#balan hurts me when i think too much about him and the lore | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

inkabelledesigns · 3 years

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So anyone that’s been chatting with me in the past week knows that I’m on a bit of a kick for Balan Wonderworld. A friend of mine has been livestreaming it, and I finally got my hands on it!...Only for my brother to kind of monopolize my Switch and play it for himself. ^^’’’ I don’t mind too much, but he’s probably gonna beat it before I do, the kid’s almost made it to World 7, just needs a few more statues for the train. Meanwhile I’ve only gotten to touch the game for the second time tonight, which has landed me searching for statues and beating the World 3 boss. But I’m glad he’s having fun, it’s awesome to share this game with him. He dances along to all the little celebration sequences, it’s adorable.

Today he went back and beat the boss for World 4, and he told me it had the same music for that dance sequence as World 2 did. I double checked just to be sure, and he’s right, it does! That strikes me as pretty interesting. I knew they reused the dance tracks for different bosses, but I never paid much mind to the order in which they’re repeated. Because it’s not a straight “123,” it jumps around a little more. It makes me wonder about the ties between the game and the novel. (This is where we get into spoiler territory.)

So I haven’t finished the novel yet (I get the sense I’m right before the final boss, much like my friend is for her game playthrough), but in it, every character has a different name. So our World 2 stage master, Fiona, is called Seagazer, and our World 4 stage master, Haoyu, is Skygazer. It’s established that these two have a close friendship since coming to Wonderworld, and they’ve got a lot in common. So the fact that their sequences share music makes me wonder if the others do too. So now I need to check. If you guys want to look too, here’s the other friendships:

Watcher and Sentinel (World 5 and World 8)

Clocktower Kid and Pensive Pierrot (World 6 and World 9)

Madam of the Mansion and Checkered King (World 10 and World 7)

If they have the same dance music, I’m gonna chuckle, that’s a really clever note game developers. I’d also like to say, dammit devs, some of the stories of these characters are so much darker in the book. Like, we find out Checkered King, the chess guy, lost his wife to sickness while he was too focused on trying to keep his title. Like oh my god, way to make me cry! Not all of them get fleshed out like that, but a lot of them do. Skygazer over there? He almost gets paralyzed in an airplane accident. Scarecrow, our good buddy Farmer Jose? He’s got a family, his home and crops are destroyed in that storm, and he’s afraid he’ll never be able to send his son to college. Madam of the Mansion has some serious issues with imposter syndrome as an artist (that hit me). Bugsy, our sweet little bug loving girl? I already loved her in the game, I identified with her as someone who had weird interests growing up, but when they go into detail about her laboring over these bugs for a class project, and everyone making fun of her for it, oh it hurt, it hurt a lot. And Lady of the Midnight Sun? Oh my gosh I cried the most over her. Her parents loved her dearly, and while going out to get her a Christmas present, they died in a car crash. She feels responsible for their death, and that hurts, that hurts so much. While I still have both of my parents, I can’t help but empathize a little with her and Clocktower Kid on the subject on death. I’ve been afraid of losing my dad since my 17th birthday, and I’m now 24. I know that even when his death does come, while I’ve been expecting it, it’s going to hit me harder and a lot worse than I think it will, and mind you, my imagination is scarily vivid. It all hits very close to home, all of the things they go through are very human problems.

