Ni No Kuni: The Wrath of the White Witch

 I have a constant desire to explore and seek adventure in my life, and while I prefer to do so in the natural world, that is not always a tangible option. As a result, video games have created an amazing opportunity for escape and exploration in my life. A game that has significantly impacted me is Ni No Kuni: The Wrath of the White Witch. The game itself is absolutely stunning and follows a young boy, Oliver, through his adventures in an expansive, fantastical world. However, the real moments that make the game so special are the ones that immerse you beyond just being aesthetically pleasing. One particular moment occurred a few weeks ago. I had spent a while travelling around the map, and I came upon a rock with writing on it on a random island that I was on. The writing was not in any real language, so I found myself perplexed. There was no tutorial, no explanation to figure out what it was or how to decipher it, just a rock. I was annoyed, but I was in the middle of another quest at the time, so I simply continued. Later, the quest required me to read out of the full, in-game book, which has information on the world. It is an actual, 300 page book that the player can read every page of if they so choose. I was reading through the book and found myself interested, so I started flipping through pages. Eventually, I found a page that had a full alphabet in another language in it and the key to decipher said language. I thought about the rock and flew back to it as fast as I could, and sure enough, they were the same language. The rock was a tombstone for an adventurer in the world. No secret item, no hidden area, just a guy who had died. Prior to this moment, I would not have considered any of my experiences with video games “beautiful”. I could have easily gone through the entire game never deciphering, remembering, or even finding that island with that rock. I found it using the tools offered to me that I was not obligated to take. It reminded me of why games and the people that make them are so unique: they give us other worlds, not only to be these amazing, god-like fighters or wizards, but to explore as well.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Does an Artist Capture? - Jacob Hamilton

  What does the artist capture in his artwork? This question has  emerged  in class on multiple occasions. If  a painter paints an image of  a  chair, what is captured in that  image? One might naively respond that the artist has captured the chair . This answer implies that the artist has tried through his art to produce a duplicate of a chair. If this is the artist’s end, then the artist  is in pursuit  of a frivolous end. To recreate or reproduce a chair via the medium of painting will only produce  a highly deficient chair. One cannot  sit on a chair that has been painted  and it  is  therefore  a very bad  chair.  Therefore, it is  highly  dubious to  maintain  that the artist’s job is to produce duplicates of things .    T he question   remain s , w hen an artist paints a chair ,  what is he trying to capture?   When we engage with objects in the world,...
Read more

John Dewey- Meservey

John Dewey talks about poetry and music and how it is intertwined with human life. The aesthetic journey refers to the way in which art is experienced. Poetry as art is meant to carry one forward in life. Experience is an individual thing. We can all look at the same artwork or read the same story and come out the other end with different interpretations and feelings about it. It is inescapable and an intrinsic part of our lives. Art and experiencing art is essential to our being. 
Read more

Pilgrimage - Julia Allen

 I had for so long in my life misunderstood the true meaning of a pilgrim, and I loved how the reading and discussion in class re-framed what a pilgrim is. Someone who is focused on the experience of their journey rather than an end goal is the broadest definition of pilgrim that I can take away from this. I had only thought of pilgrims as either religious pilgrims or the image of the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, but what a pilgrim really is is someone on a spiritual journey of some kind. In class, we discussed Chris McCandless was a pilgrim going on a journey that people really misunderstood. He separated himself from society and left to find himself, and people struggle to understand actions like this that they see as reckless or dangerous. Pilgrims are liminal, the cease to be productive in society and remove themselves from it in order to connect with nature/god, and in a productivity focused society like ours it is hard to appreciate these people and their pursuit of higher self...
Read more