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Sometimes I still think about Yoko Taro's "Light novel harem protagonist open world videogame" concept and try to decide whether or not I have any idea what he was going for
Where Is Harkan
wh
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OK so lemme see if I can recall the summary of this
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but Yoko Taro had a long rant on twitter about game design and narrative freedom a while back
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where is thesis statement was that there's a fundamental tradeoff between player freedom and strength of characterization
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where if you let the player do whatever they want, but also establish a personality for the hero, then the two will inevitably be at odds
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for example if the plot develops a sense of urgency that the hero must save his dying love interest
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but then the player stops to do 80 side quests
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creating a schism between the character as portrayed in the fiction and the character as portrayed by the gameplay
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which he called "emotional bugs"
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so the more you let the player Do Anything, the less you're safe to define about their character's personality
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thusly he suggested a game premise where you could have true player freedom
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and it was a light novel world where the main character has no personality and is surrounded by beautiful women who are all in love with him but he can never date any of them
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again I don't 100% get what he's going for with that but it was still an interesting series of free-associating thoughts
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I assume he's just trashing the industry's obsession with nonlinearity and player freedom.
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Incidentally:
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Mass Effect AU where Paragon and Renegade are both canon and it's just that Shepard is Two-Face.
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/flips coin before shoving merc out a window
boo(f)
I feel like he was putting both like
boo(f)
the Open World Crazy and your Generic Harem Anime on blast
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by associating the two
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Yeah it reads like.
boo(f)
Like it reads like one of a number of joke 'solutions' we'd come up with for shit like this
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"The ultimate embodiment of your design philosophy would of course be [this obviously awful idea]"
boo(f)
"You're not allowed to define a personality for an open world protagonist very well, so I posit the perfect open world protagonist:"
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"An anime harem lead"
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Here's my original plurk on it roughly translating the full thing
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I wish I had posted a link though
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I feel like it's kind of relevant to Persona's design, the way he talks about it
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like, the player's freedom to pursue s-links or not as they wish
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means that the protagonist's emotions can't be affected by them in the main story
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Persona does not, indeed, seem like a series Yoko Taro would like.
Be Maki-Mine🍁
I think it's more like a commentary on how nonlinear video games aren't actually about emotional growth and change, as multiple love relationships without dating aren't about growth and change (please pretend I said this in a polyamory friendly manner and instead a harem anime critical manner)
shivorce
fallout 4 has the exact problem he was talking about, which is kind of sad for an rpg franchise
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"you need to find out who took your infant son and get him back, but also you wanna help out this settlement you have no ties to?"
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side note, Yoko Taro had another interesting comment from his playthrough of Fallout 4
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where he talked about differences in language that can require actual logic changes instead of just replacing strings for dialogue subs
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because (as I understand it) in Fallout 4, you pick your gender at the start, and then dialogue generally just doesn't make any references to it during the game
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but Japanese has gendered first-person pronouns
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so the Japanese version of FO4 has dialogue choices that assume the protag is male regardless of what you picked
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because the dialogue engine doesn't have "check your gender before outputting this dialogue option for the player"
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Couldn't... you just go with watashi?
shivorce
iii dont remember off the top of my head if they refer to the player's gender or not. i think there might be some minor instances but nothing major
shivorce
and every character is romanceable
shivorce
which is good and also kinda not
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watashi is technically neutral but has a pretty strong feminine lean
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especially if you're using it in non-formal situations
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which I suspect most of Fallout is
shivorce
oh yeah for sure
shivorce
it's the nuclear apocalypse and only very few groups really have like a formal hierarchy, mostly the brotherhood of steel