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@@NoctLightCloud > Hello there! My name is Daryl and on this channel I write and create videos on the interaction between psychology, video games, video game design, and life. I have a Bachelor’s degree in psychology and have spent more hours with a controller in my hand than I’d like to admit. Thanks for visiting my channel! I typically release new videos once a month. **This channel's content is intended for those ages 13 and up.** lol From the "about" description of the channel.
Same, I got to what I thought was the final mission a few years ago. And then never went back to the game. Although I've always been meaning to. Very similar experience with many other games. I get right to what feels like the end and then stop playing just before I get the ending. But I make sure to avoid spoilers still
I have something sort of similar with the Witcher 3, I finished the main game and the first DLC but never finished the second DLC even though I keep hearing is one of the best ones. I keep telling myself I will one day
I think the XIII situation is so strong because the XIII ending is so clearly meant to be an ending. And a very tied together happy one. And then XIII-2 comes along and just, literally seconds later in the narrative, rips it apart and tells you none of that shit stuck. Everything gets thrown into proper chaos for no real reason just because and the characters themselves don’t get 20 seconds to reflect on their journey and enjoy their reunion. It’s such a strange choice to not let that ending breathe and just pick the new story up like, 5 years later in the timeline.
Completely agree with the XIII-2 sentiment. I love XIII-2 to bits, but telling me the hours I spent triumphing over the gods that would call us pets in XIII was only possible, because of another god. UGH
As a person who loves the XIII trilogy to death and has completed all 3 games many times, I have to agree with you, despite the fact that XIII-2 is my favorite of the three.
I hate when media does that "right were it left off" sequels Give the characters some time to breath before they go back to fighting stuff This way not only can we see what they were doing with their lifes but also can give ways into new character arcs and things like that now that the sitiation has changed
Exactly. Narratively, I was annoyed by XIII-2 and Lightning Returns. Hurts as well that the ending for XIII-2 also didn’t provide much in closure because it was set-up for the third game.
You know,the freezing thing actually explains a lot about why the Kingdom Hearts fandom reacted so negatively so Dream Drop Distance. The story introduces a plot elements that goes against the conclusion that many people came to after the previous games. It's not even a retcon or anything since it was properly set up in the same previous games but most people just came to a different conclusion and froze on that, so when DDD came around and said that was wrong it felt almost offensive
Can you be more specific? What conclusions to 2 did people draw that DDD supplemented? If it's just about the villains coming back, it was actually Recoded's secret ending that first said that was going to happen. If it's just time travel shenanigans and dream stuff, I wouldn't say that goes against any conclusion you can make about the universe after playing the previous games. Personally the only thing that really bothered me about DDD was Master Xehanort being the man in charge instead of Apprentice Xehanort, the World that Never Was being intact despite Xemnas both turning it into a dragon and Pete and Malificent being set up to take control of it (that's a twofer on just ignoring previous plot points) and a story that was very end heavy on any actual plot.
Well when a company takes too long to make a game that's what happens. People speculate on theories for years, and get so desperate they make up their own stories. Then the mega company just ends up making the story worse. In the indie-starved 2000s, this was rampant. Thank god triple-a's are fading away in favor of indie opportunists taking advantage of sluggish studios
@@Jotari I'm mostly referring to Nobodies having hearts. In hindsight it makes a lot of sense and every Nobody throughout CoM, 2 and Days are explicitly shown having emotions. But a lot of people played those games as kids and as a kid it easy to not connect those elements, especially since the games never outright *tell* you that they have hearts, so lots of people froze the info that Nobodies don't have hearts. Nowadays you'll see these same people screaming "retcon" and completely dismissing DDD. Ofc this can also apply to the organization coming back, that if a nobody dies and a heartless dies then they are recreated, stuff that do make sense but since they were introduced much later a lot of people feel like the rules were broken instead of expanded upon
I didn't see a lot of people reacting negatively to Nobodies having hearts, rather the strongest reactions seemed to be towards Xehanort and the way his character (and various personas) changed by the time travel. Where he used to be driven by a desire for knowledge, now he already knows everything and is driven by a sense of destiny. It makes sense for him to lie about being a knowledge seeker considering he was impersonating a scientist and leading a team comprised largely of scientists, but people were attached to the idea that the Xehanorts were curious and callous whereas DDD made them all-knowing and strongly motivated. Freezing and unfreezing still explain what's going on, but I think that it's maybe a little more reasonable to be mad at the big bad changing motives than at Axel loving his friends.
I kinda wanna add a bit of my experience to this, since I feel that oftentimes I just, don't freeze or forget the game after I freeze, since I deal with ADHD, so my attention on these things constantly shift and it's rare I even care if there's an end or not. I just kind of drift around until I hyperfixate on a single game or series and HAVE to see all of it due to obsessing. My reaction to "You're probably wondering about that dormatory study, still thinking about that?" was "I forgot"
Yep as someone with ADHD I’ll freeze a bunch myself. There are some games where my save is right in front of the final boss room, and I’ll completely forget and move on to the next game. My freeze is when my brain says “enough of the hyper focusing”. Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Divinity Original Sin 2, Atelier Ryza, Tales of Arise, and probably many others I forgot. But usually at some point, my hyper focus wanes and I’ll jump around games and completely forget to finish those games, even if it’s just 1 or 2 hours left.
@@Ceece20 ahh yes, AT Nergigante from MHWorld, the final frontier between being a casual and an average MH player.... Lemme just grind Sykrim Alchemy, Enchanting and Smithing to make the ultimate Armor set
Genuinely thought I was the only one. A great deal of that is very me. Another thing is I find I get a little sad when I realize I’m entering the endgame. The suspense and core loop of the midgame feels like a cozy limbo I don’t wanna leave. My adhd just switches the hyper fixation at a very opportune time.
Oh what a *fascinating* topic. I always wondered why I learned way more heavily to games without a defined ending like MOBAs or Rimworld or whatever. Looking forward to the next one!
Probably you're lower in openness and higher in some other personality trait, with that particular personality trait being the glue that keeps you to it. I say you're lower in openness because games that have endings are based on stories that have a start & end. The story element and the sense of closure for stories, ideas, emotions, and journeys is desired by those who are higher in openness. I have high nfc in this regard. I like games with ends. But I also like to spend my time playing L4D2 in a sandbox way because that plays with my agreeableness trait (desire for cooperation and teamwork).
Such a great video, it really explained the topic super well and the pacing was spot on. I always end up playing games and trying to finish them, but I rarely get all the way through because I don't have the patience usually. My NFC is pretty high though, so I end up with this back log off games that I'm itching to finish, even if I'm not actor that interested in playing them. I feel like I just need to cross them off the list. That said, whenever I do finish a game, it ends up being such a rewarding experience that I find myself wanting to play it again just to get that high of completion again.
I think that age might play a part in this too. My younger self never liked seeing something end and always wanted more even if that more was not as good as what had come before. Now that I’m older I’ve grown to appreciate a great ending and find less desire to even start a show or game series that is very long.
One thing I struggle with is I have a hard time going back to games and shows that are interrupted by either life or an activity that grabs my attention, to this day I still haven't finished FF7R despite the fact that I was really enjoying it and had no desire to put it down.
Currently, I bought Aeternoblade 2 on Switch because I bought the first on 2DS. Kinda left it behind and now I have to start all over to figure it out and get to the end. But WOW, they sure played a Soulsborne before making the sequel! I am *SWEATING IT* here… I’m beating both games
It's hard to jump right back into the late stages of a game when you've been away and out of practice for too long. What used to be easy suddenly feels disproportionately difficult, and decreasing the difficulty feels like cheating.
This is me too. I never finished skyward sword, twilight princess and such because of that. But that is also just the tiny bit of completionest in me. Comming back and not knowing what I've already accomplished and having to slowly do things to see if I did them does not make for fun for me so I either start over, or walk away.
This puts into words the reason behind a phenomena that I've experienced and been kinda immersed in for a while: enthusiastic fandom. You showed a clip of Undertale at the end when talking about conclusions, and that's an excellent example to illustrate what I'm getting at. On paper, that particular ending is as good of closure as it gets. And afterward, the game even asks you to freeze, to take your closure and go. It practically begs you to. But so many people just... don't. They come back and exhaust everything else, and literally destroy their closure with endings that cannot be taken back. And even among those who respect the game's request to close the program and move on, many only actually do the first part. All of the fan content, the alternate universes, the fan fiction, fan games. These are all expressions of being so immersed in a story that you simply do not want it to end. There are always new corners to prod, new ideas to explore, new shadows to shine a light on. You never freeze and you never feel desire to. But here's the odd thing. Among the people I've seen get caught up in this fandom loop of non-closure, not just with Undertale, but with anything, many are those for whom their NFC with other works is generally high. I'm no scientist, but if I had to hazard a guess, some people just have "buttons" that a piece of media can press that will nearly obliterate their NFC with it. It clicks for them and it can take years or decades for them to have had "enough" of it because it just makes them that happy. And honestly, that's a wonderful thing, that people can find works of art that captivate them such that they will expand their own creative boundaries to have more of it, and encourage others to do so as well.
I think with Undertale there are several factors at play: -It is very short, and one "normal" playthrough has you basically becoming confident with the skills required by the very end -It was impossible almost from release week to avoid at least some spoilers, and I think many people were aware that the "true ending" is experiencing all or at least the most important endings, even in a particular order (normal to pacifist to genocide), and the difficulty curve and pacing of each game path is actually designed with this order in mind -The game wears the fact that it's messing with you and manipulating you on its sleeve, and has many players wanting a "do-over" from the very beginning when they accidentally kill Toriel; As such the game begging you to put it down reads very much as reverse psychology, and the kind of person to get invested in the game in the first place will actually lack a feeling of closure because they will have regrets about how they approached the game -The game was made by Toby Fox, whose prior fame mostly came from working on the Homestuck soundtrack. If you're not familiar with Homestuck, it was (is) definitely not for people with high need for closure, and Undertale was both announced and released while Homestuck 1 was ongoing. The vast majority of the Undertale fanbase were part of its viral sensation and were not from the Homestuck fandom, but the _core fanbase_ who codified the game's community and how people approached it all came from the Homestuck fanbase -The average need for a sense of belonging is much higher than anyone's need for closure. That's probably why multiplayer games are so successful even despite apparently so few people having low NFC, and with the incredibly strong clannishness paired with the large size of Undertale's community it was (probably still is) like crack for people who have that need and aren't getting it satisfied elsewhere.
@@vitriolicAmaranth there's also Toby's work on Earthbound fan-games, in which the earthbound fandom has been begging for its 3rd game here in the west for years
this is exactly how i feel about minecraft, i typically love single-player story based games with a defined ending but i find myself constantly coming back to minecraft again and again even after 12 years despite it’s lack of a real ending or story.
@@lukrio99990 Right but he didn't have a large following from that. His following from Homestuck was large, rabid and already obsessed with him and his work.
I'd love to see an essay on closure vs bingeing- how/why little kids watch the same movies over and over. I'm also interested in why I'll play a story-based game all the way to the final boss and then start the game over from the beginning before finishing it.
Lovely work as always Daryl; I experienced a similar saga with Twilight Princess (I started and stopped that game multiple times across Gamecube, Wii and the Wii U Remaster until I finally finished it back in May) Really insightful stuff!
I was so excited for TP on Wii, but when I finally got it (didn't get a Wii for years, became a PC gamer primarily) I got halfway through and shelved it. So similarly, I finally finished it on the Wii U version years later. I'm glad BotW at least lived up to the hype for me; Until then, MM had remained my favourite Zelda by a wide margin and none of the other 3D titles were even top 5.
The second mentioned that he watched 13-2s trailer I laughed out loud thinking to myself: "Well, he's either diving straight into 13-2 or raging knowing that his beautiful headcannon ending was sent to the abyss"
This might explain why I usually struggle so much to continue playing competitive games. It's not that I don't enjoy playing then, it's that the lack of a promised end at some point makes me lose interest. This is also probably why I feel so good when I get to move a game to the "finished" category in my list, it's so satisfying to know that I'm done with something.
You did it again Daryl! What an amazing video! I get what you mean, I have tried to play nier automata so many times and I know it's great but I just keep putting it down again and getting started on a new game. 10/10 video, so glad im a patron!
Oh man, Nier is sooooo worth finishing! Even if you have to finish it like 5 times lmao, easily one of the most profound endings to a game I’ve played.
