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The ability square had to made mini opens worlds with so much atmosphere is my favorite thing in retro gaming . Saga regions, racing lagoon micro machines map, front mission 3 cities, bars and false net, ff and their cities, world maps and dungeons....those games have so much content and work in them you could mod another story or a multiplayer mod and still not be tired of them
I'd say it's not that simple sadly. One player might love a game that teaches them a playstyle or genre they have not tried before, and greatly enjoys that after completion they unlock a harder difficulty mode, a sign of their growth. Another player already has all that love and skill from a previous game in the genre. But now they have to slog through hours of low difficulty that does not engage them and they struggle with paying attention, before they can unlock the gameplay they actually wanted to experience. Just one example that shows that fun is subjective and not universal :/
I just could never get immersed with Western wild west story compared to the"spaghetti western"that i used to grew up with,no offense but it a very different tones
Wait, when exactly in gaming did this idea come about that all this details, realism, moviefying games etc equals "immersion"? Because by that logic, every single game in the 3rd and 4th gen had zero immersion. Which is ironic considering those games kept players glued to the screen and offered more escapism than these so-called "immersive" modern tech demos. What exactly does this term "immersion" mean?
Yeah, I don't like movie-style games. I prefer games with dialogs that I can go through manually and read at my own pace. The only exception is Final Fantasy X and XII. Final Fantasy XV has gone way too far in making the game "movie-style." "Movie-style" dialog in XV makes the characters forgettable. I did not care to follow along that much due to my hearing impairment and I might miss some things that people said. I'm also visually impaired as well.
Haven't even watched the video yet but the Phantasy Star IV screenshot in the thumbnail is something that always stuck with me ever since i saw it all those years ago. The feeling of the endless unknown expanse it evoked I feel was almost never realized greater than in that game, even now far in the future where it should be able to be realized even more...
I feel that, I don’t usually like playing games based in reality. The farther a game is from reality the more immersed I can usually get as I play games to see and do cool stuff that I can’t do in real life
Such an interesting idea that I never realized before. The limitations back then definitely brewed our imagination a lot. Going back and playing older games now gives me that same feeling. Especially with things like graphics during an in game cutscene (like the Phantasy Star IV example). I definitely enjoy the imagination side of things.
You the limitationsn broaden our imaginations back then,since i grew up with Nes,Snes PS1,Sega Ps2,lot of make me wish there alot we can do around the game,nowadays the charms might be lost considering there to much games like 3d open worlds,jrpgarounds
Man those PS1 pre-rendered RPG backgrounds are still some of my favorite art in all of gaming. Maybe it’s just nostalgia talking but they’re still beautiful. Also imagination was huge growing up. I was knee deep into Gen 1 Pokémon and so were all of my friends in 98/99. The crazy myths, lore, and fan theories were just amazing. I put probably 100 hours in looking for “Pikablu” around the truck by the SS Anne. The internet was still the Wild West and there were all kinds of rumors out there. They were somewhat believable too since Pokémon already had missingno and the level 100+ rare candy glitch. Good times
RDR2 is not that immersive. I drop it because of it. You can't what you want with npcs, you can't have a relationship with a girl, you can't even sit in a banch or chair (unless it is a bar to drink the scripted beer). Skyrim yes, is a immersive game!
I'm glad your videos are slowly getting more and more views. I love seeing your carefully selected clips of retro games. Channels like your really inspire me to finish off my old SNES/Saturn/PS1, ETA collections, just to see all the unique art style and I 100% agree with you about promotional renders (Super Mario RPG takes the cake for me). Keep it up, just seeing that 3s clip of Mischief Makers makes me want to play that game now, and I remember being fully uninterested in the 90's for that specific game.
