Quick note: Since I'm pretty sure it's the part of this video that people are most likely to take issue with, I feel like I should point out that the section between when I say "Even details that should be obvious are sometimes obfuscated" at 9:27 and when I say "Whenever one of these questions seems close to having an answer" at 13:23 (basically the parts about the start of the game, Asher and Grant, and Red's voice) are relatively minor points, and the bulk of my argument is in the material before and after that section.
I'm rather late to the party, but I figure I may as well add on a personal detail to this excellent analysis. This concerns a frustration I felt with the ending. The events play out as they do, until they lead us to the final boss - Royce and Red facing off for the chance to escape the transitory and return to Cloudbank. In this moment, the world outside the transistor is very nearly destroyed with a handful of desperate survivors hiding away in the ruins of their now-mostly-empty but thankfully process-free reality. Royce continues to be motivated to wield the power of the transistor to build a better world - something that his knowledge should enable him to do if he were to escape the transistor - and has expressed what seems to be genuine remorse over the ethically questionable methods his ground once took to pursue that goal. As is established in the video, it's unclear why they took those actions if they had the transistor but we see that in the end Red can use the transistor to rebuild so it follows that Royce would now be able to pursue his goal - only this time the world needs his help more than ever, and his actions and regrets indicate that he would provide that help in a moral fashion. So this sets the state for the final boss. Red fights him, beats him and thereby seals him in the transistor. She returns to cloudbank, makes a halfhearted attempt at rebuilding and then decides that she's rather actually go back to the transistor and hang out with her boo - leaving the vitally important blade (that now holds and is responsible for the continued prosperity of their "souls") laying on the sidewalk in a mostly ruined world. It's so frustratingly short-sighted. Had she simply agreed to Royce's terms and knelt down in the transistor to be defeated then everything could be fine - Rocye would be free in cloudbank with the transistor to allow the survivors to rebuild a better world (whilst also protecting the transistor itself, and thusly those within it) and Red would be free to hang out with her significant other. But Red fights him for no reason beyond, perhaps, spite or anger and then, once having received the responsibility of winning, decides to cast it aside. If this had been presented differently this could be a tragic ending or a commentary on the motivations that drove Red/the player. But the game frames this as a poignant and ultimately happy ending with Red and her beloved standing in a beautiful field of grain, so it feels more to me like an earnest "happy ending." It's maddening, and the self-absorbed, selfish thoughtlessness of Red makes me regret "helping" Red along with her little mission. The only alternative I'm offered to this, though, is simply quitting the game at the final boss and pretending that things work out. It's a shining exemplar of the style-over-substance, "deep" profoundness - complete with the sad themes, pretty presentation and lack of actual meaning - that's mentioned in this video and it's a shame that the game goes out on such a note.
Thank you for an excellent comment! I am very impressed by the depth of your analysis, as you have illuminated something that should have been obvious to me sooner---that Red fights Royce to get out of the Transistor, only to immediately put herself back inside, thereby canceling out the (already small) claim that the boss fight had to importance. I suppose it could be argued that she doesn't decide to exist forever in the Transistor until after she has already defeated Royce and escaped, or that the player is supposed to feel that Royce is unredeemably evil for some reason---but neither of those guesses do anything to address or justify what a strange narrative choice it was by the game's author(s). I really thank you for highlighting this. Not only did I fail to notice this fact (which seems blindingly obvious to me now, in retrospect), but not a single one of the comments on this video or in a forum post about this video mentioned it either, back when I published it. Just goes to show how distracting the game's style can be from its ostensible plot, I suppose.
Great analysis. I just finished playing the game through and found myself feeling frustrated and dissatisfied at the end. Your video hits on all the points I had in my head but couldn't put into words, especially the part about not ever really knowing the Camarada's motivation. I felt like I couldn't connect emotionally to any of the characters because I didn't have a good read on why anyone was doing what they were doing, and that took the buzz out of it for me, despite the gameplay, design, and music. Bastion is one of my favorite games of all time; the ending is still heart wrenching for me. This game just didn't have that. Perhaps that's on me for expecting this to be "Bastion 2.0" but to be fair, that's how it was marketed.