This video specifically touches a part of me that is probably the precedent for my whole modus operandi with anything narrative. It's less of a 'hits close to home' but more of general correlation to what I understand. I no joke had an almost identical experience with FFXIII, though it wasn't 13 years long I believe I started it in something like 2012 and then finished it in... 2017? I want to say. I then had both FFXIII-2 and Lightning Returns sitting and ready, and whilst I started FFXIII-2 straight after to see what I was getting into it once gain became a long journey that I played time to time, I believe I finished FFXIII-2 in full only last year. (I have similarly started Lightning Returns in January). To speak neither here nor there it is a series I do enjoy even with its downfalls. To the point though, this isn't the case with only FFXIII, rather this is something I do with everything - books, movies, games. I find myself often with a full library of items that are part way through - however, I never have the intention to drop them. I need them to be done, complete and finished. Whether that means its something I'll return to in actual years from when I started it - doesn't matter. That freezing though where I feel I got enough of a sense for what the game is, automatically puts things on stand-by though, I move over to some else or something new that I have chosen to reintroduce that seizure to. This in a lot of cases is a game I have left behind and then when I reach another point that again feels like a kind of freeze I back away from it to something else - whether intentionally or no. I find myself in this vein never really giving up on a game, even if mediocre. The only things I steer clear from are something that up front disappoints me and/or shows that there really is nothing new to "seize" by playing it further. But even if I freeze on a game based on the immediate style of play an element of the story, music or something else will often reignite in my mind after a time and I'll go back to it in order to play more. Not necessarily with the mind to finish the game completely (though in an ideal world that would be the hope each time), instead its until I feel comfortable with my time spent with it - as you yourself said in the video: like time with an old friend. As a result of this behaviour I have a lot of these long-winded and sentimental attachments to things that have been brought to closure not just because the game told me its done but because after such an amount of time, its now the moment when I know I won't be picking it up again. Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion, Dark Souls II, Final Fantasy XIII, The Witcher, and a truly massive amount more I won't list here. It's a weird gratifying feeling but even should I feel that need to seize again, I am not picking the game up to play once more, its something I'll then seek a community for online, listen to the soundtracks again or watch videos not too dissimilar to this one that digest the game in a different light to how I did.
Amazing video as always! My personal favorite game that gave me the most closure was Celeste. But not the story itself, oh no. Having just a story to finish in Celeste wasn't enough for me, however going back and finishing B-Sides and C-sides with the added challenge, on top of the game rewarding me for finishing those with more story, gave me the best "Oh yeah, that's it, I'll be heading out" feeling I've ever had with any game. I felt like the game had its closure with the story, and I had closure with being able to say "Yup, I did it". That's why I have never gone back to playing it, but will confidently say that it is and will remain one of my favorite games of all time.
Definitely on the same page with you there, getting through the B and C sides is one hell of an achievement. Same vibes as souls games, just such a deep sense of “I really did it” at the end. Thanks for the kind words!
a little bit the same. i also got some golden berries and speedran a little but since then i have no will to touch it even tho it's prb my favorite game
I have almost the opposite experience. The base story of Celeste was fun, rewarding, and interesting in its own right to me, and then I tried to do the rest of the game and got skilllocked behind the B sides. I ended up finding enough hearts in the A sides to struggle through Core before I'd beaten a single B side, finished 2B, and then got locked into Farewell forever and haven't finished it. Understandably, the feeling of closure I could have had with the game is broken now, and seeing as I dont have the patience to actually get through enough B and C sides to learn the skills needed to finish the story with Farewell, its doubtful I'll ever reach that point, which feels like a shame until I remember that I didn't find the challenge of the B sides fun. In short, my failure to complete the bonus story content has made it harder to appreciate the closure I might have gotten by beating the story of the base game. If Farewell had been placed between 8A and the B sides in the difficulty curve, I'd feel differently, but, here we are.
I find it interesting that I've been struggling with this topic, but more so for anime. A lot of the time I'll freeze watching the literal best shows of the season after 3 episodes because it's peak! I don't want to see it fall off and get worse, and I want to be able to have the opportunity to still watch it for the first time. So instead of actually enjoying myself and watching content that I know I'll enjoy, I'll leave it and let it stay frozen in time.
I just commented myself but I do the exact same thing! Games or other media I really love I often won't finish because then I know that experience is over and I can never have it again.
I find that it heavily HEAVILY depends on the game for me. The more a game makes me care about its characters, the more I want to see the ending and achieve closure, especially if the story really puts those characters through the wringer. I recently beat Eastward and REALLY felt that, because after the credits and final scenes were done, I felt crushed. I'll think about that game for a long while because of its story and its ending. I'll probably not touch it again in a while, except maybe to play the minigame, if I feel like it, because that story is (sadly) done. On the other hand, I play and replay certain games for hundreds of hours. Seen the credits in Pokemon? No matter, onto the postgame or onto another playthrough. Beaten Digimon World for the third time? Fourth playthrough, let's go! Beaten Dark Souls 1? Next build, come on! Beaten another run of Monster Train? Bring on the next! Beaten Gotcha Force for the 20th time? I still need the rare version of 80 units! I really REALLY enjoy games that I can replay over and over again if the gameplay is good, but every good story needs an ending for me. I'm not sure where that puts me tbh, because I feel like it's more dependent on the games and less on my personality.
Your story with Final Fantasy 13 reminded me of my own story with Kingdom Hearts 1. I got it as a kid because like all children of that era I loved Disney movies, but because I had no real conception of an rpg overworld (I hadn’t even played a Zelda game at that point) I ended up getting stuck on destiny island, completely unsure of how to proceed. I went back to the game several times, restarting from the beginning so often that the image of the stained glass Disney princesses is burned into my memory. One part that stuck with me was the door that can’t yet be opened. In 2020 I booted up my ps2 and that same copy of Kingdom Hearts 1, and (after a few months) stood before that door. I had to just stand there and take it all in. This was it. Time to see all that kingdom hearts has to offer.
I spent a lot of my pre-teen years watching my older brother play FFs 7 to 9, and playing them myself, though only up to the point where they got too difficult. Then at 16, I decided to spend a summer vacation completing all three games. I discovered mind blowing plot details that flew over my head as a child, like Cloud's true backstory, or how dark FF9 is despite its cartoonish style... I was definitely more emotionally invested. I guess having closure on these childhood games was in a way like having closure on childhood itself.
I personally fall into a small crack between the two: I love single-player experiences with a definite end, but I always purposefully stop just before the final boss and may never return to that game, but on the rare occasion I do come back later and beat the final boss, I'll clear all the post-game and I'm not sure why.
I too, in playing 3 main line Pokémon game in the recent past, tend to stop just before the finale, the Victory Road. For me, I suppose, it's a way to limit my enthusiasm for that story because if I end the story right away, I feel I'll be left a lonely/craving for more feeling because I still have the energy/thought but ran out of things to use it for.
For me, even in two games that both have very defined endings, the different amount in which they focus on their respective endings can drastically impact the overall experience to me. Taking Botw and Elden Ring, for instance: in Botw, the ending (Hyrule castle) is literally always in sight, no matter where in world you go, so it led me to constantly keeping that goal in the back of my mind, and everything I did felt like I was directly making progress towards a goal. On the other hand, in Elden Ring, in which I had no idea how far the final goal was, I ended up just aimlessly wandering, but also taking in the world a lot more - basically, I played it like a game without a defined ending (which made me not actually finish it). The same thing also goes for similar pairs of games like Gungeon and Hades and even platformers like Banjo-Kazooie vs. Mario 64 to some extent. Of course there are a lot of other possible differences that could cause this effect, but I am quite curious if it´s a personal thing about myself or a more universal game design principle that´s at play here.
Wouldn’t the erdtree, the colossal glowing beacon visible everywhere in the overworld and cited as the tarnisheds end goal by three npcs in the first 10 hours serve the same function as hyrule castle?
Interesting, I had the opposite experience. With each area having it's own legacy dungeon or direction that the sight of grace was pointing to, I always felt compelled to make progress and finish the game. Each area was huge, but small enough to a point where I could feel done with an area after finding the landmarks. With Breath of the Wild, Ganon just became less of a focus because you could almost always see Hyrule. I kept wanting to do everything before reaching Ganon because the castle felt like a point of no return. This eventually burnt me out to the point where the game started feeling really repetitive and I quit before ever beating the game.
@@inconsistenttimebomb6922 If I’m honest I didn’t really remember finding npcs that clearly pointed out that the Erdtree was the game’s goal for a long time, mostly because I ended up wandering completely off the main path in the beginning, and also I guess I was just more engaged with other elements of the story, since in BOTW the great plateau being an isolated tutorial area and the Main Quest being simply “Defeat Ganon” made it really clear what your end goal was. But even then, being able to theoretically visit Hyrule Castle at literally anytime after the tutorial made everything in the game feel like a choice, since at anytime I could go and try to defeat the game. Plus, I always knew the relative distance between where I was relative to the goal, and the guardians, the game’s final enemy, where everywhere in the map, allowing you to see your skill increase, so all that combined made progress towards the goal even clearer, I’d guess. In Elden Ring, on the other hand, all progress I made was always focused on the current boss I was fighting, which was awesome, but I never really felt like beating a boss was getting me any closer to the end, possibly because even if I had some interest in exploring the biggest Erdtree which was likely to be the end, I didn’t really even know the clear steps to get there. Though if I’m honest, there could be a million other reasons behind this, like the difference in difficult or freedom of movement, but the fact is that I ended up playing Zelda as a game with a defined ending, and ER a game without one, and... honestly I still loved both either way, just in a different way.
@@aidansilli4257 Huh that’s really interesting, we really did have almost the exact opposite experience. If I may ask, are you more of a NFC guy or not? Because in this case you progressed more towards smaller, more local goals, while I did so more towards the larger ones, so maybe the difference was in there somewhere. Or maybe you’re more of a completionist, that could be the factor too, since I don’t generally enjoy being completely done with an area
@@lockfour495 I would say I'm more of a completionist and I prefer smaller goals. I like to clear out areas and find as much as I can. I love games like Banjo Kazooie/Tooie and Hollow Knight because they have a distinct number of stuff to collect/find. In this regard, Elden Ring was big, but still manageable. I just got bored of hunting for korok seeds, fetch quests, and shrine hunting in breath of the wild.
This video has also been helpful for me because I wonder how my friends can spend hundreds of hours on the same games and not get bored or burnt out. I am probably just the highest need for closure person in my friend circle.
Younger, I played more games without ending, or even games with one but I'd just hang out with the npcs and wander in the game's world. Now, I mostly play story games, I wanna feel like I made progress and not just had fun (or else I'll think about all the more productive stuff I could be doing... Omg why am I here watching this, I have college exams next week!) Great vidéo, as always.
I've run the whole spectrum of those reactions. I can say now that I've been disappointed enough by endings that I don't give much of a damn for the closure a game thinks its giving me. I voted for the option that felt more likely that the devs knew what they were doing, but in practice I'm ready to put something down for many reasons.
Thank you for the subtitles. A great and thought provoking video as always. I don't really need to take a survey to know that I'm a high NFC. The constant dozens of youtube tabs of video essays where I'm going "I can't close the tab until I watch this!" and then never do a lot of the time is proof enough. :) And again, thank you for the subtitles. I definitely appreciate the effort to provide them.
For me, as I get older and take on more responsibility I just find it harder to commit to sticking to the end of games with a definitive end. I find myself being a lot more "honest" with myself about what I will enjoy when I buy games now. My need for closure has gotten lower and lower as my time constraints have gotten tighter and tighter. I much prefer more open ended games with a simple enough game play loop that I can enjoy whenever I find time to pick one up. However, with that said, certain games with a defined ending, but a fun enough gameplay loop I have finished in a short period of time (for me that would be within a week of date of purchase). Most likely because I didn't feel like I had to invest as much into getting to that ending in such a short period of time. I have so much more to say, but I will leave it at that. Great video!!
I intensely prefer games with a defined ending but I also love games that have that ending and then have more postgame content, especially postgame story. I love DLC that adds story content for this reason. Don't know what exactly this says about me. I have a hard time with games that don't have an end (lots of mobile games where come back to basically manage a farm, such as dragonvale). It's strange.
A very interesting video. As someone who has a backlog of games whose postgames I've started but never finish and have always wondered why this is, I think this video has given me some insight. I do find that until I've reach a games ending my mind can't properly unravel my full feelings on the game. I crave having a game say to me "the end," and get that sweet, sweet closer. Even with open ended games I end up making my own goals for closer. Ex: I'm a Genshin player but I don't play to reach an end but rather to reach my end goal of getting a character I want.
