health? You got it. New moves? Absolutely. More damage? Not on your life. The reason for it is, if you could deal twice as much damage, that means you have half the opportunity to style on your foes. You'd be stronger, but feel weaker.
This is an excellent point - I wondered that when playing!
It's interesting because in some ways, the lower difficulties are actually harder for DMC - enemies dying faster means you can't continue the combo enough to consistently get SSS. It forces me to play defensively (doing perfectly timed dodges, parries etc. give quite a lot of style bar), which seems antithetical to the game that supposedly gives us a power fantasy through our execution of combo.
Don't forget that the greatest powerful abilities in the game such as Royal Release and Quad S and even Red Hot Night (or to a lesser extent the Devil Breaker Break Ages) if you want to cheese bosses directly require you to play masterfully to make use of them. Yes, you CAN cheese DMD Vergil with Red Hot Night to get an instant S Rank but it has such a long windup even that requires a few resets to pull off so it's still satisfying when you get it.
It's partially why playing as Vergil isn't as satisfying, because the game just gives him flat out better damage and free invincibility all over the place, and like just doing a regular-ass combo string on the ground with him pushes you to SSS.
That actually makes a lot of sense to do it that way with games like DMC or Bayonetta.
Wonderful 101 also did this to some extent. You didn't get physically stronger, but instead, was givin more ways to build your team and dish out damage
Yes that's the case for all character action games as far as i know.
Bigger number? Nah.
Small number, THEN big number
you will love Gothic then
Funnily, I think this is something the Disgaea developers learned the hard way.
Disgaea's an RPG series known for letting you grind and break the game to its limits, starting you off weak and asking you to find your own way to ridiculous heights.
You go from dealing some 12 odd damage to one target, to billions across the entire map
However, for Disgaea 6, the developers wanted to ease newer players who only played the story into the true endgame (where most of the meat is on the proverbial bone). So, to make it less intimidating, they multiplied all the numbers by 1,000 at the start of the game.
What would normally do 30 damage in any other game deals 30,000 in Disgaea 6. Of course, EVERYTHING was scaled by this amount, so it didn't actually end up changing anything.
The numbers got quite bloated early on and it ended up having the opposite effect. The power fantasy the Disgaea series is known for was lost for that game in particular - even I haven't gotten to the endgame of it yet because it just feels so dull (autobattle notwithstanding).
It's an interesting anecdote I thought I'd see in this video because it's such a good story and I know Adam's shown Disgaea before, but ah well. here it is anyway
This is almost a haiku
Me want number go big, not number big!
Line GOES up, not line*is*up
The greatest moment of power for me was having a god-run in Noita. In the sandbox roguelike, most runs only lasted around an hour for me, but just once, I had a run that lasted 7 hours. I traveled all throughout the map, one shotting bosses, and traveling to parallel worlds. Through alchemy I mixed up a healing potion that I could make loads of, and it was incredible
But with great power comes great responsibility. One does not become a god without protecting the fish friends.
Noita really deserved more than a mention in this video. You go from doing single-digit damage and having 100hp to annihilating half the screen with auto-homing shots and being immune to half the damage types in the game. Your own ingenuity and understanding of the game is the biggest source of power, but on the other hand there is NO amount of power that will make you truly safe, so you keep pushing to get even more powerful. The game fully expects you to exploit and break its systems, even demands that you do so to prevail.
I made almost this exact same comment. Noita gives a power trip like no other to be honest.
I can't believe you talked about the empowerment of breaking games without touching on progression skips or mastery of hidden mechanics. I never felt more powerful than when I managed to shinespark to Super Metroid's crashed ship to get the Gravity Suit early, effectively mastering shinesparking and walljumping in the process. For me I think that's the most fun way you can break a game!
I found one of the best power fantasy scenes is, ironically, one that makes little effort to make you feel powerful; the Don’t Fear The Reaper ending of Cyberpunk 2077. It’s especially satisfying if you’ve done the other endings and know how difficult taking the tower is. Yet with only one life you go in, bring down a small army, take down a legend, and claim the ending all by yourself. It’s unforgettable.
Johnny's comments and the music also contribute to this feeling
I feel like this also plays into why speedruns are so entertaining to watch. Since in speedruns the runners take control of the game and show their audience what is possible with total mastery over a game.
"What is the most powerful a video game has ever made you feel?"
I created a rocket powered washing machine in Little Big Planet 2 that moved with such high velocity it outran the camera. Also gave a bot super powers that broke the frame rate.
Baldur's gate 2 as a sorcerer, was a constant power trip: you start with melf's minute meteors, then you get chain lighting, then Abi-Dalzim's Horrid Wilting.
Then you kill a dragon with a level 1 spell.
Learning to wavedash in Celeste made me feel super powerful. The tutorial is in chapter 9 after completing every other level and it really feels like you unlocked the power to break the game by doing so
Golden berries in celeste ❤
They just make you feel so absurdly competent compared to when each screen felt impossible (I'm at 190 berries I'm not *that* crazy
@@solsystem1342as someone who got all 202 berries I think the last one isn't worth all of that time required to get it😅
@@stsenjoyer5650does that include the golden or do you just mean the regular?
If you mean the golden, too, and are specifically referring to Ch. 9's, then yes, I agree whole-heartedly. Ch 8's, however, seems like the perfect pinnacle to your skill at the game (and to a lesser extent the B-side and MAYBE C-Side). Considering that reaching the peak was your goal the whole time, getting up there in one single go (I presume there's no checkpoints in Ch. 8, and please don't spoil me on that), knowing more about how the game works compared to your first attempt at it, is bound to feel just as good as when your novice self got up there the first time.