I watched the beginning of the video and remembered a funny thing. In my country in the 80s-90s there were almost no licensed games. We bought pirated copies on game cartridges, floppy disks, and then CDs. And they did not come with colorful manuals. Moreover, pirates cut out music, videos and everything "heavy" from such games so that more games could fit on one cartridge or disk. On top of that, most of us had money problems and couldn't afford actual game consoles or powerful PCs, settling for something that was 10 years behind the trends. And when you bought such a hacked game at the city bazaar, where pirates traded - you prayed all the way home that it was the same game that you read about in your favorite game magazine, and that it worked and did not crash. And here I finally come to the main point - those game magazines in our environment worked in the same way you described the influence of game manuals on your childhood imagination. We couldn't afford many of the actual games of the time, so we reread the same reviews over and over again, and our imagination drew practical other worlds. This was aided by very small screenshots printed in poor quality. And often the screenshots were made out to be shots from CG movies, which made our brains explode even more. And our journalists embellished these pictures with incredibly juicy text descriptions. It was fucking magic😊
This is a great distinction to make clear, and I totally agree. The route of Imagination in gaming will always be my preferred way to experience the medium, but it just can’t be as it was before entirely. Also, in the age of the internet where anything can be looked up at anytime as soon as a game releases, the golden age of videogame imagination will never be the same or as explorative as it was in the 90’s and 00’s. However, immersion is still very excellent too, and essentially the natural evolution.
Agree,nowadays most of them got their info from internet,especially the younger generation,to the point the some might become smug and arrogant at it,it bit annoying to be honest,considering longtime player who been playing some series for longest usually get disrespected by them,i remember some of younger player asked and tell me to uses emulator despite i already known about that stuff long time ago. Off topic like whenever i discussing some stuff like older anime,reminded me when they usually goes older anime has 3d and digital working on them too,despite i said it was only used on some scene that hard to animated even back then(like some scene in Char Counterattack movie) What i mean is most nowadays anime is fully digitalized and too clean to invoke certain tones like the sombre feeling,or fluid machination scene,more lively character with much expressive facial features that was mostly present on older anime like Magnetic Roses,Macross,Bubblegum Crisis,Parasite Doll,Vampire Hunter D,the first GITS film,considering most of them usually said anime nowadays is better than older anime back
Yeah,that the reason why i wish some modern game like Kingdom Come,Days Gone would atleast has some open world activities around it,like fishing,making a camp or hideout
Another great video. Personally, i believe immersion works best when you're trying to tell a more realistic story. When we're talking about fantasy, anything goes for me.
Thank you! That’s a great point to make, I do like more realistic styled controls when the game itself is more realistic. For something that’s not based in reality though I just want your classic video gamey elements and fun movement
Great topic to discuss! For me, imagination has always been a necessary component for my enjoyment. A game needs to leave me enough “dream room,” to engage my mind. Old games were great at this, but modern games with minimalist design aspects (i.e. Dark Souls) leave tons of room for the player to dream as well. 🎉
That Breath of Fire 4 opening had me in a chokehold. I always thought that I could find everything that was shown. I went back to those plains so many times. I wish they made a BOF3 or 4 anime
Thanks! And hey I totally get why some people love it so much, it’s extremely impressive what they were able to do with it even if it wasn’t really my cup of tea
I love limitations on world presentation and exploration. If the game is fully open and photorealistic, then you know exactly what you will get. Artstyle and genre can help a bit, not every forest or mountain will look the same, but in general you know what reality looks like and exploring every nook and cranny of this open space becomes boring as you've seen it 100 times already on the way there. Heck you can probably see everything from here, no need to walk over. The limitations of old games instead hold limitless potential. You get screen transitions, you get abstracted pixel or low poly art, everything you see has the potential of receiving a much more detailed presentation if you examine it close enough. That last screen you have not been to in this region... you have NO idea what hides there, you can not see it before it loads. That one cliff ledge that looks like something is hidden there... it might be nothing at all, but you will wonder forever. That one screen that looked nice but did absolutely nothing... It might just be eye candy, but you will think about it while the credits roll, and attempt to unlock its secret. If every pickup in a room is highlighted with floating icons, you don't look at the room, you just go in, press the button and leave. But if you have to go into every corner to check if the game changes the viewing angle or pops open some unique interaction menu, you really observe your environment. Limitation isn't just about imagination, it's very practically affects how you engage with the game, how you behave and play. If you know you don't have the full picture yet, then you put more effort into exploring this leads to getting more out of finding something, even tiny things.