Intriguing. I played Genshin, enjoyed it, and played it for the story, as well as experience. Then stopped when I finished everything up to before the Inuzuma update, (and that summer island one,) and I haven't gone back to it since, because I know how expensive it is, and I don't quite have the patience to be ftp
Great video Daryl! Aside from the face that I loved seeing your FFXIII tweet and hearing someone talk about how they love the game, I tend to have a bunch of games that I want to finish as well. Last week I finally got around to finishing the Somnium Files after taking a 3 year break and I had an absolute blast. Your video really motivates me to continue with another game and check it off the list ;)
Actually, this personally explained a lot for me! I used to play Genshin Impact a lot, but like after 2.0 my hype died out, and i said that it was because i liked how that part of th story ended and didn't want the more and more updates on the characters they put out. Now i get why much better, so thanks for the video ^^ It was really interessing and well done, good work lol :D
This explains how cliffhangers work so well, considering how it's usually a high tension moment with no appropriate closure. Also explains why I get slightly upset when a game or movie ends, even on a good note, slightly upsets me because they do not go on for a short bit to show how the main and side characters' lives normalized after the series ends.
Thx for making me always look educated and smart in front of my boss and friends by teaching me this cool stuff, when in reality I’ve been watching video games on YT ❤️
When I play games, I usually have two that I am playing during a certain period. Usually I have one game, which has a story and an end which I'll play if I have a nice big chunk of time to have fun with it, and another game, which is a lot more open ended which I'll play on and off when I short periods of free time.
When you started talking about Final Fantasy XIII, I completely forgot about the psychology experiment and became enraptured by your story. It was well told and mirrored most of my experiences with the game. I say "most" because it didn't take me nearly thirteen years to complete, but I was also taken with the world and the story.
Great video! Not related to video-games, but now I know why I liked the ending of Immortal Hulk so much! Once I started reading Hulk's comics it always bothered me that he never got a happy ending or an ending at all. I really love that character, but Planet Hulk and World War Hulk always had an ending that said "there's more to come" and I knew it wasn't gonna be happy. I wanted an ending, a happy one. So when the Immortal Hulk run ended it finally felt like Hulk and Banner had their happy ending, I could stop at that moment and believe that was it, all he went through lead to that moment and there was only good things awaiting the character after that. I kinda have a similar feeling to some other medias as well, I'm glad this video helped understand why.
I definitly had this with breath of the wild. I spent most of my play time ignoring the main story to just explore the whole world. I got 90% of the way through everywhere when a switch just flipped in my head and i thought "okay, i am done exploring, time to finish the game now" and I made a beeline to all the story parts ignoring all the optional stuff. Glad that theres a word/phase for it
so where do I fall as someone who prefers games with an ending, but usually stop playing right *before* the end? (also as someone who loves FF13 and its sequels, I do have to say it's definitely true that 13-2 kind of takes away from 13's perfect ending)
Well, going off of what Darryl said, I think it could go either way. But I'm leaning more towards the fact that you could have a high NFC. Thus by the time you have reached the ending you have already come to a conclusion or freezing point for the game. Continuing to play and then end the game could possibly continue the seizing process and change the freeze point you have already selected in your mind. Hope that helps!
Same here! I'm starting to think we need an essay on this topic, because I also stop right before the end. I tend to go back to the beginning a second (or third) time and only then will I finish it.
@@NoiseDay When my mates are trying to reccomend a game to me and I ask for the average amount of hours it takes to complete it, they will always jokingly cut of 1/4 of the expected gameplay hours because I'm always dropping the game before I reach the ending. I do the same with books aswell. Recently I piccked up Good Omens because my mate wanted to read it with me but I got 70% of the way through then stopped right before the climax. I still need to get back to it but I've moved on to a new book >_>
I definitely have a high NFC. The Greatest Closure a game has ever given me is definitely the ending of the original Persona 5; it's part of the reason I can never really get invest in Royal. I've rarely have felt so content. Also FF13's OST is banger central
Oh dude, I watched the added content of Royal on TH-cam and I think it’s done in a way that doesn’t detract or fundamentally alter the original. It’s very interesting and in keeping with the original themes, so Id at minimum watch the content on TH-cam. If you find it offends your relationship with the game, I’ll take the blame for it, but I think it only enhances.
I rarely decide that I'm done with a game when the game ends. I have tons of games that I "finished" maybe an hour before i reached the actual ending. And some other games I kept playing long after the content had run out. Celeste for example, I 100 percented at 17 hours (except golden berries) but kept playing, modding to get new content and I now have 100 hours in that game. I also wonder if this can be related to replaying games or watching your friends play games you've finished. I definitely do this with games that finished before I felt finished with them myself. I love watching blind playthroughs of Celeste.
My god, Crosscode is the best indie game story I swear to god. The gameplay is also extremely fun, if not a little too difficult at times. It beats a lot of popular AAA titles for me. The way they wrote Lea's character was so dang good, making a silent protagonist that actually makes sense on why they can't speak, and having that be part of their character flaw. I felt for her in the end, and I was so happy with the conclusion and the DLC epilogue. Also, I love the meta-story of playing a game about being in a game (kinda).
@@Caliboyjosh10 Same man. I highly enjoyed the base game but its somewhat incomplete ending kept it from being my faavourite. Then the dlc proceeded to give me everything I could've ever wished for and much more. Well worth the over 20$ worth of content sold for only 5$ Very excited for RadicalFish's next game, Project Terra!
@@ShallBePurified I absolutely adored the characters. They actually felt like real people playing a game, specially Emilie! I had to remind myself she wasn't real sometimes lmao. Another well done aspect of the game is the sheer quality of the side content. The side quests had just as much polish as the main game, and alot of them were just as fun! To the point I often felt like some of them should just be mandatory. It's genuinely hard for me to think of flaws in this game. I swear if this had more marketing, it would've been as big of a hit as indies like Hollow Knight and Celeste
@@st.altair4936 It sucks that the dlc came out nearly 3 years after the base game. So many fans will miss out on it, I almost did (found out 8 months after release randomly). They could of easily charged double and I would of been fine. Also hyped for Project Terra :)
Wow your poll results surprised me! I play far more games with endings and often story conclusions, but when I think of my “dream game” it’s always something that I could play infinitely.
The experience you had with FF13 I had a similar one with FF12. I have 2 saves in my PS2 memory-card where one is 1200 hours long and the other is 700 hours long, and I'm not exagerating when I say that I didn't even complete 1/3 of the game based on the bestiary, and I'm yet to reach closure with that story.
while I don't have any problems apreciating a good story from start to end, I prefer games without a clear end because I love the freedom it gives and how much I can invest in this experience before having to move on and eventualy forget about it. I feel like, when a game is able to make me invested for so long withouth needing to end, It's like it becomes a part of my life and part of who I am, giving me a sence of belonging, and to me that's something special in a very personal level.
I would say that I have always been a low NFC type. Growing up, I did play a good mixture of games with definitive endings, and games without, and I'd say that I can enjoy both. But I believe the reasons as to why I prefer games with no stopping point are that: A) I frequently hit points where I could no longer progress in a game, due to... y'know, being dumb as a kid, and B) many of the games I can recall playing a lot were non-ending games - most notably, the eternal grind known as RuneScape. Now I will say this: I do still like to at least play a game the whole way through once. There is that part of me that wants to see the journey start-to-finish first (where applicable). But, after that point, I will gladly continue to play the game far beyond the "closure" point. Perhaps the best example of this would be Dead Cells. I finished that game to 100% completion by around 368 hours of playtime (which, I know, is a _lot)._ And since then, I have almost matched that number again, as my Steam account currently lists me at 699 hours. This is not that much related to the video, but I just want to say that your comment about your time with FF13 lasting for thirteen years kind of resonated with me. Even moreso with the fact that you said that this was during your freshman year of high school, because I was also at that point of my life at that time. (Although I started school early, so I'm probably a year younger than you, at 26.) I have been on a "journey" of sorts for that long, too. Not involving a video game, but rather another person - someone that has made a huge impact on my life, even today when they're currently no longer a part of it. I won't go into the story here, unless anyone is actually interested, but to _roughly_ tie it to the video topic: whenever I talk about this with other people, everybody else (at least, so far) seems to jump to the "closure" conclusion, and tell me that I should move on with my life. And yet, in a similar way as before, I have no interest in doing that.
I'm definitely a high NFC person, and I instantly and confidently say that I prefer games with an ending, and in terms of the number of games I've played, the majority had an ending. However, I've noticed that in practice, when it comes to the games that I love / hyperfixate on / put the most actual hours into playing, there's a pretty even 50/50 split of games with / without a defined end. I think for me, when I'm obsessed with a game, I literally can't get enough of it, and so it kind of overrides my NFC - I never want to stop the seizing phase, I suppose.
I haven't finished the video yet, but I just got to the part where you revealed you hadn't told us the conclusion of the study at the beginning. I hadn't been worried about it because I had come to my own conclusion and stuck with it. You proceeded then to explain the process of seizing and freezing information right as I explained to myself why I hadn't been hung up on it. Odd experience where I was actively doing what you were telling me about and figuring it out right before you explained it to my face. Very good video, love this channel. XD
Ffvii remake has an ending, and yet I keep replaying it. I’ve done every single optional challenge and gotten every trophy in both the base game and DLC, and I always look up part 2 news when I finish. Safe to say I think it’s a game that I don’t want to be frozen on despite it having an “ending”
I tend to find myself actually ending the game right before the final boss or credits. When I played Pokemon as a kid, I usually tried to beat the Elite Four once or twice, failed and just started a new save. I like that sense of closure a lot, but I think for me it doesn't come with the credits. It does when I feel like I've exhausted all that the game has to show and I don't wanna bother with the final fireworks. I'm okay with my experiences being finished prematurely. Sex joke.
I also end right before the final boss, but it's usually to restart from the beginning. I don't know if I find the final boss too intimidating or I'm not ready for the game to end, but I frequently play a game two or three times from beginning to when I think it's about to end before I then finish it.
Though now that I think about it, those games are all Zelda or Zelda-likes. I don't remember postponing the ending of games like the Assassin's Creed series or Horizon Zero Dawn. They also don't have very memorable final bosses (it would take me a solid 30 minutes to remember any of the final bosses or stages of AC games). These are also games with an outrageous amount of collectibles and side missions, whereas Zelda is more straight forward and simple.
7:01 I get that mindset. In an openworld type game, I tend to set up goals based on what the game is asking of me. For something like Forza Horizon 5, my goals are things like "I want that car, and I want to upgrade it." The game gives me the tools and short term goals in the form of events and races to meet that long term goal in whatever way is most fun to me. The core experience is there, the fun is in the doing. In something like Minecraft or other survival crafters, where the goal is "craft what you need to survive" I find myself getting bored once I have a safe base with a functioning farm set up. I don't need to go out and get better tools, or kill the bosses, or any of that. I have accomplished the two goals the genre has set for me, and everything else is just.. extra.
Great video, i decided to take the nfc test and I honestly thought going into it that I’d have a high nfc since in the study at the start I’d come to a conclusion almost instantly and then just kinda forgot about it until Daryl mentioned it again. though my conclusion was, there’s probably more to the story which probably fits the score I got, which was 120. Way in the middle.
Overall a good video, and I think I am high on that need for closure train, since I prefer solid endings and am not into sports or social events. Still the example of the dormitory experiment feels a little like it is implying that people like me would be judgemental and even though I just had to wait too in the video until I got an answer I felt no pressure to decide an ending for that story. Hell, there are a lot of TV shows that I never finish because they just keep going on with no end in sight and so I check out at one point or another, but I mark that of as an L and leave it there, not judging the that I got no closure and no need to make one up. But well maybe I am weird that I can live with quite a lot of ambiguity, that I am interested in closure but only for the main story and central themes, but don't mind I do not get the answer for every single detail. If I take for example the film Inception, I got closure out of it even though it was not shown at the end if this is still a dream or not, since that was not relevant for the characters arc there, thus I feel no need to declare it one way or the other but leave that aspect as ambiguously open.
I am talking about personal experience, but when you talked about ff13 is kinda of what I experience on a daily basis with anything that needs focus for a long time because of ADHD
This is a really interesting video, because I noticed, when I played mc with my best friend, that I tended to prefer tasks that could be considered story invested: making farms/gardens, botonia, etc. My best friend enjoys the mechanical side of things, and we play the packs she picks because she like having the questlines and such. It's interesting, that we both find our own freezing point!
