#gepetto

“His cold steel fingers… they tremble in fear.”

Holiday card trade with @veilnebuula 🎄💞

GEPETTO 2, GEPETTO 1, 1999 Margi Geerlinks, b. 1970

One of the reasons I really didn't care for Elden Ring is because it might have a trendy open world, but that world is so shallow and lacking in depth and nuance and complex characters. And the reason I bounced off Shadow of the Erdtree hardcore is because it was just that but...more. No one was more complexly explored then a few mysterious lines and some lore scrawled in an item description box. That isn't storytelling. It's barely even a vibe.

But Lies of P and now especially Overture man. The way Lea's central conflict is built up and so heavily explored and the way the story treats her with respect and agency, the way the depths and complexities of Gepetto's various crimes are shown, the way Carlo's death so tangibly impacts the other characters and the entirety of the story while they can barely bring themselves to speak about it, and how that mirrors P's direct impact on the story through his actions and the way everything revolves around the same core philosophical questions, tying back into those central themes of person hood, grief, technology, and humanity.

All of it has an emotional resonance that you can't get when your entire game is just. Vibes. Fromsoft has been substituting vibes for having something meaningful to say for years and getting away with it under the auspices of 'that's just how Souls games are'.