Very well said! It's never an automatic problem for a story to be ambiguous---but when the characters all behave and talk as though there is total clarity for the audience, the audience will inevitably feel dissatisfied when there isn't. Anyway, thanks for the nice comment; I'm a big fan of Bastion as well.
Hey man, cool analysis, I agree the story leaves perhaps a few too many blanks for you to fill, though I think a few questions you had I thought were kinda clear (in an ambiguous indie game kinda way). The terminals in Cloudbank offer you chance to vote on various things, anything from architecture to the colour of sky, it is implied that the whole society of Cloudbank runs like this, on a shared consensus that changes with the whims of the people. The Camerata felt that as creative and high society types this constantly shifting consensus was detrimental to the city, they and various cultural leaders could do better, they knew better, they gained access to the programming behind Cloudbank and we're using the transistor to capture the essence of various cultural influences, artistically the best of the best in Cloudbank, they were going to use their combined essence in the transistor to make an artistically perfect Cloudbank without the need for consensus and constant change to please the people. That's how I read it anyway . With Reds voice I think the part they absorbed was her words not her ability to make noise hence the humming, this doesn't really make sense in any scientific way but if we've suspended our disbelief this far it's not that much of a leap. Really enjoyed the video though, agreed that it's a pretty great game overall.
Thanks for your comment! I think your assessment of the current reason for the voting terminals is solid. But as it stands, there are at least three such terminals (bridge to Fairview, the weather, and Red vs. Facsimile) and two of them are re-used twice during the game; there are even at least three more if you count the process ailments and twice-used Junction Jan's terminals. All told, even if two or three were retained for the purpose you describe, that still leaves a lot of redundancy, at least five opportunities for additional world-building that are skipped---and that's already setting aside all non-voting-related terminals. And your guess as to the reason for the Camerata integrating people is as good as any I've heard; it at least brings together the stuff in the limiter logs and Royce's biography (about wanting to change things) with the stuff in Asher and Grant's biographies and narration (about them not wanting anything to change ever again). But that's still got the hard-line "We love our city the way it is" stuff from Asher to contend with.
Aye, I think I was definitely hankering for more world building but I guess from my point of view that's a testament to just how intriguing and interesting a world they have built with this game actually is. I think the fact that certain aspects of the story make us have to think and interpret the world and the motives of the antagonists to fill in the blanks is a deliberate one, it's quite on form from Supergiant. I guess the question did they lean too heavy on that with this game to point of it being frustrating? Yes a little bit I guess, but how many years on now? and the game still invites interesting discussions.
To be honest, this is the first time I've ever heard of them, but that's not too surprising as I haven't delved much at all into the VN or 'classic adventure game' genres. But I am aware of the developer's other notable project Killer7, so who knows? I might check them out some day.
Royce says at one point that the transistor will “take you away” when you kill someone, so it’s implied that they teleport since the sword was thrown, depicting loss of ownership. They mention influential voices, who are the main targets, and it is usually inferred that the Camerata takes them to find what the people want. They wanted to get a hivemind to find what the people want, and the transistor was a tool to build the hivemind. The only theories I’ve heard about the process is that it’s a digital world, and that the transistor is an admin tool, which is used to control the process which was what allowed the digital world to change the world quickly. The transistor failed because Mr nobody wasn’t registered at all in any database, and there was no data for the transistor to find. Royce even says that the process does busy work behind the scenes, and the transistor was to “put it center stage”. That’s all I know from my meandering throughout the internet and my many replayings of this game. It’s unclear, and could have been told better, but it’s there. Thanks for reading this ramble of mine
How would changing Cloudbank based on a hivemind that represents what the people want be a noticeable change from the existing system, where changes occur based on polling the population to find out what the people want?
