I played 90% of Order of Ecclesia back in early October and then got busy just before the final boss. Now I‘m fighting it and it’s making me frighteningly aware of the fact that I have never actually beat the boss in a legitimate way (it‘s Dracula, I don’t know why I‘m dancing around the subject). It’s hard! I want to do the combat & platforming trials you unlock about halfway through the last level too but I might just give up after beating Dracula. Back when I first played it I used some cheap glyph + equipment combo which can kill him in five seconds, but playing it the “correct” way is honestly quite a trial. Following this playthrough I maintain that it is the best of the Igavanias.
Also decided on a whim to play Trico again. Something I feel makes it unique (besides the elephant in the room) is the way space is constructed and the way you interact with it:
- ||You make your way through these massive rooms which are massive _for a reason_, but it doesn't feel artificial in that way—it simply feels like a worn out old sacred space you're discovering.||
- ||The telegraphing of what you're supposed to interact with or not is blurrier than in other (big-budget post-6th gen) games. I see the Icos occasionally compared to From games but they really don't feel similar at all to inhabit—Souls games have some weird spaces for sure but they are also full of tight hallways with bowling bumpers (curious how King's Field compares). I enjoy the way that in Trico and SotC (maybe I should call it WatC to uphold my principles) you can climb on a bunch of handholds on walls, vines, etc which don't lead anywhere, they're just there to make the world feel more like an actual place (and to delay your figuring out the solution to a puzzle). Making a game where giant bosses have to have collision detection all over led to some really interesting world design (if that was in fact the line from point A to point B)||
- ||The puzzles occasionally rely on a more "real-world" kind of reasoning (is there a more accurate term for this mode of game-relevant thinking? Something that describes how in Breath of the Wild you have to|| ||cut down that one tree to make a bridge rather than use some prescribed key item on an artificial lock barrier to advance,|| ||or stacking regular old breakable crates to reach a level entrance in Deus Ex or something. Not that there's an exceptional amount of this in Trico, but the fact that you can interact with most surfaces in the world makes it feel more like you're intuiting solutions to more real-world plausible kinds of situations, e.g.|| ||dragging a wagon beneath where light is showing through a grate in the floor, then allowing Trico to catapult you up toward the grate.|| ||I don't know, maybe these are different phenomena since in Trico there is only one solution to a given problem. Still lends the world a sense of verisimilitude somehow.||
- ||The boundaries to the space you're in feel very natural. The space you're walking in is either a priori closed off because there are visible walls around it—it's a room—or else you're crawling across bridges, scaffolding, scaling towers, etc. But ever-present in the background is the rest of the fortress: huge atria, towers and their spires, crumbling pillars, crenellated parapets extended for miles; surrounded at a distance by the walls of the intriguingly bizarre crater valley. You'll see a given architectural feature while exploring one part of the fortress and have no idea whether you'll go there later or not. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't; sometimes you return to an earlier part of the fortress after it's been altered in some way. There's no (obvious) way to tell where the journey will take you.||
On top of that they made ||a real living animal|| and put it in a video game.
(spoiler-tagging everything because I really don't know how many people here played this, I know treefroggy hasn't and I will preserve the frog's innocence darn it)