please post your fav video game forests here. i would really like to see them. i like forests IRL as well but when i’m hiking through a nice one with my wife i often make the joke “this is just like in a video game lol”
to me a good VG forest is all about the visual and music combo. some of my favs (all PSX, whoops) are:
Shingo Forest from Star Ocean 2 (damb this game has good music. so much reverb)
Any forest from Suikoden II. They are all soundtracked with just chirping birds but turns out there’s no separate sound file of that available. Guess it’s just me who would listen to that lol
Not a super interesting answer, but I love the Lost Woods in A Link to the Past. The way the fog clears after you get the Master Sword and then you get those patches of sunlight filtering through the leaves, that always stuck with me.
Also the initial Lost Woods theme from before you dispel the fog is one of my favorite Zelda tunes and I kind of wish it got remixed more in the other games
Dreamcast Phantasy Star Online. :P I don’t just think it’s a nice forest, but it’s one of my favorite 3D environments. They made an environment laid out like a simple walled maze look and feel like a larger environment. Something teeming with wild life lurking in the bushes. It’s charming.
Speaking of real life hiking wrt to this topic that the White Orchard section from the beginning of the witcher 3 was surprisingly atmospheric and true to life, and reminded me of the beech-maple forests in the upper midwest where I’ve done a good amount of backpacking. In fact I was disappointed when the game moved to more dramatic “fantasy fiction” terrain.
I loved the forests in Dragon’s Dogma especially at nighttime when monsters leaped at you from the darkness while you hold out a torch. Classically tense.
@MegaSigil I love Lost Woods in LttP too of course. The Threads of Fate tune is good. I was checkin out the composer but looks like he’s out of the industry
@sosadillatron I wanted to play PSO so badly. It always seemed hopelessly unattainable to 16 year old me
@yeso yeah I also noticed that watching a playthrough of Witcher 3. Most VG forests seem to be based on temperate rainforests in Japan or the American PNW (where I live)
@copySave I see this is for Switch now, I wanna check it out
@whatsarobot Always count on Mitsuda to drop a nice forest theme
my last experience of this area was watching someone do a randomizer run of the game and Artorius spawned here. You could hear him rage-stomping around well before he actually appeared lol
I remember The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (which I had to look thru my Steam library just now to find the name of - I wanted badly to call it What Remains of Edith Finch lol) taking place in a pretty well-realized forest environment. In fact, that’s kind of all I remember about the game!
For more stylized forests, two games I played recently, A Short Hike and Lonely Mountains: Downhill (another game whose name I needed to look up - I tend to refer to it as Bike Game) both capture the forest feeling well.
@tombo well, I doubt you were trying to get it but you got it. I find the history of the people who developed it (whose name escapes me ATM) very interesting
@Moon It’s pretty crazy that you asked this trivia question, because just yesterday, I was looking at your avatar and for the first time, realized, “Those ain’t no regular deer!” Very cool.