@@TheGemsbok As Royce mentioned in his autobiography(writing looks like his own), he mentions that the city and the voting comes in cycles. Something from parks to bridges to railroads and back to parks if I can recall. The structures that he designed that were permanent were unpopular, and he became frustrated with the impermanence. When everything changes, nothing changes, and it became boring. Given that that was the creed, it’s safe to assume that that reasoning was for the whole Camerata. The most culturally significant people who know what the public wants would help bring a permanent good of cloudbank. “Everything changes” on the daily, and so “nothing changes”. Edit: I forgot to answer the prompt. The hivemind is designed to give a permaneant idea. They all consider it, all know what they want, and collectively a decision with the best representatives is made. Public loses their control, but the Camerata gives them what they need and don’t think they need. That’s what changes would be made through a hivemind
Right, but that still clashes with one of the few explicit statements that is made about their goals in the game, when Asher says (in voiced narration), "We love our city the way it is. We didn't want to see it fade because someone out there didn't like the color of the sky." Reshaping Cloudbank according to the vision of a few chosen individuals is in contradiction with loving their city the way it is. Players may supply their own answers and theories here. But there's nothing within the game that would definitively settle the contradiction between their goal being 'keeping everything as-is without change' and their goal being 'changing everything to something better.' To be honest, the more I think about it and the more responses to this video that I read, the _less_ I feel these and related elements were thought through during development. The writing is the only aspect of this otherwise excellent game which feels somewhat sloppy.
@@TheGemsbok “because someone” implies a singular person, random citizen, and they wanted a vision of perfection. They didn’t want the city to fade from voting, and created a perfect city. It would fade due to idiotic voting, and their goals stop that
Well, that is a wonderful demonstration of what I meant when I said players would be able to supply their own answers or theories about this. Yet they nevertheless say that they like their city the way it is. Unlike the notion of a perfect city, that part's verbatim.
It's been a while since I played but I think even before the end of my first play through I definitely got the sense that the Camerata was targeting "visionaries" in Cloud Bank because by assimilating their personalities into the Transistor they would be able to create a more "perfect" version of Cloudbank once they were ready. They don't really articulate what perfect means to them, but honestly I felt like the impression that it was *their* version of perfection and that they were willing to murder to achieve it was enough to convince me that they were the bad games as far as I was concerned. I also remember getting the impression that they target Red for her "voice", as in her ability to sway the hearts and minds of her audience and that her SO intervening it disrupted her "transfer", leaving her with her life but without her voice and vice versa for him. I mean, she can still hum and still type sentences, but they did successfully take her ability to sing provocative songs, which is what she was known for in Cloudbank. There are still definitely holes in this theory (like why are the functions of these people just lying around as you find them? Why did Red and SO seemingly teleport across the city?). The whole "Asher" age discrepancy is larger than most couples (which the dialogue *heavily* implies they are one), but imo not improbable enough to be worth being viewed as a plot hole, especially since the devs have a record of taking a relatively liberal attitude towards relationships. Honestly I've just learned to tolerate plot holes in video games in particular because devs go through a lot of changes mid-development. Levels get cut, dialogue and exposition get rearranged on the fly, that sort of thing. And in a video game about an entire society in a simulated reality with no knowledge of an outside world is going to create a *lot* of question regardless of how much exposition the game offers. Thanks for the great video!
Thanks for your comment! Yeah, that all sounds pretty reasonable to me. But that doesn't explain why Asher would say, in voiced narration, "We love our city the way it is. We didn't want to see it fade because someone out there didn't like the color of the sky." The conflict between 'we want things to change' and 'we never want things to change again' is only partially resolved through that viewpoint. As to the issues of Red's voice and the relationship age gap, I would direct you to my pinned comment above; those aren't really important aspects of my overall argument in the video, just a few extra curiosities I thought people might be interested in.
@@TheGemsbok I will say that just to satisfy your curiosity about the age thing, I think it’s literally just because the gay community accepts and very often celebrates the “daddy” kink, which is when the idea that someone younger is dating someone older. So basically it’s just a gay thing lol. Again, just satisfying your curiosity lol
I LOVED Transistor the first time I played it, like top 10 best games EVERY contender, back when it was released, but played it again last year and just could not get into it like last time around. I mean I played it all the way through, but the deep mystery that engulfed me back then, felt a bit... ungenerous. Frustrating. Will be replaying Pyre soon, which I consider Supergiants magnum opus, so I'll see how my experience with that game will be this time around. :)
This is really, really great work! I feel like the people in the comments who are trying to bicker about specific plot points are really missing the big point of this video. Maybe they only play a lot of games, and don't also watch a lot of movies or read a lot of books. Or maybe they only watched part of the video, because the really important stuff is in the last 25%ish. There are ways of telling stories that are vague, but still form a cohesive meaningful set of ideas and give enough material to put together a proper analysis. He shows a clip from Shadow of the Colossus, because it's a game that does exactly that. And all of the directors named in the conclusion do that too. It's not a problem that there is ambiguous stuff in the game. It's a problem that the ambiguous stuff affects the biggest ideas in the game and comes across as completely unintentional. That makes the themes of the game half-baked and only barely open to meaningful analysis.
