2322: Lore of the Land

(This should have posted yesterday but didn’t, for some reason. Apologies!)

I love lore. I absolutely love it when something I’m enjoying has that feeling that the entire world in which it’s set has been thought out and planned, even if 90% of the material is never seen within the work itself.

This is particularly brought to mind at the moment due to Overwatch, which has some absolutely fantastic superhero-style backstories for all its characters, with Pixar-quality animated shorts and comics putting a significant number of the characters in a lot more context than the game itself offers.

But there are some other particularly good examples I’ve experienced over the years, too.

One that springs to mind immediately is the visual novel-cum-strategy RPG hybrid Aselia the Eternal, which has some extraordinarily detailed writing throughout that means even though you never get to “explore” the world freely, you have a very strong sense of time, place and social norms. In the early hours of the game, you even start to get a feel for this strange other world’s unique language — and indeed, for a significant portion of the game, the voice acting is not in Japanese, but rather in this fictional language.

Another good example is the Senran Kagura series, which always has the strong feeling that there is a lot going on outside the stories of the central characters the games focus on. I predict that as the series continues to grow over time, we’ll start to see more and more of the broader context in which these young shinobi girls are fighting — we’ve already finally started confronting the terrifying youma in Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson.

And then, of course, there’s Final Fantasy XIV, which has lore so detailed that they have a staffer specifically hired to ensure that the lore stays consistent and can be explained in great detail to those who want to know more. Indeed, the Lore subsection of the official Final Fantasy XIV forums is one of the most interesting parts of the website, as it includes all manner of things about the game you may not have otherwise seen unless you specifically went looking for it.

Lore also leads to people coming up with their own theories about what is going on. I enjoy doing this myself and indeed have indulged in it publicly on occasion, but I also really love reading other people’s thoughts on things. I remember reading an extraordinarily detailed account of the metaphorical depictions throughout the Silent Hill series, for example, and being absolutely enraptured.

For me, lore makes things better. It gives things meaning and context. It can even give things that seem to have no real “story” as such — Overwatch is a good example, being a multiplayer shooter — a sense of narrative. And for me, in games at least, it’s often the difference between a game feeling like a cynical “product” or clearly coming across as a creative work of art, filled with the passion of its designers.

So more lore, please. And, on a side note, familiarising myself with much of the Overwatch lore over the last evening has made me very interested to see how Blizzard plans to develop the game over time.