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It takes a lot of courage for me to even start this subject as I feel it’s very hard for me to do any kind of justice to this series. It’s funny that it has to hide behind a thick layer of the fighting that I so hate but from the start I could tell these games are so much more about the artwork. With each game in the series that I played I was amazed by the architectural & decorative styles, the concepts, even though they were hidden behind the limitations of their respective technology barriers I saw them for the brilliant concepts they are. Wikipedia has an excitingly good article of some of the concepts in the games. A unfairly short summary on my part would be this: the series is told through two very different points of view, to the point that each game could be considered defining and yet the others complete it. When playing the Soul Reaver games I totally felt Raziel’s outrage and desire for revenge and justice, his blaming of his cruel master both for his fate and that of the world, while when playing the Kain games you saw the other side of the coin, the trials and difficulties of one who wishes to combine self preservation with doing good for all, at any price, willing to work centuries in the amazingly idealistic hope that he will hit the "edge of the coin" situation, the improbable situation in the stream of time and fate in which he could reconcile the two mutually exclusive "bad" outcomes. Besides the many seductive themes for me I was thrilled to be faced with some mind twistingly delightful time paradox/solutions, all managing to form a story bigger than the pieces. I was blown away by how even though instead of playing the 5 games in the order they were made I played them like 2, 1, 5, 4, 3 and STILL shockingly enough the story was amazingly coherent and each fragment of memory that I could remember made all the others shine all the brighter. I warmly recomend the wikipedia article (don’t forget the amazingly deep links at the end of the article), from which I’ll just quote a bit I particularly cared about:

An underlying element of the story is heavily concerned with destiny and throughout the series fatalism is a strong theme. The idea that a person’s destiny can be foreseen and thus altered is presented to the player. Much of the final game Defiance is devoted to discovering whether this hypothesis is true. Some characters try to use this facet to their advantage by attempting to manipulate other characters’ (notably Raziel’s) destiny.

Free will is also challenged during the story and a great number of the in-game characters believe that no one truly possesses free will, except maybe Raziel. Therefore these characters believe that Raziel is the key to altering destiny. Manipulation also plays a major point in the progression of the story since nearly every character, at some point in the story, is manipulated by another.

I deeply cared for these themes, ones so very rarely treated. It feels like such a grand attempt for one to try to battle the immortal streams of time, to fight for one’s fate even in the face of it being foretold and locked… even when everybody tells you it’s impossible.

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I’ve recently finished MGS3 and am still recovering from what a masterpiece this is. I had obviously heard a ton of praises of it, but have avoided it for so long for two reasons: it contained two themes that I quite hate, war and stealth/patience in games. I’m absolutelly not sorry, on the contrary. It’s one of those very rare masterpieces that actually impressed me much more as I went along and discovered the continued attention to detail and greatness, as oposed to it throwing it all at me in the first hours of the game.

First and foremost I have to praise the games cinematics. They were done with great care and impressive skils. They totally took me away from the awareness of the ps2′s technical limitations and into the realm of fascination and respect for cinematic style. Oh, did I mention? … I do believe they are in-engine cinematics… yet they look amazing! A little blur here, a little hue shift there, and a ton of little details like a bird flying off in the distance or a little bit of dust and motion blur make a world of difference.

Secondly the story is deliciously intricate and I must say this is the best spy type story I have encountered in any movie, game, or book. The characters evolve with amazing depth and it has a way of constantly throwing at you believable problems that turn apparently straight forward things into twisted pathways of problem solving.

Well, in a sea of goodness… let’s give a try to the bad stuff: well, I would say the stealth and patience required, but the game is delightful in that the difficulty if set low enough (I obviously played it on easiest level) can actually be played like a total action game, with total dissregard for the way it was meant to be played: stealth and patience. It was really great, because I would still do the stealth part because it was fun, but I wasn’t getting frustrated or retrying when things got difficutl. Getting the player to actually play the steath because he wants to, not because he has to: ***wonderful***. … umm… what else? Well, it’s so easy to forgive the game for all the bad stuff because of the amazing cinematics. Tens of minutes at a time (or so it felt) and yet I was always on the edge of my seat waiting for what’s goign to happen, which character would turn on which, what story twist would occur… Also on that topic: the game has one of the best self refferencing parody I’ve seen. Possibly the best one ever. It manages to be in-character and yet outrageous at the same time. Now I should mention at this point that I very much dislike 95% of parody stuff. I strongly believe in serious treatment of serious topics so I hate it when gratuitous humour is used. Luckily the game has a quite serious treatment throughout the solid 24h of gameplay that it took me and only has these parody cinematics as extras. And amazing extras they are too… but only if you’ve seen the actual serious tone cinematics. And it’s none of that "bloopers" stuff either… they could be short films in themselves. I’ll risk partially spoiling one, just because they’re so many: for example there’s this really intricate long cinematic and gameplay experience inside a might-crash airplane, one that starts off with the "villain" (so many layers upon layers…) breaks through a door, anyway, there’s this bonus scene "the quick version" in which that results not in him starting the fight, but in him falling out the other door. It may sound like a standar silly "blooper", but these extras have the same attention to detail and video editing and postprocessing like the normal cinematics, so much so … well, you just have to see it to believe it. Or there’s this quite long one that uses story elements and yet feels like it’s a reference to that I believe "Eraser" movie, with time travel that manages to insert itself into a lot of moments in the story in subtle, almost believable ways, explaining things not shown… I’ll stop now: it’s no fun unless you see them, and even then it’s no fun unless you’ve seen all the serious toned cinematics throghout the game.

