Ori and the Blind Forest Doesn’t Work + You Should Love It | Ori Video Essay ft. Wizawhat, Razbuten

questions this is Ori and the blind Forest Moon Studios 2015 action platformer it's a love letter to gaming Classics like Metroid and Rayman with arduously handcrafted environments and gorgeous music and after a four-year development cycle bringing together veteran deaths from all across the industry the game was the recipient of Xbox's Game of the Year award and I really don't like this game but before we get into it I want to make one thing clear I'm not here critiquing your favorite game to insult your intelligence or to make fun of you if we have a difference in opinion I think that's okay that's what video essays have always been about for me seeing other people's perspectives about media that I've consumed whether I've enjoyed it or hate watched it and even when I disagree with someone's take on something it's still interesting to hear what they thought and what they got out of the experience with all of that being said let's talk about why Ori and the blind Forest doesn't work for me and why you should still love it foreign also I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who supported and shared these videos in the past because as of this video you might have noticed the film otter channel is part of the YouTube Partner program more at the end of the video about that but thank you so much it's because of all of you and it means the world to me thank you before we get into the video essay I just wanted to jump in here and remind you to subscribe and like the video for more content like this every single month it's free and really helps the channel grow thank you so much it can really sting when someone doesn't like something that you really love as humans we naturally Bond over things that we have in common with others and on the internet especially that sense of connection can feel so much greater in our electronic spaces we wear these things that we enjoy like Badges of honor and it can be really easy to accidentally create an echo chamber for ourselves fandoms are kind of predicated on being exactly that as an example and if you want to hear more about that I did make a video essay link is in the cards so when I mention that I enjoy a series as goofy as Kingdom Hearts only to be met with comments about how the story is terribly structured or how the dialogue is cringe which it absolutely is it can kind of suck one less thing for me to connect with people over the main difference here is that Ori is widely accepted as one of the best indie games of the last decade and it's rare to hear of someone who dislikes it at least in my experience so when someone tells me Kingdom Hearts isn't for them I get it it's not for everyone and it's not meant to be but my dislike for Ori in the blind Forest is almost always met with the same response why why do you not like my favorite game why do you not like this inherently good piece of media how could you have possibly written an eight-page script critiquing this game well otter you must be apathetic and emotionless so why do I dislike Ori in the blind Forest and don't worry I'm not just going to leave you with well it's bad or it's just not my thing because in reality I should love this game on paper it checks all of my boxes I love metroidvanias I love emotional storytelling in a video game and I love Platformers and it just didn't click for me and here's why there's a lot of things that I didn't really love about my time with the game some of them I'll admit are surface level complaints like I don't really care for the art style myself it reminds me a bit of a 2008 mobile game with the bloom effect turned up a bit too high that's really just a taste thing though and plenty of people really love the visuals other design choices throughout the game are a bit more perplexing to me as someone who's played it several times to get footage for other videos and to write this script and I think those are the building blocks to this game that make for a shaky Foundation which even a great paint job wouldn't really fix foreign things I noticed about this game was the controls felt really uncomfortable Ori controls very strangely and I never really quite got used to it throughout my play time from the second you start controlling this little Mouse he feels slippery like you're constantly moving through an ice level and we all know how fun ice levels are in Platformers that's a different video though the acceleration feels very sudden to give this game a sense of momentum which makes for some very visually impactful sequences like this hallway here early in the game look at him jump and flip and yeah that feels really cool but when you have to move through sections like this that unexpected acceleration starts to be a lot less cool I think a lot of people forget how much Precision platforming there is in this game which the slip and slide movements don't really gel with in great Platformers the protagonist's movement style is reflected in the level design shovel Knight's moveset wouldn't lend itself to adventuring through the tunnels of hallownest for example and vice versa one of the reasons so many people love Celeste is for its tough Precision platforming but it has the tight controls to support that Ori seems to be built for screens you might see in a Sonic the Hedgehog game but almost none of the segments in Ori and the blind Forest back up the main character's movement style whereas the platforms that Madeline is landing on in Celeste are platforms that remain clearly defined with rectangular Corners everything is nice and tidy readable clearly visible with no foreground elements to break your line of sight most of the time the world is designed to help you overcome its challenges not get in your way and there's another snag that ori's gliding doesn't really account for these curved edges on everything that make you slip off the side even if you've made the jump these