@@JonathanScarletThey definitely mean Chapter 9 golden, which is an insane achievement since it's basically a combined A-B-C side level, each longer and harder than anything else in the game. I mostly agree about chapter 8, except for the C-side. 8 C-Side screen 3 is such a gauntlet already that Screen 1 and 2 combined are faster and easier. Conceptually you're just slightly extending Screen 3 with a warm-up. Just practice screen 3 for a while until you can get 2-3 consecutive clears then try the whole thing. It's way less of an endurance challenge than 8 A or B deathless, much more a technical challenge
I love the dedication to actually make a shocked yelp instead of just saying Aaah!'s name blankly
I absolutely love Risk of Rain 2, the best “power fantasy” example I can give is from my recent beloved fireworks build. You take artefact of command (you can choose items) then absolutely all white item you get should be fireworks (shoot homing missiles every time you interact with literally anything) and any red items you get should be I. C. B. Ms (all missile items shoot more missiles) and you can quickly get to the point where simply activating the teleporter fills the screen with fireworks, ranking your fps to an almost painful degree, killing absolutely everything on the map, including the teleporter boss ofc
(Side note if you wanna do this make sure to get at least some movement items so you don’t die horribly, also make all your purple items safer spaces for obvious reasons, also also you can kinda take anything for your green items (hopoo feather), also also also your equipment can kinda be anything but make sure to swap to remote cafinator so your not useless against Mithrix)
I recently very much enjoyed a gamejam indy called Pseudoregalia. It's a small metroidvania with really fluid and fun traversal mechanics unlocked by collecting four or five powerups scattered throughout the map. What I really loved about it was that it was designed in such a way that you can collect any of the four in basically any order. You can "misuse" all of the powerups to, at least apparently, do things and go places you aren't meant to, scrambling up walls with the wall kick or using the slide to bounce over a wall. So throughout the entire game you often feel like you achieved something in a non-standard way. Which, as is pointed out in this video, gives a very satisfying sense of agency.
Plus the player character is packing a whole bakery
Pseudoregalia is so good
@devinward461 as a family man, I felt obligated to put on the Big Pants 😂
When you figure out a game combo and it starts breaking enemies. That's what makes games the most fun.
Examples. Bug fable poison comp. Get everything together and start destorying bosses so fast the game can't keep up.
Fire emblem anytime you can train in arena or nosurafu combo.
Break enemy systems in Xenoblade Chronicles or such. It's all so much fun
Surely your favorite example is Spishtar omnilooping?
Although there were probably more impactful, the moment that comes to mind for me is getting construction robots in Factorio. Suddenly, everything kicks in a gear and really starts going exponential, not limited anymore by your own set of hands.
When you realize your robots can replace items as fast as the bugs can destroy you know the factory has become truly unstoppable
You might argue that this can be dampened if you have a mod like Long Reach (which functionally make your placement range infinite), but I agree that being able to have robot that can place down your stuff for you (and far faster than you can switch items once they have enough speed) is a huge step up.
And as Greenlandrobot says, once they can outpace even Behemoth bugs in replacing what's destroyed (including themselves, I hope!), then you're real golden.
Cinematic games never really make me feel powerful. They usually make me feel like I am just along for a ride.
My biggest power phantasies usually come from mastering a game in some form or another. When you asked about it at the start, three things came to mind: Hollow Knight's Pantheon of Hollownest, Aria Low% in Necrodancer and Celeste's freaking 6b and 7b golden strawberries.
Beating Aria AT ALL (a feat that I managed exactly once) made me feel like a goddamn queen.
Good pick indeed.
Very glad you used Territorial Rotbart as an example for games with fixed levels. I have a distinct memory of seeing him for the first time, seeing his high level, totally bricking it and running the other way. A mere 60 hours later and I was spanking him like it was nothing
the visual puns are honestly ridiculous at this point
Are you saying Zote the Mighty is not an endgame boss that takes countless hours to learn how to defeat?
Beating Ishin at the end of Sekiro was by far the most powerful I ever felt.
"What is the most powerful a video game has ever made you feel?" For me, it's when in a stealth game, I complete a level entirely undetected, successfully stealthing my way past all the guards and hinders. I don't think that fits neatly into the kind of power fantasies this video describes, but for me, that is my favourite power fantasy in gaming.
games that let you alter the terrain are some of my favorite, going from this rugged landscape to nice efficient pathways and tunnels with maybe some farms set up always feels great
This is going to be a weird one, but for me, the biggest power trip I had was desining an invincibility machine in terraria.
Learning all there was to learn about a bug/feature to move your character quickly, expanding on it with my own experimentation, decrypting strange I frame exploits that were powerful but impractical, and after weeks of theorising and experimenting finally figuring out the right blend of old and new tech to not only make said exploit practical, but make it reach its theoretical potential, that's not something I'll soon forget.
I just played through Doom 2016 the other day, and I find it interesting that the weapon that feels the most powerful is NOT the BFG. It is a screen clearing weapon that feels very boring to use - I don't have to aim it, or even know about half the demons I kill with it. My favorite weapon is the minigun with the turret mod and the ultimate upgrade that prevents it from overheating. The Baron is the toughest basic enemy in the game; it takes whittling one down with shotguns and rifles over some time to bring one down. With the turret minigun, I can stare one down, and fill it with lead before it can do anything to me. It feels far more visceral than the BFG, and still takes enough skill and courage to use to feel earned.
