- Pronouns
- She/Her
So there's this weird place in Final Fantasy XV called Pitioss Ruins. It's a secret dungeon of sorts, and the entire thing is bizarre, and somewhat genius. To get there, you have to do a sidequest to make your car fly, then land on a super hard-to-spot little piece of road, and walk from there. Pitioss Ruins is nothing whatsoever like the other parts of the game. It's a straight-up platformer. You can't do anything. Noctis has no abilities at all. (You can't even warp-strike in there) All you can do is hit stuff with your sword to activate switches and other things. This kind of super-subtracted premise allows for the experience to be completely built around the level design, which is some truly ingenious level design, on par with any top-tier Zelda dungeon, Metroidvania map or Dark Souls world.
Pitioss Ruins is something not all people like, mainly due to the controls (Noctis isn't really the platforming guy), but I personally found it incredible. I absolutely adored the way that the dungeon sort of organically guided you through it, took you through the various traps and challenges, and made for some truly spetacular moments of just level design magic.
And yet it's, like, there? Who thought it was a good idea to craft one of the most incredible level design accomplishments of the past few years and just tuck it away as a secret dungeon in a messy JRPG?
Sometimes, a game just throws an incredible section, feature or design quirk at you that is so amazing that it would suffice to fill up a whole game alone, and then it disappears, never to be seen again. Are there any examples you can think of, where some odd one-off idea or mechanic just flew by and made you go "Hey! Make that a full game"?
Pitioss Ruins is something not all people like, mainly due to the controls (Noctis isn't really the platforming guy), but I personally found it incredible. I absolutely adored the way that the dungeon sort of organically guided you through it, took you through the various traps and challenges, and made for some truly spetacular moments of just level design magic.
And yet it's, like, there? Who thought it was a good idea to craft one of the most incredible level design accomplishments of the past few years and just tuck it away as a secret dungeon in a messy JRPG?
Sometimes, a game just throws an incredible section, feature or design quirk at you that is so amazing that it would suffice to fill up a whole game alone, and then it disappears, never to be seen again. Are there any examples you can think of, where some odd one-off idea or mechanic just flew by and made you go "Hey! Make that a full game"?