Jedi Fallen Order Part 17: Return to Dathomir. Again.

By Shamus Posted Thursday Dec 17, 2020

Filed under: Retrospectives 86 comments

New lightsaber in hand, Cal leaves behind the frozen world of Ilum, the dumb Jedi obstacle course, and the collectible items that nobody wants to collect because this place sucks. We’re on our way back to Dathomir. 

This is our fourth attempt at getting into this silly temple: 

1) The gap is too big, give up and leave. 

2) A trap drops you to the bottom of the world and you fight a dragon-bat to get out. 

3) The vision that makes Cal break his lightsaber.

Just like the last time we were here, we need to meditate to progress. The door is otherwise impassible.

Space Ghost

Put that thing away, you're gonna get us all killed!
Put that thing away, you're gonna get us all killed!

When Cal meditates, he again has to face his former master Jaro Tapal. This is the moment where Cal has to get over his survivor’s guilt by realizing that he doesn’t bear the blame for Tapal’s death. 

It’s normally hard to depict internal struggles like this, but in Star Wars we can use the Force as a storytelling mechanism to make the internal struggle an external one. Instead of having our main character talk about his feelings with someone else, we can create this apparition of Jaro Tapal to serve as a literal embodiment of Cal’s guilt. Cal can talk directly to his inner demons, confront them, and overcome them. In this exchange Cal calmly rejects Tapal’s accusations and refuses to fight. The Tapal apparition attempts to attack Cal, but it doesn’t really have any power to hurt him. It never did. All it could do is guilt Cal into hurting himself. This was literal in their previous exchange when Cal broke his lightsaber, and figurative in the sense that this guilt has weighed on Cal for the last 5 years and prevented him from reaching his true potential.

This is fantastic. It’s a solid idea, expressed in a compelling way, that’s consonant with Star Wars loreIt’s even consonant with Traditional Star Wars!, that works in the context of a video game, and is beautifully written and performed. It gives us both spectacleLightsaber confrontations are always exciting, even if the participants aren’t actively swinging their swords around. and emotional at the same time, which is something that – at least for me – Star Wars hasn’t accomplished since 1983. 

My only gripe is that it took us way too long to get here. Cal felt like a stock Normal Guy protagonist for almost half the game. And even once his problems surfaced, it took awhile for the conflict to become interesting. The first few chapters of the game focused on the Cere / Trilla conflict, and that wasn’t nearly as powerful for me because of all of my nitpicks with the author’s interpretation of the Dark Side. (And also because that conflict doesn’t really involve our protagonist.) 

Once Cal has made peace with his ghosts, he finally enters the temple.

Merrin

So... I realize lightsabers are fun and everything but... I'm gonna need that back.
So... I realize lightsabers are fun and everything but... I'm gonna need that back.

Merrin teleports in and Cal introduces himself properly this time. He’s being a little less arrogant and entitled now. That’s good. It shows character growth. He’s made peace with his past, and now he’s stopped thinking with his lightsaber.

He even hands his weapon over as a sign of goodwill. They talk about their individual damage and trauma from the last 5 years. Once they’ve bonded a little, she returns the weapon. Cal is actually acting like a Traditional Star Wars Jedi instead of a nu Star Wars Jedi in this scene. I really dig it. I just wish the story had made it clear that his earlier behavior wasn’t okay. 

This story has been ignoring Cal’s outrageous body count for the purposes of gameplay, and I assumed we were supposed to ignore his confrontational posture with the Dathomir locals for the same reason. This is a problem that isn’t really an issue for moviemakers, but is a constant challenge for game designers. 

The Line Between Story and Gameplay

To walk through this tunnel it looks like I have to murder three more people who live here. I'm the good guy, which means they have no right to stop me from invading their home.
To walk through this tunnel it looks like I have to murder three more people who live here. I'm the good guy, which means they have no right to stop me from invading their home.

There are some things – like cutscenes – that are explicitly part of the story, and some elements to the experience that are obviously NOT supposed to be taken literally. Things like save points, the inventory grid, or the hero magically healing gunshot wounds by crouching behind chest-high walls are all gameplay abstractions that we don’t include as part of the “story”. If Nathan Drake pushes through the mercenaries in the jungle and reunites with his friends, and if one of those friends asks him if he’s hurt, he’s not going to reply, “I was shot fifty-three times, but it wore off and I’m fine now.” To go on this adventure, we need to compartmentalize a bit or the whole thing flies apart.

I’m not really complaining that the game suffers from the dreaded Ludonarrative Dissonance. It’s not that gameplay and story are in direct conflict, it’s just that in a complex and story-heavy game it’s not always clear which bits we’re supposed to believe and which bits we’re supposed to ignore for the purposes of gameplay.

I had figured Cal was acting like a jerk on his first visit to Dathomir because the game designer wanted us to have dudes to fight here, so they contrived this conflict. I wasn’t trusting the storyteller. I figured Cal’s behavior was pretty normal for a Nu Star Wars Jedi, so I didn’t think this was setting up a character arc. 

I think you could have fixed this if the story had openly acknowledged his error. When he got back to  the ship, perhaps Cere could have attempted to correct him, and he could have rebuffed her. Then we’d understand his behavior was demonstrating a clear need for character growth and not just an excuse to dump mooks in our path.

Once Cal and Merrin have become friends, Cal finally gets around to explaining that he’s here to save childrenAgain, it’s been at least five years so a lot of those children are tweens or teens now. from the Empire. He could have avoided doing a lot of murders if he said so sooner, but whatever.

Once the chat is over, Cal heads inside. I thought we were here to get an Astrum, but apparently we’ve decided to confront Malicos. 

Malicos

Look, I'm sorry I can't join your creepy Jedi cult academy right now. I already have a full-time job and I doubt I can afford the tuition.
Look, I'm sorry I can't join your creepy Jedi cult academy right now. I already have a full-time job and I doubt I can afford the tuition.

Malicos sees Cal, and assumes the kid is here for training. Malicos has the idea to replace the Jedi Order with something new. It’s not completely clear what this new order would look like, but like all would-be dictators Malicos probably assumes he can figure out these “small details” once he has absolute power over everyone around him. He dreams of building a Grand New Thing, but it’s a safe guess that his new order would turn into a death cult of backstabbing and infighting. My read on it is that he’s trying to create a Sith-style theocracy without the Sith-style order. If the Empire represents space fascism, then Malicos is going for “basic despotism, but with lightsabers instead of guns.” Maybe I’m reading it wrong (Malicos seems a little vague on the details himself) but I think it’s safe to say that his new order would be a heinous disaster even by Jedi standards.