curves match the aesthetic of the world's design but they make the gameplay much more unpredictable and that doesn't feel great or Fair especially when the jumps themselves could be described as floaty now floaty is a term that gets tossed around a lot and the definition is a bit amorphous to say the least but the working definition that I'm going by is that the change from one state to another feels delayed so I press jump and Ori Waits a few frames before actually jumping himself and the hang time while up in the air also feels extended making the world feel like it has the gravity knob turned down ever so slightly and this kind of delay is detrimental to the gameplay experience of a platformer you want your inputs to feel responsive especially when things around you move so quickly and all of this comes to a head in this Infamous section the ginzo tree Escape it's kind of a perfect example of everything wrong with ori's control system after restoring the element of waters the tree we've been moving through starts flooding the music swells and our only way out is up in theory this is a pretty cool sequence but in practice this is just a tidal wave of frustration no matter how speedily you make your way up the trunk of this tree the rising water rubber bands to meet you wherever you are meaning you can never actually get a meaningful lead on your impending doom your wall jumping on curved surfaces you're trying to perfectly time your floaty jumps to projectiles that are appearing from off screen oh right um bash bash is a thing yeah the shiny new ability you get right before this bash is one of the more UniQue Ideas the game has again it sounds super cool but it controls very confusingly you see to use it you have to be within range of a projectile or glowing object then you hold the button and an arrow appears you can move this around for a few seconds but bash's interface will almost certainly trip you up every time you want to use it because it's not just used for moving Ori around it's also used to launch a projectile in the opposite direction which again sounds cool and gets used in some interesting puzzles but this arrow is showing the direction in which Ori is going to be launched and when the sequence of a puzzle solution requires you to quickly swap between planning where you're bouncing to then where you're aiming a projectile and then back to planning your own route having only one Arrow to work with is an added layer of frustration that just doesn't need to be there personally I think having one white arrow for Ori and one purple to predict a projectile's trajectory would have been really helpful in theory this Mad Dash out of a giant flooding tree is meant to test your Mastery of the bash technique but it's kind of a perfect display of why movement in this game just feels off without the floaty jumps and the oddly shaped platforms and the distracting visuals finding this bash ability and getting to test it out would feel as epic as the devs want it to feel but sadly the controls of this game really undermine what should be a great action set piece finding abilities like these and being able to go back and apply them to previously unsolvable challenges feels great it's why I love metroidvania games like I mentioned in this video again link is in the cards it's a great mix of an intrinsic reward and an extrinsic one as well this type of progression that metroidvanias are famous for is really appealing we want to feel more clever than we actually are and metroidvanias when designed well deliver on that so when I originally heard that Ori and the blind forest was a metroidvania I was all about it and once I got into the flow of the gameplay loop I realized that at least to me Ori doesn't really make for a very good metroidvania experience it looks like one on the surface but plays pretty differently in some key ways and I'm not really someone who needs games to adhere to one specific set of genre conventions I mean I made this video all about why playing with convention and expectation is great one of the coolest feelings about playing a metroidvania is coming across something and thinking oh I can't get over there right now but I bet if I come back later with an upgrade I'll be able to I never really had that experience in Ori and the blind Forest it's a design concept that a lot of people refer to as the lock and key design system where a game shows you a door like this long pit in Hollow Knight and later you find a key to unlock that door in this case the crystal Dash ability now you can unlock this pathway no problem and get to some new chunks of the map that you couldn't access before in metroidvanias you'll see a few obstacles well before you can overcome them giving you a sense of Discovery and accomplishment later on it's the anticipation of future upgrades and the ability to backtrack later that form the foundation of a metroidvanius progression system these moments are the parts that make us feel clever and they're designed to make you feel that it's a pretty neat trick that almost never gets old and as you progress you should feel stronger but also more capable of traversing this unfamiliar world and that design philosophy is what made Super Metroid and Castlevania Symphony of the Night such standout games when they were least an Ori in the blind Forest it's almost always the other way around you're given the key and then the door and there's rarely an incentive to actually go back to a previous area with an unlocked ability and never a moment of ooh I need to remember this you're always moving forward but when the game does have you do some backtracking it's to shortcuts that lead to new areas without you actually using your new ability again you'll quickly find the game doesn't reward backtracking with any meaningful incentives and often leads you to a dead end rather than something that Loops back around for an aha moment whereas something like Metroid dread teases you with frigid rooms that you