I remember playing Dragon Warrior II for the first time when it was a brand new game on the NES and thinking, "Wow! There are tables, chairs, and beds in the houses now!" But I'd never assumed that the houses in the previous game were empty; I'd just used my imagination to fill in the details. I'm not suggesting we should go back to that, but it was an entirely different experience, and I'm glad I was there for it as a kid.
Post 5th gen also shifted away from more static cameras and i felt these games were worse for it. Like FF7 Remake/Rebirth doesnt sit as well with me with a fully scaled world with player camera control. While FF7 you had visual setpieces that the creators controlled the image you see, and every screen was a well thought out painting. Remake/Rebirth scaled everything 1:10 and the camera is always pulled in so you never get the same pulled out view of the “painting” of a scene. I felt it was way less of an interesting game to look at than the originals despite the huge leap in realistic graphics.
Awesome video! I agree with a lot of your points, and thinking about it older games had more to them because of the "imagination" aspect. In older games we got more unique stories and better fleshed out characters because game devs had to use different means to hook people and "immerse" them. Comparing FF7 to 15, each character in 7 had a home town and a backstory, families to go to, a place they "belonged" to. Now it's all just glossed over or not even mentioned because there has to be a big flashy cutscene to show you the invading imperial army floating above you (doing a whole lot of nothing by the way).
Etrian Odyssey excels at both sides of the coin. Your party members only have static portraits, so it's up to you to fill out their personalities and backstories with your imagination. That goes for dungeon events, too, which are simply described to you in text; you get to figure out how your party members feel about what just went down. On the other hand, filling out the dungeon map by hand really immerses you and gets you feeling like you're the one exploring the dungeon personally, even without realistic or proportional graphics.
I disagree with the title of this video. "Imagination vs Immersion" implies that those two things are separate and that you can't have one without the other. If anything, those two elements go hand in hand. You can't genuinely immerse a player if you can't tickle the immaginative parts of his or her brain. If you can't immerse someone through that, imo, the "immersion" is likely superficial at best.
Fantastic video on a great subject. To this day, I still think Metroid Prime is the most immersive game I’ve ever played. It completely absorbed me. I ten to find immersive sims well, immersive. Deus Ex Mankind Divided and Prey are among the most recent. Too bad it’s a gente with a very small output because the games don’t sell a ton.
I first really noticed this effect graphically when I replayed Sunsoft's Batman on NES. The backgrounds are mostly just black, with patches of color representing dimly lit bricks or whatever. Your mind fills in the blanks and makes it one of my favorite games visually
Thank you, music plays a big role in games to me so I give a lot of importance to it in our videos as well always trying to find fitting tracks for the particular section
Honestly I think it comes down to art direction and game design itself. It's funny you mentioned Star Ocean when talking about getting to screw around in towns cause the first thing I thought of when you said that was Zelda BotW and TotK. You can flout realism and cutting edge graphics all you want, but the moment you take away player agency you're... well, taking them out of the game itself. That's why I think I got way more mileage out of games like the aforementioned Zelda titles and the Xenoblade series than RDR2.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is partially what made me go back to playing those late 90s and early to mid 00s games. It's a great and beautiful game, and you really get out what you put into it. But, there is something to be said of simplicity. I was playing Portal 2 with my son and the engagement of having every room be a puzzle was fun. But, there is repetition in simplicity. Then I want to go back and do my chores for the day before riding into Valentine and partaking in the saloon and seeing what happens...
Thank you for articulating this idea. I've always had a similar thought. Around the PS1-PS2 era they were able to put in just enough detail to suggest fantastic worlds but where restricted enough by the hardware that they never rose to the scope of modern open-world type experiences that often feel somewhat thin despite their richness. It's been a while since there's been a game that gives me as much pleasure to hang out in as El Nido from Chrono Cross, the world from Legend of Dragoon, or Spira from FFX
I think about this all the time! As a kid, playing snes games, I’d look out upon the mountains and cities and wonder which cheat code might allow me to explore those areas… I still remember how mind-blowing it was to be able to explore the inside of buildings in GTA 3. Gaming has come a long way graphically, but in many cases, the emphasis on music and storytelling has suffered. Probably why I’m drawn to games like Chained Echoes.
