[SPOILERS] Braid Level 1-1 (Normal, Reverse and Special)

[Influx27]

This game's ending is so incredibly stupid. I can see now why people were calling it pretentious.

[ResidualOaklore]

@Influx27 What kind of shitty world do we live in where great storytelling gets labeled as pretentious?

[TheMizuPanda]

@Influx27 What on earth is stupid about it? Not every game has the heroic knight getting the lady of his dreams and being happy forever after, y'know.

[Influx27]

@TheMizuPanda It's stupid because it's the story of a moron unable to cope with his own stupidity. Instead he reinvents his past into a game, but even then he's still unbelievably lame.

[YoMrWhite]

@Influx27 Huh, spoiler alert, the game is about the nuclear bomb ...

[Influx27]

@YoMrWhite having one quote or maybe a picture of a nuclear explosion (I forget exactly what's in the epilogue, only that it's very small) is not enough to say that the game is about the bomb. For all the space nukes hold in the game one might just as easily say the game is about the end credits.

[COZYTW]

@Influx27 Huh... Really? I thought the story throughout portrayed their feelings and the plot quite well.

... There was a picture of a nuke?

[Influx27]

@COZYTW A plot is the linear progression of a story. There's not a lot of linearity in Braid, so no plot. The story, though, mainly has the most to do with a whiny kid who's really unhappy with a breakup and has now retreated into a world of video games, and that is by far lame.

And I think the picture & sound of an explosion appears during one of the diaries in the epilogue, but that has about as much weight on this story as a feather would on the moon.

[COZYTW]

@Influx27 I'm not sure about that... Surely there's more than 1 way to reveal a plot?

I mean, this story feels like it exists already, we're unraveling different parts at a time.

[Influx27]

@COZYTW ...yeah.

plot and story are two different aspect to any creative work, and you can easily have one without the other.

In this case, the progression is not linear and so there's no plot. It's the same way that "Memento" is a film with a story but without a plot. The book "The Crying of Lot 49" kind of has a plot but no story.

[COZYTW]

@Influx27 Okay... Then that was my bad, I used 'plot', not 'story'.

But I'm not understanding the parts about "reinventing his past into a game", I don't recall an epilogue scene at all. If anything, after the epilogue it jumps back to a room right before the place when the player starts the game. I mean, sure, Tim is foolish in his own sense, but I don't see the relevance.

I feel that the game's essense was in its gameplay, its story is merely an enigma the maker refuses to reveal.

[Influx27]

@COZYTW "refuses to reveal"? You don't need the writer to explain her story to you. The story is of a stupid whiny kid who mentally broke from the world and now his mind is made up of videogame imagery. It's stupid and pathetic.

As for the epilogue, there's some secret cloud area with a bunch of books that I think you can only reach it if you've gathered all the stars (I've never gotten there, 'just seen videos of people who have).

[COZYTW]

@Influx27 I really don't see the stupid whiny kid nor the videogame imagery. I really don't.

The lamp posts outside his house don't look modern at all, they look like they're during the 1940s and 1950s - I don't think video games would have existed then.

[Influx27]

@COZYTW look at the paintings, read the diaries, pay attention to what plays out in this level. He's some prep school kid who made his girlfriend angry, she left him for someone else, and he's over-dramatizing it ridiculously. Everything you're seeing in-game is just the nonsense in his mind, and that mind has retreated back into a video game (Mario).

[COZYTW]

@Influx27 ... The epilogue didn't depict the princess as his girlfriend.

It depicted the princess as a mother figure to him.

[Influx27]

@COZYTW that's not how I read it. I'll go take another look (not right now, but later when I'm not doing something else).

[COZYTW]

@Influx27 *essence. Pardon my English.