Anyway, Cal isn’t interested. Maybe Malicos doesn’t want Cal to tell other Jedi about what he’s been doing on Dathomir, or maybe he’s just a dick that can’t take “no” for an answer. Anyway, a lightsaber duel ensues.

Let’s Talk About Saber Duels Again

'That was nothing.' Malicos says as I wave my lightsaber through his midsection. The taunts in this game are AWFUL. People make fun of you for 'running away' as they retreat. They repeat themselves endlessly. They mock you even when you're wiping the floor with them. It's all dumb, obvious, dissonant nonsense. Silence would be better than this.
'That was nothing.' Malicos says as I wave my lightsaber through his midsection. The taunts in this game are AWFUL. People make fun of you for 'running away' as they retreat. They repeat themselves endlessly. They mock you even when you're wiping the floor with them. It's all dumb, obvious, dissonant nonsense. Silence would be better than this.

You probably remember that back in part 11 I suggested making these fights less visually ridiculous by having combatants stumble or falter when their opponent has a successful attack rather than showing them surviving dozens of full-body lightsaber slashes. That’s a nice first step, but we could do a lot more if we wanted to be ambitious.

One of my gripes with SWJFO is the lock-on system. In a group fight, I just don’t see the point of using lock-on. When you lock on to a foe, you’re telling the game to make your character always face one particular enemy. That’s not super-helpful when you’ve got three people in front of you. I’d much rather do the Batman thing and push the stick in the direction I want to block / attack, since manually switching targets is slow and fiddlyTo change targets you need to flick the analog stick to the side and then allow it to return to center. It’s slow, it feels terrible, and I found it sort of dodgy and unreliable in a hectic fight.

The one place where lock-in is useful is a one-on-one duel. So it’s really obnoxious that the lock-on system is effectively broken during boss fights. 

The small orange dot in the middle of Malicos' body means I'm locked on to him.
The small orange dot in the middle of Malicos' body means I'm locked on to him.

When you lock-on to an enemy, the game highlights them with a tiny dot to show which foe you’re currently focused on. The thing is, if the two of you get too far away then the lock is silently cleared. The bosses in this game have a lot of big moves where they leap backwards and then launch themselves at you. This breaks lock-on. So what happens is they leap back, launch at me, I parry, they land a little to the right of me, and then I swing at the empty air in front of me because I was expecting the game to keep me facing the right way. So then I fuss with the camera to get them in the middle of the screen so I can lock on again. I take another swing now that I’m facing the right way, but the moment of opportunity is gone and I need to wait until my foe overextends themselves again. You end up fighting the controls instead of the boss. 

This is silly. This is a boss fight. You have one adversary. You can’t run away. There’s nothing in the environment that requires our attention and no secondary foes to worry about. There is literally no reason for me to ever want to look anywhere else. Even ignoring the needs of the player, there’s no reason to have the villain fly off-screen. Basic cinematic rules dictate that we should keep the camera in a spot that’s useful for the audience.

Now, we could fix this by just keeping the camera lock during boss fights regardless of distance. That’s certainly what the developers ought to have done. But let me propose something a little more ambitious as a solution. Take a look at this image:

There's no reason a videogame couldn't offer a camera angle like this during a duel.
There's no reason a videogame couldn't offer a camera angle like this during a duel.

In the movies, a lot of lightsaber fights end up looking like that. It’s a cool camera angle that shows both of our combatants. It’s dramatic to have the frame split between these two opposing forces and it lets the audience get the best view of all that awesome choreography that everyone put so much work into.

This view gives the set designer the freedom to create a good backdrop for our fight. They can have the combatants backlit to create a duel of silhouettes. They can leave the background dark / muted and shine a light on the characters to keep our attention focused on the people rather than the scenery. They can leave everything dark so each character is illuminated by their own lightsaber, thus underscoring their allegiance / personality.

But in video games we’re stuck with this over-the-shoulder view where the most valuable screen real estate is spent on our protagonist’s back. The protagonist blocks our view of the adversary, and the camera swings around to create a lot of motion blur and confusion without giving us any deliberate dramatic framing. 

The duels in this movie were forgettable because I didn't care about the characters, but at least they put the camera in the right place.
The duels in this movie were forgettable because I didn't care about the characters, but at least they put the camera in the right place.

I don’t see why we can’t have the more cinematic framing in a video game. In fact, Virtua Fighter did this exact thing way back in 1993, and it worked really well. Assuming you’re on the left side of the screen, you press right to close distance and left to back away. Pressing up will have you walk away from the camera and down has you walk towards it. The camera can respond to keep the fight in profile, thus rotating around the fight as needed. As a bonus, that rotation looks like a slick and stylish cinematic choice rather than the brute-force mechanical movement we get from an over-the-shoulder view.

There’s nothing about this setup that would be incompatible with the established mechanics. Block, parry, dodge, leap, and attack would all work exactly as before. The movement controls are all screen-relative, which is effortless for the player to adjust to. The player wouldn’t need to worry about babysitting the camera during the fight. We could even do some subtle things with the camera to heighten the tension during the fight. When things are tense we can have the camera dolly in so our combatants fill the frame. When we want a break in the fight, the bad guy can retreat and the camera can transition to a more wide-angle view. This would put the characters against our awesome background while the two sides trade verbal jabs. If we’re going to shove movies into our video games, then we might as well make full use of the language of cinema.

 

Footnotes:

[1] It’s even consonant with Traditional Star Wars!

[2] Lightsaber confrontations are always exciting, even if the participants aren’t actively swinging their swords around.

[3] Again, it’s been at least five years so a lot of those children are tweens or teens now.

[4] To change targets you need to flick the analog stick to the side and then allow it to return to center. It’s slow, it feels terrible, and I found it sort of dodgy and unreliable in a hectic fight.



From The Archives:
 

86 thoughts on “Jedi Fallen Order Part 17: Return to Dathomir. Again.

  1. MerryWeathers says:

    Gotta admit, all this recent discussion about Star Wars as a whole on this site makes Jedi: Fallen Order boring in comparison. Can this retrospective maybe transition into one about the KOTOR games or possibly even The Mandalorian, pretty please Shamus?

    1. Henson says:

      I must admit, a retrospective on KOTOR 2 would give us all a lot of material to talk about. That game is a mess, but what an interesting mess.