I still love the type B lanius cruiser in FTL, because I discovered you can use the teleporter to extract brainwashed enemies.
Kidnapping the enemy one by one and suffocating them within my own ship isn't terribly powerful, but it's nice because it's an inobvious use of your tools.
Bravely Default:
- have everyone with Time Mage's passive "Hasten World" to regen 4 BP per turn
- Valkyrie's Super High Jump every turn (uses BP, but you're getting 4 a turn so it's infinite)
- while in the air from Super High Jump, all enemy attacks miss
- to ensure you go first (to jump in the air), equip Ninja main job
- to maximize damage, Dual Wield Axes
In a game in general, the most powerful I've ever felt is a close contender between two incidents, one in a friendly rules game of Magic the Gathering, and another in a modded run of Europa Universalis 4. Since I've is a tabletop game and the other is a video game, I'll count them separately.
In that one moment of MtG, I was playing Agaistín three of my cousins, and it was everyone for themselves, no teams. I had both Chandra Nalaar and Liliana Vess on the field, and had been building up to use both of their ultimate abilities on the same turn. With Chandra, i wiped one of my cousin's entire field, with Liliana I raised all creatures from all graveyards onto the field under my control. My cousins _never_ let me get away with that again after I won that game.
In EUIV, I was playing Japan. I'd united the islands within fifty years, and so 8 went for China and Korea. Very little hard made me feel quite as powerful as, after a series of wars, with hundreds of thousands men dead in each one,, finally standing victorious, seeing Japan stretch across the map, controlling all of China, Korea, and Manchuria.
I played the noise update of pizza tower recently, and the way he cheats around most of the level gimmicks made him feel so much more powerful, the pig cops having no negative effects on him, a certain spoiler for fake pep, and phase 3 of the final boss in general. Kinda surprised the game wasn't mentioned it at all here!
Also getting a godrun in Streets of Rogue where the items and mutators I find synergize very well. For example, my robot win where I got into a very bad situation near the very end and had enough healing beer (42 of them) saved throughout the run to survive gave me such a rush!
Terretorial Rothbart from XBC series, and similar out in the open super boses, are power fantasy done so damn well.
You usually run into them super early, and get friggen destroyed. You then have to run/hide from them if you see them again. They are super strong, stronger than end game bosses, so its post game content, but when you finally get revenge, you feel like a god.
I used to get bored, and want to know what would happen if I got as good as I possibly could. I had done the mastery thing on a game or two. Failed at it in others. Grinded as much as I could. So I just figured out how to break programs with whatever I could find. Cheat Engine. Modding. Even writing scripts. Frankly it’s the best game I ever played. And makes you imagine how you could make something new, after seeing that it was not actually all that fun to be overpowered. The fun is always getting overpowered.
Back when the Ringed City DLC came out for Dark Souls 3, I spent a lot of time helping people fight Midir. At some point in that process, I came to the realization that I just *knew* Midir. How to move, where to place myself, to attack, dodge, do everything perfectly to smash himù in the face with a big sword. It was more of a dance than a fight, you could say. That was really one of those "feeling powerful" moments, despite technically being quite the opposite, since a couple wrong moves would be the end.
One of the many reasons I love those games, those feelings come despite everyting
Similar thing happened with the Sisters of Battle from the Hollow Knight Godhome DLC fights. Just perfection to realize that you can do that dance
Midir gave me problems after 2 days of trying i finally beat him in a fight that felt like it lasted an hour because i was super careful.
The sister i beat on the second try though and never lost again in further playthroughs , they just clicked very fast for me.
It's always fun when a game is open enough to let you experiment on builds and find the best way to defeat foes. I'm fine with games that have numbers with levels but give us the freedom to learn Every part of the game to really have fun
It might not be quite applicable, but finally being able to pull off a sicc combo in the heat of combat (that I practiced a lot beforehand in a training environment) and beat your opponent with it in RUMBLE makes me feel super powerful. Since it's a VR fighting game, it means you're actually performing the techniques correctly and with the right timing using your own body. For a couple moments you'll feel like frickin Toph, Grandmaster Earthbender... until you accidentally launch yourself out of the arena with a miscalculated punch.
The most powerful I've ever felt playing a game came from reaching the wizard/special mode in a (virtual) Theater of Magic pinball machine in The Pinball Arcade. I felt like I was, even if just for a few moments, triumphing in an unexpected way over a machine that was designed to try and make me fail. The knowledge that that moment would be forgotten save for three initials and a high score made it all the more exhilarating.
Beating Apollo in CrossCode. He quickly proves a tough fight that you want to win and it was so satisfying to manage to do it.
Everything in that game feels like rebellion: either you're beating the tyrants who make the rules, or you're rebelling against having to do that by just running around playing the MMO instead.
I love that you included footage from Terra Nil; that game's demo helped me survive a really awful hospital stay in the middle of 2021, and the game, itself, is deeply meaningful to me, gorgeous in terms of graphics, and the sheer feeling of *power and control* over the world it gives me is so amazing, and the main purpose of that power and control is to make the planet better for everything that lives there? It's amazing!
Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope has a lot of really cheap ways to do massive damage if you pick the right character/spark combos. For example: Rabbid Mario has pretty insane damage, with trash range. He has the game's interpretation of a melee weapon, which allows him to attack ALL enemies within a semicircle in front of him, rather than getting to aim at one enemy from a distance. You can easily deal with his range issues by equipping him with one specific Spark - equippable Rabbid-Luma hybrid characters that all have some ability when used - which attracts all enemies within a certain range to his location.
This Spark is also incredibly powerful when used with Rabbid Rosalina's ability to put enemies in stasis for one turn. She can do it to 1-3 enemies using her first dash on a turn, but also has an ability to do it to all enemies within a relatively short range. A relatively short range which is less of a problem when you can bring every enemy within a much larger range directly to her location.
Best of all is combining all of these abilities into one. First you can use another character equipped with a spark that increases damage for all allies nearby. Then have Rabbid Mario call enemies to him and punch them. Then have Rabbid Rosalina and your third member attack, then Rabbid Rosalina freeze them. Nothing can move for the turn, so you immediately get to attack with all 3 characters again, and freeze at least one remaining enemy using Rabbid Rosalina's dash. Assuming they didn't already all die at some point in this process - for random encounters just getting to the point of Rabbid Mario punching them is enough.
Rabbis Rosalina is absolutely busted in that game. I upgraded her crit chance to max and then put on a Spark that increased her crit chance even more. So her crit chance was 100% and she shot I think 18 bullets. Pair that with a Spark that passively increased weapon damage, a Spark ability that can increase all damage, and and upgrade where you deal extra damage on an enemy you froze with her, she could easily halve if not one-shot late game bosses.
My ultimate power fantasy moment has to be from Monster Hunter 4u.
There are two specific boss fights that gave me this feeling.
The first has to be Dalamadur, a mountain sized snake, with a mouth large enough to swallow a town, so long that when you are at his face, you can see his tail on the other side of the mountain, half a mile away from you, and there you have you, your hunter, striking this leviathan with what might as well be a prickly rose thorn, but slowly and surely you whittle this giant down, until you hear proof of a hero start playing, and as the big brass horns shout the voices of victory, you scale the mountain until you look down on the serpents head, leap off, then strike the final blow, planting your sword in the head of the might black dragon Dalamadur.
The second is the walking calamity of tar and gunpowder, Gogmazios.
At the doorstep of the guild, you fight this towering skyscraper of a dragon, dripping with scorching tar and the weapons of all who came before you, but failed at slaying this behemoth. But unlike all those who have failed at slaying this dragon, you cannot run, you cannot hide, if you fail, society will fall to this disaster.
So you and your companions face this monster, so large you need to scale buildings to even have a chance at hitting him somewhere it would even remotely hurt, carrying these heavy cannon balls only to tickle him, shooting these lances of arrows from your ballista, only to add to the pile that is already there.
But after some time, avoiding the hellfire and fury, you can loosen the weapons and tar that has been shielding him until now, and that is the time to strike, as a monster slaying spear called the Draginator that once failed its task, falls down to the ground, poised to fulfilling its long lost purpose, by striking true and piercing this dragon.
These are both really hard optional super bosses that not all would play, and since its from one of the classic Monster Hunter games, they werent spoiled, nor were there any guides or content creators showing these fights off, unlike how it is now. When you finally slayed these monsters, you did it on your terms and it was your victory.
I dont know if they were objectively harder fights then the modern Monster Hunter super bosses, or if i was just worse at the games back then, but i can say for sure that no game so far has given me the blend of huge boss fights that was as threatening as these two were, yes Bayonetta and Metal Gear rising had the scale, but the threat wasnt there, you were given the spectacle on a platter and you could lean back and enjoy the show, and games like Dark Souls, Elden Ring and modern Monster Hunter have the threat, but there are no bosses so large and spectacular that climbing the environment around you were mandatory to even stand a chance.
There is more in the power fantasy moment indeed, and i hope that Dragons Dogma 2 and Monster Hunter Wilds has some boss fights fit for this yearning of slaying something so large and dangerous as Dalamadur and Gogmazios.
I have two moments I want to mention. First was my first test of Assimilator Colossus in Stellaris - in essence, pulling a Borg on an entire planet with a Death Star-esque supership. It was indeed a sensation of achieving a level of invulnerable dominance and cool in a 'kid with a magnifying glass' way.
The other was in Age of Wonders: Planetfall. Got caught out of position and 2 solid midgame armies attacked me and I only had provincial garrison to defend. Thanks to effective utilization of tactical operations (effectively spells), couple good rolls in clutch moments and (ab)use of no healing cap I had wiped them to a man. I had felt like a god, because I managed to pull through an impossible victory thanks to a one-in-a-milion combination of luck and skill.
Re: the end recommendation of Quinn's Quest, I would also recommend Notepad Anon for his RPG reviews touching on "yes, but what do you actually *do*" and "This thing says 'Just Wing It lmao' HOW often?"
The most powerful I've felt was the day I un-installed league of legends.
The plot twist is when you reinstall it in a month.
Another memorable power moment: Using Apple of Eden in AC:Brotherhood and Revelations.
One that comes to mind, is Starwars The force unleashed. Having you play the first level as an unstoppable Darth Vader, against the wookies, which we know are the good guys. Was a awesome way to make you feel powerful, yet understand you're not "cool".
Also... any game that in the final battle, you have the assistance of all the friends and allies you've made throughout the game, just give me chills. Because you feel all that work pay out, doesn't matter the final battle is easier because of it.
