AntiAnarch

Apologies for omitting any socialite introductory post for the moment... PREFACE: Stella, your passion and intelligence and investment are worlds above any other possible channel of information, evident in your every sentence. The officialized corporate paperback guides are jokes compared to your "work", truly. I personally want to offer you the acclaim and give you credit you merit, the world of modern herdlings and lemmings, I imagine, has not... PROCEEDING ON, ahem... So: I finally purchased and am enjoyably going through the beginning phases of "Shadow". I am a "fan" of the hardcore completionist diehard variety; or, can also be characterized as an anti-fan really. I take games seriously, and moral underpinning, meta-ethical pathos, is the most axial polar thing in my eyes. Why Metro attracted my attention, Mass Effect, even Bioshock Infinite, a handful of others - the unique moral metaphysics of such games determine their elite status. Games of the species of Call of Duty, can never compete with creations transcending the vendible commercialist category, and crossing into the realm of the Kantian aesthetic, i.e., true human art. The implicit meta-ethical undergirding and underlining of the newly-envisioned Lara in her "Survivor"-cosmos, her characterological development, maturation and transformation, honestly, played a large role in my interest in what was hitherto, never an object of interest, but active antipathy. I am ideologically a paleo-conservative of the most anti-feminist persuasion, BTW - nothing is simple in life. The way I see things, feminism, even if inside the minds of a few game-creators (?), was not involved in the "new" Lara so much as a sincere effort at "transfiguration", however verbalized. I also realize the moral aspect is not as totally central and all-permeating in every game in every part, as I would wish it to be, in the Survivor-tale; still, that is how, humanly speaking, I got to where I am now posting, years later, on a Tomb Raider forum on the Web... I should state emphatically I never absent-mindedly lose focus in my commentary or lose myself in digressive side-paths of thought. NEVER. Anyway, specifically, I am in Kuwaq Yaku, and in Shadow, there does not seem to be anything like an intended progression arc, either in terms of skill-development (set in its new ultra-convoluted basis) or, equally or more significantly, in terms of story-line, either, unlike previous "Survivor" iterations. I am not sure "chaos" is the word to describe things, but something similar, and yet, not necessarily negative. An open world universe is not existent, but something else I don't know how to describe. In Rise, the base-camp saves had (admittedly linearity-bound) coherence and even if we did not have complete libertarian freedom to twist the story any arbitrary direction we wished, the predetermined path made sense, was experientially rewarding and intelligent in its way. I have a hundred (close to literally here) paths or options of furthering the narrative right now just barely mid-way in the Peruvian area, and wish I knew firstly, what is the objectively logical and intended route; secondly, if any such route was even intended? Do I need to re-conceptualize what I am doing? What exactly was the designer staff or game-engineer goal here? I am just sort of dizzy. I am wandering around Kuwaq Yaku as if inebriated or drug-addled, and confusion-beset so badly, I am not even furthering the story but nervously harvesting resources at previous camp-sites, because so uncertain as to how or where to begin furthering the story. Most weaponry available at this narrative point, is fully upgraded because I am just stalling. Stella is top-notch in her instructions, but the game's "non-linearity" is something to be negotiated with, and daunting. If I continue on in this lack of nerve, I shall just do a turnabout, and robotically follow Stella's words to the letter, if only to save myself from inertia/stasis. Please do not confuse my meaning. The game is excellent in every expected way; I purchased the Croft Edition despite personal relative poverty; I can indeed tell genuine erudition was injected into things, although, as a Westerner and heir to Greco-Germanic and Christian culture, I cannot follow along with the archaeology as I could in Byzantine Siberia, reading Norse runes right with Lara and so on. Externalities like visuals mean nothing to me; I personally feel the visuals are perfectly fine, more than fine; in any case, I am not offering a game review here, however, so continuing in this direction is not what I have in mind... I should remind myself and others, I think, in my befogged state: The bigger picture is the game is not substantially different in quality from either of its predecessors, only very different in ways I am slowly learning, and to critically devalue globally the whole game simplistically, on pretexts of the most petty nature, so undeservedly, as is the fashion or fad currently, especially within its apparently schizophrenic "fan-base" (the purely destructive "deconstruction" of pointlessness, even more thoroughly conducted as if sabotage from within its own self-vaunted fanbase, than the outside world unfamiliar or unknowing of TR), equates in effect to signaling the death-knell of Tomb Raider, as an idea, project, aesthetic product, at this juncture in time, when it deserves a more honorable burial, and if the artistic cerebral energy was incentivized, could still hold many future potentialities of worthy nature. The malcontent-ridden fan-base is idiotically shooting itself in the foot; for, I guarantee, beyond Survivor, Shadow and Camilla, no Tomb Raider shall exist if the present negativism-polluted atmosphere holds. Like it or not... (I add here again I in NO WAY EVER make digressive polemical turns in my thoughts - EVER.) Forgive the informal, unpolished nature of these thoughts. I just managed to buy the game on Xbox One S, started playing one and a half days ago, and I suppose I am just over-communicative...