I found Life is Strange way, way more moving then The Last Guardian. I think this is because it was showing a relationship, not asking me to form one myself with something I essentially couldn't see as real. I feel this is important to the discussion, but can't be bothered with much more than that.

AJ wrote:

I found Life is Strange way, way more moving then The Last Guardian. I think this is because it was showing a relationship, not asking me to form one myself with something I essentially couldn't see as real. I feel this is important to the discussion, but can't be bothered with much more than that.

Life is Strange nailed the directorial aspects too with music and scene setting plus development of cliched yet hugely likeable characters.

Most emotionally impacting game I've played if you discount fear. Project Zero scared the shit out of me but it's an easier feeling to elicit.

I could say similar about Last Guardian, though. I was welling up a bit at the end of Life is Strange.

I also felt things playing SteamWorld Dig, but I was exceptionally stoned playing that, was making up my own back story and thought the tech blocks looked like contorted faces.

hylian_elf wrote:

I'm not sure there's much to say on this topic. I'm not sure why some people think games can't evoke emotions though when they clearly already have done so in a lot of people.

These two things are exactly my current stance on the thread.

Maybe not, there has been some poor phrasing and I'm not paying much attention.

Bayonetta makes me cringe so much I want to peel a layer of my skin off.

It was the best of games, it was the worst of games...

Why Aeris and and not another character from a different game? If that's allowed, then yes. I cried at a characters death. It filled me with sadness. So games can evoke sadness.

The main baddy from God of War.

No... Wait...

I was right the first time...

...

Fml... She's a character in a Final Fantasy game.

dynamiteReady wrote:

Did anyone ever really cry at Aeris' death?

I welled up, which is the most any media's achieved. Dunno how much of that was because I was loosing my main healer, but I was a lot younger.

Dark Soldier wrote:

Crying at media shit lol dorks.

Have to disagree with tiger. Didn't find Life is Strange emotional at all, but maybe that's because I didn't like the characters. Max was okay, if a little whiney, but the girl with the blue hair was horrendous. Standard teenage angst with additional whining, but she's really cool or pretends to be and she doesn't really have close friends and oh being a teenager is so difficult.

Fuck off and write a better character.

Hmmmm....it appears that Life is Strange elicits an angry response from me.

I've yet to play a game that packs the emotional wallop of a film like Amour, or the letters home from the night before the big push in the novel Birdsong, or a song like Guy Clark's Let Him Roll, or when Andi Peters left Live & Kicking, or when John Lithgow slapped Harry and told him that they didn't want him living with them anymore, or the bit in Band of Brothers where it reveals the names of the old men who have been talking before each episode...

I'm all for it if it happens, but like Kow said on the previous page it feels like they're still a fair way off.  Gears of War isn't a great example as it failed so miserably, but someone thumbing a tattered photograph of their dead wife before roaring and running at the enemy just isn't going to cut it, and sums up a lot of ham fisted attempts at eliciting an emotional response.  I'm putting most of my faith in walking sims for pushing things forward.  Firewatch in particular did some neat things with its narrative.

I think the most feels I have had was when I accidentally let Wrex die in Mass Effect but I could just reload the save.

I also remember shouting Noooooo down the mic when Dim died in Gears 3. My mate thought it was because I cared but actually I realised quickly that I was going to have to be one of the even shitter side characters for the remainder Of The campaign.

I cried when my Pokemon Blue save corrupted with 149 Pokemon.