[pro-player]http://ettugamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Valkyrie-Profile-006-Arngrim-and-Jelanda-4.mp4[/pro-player]
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Here is a radical departure from reality. There is something at once totally alien about the discussion that one must have with oneself when considering where the discussion will lead. When she states, “Consider it a gift.” to whom is she granting it? The gift could be one of the human soul, the ephemeral, essential humanity and strength one requires to manage the problems within. The gift could be her’s, that she is granting herself a kindness under the auspices of stolid friendship. There is a distinct sense of unknowing during the exchange, a sense of forgetting the product of one’s thoughts and actions, simply accepting the impossibilities of a certain kind of solidarity. Somehow, there is a constant sense that everything, from the world, to the girl, to the concept of a videogame is lacking. Here we see a brief moment of clairvoyance, a sense that time retains an eternality in reference to memory.
There is a cyclical memory within Valkyrie Profile that beautifully reinterprets the conception of both the mythology from which the game is built upon and the classical ideology about how anyone approaches death. Here death is many things, death is beyond an end, a path which opens in many direction. The snuffing out of the ephemeral being is juxtaposed harshly against death as a beginning which has a direction beyond the control of fate, beyond the inevitability of a mortal life. There is not just a sense of loss that comes from such a contradiction in classical thinking about death, but a sense of hope that is created in one’s perception towards death.
An alien approaching the concept of death might think in such a way. That the end is never truly the end, but a series of beginnings. Which perhaps defines the strength of a videogame profoundly. A videogame is a series of stories that unfolds through the interim interaction and constructs a crevasse of unreality. Within that trench the mind is free to wander into impossibilities previously not conceived. Perhaps here, touched upon, is the conception of death as a form of renewed life. That the passing of one inherently strengthens a certain resolve or understanding of the movement of life. There is a brilliance to such conception, a type of beacon that one lights only when delving into such amorphous constructions of worlds.
Such worlds are similarly without judgment, and perhaps the gift too is without judgment. Though an unworthy soul, strengthened and empowered by the knowledge of others, even if forced, a form of redemption can occur. Such candor for possibility is what makes videogames a joyous gift that we might receive, if the participant is willing to plumb the depths. Perhaps the player will need a background to enrich their notions of understanding, but the alien landscape of a game may be empowering on a level not yet founded actively. Confusion, miscommunication, can at times be the greatest gift of all.