Thank you for your comment! Yes, you've got it. A game with three tiers of biography unlocks for both main and peripheral characters, unlockable enemy descriptions, journalistic nodes, and constant narration is a game that is trying to tell a particular story. The characters speak and act as though the intentions of the Camerata and the nature of Cloudbank's administrative organization are transparently clear---especially the primary narrator after leaving Bracket Towers. But when you comb through the game's presentation of that story (as I did, with the original intention of simply providing an analysis of the game), you find such a huge number of loose threads, holes, and inconsistencies that a well-founded interpretation is only possible in terms as vague as those employed by the game. The notion that it is intended as an impressionistic tone poem lacking in concrete narrative, or something of that nature, strikes me as an obvious error because it requires ignoring such a huge amount of specific (albeit inconsistent) plot details. Meanwhile, the notion that it is actually a very clear tale with no ambiguities is also an obvious error, as demonstrated by the number of guesses and speculations that must be made in order to uphold that point-of-view. It is very telling that there are people trying to defend the game's story along each of those diametrically opposed lines.
I think you missed the forrest for the trees, friend. This is one of the problems with most youtube critique. Great audio, editing and video quality, I Just think your analysis stays a bit on the basic side of things. Which is ironic since you're complaining about the lack of depth. I will keep an eye out for your content. Looks interesting.
Well, that makes perfect sense to me. The script for this video originated from me setting out to write a full close reading and analysis of Transistor's story. In the process of doing that, unfortunately, I found that there were so many gaps and incomplete ideas in the worldbuilding that writing a well-founded, deep interpretation of the game would be needlessly difficult without doing a fair amount of guesswork and speculation. So what remains is what little can be said with certainty: that the game treats certain themes, although exactly what it says about them is anyone's guess. Anyway, thanks for your comment.
You pinpoint a lot of the issues I have as well. This was very refreshing as I am a bit bummed by people referring to Transistor as their best title. Well put, now I have to ruin your beautiful session with some *quick rankings* oo. I hope you've played Pyre. Love it to death. Yet all their titles are so closely matched. My table of rankings, where rank 1 2 3 get 3 2 1 points respectively. *Soundtrack* - Pyre, Transistor, Bastion (Korb has upped himself every time. Bastion ost is no slouch but still is outmatched by the later ones.) *Songs* - Transistor, Bastion, Pyre (Actual vocal songs carry a lot of weight in Supergiant Games. Of course it needs it's own category for the fact that I find Pyre soundtrack incredible but the standalone songs in Transistor makes the game shine. All the while I thought I ranked the three Bastion songs as the one of the best gaming moments I've ever experienced. Says a lot about the musical competition between the games.) *Gameplay* - Bastion, Pyre, Transistor (Yeah I never really enjoyed the gameplay in Transistor much. Pyre was lots of fun. Bastion hack and slash is timeless.) *Story* - Pyre, Bastion, Transistor (In a way one of the weaker elements of the games. They sport great world building, especially Pyre, but most of the plot comes down to ambiguity. I mean I still dig the overall content.) *Art* - Pyre, Transistor, Bastion (The visuals just gotten better and better. In a way world building taps into this category as well.) *Feels* - Bastion, Transistor, Pyre (Dividing this from the Story category felt right, these games really get to you alright? Pyre 13 Transistor 11 Bastion 12
Very thorough rankings! If Pyre is indeed a touch stronger than their other works when taking every element together, then I guess I'm in for a real treat when I play it. Thanks for your comment.
Isak Ronestjärna Pyre has the best story/characters easily and the dynamic OST always made reading fun. But the AI in combat was the biggest flaw easily as it was brutally difficult one match and piss easy on another . Still a great game
@@denzelromero4796 Yes I agree on all your points. :) Also was surprised by the fidgety difficulty level, some games being snooze fests where you score in a second time, while some games you were on your toes literally 5 points away from a loss and the enemy making mind boggling fast offensives.
