Alright, nothing earth-shattering to share today---just the first of (hopefully) many bits of storytelling advice gleaned from my research.
I don't think I've gone into too much detail about my research (I'll do so tomorrow), but right now for it I'm playing through Final Fantasy VII again, focusing on character development. One thing I realized very quickly is that the game goes out of its way to remind you that Cloud is "special" in a way that might be sinister.
It really helps to keep your interest, and made me realize that I had failed to do that in my own novel. For all my blather about how it's a novel about Litnig and him dealing with the revelation of his identity, I don't start hinting at that identity in an open way for a long, long time.
Luckily, I've figured out how to use this to kill two birds with one stone (the other being that I've never really described how it feels, physically, to Soulweave). Stay tuned for my next draft to find out how. ;-p
Anyway, I know I'm only regurgitating the advice that every aspiring author gets about going back and picking apart your favorite stories to see how they work, but it really is worth doing, and I think it's taken me far too long to get around to it.
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2 comments:
I kind of can't believe you've talked your way into getting paid to play video games... Also, on a related note, I saw an xkcd webcomic the other day that mentioned downloading an alternative version where Aeris doesn't die and hacking it in somehow with her character taking other characters' lines from time to time. I don't know if that actually exists, but it might be worth looking into. For your research, of course ;)
Yeah, I'm just sticking to what you can see with one playthrough of the retail version of the game for this, but if I were ever to take this kind of research further, I'd have to start using cheats and hacks in order to get everything out of the story that's possible. In the meantime I'm already forming notes around the date sequence of the game and using YouTube footage to see the other three options (apparently you can date either Aeris, Tifa, Yuffie, or Barret...crazy, huh?), and I intend to use it as an example of how studying videogames is much harder than studying puny things like novels and and film. ;-p
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