can't Traverse like these or tiny gaps for Samus to roll through later on like these or impenetrable doors like these what Pathways lay behind them waiting to be uncovered only one way to find out backtrack with a future ability that you know is on the horizon leave it to the Metroid franchise to come back after it was thought dead in the water to remind everyone what a great use of the Metroid formula can look like again bash comes to mind here since it's given to you and you're not asked to backtrack with this new ability to unlock routes That You Came Upon earlier bash is bestowed upon you and then after this you solve a gauntlet of puzzles with it this isn't an inherently bad thing plenty of great games give you an ability and throw puzzles at you to test your use of that ability in that order but that's not really a point of favor in this being a well-constructed metroidvania with an interconnected entangled map that encourages exploration another part of this genres formula that Ori changes oddly enough is save points in a lot of metroidvanias the predetermined save points add to the challenge if you die trying to get somewhere you're sent back to the last bench or bonfire I'd have to try that section again with enemies respawned Ori on the other hand still has these predetermined save points and respawning enemies but then also kind of negates them in practice by letting you save wherever you want for a fee I'll admit the trade-off of figuring out whether I want to use the blue stuff for on-the-fly save points or for my abilities is a pretty cool mechanic you have to decide if you want to play aggressively and risk not being able to save after a really tough section or if you want to play more defensively but I feel like it makes the metroidvanianists of this game feel even more muddled this mechanic makes you as the player a bit less strategic with your choice of paths when you might be in a classic metroidvania where your checkpoints aren't as forgiving it feels like Ori in the blind Forest couldn't make up its mind and is stuck halfway between being a methodical metroidvania and a fast-paced Precision platformer I'm not one for putting games in rigid genre Boxes by any means but it really does feel like some of these ideas and mechanics are at odds with with one another the game really is a jack of all trades but a master of none okay now for some low-hanging fruit to break things up here's a pretty cold take for you like ice cold Ori and the blind Forest has terrible combat I think pretty much everyone can agree on that from every fan of the game that I've talked to it seems to be unanimous that the game's combat leaves a lot to be desired and that's putting it kindly for a game that seems designed for flowing movement and momentum based platforming the combat often forces you to just stand still if you haven't played the game here's how attacking an enemy works you hold down the attack button and your little Spirit friend shoots at homing attacks to hit your opponents well hopefully anyway there's no way to aim or lock onto anything so everything is up to our little Navi stand in you have no control over where these attacks are going and these attacks are fairly weak as well which forces you to stand around and hold the attack button down quite a lot again when there's amazing set pieces like these the game really grinds to a standstill when combat pops up and there's no Dodge button either which makes this stop and hold the attack button approach a Surefire way to take damage almost any time you encounter an enemy The Game's strength is really in its puzzles and its Chase sequences so why combat is inserted into Ori in the blind Forest is honestly a mystery to me had the game taken out combat entirely Corey's gameplay would be miles less frustrating I hear the combat is much better in the sequel for what it's worth but I have yet to get to that part of my gaming backlog though maybe I'll stream it someday this is where things are probably going to get a bit dicey so everyone deep breaths please I really think Ori and the blind forest's storytelling is lazy at best and emotionally manipulative at worst and before you click off let me explain what I mean without a doubt a lot of people were moved by The Game's story and that's great if it spoke to you and you enjoyed it I just want to be clear I'm not trying to insult your intelligence or judge you as a person when I see the game's opening cinematic I see a lot of different storytelling Inspirations that don't really pay off well for me as an audience member over the course of five minutes we're introduced to both Ori and Naru and after we see them build a bridge together Naru starves and wastes away left as a husk for Ori to find one day as he comes back home it's very similar to something like the opening for Pixar's Up where we're introduced to characters and C1 pass away leaving an emotionally devastated protagonist to go on an adventure alone scarred by the loss of someone one they loved Up's opening is tremendously impactful because it's something we can all relate to the love and loss that these characters experience comes from a place of realism so we don't really need to know much more about them to form a bond and root for them and even without dialogue we get to see so much of their personality through these little snapshots in their lives with Ori in the blind Forest on the other hand we're introduced to these two voiceless characters living in a fantasy Forest they're both really abstract no real personality or goals for us to connect to so when Naru Bites the Dust five minutes after we meet them it just kind of feels a bit Hollow to me but even so apart from this crawling animation which is very well done Ori doesn't really seem to be affected by nauru's passing after we start the game and this animation is very heartfelt and impactful but he just gets up shakes it off and starts the adventure and seems to forget about it instantly so if this