Aight, lemme try my hand at this.. The kidnapped people are reduced to functions. There's no indication that any of them are alive or dead, but presumably they're chilling in a meadow somewhere inside the transistor. Regardless, their lives, skills, impact on the world, etc. are reduced to a sort of essence that then manifests based on how the user sees fit, implying that there is an 'essence' and then a 'function,' although they are collectively referred to as 'function' within the game. My guess is that the Camerata's goal is actually not the same for each of the members, with Sybil having her own ambitions, alongside Grant and Asher, and then Royce. Sybil was willing to jeopardize the transistor (albeit possibly due to lack of technical know-how) in order capture Red, or perhaps eliminate Red's unknown friend. Grant and Asher seemingly have some grand goal of progress to triumph over superficiality, which I guess can be seen as a pursuit of 'truth,' some sort of meta-reality that doesn't waver to the whims of people. Given that this kind of 'truth' is defined by people, it doesn't seem to me to be a fair way to then exclude people from participating in determining what it means - ultimately, the truth is reduced to something like white blocks. [NOTE: include Royce] The Process is indiscriminate. My reading of the Process is something like nature, or perhaps science, or perhaps scientific truth. It acts indiscriminately, and it has no intention or purpose other than whatever its programming happens to be. To control the Process is then an act of domination. The Process can be 'controlled' in the way that a cow can be controlled to plow fields, or water can be controlled to generate electricity. idk how Red and her boyfriend ended up on a roof in the middle of nowhere. She teleported up there, and when she arrived he was lying there already. who tf knows tbh I don't know how Grant lost control of the Transistor. Maybe it's something incredibly arbitrary, like whoever happens to be holding the handle. Maybe, when Grant threw it at Red to absorb her, the boyfriend 'grabbed' it by getting stabbed with it and interfering with its intended action. It might explain how they were subsequently teleported out of there (presumably, not the intention of the Camerata), and how he knew there was a nice-ass bike waiting for them downstairs. Red's 'voice' was taken by the transistor. I think it's fair to make a distinction between her literal physical voice, her vocal cords, and the music that she made, which was sung. It would be fair to then ask why she was still able to write words when it was the words that were taken out of her songs. My reply is that there is something special about having words be accompanied by song, and vice versa. There are several points of failure within the world of Transistor and the downfall of the city, which maybe we can try to point to in order to derive some sort of moral from the story. Firstly, the city exists. >The city constantly changes on the whims of its inhabitants >Four individuals come to want to surpass the whimsical cycles >They take control of the transistor and use it to absorb functions >They fail to absorb Red and lose the transistor in the process The first two points are a classic starting point for any story where characters pursue truth, or perhaps merely something more than their mundane existences. They then learn to control and manipulate the world. Sybil deceives the Camarata when they go to obtain Red (for some unknown reason), telling them that she is alone, which one can interpret as human failure. This ultimately leads to their failure to obtain Red and also lose the transistor, losing control of the mechanism through which they controlled and manipulated the world. The conflict is resolved once the transistor is restored to its rightful place in the cradle. I find the idea of the lover's suicide to be quite boring, which is why my reading of Red's suicide is that she didn't want or didn't need to have the transistor, or even that no one should own the transistor for themselves. It makes less sense, but I enjoy the idea more.
Well done! I think that's a great effort at bridging many of the gaps left by the game itself. Thank you for the comment. But I should clarify that I never said (nor intended to say) that it would be impossible for someone to build a relatively coherent set of narrative details on top of the material in the game, and then provide an interpretation of that set. Rather, this video is about a disconnect between the clarity of plot and story implied by the characters and terminals, and the opaque nature of the actual plot and story that is present. As I put it in another comment here, "I try to make it very clear in the conclusion of the video that I don't need or even want Transistor to be more clear and less symbolic. Rather, it is the game itself that makes myriad attempts at clear storytelling---through unlockable character biographies, unlockable process notes, and extensive narration. Those attempts just continually step on their own toes; they retread certain plot points repeatedly, while leaving others hardly touched." It's when working only from the details of the game itself (as in literary analysis), with no significant guesswork or conjecture involved in answering the many unanswered questions and even seeming contradictions, that I believe only superficial themes can be reliably derived from the work.