A.."recent" one that comes to my mind is NG+ in Sekiro. My playthrough took weeks with breaks of self reflection in between to unlearn Dark Souls and get into the flow of this new system.
Then after finally beating Isshin going straight into new game+ I was beating the everloving shit out of Genichiro on top of Ashina castle within an hour or two and a wave of "Oh how far I've gotten" came over me.
I think one of my favorite power fantasies in any game is actually a board game - Aeon's End. It's a cooperative deckbuilding game that pits you against a Nameless - a giant, titanic monster that can and will kill you. Every single one feels like an uphill battle, and my win rate even after nearly 30 full games is still around 50%. However, the best feeling in this game is looking at the cards in your deck, looking at what the Nemesis is doing, and going "Hold up. I think we can actually win this." It's similar to a lot of Soulsborne power fantasies in a way, where you're able to understand your opponent and refine your strategy to overcome impossible odds.
So this is why I always love playing anti-tank classes in Battlefield-like games?
Never thought of it like a power fantasy. Interesting perspective!
To me a huge power fantasy was in Baldur's Gate 3 the whole House of Hope area. You come into the home of a devil - an insanely powerful lawful evil being who can do pretty much anything for anybody as long as the price is right (usually their soul). You spend some time sneaking around, possibly destroy some contracts, free a poor victim of his who had been tortured by him for centuries and then as you're almost out of his place, he returns. And with him comes "Lives, all mortal lives, expire" an absolutely epic song and a pretty challenging fight against him.
I remember playing Skyrim. Killing dragons with ease, destroying bandit camps without even having to look at my healthbar, fighting 4 bears at the same time with a simple iron sword!....and it suuuuucked! It was so freaking boring! The second I got powerful enough to where literally nothing was a challenge (Happened the second I got a weapon tbh...I am not sure that game is not made to be played on normal difficulty)
Now, when I cranked the difficulty up (ahm...and added a few mods) and the enemies actually started feeling like a threat it started to feel like a proper power fantasy game.
Slowly making my character stronger, being really happy that I found some loot that was just a tiny bit better than my current loot, barely managing to take down a bear with half of my potions gone and another quickly running towards me was way more interesting and fun!
Adversity and overcoming said adversity is needed for me to really enjoy the game. I am not especially good at games, but I still want to be challenged. Doesn't have to be a soul game level difficulty, but it needs to have something for me to overcome, otherwise I wont be invested in the game in the slightest.
Personally I feel most powerful when a game stops being a challenge and becomes an exercise in creativity, instead of "how do I beat this?" you go to "in which way do I want to deal with this"
This is so well put. I was trying to think of why Hades gave me a power fantasy and it's exactly this. First few runs I needed Athena to even get to Meg. Eventually as I got better, I could make insane combos work even at high heat. What a game!
A short hike is genuinely a top 5 game of all time for me. It’s such a nice and comfy game and the pay off for making it all the way to the top and gliding down is super fun and makes you feel really cool.
Love the feeling of destroying demons in Doom and Ultrakill
mine was in Arma 3, where i only play drone operator for two of my friends on the field. Finding every threat for them, assisting them, playing along to help them make well timed operation, that is a very good feeling. You are the eyes in the sky, and it's so powerful.
The most powerful I have ever felt in a game was glitching my way as fast as possible through Portal (yes I mean speedrunning). You talked about feeling like breaking a game makes you feel powerful, but actually breaking the game made me feel like mastering the game quite literally. You control something that at first had you follow its rules. Of course it will not work for every game, but the way the speedrunning community still is breaking the game even more makes for a very powerful feeling. Great video!
*Being in control* feels so good. This year, Automaton missions in Helldivers 2 gives me the best power fantasy. I can weave around enemy detection range and destroy their bases with a well-placed stratagem. Instead of persevering with the odds stacked against me, I can and will flip the table, make any tree or boulder yell "For Super Earth" out of nowhere, get over with whatever I need to do at that location and get the Hellmire out of there before enemy dropships even arrive. When I clean half of the map, pick up super samples, and rendezvous with the rest of the team in one piece, that's when I was in peak performance at planning when, where, and how to start a fight.
When you mentioned Balatro, i remembered that one my most exciting moments in Magic The Gathering was when I striked a player with 210 damage points using a combo with non modified Riders of Rohan precon commander deck.
Especially because I was playing against non-precon high power decks.
I think the single most powerful moment I had in video games was, when I first unleashed the Megiddo special ability of the Sol Blade from Golden Sun 2, which is basically launching a miniature sun at an enemy.
This thing was so mindboggling to me as a kid that I still remember it vividly, even though I've seen much "better" graphical spectacles by now.
Balatro is gonna easily be my most played game this year.
Wether you want to or not, there is no escaping it.
Cause Balatro is love, Balatro is life!
I'm kinda fascinated by how we differently define 'power fantasy'. From what I tried of Balatro, it never made me feel powerful per se, what it made me feel was clever, and I think of that as a different thing. If the goal is power specifically, I still think some spectacle is needed.
I'm glad you mentioned the idea of power by comparison though, because when I was thinking about it that seemed to me the key point, at least one that games might miss. The games that came to mind when you put forth the question at the beginning were Helldivers 2 and Furi, and both of them have kind of a curious mix: glorious visuals, capable but vulnerable player characters, and impressive enemies for them to go against. And I think that's an important part, if the enemies don't feel capable, it starts to feel too little like glorious success, and kinda like you're bullying the NPCs.
