-EDIT- This ended up being longer than I expected. Get a cushion. I get a sinking feeling every time an existing universe decides it's time to go multiverse. (And to a lesser extent, when it goes time-travelling.)
If there's a film like EEAAO, that only exists to explore the concept, then I guess that's fair enough, and besides, it's what you signed up for.
But when it's established characters/settings/rules I'm already familiar with, it feels more to me like a disintegration than an exciting new frontier. And it's hard to go back once you've opened that door. Cracking it open more than a millimetre for a quick glimpse is narratively all I think anyone has gotten away with, before the structure starts to disintegrate before your eyes, and clichés or deus ex machinas are required to hold it together, which themselves are often little better than the disease.
It reminds me of how the Marvel characters start to literally disintegrate, around the time Tony Stark invents time travel. (you may say that happened before the time travel arc but with this particular subject matter it's irrelevant). Or how multiple different religions talk about what the effect of first-hand direct contact with God would be like (i.e. instant, incomprehensible death, for starters.)
Imho, as a society, we're not quite mature/developed enough to accept that there are concepts we aren't meant for, and can't handle. We tell ourselves, “Hey, we're modern people, look at all our fancy toys, I have gay friends, I sponsored a penguin, I drive a Tesla that parks itself, this cup is even made of bamboo. “We can handle whatever comes our way; we're ready for anything.” But in reality the best the smartest among us can honestly claim, is that they're stumbling blindly forward faster than everyone else.
Civilisation is currently in its angry, identity-obsessed adolescent stage and stubbornly unwilling to entertain the idea that short-term and long-term liberty are antithetical.
I'm a subscriber of the educational YouTube channel, Kurzgezagt, but back in 2017 they released what I still think is an incredibly irresponsible video titled, “Optimistic Nihilism”. In it they mentioned how there's actually no inherent meaning to anything, but that's OK because that means you're free to create your own meaning, and utilising this method will be sufficient to sustain and fulfil you in your life. Aside from the the fact that on a scientific level, religion simply agrees with the human body from a health perspective, and nihilism simply doesn't, and there's psychophysiological evidence going back almost a century, that people cannot simply create their own values, (e.g. you can't award yourself dopamine and serotonin on a whim) aside from all that, they were so desperate to end the video with a positive spin that the narrator said something like, “... and if you're nice to other people, you get extra points.” And I just remember thinking, what the hell is that? Extra points? Sorry but points denote value. No meaning means no value. Nihilism = no point. No point? No points. You can gift yourself as many of those as you like, but you aren't going to care, and you might not realise that until it's too late.
To boldly plow headlong into being that guy, politically/ideologically, the multi-verse is essentially the ultimate leftist concept. It's the breaking down of all boundaries / rules / limitations, until every last scrap of meaning is dead. And you may not notice it behind a warm fuzzy Marvel filter, but in reality Rick and Morty is closer to the mark, and even it, conspicuously breaks its own themes to keep its audience invested, not daring to go up against the monstrous abyss of true nihilism. I can't think of a single film or TV show that's tackled the multi-verse successfully, unless the point of it was to instil a sense of trauma.
Unlike with Dr. Strange or Spider-Verse stuff, that handle the multi-verse as disorienting but ultimately wacky and delightful, in my opinion not really knowing what to do with the subject matter, thus ultimately feeling stylishly hollow, with unearned emotional beats. The most successful implementations (again, in my opinion) portray it as a spirit-breaking and lethal addiction / disease. Which leads me to EEAAO.
I think in reality, if you went through what Evelyn did in EEAAO, you'd almost certainly end up in a mental hospital or dead from suicide. It's just orders of magnitude too much to take for a human brain, but I enjoyed the film immensely, and I think it was very important culturally, not to mention intentionally or unintentionally kind of genius. See the reason people, but more interestingly the media and the ailing culture in general, raved so enthusiastically about EEAAO, is because EEAAO is secretly a conservative film posing as a liberalist one. Hiding underneath homosexual subject matter, a female minority lead, baked subtitles, butt plugs, and a jaded, sexist, narrow-minded member of gen X, is essentially a film about the context-destroying chaos that comes with the removal of borders, boundaries, and rules. About the importance of (sometimes) rejecting what may seem objectively better, in favour of valuing (read: conserving) what you already have. About how you need an external value framework in order to live in the world. About the corrupting power of freedom. That's why it felt so fresh. Because it's the enemy. It snuck past as a foreigner's foreigner, a meta-liberal if you will. When in fact it's just a regular conservative in a liberal's sparkly rainbow coat.
Anyway, there's my two cents on multi-verses and I'll stop there.
@chriss_m: There's nothing to any of them. They're more like interactive galleries than games. I haven't played this 2023 one, but in my experience this could almost be a review for the standalone first game, or second game. Even LoF2 I thought was only better in artificial ways. I gave the first one a pass because it's a new indie IP (and I got it free) but when the second one was just as shallow I was less sympathetic. And now it sounds like they're just doing the same thing again after lukewarm feedback, two games in a row. Why can't they just add a proper story, characters, arcs, progression, gameplay, anything? At least in this one they apparently added chases, but they're shallow. And they added a tiny bit of combat, but it's tacked-on. It's all just a box-ticking exercise for this dev, no ambition.
I always felt like this series wanted money, but didn't want to put in the work. So you know how to make pretty environments, but that's not a game. Why didn't you bother learning how to make a game?
@nilsdoen: I've no doubt it's still the most popular fantasy world going, and that it's slowly getting more popular all the time, despite not being very well “exploited” in modern media.
The LOTR trilogy wasn't “goofy as hell”. That's not an accurate description. It has a few of stunts (literally a few, for 10+ hours of run time), that wouldn't have been out-of-place in a modern action film.
But it's like, hey, if you have a shield, you have a flight of stairs, you're going downstairs anyway, and you have the skill... why not slide? It works, it's efficient, no wasted/excess movement, (he didn't backflip onto it) it's not implausibly hard to pull off, and makes you a harder target. Elves are famously exceptional at that kind of balance and poise stuff. It's a type of world-building. Besides Legolas is the only one who ever does it, and he's elvish royalty.
It's not fair to paint arguably the best trilogy ever made that way, just because of a grand total of 45 seconds of modern-looking stunts.
@lon3wolf2002: Well... you know... In this day and age there's no excuse to not have at least some idea of what a game is like before you buy it. I mean YouTube exists. And there's never been any excuse for pre-ordering.
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