      1. John says:

        I could have sworn we just had that argument during the recent movie discussion.

  2. Joe says:

    You didn’t like the Death Star duel? That’s a good one. In fact, I’ve never actually seen a bad lightsabre duel. But anyway, that’s the one where Rey almost goes dark, then stabs Ren. Then heals him and runs away. It’s the catalyst for his turn to the light, which might be my favourite scene in the movie. There’s plenty of wonky stuff in TROS, but not that. Okay, my favourite fight in the movie is the shifting locations one earlier.

    By the way, your autocorrect is misbehaving. It should be consistent, not consonant.

    1. MerryWeathers says:

      In fact, I’ve never actually seen a bad lightsabre duel.

      A lot of people say the lightsaber fights in the PT were one of it’s few redeeming qualities but I personally thought all of them, with the exception of Maul vs Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon because that one actually felt properly choreographed, sucked ass.

      Most of the lightsaber fights in that trilogy was just a lot of swinging and backflipping, on the latter, I noticed on rewatch that a lot of characters tend to just randomly backflip in the middle of a lightsaber fight, even when it feels like an out of character for them to do so like Dooku. It all felt excessive, especially with Anakin and Obi-Wan’s duel which sucked out all the emotion from being too over the top.

      I think this is why I enjoy the OT and ST duels more, because they’re more grounded and you can even see some character in the way they fight in those movies.

      1. Henson says:

        I contend that the Anakin/Dooku saber duel from Attack of the Clones is one of the worst. It’s not a fight, it’s a light show.

        1. Sabrdance (Matthew H) says:

          I distinctly remember how awesome it was in the theater when Anakin grabs Obi-wan’s lightsaber, and then cuts the power cable -and it was all so cool.

          Then I watched it a second time and I was like -hold on, why is he cutting the power cable? Does he know he’s on camera?

          1. Henson says:

            “This movie ends…now!”

        2. BlueHorus says:

          The Anakin/Dooku saber duel from Attack of the Clones is one of the worst. It’s not a fight, it’s a light sho.

          [UNRELATED GIF]

          1. BlueHorus says:

            Bah, Anakin vs Dooku? So that GIF is unrelated.
            Still, whenever I think of the Prequel trilogy’s lightsaber fights, it always comes to mind…

      2. Joshua says:

        I find those fights to be ridiculously showy, and filled with moves that would get them killed if their fights were real. It’s also somewhat ironic that when attacking each other with swords that would cut through each other like butter, they put so much force in their swings instead of focusing on wrist movements.

        1. Chris says:

          lightsabers are solid against other lightsabers, so heavy swings might still be relevant to beat down on someone’s guard.

      3. jurgenaut says:

        Yeah, PT duels are not fights to the death where everyone fears for their life and limbs and tries to end it as fast as possible. They are more like… 2 (or 3) man flashmobs suddenly meeting up where each participant is cheerfully moving through their own personal kata to make it look like a trained dance routine.

        It’s like watching 40 year olds doing capoeira or slacklining. You can tell the combatants are doing it just to look cool, but they don’t understand it looks fake and lame.

      4. ElementalAlchemist says:

        It all felt excessive

        I think there’s a Youtube channel that points out all the places the combatants would have died in lightsaber duels if it was a real fight. The TL:DR is that saber duels should almost always be like classic samurai duels, over in one or two strokes. I guess to give Lucas some credit, he did kind of do this a few times in the prequels, albeit only when it came to minor characters. Although really that was more just to clear the stage for the main actors to wave their glow sticks at each other for 10 minutes.

      5. Vernal_ancient says:

        I mostly agree, except that the one bit of Obi-wan and Anakin’s fight where they fought down a narrow corridor while their lightsabers threw sparks from the walls with every slash is probably my single favorite visual in any lightsaber fight. Just for a moment, that fight suddenly felt extremely grounded and lethal in a way that the prequels otherwise never really managed

    2. Shamus says:

      In this case, consonant means “in agreement or harmony with”. It’s the opposite of “dissonant”.

    3. Parkhorse says:

      Yeah, but that Death Star duel in TROS leads to Kylo being forgiven by… his hallucination of Han? Han couldn’t have left a force ghost, which means it was in Kylo’s head, which means he functionally forgave himself for killing his father, and that lead to him turning light. Which was really dumb, and (for me) made the duel retroactively worse. I know it’s coming, so I can’t ignore it.

      A lot of the prequel trilogy lightsaber duels have a choreography issue of people deliberately swinging in ways that will miss their opponents, that gets impossible to unsee. Like, yes, it’s a film, and swinging for near misses, or in a way that lets the other actor dodge or block, that’s expected. That’s how you continue to have actors. But when your point of aim is very obviously a foot above the other guy’s head, and he never had to dodge or block (or probably backflip, because prequel trilogy)? It feels like the stage fighting in a high school production of West Side Story, just with more spiny glowsticks. I just find it really hard to ignore and that makes most of them pretty unenjoyable.

      1. Joe says:

        Or, it was Leia manifesting as Han. Or who knows. The Force is vast and mysterious. I won’t say everyone has to like it, but I do.

      2. John says:

        I prefer the system that you see in old movies like The Adventures of Robin Hood, where Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone are each mostly swinging at the other guy’s sword. It’s not good fencing form, nor is it the way that people with those kinds of swords would have actually fought, but it looks cool and has real, obvious physical weight behind it.

        1. Joshua says:

          Flynning, for those who don’t know.

        2. Syal says:

          Something I started wondering recently; do the lightsaber props have actual extensions on them, or are they just the handles and all the clashes are mimed in open air?

          1. Thomas says:

            I don’t know if that’s the same for every film, but I believe in the original trilogy they were mirrored rods. I heard they were very fragile which is why they swing them so gingerly, but that could easily be urban legend.

            Googling it now, it looks like the modern films using a slightly more sophisticated of the glowing lights in a plastic tube that they sell in shops.

            EDIT: In my research I was reminded of one of my favourite PT facts, which is Ewan McGregor kept making the buzzing noises when swinging his lightsaber around and had to stop himself.

            1. BlueHorus says:

              In my research I was reminded of one of my favourite PT facts, which is Ewan McGregor kept making the buzzing noises when swinging his lightsaber around and had to stop himself.

              It’s what I’d do…

            2. CrushU says:

              They had to keep reshooting the Obi-wan vs Darth Maul at the end because the actors kept clashing hard enough to bend the rods.

