Logan

Great article. Got me interested in Andor when I’ve been totally unengaged by Star Wars for the last decade, I may need to check it out.

You draw a line between the politics of the original series and those of Andor, i.e. the exploration of rebellion and oppression, and I would be very interested in further exploration of the way sound is used in the OT. Darth Vader’s breathing is one that stands out to me as potentially ripe for analysis.

Anyway, good work! A pleasure to read.

Very good article.

Echoes reminds me quite a lot of Fusion, the other Metroid game that I would say makes the most use of horror tropes to create this oppressive atmosphere. I’d love to see an article about the two in conversation, about how Echoes creates a hostile atmosphere while Fusion creates a perfect antagonist in the SA-X, and how these two types of horror are different. Even the empowerment in each game to overcome these different challenges feels unique.

Man, Metroid is so good.

This is a really important lesson to learn about vision in game design. Every single piece of Breath of the Wild is oriented toward the idea of exploration, of discovery, and of a sort of true-to-life sense of adventure. If the game weren’t so big I could be convinced that it was designed by one person. It’s one of the first huge AAA titles to replicate the feeling that indie games have been making use of for the last decade: the feeling of authorship, the feeling that this piece of art was designed by a single mind. Everyone who designed this game was in sync, as you’ve pointed out so cleverly with this attention toward the music.

It really is remarkable.

Good article (other than a few typos).

I’d be interested in seeing a deeper dive on this. The article mentions that media has a significant effect on child development, but there could be more there. I wonder if studies have been done on the influence of anime specifically on American children vs. the regular misogyny and sexualization of women in western media. It would also be neat to see how anime-influenced cartoons (Avatar, Samurai Jack, to a lesser extent Steven Universe) take anime tropes and flip them. There’s a lot to discuss here, and I appreciate this first pass.