I can really relate to pretty much everything in this video! Great topic. I love your videos but there's lots of content so I hadn't really reflected on the fact that youtube hasn't suggested your videos (which they always used to) to me for 3 months(!). I see now that I have a handful of vids to catch up on and I'll pause "Zelda's Quest" on this one because I want to see that story unfold chronologically. The lesson for me, however, is crystal clear: Set that bell to "all". Cheers, bros
Btw! VR has been the tech that reignited my passion, wonder and excitement for gaming the past 8 years. My favorite feeling and nr:1 immersion go-to these days is a heavily modded Skyrim VR. I'm THERE! It. Is. Insane.
I would love to go back to an age of imagination in gaming. I do love the balance the 5th & 6th gen hits where depending on the mood you can lean more into one than the other, but as always my dude - great video and great topic. I’m curious- have you ever dropped a game due to either the immersion not going deep enough/ going too far? I can’t finish RDR2 because at some point the immersion ruins it for me and I just want to play something else in my limited gaming time. It actually drove me to start playing more racing and fighting games over the past 2 years since I wanted something more action focused for quick gaming sessions. Been loving MK1 lately and this topic made me reflect on how much even fighting games have evolved over the years.
I would love to explore Ivalice to my hearts content in Final Fantasy XII with no story and no enemies in sight. No loading zones between parts of the environments. I would love to explore Corneria in Star Fox Zero and see all the beautiful waterfalls, but it's a fighting on rails game and is only available for Wii U, which I do not have because I could not afford a Wii U at the time. And I wish I had the first Nintendo Wii, but now I have a Nintendo Switch. I would like to see Square Enix remake the City of Esthar so I can explore the beautiful city in all its glory without having to go through the story of Final Fantasy VIII. I would love to explore the outside of New Jerusalem in The Talos Principle II. And of course, be able to travel between puzzles and New Jerusalem. I would love to explore New Jerusalem during the night. Of course, I can explore New Atlantis in Starfield, but that meant that I had to go through the story so I can dismiss the companion and explore in my own leisure. I would love to explore Atlassian in Final Fantasy XV without having other party members surrounding Noctis and speak their brother troupes. I guess most people don't mind brother troupes, but that's just me. I prefer to explore alone and take a break from having all 3 party members tagging along. The town of Vale in Golden Sun and the Apojii Island in Golden Sun II is awesome, but it would be nice if it's all in 3D. One game that I enjoyed exploring and relaxing is Larapool in Quest 64. What other breathtaking games are out there that are not meant to be explored but is only for combat, puzzles, or both? Of course, there are walking simulator games, but in my opinion, far too many walking simulator games are far too apocolyptic for my liking. Too dystopian. Maybe that's because I'm an utopian kind of guy.
This is one of the reasons why i like games from the dreamcast, or the psp. They hit the nail where the graphics can look really nice, while still leaving enough to the imagination to fill in. Opening a drawer inside Ryo's house in shenmue and seeing a jpeg of spoons shows their ambition and how they had to deal with limitations, it's really charming.
Awesome video! Man even looking at just the thumbnail of that phantasy star picture (and the picture in the bottom part, not sure which game 😅) really made me think. The imagination the games invoked really were a force! I almost think it’s more powerful really but they’re both good. Ff7 remake looks so cool (I haven’t played it, despite being the biggest ff7 fan around, because I don’t have a PlayStation.) so if done right it looks like they can really make it work
Video idea: Forests in RPGs. There's some really beautiful forest settings in Japanese games, often with great accompanying music. FFX's Macalania Woods comes to mind.
The amount of time I spent daydreaming about some little detail on the world map that was just a flourish was crazy. Staring at the maps of legend of mana in the cities was so fun. Walking around on the world maps of final fantasy, breath of fire and chrono trigger especially made me create all sorts of imaginary places that existed in the world we couldn't go to.