        3. Ofermod says:

          My understanding is that Rathbone was a legitimately good fencer, and it was unfortunate that he tended to be cast as the villain (and therefore always having to lose). Tyrone Power was also supposedly pretty good, which would explain why their final duel in The Mark of Zorro was fantastic.

          Errol Flynn, on the other hand… not so much.

      3. Zekiel says:

        This was about the only thing that I forgave RotS for, because it was obvious they wanted it to be a projection of Leia forgiving Kylo, but couldn’t because of Carrie Fisher’s sad death.

  3. Dreadjaws says:

    It gives us both spectacle and emotional at the same time, which is something that – at least for me – Star Wars hasn’t accomplished since 1983.

    I don’t get it. I thought you watched The Mandalorian.

    I don’t see why we can’t have the more cinematic framing in a video game. In fact, Virtua Fighter did this exact thing way back in 1993, and it worked really well.

    Well, fighting games are in general more “cinematic” due to the camera position and the flashy moves that tend to play with it. I remember the PS1 Spawn game was a third person game when you moved around that changed into a fighting game whenever you encountered an enemy. It wasn’t a particularly good game, but I always wished more games had tried that system.

    1. MerryWeathers says:

      I don’t get it. I thought you watched The Mandalorian.

      I don’t think The Mandalorian has had a real emotional moment so far, there are a few heartwarming scenes with Grogu that isn’t just him being cute but there hasn’t been one that was really moving or poignant which is a shame, because Din and Grogu’s relationship should feel like the perfect setup for these kinds of moments.

      1. pseudonym says:

        I agree. I also think too much screen time is wasted om “cool fights” and “badass moments”. I think protagonist badasses are a wrong fit for star wars. Im the OT and the PT killing is a bad thing, that evil characters do. That is why the main mook in the PT is droids. Killing of humanoids is never glorified.

        Compare that with the Mandalorian, well… I find the killing of stormtroopers like flies quite off-putting and not very star wars. Compare it to the OT where most imperial officers are killed on-screen by… Darth Vader. Who was from the dark side. Or in the PT where Anakin’s killing foreshadows his fall to the dark side.

        1. Syal says:

          The OT had no problem killing Stormtroopers in the Death Star or on Endor. (And of course, Han Shot First.)

          The PT was Lucas becoming older and more concerned about showing violence to the kids*. (Hence, Greedo shoots first now.) But they still mow down clone troopers in RotS.

          *(sort of. There’s an awful lot of decapitating hands in the Prequels.)

          1. pseudonym says:

            In the OT they don’t seek to kill stormtroopers.Most times they are running away and defending themselves. On endor it is a fight, but at some point they capture their objective and do not kill the remaining troops.

            In the mandalorian season 2 ep, 6 the stormtroopers are killed to the last man. Even the ones who flee and are no longer a threat. And it is filmed in a way as to suggest this is “cool” and “badass”. The tone here is significantly different from how the OT handles stormtroopers.

        2. Joe Informatico says:

          (Caveat: I haven’t watched Mandalorian Season 2 yet.) I was okay with Mando wasting dozens of stormtroopers, but I remember finding the S1 episode where he kills a couple of the Jawas who stripped his ship for parts pretty off-putting. And then 5 minutes later it’s all a big misunderstanding and they give him a ride despite the smoking corpses of their cousins on the sand, which made it even more unsettling. I can like a dark and gritty anti-hero as much as the next guy, but usually they’re dishing out punishment to scum who are worse than they are. I find it harder to empathize with a character who would kill someone just for stealing the tires off their car.

          1. pseudonym says:

            In Mando’s defense: he thought they destroyed his ship, and this ship was has livelihood. He only later learns that it was merely disassembled. So I can understand his initial reaction.

            However I don’t understand either why the Jawas would want to deal with him after he disintegrated a few of them.

            The same goes for the stormtroopers in season 2 ep 6 who try to capture some people alive even after half their unit was slaughtered. This later turns out to be temporary plot armor so the outnumbered persons can be saved and the storm troopers get slaughtered to the last man. Plot armor so more badass moments can be shown, very lengthy action scenes during which the story does not progress. I hope they tone down this “cult of the badass” thing next season. (If there is going to be one.)

    2. Shamus says:

      “I don’t get it. I thought you watched The Mandalorian.”

      Oh. I guess I was unclear, but I was thinking specifically about the movies. Also, this series was written before Season 2 started.

  4. John says:

    Oh, Shamus, you get so many points for referencing Virtua Fighter rather than, say, Tekken.

    I miss Virtua Fighter. It’s the game that persuaded me that there might well be something to this 3D business after all. Unfortunately, the only version available for download today, as far as I know, is the Genesis de-make on Steam. To get the real deal you have to go on eBay and acquire something called a “boxed copy” that comes with a mysterious object known as a “disk”. I’m not sure what that’s all about.

    1. Lars says:

      Play one of the Yakuza games. Virtua Fighter 1, 2 and 5 can be played in the SEGA arcades there. Plus games like Outrun and other SEGA classics.

      1. John says:

        Really? Damn. I’ve always regarded the Yakuza games with a kind of horror, but now . . .

        1. Syal says:

          The various Yakuza games have various arcade games. If you’re specifically looking for Virtua Fighter make sure to get the right one.

          1. John says:

            Thanks. I appreciate the link. I did notice while looking at Steam earlier that some of the Yakuza games are set before Virtua Fighter was released, and so I figured that Virtua Fighter wasn’t in all of them. You’ve saved me quite a bit of trouble working out the details for myself.

            Now, if only I could get over my Yakuza aversion. Which of the Yakuza games would you say is the shortest?

            1. Syal says:

              I’ve only played 0 and 1 Kiwami, my knowledge ends here. I assume the earlier ones are shorter, but have nothing to back that up.

              My understanding is that apart from 0, Kiwami/1 and Like A Dragon, they’re all sequential and will contain spoilers for earlier games. And LAD is a turn-based RPG.

            2. CloverMan-88 says:

              Length shouldn’t be a concern if you just want to play Virtua Fighter, you should have access to open world arcades as soon as you are allowed to free-roam, which should take a couple of hours tops, less if you skip cutscenes.

              1. John says:

                Cool, glad to hear it. I was afraid that it would take longer to unlock arcades in a longer game.

                1. Syal says:

                  Kiwami 2 reaches the Virtua Fighter arcade in… I’ve got 45 minutes on Steam and possibly half that was faffing about in the kitchen. But the first 2/3 of that are massive spoilers for Kiwami 1.

