an absolute Plague upon my brain since i first started playing, and ive written so much thru various livemessages that trying to gather All my thoughts together into a semi-coherent piece of writing is intimidating. the most succinct summary i came up with before now is "i definitely would have loved this when i was 14, and im somehow genuinely kinda 50/50 on whether the fact that i didnt get the chance to Experience it back then is a blessing or not", so ig ill just start trying to unpack that and the various larger emotions it reduces to shorthand

so on one paw, considering that my first few hours in this game were filled with such absolute bewilderment as to how literally anyone even the wasteland of Gamers In 2010 took this seriously or praised it, i ended up Seeing The Vision several times by the end, and on the whole, even tho my bewilderment was justified, i do Get how the various tricks it pulls off earned it such a sizable initial reputation. even tho it's also Far too long, that does mean it gets into a rly good Spread of various pulpy paperback appeals that are not lost on me even as i care infinitely more about some then others...because for the most part, i do think it comes across that cage really likes All Of Them even as he leaves some undercooked. the world famous Norman Jaden and his Stupid Fucking Glasses are probably the biggest example...his plot utility is very little, interest in him as a human is Zilch past drug problems and being the relative "good cop", but his Stupid Fucking Glasses and emphasis on investigative process come across as sincere indulgences for cage..."indulgence" absolutely not meant as a criticism here, because whenever he's not being Wildly Misogynist And/Or Racist, cage is absolutely at his most endearing when he's attempting to show you something he thinks is really cool and will really impress you. he might not pull it off, but as much as i hate the Stupid Fucking Glasses im glad at least Someone was excited about them and how Neat they are. its easier for me to process in the show-off moments that are more directly in my wheelhouse...the killer's silly jigsaw games, especially the first three, were massive highlights for me, with the third in particular giving this brief glimpse into The Saw Game I Always Wanted. overenthusiastic film student flourishes like the various split-screen sections or that shot of jason's balloon flying off into the sky grew more and more likable the more i sat with them. it often has an amateurish energy that can be Unsettling given the clearly huge amount of money gone into this! but even tho the most fun you can have with heavy rain is probably just imagining a better version of its occasionally provocative concepts, theres a mind-consuming charm that kept it compelling thru the driest and most uneventful chapters. it ticks many many boxes of my personal proclivities...melodrama, high concept thriller shit, death games, big pulpy plot twists, formal experimentation, goddamn Water Symbolism...theres a lot im an easy sell for, and sometimes it lined up in my head just right

on the other paw! this is a 2000 page first draft, a "cinematic" experience with next to no faith in its imagery beyond blunt metaphor and uncanny hollywood pastiche (so many scenes and beats are constructed entirely out of two or three or four Big Movie Shorthands for Sadness), messily married to a genuinely garish use of the video game medium that intersperses every weighty dramatic moment with comical klutziness. cage seems to care about video games entirely in that they allow him to explore his fixation on Narrative Choice , which mostly ends up allowing him to deny the responsibility of having to make his Big Ideas and potential thematic threads Go Anywhere...if ethan is meant to have a coherent arc about realizing that nothing was his fault, it has to take for granted that he's Still Alive and Waggles The Stick Fast Enough to get his catharsis,,,and as the most dramatically coherent character in the game, u can imagine how the others make out. every madision chapter somehow managed to shock me with new flavors of Badly Written Woman, scott gets a really fun flashy twist that nevertheless feels deeply unreconciled on a human level, and norman is a prop to hang his Stupid Fucking Glasses and Prestige Cop Show Antics on. its so hard to meaningfully build to anything, or give impactful takeaways...i cant rly emphasize enough how much looking into the other endings lowered my opinion of the game, even considering the super mega happy ending i got wasnt entirely coherent or satisfying. instead the only coherency to be found is in the overall creative lens of the game, which is deeply emotionally unimaginative, self-obsessed, and insecure...cage's sad dad neurosis ceasing to be even theoretically sympathetic the moment he wields it against his Bitch Wife and his Inexplicably Devoted Trophy Gf. even putting aside the Larger Oopsies that happened at quantic dream, there is just such a scummy underbelly to this thing...big Provocative Questions:tm: explored in entirely self-justifying ways, an anti-arc where u realize u did nothing wrong and were actually an awesome epic dad the whole time. for all its occasionally endearing, mindlessly compelling qualities, it feels like i have at least a moderately moral duty to be mean to this

obviously u can take me with a grain of salt if u know my tastes,,, but for however badly vivec is laid out, or however weird it is that a bunch of white guys from maryland keep trying to do meaningful commentary on imperialism but their main nuance is to make the occupied peoples Xenophobic and Supremacist, or however overly small and unmotivated the soundtrack is, this rly does come closer then just about anything else to fulfilling the Promise of the computer rpg world. definitely not necessarily the computer rpg, its not really reactive enough for that...but when i first found out about skyrim as a Young Child, the promise that was made that intoxicated me was that i was going to enter an entire world, believable and living, which was my playground but that existed apart from me. currently i do think the Open World is probably best served by less traditional games...eastshade, lil gator game, even death stranding use their spaces for more Big Expressive Ideas then simply to emulate some kind of Reality thru compromised shorthand. but morrowind nails on the goldest possible version of itself...a small island, culturally and politically dense and self-sufficient but still involved in larger conflicts, extremely diverse in terms of aesthetics but all feeling coherent anyway. u see where they get their food, where those who want to get away from everyone else live, where the centers of local and occupational government are, the slow errosion of any imperial structures the further away you are from seyda neen. and the granular growth of the RPG Journey is equally intoxicating...the emphasis on pure Numbers rather then real-time skill is a roadblock to some, but its the main thing that sells your progression...the way it fundamentally feels to do things is appreciably different at the start and end of the game. the faction quests in particular were a huge highlight for me, very simple moment to moment, but their cumulative effect is way more impactful then anything i can recall from skyrim.

when open world games let me keep playing past the completion of the main quest, my main way to achieve closure before the uninstall is to simply walk all the way back to the starting area, preferably to the place i first took control. i aim to do this without any fast travel or consulting the map if possible. in some games this is more feasible then others, but morrowind is perfect for it. in doing so i passed thru some of the first roads i ever walked thru, the first big city i found, the first imperial outpost i found, the first ancestral tomb i raided before giving up on tomb raiding and becoming religious out of penance, the little town where i met the first memorably weird npc who gave me a quest, and finally the place where i killed my first mudcrab. it was, genuinely, a greatly emotionally pregnant experience. the main quest is great honestly, and i love how it ends framing itself as basically a superhero origin story for your character. but more then anything, it felt like My adventure. my aforementioned religious penance, the time i spent adventuring in the bitter coast and west gash before ever going to balmora, the way i slowly clawed my way up to the top of house redornan (which started full of hostile ashlanders and ended with me having a mansion and every guard fawning over me), the way i stumbled into a levitation artifact about halfway through my playthrough that i used up till the end of the game, the way being the nerevarine caused a crisis of faith which had me embracing my new self but still holding onto my temple beliefs stubbornly, and the way that the ordinators that were supposed to be killing me for being a heretic ended up mostly killing me for stealing their sacred armor. i dont think any other of this Kind of rpg has given me these kinds of memories, not even my beloved new vegas. wealth beyond measure indeed.