#item design

I find Pokemon's pokedex entries to be a fun, engaging, harmless example of this.

Maybe in extreme cases knowing 1 Pokemon's dex entry will add an extra layer of depth/motivation to 1 character usually in a spin-off, but otherwise they're just fun trivia flavor text to share with friends at the playground.

The actual story of the game you play through has little to nothing to do with any of them. The interesting parts of the stories themselves are just the parts you play through. You typically shouldn't leave a Pokemon game with questions like "but what the fuck was any of that from start to finish and why?" because you didn't find & read every scattered page of a novella in a game ultimately about strategic combat, even if exploration is a factor to help prepare you for the next battle.

Extra bonus points for the fact that generally, every single Pokemon has to be captured by you in gameplay in order to unlock their dex entries. Pokedex entries are all equivalent in relevance. Some Pokemon are easier to catch than others, but they still require some level of engagement with the same fundamental mechanics.

In contrast, further along the spectrum~ Genshin Impact. (Instead of talking about the game known for menu lore out of spite)

Genshin is a game where the interesting parts of the story happened off-screen and before you started playing. But you'd only be barely aware of that just by playing the actual game part of the game.

Genshin does actually have a sort of equivalent to pokedex entries; that being, when you get a new character (typically from overpriced (more than $0) gacha gambling with real money) and upgrade them, you unlock paragraphs of backstory lore and first-person voice lines of the character and their interests. This serves a similar function as pokedex entries, "you put in the work to get 'em, here's some extra info to endear you more to them".

Setting aside difference in presentation, "you befriended this bird via the game mechanics. Here's some bird-things it does" VS "you spent equivalent to $400 on this anime man because he's hot/meta and Limited Time Buy Now. Here's some reasons to actually care about him. Hope you do!"

Often times the devs try to be sneaky and DO actually lock very plot-important details behind these $400 walls of text. But only sometimes. Your $400 might carry less narrative relevance than someone else's $400 spent on a different anime boy. This isn't a "Weedle VS Mewtwo" situation where the stronger & more important one is more likely to have more important information. It's genuinely scattered. But that's only about the characters.

Genshin does also contain many, many, many items, weapons, books, armor and the like, obtainable through exploration and gameplay, each with menu descriptions of varying levels of reality-shattering lore implications. But some can also just be a bird's egg. An egg from a bird. You can cook it and eat it.

I already take issue with the confusing strategy of writing a story full of interesting happenings, but you only play through a part generally AFTER all the cool stuff already happened, and it's NOT framed as a goal of archeology to "uncover the lost history of what happened here", it's just history that none of the present characters will ever care about, assuming ever directly acknowledge it.

Nor is it wholly a Xeno Series situation of "interesting things did happen in off-screen history, but what you're playing is the point where all the dominoes finally fall at once". Genshin tries to connect some of its lore to present events but it just misses the mark. Sadly explaining how would require getting into actual specifics but I've been avoiding that because it doesn't matter to my actual point and would be too easy to get bogged down by.

it leads to this feeling of haunting dramatic irony where everyone is just bumbling about their day to day with their first-world problems as they unknowingly walk on the corpse the biggest elephant to ever exist in one room, which is only privy to the audience, forever frustratingly unable to get anyone to address it.

But something that annoys me somehow possibly more is the game design element of not all lore dumps being created equal. An item's menu description's potential for lore capacity has seemingly next to nothing to do with how easy/expensive an item is to obtain.

If the game has successfully tricked you into caring about reading all its bloated nonsensical poetry that hates telling you exactly what means what, this incentivizes you (/lore heads) to go full Completionist and hunt down every single collectable item indiscriminately to a near neurotic extent.

Easy to find, useless items could be super important, or not, and the same applies to hard to acquire, meta items. One of the best character's best weapons is a fucking metal pipe which takes like weeks of farming to get. Its lore is "this is a metal pipe someone ripped out of a group of metal pipes. It's really cathartic to hit things with".

I suppose that's in line with the game's gambling preferences, and I don't doubt it's possible to make a game that really drives in that feeling of small appreciation of the world and "any little thing could have a lot to teach you" but that's not what Genshin is. Instead it takes the would-be excitement of finding a new group of paragraphs to read from your inventory, and Averages Down the value of every single one.

I think that's all I care to say about Genshin on this topic.

I want a 3rd example just to round this out but I keep doing this thing where my brain runs out of steam to fully complete these huge infodumps faster than I can type them into being. So I'll be short.

Kirby is cool. You know how modern Kirby games started doing that thing where if you're fighting a boss, the default pause screen will be replaced by some sometimes cryptic, usually concise lore about the boss in question? I think that's cool. They almost never help you actually fight the boss any easier in the heat of it, and piecing together the lore descriptions can indeed reveal greater depths to the story play through, but there still IS a story to play through even without the full context. "Kirby is kinda like the Xeno series in that regard', they said without a shred of sarcasm. Maybe in a best case scenario, keeping a close eye on the hidden lore will actually help you be smart enough to predict the upcoming narrative direction the series is going in. That's pretty cool! Because unlike so many others cases of menu lore, Kirby actually bothers to take the lore implications it raises, and then actually explore/flesh them out later. You get ANSWERS to your QUESTIONS. Unheard of!

The opposite of THAT spectrum on this I-guess-now-it's-a-2-axis-diagram would I guess be the majority of Mascot Horror games which are Oops All Lore Implications, Never Any Clear Or Satisfying Answers Ever

Mystery Box writing and all that

ok there I'm done