I won't say Xenogears is the most pretentious game ever made, because I'm aware Disco Elysium exists, but at one time it perhaps was.
GTA4 "cynical take on America from immigrant" is so bad. I can say this personally, of any group that comes to America, Eastern Europeans come over and become the most gung-ho and patriotic and will angrily tell Mexicans speaking Spanish to "LEARN ENGLISH" through their own broken English. Eastern Europeans today are fascinated by American culture, and in some parts and ways they're still in the 90s and 00s (in actually a culturally good way--it's not all superheroes and rap music there yet). As someone with roots to Easten Europe Niko's back story was the worst in the series and his character was just a cardboard cutout with a vague Eastern Euro accent. Actually, GTA 4 was the worst in the series, 5 was way better--San Andreas being the best. GTA4 was Rockstar trying to take themselves way too seriously.
I won't say Xenogears is the most pretentious game ever made, because I'm aware Disco Elysium exists, but at one time it perhaps was.
GTA4 "cynical take on America from immigrant" is so bad. I can say this personally, of any group that comes to America, Eastern Europeans come over and become the most gung-ho and patriotic and will angrily tell Mexicans speaking Spanish to "LEARN ENGLISH" through their own broken English. Eastern Europeans today are fascinated by American culture, and in some parts and ways they're still in the 90s and 00s (in actually a culturally good way--it's not all superheroes and rap music there yet). As someone with roots to Easten Europe Niko's back story was the worst in the series and his character was just a cardboard cutout with a vague Eastern Euro accent. Actually, GTA 4 was the worst in the series, 5 was way better--San Andreas being the best. GTA4 was Rockstar trying to take themselves way too seriously.
My best friend - more or less, best friend that moved off recently - lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union. He's not exactly a patriotic conservative type in the sense of being deeply interested in American history and values and such, just libertarian, but he's gung ho about things like US flags and, like you say, just kind of a 90s 00s common sense mentality, that brief glimmer in time when people had climbed the mountain of bigotry and fanaticism just to go plummet down the other side.
I dunno, DE has good gameplay & writing and has a meaningful message for the times.
Judge people as individuals instead of hyperfocusing on their politics. Game is made by a communist, but the hero is a cop and everybody's favorite character is a stereotypical pragmatic conservative.
The game is leftist, but using pretensious as a synonym for that is just silly, especially considering the state of conservative media and its hero complex.
Kitten squad: You know what makes me want to be an animal rights activist? Repeatedly getting interrupted in the middle of middling gameplay with vivid recreations and descriptions of animal cruelty.
This shit was free on playstation and had no pre game warnings as far as I remember. Thanks PETA.
Walking dead season 2: This applies to a lot if not all telltale games, but your strapped into a ride that never changes or stops. I wouldn't mind as much if they didnt lie to your face about player choice. You're choices dont matter except to maybe piss people off or slightly prolong their lives for a couple scenes before they die in the most depressing way possible. It's a nonstop train ride of pain that forgets that the original worked so well because it had actual quiet moments of levity and peace in between the misery. It also conveniently prevents you from preemptively killing characters towards the end that needed to die.
It may be one of the few games that can stand close to TOU 2 in terms of sheer misery porn.
Rise of the Tomb Raider: mechanically solid, but I cant stand how this game tries to present laura after the events of the first game. She should be an experienced shellshocked survivor. Not this pathetic quirky naive idiot. Had to shut it off after the first couple hours because it felt so insulting. Ive never seen a character regress this badly in a sequel after a solid origin story.
Resistance 3: This game wants to have its cake and eat it. On one hand, its a dark, dam near hopeless post apocalyptic alien invasion story. On the other hand you're a bland 90s FPS hero who cannot be stopped.
The opening of the game may be one of most unintentionally hilarious situations ive ever played in a videogame. America is so fucked, and so absolutely gutted of any kind of governing force that its just you and a bunch of literal hillbillys with shotguns against an entire alien invasion force. I was giggling like a madman at how perfectly screwed the situation was. Later on it tries to be deep and pretentious about man's inhumanity to man with you fighting a bunch of humans stupid enough to run an underground fight ring while the alien invasion is going on. Then it turns around and had you teaming up with a hilariously earnest gun toting catholic priest fighting alien zombies Which was great, but this game doesnt know what tone it wants.
The biggest theme that was striking to me, was the idea that the main character needed to embrace his humanity and forsake the upgrades of the first two for 90's health packs. That apparently having regenerating alien blood was a lability that needed to be cured, despite the fact that its power THE ONLY reason our hero's were able to pull of some semblance of a win at the end of the last two games. Look it has the potential to backfire under extreme situations sure, but when humans have the consistency of wet tissue paper under fire I think the whole keeping your humanity theme is dumb and naive.
By the end It looks like it's setting up a bleak ending and I honestly would have respected it more if it did, but you somehow manage to win. This one fucking normal guy without any regenerating health, backup or charm somehow manages to defeat the aliens and blow up their capital. It was a fun game, especially in co-op but it completely ran counter to the overall tone of the series.
