vehemental
Member
- Jun 4, 2017
- 432
- 1,902
- Lessons in Love isn't Moby Dick, man. It's not Nostalghia, it's not Dostoevsky, it's not even Breaking Bad. Perhaps it comes closest to these in the context of western adult visual novels (something LiL tries not to be), but these are even more outrageously absurd comparisons than Dragon Quest. LiL has an interesting amount of depth, a huge amount of potential, and can be charming in its own way, but for as long as the developer decides to keep showing his ass by doing shit like self-inserting his own petty grievances - not around things like "boy the lines at the DMV sure are long," but literally things like "I treated this one specific person at Patreon like a fucking idiot and they banned me for it, how unfair" - it can never be taken even remotely seriously. The developer's antagonism towards his audience, resentment of the business model in the industry he exists in, and his own personal dissatisfaction with his income are all completely unmasked and spoken verbatim by his characters. The funny thing is is that you can actually do those kinds of things in a work like this that's intended to be meta and surrealist, but Selly goes so overboard with it that it only serves to directly paint him as a childish narcissist megalomaniac and is only worthy of an eyeroll. The reason why so few people on the outside knew that James Corden, Oprah, or Ellen Degeneres are such assholes is because they maintained professional distance. There's very little here.
- You have never played Elden Ring and are not familiar with it at all, especially if you think that's what 12 year olds are watching on Twitch. Your original argument hinged upon the completion of ostensibly arduous tasks in a "simple RPG" in order to gain some reward at the end. Soulslike action RPGs, which Elden Ring is the pinnacle of, are the standout examples of this exact philosophy in video gaming. They're not the dopamine firehoses most people would rather play than do homework or read a book unless those people are absolute chads. They're games that you need to lock into and settle down for a long haul of frustration and adversity, and only give you delayed gratification after mastering the extremely complex skillsets they require. Elden Ring and Bloodborne especially reward this earned mastery with incredibly rich lore and storylines. George RR Martin worked on Elden Ring for fuck's sake.
- The "artistic intention" you're clinging onto in this instance is save-scumming to accomplish a task as deep and as nuanced as a game of sudoku. I don't find that installing URM and using it to breeze through arbitrary time-sucks to be that far removed from needing to save-scum, both are cheesy workarounds for poor game design, and I don't give a shit what the developer's intention is, because he's proved he can be a fucking idiot in equal measures to his genius. The mere fact that I'm spending this long to address your points one by one is prima facie evidence that I'm not the quivering, dopamine-insufficient, TikTok-brained "child playing with toys" you'd like to uncharitably paint me as, and I would argue that the mere act of slogging through the immense length of this game and posting in this thread at all was enough to defeat that standard.
The fact is that the developer of this game is always trying to extend its playtime as much as possible in ways that are meaningless, likely because he thinks it will make him more money, and I choose not to engage with these efforts because I've determined they're a waste of my time, just like continuing to engage with you is, because I don't believe that any combination of words that come out of my keyboard, no matter how well-reasoned, will ever change your mind on any topic.