@@TheGemsbok Idk, I've never felt that more was necessary than the superficial framework. Once the narrative is sufficiently coherent, I get to play a kind of game of narratives with the spaces in between, which is an exercise that I enjoy. If there's a disconnect between the supposed clarity offered by the game and lack of actual clarity, that's not something I'm concerned about.
Have I been summoned? So let me preface this, with “I hear the words critique and Transistor, and I immediately want to fight you.” Let’s begin. So, the OVC is has proven to be an unreliable source of information. The OVC insinuates that Red is dead at one point. Furthermore, “suspicious activity” that started at the Empty Set could conclude far from it with the starting events of the game. Anyway, this section of your critique seems kind cumbersome (get it?), as you start to focus on how heavy the Transistor is. Sometimes she literally levitates it with her mind so... The process seem to be running amok because the Transistor has to be returned to the cradle, at least according to Royce. Likely, without the influence of the Transistor, the Process that enables Cloudbank corrupts over time. It runs unchecked, erasing without the corresponding act of creation. The major ambiguity in the game are the events involving the transfer of the Transistor permissions to Red, but whatever happened, Blue was impaled, and Red lost her voice (perhaps she was grazed). Red hums internally during her turns, and you can also hum using the Transistor as an instrument, but in terms of employing her voice *as a voice, emanating from her body,* she can’t, it was literally ripped from her. The is an instance of a similar thing happening, Royce’s trace is partially integrated into the Transistor to create Flood(). I think this is a ginormous stumbling block for you. The lost voice isn’t figurative. Red loses her voice, Blue becomes nothing but a voice. Anyway, now to keep watching the vid. Ok, back! My understanding of the Camarata is that they were on paper opposed to a city that changes on the whim of the people, on fads. They perceive the Absurdity of their existence. But you are correct that they do not point at anything at the object level that they dislike about the city. Just that things are arbitrary. I understand them as consolidating power to influence the city by capturing the talents of influencers and impersonating them, or their works. They’re deeply elitist, and it’s ambition and lust for control that drives them wrapped up in the condescending tagline, “when everything changes nothing changes.” Who says they need to have a pithy bullet point platform about what they want to institute? They want control, surreptitious and invisible control by seizing the talents of others. The city and its denizens are more like a canvas, than meaningful people with agency to the Camarata. The reason to fight Royce is simple: your lover, disembodied, your defining talent taken, the world destroyed, all because a hubristic autist wants to play God? Is that not good enough?
I've heard a fair number of responses to the video in the past week since it released. Yours is the first to really try to address almost all of my specific criticisms with specific rebuttals. So on that point, I commend you. But when I say toward the end of the critique part of the video that you can't get further than a surface-level analysis without some degree of guesswork and speculation, I'm more-or-less referring to the kind of material in much of your response. There's nothing in the game to suggest that Red's humming is internal or that she's using the transistor as an instrument when doing so---she just leans on it while humming. There's nothing in the game to privilege your interpretation of the events preceding the game, to explain why the transistor is sometimes still able to control the process without the cradle, or to explain why the traces of the people apparently already integrated by the transistor are found strewn around the city. Moreover, it would only matter whether the information in the OVC terminals was accurate if the information in the OVC terminals provided enough info to inform an analysis; very few things reported in the terminals fall outside the purview of what can be independently verified by the player anyway (through gameplay, narration, cutscenes, etc). The events at the empty set are also recalled by Red . . . when she's at the empty set. Where Sybil is still present. Sure, you could suppose that all of the evidence (the terminal describing the events at the empty set, the cutscene that occurs there, and Sybil’s presence there) are all misleading, and they really all intend to communicate events to the player that took place across half of the city somehow, but that's just another guess. On the point about the Camerata's goal, we are in complete agreement that the Camerata despised the arbitrariness and whims of existence in Cloudbank. Yet there is still blatant contradiction in the game between two motives: 'they wanted everything to change' and 'they wanted nothing to change.' Most people say, in response to this, that they wanted everything to change to something better and then never change again after that---that seems to be what Royce's biography is implying. But Asher states outright, in a line of spoken narration, “We love our city