how to make a fumito ueda game:

1) be comfortable with silence
2) the story you are telling is not lore, but the events that are occurring to the player in the moment, strip literally everything else away
3) shit controls
4) lots of heights to make u clench ur butthole

5) the character themselves is a joy to watch and control even though the actual inputs don't always do what you want

6) be able to see where you came from or where you're going from extremely far away

a great example is the windmill in ico. It's easy to feel like you've come far and done a lot once you look back at the windmill from the bridge and it's just a TINY little thing.

The real brilliance of Ueda is that with each game, he gets better and better at storytelling, but everyone thinks that his storytelling is actually like massive piles of lore and secret connections between games and shit and the truth is he doesn't actually seem to care.

Ueda writes a story about how a boy meets a monster and the two of them escape a prison.

Fans are like omg what is the master of the valley, the deep lore, who built this place--like all this shit that doesn't matter. It's irrelevant, just like whoever imprisoned dormin.

A lot of people have very foolishly taken this to mean that dark souls has good storytelling because you get the story in lore items you find around the world so we have a shitload of really bad stories trying to imitating dark souls.

But imagine a dark souls that actually gets ueda--miyazaki gets better with every release, but he's not there yet. You can tell he's chasing ueda while bringing his own DM sensibilities to the games.

Most of the ueda-inspired games seem to want you to know what actually happened, they seem to care far more about how the world came to be ruined and just tossing in a bunch of puzzles. Ueda's puzzles are for DRAMATIC EFFECT.

like there are several puzzles in the game where it's like you running off and going "don't worry, I'll be right back" and Trico whines and cries because he thinks you're leaving, but later, when you're in danger, he runs away... and shows up down below, ready to catch you.

at one point, you realize he's pretty scared of water, but eventually, he trusts you enough to nervously dive into the water, dog paddle around, and eventually dive for you.

Every time, these puzzles are about the _emotional effect_ of the moment in time.

so ueda creates puzzles that are brilliant because they're making you emotionally closer to trico, whereas a lot of the people who tell you they're influenced by ueda's games end up making things where puzzles are mere barriers to progression.

it's the Grand Theft Auto problem, right? You want to do stuff, the world is this big "go do lots of cool shit" world, but the quests are often assholes who are like "I'll let you do this BUT you must DO THIS FOR ME" and at the end you're like "ugh glad that's over with -_-"

it's the difference between "shit getting in the way to pad out the length of the game" and "doing shit which has emotional payoffs."

Like, that one puzzle in TLG where u get separated from trico, worry that he's lost, see feathers (now hope!), then panic as you see EVIL TRICO

it's literally all a series of beats within the missions designed to make you feel shit that propels you forward through drama.

a key thing about ueda is that he's not doing weenies like naughty dog does, where you see a large object, go into a building, come out the other side, and the object is closer, and then you do that 9 times in tlou2.

a lot of the times, you don't see the weenies until AFTER you've been there. He often uses them to evoke an almost nostalgia--the post-credits scene of The Last Guardian goes right back to the room you started the entire journey in.

anyways give me $400 and I'll write about this for a blog post after I finish my danganronpa and tlou2 pieces

but seriously butthole clenching is crucial to making these games work

also @PABastien cursed us on the stream last night with the knowledge that there was an american screenplay of shadow of the colossus and it was apparently another Save The Cat exercise