I’ll end my impressions with two notes:

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          These days I’ve been playing Metal Gear Solid. No, not 4, but the classic MGS3. Yes, I know it’s been out there for ages… but I tend to very much avoid stealth and war/military themed games. It says a lot for the level of polish and superb attention to detail that the game has that it’s got me playing it. If only more games had this kind of detail…
          But that is not my point. After just about each save there’s a couple of minutes where the Para-Medic engages Snake into a conversation where she tells him about this or that big movie that just (1960) came out, about martians, about James Bond, about alien worlds… She’s always very excited, and often finishes with “you’ve got to go see it!”. There’s a strong atmosphere and feeling in these discussions, one that rings true to me: there was a time when movies were a big social event. Everybody knew about a big one that came out this year. Sure, we have big blockbusters today, but it’s okay if you haven’t seen one or another. There’s just so many of them. Tailored for different tastes. But there was a time when if a big movie had come to the cinemas it was a big social thing, if you didn’t keep up you could unexpectedly find yourself in a bad social setting if you couldn’t debate it. No, I haven’t really lived those times, just hints of them many years ago. It was like one generation back I believe.
          So where am I going with all this? Well, I think that is about where games are now in their respective timeline: if a BIG game comes out every gamer knows about it, and probably at least tries to play it or form an opinion from seeing it. I think actually games are even more in their (relative) past: in that time you could recomend somebody a movie, with just excitement, no guilt that you’re pushing somebody into big expenses. With games nowadays though, a certain game you recomend may require a certain console or a powerful PC + the game price… so that’s not so cool.

          But does that mean we’re living bad, (movie relative) ancient times, in gaming? Well, sure, I’d love for there to be as many good games to choose from like there are well made movies & tv series, so that I could choose exactly the genres and topics that I find interesting… but at the same time these ‘ancient’ times are also magical ones: it’s been ages since I’ve seen many people really blown away by some movie. People are no longer amazed by special effects or plot twists. They don’t feel like they were there. They don’t talk about it with excited shouting voices: “woooww!!! you should have seen that! it was like the rocks came alive! and the way he jumped on the cliff… and almost fell… took my breath away”, instead they say calm things like “yes, it had quite good special effects” or “It was an interesting story, very simila to …, though “. In the meanwhile though you see people talking about games they loved: “And I went there, and I jumped onto the platform and shot at the three headed monster! Maaan.. it was soooo coool!!! Took me 30 minutes till I figured out how …”. It’s a magical time when each new big game has people going “ooo!!! That was amazing! I’ve never seen that done before!!!”.
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      One of my favorite modern painters… make that all time painters… is Bruno Gentile, aka Hydropix. I love his sense of perspective and chosen themes. Born in Paris in 1975, he’s been working in the games industry for more than 11 years (i do suspect his website is a bit outdated), “mainly doing 3D works, (environments in “Alone in the Dark IV” and much more )”. I wish I had a comprehensive wikipedia article on him, but since I don’t I’ll have to rely on the the little info he put on his website:
“I’m currently a concept artist and illustrator at Ubisoft Montreal, in Canada, where we’ve been developing “Prince of Persia – Warrior within”, “Prince of Persia – The Two Thrones”, “King-Kong” and more projects.”
      Getting back to the things I can say: his painting skills are amazing, and his paintings have great moods. He uses darks for framing quite a bit but they fit in well with the very dramatic subjects he depicts. I strongly believe that it’s in no small part due to his vision that I loved the art direction in Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones so much. I can only admire them for adopting in the game a perspective very similar to his paintings, which though oftentimes has lead me to missjudge distances makes the whole game feel like… like (cheesy alert) a moving painting in parts (omg… the words i’ve used!!! Who would have thought i had it in me? Not me…). I got to see two videos of him at work and was also very impressed by his use of images: from what i’ve seen he’s developed this magical technique where he slaps on seemingly unrelated images to what he’s painting which give it a lot more texture and variety.
See the master at work:
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