  5. Thomas says:

    I’m very much in agreement on being more innovative with the camera angles for boss fights. This is another thing Hideo Kojima experiments with that very few developers do. Nier proves that you can mess with the camera _a lot_ and still keep the gameplay coherent.

    Developers in still undersell the spectacle they can create in boss fights (and a lot of level design). Actions film set boss fights in halls of mirrors, or under strobe lights, or in silhouette or the pouring rain, or in fog, or as the scenery is getting destroyed around them. You see a couple of games make attempts at things like this, but it could go so much further.

    Hopefully with the new generation and the ease of use for fog and lighting effects, we’ll get some more ambitious attempts to style up boss fights.

    1. beleester says:

      It’s really only camera changes that aren’t common. Pretty much every other atmospheric and lighting trick that you mention is something I’ve seen before. Metal Gear Rising alone has at least three of those, but it still restricts the dramatic camera angles to phase changes and quick-time events.

      (“Hall of Mirrors” is the only one I’ve never seen at all, probably because mirrors are really expensive to render convincingly. But Deus Ex: Human Revolution had you fight Namir in a hall of mannequins that look like him, which had a similar effect.)

      I’d say it less to do with hardware capability and more to do with it being harder to design. Even if your controls are camera-relative, moving the camera suddenly could lead to annoying surprises that you might not want in a fast-paced action game. What if the camera changes angles while the player is moving, and they start running (or attacking) in the wrong direction? What if you bring the camera in close for a dramatic clash of swords, but the player chooses that moment to run away and heal? What if the “dramatic camera” is obscured by scenery, or pushed into a wall? (Imagine the Darth Vader screenshot had the participants one foot to the right – Vader’s actions would be mostly hidden by that railing.)

      All these issues can be handled with more testing and design work, of course, but it’s a more complicated problem than just filling the arena with fog.

    2. RamblePak64 says:

      It throws me off that you reference Hideo Kojima but then bring up a Yoko Taro game.

      1. Thomas says:

        Yes, not a mistake but a clumsy construction anyhow.

    3. MarWes says:

      There’s a scene in Arkham Origins where Batman lands on a balcony full of mooks, and for a brief moment during the beginning of the ensuing fistfight, the camera switches to that of an actual camera mounted on a news helicopter, broadcasting one of the first in-universe public sightings of the Batman while Vicki Vale narrates how he is on his way towards becoming a hero and a household name. It is somewhat disorienting at first, and doesn’t last for very long, but I remember enjoying it very much, it felt very cinematic.

      1. Benjamin Hilton says:

        That really was a great moment. There’s also a mini boss fight in God of War 2 that is pure silhouettes shot from the side. It’s really week from a mechanical standpoint since your essentially fighting in 2-D but visually and narratively it’s one of the parts of the game that has stuck with me the longest.

    4. Abnaxis says:

      The first game that came to my mind when reading the bit about camera angles was Nier as well.

      But let’s not forget the REAL cinematic Star Wars experience: REBEL ASSAULT 2!

      ((holy shit, I actually finished that game when it came out. What was wrong with young-me!?))

      1. John says:

        They made a sequel to that? Goodness. I played a bit of the first Rebel Assault at a friend’s house not long after it was released. It was a very nice-looking game, but I remember being distinctly underwhelmed. I didn’t know what a “rail shooter” was in those days, but even then it was obvious to me that I didn’t care for rails.

  6. Mephane says:

    This story has been ignoring Cal’s outrageous body count for the purposes of gameplay, and I assumed we were supposed to ignore his confrontational posture with the Dathomir locals for the same reason. This is a problem that isn’t really an issue for moviemakers, but is a constant challenge for game designers.

    This problem and the dissonance that usually results from it is actually very common in (super)hero and vigilante stories, movies and TV shows included. Even those that outright vow to never kill, e.g. Batman, send mooks to the ER by the dozen (spoiler: if someone is totally knocked out, they probably need medical attention asap), and those who don’t categorically refuse to kill suddenly will be like “it is wrong to kill this mass-murdering psychopath” when they had no qualms whatsoever about mowing down a hundred henchmen on the way to the confrontation with the villain, and let them live, sometimes even go free.

    When you lock-on to an enemy, the game highlights them with a tiny dot to show which foe you’re currently focused on. The thing is, if the two of you get too far away then the lock is silently cleared. The bosses in this game have a lot of big moves where they leap backwards and then launch themselves at you. This breaks lock-on. So what happens is they leap back, launch at me, I parry, they land a little to the right of me, and then I swing at the empty air in front of me because I was expecting the game to keep me facing the right way. So then I fuss with the camera to get them in the middle of the screen so I can lock on again. I take another swing now that I’m facing the right way, but the moment of opportunity is gone and I need to wait until my foe overextends themselves again. You end up fighting the controls instead of the boss.

    It appears you play with a controller. I can say with keyboard and mouse I had no issue with this, manually turning towards him was quick and easy, the loss of lock-on just a slight annoyance that I completely forgot until you mentioned it here.

    1. Asdasd says:

      Reminds me of my ‘non-lethal’ playthrough of Mirror’s Edge. Listen, I can’t be held responsible if the guy I just knocked out happens to fall off the scaffolding surrounding this 40-story high-rise. If anyone bears that guilt, it’s the developer who implemented ragdoll physics in this game.

      1. Benjamin Hilton says:

        There’s one specific mook in that game perched right in front of a glass window like 30 stories up, and I’m convinced the developers put him there to test the conviction of non-lethal players, because if anyone was ever asking for a dropkick it’s that guy.

    2. Liessa says:

      Just for once I’d like to see one of those “thou shalt not kill” heroes confronted with the reality of what their ‘non-lethal’ attacks meant for the victim – long-term brain damage, months in hospital, PTSD etc. From what I understand, there are very few ways to knock someone out that don’t carry at least a serious risk of permanent damage, and the risk increases massively if they’re out for more than a few seconds.

  7. Fizban says:

    Having bosses break lock-on is pretty standard, and I generally don’t mind it as long as it’s a minority of them. This creates another contrast between normal enemies, who can’t escape your vigilant gaze, and jumpy flashy back-stabby bosses, who can- and then once you’ve seen the move a few times you’ve learned it and pivot/dodge/etc as required. Often the big post lock-break attack is slow with little tracking and comes from directly behind you, so dodging is just a matter of not freezing up.

    Of course, that’s not what’s here- that sounds like just sloppy “didn’t bother playtesting” stuff.