That’s the thing I really love about Balan Wonderworld, but it’s also the biggest contrast between the game and the book: It’s a story about healing. In the game, everything starts out bad but ends up happy, but in the book, it starts off happy and turns out really sad. Honestly, you read the book for the angst and then play the game for the good vibes, ‘cause like, you can’t NOT smile at least a little bit while seeing these characters! In the book, everyone is so upset when you snap them out of their monstrous forms, angry and grieving now that they have the memories of their human, Earthly lives back, because they didn’t want to have to go through any of the pain and trauma again. Lance locked it all away, let them be happy, but it wasn’t real happiness. And it’s the moments where Balan pops in and tries to comfort some of these characters that really hit me. (Y’know, besides the lore point of him taking off his hat.) He sounds like he feels bad that this has to be done, but he knows that if he, Leo, and Emma continue to let Lance manipulate things, Wonderworld won’t be alright, and neither will any of the people who live there. Balan makes it very clear that Wonderworld isn’t about being happy all the time, it’s about finding balance within your life, within yourself. Even though we go through difficult times, we have to keep going, we have to believe that there’s something better on the horizon, that we can move forward and make things better for ourselves, be it by charting our own path or working together with our friends. That’s a really positive message. We have to balance the positive and the negative, otherwise we won’t know joy for what it really is. While I may not know how this whole thing ends, I have to say, I haven’t had this much fun with a game in a long time. 3D platformers are usually not my jam, I’m really bad at being precise (which has been a problem a few times so far), but this game goes at a slower pace, which is exactly what I needed. It’s so cheery and bright, super colorful too. Not gonna lie, I have a fanfic in the works already. ^^’’’’ Hope to share a lot of love for the maestro with all of you!

#balan wonderworld #balan wonderworld spoilers #balan wonderworld novel

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ganymedesclock · 4 years

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I kinda wanna hear your thoughts on NiGHTS, if you don't mind me asking. I just really like your speculation/headcanon posts!

I have great affection and great frustration for NiGHTS, honestly.

There’s a lot to love about the series. It’s got exquisite visuals and a really cool concept. While the gameplay isn’t completely my cup of tea, I think it’s a novel innovation. The designs of Nights and Reala, their bond and conflict, are really interesting and Wizeman’s a pretty impressive chunk of cosmic horror. I even feel like some of the dislike of Owl in JoD was unwarranted; yes, he was made the face of the slightly clumsy tutorial mechanism but it’s hard for me to not care a little that Nights, who is privately lonely in ways they seem disinclined to admit to anyone, clearly has some mutual fondness for this fussy bird dad.

But I definitely feel like the games have their problems- and I’ll focus here mostly on JoD because I feel like NiD itself was a pretty minimalist piece flying more on emotion than deep lore and it was successful in that regard.

I feel like JoD in particular struggled to decide if this was a story about Nights and Reala or a story about Will and Helen, and while they could’ve made room for both, it would’ve required more integration than they pulled off, and it ultimately weakens both narratives.

Nights never really meaningfully reaches a conclusion with Reala. They get angry enough to hurt him, feel bad about it, Reala goes on to take their new friends hostage, and Nights gets angry again and, seemingly, finishes Reala off, either personally, or indirectly because their attempt to kill Wizeman would affect Reala too. Even the nature of their sacrifice is hampered here because they don’t really sell us on what it is about Will and Helen that makes things so different. I take issue with the short-lived archie Nights’ comic’s invention about the “two perfect dreamers born once a century” but it at least explains all the hullabaloo about these specific people. I don’t mean that to be callous- but there has to be a reason Nights makes their stand here and now, even if it’s for internal reasons rather than Will and Helen, and we don’t get a sense of why that is.

Will and Helen themselves have the seeds of interesting or compelling problems, but they aren’t really brought home either. The conclusions they make don’t really feel of a piece with the nature of their issues. We don’t really find out what about Helen is ‘fragile’, and you have to read into things to see the contrast between Will’s lonely, ‘abandoned playground’-like second dream and the vibrant potential of his third dream, this fear that if you can’t grow up people will leave you behind in childhood.

JoD takes from its roots in NiD that it is good at evoking emotions. Many of the ‘major beat’ cutscenes land with really impressive intensity and evocative qualities! I can vividly call to mind Nights and Reala’s argument in Delight City or Reala circling Helen menacingly in Memory Forest.

But I feel like the devil’s in the details. Frustratingly often for me, these vibrant splashes of story were followed up by, like... hey kids, it’s time to chase Octopaw around in circles again! This is in-universe and out a completely pointless exercise! Let’s save some Nightopians from Wizeman, never once examining or explaining what Wizeman wants with them!