Read only memories: An interesting case, as it's actually one of the better gay indie games. So much so I didint even realize most of the characters were gay or ambiguously so till I looked it up. (Even walked into a gay bar several times before realizing it was a gay bar) It's very much a story first kind of game with a decent mystery and great pixel style. Really its only major issue is the "good" ending it tries to steer you into is naive.
You have to do it to save your own ass, but not much of a big deal is made out of giving EVERY AI ON EARTH sentience. Really? You dont think this might perhaps have the potential of backfiring HORRIBLY in some way? How's kill tron 3000 or your microwave going to react to having feelings?
Also it tries to make the AI buddy cute and likeable but it tries too hard and treads the line between being annoying and passable. Why would you give your robot a little kid voice anyway?
Killzone shadowfall: This one is a neat case of being a title I assumed was pretentious when it came out, but actually ended up ageing a lot better with the benefit of time and hindsight. It's still a dumbass idea to house former enemy combatants on your home planet and the ending was pretty cruel. but People are capable of being morons these days.
For shits and giggles I'll play devil's advocate on Gone Home. I played it on gamepass knowing full well what the reveal was just because complex, realistic house design in games (especially huge mansion maps like GH and Luigi's Mansion) is my thing and I came away feeling that it was okay for what it was, but holy fuck was the marketing offbase and they deserve every slam they got just for marketing it like that. Also, if you want the game Gone Home was marketed as, go play Visage. It's got some find-the-tiny-object-to-proceed problems but otherwise it's dead on Gone Home with the paranormal horror payoff it was billed with.
My nomination is what I call the 'bootleg katamari' genre: The Wonderful End of the World, What the Golf, Donut County and every other game that follows the very distinct cookiecutter gimmick they established. You establish a simple gameplay loop in a world filled with a large variety of simple low-poly objects and then you pepper it with *wacky zany* writing. After a few levels the gameplay levels out into a loop of the same four or five basic actions where the only thing changing is the objects being manipulated with essentially no increase in difficulty or added gimmicks to keep it fresh.
Oh, also fucking Stray. I hate that game enough to dump ten pages on it. It's everything wrong with indie development cranked up to eleven.
Oh yeah. Dejobaan games.
Remember when Valve sold a games pack to promote Portal 2's release that had an early access flop in it? What a fucking omen.
Also, remember when "quirky" humour meant "the most basic bitch shit imaginable"? Twinbeard just released a new game for the Pico-8!
If we don't have a community watch thread for wannabe communist fans of DE, we probably should. I liked the game overall but holy shit the fanbase is even more insufferable than Undertale's.
But Xenogears was an actual game, at least one disc of it. Had they finished it maybe, but it came out at a time when japanese entertainment was "deconstructing" stuff with a lot of german-sounding words.
Its fans though, they bake fart brownies and constantly suck each other off.
So for me, I have to preface a lot by saying that I deeply enjoy pretentious stories... that are good. See, SUDA51 is incredibly pretentious. Especially if you play through the Kill The Past entries, it's utterly impossible not to come away with that impression. KILLER7's story is brimming with references to historical events and geopolitical concepts that are way too big for it to do any justice to, and I love it for that.
Then there's bad pretentious stories.
Dear Esther was a game I got for a dollar and I despised - the idea of chopping up a story and having different segments of it be exposed to you at different periods... maybe is interesting? But you literally just push forward. It's not a fucking game.
Coffee Talk was a riff on VA-11 HALL-A, except it decided that the game needed more overt references to contemporary politics... through the lens of a college student who probably had yet to pay their own rent. It's utterly insufferable. It's everything wrong with modern writing: rich yuppies singing empty paeans.
OMORI, and its presentation of hikikomori and agoraphobia, is utterly insufferable. The middling gameplay somewhat saves it from being complete garbage, and I'm personally fond of the art, but the themes are insufferable. It's toothless and empty.
Well, some of them are, some of them aren't. There's a really good (and long) interview regarding the ownership of the IP and why some of the bigwig creatives of the game were given the boot. There was a whole writing team, and one of the guys interviewed there was in charge of writing the Union Boss. I fucking love the Union Boss.
I think DE is pretentious, but it's pretentious in a good way. But I have sperged long and hard about that before plenty of times.
Gone Home's problem is purely its original price tag ($20) and the idiotic amount of coverage the game got. Had it come out as a $2 game without much fanfare, I think it'd be regarded as pretty neat. Because it's pretty neat, if for a very specific craving. At that point in my life, I wasn't really that into pretentious indie shit, but seeing everyone I knew - who was basically just into shit on the level of Zelda - start gawping about how the game was 'revolutionary' was ridiculous.
Gone Home literally won some Game of the Year awards in 2013.
2013
We're talking a year that consisted of Saints Row IV, Grand Theft Auto V, The Last of Us, Black Flag, Metal Gear Rising, A Link Between Worlds, Bioshock Infinite, Super Mario 3D World, Rayman Legends...
I mean, people here know I hate some of those games but HOLY SHIT who the fuck in their right mind would have given Gone FUCKIN' Home a Game of the Year award that year. You're damn right that kind of coverage fucked it.
Middens:
All the 4th wall breaks and discount Yume Nikki worlds just to say "guns=bad".
The fact the karma system doesn't even work properly just makes it worse.