I had a simmilar thing watching One Piece, I'd gotten into in 2016 I think, I watched about to Alabasta I think, then just kinda stopped for a while, then I watched a bit more and got to Skypea, stopped again, end of last year I got back into it and then finished that arc, took a short break to grind Apex, then binged it and got caught up. I think that made it feel like I've been watching for longer than I really have, and I really love this series now
Honestly reminded me a bunch of my uncle in real life. He's been gone from my family life for like 6 years. We still chat but I feel like he's so determined on how he last saw my grandmother as some useless old bat that even when things change he can't look past the conclusion he's made for himself. Currently praying for him but this video brought a lot of things to light
Hi Daryl! I recently came across your channel and I have watched quite a few of your vids and I have to say keep up the good work! I really enjoy the pacing of your vids and especially your commentary over them. It is very exciting to see psychology becoming more relevant in the world of gaming and for TH-cam creators like yourself making educational videos that are fun and informative. Keep it up :)
Hollow Knight was a game I froze on quite happily. I went intonthe game almost entirely blind, sans having watched you Deepnest Helplessness video. I got a lot done but I missed the true ending and never found the white palace. Even still I was happy with the ending I did get and didn't feel the need to try for something "better"
I actually noticed this trend in my own gaming preferences some years ago, when I was trying to figure out why I could never get into MMOs, though I never knew the term for it, or the psychological factors behind it. I hadn't realized it was such a major factor for so many other people as well.
What you mentioned about FFXIII kind of happened to me with Persona 5. I started it but didn't play any more in case I decided I wanted to record it, but then didn't play it for a full year. Then, I started playing Valorant with people and also had work and/or school during the day so I didn't pick the game back up until the very end of 2021, when I finally completed it, and it did make me emotional as well.
I desperately crave finality with games but sometimes that just doesn't come. Playing a game like Coffee Talk is something I really enjoy but I never feel satisfied when it's over because I want more. These are just snapshots of character's lives that I'm invested in and care about. Sometimes I do all there is to do and just want more
I also think that your personal definition of what is the end is very important. I am this kind of person that will try to get all the cellectibles, to do every side-quest etc. But I don't do speedruns, rodomizers, neither do I like non-ending game. Because for me, finishing a game means doing everything the developper have put in it, and I'd rather do this as quickly as possible.
I was just thinking about this concept last night funnily enough; I was thinking about how a lot of my favorite games (Fortnite, ARMS, Rivals of Aether, etc.) can be played forever, theoretically. I’m commenting this before the video has ended so I’m excited to see the conclusion!
Halfway through the video rn, but i just need to get this out there: I had a very similar ending experience with Signalis, of all games. I played through the whole game, and ended up getting what I later discovered was my favorite ending on my first try. But... it just didn't sit right with me. In Signalis, without spoilers (much), there isn't really a... traditionally 'happy' ending. And as much as I understand why, and I absolutely get what Rose Engine was going for... it just didn't sit right with me personally. That's when I found a fan animation on YT, titled "Remember your promise" iirc. This animation made Signalis and its themes really click for me, and now, it's become my headcannon ending to the game. And honestly, its as cannon as anything because, uh, bioresonance shenanigans lol
There's also the fact that most games without a defined ending don't have a defined beginning I'm gonna keep playing that fighting game for the same reason I bought it, just to play it Whereas I'm gonna stop at credits for an RPG because I bought it to finish it
I have a VERYYY similar story with ff13… I picked it up in 2011. I played it on and off, coming back to it again and again… I eventually beat it a WHOLE DECADE LATER. 10 years i had been chipping away at it. Finishing that game made me very proud actually… it was kind of an important lesson to me.
I'm horrible at finishing games! There's games I restart over and over, and games I start that I put down and don't touch for months! I feel guilty wanting new games to try, cause I like the other games but haven't played/finished them, so I have to remember that having fun is all that matters
13:56 ive never had "freezing" happen for rocket league, or Minecraft (and on top of that i realised 2 months into playing rocket league that i would never be "good")
This video got me to return to and finish Final Fantasy XIII. I was in the same boat as you, I'd started and got most of the way through it back in 2011, but never finished. It was well worth resisting and completing. Thank you,
Took the long NFC scale and got an 89, which is quite fitting considering I usually spend most of my time on a few titles, of which many are roguelikes. Not really keen on playing games just to experience the story, I find more joy in the process of learning and improving. I'm actually somewhat hesitant to end games, preferring to instead replay or rewatch stuff to extract the deeper nuances of media and this video was quite helpful in understanding why. Very interesting.
Interesting ! While I answered that I liked games with endings more in your poll, the way I play them (I generally push far for endgame, ng+ and the likes, if I enjoy a game i'll play it a LOT) and the NFC scale survey show that I skew way more towards having low NFC. And yeah when I think about it, it makes sense. I enjoy endings as conclusions, but they're very often not at all the end of my relationship with a game, as I'll usually start looking for discussions, essays and videos after I'm done.
I had a similar experience with FFXIII, though it was several years after it had been out and I finished it within a few weeks. I have tried to get into FFXIII-2, but now I don't acknowledge the existence of the sequels. My NFC was completely met with the first one.
really interesting video! As someone who loves games like Minecraft, Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, Cities Skylines etc. I figured I would be more on the low NFC end. I have no idea what it is but when I play games that have a story or a fix ending usually I find myself rushing through it. This doesn't mean I don't enjoy them, I really do, but sometimes it feels like this story game is just something I really want to finish only to move it off my pile of games I own but haven't played yet. Usually I really enjoy both types of games but find myself gravitating towards farming sims and sandbox games because I can play them while talking with friends or playing with them or watching something
It is interesting to note that as a board game designer, we try to have both. A board game needs to have an ending less than 2 hours or most people will not want to play it. Less than an hour even better. But you need to have players who want to play it again. To do this we generally have an ending that wraps up just before all your building up has come together. Namely on the next turn you feel you will become unstoppable, the game ends, right before that turn.
I do love the final ending in 13-3 (not that I played it myself since the new time limit mechanics and also the need to "complete 13 and 13-2" are both severely high barriers to unfreeze). in fact, I think 13-3's mechanics probably ties into this a bit more than it seems.
This is always weird when it happens with people. Like, my little brother is 32(?), but in my mind, he's frozen at like 11 or 12, which was the last time he was regularly in my life. So when I see him now, it's mind blowing to me that he's an adult. And it happens every time.
Man, beautifully put together Daryl! This video really let me understand why some games I spend so much time on despite me 'wanting' to spend on other things as well. I used to often play games just to finish them but now mostly I prioritise what I find purely enjoyable! Also, I see the Xenoblade clips thrown in there, nice progress man, hope you enjoy it :D
This is really interesting and very relevant for me. I've started playing through an expansion to a game I love and for some reason I keep replaying alot of content from the base instead of finishing the expansion even once. I want to see where the story goes because I usually love the story, but it's like I don't have the patience for taking in new content anymore and instead just replay what I already know. Perhaps I've forzen on the game somehow. Now that I think about it, I guess I've been like this with games overall the last few months. I basically only replay old games I like and have almost no interest in playing any new ones. I sometimes feel like I should try more games because I used to do that and it seems like I'm missing out on many great games. But I just feel like I'd prefer to plat the ones I know already.
I know a lot of your videos are sparked by personal experiences or moments, but I'd love to see a video on video game "sanctuaries" and what makes them feel good/special. Places like Firelink Shrine of Dark Souls, or the aptly named Sanctuary of Borderlands, the location to which you can always rely on returning. The place that feels like home in a game where nothing else does.
I remember calling my dad over to my room to look at the graphics of ff13. It looked stunning. The game never got me hooked, it felt wrong as a Final Fantasy game. The music for Sunleth Waterscape I still listen to to this day, though.
Beautiful❤ After finishing "finding paradise" for the second time I felt that undescribable feeling of appreciation I think thats the most closure I've ever experienced I suggest you try it
This explains a bit about why I like Frostpunk but not other city builders. Except for endless mode, the scenarios have an end. The main one starts off like a basic city builder, with some tasks to guide your city, until you find Winterhome and all hell breaks loose.
6:37 Heyyy that's me! I bet NFC heavily affects anime preferences, too. I don't go for 100+ episode shonen shows because I'm not down to wait that long for an ending, especially knowing that if the anime gets cancelled before the manga completes its run, or the mangaka drops it at some point, it may never properly end at all.
I find I oscillate between a games with ending and games without them. Playing a game without an ending (or a game where aiming towards the ending isn't the point for a long time, like BotW) allows me time to process a game with an ending before jumping into the next one, but eventually I peter out on the ending-less game and hop to my next more concrete experience.
when I had the time, my times was definitely split. I still enjoy both, but I tend towards games with goals simply because it's more doable in my current setting with no internet access where I play and only short intervals available at a time where I can slowly work through games but not hone skills.
Wow, I actually Freeze really often when reading stories and playing games along with my friend. Every so often I’ll stop myself to take a screenshot of the part I just read, or the frame I just saw, and send it to him so we can hush about it. It gives us an opportunity to ruminate on and appreciate aspects of the story we might otherwise have left uncommented on in the wake of bigger plot points. I start making conclusions about minor plot things, and then get excited to experience more cycles of seizing and freezing.
As someone who loves both Animal Crossing and minecraft, this was both very interesting but also eye opening. Cause what I usually do in those games is to either set up new goals over and over to make them more rewarding, or to reset them when it all becomes too conclusive and i am too burnt out on a game or world. But I feel like this gameplay style is really good for me because it gives you so much freedom in what goals you‘ll pursue. It‘s a bit like breath of the wild really. You just set up a goal. In minecraft maybe you want a new build so you make a flower shop, in animal crossing maybe you wanna redecorate an island area or you wanna renovate a villiagers house, and in games like botw maybe it‘s getting stronger so you can get the new heart container. All of it is so fun to me because I get to decide what my goal is. And if i don‘t wanna ever beat the ender dragon that‘s really enjoyable to me too that you don‘t even have to. The freedom just feels so nice and the calm pace of minecraft and animal crossing makes them also so adaptable to my work schedule. Minecraft and animal crossing don‘t demand from me to pay full attention to them for a while. Maybe i‘ll just sit in my minecraft house and write my diary in there, or maybe I just do the daily chores in animal crossing. And on days i don‘t wanna play they‘ll just wait for me patiently. Even change a little to show that they are simulated to appear as alive as my world is in the case of animal crossing. These games just feel so nice because you don‘t have to rush through. You don‘t have to play them 6 hours a day. You can, but you don‘t have to. And I do really like that about them. Even though i also love games like prey or bioshock where it demands my attention on it‘s rollercoaster ride to enjoy it‘s story. I like that sometimes but not always. And so whenever i just wanna enjoy some calm i put on my little pocket worlds, do a little task or set up a new project for my worlds, and do as much as I want to while listening to a podcast or something. And I really enjoy this.
A hearty thanks to The Ridge for supporting the show! If this is the wallet for you, don’t miss out on an extra 15% off! > ridge.com/daryl and use coupon code “DARYL” at checkout :)
Thx m8
Anime waifu daryl
@@-Scrapper- Anime waifs daryl
Wait how you comment a day ago even tho the video is 50 minutes ago???
@@atrik1st716 Time travel obviously 🙄
As a person with a psych BA and an MA in Communication Studies, I must say this channel scratches that academic itch. Great job, Daryl!
guess you can know stuff without, you know, a degree.
@@NoctLightCloud I’m pretty sure Daryl has a Psych BA. He talks about how he’d need to do a Masters to do his own research
@@NoctLightCloud
> Hello there! My name is Daryl and on this channel I write and create videos on the interaction between psychology, video games, video game design, and life. I have a Bachelor’s degree in psychology and have spent more hours with a controller in my hand than I’d like to admit. Thanks for visiting my channel! I typically release new videos once a month. **This channel's content is intended for those ages 13 and up.**
lol
From the "about" description of the channel.
I don't like academic being used in the same sentence as BA Finger Painting
I have this with The Witcher 3. Still haven't finished it but I'm sure one day I will (or at least that is what I'm telling myself).
Same, I got to what I thought was the final mission a few years ago. And then never went back to the game. Although I've always been meaning to. Very similar experience with many other games. I get right to what feels like the end and then stop playing just before I get the ending. But I make sure to avoid spoilers still
Same, as much as I love it’s open world, I feel overwhelmed with the sidequests, so I kinda stopped
I have something sort of similar with the Witcher 3, I finished the main game and the first DLC but never finished the second DLC even though I keep hearing is one of the best ones. I keep telling myself I will one day
Me too
Same, I have 150 hours over 3 playthroughs and still haven't beat it, but I'll do it someday
I think the XIII situation is so strong because the XIII ending is so clearly meant to be an ending. And a very tied together happy one. And then XIII-2 comes along and just, literally seconds later in the narrative, rips it apart and tells you none of that shit stuck. Everything gets thrown into proper chaos for no real reason just because and the characters themselves don’t get 20 seconds to reflect on their journey and enjoy their reunion. It’s such a strange choice to not let that ending breathe and just pick the new story up like, 5 years later in the timeline.