Also, for me at least, controlling a character that's intuitive to control and fun to play is an important part. I think there's something to be said for a character who feels capable even when you're getting your butt kicked, as a way to keep the feel of power.
From the beginning, Disgaea is a tactics rpg that gives you tools to become overpowered. The level cap being 9999, and letting you dive into your items/equipment to increase their power and bonus effects. But they also give you bonus levels to challenge how broken you are by fighting broken enemies right back. lol
Factorio is a fantastic gradual build power fantasy up until you get the robot network. Then it is a huge step change that very much feels earned.
I think a rather unnoticed example of this subject is Bravely Default, and how, through the job and skill systems, allows you to set up party configurations that can do insane things to the classic JRPG turn based combat systems. Half the fun I had in that game was figuring out how to perform absolutely insane, game breaking combos, and it was glorious seeing them come together
It's funny, listening to you describe Balatro just sounds exactly like the experience of playing Queen's Blood from FFVII Rebirth. Beating the computer player and then spending the next 5 minutes without cashing in just to further play every single card in your deck to win by a 100 to 0 landslide was the biggest power fantasy in that entire game to me.
Most powerful I ever felt was when smurfing in DotA. Sorry I shouldn't have done it. But daym those rampages felt good
What comes to mind right away is the absolutely epic boss fights in Final Fantasy 16 and some of the fights in my playthrough of Stellar Blade. Getting every parry off while chaining long combos together is great. When you manage to do it all without taking any damage... That's so much fun!
I agree with your reference to Death Stranding, too!
I feel the need to mention incremental games and their prestige systems: usually to get stronger in those you need at some point to start over, repeatedly. This lets you face the earlier challenges increasingly quickly as you get stronger while still slowing down at the end as you tackle new challenges.
Persona 5, being an introvert student with a big social circle living in the attic of a coffee house, with a succesfull academic life, more money to spend than i could need, and aby possible romntic interest avaible to me is not seeking or being seek by anyone. With a complete heroes journey to achive my desired personal futur...
The single run in The Binding of Isaac Rebirth that I went on a power trip with was also a run that I lost. At this point I unlocked Mom's Heart, but I hadn't progressed past that point. I had a really good run as Azazel with alot of health, so I decided to use the sacrifice room in one of the Caves/Depths floors to warp to The Lamb, a boss I was nowhere close to unlocking at the time and almost killed it. I only lost because I never refilled my health.
Isaac is the one example that comes to mind when I think of breaking games.
To answer the original question of which games made me feel most powerful with two examples I don't think were mentioned in the video: Warframe and Cyberpunk.
In both cases, the early levels were a struggle, but as time goes on, your character gets exponentially stronger, both within the fiction of the game and mechanically, AND you gain mastery as a player, and the game's flow (=movement) enables you to express that mastery in absolutely spectacular ways. In both games, you pretty much end up being a speedrunner.
On my favorite things about game design RUclips is when RoR2 is mentioned, for one of its many brilliant design choices, and the video Creator unerringly puts a track from the wonderful soundtrack in the background
Never thought I'd hear about Quinns' Quest on an Architect of Games vid - I love all of Quintin Smith's stuff
Getting my first god run in noita which lets you completely break the boundaries of the game by going to parallel worlds. Stack up thousands of health. One shotting every boss I came across after spending hundreds of runs afraid of them. Just to die to a speck of polymorph while traveling at light speed
My greatest power fantasy was in Everquest, coming back to Qeynos Hills on my human SK after reaching max level on my unholy steed and enacting revenge on the kill stealing Guard Nash. It was both cathartic and made me feel like such a badass.
Great point on getting a one-up on the game, I think the best feeling is genuinely outsmarting the game rather than an intentional "game break". Sandboxes can allow this, but in some games that are actually buggy and exploitable, I find discovering gamebreaking bugs exhilarating.
The most cracked I’ve ever felt was in Risk Of Rain 2, stacking corrupted Lensmaker’s Glasses giving me a 10% chance of auto-killing enemies on each shot, with the Commando who has dual SMGs. Basically auto-killed every enemy I saw in a huge purple explosion by the end of the run. Few games have let me feel like I’ve completely abused their systems like that before lol
The most powerful I've ever felt was a few times in Octopath traveler 2. Between the castti nuke, slowly building up to 1 shot all the normal battles, the temenos coercion chain and 1 shotting every ending boss, the game is excellent about giving you the feeling of limitations and then allowing you to break them an *awesome* ways!
Top 3 Power Moments for me would be...
* The end sequence of Metroid Dread, where you get the Hyper Beam and the ultimate suit
* Elden Ring, facing off against Praetor Rykard with the Serpent Hunter
* Dark Souls 1, getting the Balder Swag Sword and just breezing through the latter half of the game at 40 Dex (including a good chunk of the DLC).
Cube chaos is the perfect embodiment of that concept. I wish you would have mentioned it.
I am _incredibly_ surprised you didn't mention Warframe, because it's pretty much the exact same thrill as Balatro; taking a normal movement shooter, and twisting the mechanics and numbers until you're a walking god.
The games that make me feel the best are games like arma reforger and tarkov. Leading a push, lighting up a transport truck stocked full, ambushing a group of enemies that never knew I was there. Things like these are why I play games.
the most empowering moments for me have been the dialogues in mid-late game elden ring. the explicit acknowledgment of the game that you are going further than everyone else.
