Chris West writes: "So I recently finished playing through Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and I’ve got to say, I wasn’t impressed. The art direction was quite beautiful and the setpieces were done well, but I found the story aspect to be inorganic. The game consisted entirely of unconnected events that are generally considered to be either sad or touching. Considering how much praise this game has been receiving, I welcome all forms of backlash with open arms. While my opinion of Brothers isn’t the focus of this article, it’s place in a pattern of serious and humorless video game narratives is. A narrative featuring serious themes and subjects isn’t a bad thing as long as the writing and story is good, but it seems everybody is aiming to make their games dark and depressing because everyone else is doing it."
VGChartz's Mark Nielsen: "Upon finally finishing Devil May Cry 5 recently - after it spent several years on my “I’ll play that soon” list - I considered giving it a fittingly-named Late Look article. However, considering that this was indeed the final piece I was missing in the DMC puzzle, I decided to instead take this opportunity to take a look back at the entirety of this genre-defining series and rank the entries. What also made this a particularly tempting notion was that while most high-profile series have developed fairly evenly over time, with a few bumps on the road, the history of Devil May Cry has, at least in my eyes, been an absolute roller coaster, with everything from total disasters to action game gold."
Huzaifah from eXputer: "Devil May Cry 5, the latest iteration in the iconic DMC franchise by Capcom, still holds its own as a fantastic hack-and-slash in 2024."
"The Game Music Foundation are today very proud and pleased to announce an additional concert, circling back to the roots of Game Muisic Festival in Poland. On April 28th, 2024, the National Forum of Music in Wroclaw will once again become a place to celebrate the art of video game music, featuring scores from The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II." - The Game Music Foundation.
nah. look at japanese titles like killer is dead, etc.
This guy needs to play Borderlands 2, bad.
"Personally, I blame the excellent The Walking Dead Season 1 and Spec Ops: The Line for starting this trend. The problem with this trend is that lesser writers shoehorn in dramatic themes and tropes in the hopes of creating a deep and emotional experience; instead they get an inorganic mess that fails to do what they wanted it to do."
And thats where I stopped reading*...
People need to stop cherry picking examples and claiming unrelated events are somehow related in these theories that go nowhere. Before TWD and Spec Ops there was BioShock 1/2, Catherine, Deus EX is pretty serious from what I recall, Resistance, Killzone, Dead Space, God of War, Ninja Gaiden, Metal Gear Solid and many many many more games that took the serious approach (some games, like NeverDead actually took itself too seriously at times).
At the same time we had Disgaea 3/4/D2, Neptunia, Borderlands, Bulletstorm (nothing in this game was remotely seriously), Deathspank, Dead Rising (did you play Off the Record?), Bayonetta (really anything PG), Army Corps of Hell and no silly game list would be complete without Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon (<3).
This isn't a trend, it's either a reach for an article or someone who just so happens to play a lot of "serious" games (then again, they considered DmC serious...). I mean, there is only a finite number of ways you can take a story and some games go for the dramatic feel and others go for the comedic feel and other games say **** it and do whatever (pretty much anything Suda 51 has done).
* Note, I actually read the article.