    What confuses me is how they’ve managed to botch switching targets against multiple foes. I’ve never had a problem with the speed of it in DS, just a quick nudge on the right stick (where your right thumb ought to always be, because attack is on the bumper and camera control is important).

  8. Geebs says:

    The business of breaking lock-on with distance is just another direct lift from Soulsborniro. Like a lot of the mechanics in Jedi: Fallen Over, it’s irritating because the gameplay is overall a lot looser. When the bosses in FromSoft games break lock-on, it’s usually because they were designed to – which is still irritating, but in a more satisfying way.

    1. Addie says:

      I’m thinking about the Lost Sinner in particular – you fight her in the dark, and she’s got quite a few jump-about moves which specifically break lock-on. You can do a ‘side-quest’ to light up her arena, or if you’re using a one-handed weapon, then you can carry a torch in your off-hand, and then you keep lock-on on her for the whole fight. Not really necessary in the first cycle, but in NG+ and above, she gets a couple of bonus mooks for the fight as well, and then it’s really really helpful to be able to keep track of everyone.

  9. MelTorefas says:

    Interesting take on the cinematic camera. I find myself on the opposite side; I tend to HATE when games change the camera and movement rules for one fight to try and make it feel more cinematic. I actually just ran into this in Genshin Impact, when fighting Stormterror (big ol dragon). After the initial section where you fly around shooting energy blasts (which is super annoying for its own reasons, because that is not a thing you can do anywhere else), you get a sort of fixed-camera scene where you can only move side-to-side. I found it completely disorienting and incredibly frustrating to suddenly not have the camera behind my character and not be able to move it normally.

    The duel camera you were describing sounds like it might be a BIT better, but I still don’t think I would like it at all. I have zero interest in a game trying to make my gameplay more cinematic; I just want to play the dang game.

    1. Steve C says:

      Yeah I’m with MelTorefas. I don’t like it either. The only times I like it is when it is for comedy purposes (think Monkey Island) or when it is a dramatic effect that is dramatically different from existing game play. Otherwise I hate it. Most of the time it is just an excuse to insert especially egregious quicktime events too. A generally bad idea, but not a universally bad one. For example I would hate and resent Shamus’ suggestion if it during a boss fight like Malicos. Though if was used in a fight with Jaro Tapal where there is a completely different game play goal than normal then I *might* appreciate it.

      I can think of two good examples of doing it right and wrong from the same game and even the same quest– Warframe’s Second Dream. In it you carry someone and the controls change. This works exceptionally well for a slow rescue walk. It’s amazing how well it works actually. It’s all drama. Then later you have to fight a boss with these controls with a very unclear objective. It is terrible. It is so bad it wrecks the previous amazing job they did.

      Going with a dramatic camera angle is generally a terrible idea. Yes it can work very well. Generally it is both overdone and awful.

    2. Bubble181 says:

      Same. Suddenly changing movement direction, camera angle, etc for a boss fight is just as annoying as suddenly changing mechanics.

  10. The duels in this movie were forgettable because I didn’t care about the characters, but at least they put the camera in the right place.

    This is one of the most annoying things for me about Star Wars, and a lot of other modern movies. They’ve got acting, direction, special effects, lighting, location, logistics, animation, set building, choreography, all these other things that range from “passable” (which I mean non-sarcastically, truly “passable”) up through to “excellent” (Star Wars special effects, for instance)… and then they load down this hundred-million-dollar production beast on the back of writers and/or directors-acting-as-writers who are just manifestly incapable of handling it.

    It’s the work of hundreds, or even low-thousands of people, because one or two people literally don’t understand the stuff taught in the first class of filmwriting school. (Or, if you prefer, don’t demonstrate that knowledge with the scripts on the screen.) Even if you do all the basics right, it doesn’t guarantee you’re going to be graced by that special spark of life, but with so many basic errors in modern scripts, they sure aren’t walking into that casino with a lot of chips.

    And I feel bad for those thousands of people who did such good work.

    (Video game stories certainly have similar problems, but since there’s also gameplay in between all those cutscenes, bad writers can still do disproportionate damage but it’s much harder for them to ruin the entire experience singlehandedly the way a movie can be ruined.)

    1. Rho says:

      Not that I’m going to rehash the previous discussions, but it’s obvious that Disney rushed to get movies out the door. In consequence, they ignored their own Marvel precedent and basically “pulled a DC”. They didn’t have an overall idea of where they were taking things and ended up spinning their wheels. It’s also clear that the scripting phase was rushed on each movie, or in some cases Disney panicked and forced major changes mid-shoot. I’ve criticized the directors broadly, but I have to admit that kind of erratic and unhinged corporate scrutiny could make good work impossible.

    2. Daimbert says:

      I’ve mused before — mostly with respect to horror movies since I watch lots of them specifically to analyze and comment on them — that maybe it IS things like film schools that are causing the problem, because the most common issue I see is that the works seem to know the standard tropes and seem to be trying to make sure they get them in but don’t really understand what they’re used for and what they actually do. In things that’ve been talked about on this site, TFA seems to be trying to hit all of the notes that were hit in ANH, but doesn’t understand what they were used for and what they added to the movie, and so simple ends up putting them in and missing all of the elements that made them interesting. For example, in ANH the Death Star was the constant threat, built up from the beginning and tied into everything (in particular, why Artoo was important). In TFA, it just kinda … exists. That’s not what the droid had information on, and it’s not even the primary target at the end and what was important. It’s there, but not really there. The same thing applies to the droid and the search for him, as what he has isn’t actually important and opens up plot holes, but you have to have the droid chase thing, right?

      Another example is Mass Effect 3, with the kid and with Earth. As Shamus noted, those things are there because kids and our own planet should be things that we can care about, but no work is done to actually make them relevant. Thus, we have the Star Child at the end and the dreams referencing something that we don’t care about, and Shepard looks like an idiot for arguing that the other races should abandon their homeworlds and help Earth because … well, it’s Earth, right? Both of these things CAN be used to generate emotional connection and drama, but only if they’re actually used and set-up, and not just dropped in to generate PATHOS!

      I also think that this also works against subversions a lot of the time, since in order to properly subvert tropes and expectations you have to know what those really are, and a lot of the time the subversions fall flat because they don’t really subvert them and so don’t produce the expected reaction. Arguably, TLJ fails partly because of this because the tropes in many cases — especially in the Poe/Holdo conflict — aren’t set up properly beforehand.

      I can see this following from, at least, basic writing courses focusing on the elements and not enough on how they are developed and fit into the work overall. This may well be a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.