Before watching past 3 minutes: I'd like to say my experiences with Powerful feelings in games come from fun. If I'm enjoying myself whether the game is easy or not, it's a good sign. If the game is just hard enough to keep my attention, but still engaging enough to make me want to keep playing, that's a good sign. Then, when it cranks up the difficulty, whether I can match it or not, I'd still enjoy it. And if I can surpass that difficulty curve, even better.
I'd say my two examples are Sephiroth in Kingdom Hearts 2 vs 1, and Skyrim as a whole.
Skyrim is easy: if you level too quickly, the game will become punishingly difficult, and you'll have to grind your stats up. Contrarily, doing the latter early can have you breeze past the game regardless of level. However, since most of the joy from Skyrim comes from immersion, not combat, I never feel like I'm wasting time, even on repeat playthroughs.
For Sephiroth, the answer is a bit stranger. Most people agree that KH1 had a much harder Sephi fight than KH2, but I'd argue it's less rewarding. For one, getting to KH1 Sephi is a slog. The KH1 Hades cup is more tedious than anything else. For Sephi himself, he just feels unfair, even compared to some tougher bosses. KH2 Sephi is much easier, but still no mean feat to defeat, and more importantly, feels like you can go at him from multiple angles. KH1 Sephiroth practically demands you fight to his tune, then punishes you for it. KH2 has smoother controls and the fight itself can be taken on in multiple ways, rewarding experimentation. When you beat KH1 Sephi, it feels very "finally", but with KH2, I get the sense of "I did it".
That being said, grain of salt: I prefer easier games, and those who love more challenging titles will likely have the opposite response, as they're looking to overcome difficulty regardless, where I prefer having some level of control or self-expression in my games. Baba is You is a great game for this btw.
Still haven't beaten Sephiroth. Damn forgot about that life goal!
My favorite power fantasy is still Final Fantasy V, the jobs opens so many possible parties and just using the absolute best one makes you literally unstoppable. I love this game so much
Balatro makes you feel like you’re in an anime about bending luck to your will and fighting the house
to me it's maybe beating pure vessel in radiant difficulty in hollow knight
Even the voice lines in titanfall 2 make you feel like a badass. You ever heard that “we’re outnumbered 3 to 1 pilot”? But you see your core is almost online so you just fight like mad, doing whatever it takes to take them down with you until eventually your Titan is screaming “EJECT. EJECT. EJECT” at you. It’s really rare that you win, but god it’s exhilarating and even taking down 2 makes you feel like you’re one of those legendary pilots on the frontier that turns the entire tide of a battle
I just started replaying Age Of Mythology (2002) and those games I feel have a great power fantasy balance. First time on hard and they keep throwing attacks at you while you're trying to grow an army to overwhelm them before they overwhelm you. It's quite thrilling to feell powerless and annoyed and then stomp them with lots of army that you worked hard to get and mantain
I'm too anxious to play online but the campaign and random maps are a blast
Among Us, being the impostor, three players left, and the two remaining innocents start accusing one another. Never felt more powerful.
Some of my favorite moments in games are when you get a rouglike run SO good, that it actively starts to lag the game. You've become so powerful that your power has transcended the game itself and is now causing the very hardware you are playing on to beg for mercy. RoR2 can let you do this stuff, and what makes it fun is that it's not all of the time. A God run only comes very rarely (at least for me), so it's extra special when it happens.
The most powerful I've felt lately is making my own Path of Exile builds and learning crafting. Finally getting that one build that deletes the entire screen, or that one build that can stand in the middle of 100 enemies, or that one build that has 10x more damage that all of your other ones just does it for me.
10:55 I've been playing so much Helldivers 2 that I thought I was finally going crazy and hearing the theme while off the game.
Noita (mentioned at 15:20 as an example of games where the power fantasy comes from breaking the game) does something really special. The Noita devs made a genius design decision for preventing you from acclimatizing too much to being all powerful after "breaking the game". In the game there is a pink liquid (Polymorphine) in the game that is really hard to get rid of or avoid completely which temporarily turns you into a defenseless sheep that will get one hit killed no matter how much HP you have accumulated or how many imunities you have collected. This means that the further into your game breaking run you go, the more powerful you become, but at the same time with the threat of loosing it all from stepping in 1 pixel of Polymorphine makes the tension of loosing it all ever present. This is just something I have never seen another game do.
I think for me, the most important part of the 'power fantasy' is when the triumphs come more from the improvement of my own skill as a player than from anything the game gives me as a mechanical advantage.
Fighting Games are an extreme example of this, especially when played against the same set of friends/rivals: there are no buffs, there are no new moves, there are no health/armor/damage/weapon/whatever upgrades. You go into every match with exactly the same toolbox as anyone else going into that match with the same character. Whether you win or lose, that progression to the reward, is all on your personal skill and knowledge of the game.
While you touched on it a bit with player agency and building ridiculous combos of items/powers in roguelikes, I think the idea the the player themselves is getting better at the game, instead of merely having gotten more mechanical enhancements within the game, is one of the key differences that makes some games engaging and rewarding while others ...not so much, even if both are providing similar levels of spectacle and "power".
The most powerful I've ever felt in a game was stumbling across some ridiculous synergies and strategies in Slay the Spire. I feel like it's a good example of everything you said, because you start out weak and vulnerable to the point where almost every combat could kill you. But then the pieces fall into place in just the right way and now you can stomp on enemies way stronger than you ever thought possible. And it's all because you were so clever (and lucky).
