Meta!! Worldbuilding!! Making magic have rules

I wrote a Legend of Zelda thing for Worldbuilding Exchange!

I also received a beauty of a KH fic focusing on the development of the Radiant Garden and what position Ansem held in the city before he became lost to his reseach. It was wonderful, the narrative voice was very soothing and the author did an excellent job with weaving in canon details and focusing on the magical civics -- loved that, that was just what I wanted.

I'm definitely going to adopt the headcanon that Ansem drove the democratisation of Radiant Garden, that's a lovely detail to add to his character. I've always been many minds about Ansem, but this might push me into finally considering him someone well-meaning but single-minded.

Definitive more like definite-ly not my cup of tea

So the OG Xenoblade remaster is coming out annnnnnnd almost every single character is much paler than in the original game, their character models have more detail but this makes their animations more subdued and makes everyone more wooden and less expressive

and while the environmental detail is scaled up to XB2 levels, it looks way more artificial than it looked in XCX and XB2 because everything is in detail now, the different texture level-of-detail effect is gone and replaced with a kind of bland semirealism, and the camera system doesn't seem to be doing any blurring based on depth-of-field

and

...I just instantly thought of this video, and about the death of aesthetics in the '00s as the graphics arms race commenced, and feeling that same gut-wrenching vibration of "wow this is much uglier even though it's more technically impressive"

And they're calling this the definitive edition of the game, which sucks on a number of levels. It looks... boring, which is not something you could say about OG Xenoblade with its vertex-painted shadows and stylised textures that gave it that look of hand-painted animation backgrounds.

It seems, with the Switch Nintendo has sort of dropped into their own Stupid Graphics Arms Race.

*bangs head against wall*

Start! Conversations! More! Stop! Being! Afraid! Of! Silence! People! Like! Talking! To! You! You! Absolute! Coward!