character's death at the beginning doesn't really inform the way our protagonist looks at the world what's the narrative purpose of including it at all and since we can just skip the intro all together without any real change to our experience of the rest of the game's events is the only point of this opening to emotionally rattle the player with an unearned character death and spoiler alert Naru is revived anyway through an unexplained deus ex machina moment at the end so any impact it might have had is completely lost character deaths in and of themselves aren't a bad thing at all by the way there's plenty of character deaths in media and video games that serve to further the story or a character's motivations you can even see character death in later parts of Ori in the blind Forest being used to justify the aggression of our main antagonist Kuro the owl after her babies are killed by the Light of the spirit tree she seeks to exact revenge on the perceived cause of their death Ori that's some pretty solid character motivation and a great start to an antagonist's Journey but that again makes me wonder what the point of Naru was at all narratively speaking other than to cheaply tug at the player's heartstrings and while the narration throughout the game makes it feel a lot like a fairy tale the trade-off there is that everything we're witnessing feels even more impersonal we're one step further removed from everything that's happening and get even less insight into how our main cast of characters feels about the events that are unfolding The crucial storytelling rule of show don't tell is really hard to follow when an audience's primary connection to a story is through voiceless characters and narration all that being said Ori in the blind Forest is not a bad game it's not shovelware it's not terrible I just don't like it it's just not for me if you've gotten this far into the video essay and you want to give this game a shot I encourage you to there's plenty of people who love it whose opinions I respect for example [Music] when I first played Ori I went in expecting basically a Celeste type game something difficult a platformer mostly and not much story so when a story was introduced in the first few moments of the game I was actually pleasantly surprised and I know that for a lot of people it's important that your characters talk to you and they convey exactly what their reasoning is and how they feel about things for me the fact that Ori didn't do that was actually very good I didn't get to hear Ori say wow I'm so sad right now this is a sad moment I had Ori I had the expressions and I had the incredible musical score to accompany it and give me the emotions that Ori was feeling already these days I feel like a lot of games very much dump Exposition on you I am very much a story loving gamer so when I stream I try to look for things with a good story when I went into Ori I did not expect one I thought it was just going to be a platformer but it turned out to be one of the best stories for me personally to experience there was never a moment where they gave me a note that said oh the forest oh it's such a terrible time they're having no we just got Ori we got the music and expressions and that's it it was very much a game about feelings exclusively they didn't tell you how to feel with dramatic readings they showed you how to feel they gave you music to accompany it and it worked so well for me I cried several moments in the game and that's where basically without text there were here and there moments where they said this is what's going on but they were a very few lines and most of it was just you on your journey with Ori and the emotional connection that I felt because of that because it was just emotion driven and not a storybook it meant a great deal to me the story didn't have to be very complicated it just had to be engaging for a story to build a connection between the player and the character they are playing without words is very difficult to do and I think Ori executed it perfectly Ori and the blind Forest is a game whose themes and overall style elevates what is really a pretty basic metroidvania to an unforgettable status in contrast with other additions to a genre that commonly begin with a really strong main character having all their powers taken away Ori begins her journey already extremely weak and even near death its minimalistic storytelling depicts a narrative about truly overcoming the odds Ori is prey in her environment she has no attacks of her own until she rescues sign and even then she's incredibly small and frail which she does have is unmatched agility expertly communicated through her controls and animations it's an intentionally floaty feeling game which is a bit of an abstract way to design a platformer but I can't help but feel that Ori needs to feel floated like a wisp on the Wind what Ori in the blind forest does exceptionally well is play into ori's abilities and limitations through its incredible sense of scale rather than littering its areas with traditional boss fights the real boss fights are the Escape sequences easily the most incredible sections of the game with the ginso tree being a standout moment as a fan of exceptional movement systems and Platformers I love orian the blind Forest but as an emotionally touched player moved by its narrative and Charmed by its inspiring themes and breathtaking music or in the blind Forest is one of my favorite games one aspect I've always enjoyed about Ori in the blind Forest is its save system while there are a few automatic checkpoints throughout the game the majority of the time it is on the player to create their own through the use of the Soul link pretty much by consuming an energy cell they can make a checkpoint anywhere they want and this approach leads to a lot of interesting decision making especially early on is it better to drop save points frequently but be underpowered for encounters to come or use energy primarily for attacking