In The City

This is the second day in a row where I'm only posting because it's Blaugust. Do not expect a quality read! But then, as we were discussing during the opening skirmishes of the Blaugust AI Wars, we don't really have any standards for posting other than that it should be mostly your own work. Neither quality nor word count matters a jot when it comes to putting up something that's going to qualify as "a post" for the purposes of the award tally at the end of the month.

At least say I can say, with a straight face, that this was a post I was always going to write. Screenshot posts have long been a staple of this blog, so I'm not just bunging one in so as not to miss a day. Well, not only that...

I don't always need a reason for a screenshot post, other than that I've taken some and I think they look good, but in this case I do have a minor point to make. As I mentioned in passing, in a recent post about Wuthering Waves, I was taken by surprise on my return to the game by just how exceptionally lovely it is to look at.

I remembered it was good but I'd forgotten how good. I'd gotten used to thinking Neverness To Everness looked gorgeous, which it most certainly does, but WW could give it a good head start and still come in ahead. Given that delightful surprise, of course I took a whole boatload of screenshots on my return, as you would, when you'd seen something worth photographing. 

Even as I was taking those shots, I already had it mind to use a some for a post. This would seem to be the ideal opportunity.

 All of these shots were taken while I was working my way through the twelfth act of the second chapter of the main quest, a section cursed by some ironist at Kuro with the unappealing title Stagnant Dawn on Wastelands. Whatever image that summons up isn't going to bear much resemblance to what you're about to see.

Pretty much the whole act, which took me several hours to finish, takes place inside a Sonoro Sphere in which a city called Honami is trapped, in a kind of Groundhog Day-esque perpetual time loop. The real Honami was destroyed by the Lament decades ago but an image of it remains, complete with all the citizens, known as the Left Behind, going through the motions of their final hours over and over, not knowing anything is wrong and yet somehow knowing something isn't right..

 All of which could be quite depressing if the place wasn't so damn beautiful. It's a stunning creation, all pastel washes and blurred edges, as though seen through wet eyes. To say it was painterly would be underselling it. It has a three-dimensionality paint would struggle to match.

 It also has a surreal element that lifts the whole thing onto another plane. The writers at Kuro seem to be adept at combining elements that shouldn't work together at all, yet somehow making them seem like the most perfect of fits. In Honami, we have a convincingly realistic, albeit mildly futuristic, urban environment, populated by recognizably ordinary people doing and saying recognizably ordinary things, while all  around the surfaces of the city are melting, glowing and sometimes turning into bubbles and blowing away.

 And if that wasn't surreal enough, into this twisted reality intrudes a whole gang of cartoonish capybaras, the highly fanciful incarnations of the Guardian of the city. Previous guardians we've met have been mighty dragons. Honami has a funny animal straight out of a Saturday Morning Cartoon.

It absolutely should not work, particularly given the always bittersweet, occasionally bleak nature of the story, which revolves around loss, sacrifice, bigotry, bullying and despair. But somehow it does.

 In the later cut scenes, after the enemy has been vanquished and the Left Behind released from their eternal wheel, the aesthetic changes to an elegiac, evocative, cinematic style. With plenty of lens flare, which obviously I loved. 

The conversations are heartfelt and emotional and the visuals pick up the tone perfectly. I'm very much looking forward to the upcoming anime. Clearly Kuro has both the writers and the artists to make the transition.

 I'm also very much looking forward to reaching the point in the narrative where I can branch off and experience the permanent residue of the Edgerunners collab. Based on what I've just seen in Honami, it's easy to see why that potentially disastrous collision of worlds turned out to be so well received by fans from both sides. These people really know what they're doing.

 My only regret, having finished the Honami storyline, is that I didn't spend more time in the city. True, since it only existed as a backdrop, most of it was blocked off by invisible barriers, but there were plenty of opportunities to explore at least a little off the prescribed path and I failed to take any of them. I was too wrapped up in the story to go wandering off. Now I wish I had.

I don't think the area is there to visit freely outside the story. I may be wrong. I hope I am. 

As far as I can tell, though, most of the wonderfully imaginative, finely detailed places we get to visit as we follow the exciting and complex plot, exist only as long as they're needed. If that's true, it makes the sheer quality that hallmarks each and every one even more astonishing.  I think I'm going to have to give Kuro the nod when we get to Creator Appreciation Week.

Maybe I'll do another screenshot post...