Completely agree with the XIII-2 sentiment. I love XIII-2 to bits, but telling me the hours I spent triumphing over the gods that would call us pets in XIII was only possible, because of another god. UGH
As a person who loves the XIII trilogy to death and has completed all 3 games many times, I have to agree with you, despite the fact that XIII-2 is my favorite of the three.
I hate when media does that "right were it left off" sequels
Give the characters some time to breath before they go back to fighting stuff
This way not only can we see what they were doing with their lifes but also can give ways into new character arcs and things like that now that the sitiation has changed
Exactly. Narratively, I was annoyed by XIII-2 and Lightning Returns. Hurts as well that the ending for XIII-2 also didn’t provide much in closure because it was set-up for the third game.
Yuup! The *FFXlll-2* & *Lightning Returns* Didn't Help ~ Much.. The Standalone Was Fine. But... There Were A LOT of Developing issues
You know,the freezing thing actually explains a lot about why the Kingdom Hearts fandom reacted so negatively so Dream Drop Distance. The story introduces a plot elements that goes against the conclusion that many people came to after the previous games. It's not even a retcon or anything since it was properly set up in the same previous games but most people just came to a different conclusion and froze on that, so when DDD came around and said that was wrong it felt almost offensive
OUCH
Can you be more specific? What conclusions to 2 did people draw that DDD supplemented? If it's just about the villains coming back, it was actually Recoded's secret ending that first said that was going to happen. If it's just time travel shenanigans and dream stuff, I wouldn't say that goes against any conclusion you can make about the universe after playing the previous games. Personally the only thing that really bothered me about DDD was Master Xehanort being the man in charge instead of Apprentice Xehanort, the World that Never Was being intact despite Xemnas both turning it into a dragon and Pete and Malificent being set up to take control of it (that's a twofer on just ignoring previous plot points) and a story that was very end heavy on any actual plot.
Well when a company takes too long to make a game that's what happens. People speculate on theories for years, and get so desperate they make up their own stories. Then the mega company just ends up making the story worse. In the indie-starved 2000s, this was rampant. Thank god triple-a's are fading away in favor of indie opportunists taking advantage of sluggish studios
@@Jotari I'm mostly referring to Nobodies having hearts. In hindsight it makes a lot of sense and every Nobody throughout CoM, 2 and Days are explicitly shown having emotions. But a lot of people played those games as kids and as a kid it easy to not connect those elements, especially since the games never outright *tell* you that they have hearts, so lots of people froze the info that Nobodies don't have hearts.
Nowadays you'll see these same people screaming "retcon" and completely dismissing DDD.
Ofc this can also apply to the organization coming back, that if a nobody dies and a heartless dies then they are recreated, stuff that do make sense but since they were introduced much later a lot of people feel like the rules were broken instead of expanded upon
I didn't see a lot of people reacting negatively to Nobodies having hearts, rather the strongest reactions seemed to be towards Xehanort and the way his character (and various personas) changed by the time travel. Where he used to be driven by a desire for knowledge, now he already knows everything and is driven by a sense of destiny. It makes sense for him to lie about being a knowledge seeker considering he was impersonating a scientist and leading a team comprised largely of scientists, but people were attached to the idea that the Xehanorts were curious and callous whereas DDD made them all-knowing and strongly motivated. Freezing and unfreezing still explain what's going on, but I think that it's maybe a little more reasonable to be mad at the big bad changing motives than at Axel loving his friends.
I kinda wanna add a bit of my experience to this, since I feel that oftentimes I just, don't freeze or forget the game after I freeze, since I deal with ADHD, so my attention on these things constantly shift and it's rare I even care if there's an end or not. I just kind of drift around until I hyperfixate on a single game or series and HAVE to see all of it due to obsessing.
My reaction to "You're probably wondering about that dormatory study, still thinking about that?" was "I forgot"
Me who also has ADHD reading this comment: how can someone forget what he said at the beginning
Me 5 minutes later: wait what college students?
Yep as someone with ADHD I’ll freeze a bunch myself. There are some games where my save is right in front of the final boss room, and I’ll completely forget and move on to the next game. My freeze is when my brain says “enough of the hyper focusing”. Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Divinity Original Sin 2, Atelier Ryza, Tales of Arise, and probably many others I forgot. But usually at some point, my hyper focus wanes and I’ll jump around games and completely forget to finish those games, even if it’s just 1 or 2 hours left.
@@Ceece20 ahh yes, AT Nergigante from MHWorld, the final frontier between being a casual and an average MH player.... Lemme just grind Sykrim Alchemy, Enchanting and Smithing to make the ultimate Armor set
Lmaaaao i have adhd and i also forgot about the dorm study
Genuinely thought I was the only one. A great deal of that is very me. Another thing is I find I get a little sad when I realize I’m entering the endgame. The suspense and core loop of the midgame feels like a cozy limbo I don’t wanna leave. My adhd just switches the hyper fixation at a very opportune time.
Oh what a *fascinating* topic. I always wondered why I learned way more heavily to games without a defined ending like MOBAs or Rimworld or whatever. Looking forward to the next one!
Thanks Sophie!
leaned*
Probably you're lower in openness and higher in some other personality trait, with that particular personality trait being the glue that keeps you to it.
I say you're lower in openness because games that have endings are based on stories that have a start & end. The story element and the sense of closure for stories, ideas, emotions, and journeys is desired by those who are higher in openness.
I have high nfc in this regard. I like games with ends. But I also like to spend my time playing L4D2 in a sandbox way because that plays with my agreeableness trait (desire for cooperation and teamwork).
Such a great video, it really explained the topic super well and the pacing was spot on.
I always end up playing games and trying to finish them, but I rarely get all the way through because I don't have the patience usually. My NFC is pretty high though, so I end up with this back log off games that I'm itching to finish, even if I'm not actor that interested in playing them. I feel like I just need to cross them off the list.
That said, whenever I do finish a game, it ends up being such a rewarding experience that I find myself wanting to play it again just to get that high of completion again.
@Guys look 👇 ice cream is good.
I think that age might play a part in this too. My younger self never liked seeing something end and always wanted more even if that more was not as good as what had come before.
Now that I’m older I’ve grown to appreciate a great ending and find less desire to even start a show or game series that is very long.
the "older" in question is 20yo for me xD
One thing I struggle with is I have a hard time going back to games and shows that are interrupted by either life or an activity that grabs my attention, to this day I still haven't finished FF7R despite the fact that I was really enjoying it and had no desire to put it down.
yup whenever that happens for me, I have to restart from the beginning. I can't just jump back in after that gap
Currently, I bought Aeternoblade 2 on Switch because I bought the first on 2DS. Kinda left it behind and now I have to start all over to figure it out and get to the end.
But WOW, they sure played a Soulsborne before making the sequel! I am *SWEATING IT* here…
I’m beating both games
It's hard to jump right back into the late stages of a game when you've been away and out of practice for too long. What used to be easy suddenly feels disproportionately difficult, and decreasing the difficulty feels like cheating.
@@SpydeyDan I just struggle back into shape… gotta finished it if I started it!
XD
This is me too. I never finished skyward sword, twilight princess and such because of that. But that is also just the tiny bit of completionest in me.
Comming back and not knowing what I've already accomplished and having to slowly do things to see if I did them does not make for fun for me so I either start over, or walk away.
This puts into words the reason behind a phenomena that I've experienced and been kinda immersed in for a while: enthusiastic fandom.
You showed a clip of Undertale at the end when talking about conclusions, and that's an excellent example to illustrate what I'm getting at. On paper, that particular ending is as good of closure as it gets. And afterward, the game even asks you to freeze, to take your closure and go. It practically begs you to. But so many people just... don't. They come back and exhaust everything else, and literally destroy their closure with endings that cannot be taken back. And even among those who respect the game's request to close the program and move on, many only actually do the first part. All of the fan content, the alternate universes, the fan fiction, fan games. These are all expressions of being so immersed in a story that you simply do not want it to end. There are always new corners to prod, new ideas to explore, new shadows to shine a light on. You never freeze and you never feel desire to.
But here's the odd thing. Among the people I've seen get caught up in this fandom loop of non-closure, not just with Undertale, but with anything, many are those for whom their NFC with other works is generally high. I'm no scientist, but if I had to hazard a guess, some people just have "buttons" that a piece of media can press that will nearly obliterate their NFC with it. It clicks for them and it can take years or decades for them to have had "enough" of it because it just makes them that happy.
And honestly, that's a wonderful thing, that people can find works of art that captivate them such that they will expand their own creative boundaries to have more of it, and encourage others to do so as well.
I think with Undertale there are several factors at play:
-It is very short, and one "normal" playthrough has you basically becoming confident with the skills required by the very end
-It was impossible almost from release week to avoid at least some spoilers, and I think many people were aware that the "true ending" is experiencing all or at least the most important endings, even in a particular order (normal to pacifist to genocide), and the difficulty curve and pacing of each game path is actually designed with this order in mind
-The game wears the fact that it's messing with you and manipulating you on its sleeve, and has many players wanting a "do-over" from the very beginning when they accidentally kill Toriel; As such the game begging you to put it down reads very much as reverse psychology, and the kind of person to get invested in the game in the first place will actually lack a feeling of closure because they will have regrets about how they approached the game
-The game was made by Toby Fox, whose prior fame mostly came from working on the Homestuck soundtrack. If you're not familiar with Homestuck, it was (is) definitely not for people with high need for closure, and Undertale was both announced and released while Homestuck 1 was ongoing. The vast majority of the Undertale fanbase were part of its viral sensation and were not from the Homestuck fandom, but the _core fanbase_ who codified the game's community and how people approached it all came from the Homestuck fanbase
-The average need for a sense of belonging is much higher than anyone's need for closure. That's probably why multiplayer games are so successful even despite apparently so few people having low NFC, and with the incredibly strong clannishness paired with the large size of Undertale's community it was (probably still is) like crack for people who have that need and aren't getting it satisfied elsewhere.
@@vitriolicAmaranth there's also Toby's work on Earthbound fan-games, in which the earthbound fandom has been begging for its 3rd game here in the west for years
this is exactly how i feel about minecraft, i typically love single-player story based games with a defined ending but i find myself constantly coming back to minecraft again and again even after 12 years despite it’s lack of a real ending or story.
@@lukrio99990 Right but he didn't have a large following from that. His following from Homestuck was large, rabid and already obsessed with him and his work.
I'd love to see an essay on closure vs bingeing- how/why little kids watch the same movies over and over. I'm also interested in why I'll play a story-based game all the way to the final boss and then start the game over from the beginning before finishing it.
Lovely work as always Daryl; I experienced a similar saga with Twilight Princess (I started and stopped that game multiple times across Gamecube, Wii and the Wii U Remaster until I finally finished it back in May)
Really insightful stuff!
I was so excited for TP on Wii, but when I finally got it (didn't get a Wii for years, became a PC gamer primarily) I got halfway through and shelved it. So similarly, I finally finished it on the Wii U version years later. I'm glad BotW at least lived up to the hype for me; Until then, MM had remained my favourite Zelda by a wide margin and none of the other 3D titles were even top 5.
Oh man that reminds me i still have to finish it. And i love that game!
This happened way too many times to count
I still have to finish it😂 maybe once we get that Switch port
The second mentioned that he watched 13-2s trailer I laughed out loud thinking to myself: "Well, he's either diving straight into 13-2 or raging knowing that his beautiful headcannon ending was sent to the abyss"
I had this with "To The Moon" for the last 10 years.
I'm glad i got teary when i finished it last month.
This might explain why I usually struggle so much to continue playing competitive games. It's not that I don't enjoy playing then, it's that the lack of a promised end at some point makes me lose interest. This is also probably why I feel so good when I get to move a game to the "finished" category in my list, it's so satisfying to know that I'm done with something.
You did it again Daryl! What an amazing video! I get what you mean, I have tried to play nier automata so many times and I know it's great but I just keep putting it down again and getting started on a new game. 10/10 video, so glad im a patron!
Oh man, Nier is sooooo worth finishing! Even if you have to finish it like 5 times lmao, easily one of the most profound endings to a game I’ve played.
@@DarylTalksGames now you just sound like me when they say they have given up on a series I have loved
This video specifically touches a part of me that is probably the precedent for my whole modus operandi with anything narrative. It's less of a 'hits close to home' but more of general correlation to what I understand.