but risk losing a ton of progress if you fail because of all this a lot of thought has to go into where players should drop their save points as there are certain areas that are far more dangerous and challenging than others and without proper consideration the player could put themselves in a hard to escape situation now to some people this mechanic may seem really punishing and you know it is as much as I like it I certainly don't think it's for everyone given how used to autosaves most people are at this point there's a pretty good chance that a large chunk of players will forget that Ori doesn't have them and lose a fair bit of prog progress because they didn't think to drop a checkpoint and I expect this is why Moon Studios moved away from the mechanic in the sequel however I find it to be an interesting piece of game design it isn't often that a title makes you think about when the best time to save is and I'll always appreciate the layer of depth it adds to Orion blind forest's exploration and combat [Music] hello I'm skyhoppers and I'm here to provide a defensive or at least a brief exploration of the story of Ori and the blind forest in general it is pretty simple the forest is dying overwhelmed by Darkness after an attack from the giant owl named Kuro the Japanese word for Darkness pretty heavy-handed your goal is to restore light to the forest restore its Vision cure its blindness it's easy to see a straightforward environmental message but it gets complicated when as otter mentioned we learned that the source of kuro's Rage was the death of her children due to the intense light of the spirit tree so far the spirit tree had been an unalloyed good he the tree is ori's father and the narrator of the game the light he shown was intended as a beacon for Ori to find their way home the reason Ori never returned to him is that their adoptive mother Naru shielded them from seeing that light had Ori responded to the beacon it likely would have prevented the deaths of kuru's children huh it is clear before anything else that Naru is loving and kind she know what she was doing was she being selfish in wanting to preserve her connection with Ori or was Naru simply unaware of their original source I don't know from this though we can see that all of the pain and death that lingers under the glittering surface of Ori in the blind Forest began in three distinct ways with a parent's desperation to protect their child that is an interesting choice as for what that means I'm open to suggestions comment your thoughts down below and of course subscribe to film otter I think on the internet especially on YouTube where Nuance gets lost and context goes to die in the comment section it's kind of hard to remember that like it's just a game I'm just some guy on the internet who has a degree in editing and a background in documentary work if you heard me say this when people talk about scary fandoms the ones surrounding undertale is bound to come up in the conversation or this this is the return of the oberden and I hated it and it got your blood boiling maybe don't take games so seriously you can dislike a video game that I love and vice versa and we can co-exist we can even be friends none of this matters we are all so insignificant we're all gonna pass someday so before that happens take a deep breath and just enjoy stuff you know [Music] hey there thank you so much for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did hit the like button and subscribe to the channel it's because of all of your support over the past year and a half that this channel got enough subscribers and watch time to be a part of the YouTube Partner program and that means the absolute World it means I'm one step closer to possibly making content creation my full-time thing which is crazy so yeah I just wanted to take a moment here to say a big thank you to everyone who has ever shared these videos it's made all of the difference speaking of helping out these videos are not cheap to make so if you do believe in the content and want to help me do this full time you can always support me with donations over on my Kofi page if you're not familiar with Kofi it's kind of like patreon but a lot cooler but yeah thank you to all of these lovely monthly supporters over on my Kofi like nightmare God undies Marita voxemandius mumpau veltwalker puzzled Monkey Tree actual boy cap Danvers Robertson oyster milk the werewolf dear papaya being fiello and jardra's pixels for as little as four dollars a month you can become a monthly supporter over there to help make these videos possible and in return you get shout outs at the end here extra content throughout the month and sneak peeks at Future video essays also if you want to check out any of the games that I mentioned in any of my video essays there's always affiliate links to Humble Bundle down below they help support the channel and trans Charities at no extra cost to you so it's a win-win-win and worth checking out and speaking of links there are links down below to all the creators who helped out in this video as well please go check them out they're all wonderful anyway thank you thank you again I had a great time making this video I hope the comment section isn't too crazy but yeah I'll see you in the next one thank you again for watching and bye go share the video

Channel: filmotter

Views: 13,808

Keywords: ori and the blind forest, ori and the will of the wisps, video essay, analysis, ori, ori video essay, filmotter, razbuten, wizawhat, skyehoppers, jinzee, proper bird, why ori and the blind forest doesn't work, ori and the blind forest video essay, ost, metroidvania, controls, empathy, story, ori and the blind forest critique, criticism, metroid dread, video game, analyzing, ori and the blind forest deep dive, deep dive, naru, kuro, opening, up, pixar, moon studios, blind forest, retrospective, otter

Id: xc_uDld2f5w

Length: 32min 2sec (1922 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 05 2022