I try not to gripe too hard on Wizeman’s inscrutability because he as a character at least resonates with it- that he’s only a handful of ominous details in the dark actually kind of works for his character and the jawdropping beauty of the Unconscious Space and Will and Helen’s respective leaps of faith into the sea of darkness is contrasted by a profound sense of unease. Why is this space simultaneously so real and unreal? If Nights lands on a real-world building at the end of the game, sure, they’re alive, but is that a good thing, if they’re inextricably connected to Wizeman and Wizeman seems to be clawing at the veil between dream and waking?

Again, this is not a frustration of I hate these games. It’s a frustration of, I really love these games, but they feel like a vivid concept padded into existence with inconsistent flesh where the most interesting workings of both worlds- the real world emotional problems, and the dream world’s politics and potential fate under Wizeman’s onslaught- struggle because they’re ramming into each other at cross purposes rather than intertwining and facilitating/shoring each other up. There is some unbelievably premium good shit in NiD and JoD both but the experience of those glorious moments is undercut with the disappointment of going straight from that, to, octopaw. Nights do you wanna talk to Owl about how you unhealthily use harassing this octopus as a way to run away from serious emotional talks? No?

All of this has been a big reason why I’m looking forwards to Balan Wonderworld eagerly, because, Balan Wonderworld seems to be doing the spirit of what NiGHTS was as a series, and directly answering some of the problems of JOD. The human-side dynamics are spiced up with the chapters each having their own stars-of-the-day, and we’re digging into more raw emotional territory than stage fright or a nebulous insecurity growing up- just the three released so far are dealing with unexpected catastrophe bringing ruin to months of hard work, an accident leading to medical problems and a sense of betrayal, and the ‘pettiest’ problem, interpersonal rejection, is easily the most heartbreaking because it showcases how little self-confidence that afflicted person had.

Balan’s more mature position as a maestro and a hands-off sort of narrator figure while Leo and Emma take center stage means that I don’t mind as much when the kids get focus- in JoD, while Will and Helen were kids, Nights seemed like a teenager who was disconcertingly willing to throw themselves under the bus for friends they met yesterday and this wasn’t really framed as a bad thing. With Balan, I feel like even if Balan does at some point in the narrative sacrifice himself to advance Leo and Emma, it’d play to very different tropes- the removal of the magic feather or mentor, as a lesson you have to fly on your own.

(and, Balan is an integral part of the Wonderworld itself, and I have reason to suspect Lance would have a vested interest not fully ‘removing’ him even if they at some point separated him from Leo and Emma)

The kids themselves are also shored up in terms of intrigue. I’m really excited for square enix’s involvement, because they’ve produced a few stories that dig at emotions, and taking characters from the stock of, say, Neku and Shiki from World Ends With You, who Leo and Emma have passing resemblance to (a boy who lost a friend and became disillusioned and closed off, a girl who’s ebullient and sociable and more than a little insincere in it, hiding an insecure, lonely core) I think this is very promising.

That doesn’t mean I am abandoning all love for the NiGHTS series or that I think it’s garbage compared to Balan Wonderworld, especially since they have different themes and motifs and one isn’t even out yet, but I think that it’s interesting how, to my eye, the Wonderworld game seems like a sort of continuation or refinement upon JoD- that NiGHTS in some ways seems to be an inspiration bedrock for this new theater adventure.

Ultimately even if Balan Wonderworld is everything I hope for and more, there’s always going to be a place in my heart for NiGHTS, though. (I mean, hell, Nights themselves was an instrumental force in me figuring out my own relationship with gender.)

(and, once the game DOES come out, I feel like I’m certainly not the only one who’s gonna want to write crossover fic.)

TL;DR I love the nightmare jesters from the absolute bottom of my heart but I just wish we had a little more plot to squeeze loose.

#NiGHTS into dreams #Balan Wonderworld #readmore #Anonymous

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