#end product being just one of the most soulless piles of slop i’ve ever played
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whoredmode · 1 month ago
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going off something i was talking about the other day. i think i know why i took sriv’s terrible quality so personally. like why i felt so insulted and angered by it. it felt like a slap in the face to anyone who cared to take the early games seriously. even if that wasn’t the intention, it doesn’t really matter if that’s how it ends up coming off regardless.
sr1 is a tragicomedy, it has elements of heightened reality but at its core is a very genuine and grounded piece of work. the tone was meant to be based off (specifically) hip-hop music videos, which in and of themselves are incredibly sincere pieces of art—the visualization of something you can’t see, or in some cases the visualization of literal lyrics. pieces of art that have a point to get across, oftentimes ending in either bittersweet or sobering ways (see: playa’s death at the end of sr1). sr1 hits the beats it wants to and tells the story it wants to tell, even in the face of being a GTA clone or whatever. it had real heart. it had a point to its narrative. and i’ve actually written a longer piece discussing the use of music in the games and its love/hate relationship w gangsta rap and hip-hop if you’re curious. whether you think it did this well or not is up to your own tastes, but the intention and end result is clear.
so all that to say when sriv came along and was just unfunny jokes and badly written irony, parody, and quips placed against painfully bathetic moments and quite literally blowing up its worldbuilding. it’s like. oh. that’s how you’re sending this off. if the intention was just to “make a fun game” then sure, fine, whatever, but there’s really no need to just be so…dismissive of what came before. you’re just lying when you say the narrative of the games was never meant to be taken seriously from the start. sorry for caring?? i forgot it’s not cool to be sincere anymore. forgot we’re all supposed to have this sense of ironic detachment to all art. ok. whatever.
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