I'm glad to hear you enjoyed MARDEK chapter 3! I remember back when MARDEK 3 came out, you seemed really burned out from developing it, maybe that soured your perspective on the game until now? It seems like you never really replayed the third chapter and defined MARDEK mostly by its much more amateurish first and second chapters, which led to you having a much lower opinion of the series than others who mostly remember its third chapter. Hence the frustrating disconnect between fans and creator, I'm glad you're finally seeing what other people saw in MARDEK 3!
It is kinda striking how in many ways MARDEK 3 already started laying foundations for themes you'd explore in your later games. There's definitely a lot more introspection, overarching themes, morally complex antagonists and character arcs and whatnot going on in the third chapter than those preceding them! Qualna's arc especially is one that really feels like something you'd make these days, and also a part of the game most people find compelling.
Which makes it interesting to think you admitted Clavis was a rather late addition to the game! Ever since you told me that, it struck me how indeed Clavis feels like he was tacked on to the game in a sense, appearing in areas clearly not designated to be used for cutscenes. Figuratively but also quite literally an alien to the world, forcing himself into the plot to try in vain to make Rohoph see reason and dissuade him from fanaticism. Funny how it all works out to craft such a compelling narrative!
Having two trilogies is interesting, no doubt you already have much of the second trilogy planned out by re-purposing elements from taming Dreams. Exciting, that! I also am glad to see you're considering addressing the whole cataclysm thing as well as a pre-cataclysmic look at the setting! I've always wondered what the Elarna were like...
The concept of two trilogies is also really interesting in how they can cross-reference and further enhance each other. Events in one game can carry totally new implications if another game reveals more bits of underlying information about them. Perhaps the elemental magic of the ROHOPH trilogy really is just sentimancy as it existed during Belief, but following the 600 years that passed it stopped to be recognized and such and perhaps grew more violent due to the influence of Miasma and being used in a conflict-riddled society.
I've just finished playing the fourth and final campaign in the Shovel Knight series, which takes place before the other three, and it was full of references to the other three games in the series, and it was really satisfying to see how it fills in small lingering questions from the older campaigns, fleshes out their characters and motivations in interesting ways and has a lot of satisfying and interesting call-forwards. That's one of the big advantages of staggered releases instead of making one big release!
One thing you mention is the whole violence thing in the ROHOPH trilogy. While in MARDEK the combat was violent, most of the opponents were just mere Miasma, so you weren't exactly killing any sentient beings for most of the game. It's only really when fighting bandits, Droma and boss battles that the party's really inflicting violence on sentient beings, and the recurring bosses just get smacked around rather then being killed outright. (The game even jokes about this with Meraeador's Flamethrower, where he argues he's just torching Miasma even though you can also use it against random bandits and whatnot.)
I think you can avoid a lot of the moral quandaries by just making Miasma enemies dissipate when defeated but having human opponents surrender/get knocked out/flee. Games like Earthbound and Mother 3 are rather violent too, but common animals and people are just 'returned to their senses' rather than exploding or turning to ash like robots or zombies do. The games would be rather grim if they didn't have distinct defeat text for different sorts of enemies!
2
Tobias 1104~4Y
I think this is the first time that I'd really played Chapter 3. While developing it, I had to go over each bit so many times that I never really experienced it as a whole, and nothing was new or surprising to me as a result. It's strange then that considering how much time I did spend on it, I remembered it so poorly compared to the other two chapters, which did become what I based the series on in my mind.
I remember saying fairly recently that Taming Dreams' writing is something I'd be happy to show off even now, but I was embarrassed about MARDEK's. While playing through the end bits, especially the finale with Qualna, I thought "wow, I'd be happy to show THIS off now too!"
Maybe I've talked about this before, but from what I remember, the original ending to Chapter 3 had Sslen'ck get possessed by several elemental crystals and turn into some Super Saiyan-like POWERED UP form that you had to fight, for reasons I forget. It was stupid! And the game would have left far less of an impression had I stuck with that.
But it bothered me that you spend most of the chapters gathering these elemental crystals, but don't even use them for anything in the end. It's because of how it was constructed, adding the deeper stuff on at the end when most of it had already been made. So I'll be keeping that in mind for the remake, writing a story that doesn't feel quite so pointless.
I tried to (re-)design the Elarna the other day, but I'm still not sure what they look like! The plan so far is to set Belief 3 in their petal (since that's where the Cataclysm occurs), and I think I've come up with something that could work well. I wonder how many years it'd be before I can actually make that though!
Miasma's always been described as a sort of 'residue' left over from creation, so I'm wondering whether it's something that only comes into the world following the Cataclysm. Before that, the gods would be present to make sure everything's all working fine and everyone's safe, but the Cataclysm causes such a scar to the world that the miasma is sort of like 'blood' that flows from it. Or something. It's kind of like there's some spillage from the dreamrealm. The "elemancy" (or whatever I call it) would rely on this too, so that's not present in the time of the gods. I think the skills in Belief might just be called 'social skills' or something similar rather than sentimancy.
I've been giving a lot of thought to how the violence will be managed! I'm imagining the miasmal nature of miasmon becoming clearer by, for example, bleeding out black-purple 'blood' when struck, which floats up rather than spills on the floor, and they'd dissolve into black clouds when defeated rather than falling on the floor dead.
