I’m always a advocate for being in the mindset of the here and now: focusing on what’s right in front of you helps to declutter the mind.

Besides, the future may not be one of the most reliable sources of comfort one can imagine…

My adventures through Mina the Hollower (MtH) continue to be deftly harrowing, as the games hybridization of the styles involving both Zelda and Dark Souls metaphysics, make for a mindfully crafted slew of bloodbaths in which one may drown, or become a master and commander of, depending on the depth of thought one puts up against the systems at play. I’m not sure how much time the average player spends thinking about such unseen forces, some examples include the engine of the game, the combat system, the painful cost of the economics of damage at hand…all of which I usually just shorthand as metaphysics, but sometimes it is worth it to elaborate within reference to the “vagueness” at hand, as there are many abstractions that permeate any given realm, so shorthanding on such elaborate systems helps to make swift the day that usually paralyzes us in confusion.



I kind of left a question hanging in the air just now, as I became overly distracted and ridiculously charmed by my own sense of amusement with wordplay (it’s delightful to be able to effortlessly indulge in the act of creation), but I digress to my initial curiosity, which was in some sense, mostly a rhetorical one; the thought in question:“…not being sure how much time the average player spends thinking…”. There was more detail involved with that wonderment, but I realized I had the ability to end the sentence much sooner, in already discovering the answer to my elaborately flippant rhetroic.



In a fairness, while my cynical ways do lead me to believe most people simply do not exercise any cognitive efforts whatsoever on the regular (which saddens me deeply), not everyone can be expected to be some all knowing entity or even a journeyman academic about random fields of knowledge at any given moment. I’m not even sure if people have a relative notion of the relevance of strategy when playing any game, let alone a single player, non-competitive experience, so there are technical layers of exception one might use to let others off the hook, though I don’t think it will ever excuse the deep lack of preponderance so many thoroughly lack.



Not quite sure why I have taken my sweet time in winding up to my point with all of this extravagantly excess of prose, but as mentioned, sometimes one just gets lost in the act of the craft, in a moment of blissful glee: this writing is as much about your enjoyment of reading it, as it is my joy in writing it, so this two pronged effort of focus is important to maintain. Getting back on track: where as I’ve already made mention of Mina’s twofold inspirational focuses here and elsewhere, I’m guessing many others perhaps overlook the influence the Souls games have possibly had on the title, as most Soulslike experiences tend to be, at the very least, 3D in reference to their aesthetic. This seems like a shallow point of aesthetic relevancy, but people often use the “magic of their sight” to help explain away the unknown nature of the world in front of them, so if seeing is believing, their eyes then become the moderators of the divine. A bit heady of an accusation, I admit, but belief runs deep with many, and most do not have the time or inclination to do much but “feel” their way through a situation, leaving the thinking forgotten and to the wayside.



So yes, within the realm of science, the believer may find their hypotheses lacking in premise, so goes the world and the ways in which our own minds fail us. This relates to Mina with more relevancy then one may have been led to believe thus far, as most beliefs are usually surface level deep, or at least, purely aesthetic, in many ways both seen, and in a strange stroke of paradox, unseen. The visual elements of Mina certainly indicate an 8-bit adventure of sorts, and many may have even been around the block enough times to notice the staggering similarities between this experience, and where old school Zelda games are concerned, most pointedly, Link’s Awakening, which this game owes a heavy debt of inspiration to. However, within the metaphysical field of divine aestheticism, the Soulslike DNA will definitely be felt and not see, though most I find have serious attention issues when they are too busy dealing with their own gruesome death at the hands of a psychotic shadow beast, which is a perfectly understandable position to be in.



Mastering the art of Soulslike games certainly requires patience in honing ones craft, which is a fancy way of alluding to one perfecting the art of absolute eating shit on a constant basis, and then knowing how to make room for seconds….and thirds, and eventually 50ths, depending on the grueling depths of misery one is attempting to grind against. Though, not all of Soulslikes and the mastery of the genre, just literally boils down to hitting your head against a wall till you make a hole; there are right ways and wrong ways to die, and to further complicate things, the important value in dying in the wrong way, can actually be one of your greatest tools for learning, and finding a way to better approach the situational problem at hand. It is only when one doesn’t have the awareness level to understand the qualitative value difference between a right and wrong way to die, do they then end up betraying a better sense of progress.



In a moment of productive insanity, I will give you a little sneak peak into my writing process, as there are times I will have all of my conceptual ducks in a row to know how to quack my way through a written experience, but today’s inspirational throughway has left me completely blindsided. I usually aim for about a thousand words on any given article, just as an excellent point of reference and effective benchmark to help moderate myself with my daily writings. I have now just successfully blown past that quota, and I’ve really not even begun to get to the heart of my point.



I’ll have to pick up where I left off next time, in a hopes of finalizing my observational speculations here, though I will leave you with this idea: the dangers inherent in solely relying on one’s intuitions, as intuitions are only as relevant as the experience they’re based off of.

It’s why surfers don’t make good sherpas.

~Pashford