      1. Sleeping Dragon says:

        What OP and you describe is literally my problem with most large Ubisoft games. The production values are good, the gameplay is smooth (perhaps too bloated but the mechanics usually work fine), the environments tend to be between good and fantastic… and then the writing is not just tropes but stale tropes executed so sooo poorly…

        Like, AC2: Ezio has an obvious arc of starting as this angry young man driven by pesonal revenge who grows up to be an assassin who can see the big picture beyond his personal interests. So let’s have him kill templars like a good assassin should through the entire game and then spare the person whom the assassins want dead the most. Watch Dogs: Aiden never stops to consider his own culpability in his niece’s death, or civilians caught in the cross fire of his little vendetta. Far Cry 3… I don’t even.

        And here’s the thing, as TvTropes page is fond of saying “tropes aren’t bad, tropes are tools”, but they need to be executed correctly. They need to be supported by writing, acting, character design. It’s not enough to put in a line of dialogue “you’re a real assassin now” if nothing in the character’s behaviour reflects it, and it seems like whoever is behind these works KNOWS the tropes but doesn’t UNDERSTAND them.

  11. radfordblue says:

    The more cinematic camera angles would be great, particularly in big cinematic conflicts like lightsaber duels.

    The way you describe them reminds me a lot of how Nier: Automata handles its camera. It regularly switches perspectives and angles to match the action and give the player the best possible view of what’s going on. I was surprised by how intuitive the controls felt. The camera would switch from a third-person over-the-shoulder 3D action game to 2D bullet hell standing on a moving train car without skipping a beat, and it was the best part of that game for me.

  12. RamblePak64 says:

    I don’t recall, did the second encounter with Tapal occur purely in cinematics? I recall at some point thinking “Ah, I bet I need to just defend and not strike”, which might have been during the first encounter. At which point I gave up and got offensive when nothing was happening anyway. It’s been over a year so my memory is fuzzy on it, but I recall drawing on my knowledge of Final Fantasy IV. After you become a Paladin you face yourself, and while you can fight offensively, I feel like the in-character trick is to defend while the Dark Knight manifestation of your past whittles their own health away.

    Of course, in an effort to simplify the game for Western audiences less familiar with (J)RPGs at the time, they took away the Dark Knight ability that your reflection uses. It strikes all enemies on screen, but at a cost to your own health. So if you played the game as it was originally designed, you’d more likely figure out that you could defend the whole battle and the reflection would gradually kill themselves. US players, on the other hand, would have no knowledge of this. I don’t recall how I figured out as a kid you could defend, but it seemed incredibly appropriate since you went from a Dark Knight to a Paladin.

    Long story short, I was expecting, or perhaps hoping, for something similar here. I’m assuming that didn’t happen, or you’d have written about it. Such a missed opportunity.

    In regards to the duels going into a side-scrolling view, it’s actually a neat idea that could be used to reduce the amount of combat in the game. Third-person 3D exploration is used for… well, exploration and platforming, but once you’re thrown into combat, switch to a fighting game. Or, since we’re talking about sword-fighting, make it a bit Soul Calibur style.

    However, the game director was formerly the director of God of War 3, so he’s already experienced in making lesser imitations of better games (God of War is lesser than Devil May Cry, and Jedi: Fallen Order is lesser than the Soulsborne, Devil May Cry, and Metroid Prime it takes influence of (I once again recommend Darksiders 3 for a better variant of all three of these, though on console it’s still a bit buggy. Dunno about PC)). So instead of Jedi duels looking like they did in the films, they’re the over-the-top Nu Jedi cranked up to a video game character action extreme. For a game of this speed and pace, the lock-on should stay on. Even when Bloodborne breaks lock-on, as mentioned in a comment above, though, it’s usually a sign to get ready to dodge, and then the boss will often have their own recovery period. Nonetheless, when I think of most bosses from that game in particular, I don’t recall lock-on really breaking. So even one of the games they’re imitating did it better.

    1. Syal says:

      US players, on the other hand, would have no knowledge of this.

      They wouldn’t know the mechanic, but FF4 has a text-over specifically telling you not to attack in that fight.

      1. RamblePak64 says:

        Advising, I believe? It’s been a while so I don’t recall the specific dialogue, and I know if you attack you win anyway. There’s no punishment for doing so.

        1. Syal says:

          Yeah, it won’t stop you, but I believe you get “Paladin, do not fight” (in FF2US translation) every time you swing.

    2. BlueHorus says:

      There’a better example in the fifth game*, where you fight the mimic character. He challenges you to do what he’s doing, and repeats what you do; use your biggest spell and you get it right back. The only way to win is literally do nothing.

      It works – though of course this was back in the Bad Old Days of save points, so how impressed you were depended on how much progress you’d just lost when you die the first time…

      *Wait….is Final Fantasy V the fifth game? I forget.
      Whatever, it’s got a five in the title…

      1. Chad Miller says:

        Wait….is Final Fantasy V the fifth game?

        It’s obviously the fifth in the series, given the “V” in the title. (any other counting method is going to run into issues like the fact that V wasn’t localized in the US at all on its original console, or games that weren’t Final Fantasy games in Japan were renamed with Final Fantasy names in other markets a la Super Mario Brothers 2)

        1. RamblePak64 says:

          Yeah, only IV and VI were released with different numbers, namely II and III, respectively. The original Final Fantasy didn’t release in the US until about the time the original III on Famicom was being launched in Japan, and so rather than localizing II and III for NES in America, Square decided it would be better to release IV on the SNES as a follow-up. Naturally, they thought going from FF to FF4 would be confusing. They skipped Final Fantasy V because they thought it’d be too difficult for Western players. By FF6 they finally decided we Western players could handle the game at its default difficulty.

          Regardless, they decided with the PlayStation to shift to proper numbering. Perhaps it was due to the Internet? Before FFVII released I had played a fan-translation of Final Fantasy V on emulator, and information regarding the franchise was circulating more widely.

          Regardless, the numbering is technically only confusing for two of the titles, and you basically just multiply/divide by two in order to get each region’s number.

          1. Chad Miller says:

            Yeah, apart from the renumbering and skipping, there’s also stuff like Final Fantasy Adventure, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, and some early SaGa games which weren’t Final Fantasy games in Japan but were renamed Final Fantasy Legend in the US.

      2. Syal says:

        You can win that fight by fighting, too. If you try, he’s basically another superboss.

