YAMATA NO OROCHI'S PROFILE

Neat article! Think it's worth remembering that video game sprawl isn't always easy to diagnose, though. Take a game like The World Ends With You: at first, there's so many crazy elements at play that it almost seems like the game is a mishmash of superfluous features. But once you get further in, you realize that in reality not only is the game closely structured around its message, but literally every feature in the game is there to play into that message. Games like the latter Persona titles are even more sprawling, but might be even tighter in how the major themes feed into the gameplay and the story.

And of course there's charm in excess, as well. NIER is a game where every dungeon is a homage to a video game genre, where the player may choose to fish or garden or power slide on a boar, where sometimes your only reward from a sidequest is listening to the main characters banter. But despite the excess, and despite the game's obvious flaws, it's also deeply sad and expresses for the first time messages that have probably been swimming in cavia's consciousness since Drakengard. I've also been reading a Let's Play for this crazy adventure/shooting/rhythm game called Dangan Ronpa, and while it is literally swimming in ridiculous mini games, the atmosphere is just deranged enough, and the attention to detail strong enough, for it to work.

At any rate, I've heard the word "masterpiece" defined as a work in which every element feeds into the whole. That sounds an awful lot like "the importance of the core" to me. Occasionally a complete mess comes around that is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts, but generally if there isn't a guiding, consistent vision backing everything up then what you have is something pretty much unsalvagable.

Good job! This must have taken a lot of work