Authorial Intent

[toxicitizen]

Transistor.

 

The combat is good and the art is good and the music is good and the voice actor is good.

 

So why isn't this game like super epic best ever?

 

I think that the game honestly would have benefited from a slightly less ambitious narrative structure.  For way too much of the game I didn't properly understand what I was doing, what the antagonist and protagonist motivations were, and how my current mission contributed towards the larger goal.  Like, Bastion kept some secrets and had a reveal at the end, but right away from the beginning there were really clearly outlined goals.  "There was a calamity, get to the sanctuary".  "The sanctuary is broke, go fix it".  "The girl got kidnapped, go save her".  Without giving everything away the game still gave me pretty clear goals and reasons to pursue them.  That's what I think is missing from Transistor.

 

But just because the narrative structure doesn't do a great job of motivating the player to push forward, the actual game is so rad that I did anyway.  It concluded with a great boss fight that showed off all the best parts of the game and an inexplicable ending that showed off the worst.

 

It was interesting and had lots of good parts.  I'm satisfied with my purchase.  Will certainly play again.  Not really interested in using the unlockables to add difficulty though.

About the narrative, apparently it takes a Dark Souls approach where a lot of the info necessary for you to piece things together is found in the flavor text. I missed it on my first go through and haven't bothered reading it yet but I can't really fault a game for trusting your intelligence and letting you figure things out for yourself.

 

That being said, it does go back to the issue I initially had with the combat. Nothing is really ever explained to you and, although that's clearly deliberate, some people will inevitably fault the game for it.

[TheMightyEthan]

Just because it's deliberate doesn't mean it's good.

 

Disclaimer: I have not played this game and it may well be good, I just take issue with people trying to defend against criticism on the basis that the thing being criticized was intentional.

[toxicitizen]

On the flipside, you can't provide valid criticism if you don't understand what they were going for. I wasn't defending it or trying to argue against what FMW said, I was merely pointing out something that he might have missed. I know I did on my first run through the game. Being deliberate doesn't mean it's good, but it's absolutely relevant when it comes to the question of valid criticism vs. it's just not for you.

 

It's fine if you don't like the way Dark Souls tells its story, for example, but they decided on an approach to storytelling they felt was right for their game and pulled it off competently. Whether or not you like that approach has no bearing whatsoever on it being good or bad. If you're going to comment on it at all then you need to realize that otherwise imho your criticism is worthless.

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, I can see that.  The difference between "they did not execute their choices well" and "they should have made different choices".

[FMW]

Well there's two schools of thought on that.  Some say that the best criticism comes from understanding the intent of a work and judging how effectively it does what it's trying to do.  Some say that the experience a person has when interacting with a work of art is the only reasonable way to pass judgement on the work.

 

School of thought 1 is a little more analytic.

 

School of thought 2 is a little more emotional/personal.

 

In the case of Transistor I'm inclined to favor school of thought 2.  My narrative experience lacked focus and tangible cause/effect relationships.  If the game creators have that stuff figured out lore-wise, they hid it.  Which is DUMB because within the context of the story you're always in a hurry.  The world is literally ending around you and you're on a mission to save it/get revenge/get your boyfriend back (like I said, it's unclear).  So I feel like the choice the player makes is to either ignore the context of the action and dick around poking and prodding at everything in true adventure game fashion, or to act as makes best sense in terms of the character and miss the information that makes the story make sense.

 

So I wanted to get the most out of the story, but by playing it straight and not abusing the fact that the narrative conceit of being in a hurry is only lip service I ended up missing the story.  Way lame.

[TheMightyEthan]

I don't know that it has to be that starkly divided. You can say "I know they did this intentionally, but feel it was a bad decision because of x, y, and z." You look at the effectiveness of the work as a whole, not each aspect in isolation.

[toxicitizen]

I suppose that largely depends on what you're looking for in criticism. Personally, even when my experience with the game is negative in regards to school 2, I usually try to let it all sink in and take a school 1 approach when writing my impressions. I just don't see as much value in what you describe as school 2, at least not to the exclusion of school 1.

 

I think there's definitely room to include a more personal and emotional aspect in school 1 but it needs to be clear that that's what it is. Nothing makes me respect a critic more than when they're willing to concede their own biases. "I hated this game because of ____ but here's why you might not feel the same way." vs "I hated this game because it's dumb and bad." Of course, this example assumes that we're not talking about an irredeemably terrible piece of shit like, say, Aliens: Colonial Marines...