I no joke had an almost identical experience with FFXIII, though it wasn't 13 years long I believe I started it in something like 2012 and then finished it in... 2017? I want to say. I then had both FFXIII-2 and Lightning Returns sitting and ready, and whilst I started FFXIII-2 straight after to see what I was getting into it once gain became a long journey that I played time to time, I believe I finished FFXIII-2 in full only last year. (I have similarly started Lightning Returns in January). To speak neither here nor there it is a series I do enjoy even with its downfalls.
To the point though, this isn't the case with only FFXIII, rather this is something I do with everything - books, movies, games. I find myself often with a full library of items that are part way through - however, I never have the intention to drop them. I need them to be done, complete and finished. Whether that means its something I'll return to in actual years from when I started it - doesn't matter. That freezing though where I feel I got enough of a sense for what the game is, automatically puts things on stand-by though, I move over to some else or something new that I have chosen to reintroduce that seizure to. This in a lot of cases is a game I have left behind and then when I reach another point that again feels like a kind of freeze I back away from it to something else - whether intentionally or no.
I find myself in this vein never really giving up on a game, even if mediocre. The only things I steer clear from are something that up front disappoints me and/or shows that there really is nothing new to "seize" by playing it further. But even if I freeze on a game based on the immediate style of play an element of the story, music or something else will often reignite in my mind after a time and I'll go back to it in order to play more. Not necessarily with the mind to finish the game completely (though in an ideal world that would be the hope each time), instead its until I feel comfortable with my time spent with it - as you yourself said in the video: like time with an old friend.
As a result of this behaviour I have a lot of these long-winded and sentimental attachments to things that have been brought to closure not just because the game told me its done but because after such an amount of time, its now the moment when I know I won't be picking it up again. Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion, Dark Souls II, Final Fantasy XIII, The Witcher, and a truly massive amount more I won't list here.
It's a weird gratifying feeling but even should I feel that need to seize again, I am not picking the game up to play once more, its something I'll then seek a community for online, listen to the soundtracks again or watch videos not too dissimilar to this one that digest the game in a different light to how I did.
Amazing video as always!
My personal favorite game that gave me the most closure was Celeste. But not the story itself, oh no. Having just a story to finish in Celeste wasn't enough for me, however going back and finishing B-Sides and C-sides with the added challenge, on top of the game rewarding me for finishing those with more story, gave me the best "Oh yeah, that's it, I'll be heading out" feeling I've ever had with any game. I felt like the game had its closure with the story, and I had closure with being able to say "Yup, I did it". That's why I have never gone back to playing it, but will confidently say that it is and will remain one of my favorite games of all time.
Definitely on the same page with you there, getting through the B and C sides is one hell of an achievement. Same vibes as souls games, just such a deep sense of “I really did it” at the end.
Thanks for the kind words!
a little bit the same. i also got some golden berries and speedran a little but since then i have no will to touch it even tho it's prb my favorite game
I have almost the opposite experience. The base story of Celeste was fun, rewarding, and interesting in its own right to me, and then I tried to do the rest of the game and got skilllocked behind the B sides. I ended up finding enough hearts in the A sides to struggle through Core before I'd beaten a single B side, finished 2B, and then got locked into Farewell forever and haven't finished it. Understandably, the feeling of closure I could have had with the game is broken now, and seeing as I dont have the patience to actually get through enough B and C sides to learn the skills needed to finish the story with Farewell, its doubtful I'll ever reach that point, which feels like a shame until I remember that I didn't find the challenge of the B sides fun.
In short, my failure to complete the bonus story content has made it harder to appreciate the closure I might have gotten by beating the story of the base game. If Farewell had been placed between 8A and the B sides in the difficulty curve, I'd feel differently, but, here we are.
I find it interesting that I've been struggling with this topic, but more so for anime. A lot of the time I'll freeze watching the literal best shows of the season after 3 episodes because it's peak! I don't want to see it fall off and get worse, and I want to be able to have the opportunity to still watch it for the first time.
So instead of actually enjoying myself and watching content that I know I'll enjoy, I'll leave it and let it stay frozen in time.
I just commented myself but I do the exact same thing! Games or other media I really love I often won't finish because then I know that experience is over and I can never have it again.
I find that it heavily HEAVILY depends on the game for me. The more a game makes me care about its characters, the more I want to see the ending and achieve closure, especially if the story really puts those characters through the wringer. I recently beat Eastward and REALLY felt that, because after the credits and final scenes were done, I felt crushed. I'll think about that game for a long while because of its story and its ending. I'll probably not touch it again in a while, except maybe to play the minigame, if I feel like it, because that story is (sadly) done.
On the other hand, I play and replay certain games for hundreds of hours. Seen the credits in Pokemon? No matter, onto the postgame or onto another playthrough. Beaten Digimon World for the third time? Fourth playthrough, let's go! Beaten Dark Souls 1? Next build, come on! Beaten another run of Monster Train? Bring on the next! Beaten Gotcha Force for the 20th time? I still need the rare version of 80 units!
I really REALLY enjoy games that I can replay over and over again if the gameplay is good, but every good story needs an ending for me. I'm not sure where that puts me tbh, because I feel like it's more dependent on the games and less on my personality.
Beat KH3 on Proud Mode? Go for Critical Mode!
Your story with Final Fantasy 13 reminded me of my own story with Kingdom Hearts 1. I got it as a kid because like all children of that era I loved Disney movies, but because I had no real conception of an rpg overworld (I hadn’t even played a Zelda game at that point) I ended up getting stuck on destiny island, completely unsure of how to proceed. I went back to the game several times, restarting from the beginning so often that the image of the stained glass Disney princesses is burned into my memory. One part that stuck with me was the door that can’t yet be opened. In 2020 I booted up my ps2 and that same copy of Kingdom Hearts 1, and (after a few months) stood before that door. I had to just stand there and take it all in. This was it. Time to see all that kingdom hearts has to offer.
I spent a lot of my pre-teen years watching my older brother play FFs 7 to 9, and playing them myself, though only up to the point where they got too difficult.
Then at 16, I decided to spend a summer vacation completing all three games. I discovered mind blowing plot details that flew over my head as a child, like Cloud's true backstory, or how dark FF9 is despite its cartoonish style...
I was definitely more emotionally invested. I guess having closure on these childhood games was in a way like having closure on childhood itself.
I did a similar thing except with the GameCube Zelda games. I can definitely relate to the feeling (now they're actually my favorite games).
I personally fall into a small crack between the two: I love single-player experiences with a definite end, but I always purposefully stop just before the final boss and may never return to that game, but on the rare occasion I do come back later and beat the final boss, I'll clear all the post-game and I'm not sure why.
I too, in playing 3 main line Pokémon game in the recent past, tend to stop just before the finale, the Victory Road.
For me, I suppose, it's a way to limit my enthusiasm for that story because if I end the story right away, I feel I'll be left a lonely/craving for more feeling because I still have the energy/thought but ran out of things to use it for.
This is exactly how I play games. I'll finish only once I know the world has another adventure.
For me, even in two games that both have very defined endings, the different amount in which they focus on their respective endings can drastically impact the overall experience to me.
Taking Botw and Elden Ring, for instance: in Botw, the ending (Hyrule castle) is literally always in sight, no matter where in world you go, so it led me to constantly keeping that goal in the back of my mind, and everything I did felt like I was directly making progress towards a goal. On the other hand, in Elden Ring, in which I had no idea how far the final goal was, I ended up just aimlessly wandering, but also taking in the world a lot more - basically, I played it like a game without a defined ending (which made me not actually finish it).
The same thing also goes for similar pairs of games like Gungeon and Hades and even platformers like Banjo-Kazooie vs. Mario 64 to some extent. Of course there are a lot of other possible differences that could cause this effect, but I am quite curious if it´s a personal thing about myself or a more universal game design principle that´s at play here.
Wouldn’t the erdtree, the colossal glowing beacon visible everywhere in the overworld and cited as the tarnisheds end goal by three npcs in the first 10 hours serve the same function as hyrule castle?
Interesting, I had the opposite experience. With each area having it's own legacy dungeon or direction that the sight of grace was pointing to, I always felt compelled to make progress and finish the game. Each area was huge, but small enough to a point where I could feel done with an area after finding the landmarks. With Breath of the Wild, Ganon just became less of a focus because you could almost always see Hyrule. I kept wanting to do everything before reaching Ganon because the castle felt like a point of no return. This eventually burnt me out to the point where the game started feeling really repetitive and I quit before ever beating the game.
@@inconsistenttimebomb6922 If I’m honest I didn’t really remember finding npcs that clearly pointed out that the Erdtree was the game’s goal for a long time, mostly because I ended up wandering completely off the main path in the beginning, and also I guess I was just more engaged with other elements of the story, since in BOTW the great plateau being an isolated tutorial area and the Main Quest being simply “Defeat Ganon” made it really clear what your end goal was. But even then, being able to theoretically visit Hyrule Castle at literally anytime after the tutorial made everything in the game feel like a choice, since at anytime I could go and try to defeat the game. Plus, I always knew the relative distance between where I was relative to the goal, and the guardians, the game’s final enemy, where everywhere in the map, allowing you to see your skill increase, so all that combined made progress towards the goal even clearer, I’d guess.
In Elden Ring, on the other hand, all progress I made was always focused on the current boss I was fighting, which was awesome, but I never really felt like beating a boss was getting me any closer to the end, possibly because even if I had some interest in exploring the biggest Erdtree which was likely to be the end, I didn’t really even know the clear steps to get there.
Though if I’m honest, there could be a million other reasons behind this, like the difference in difficult or freedom of movement, but the fact is that I ended up playing Zelda as a game with a defined ending, and ER a game without one, and... honestly I still loved both either way, just in a different way.
@@aidansilli4257 Huh that’s really interesting, we really did have almost the exact opposite experience. If I may ask, are you more of a NFC guy or not? Because in this case you progressed more towards smaller, more local goals, while I did so more towards the larger ones, so maybe the difference was in there somewhere. Or maybe you’re more of a completionist, that could be the factor too, since I don’t generally enjoy being completely done with an area
@@lockfour495 I would say I'm more of a completionist and I prefer smaller goals. I like to clear out areas and find as much as I can. I love games like Banjo Kazooie/Tooie and Hollow Knight because they have a distinct number of stuff to collect/find. In this regard, Elden Ring was big, but still manageable. I just got bored of hunting for korok seeds, fetch quests, and shrine hunting in breath of the wild.
As I've gotten close to the end of my 20s realizing that it's OK to move on if I'm not enjoying something has been life changing.
This video has also been helpful for me because I wonder how my friends can spend hundreds of hours on the same games and not get bored or burnt out. I am probably just the highest need for closure person in my friend circle.
Younger, I played more games without ending, or even games with one but I'd just hang out with the npcs and wander in the game's world.
Now, I mostly play story games, I wanna feel like I made progress and not just had fun (or else I'll think about all the more productive stuff I could be doing... Omg why am I here watching this, I have college exams next week!)
Great vidéo, as always.
I've run the whole spectrum of those reactions. I can say now that I've been disappointed enough by endings that I don't give much of a damn for the closure a game thinks its giving me. I voted for the option that felt more likely that the devs knew what they were doing, but in practice I'm ready to put something down for many reasons.
There are games I haven't started because I know I'll love them and I'll be sad when they end.
Thank you for the subtitles.
A great and thought provoking video as always. I don't really need to take a survey to know that I'm a high NFC. The constant dozens of youtube tabs of video essays where I'm going "I can't close the tab until I watch this!" and then never do a lot of the time is proof enough. :)
And again, thank you for the subtitles. I definitely appreciate the effort to provide them.
For me, as I get older and take on more responsibility I just find it harder to commit to sticking to the end of games with a definitive end. I find myself being a lot more "honest" with myself about what I will enjoy when I buy games now. My need for closure has gotten lower and lower as my time constraints have gotten tighter and tighter.
I much prefer more open ended games with a simple enough game play loop that I can enjoy whenever I find time to pick one up. However, with that said, certain games with a defined ending, but a fun enough gameplay loop I have finished in a short period of time (for me that would be within a week of date of purchase). Most likely because I didn't feel like I had to invest as much into getting to that ending in such a short period of time.
I have so much more to say, but I will leave it at that. Great video!!
I intensely prefer games with a defined ending but I also love games that have that ending and then have more postgame content, especially postgame story. I love DLC that adds story content for this reason. Don't know what exactly this says about me. I have a hard time with games that don't have an end (lots of mobile games where come back to basically manage a farm, such as dragonvale). It's strange.