        Also fun is that whole area has a time limit, so doing nothing for 100 seconds is stressful, especially if you don’t already know how the fight goes.

  13. Xeorm says:

    For a modern example, Nier: Automata plays a lot with the camera for fights and it really does do a good job of making the fights feel even more climactic.

  14. Smosh says:

    While I agree that Dark Souls style lock-on systems have massive problems (best shown in Bloodborne with its giant but fast enemies making your camera swing so wildly during lock-on that any directional input you make results in a random direction), I’d argue that going too far with this and trying to turn Dark Souls into Tekken will just lead to depression: Now we’re switching between two game modes, and as is usual, both will needed to be dumbed down so the player can keep up.

    However there’s a middle ground.

    The game that did this best of them all is The Surge 2, a rather underrated entry. It locks your camera to the main body of the enemy, and there’s a secondary limb-based lock-on reticule (which you move with the right analog stick by tapping towards what you want to target), and that’s what your character attacks. This way you can have your view relatively stable (and it does sometimes gently tilt sideways to give a more cinematic view, or do dramatic close-up shots during specific attacks with long animations), while also allowing your character to attack with more precision and not suffer from the enemy-jumps-invert-my-directions-and-I-just-dodged-off-the-cliff-syndrome.

  15. “There are some things – like cutscenes – that are explicitly part of the story, and some elements to the experience that are obviously NOT supposed to be taken literally.”

    One of my favorite parts of DDO is when they’ll play with this expectation deliberately. I’m not sure how well this would work in a completely self-serious game, but you can get A LOT of mileage in a game from silently setting up an expectation of “this is an abstraction, not a real thing” and then deliberately blowing up that expectation later on, particularly if the expectation you’re exploding is some egregious player crutch like, say, the *autosave* or the respawn mechanics.

  16. Falling says:

    “I think you could have fixed this if the story had openly acknowledged his error. ”
    Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson talks about this sort of thing from time to time. Basically, on how certain things are framed makes a world of a difference. First draft, readers hate it. Then the author makes some minor tweaks, framing the issue properly, and readers really like that same sequence.

    Yet those small changes were absolutely necessary to make a giant difference. That sort of stuff bothers me too. If the character is making errors, but the story doesn’t seem to acknowledge them as such, then it makes me think the writer doesn’t have a good handle on viewpoint and characterization. It’s not good if the protagonist’s actions are good simply because they are the protagonist, and therefore the ‘good guy’.

    1. Daimbert says:

      I’ve been pondering this lately on my (rather cold) walks, and I think what’s important about this is intentionality. If the writer notes that Cal’s actions here were wrong, then we believe that the writer intended for them to be seen as wrong so that we can get that arc where he realizes it and resolves things in a more peaceful manner. But if the writer doesn’t, then we start to wonder if the author thinks that Cal’s actions were right there, which impacts how we think about the resolution at the end.

      I’ve been noting this wrt twists. It’s always good for the writer to remind us of the things that suggested that that was the case when revealing the twist, at least the major ones. This not because we’re afraid that the audience is too stupid to notice them, but because it signals to us that, yes, that ambiguity that you probably noticed earlier? Yeah, that was intentional. Lampshading does the same thing: recognizing the potential issue and making it clear that they are somewhat ignoring the issue but that it’s intentional in order to build proper drama. It’s easier for us to trust the writer if we understand what they are actually trying to do.

      1. Syal says:

        But if the writer doesn’t, then we start to wonder if the author thinks that Cal’s actions were right there

        One of the things background music can do quite well. If Cal is wrong but there’s no good way to express that without pausing the story to do so, you could change the background music to be more threatening and dissonant when Cal is talking, to give that “something’s wrong here” feel.

      2. Henson says:

        You’re essentially pointing out the importance of Framing in storytelling. The story is a collection of information, but the audience might not know how it all fits together until the storyteller puts a frame around it, to organize the story and get everyone on the same page. “Look at this part, this is important” “The hero is taking this action, but it’s not a heroic act” “This is a minor detail…well actually now it’s foreshadowing for a major twist, I lied when I said it was minor”

        What’s interesting is when the story and its framing conflict, and the story starts to unravel. Or, alternatively, it creates a story that is enjoyably bad, like “The Room”, enjoyed from a meta perspective.

  17. aradinfinity says:

    I’m reminded of Pokken, which is a fighting game that switches between 2d and 3d in a really cool, cinematic way; in 3d it’s more of the over the shoulder style, but in 2d it switches to proper fighting game, and when you do a certain combination of moves the battle slows for a second while the camera shifts and it feels really good. Something like that could be a lot of fun for the boss fights of a game like this, I think.

  18. Mersadeon says:

    Regarding the lock on: I think this is one of the worse experiences with lock-on I’ve had. Similar as in Bloodborne, there are bosses that have moves that don’t just go out of range of the lock-on but *actively break it* (mostly by throwing stuff at you). This should never, ever happen. You can’t punish a player through the interface like that! It feels terrible! It would be like switching the X and Y button on a controller whenever you dared to look to the right – *you* gave me the ability to lock on, don’t make ME suffer for it!

    1. I generally hate lock-on in games . . . to me, it usually feels like a lazy cheat because they designed a clunky, awkward combat movement system that you can’t control properly, and the only way to repair it is to have a “helper” that forces you to face the “right” way. Except when it doesn’t.

      Also, like a game-driven camera, it seems like systems of this sort make MORE work for the game designers for no significant gain to the gameplay experience.

  19. Christopher says:

    As a lot of comments mention, plenty of action games already do stuff with the camera like that. Earlier today I watched an Ocarina of Time stream, and the camera in the game that popularized(invented?) the system straight up does end up with that kinda side view a lot of the time as you and your opponent circle each other. Actually, isn’t it commonly known trivia that Z-targeting was based on some samurai movie where someone with a kusarigama wrapped a chain around the opponent’s sword so they were literally tied together? I expect the angle they went with for Zelda imitated that scene to a certain extent.

    I don’t think there’s any particular reason these devs went for the camera they did besides that being what the Souls games did.

    I have my preferences, and it depends on the combat system, but I think Star Wars of all things could stand to throw in some scenarios with different cinematic angles. The Souls camera I think works alright for what it is, but Jedi Fallen Order isn’t going for exactly the same thing. They’re making pretty standard AAA cinematic story game content even with the Souls inspiration, so using that for some cool camera staging only makes sense.

    Edit: The Z-targeting was from some ninja show apparently https://www.zeldadungeon.net/wiki/Z-Targeting

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