Were there any human enemies that you killed in MARDEK other than the bandits? In this (and in the plan for Taming Dreams), Muriance (called Murias in this, for this six letters) is a cult leader of the 'Mornlight Sect', which teaches that everyone's stuck in a miserable dream of pain and suffering, and that they need to 'wake up' to true reality, which is bliss. Death is a wake-up call, salvation from a nightmare, a key that unlocks the prison. So if you were to kill those, they might actually *thank* you for doing so. That's a more interesting idea than 'some bandits', I think, especially since it ties into the dream themes that would likely feature heavily, as they did towards the end of MARDEK with the dreamrealm etc.
It is kinda striking how in many ways MARDEK 3 already started laying foundations for themes you'd explore in your later games. There's definitely a lot more introspection, overarching themes, morally complex antagonists and character arcs and whatnot going on in the third chapter than those preceding them! Qualna's arc especially is one that really feels like something you'd make these days, and also a part of the game most people find compelling.
Which makes it interesting to think you admitted Clavis was a rather late addition to the game! Ever since you told me that, it struck me how indeed Clavis feels like he was tacked on to the game in a sense, appearing in areas clearly not designated to be used for cutscenes. Figuratively but also quite literally an alien to the world, forcing himself into the plot to try in vain to make Rohoph see reason and dissuade him from fanaticism. Funny how it all works out to craft such a compelling narrative!
Having two trilogies is interesting, no doubt you already have much of the second trilogy planned out by re-purposing elements from taming Dreams. Exciting, that! I also am glad to see you're considering addressing the whole cataclysm thing as well as a pre-cataclysmic look at the setting! I've always wondered what the Elarna were like...
The concept of two trilogies is also really interesting in how they can cross-reference and further enhance each other. Events in one game can carry totally new implications if another game reveals more bits of underlying information about them. Perhaps the elemental magic of the ROHOPH trilogy really is just sentimancy as it existed during Belief, but following the 600 years that passed it stopped to be recognized and such and perhaps grew more violent due to the influence of Miasma and being used in a conflict-riddled society.
I've just finished playing the fourth and final campaign in the Shovel Knight series, which takes place before the other three, and it was full of references to the other three games in the series, and it was really satisfying to see how it fills in small lingering questions from the older campaigns, fleshes out their characters and motivations in interesting ways and has a lot of satisfying and interesting call-forwards. That's one of the big advantages of staggered releases instead of making one big release!
One thing you mention is the whole violence thing in the ROHOPH trilogy. While in MARDEK the combat was violent, most of the opponents were just mere Miasma, so you weren't exactly killing any sentient beings for most of the game. It's only really when fighting bandits, Droma and boss battles that the party's really inflicting violence on sentient beings, and the recurring bosses just get smacked around rather then being killed outright. (The game even jokes about this with Meraeador's Flamethrower, where he argues he's just torching Miasma even though you can also use it against random bandits and whatnot.)
I think you can avoid a lot of the moral quandaries by just making Miasma enemies dissipate when defeated but having human opponents surrender/get knocked out/flee. Games like Earthbound and Mother 3 are rather violent too, but common animals and people are just 'returned to their senses' rather than exploding or turning to ash like robots or zombies do. The games would be rather grim if they didn't have distinct defeat text for different sorts of enemies!
I remember saying fairly recently that Taming Dreams' writing is something I'd be happy to show off even now, but I was embarrassed about MARDEK's. While playing through the end bits, especially the finale with Qualna, I thought "wow, I'd be happy to show THIS off now too!"
Maybe I've talked about this before, but from what I remember, the original ending to Chapter 3 had Sslen'ck get possessed by several elemental crystals and turn into some Super Saiyan-like POWERED UP form that you had to fight, for reasons I forget. It was stupid! And the game would have left far less of an impression had I stuck with that.
But it bothered me that you spend most of the chapters gathering these elemental crystals, but don't even use them for anything in the end. It's because of how it was constructed, adding the deeper stuff on at the end when most of it had already been made. So I'll be keeping that in mind for the remake, writing a story that doesn't feel quite so pointless.
I tried to (re-)design the Elarna the other day, but I'm still not sure what they look like! The plan so far is to set Belief 3 in their petal (since that's where the Cataclysm occurs), and I think I've come up with something that could work well. I wonder how many years it'd be before I can actually make that though!
Miasma's always been described as a sort of 'residue' left over from creation, so I'm wondering whether it's something that only comes into the world following the Cataclysm. Before that, the gods would be present to make sure everything's all working fine and everyone's safe, but the Cataclysm causes such a scar to the world that the miasma is sort of like 'blood' that flows from it. Or something. It's kind of like there's some spillage from the dreamrealm. The "elemancy" (or whatever I call it) would rely on this too, so that's not present in the time of the gods. I think the skills in Belief might just be called 'social skills' or something similar rather than sentimancy.
I've been giving a lot of thought to how the violence will be managed! I'm imagining the miasmal nature of miasmon becoming clearer by, for example, bleeding out black-purple 'blood' when struck, which floats up rather than spills on the floor, and they'd dissolve into black clouds when defeated rather than falling on the floor dead.
Were there any human enemies that you killed in MARDEK other than the bandits? In this (and in the plan for Taming Dreams), Muriance (called Murias in this, for this six letters) is a cult leader of the 'Mornlight Sect', which teaches that everyone's stuck in a miserable dream of pain and suffering, and that they need to 'wake up' to true reality, which is bliss. Death is a wake-up call, salvation from a nightmare, a key that unlocks the prison. So if you were to kill those, they might actually *thank* you for doing so. That's a more interesting idea than 'some bandits', I think, especially since it ties into the dream themes that would likely feature heavily, as they did towards the end of MARDEK with the dreamrealm etc.