A very interesting video. As someone who has a backlog of games whose postgames I've started but never finish and have always wondered why this is, I think this video has given me some insight. I do find that until I've reach a games ending my mind can't properly unravel my full feelings on the game. I crave having a game say to me "the end," and get that sweet, sweet closer. Even with open ended games I end up making my own goals for closer. Ex: I'm a Genshin player but I don't play to reach an end but rather to reach my end goal of getting a character I want.
Intriguing.
I played Genshin, enjoyed it, and played it for the story, as well as experience. Then stopped when I finished everything up to before the Inuzuma update, (and that summer island one,) and I haven't gone back to it since, because I know how expensive it is, and I don't quite have the patience to be ftp
Great video Daryl! Aside from the face that I loved seeing your FFXIII tweet and hearing someone talk about how they love the game, I tend to have a bunch of games that I want to finish as well. Last week I finally got around to finishing the Somnium Files after taking a 3 year break and I had an absolute blast. Your video really motivates me to continue with another game and check it off the list ;)
Actually, this personally explained a lot for me! I used to play Genshin Impact a lot, but like after 2.0 my hype died out, and i said that it was because i liked how that part of th story ended and didn't want the more and more updates on the characters they put out. Now i get why much better, so thanks for the video ^^ It was really interessing and well done, good work lol :D
new psych of play pog, these are always really interesting and good
This explains how cliffhangers work so well, considering how it's usually a high tension moment with no appropriate closure.
Also explains why I get slightly upset when a game or movie ends, even on a good note, slightly upsets me because they do not go on for a short bit to show how the main and side characters' lives normalized after the series ends.
Thx for making me always look educated and smart in front of my boss and friends by teaching me this cool stuff, when in reality I’ve been watching video games on YT ❤️
When I play games, I usually have two that I am playing during a certain period. Usually I have one game, which has a story and an end which I'll play if I have a nice big chunk of time to have fun with it, and another game, which is a lot more open ended which I'll play on and off when I short periods of free time.
When you started talking about Final Fantasy XIII, I completely forgot about the psychology experiment and became enraptured by your story. It was well told and mirrored most of my experiences with the game. I say "most" because it didn't take me nearly thirteen years to complete, but I was also taken with the world and the story.
Great video! Not related to video-games, but now I know why I liked the ending of Immortal Hulk so much!
Once I started reading Hulk's comics it always bothered me that he never got a happy ending or an ending at all. I really love that character, but Planet Hulk and World War Hulk always had an ending that said "there's more to come" and I knew it wasn't gonna be happy. I wanted an ending, a happy one.
So when the Immortal Hulk run ended it finally felt like Hulk and Banner had their happy ending, I could stop at that moment and believe that was it, all he went through lead to that moment and there was only good things awaiting the character after that.
I kinda have a similar feeling to some other medias as well, I'm glad this video helped understand why.
Great comment
I definitly had this with breath of the wild. I spent most of my play time ignoring the main story to just explore the whole world. I got 90% of the way through everywhere when a switch just flipped in my head and i thought "okay, i am done exploring, time to finish the game now" and I made a beeline to all the story parts ignoring all the optional stuff. Glad that theres a word/phase for it
so where do I fall as someone who prefers games with an ending, but usually stop playing right *before* the end?
(also as someone who loves FF13 and its sequels, I do have to say it's definitely true that 13-2 kind of takes away from 13's perfect ending)
Well, going off of what Darryl said, I think it could go either way. But I'm leaning more towards the fact that you could have a high NFC. Thus by the time you have reached the ending you have already come to a conclusion or freezing point for the game. Continuing to play and then end the game could possibly continue the seizing process and change the freeze point you have already selected in your mind. Hope that helps!
Same here! I'm starting to think we need an essay on this topic, because I also stop right before the end. I tend to go back to the beginning a second (or third) time and only then will I finish it.
@@NoiseDay When my mates are trying to reccomend a game to me and I ask for the average amount of hours it takes to complete it, they will always jokingly cut of 1/4 of the expected gameplay hours because I'm always dropping the game before I reach the ending. I do the same with books aswell. Recently I piccked up Good Omens because my mate wanted to read it with me but I got 70% of the way through then stopped right before the climax. I still need to get back to it but I've moved on to a new book >_>
Ok but the ending of Lightning Returns paid so much respect to the original game and made my eyes piss tears though lol
I definitely have a high NFC. The Greatest Closure a game has ever given me is definitely the ending of the original Persona 5; it's part of the reason I can never really get invest in Royal. I've rarely have felt so content.
Also FF13's OST is banger central
Oh dude, I watched the added content of Royal on TH-cam and I think it’s done in a way that doesn’t detract or fundamentally alter the original. It’s very interesting and in keeping with the original themes, so Id at minimum watch the content on TH-cam. If you find it offends your relationship with the game, I’ll take the blame for it, but I think it only enhances.
@@Jackbarrany oh I did end up playing royal for the gameplay improvements but I stopped before they tried to make me betray Maruki
I rarely decide that I'm done with a game when the game ends. I have tons of games that I "finished" maybe an hour before i reached the actual ending. And some other games I kept playing long after the content had run out. Celeste for example, I 100 percented at 17 hours (except golden berries) but kept playing, modding to get new content and I now have 100 hours in that game.
I also wonder if this can be related to replaying games or watching your friends play games you've finished. I definitely do this with games that finished before I felt finished with them myself. I love watching blind playthroughs of Celeste.
The game that best provided closure for me is also my favourite game, Crosscode.
Man that game needs more attention
My god that dlc had me at tears at the end. It felt like saying goodbye to life long friends. One of my favorite games for sure.
My god, Crosscode is the best indie game story I swear to god. The gameplay is also extremely fun, if not a little too difficult at times. It beats a lot of popular AAA titles for me. The way they wrote Lea's character was so dang good, making a silent protagonist that actually makes sense on why they can't speak, and having that be part of their character flaw. I felt for her in the end, and I was so happy with the conclusion and the DLC epilogue. Also, I love the meta-story of playing a game about being in a game (kinda).
@@Caliboyjosh10 Same man. I highly enjoyed the base game but its somewhat incomplete ending kept it from being my faavourite.
Then the dlc proceeded to give me everything I could've ever wished for and much more. Well worth the over 20$ worth of content sold for only 5$
Very excited for RadicalFish's next game, Project Terra!
@@ShallBePurified I absolutely adored the characters. They actually felt like real people playing a game, specially Emilie! I had to remind myself she wasn't real sometimes lmao.
Another well done aspect of the game is the sheer quality of the side content. The side quests had just as much polish as the main game, and alot of them were just as fun! To the point I often felt like some of them should just be mandatory. It's genuinely hard for me to think of flaws in this game.
I swear if this had more marketing, it would've been as big of a hit as indies like Hollow Knight and Celeste
@@st.altair4936 It sucks that the dlc came out nearly 3 years after the base game. So many fans will miss out on it, I almost did (found out 8 months after release randomly).
They could of easily charged double and I would of been fine. Also hyped for Project Terra :)
Wow your poll results surprised me! I play far more games with endings and often story conclusions, but when I think of my “dream game” it’s always something that I could play infinitely.
The experience you had with FF13 I had a similar one with FF12.
I have 2 saves in my PS2 memory-card where one is 1200 hours long and the other is 700 hours long, and I'm not exagerating when I say that I didn't even complete 1/3 of the game based on the bestiary, and I'm yet to reach closure with that story.
7:40 that's cool I did the same thing when I was in the 11th grade with my cousin. We rode our bikes at midnight to the gamestop, good times.
while I don't have any problems apreciating a good story from start to end, I prefer games without a clear end because I love the freedom it gives and how much I can invest in this experience before having to move on and eventualy forget about it.
I feel like, when a game is able to make me invested for so long withouth needing to end, It's like it becomes a part of my life and part of who I am, giving me a sence of belonging, and to me that's something special in a very personal level.
I love how the music used have their titles flash up in close captions when they start playing in the video. classy!
I would say that I have always been a low NFC type. Growing up, I did play a good mixture of games with definitive endings, and games without, and I'd say that I can enjoy both. But I believe the reasons as to why I prefer games with no stopping point are that: A) I frequently hit points where I could no longer progress in a game, due to... y'know, being dumb as a kid, and B) many of the games I can recall playing a lot were non-ending games - most notably, the eternal grind known as RuneScape.
Now I will say this: I do still like to at least play a game the whole way through once. There is that part of me that wants to see the journey start-to-finish first (where applicable). But, after that point, I will gladly continue to play the game far beyond the "closure" point. Perhaps the best example of this would be Dead Cells. I finished that game to 100% completion by around 368 hours of playtime (which, I know, is a _lot)._ And since then, I have almost matched that number again, as my Steam account currently lists me at 699 hours.
This is not that much related to the video, but I just want to say that your comment about your time with FF13 lasting for thirteen years kind of resonated with me. Even moreso with the fact that you said that this was during your freshman year of high school, because I was also at that point of my life at that time. (Although I started school early, so I'm probably a year younger than you, at 26.) I have been on a "journey" of sorts for that long, too. Not involving a video game, but rather another person - someone that has made a huge impact on my life, even today when they're currently no longer a part of it. I won't go into the story here, unless anyone is actually interested, but to _roughly_ tie it to the video topic: whenever I talk about this with other people, everybody else (at least, so far) seems to jump to the "closure" conclusion, and tell me that I should move on with my life. And yet, in a similar way as before, I have no interest in doing that.
That playstation Ms. PacMan frozen/ice cave levels background music at 16:21 simultaneously made me freeze and gave me whiplash, good choice.
I'm definitely a high NFC person, and I instantly and confidently say that I prefer games with an ending, and in terms of the number of games I've played, the majority had an ending. However, I've noticed that in practice, when it comes to the games that I love / hyperfixate on / put the most actual hours into playing, there's a pretty even 50/50 split of games with / without a defined end. I think for me, when I'm obsessed with a game, I literally can't get enough of it, and so it kind of overrides my NFC - I never want to stop the seizing phase, I suppose.
I haven't finished the video yet, but I just got to the part where you revealed you hadn't told us the conclusion of the study at the beginning. I hadn't been worried about it because I had come to my own conclusion and stuck with it. You proceeded then to explain the process of seizing and freezing information right as I explained to myself why I hadn't been hung up on it.
Odd experience where I was actively doing what you were telling me about and figuring it out right before you explained it to my face. Very good video, love this channel. XD
Ffvii remake has an ending, and yet I keep replaying it. I’ve done every single optional challenge and gotten every trophy in both the base game and DLC, and I always look up part 2 news when I finish.
Safe to say I think it’s a game that I don’t want to be frozen on despite it having an “ending”
i like stories that end and games that end. and yet i find myself replaying the same games over and over a lot
I tend to find myself actually ending the game right before the final boss or credits. When I played Pokemon as a kid, I usually tried to beat the Elite Four once or twice, failed and just started a new save.
I like that sense of closure a lot, but I think for me it doesn't come with the credits. It does when I feel like I've exhausted all that the game has to show and I don't wanna bother with the final fireworks. I'm okay with my experiences being finished prematurely.
Sex joke.
I also end right before the final boss, but it's usually to restart from the beginning. I don't know if I find the final boss too intimidating or I'm not ready for the game to end, but I frequently play a game two or three times from beginning to when I think it's about to end before I then finish it.
Though now that I think about it, those games are all Zelda or Zelda-likes. I don't remember postponing the ending of games like the Assassin's Creed series or Horizon Zero Dawn. They also don't have very memorable final bosses (it would take me a solid 30 minutes to remember any of the final bosses or stages of AC games). These are also games with an outrageous amount of collectibles and side missions, whereas Zelda is more straight forward and simple.
7:01
I get that mindset. In an openworld type game, I tend to set up goals based on what the game is asking of me.
For something like Forza Horizon 5, my goals are things like "I want that car, and I want to upgrade it." The game gives me the tools and short term goals in the form of events and races to meet that long term goal in whatever way is most fun to me. The core experience is there, the fun is in the doing.
In something like Minecraft or other survival crafters, where the goal is "craft what you need to survive" I find myself getting bored once I have a safe base with a functioning farm set up. I don't need to go out and get better tools, or kill the bosses, or any of that. I have accomplished the two goals the genre has set for me, and everything else is just.. extra.
Great video, i decided to take the nfc test and I honestly thought going into it that I’d have a high nfc since in the study at the start I’d come to a conclusion almost instantly and then just kinda forgot about it until Daryl mentioned it again. though my conclusion was, there’s probably more to the story which probably fits the score I got, which was 120. Way in the middle.
