Wednesday, December 15, 2010

I take games way too personally



In order to cope from the traumatic experiences I witnessed in Dragon Quest V, I feel like I need to blog about it and maybe everything will be okay again.

Ever since I played this particular sequence of events, my whole world has felt off balance and you know what, maybe it should feel this way. After all I did witness a legit bitch slap, my own father being murdered literally right in front of my eyes as I lay witness to it* & being a slave where the owners legit whipped people.

The asterisk is to bring attention to this little detail that makes this experience so traumatic - that scene wasn't just third person POV. That wouldn't have been so bad... ish. It's still bad no matter what though. What made the scene so life-altering is the fact that for those last 5 minutes of my dad's life - I literally saw everything he did, as if my unconscious 5 yr old character had stepped into his skin. I mean, every little detail about the game pointed to the fact that my dad would die - he was somewhat of a mentor, so it's almost expected. This? Not expected in the least and it plagues me.

The whipping plagues me just as bad, because, like I said, it was legitimate. You saw the whips flung at your character. Actually at one point, you lay witness to a girl getting whipped, but your character plus friend who caused your dad's death jumped in and beat the shit out of the guards who were whipping her.

Still. It's traumatic. This is a video game which is crafted to resemble cartoons, so people like me who fear realism in games can play with reckless abandon. I was not aware that a fucking SCYTHE was going to be held up against my character's 5 yr old neck and that I would become my father to visibly partake in his death, as I watched his HP go from 356 down to 0.

My innocence has been compromised.

2 comments:

  1. WOW.. Im speechless no wonder you were so traumatized by that sequence of events, I have been wondering what had happened.

    Rarely do games feature a characters death from first person(except when your character dies in a 1st person shooter, but that really isn't that crazy or realistic) so im surprsied that they would feature that in a rpg for the ds!

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  2. Damn, what kind of fucked up game is this? Who made this, the Japanese? I would expect nothing less.

    I've played my own share of games with shocking events. Fable II is the only one I can remember, right there at the end... sniff.

    Btw there's a trope for what you experienced:
    http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlayerPunch

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