Sometimes I think Segovia would have seen this guy play and been like, "How on earth did you do that, Willy?" www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRgU...
06.03.2026 02:24
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Sometimes I think Segovia would have seen this guy play and been like, "How on earth did you do that, Willy?" www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRgU...
FF5
People kill too many ideas, IMO. When testing reveals problems, a small change often has a huge impact, and saves a feature. Just gotta fix it based on player feedback, and re-test.
That said, testing early will absolutely save you from making the same mistake 100 times before you have to fix.
1) Pre-production (most indies don't do nearly enough)
2) Content tool creation (get those pipelines flowing!)
3) Playtesting. Don't wait for the end to test. Test segments of the game along the way!
If you're struggling to get playtests and feedback, however, you should take your game to some local cons, or even one bigger con like PAX or MAGFest. You can watch hundreds of players over their shoulder, and then ask them what they think, point-blank. There's nothing better.
Though (intentionally) un-glamorous, this is the most accurate video about indie game dev I've seen in the past 10 years. www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCSc...
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He has exactly one post lmao. Classic.
"The laws of physics mean nothing!
The universe is in peril!"
As such, one should approach the essay with a healthy critical distance, because you can learn a lot about the construction of 3rd Republic French identity through iconography. But you might be misled about how game development or the JRPG genre function.
My point about the piece, at a high level, is that it over-fits an ideology to a videogame without engaging with the practical or generic considerations of videogames. This is something that happened a lot between '10-'15, but mostly ended (in English) by 2016 or 17.
from the genre itself. Does that mean they're not conservative? Not necessarily. It's just a much more complicated than a small group of creatives deciding (consciously or unconsciously) to reconstruct French identity in a way that suits themselves. It's also a game.
My objections are two: (1) All of the creative decisions for this game were done being made in 2021, or 2022 at the latest. That's just how preproduction works. You can't make a JRPG without having the vision locked in. (2) Many of the things that are portrayed as conservative were inherited...
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be ashamed of, that I would need to externalize it. "What if your favorite media property was actually fascist" became a weary trope a decade ago. Since then, writing about games, even leftist writing, has engaged with the games themselves more, and for the better.
This, too, I wouldn't know about and don't contest. My concerns are all about the foundational form and tropes of JRPGs not really being a consideration, and game dev realities not being accounted for. Ex33 might be extremely conservative, but it's also born from a genre.
Yeah I have no comment on all the historical iconographic stuff. I wouldn't know. I'm out of my depth. It seems very interesting.
I probably don't need to belabor any of these points, I'm not sure they'll help anything. The upshot of my too-brusque original tweet is "JRPG enthusiasts should approach this video with critical distance." The author herself says that critical distance is important, and often lacking. She's right.
The trope "there is always a Japan" is a big deal in JRPGs. And the version of Japan is almost always a conservative representation of Kyoto from at least 50 years ago. So is it strange that Ex33 does the same thing? Is that purely subconscious racism, or is Lumiere a bit like Wutai?
Just for example, why does the hulking gothic warrior in Valkyrie Profile eat at a noodle shop? Is Japan racist? Or do those tropes anchor a game in which competing mythologies threaten to unravel the way the narrative works?
But there is a lot in the DNA of Ex33 which is derived from its writer, an American woman, and its genre, a profoundly inward-looking Japanese cultural product. Those facts should result in an admission of some imprecision in leftist critique of the game, and unanswered questions.
a particular preexisting ideology is stretched to fit like a glove onto a piece of art that probably wasn't made with that ideology in mind. Can we learn about the iconography of Ex33 from the history of French culture? Absolutely. Is there a lot to say about unintentional use of those tropes? Sure.
In short, almost everything that is presented as a firm fact is much more ambiguous and nuanced, and most things that are presented as ambiguous have a much more factual basis that goes unexamined. This is exactly the kind of lens you should bring to a highly motivated criticism in which...
Is the pidgin dialect of the non-human characters necessarily (if unintentionally) an imperialist trope? Maybe, but the script was written by an English speaker, for whom that dialect is a fantasy world commonplace and generally not considered racist. Does that get a mention? It does not.
Is Midgar an unalloyed vision of America? No, you and I have both lived in Japan and know very well that Midgar has far more in common with 60s and 70s Tokyo than the noir New York City that was put forward in a marketing interview in 1997.
All JRPGs have safe towns and hostile worlds. These arguments continue to pile up while ignoring existing criticism and genre conventions. We learn a lot about French history and its cultural tropes, but almost everything said about a JRPG is much more speculative than the tone suggests.
Indeed, there are many powerful ambiguities or rushed implications that make the argument seem more persuasive than the facts support. Her argument that there is a clear (if unintentional) meaning to town being safe and the outside world being dangerous ignores the first convention of JRPGs.
I don't speak French so I can't address the original intent. But in the English translation of the argument, the juxtaposition of the Trumpist right-shift and the game's release is left ambiguous in a way that would make Barthes jump up and down, banging on a copper pot.
Sure, that's plausible. I think EX33 has ALL kinds of narrative problems. But perhaps the explanations given in the video are 1) unaware of the vast field of games criticism, 2) presented as gospel truths even as they ignore JRPG conventions. Nothing makes me pucker like ignoring JRPG conventions.
I could have phrased my critique better. My point was that this seems like the effort of someone whose expertise lies elsewhere, but who has the time to talk, at length, outside of their expertise.
Moreover, it displays a 2012ish humanities-scholar unfamiliarity with the process of making games. (I was guilty of this too, in that era.)
E.g., the video says the game reflects Trump era rightward shifts, but the game had to be 99% complete before the US election, because of its release date.