Overall a good video, and I think I am high on that need for closure train, since I prefer solid endings and am not into sports or social events. Still the example of the dormitory experiment feels a little like it is implying that people like me would be judgemental and even though I just had to wait too in the video until I got an answer I felt no pressure to decide an ending for that story. Hell, there are a lot of TV shows that I never finish because they just keep going on with no end in sight and so I check out at one point or another, but I mark that of as an L and leave it there, not judging the that I got no closure and no need to make one up. But well maybe I am weird that I can live with quite a lot of ambiguity, that I am interested in closure but only for the main story and central themes, but don't mind I do not get the answer for every single detail. If I take for example the film Inception, I got closure out of it even though it was not shown at the end if this is still a dream or not, since that was not relevant for the characters arc there, thus I feel no need to declare it one way or the other but leave that aspect as ambiguously open.
I am talking about personal experience, but when you talked about ff13 is kinda of what I experience on a daily basis with anything that needs focus for a long time because of ADHD
This is a really interesting video, because I noticed, when I played mc with my best friend, that I tended to prefer tasks that could be considered story invested: making farms/gardens, botonia, etc. My best friend enjoys the mechanical side of things, and we play the packs she picks because she like having the questlines and such. It's interesting, that we both find our own freezing point!
I had a simmilar thing watching One Piece, I'd gotten into in 2016 I think, I watched about to Alabasta I think, then just kinda stopped for a while, then I watched a bit more and got to Skypea, stopped again, end of last year I got back into it and then finished that arc, took a short break to grind Apex, then binged it and got caught up. I think that made it feel like I've been watching for longer than I really have, and I really love this series now
Honestly reminded me a bunch of my uncle in real life. He's been gone from my family life for like 6 years. We still chat but I feel like he's so determined on how he last saw my grandmother as some useless old bat that even when things change he can't look past the conclusion he's made for himself. Currently praying for him but this video brought a lot of things to light
Hi Daryl! I recently came across your channel and I have watched quite a few of your vids and I have to say keep up the good work! I really enjoy the pacing of your vids and especially your commentary over them. It is very exciting to see psychology becoming more relevant in the world of gaming and for TH-cam creators like yourself making educational videos that are fun and informative. Keep it up :)
Hollow Knight was a game I froze on quite happily. I went intonthe game almost entirely blind, sans having watched you Deepnest Helplessness video.
I got a lot done but I missed the true ending and never found the white palace. Even still I was happy with the ending I did get and didn't feel the need to try for something "better"
Amazing video. I always come away from PoP feeling like I've learned something, not just about games, but about the human mind.
I actually noticed this trend in my own gaming preferences some years ago, when I was trying to figure out why I could never get into MMOs, though I never knew the term for it, or the psychological factors behind it. I hadn't realized it was such a major factor for so many other people as well.
What you mentioned about FFXIII kind of happened to me with Persona 5. I started it but didn't play any more in case I decided I wanted to record it, but then didn't play it for a full year. Then, I started playing Valorant with people and also had work and/or school during the day so I didn't pick the game back up until the very end of 2021, when I finally completed it, and it did make me emotional as well.
I desperately crave finality with games but sometimes that just doesn't come. Playing a game like Coffee Talk is something I really enjoy but I never feel satisfied when it's over because I want more. These are just snapshots of character's lives that I'm invested in and care about. Sometimes I do all there is to do and just want more
I also think that your personal definition of what is the end is very important. I am this kind of person that will try to get all the cellectibles, to do every side-quest etc. But I don't do speedruns, rodomizers, neither do I like non-ending game. Because for me, finishing a game means doing everything the developper have put in it, and I'd rather do this as quickly as possible.
I was just thinking about this concept last night funnily enough; I was thinking about how a lot of my favorite games (Fortnite, ARMS, Rivals of Aether, etc.) can be played forever, theoretically. I’m commenting this before the video has ended so I’m excited to see the conclusion!
Halfway through the video rn, but i just need to get this out there: I had a very similar ending experience with Signalis, of all games. I played through the whole game, and ended up getting what I later discovered was my favorite ending on my first try. But... it just didn't sit right with me. In Signalis, without spoilers (much), there isn't really a... traditionally 'happy' ending. And as much as I understand why, and I absolutely get what Rose Engine was going for... it just didn't sit right with me personally. That's when I found a fan animation on YT, titled "Remember your promise" iirc. This animation made Signalis and its themes really click for me, and now, it's become my headcannon ending to the game. And honestly, its as cannon as anything because, uh, bioresonance shenanigans lol
There's also the fact that most games without a defined ending don't have a defined beginning
I'm gonna keep playing that fighting game for the same reason I bought it, just to play it
Whereas I'm gonna stop at credits for an RPG because I bought it to finish it
I have a VERYYY similar story with ff13… I picked it up in 2011. I played it on and off, coming back to it again and again… I eventually beat it a WHOLE DECADE LATER. 10 years i had been chipping away at it. Finishing that game made me very proud actually… it was kind of an important lesson to me.
I'm horrible at finishing games! There's games I restart over and over, and games I start that I put down and don't touch for months!
I feel guilty wanting new games to try, cause I like the other games but haven't played/finished them, so I have to remember that having fun is all that matters
13:56 ive never had "freezing" happen for rocket league, or Minecraft (and on top of that i realised 2 months into playing rocket league that i would never be "good")
This video got me to return to and finish Final Fantasy XIII. I was in the same boat as you, I'd started and got most of the way through it back in 2011, but never finished. It was well worth resisting and completing. Thank you,
Took the long NFC scale and got an 89, which is quite fitting considering I usually spend most of my time on a few titles, of which many are roguelikes.
Not really keen on playing games just to experience the story, I find more joy in the process of learning and improving.
I'm actually somewhat hesitant to end games, preferring to instead replay or rewatch stuff to extract the deeper nuances of media and this video was quite helpful in understanding why.
Very interesting.
I don't know if I did the test correctly 😕 How'd you do it?
Interesting ! While I answered that I liked games with endings more in your poll, the way I play them (I generally push far for endgame, ng+ and the likes, if I enjoy a game i'll play it a LOT) and the NFC scale survey show that I skew way more towards having low NFC.
And yeah when I think about it, it makes sense. I enjoy endings as conclusions, but they're very often not at all the end of my relationship with a game, as I'll usually start looking for discussions, essays and videos after I'm done.
I had a similar experience with FFXIII, though it was several years after it had been out and I finished it within a few weeks. I have tried to get into FFXIII-2, but now I don't acknowledge the existence of the sequels. My NFC was completely met with the first one.
really interesting video! As someone who loves games like Minecraft, Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, Cities Skylines etc. I figured I would be more on the low NFC end. I have no idea what it is but when I play games that have a story or a fix ending usually I find myself rushing through it. This doesn't mean I don't enjoy them, I really do, but sometimes it feels like this story game is just something I really want to finish only to move it off my pile of games I own but haven't played yet. Usually I really enjoy both types of games but find myself gravitating towards farming sims and sandbox games because I can play them while talking with friends or playing with them or watching something
It is interesting to note that as a board game designer, we try to have both. A board game needs to have an ending less than 2 hours or most people will not want to play it. Less than an hour even better. But you need to have players who want to play it again. To do this we generally have an ending that wraps up just before all your building up has come together. Namely on the next turn you feel you will become unstoppable, the game ends, right before that turn.
This feel like the best video yet!!!
Amazing work man, love the passion and the thought process you go through making these videos.
I do love the final ending in 13-3 (not that I played it myself since the new time limit mechanics and also the need to "complete 13 and 13-2" are both severely high barriers to unfreeze). in fact, I think 13-3's mechanics probably ties into this a bit more than it seems.
I did not expect another video from you so soon but it is a welcome surprise! Cheers for making my evening.
This is always weird when it happens with people. Like, my little brother is 32(?), but in my mind, he's frozen at like 11 or 12, which was the last time he was regularly in my life. So when I see him now, it's mind blowing to me that he's an adult. And it happens every time.
Man, beautifully put together Daryl! This video really let me understand why some games I spend so much time on despite me 'wanting' to spend on other things as well. I used to often play games just to finish them but now mostly I prioritise what I find purely enjoyable! Also, I see the Xenoblade clips thrown in there, nice progress man, hope you enjoy it :D
This is really interesting and very relevant for me. I've started playing through an expansion to a game I love and for some reason I keep replaying alot of content from the base instead of finishing the expansion even once. I want to see where the story goes because I usually love the story, but it's like I don't have the patience for taking in new content anymore and instead just replay what I already know. Perhaps I've forzen on the game somehow.
Now that I think about it, I guess I've been like this with games overall the last few months. I basically only replay old games I like and have almost no interest in playing any new ones. I sometimes feel like I should try more games because I used to do that and it seems like I'm missing out on many great games. But I just feel like I'd prefer to plat the ones I know already.
I know a lot of your videos are sparked by personal experiences or moments, but I'd love to see a video on video game "sanctuaries" and what makes them feel good/special. Places like Firelink Shrine of Dark Souls, or the aptly named Sanctuary of Borderlands, the location to which you can always rely on returning. The place that feels like home in a game where nothing else does.
I saw your poll several days ago, but due to my gaming habits I didn't know how to answer it because I play both types of games and prefer both
I remember calling my dad over to my room to look at the graphics of ff13. It looked stunning. The game never got me hooked, it felt wrong as a Final Fantasy game.
The music for Sunleth Waterscape I still listen to to this day, though.
Beautiful❤
After finishing "finding paradise" for the second time I felt that undescribable feeling of appreciation
I think thats the most closure I've ever experienced
I suggest you try it
This explains a bit about why I like Frostpunk but not other city builders. Except for endless mode, the scenarios have an end. The main one starts off like a basic city builder, with some tasks to guide your city, until you find Winterhome and all hell breaks loose.
6:37 Heyyy that's me!
I bet NFC heavily affects anime preferences, too. I don't go for 100+ episode shonen shows because I'm not down to wait that long for an ending, especially knowing that if the anime gets cancelled before the manga completes its run, or the mangaka drops it at some point, it may never properly end at all.
I find I oscillate between a games with ending and games without them. Playing a game without an ending (or a game where aiming towards the ending isn't the point for a long time, like BotW) allows me time to process a game with an ending before jumping into the next one, but eventually I peter out on the ending-less game and hop to my next more concrete experience.
when I had the time, my times was definitely split. I still enjoy both, but I tend towards games with goals simply because it's more doable in my current setting with no internet access where I play and only short intervals available at a time where I can slowly work through games but not hone skills.
Wow, I actually Freeze really often when reading stories and playing games along with my friend. Every so often I’ll stop myself to take a screenshot of the part I just read, or the frame I just saw, and send it to him so we can hush about it. It gives us an opportunity to ruminate on and appreciate aspects of the story we might otherwise have left uncommented on in the wake of bigger plot points. I start making conclusions about minor plot things, and then get excited to experience more cycles of seizing and freezing.
As someone who loves both Animal Crossing and minecraft, this was both very interesting but also eye opening. Cause what I usually do in those games is to either set up new goals over and over to make them more rewarding, or to reset them when it all becomes too conclusive and i am too burnt out on a game or world. But I feel like this gameplay style is really good for me because it gives you so much freedom in what goals you‘ll pursue. It‘s a bit like breath of the wild really. You just set up a goal. In minecraft maybe you want a new build so you make a flower shop, in animal crossing maybe you wanna redecorate an island area or you wanna renovate a villiagers house, and in games like botw maybe it‘s getting stronger so you can get the new heart container. All of it is so fun to me because I get to decide what my goal is. And if i don‘t wanna ever beat the ender dragon that‘s really enjoyable to me too that you don‘t even have to. The freedom just feels so nice and the calm pace of minecraft and animal crossing makes them also so adaptable to my work schedule. Minecraft and animal crossing don‘t demand from me to pay full attention to them for a while. Maybe i‘ll just sit in my minecraft house and write my diary in there, or maybe I just do the daily chores in animal crossing. And on days i don‘t wanna play they‘ll just wait for me patiently. Even change a little to show that they are simulated to appear as alive as my world is in the case of animal crossing. These games just feel so nice because you don‘t have to rush through. You don‘t have to play them 6 hours a day. You can, but you don‘t have to. And I do really like that about them. Even though i also love games like prey or bioshock where it demands my attention on it‘s rollercoaster ride to enjoy it‘s story. I like that sometimes but not always. And so whenever i just wanna enjoy some calm i put on my little pocket worlds, do a little task or set up a new project for my worlds, and do as much as I want to while listening to a podcast or something. And I really enjoy this.