Hey, best I can tell, your Intro song "the light is your guide.." is a Johnny hacknslash song (according to shazaam) but the dubbed talking on top doesn't match up with the clip I found elsewhere... So What song is it? I LOVE your intro. I listen to it a few times every episode.
Even though we kind of got an idea what Terra, Locke, Celes, Sabin etc. looked like in Final Fantasy 6 based off of Amano's art (and their 3d renders in the Ps1 version CGI cutscenes and in Dissidia) I still have my own fan fiction sort of design in my mind that I am worried that if Square were to remake FF6, that it would totally ruin my memories of who they were and what they looked like I have plenty other examples with character and world design where I like how they were originally portrayed, and I dont want some modern Unreal Engine 5 adaptation of characters based on a couple sprites or a single pre rendered background. They will just end up 3d modeling objects and areas that weren't in the original in order to pad out the time spent in an area and justify the money being spent, until it reminds me nothing of the original
Imagination: Fire Emblem IV Genealogy of the Holy War (Very dark, with some of the darker acts referenced to) Immersion: Shining in the Holy Ark (I love how enemies appear around the corner, zombies dig themselves out of graves, etc)
I had this friend who scoffed at the notion of playing anything 2D or a jrpg with first-person perspective like a Dragon Quest. So many wonderful experiences that jackass missed out on, and all out of snobbery. I can immerse myself in anything if I can find something in it to get invested in, from a game older than I am like Phantasy Star I to any modern game of today. I feel sorry for anyone who dismisses older, retro games out of graphical fidelity snobbery. It's asinine, really. I don't speak to that person anymore (not for this reason), and I don't miss them.
I think a game that does this balance between immersion and imagination pretty well is Morrowind (Elder Scrolls 3). I think that was mostly because of the time at which it came out. Started the game felt like full immersion; you were literally a nobody who could barely run and swing a sword. However, there’s still a bit of imagination required to fill out the world game is in. The game mechanics also allows you to break physics and become a living God. It was a fun time all around.
My favorite use of imagination bakc then was the player's home in Legend of Mana. There's just so much stuff and small corners in each room that I start to wonder what everything is and where would I put certain stuff of mine if truely lived here. It's so dense, yet cozy all around. I loved it! Also, I've been meaning to say this for a while now, but I think your channel intro is the only channel intro I love to watch each time. The music, the visuals, and even the quotes said over it make it beautiful to watch.
Funnily enough I recently had a conversation about exactly this with my partner. I tried to explain to him why I enjoy playing Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 over things like BG3, Dragon Age, what have you. I am a lot more invested in games that let me fill in the gaps with my own imagination, it gives me more of a sense of "ownership" over the story and the characters, rather than just consuming the fully fleshed out / voice acted / animated in extreme detail / flawlessly executed content that newer games provide.
This is a cool topic. It’s like reading a book or watching the movie counterpart. In a book I build the characters looks and voices, in a movie it’s someone else’s interpretations.
Awesome video, you covered just about everything I could think of about the topic. I see it as immersion is what happens when your mind is tricked into believing in a world that isn't real, and imagination is the gap that is bridged in your mind to make that happen. The manuals, the concept art, the more detailed character portraits, and anything that adds detail is there to stir the imagination, filling in the details that aren't there. I recently started playing Daggerfall for the first time and it's crazy immersive despite the dated graphics and gameplay. A lot of the time I find it more difficult to stay immersed in a game that's more realistic because you don't use your imagination as much. If you're not using your imagination and the game does something that's contrary to reality, immersion is lost.
This is a great take on how graphics should be done. I think games today are focused to much on high end graphics without using more immersion, I think this is why games today are losing there popularity
Honestly the more real the less immersed i get. Its janky to hit an almost life like dragon or person and my blade doesnt cause its body to bend or jerk on impact.
@@GamingBroductions thanks! I had a vague memory of playing it on the N64 but didn't remember the girl, only the spiky hair guy. I'd love to see a video by you guys on the matter, thanks for your inspiring work 🙏
