We’d tucked into a dark room at The Witcher 3's Australian distibutor and watched, hands to ourselves, three CD Projekt beards play through 30 minutes of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Occasionally they’d say something redundant, like “This guy here, he is a big bad guy.” They had travelled all the way from Poland for this. It was so underwhelming, and I felt for them. Token questions were asked, token answers were given, and it was such a shame because where they are from and how it has informed The Witcher series to date – and especially The Witcher 3, by the mythical looks of its many titular hunts – is anything but token. It is fascinating, and it is unfamiliar.
The former is always desirable, the latter particularly so in video games. The two powerhouses of video game narrative cuisine – the US and Japan – have served up so many dishes over the decades they are starting to overflavour them. Our taste buds are dead. Even a modern military FPS made by Swedes can’t go five, 10 minutes without a hearty dose of F--- Yeah America. JRPGs now compared to JRPGs then (you know when) are a stark comparison between squealing fan-service and reality too abstract to say what it means. In the West, there must be black and white struggle with ultimate glory at the end. In the Far East, there must be nebulous grey subtext with maybe something happening at the end, not sure. We get it by now. When these two worlds collide we also get a complete mess like Final Fantasy XIII, but in the East of Europe, it is the art of cope and the reaches of a landscape that will never be fully explored or understood that come together.
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