A game is like to mention that got me thinking about something similar is Supraland, a sort of metroid prime spriritual successor of a 3D metroidvania, and at the end of its game it does something I think is very cool
Once you’ve collected every coin that exists in the game, you can purchase a super jump that makes your regular jump height almost go to the world ceiling. This lets you go anywhere you want, see anything, and even go some places that aren’t normally possible, but all this is only allowed once you’ve already proven you’ve mastered the game
I even would go as far as to say I think more games should do this, or at least I wish they did, because cracking the game wide open and getting I see whatever you want is a great reward for loving a game so much you 100% it
For me it really comes down to your choices in a game leading you to power, either exactly because you can use your knowledge of the game to make optimal choices or because your choices require you to put in some work to earn that payoff.
For example this could be knowing that sticking with an underpowered weapon or character will pay off in the long run because after a certain point they will become stronger, basically the Magikarp Power trope.
Another great thing is power at a cost, such as taking on a certain risk or vulnerability, but then finding ways to overcome that. Like maybe for example there is a trait or perk during character creation in an RPG that gives you certain advantages but comes with a serious weakness, but you can later craft magical armor to negate that weakness, so you are left with only the positives.
Probability-manipulation to try and steal control of a game's randomness also feels immensely powerful. That is what made Isaac with his D6 my favorite character in the Binding of Isaac, because under the right circumstances you can reroll the random items you find over and over until you gain really powerful ones. This is also a good example of a Magikarp power because the D6 doesn't do much for you early on, but later on with the right support items allows you to easily stack powerful passives. (generally the Binding of Isaac is great for power fantasies)
Overcoming early game struggles is why I love to play Rimworld modded to start with nothing, not even Research, because the early game will be hell but each new unlocked research has such a huge impact in what I can do and how I can overcome these struggles. Building your first freezer and being able to stockpile food can be amazing.
Being able to abuse gameplay mechanics, which work as intended, by using them in clever ways can also be fantastic. For example in the first Dark Souls there was this strategy of intentionally applying a weak poison to yourself, because while it would mean your HP is constantly drained at a slow rate, it would prevent you from being afflicted by a much stronger poison that would drain your HP much more rapidly.
There are so many examples and ways in which games can make you feel powerful, though imo it has absolutely nothing to do with being cinematic, in fact I personally really dislike games which try to make you feel like a badass because you are essentially watching a movie but press a button here and there. I want my feeling of power to be solely focused on the gameplay, fancy graphics to go along with it are just a bonus. That's why "boring but practical" is a good trope. Like in Deus Ex (any really) you can find all kinds of fancy weapons, from high grade military to futuristic scifi stuff, but ultimately your humble pistol, which you can pick up within minutes of gameplay, with its great modding capacity and plentiful ammo will be able to carry you through basically the entire game if you know what you are doing.
Mods, cheats and exploits ruin this of course. That's why I'm always a bit disappointed when the Spiffing Brit makes a video about a game but it relies on a mod or exploit instead of just showcasing a clever or unintentional tactic to break the game.
Ah well, I'm rambling. But power fantasies in games, through gameplay, is one of my favorite video game design things.
I actually remember I stopped playing Binding of Isaac because they patched out too many of the cool ways you could break the game and nerfed stuff that was just introduced in the (then) latest DLC which felt like a scam, you bought a new DLC to get these fancy, cool, new powerful items and then they all get nerfed after a weak. Though if I'm not mistaken the last DLC re-introduced a lot of brokeness.
All good points -- I do think it reveals in some games mentioned, like God of War, that they were designed with the higher difficulty levels in mind. I recently completed a hard mode playthrough of that game and every little stat boost and bonus felt so satisfying because the fights are so hard. I think pattern recognition also becomes a part of this build up. Sure, your POWER might be about as high from the start as it ever will get, but your SKILL and knowledge of the enemies is what improves. Especially when you go up against Sigrun and finally after thirty tries know her patterns well enough to pull off essentially a no-damage kill. Brilliant.
But I only felt this when going back and playing on the harder mode.
A time I felt super powerful was when I had mastered Ultrakill’s mechanics enough to P-rank one of the hardest levels.
It so much connected wasn’t the spectacle for me, it was the skill I had finally obtained
One of my favorite ways to create power fantasies is to reuse an early game boss as a regular enemy in the late game - especially if the boss was really tough. You remember how many tries it took to finally beat the Capra Demon, so you feel how far you've come when you take them down in two hits towards the end of the game.
My favorite power fantasy moments are CrossCode's Gastropolis fight, and the entirety of Copy Kitty.
The most powerful I've ever felt was probably in one of my successful Risk of Rain loops. Insane to the point of game breaking
I think the first time I ever felt truly powerful was back in the days of Daggerfall.
I picked up magic early because it trivialised a lot of things(locked doors? There's a spell for that. High walls to climb over? There's multiple spells for that. Impossible dungeon layout? Believe it or not, but there's a spell for that too).
But when you unlock custom spells it becomes OP. The spells cost in MP and gold is determined by INT, meaning spells that boost INT even temporarily super useful for just making new even more powerful spells cheaper and easier to cast.
Then you can scale spells off level, which is weak in the early game, but actually very effective since enemies don't scale as ridiculously fast as the player's power does.
The end result is that by the end of the game I had a spell that cost 30MP, but blasted an explosion of multiple elements dealing about 800 damage, restored my health by 200% of the damage dealt, and then just in case they're resisting magic it lowered their magic/elemental resistances.
Nothing could withstand more than a couple of blasts.