the way it is. We didn't want to see it fade because someone out there didn't like the color of the sky.” There is really no reading of the phrase “we love our city the way it is” that leaves room for wanting to change things. Again, one could guess that Asher is lying, but that would be yet another guess to add to the pile. Finally, to Royce: *Grant* disembodied the narrator, took Red’s talent, and destroyed the world. And Grant is dead. It’s conceivable that Red could blame Royce if she were being deeply illogical, but the player likely doesn’t feel the same; people tend not to credit the manufacturers of rope with all of the nation’s deaths by strangulation. To be honest, the more I think about it and the more responses to the video that I read, the *less* I feel these elements were thought through during development. To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, an author can leave a lot of details out of their writing without causing any problems, provided that they know the details they're omitting. But I should close this lengthy negative comment by reiterating that I truly do think Transistor is a wonderful game. There are literally thousands of games with worse writing and larger plot holes. The only reason I’ve singled out Transistor for this video is that its somewhat sloppy story is the only part that is not truly exceptional. It has top marks in every other category: art, music, design, pacing, and so on. I don’t see any reason to spend 20 minutes criticizing the story of a more mediocre game, because a more mediocre game never came anywhere close to unfettered excellence. If people want games that are great works of art which can stand alongside the greatest works in other categories of media (and I surmise from the subtext of your comment that you agree with me that games have that potential), then people can’t just heap unrelenting praise on a game simply for being better than other games. Games have to be considered in the broader context of art, by even-handed criticism as one would apply to literature or film.
> you can't get further than a surface-level analysis without some degree of guesswork and speculation, I'm more-or-less referring to the kind of material in much of your response. That’s fair, you have to do guesswork, alot of guesswork. But I generally prefer that to the opposite extreme, where things are over-explained and contrived, things explained merely to be explained. I never felt exposition-ed at, where other games would probably have some character spout exposition in a 3rd wall breaking way. > Yet there is still blatant contradiction in the game between two motives The Camarata doesn’t seem contradictory to me. Cloudbank would continue to change according to the whims of the people, and eventually any trace of the past would be erased. They wanted to exert lasting influence on Cloudbank, instead of a memoryless amble controlled by majority. That’s how “We love the city the way it is” can be reconciled with seizing control of it. > people tend not to credit the manufacturers of rope with all of the nation’s deaths by strangulation. I think Royce is to blame. Not it a direct sense, but he’s totally unremorseful, and what happens to Blue and Red and the City is a direct result of plans he set in motion. He’s just like “Oops, I guess you’re miffed about your boyfriend, aren’t you?” Grant is a pawn of Royce. They set out as a group to hurt people and people got hurt. So yeah, Royce just nonchalantly fucks everything, and then is like, “Whatev’s, I’ll just get the Transistor back and build a new city at my leisure.” > There's nothing in the game to suggest that Red's humming is internal or that she's using the transistor as an instrument when doing so I’m sorry, I can’t see it any other way, the humming during turn() is totally non-diagenic, (when Royce uses turn() a bass guitar comes in, but there is no literal bass guitar in game) and when she hums by holding L1 i’m so convinced it’s coming out of the Transistor. She rocks it back and forth and clutches it close, like she’s trying to feel her voice resonating in her chest. She’s voiceless, until the end of the game in the credits. > But I should close this lengthy negative comment by reiterating that I truly do think Transistor is a wonderful game. Oh, I can tell you love it too. It’s my favorite games along with Gris, I beat it 4 times in one sitting when I first played it, and I had a computer science exam in grad school the literal next day. (I think i only stopped because I had to go to it) Anytime i get to spill a whole bunch of words on the internet about it, I will. :) I’m really happy you made this video, and Pyre honestly addresses your narrative concerns, everything is much more concrete, but I love the vague, impressionistic story of Transistor.
Again, your take on the Camerata does seem like a suitably reasonable position to me, but it contains too much speculation to form a strong foundation for a close reading of the work. To your note about Pyre, though: I try to make it very clear in the conclusion of the video that I don't need or even want Transistor to be more clear and less symbolic. Rather, it is the game itself that makes myriad attempts at clear storytelling---through unlockable character biographies, unlockable process notes, and extensive narration. Those attempts just continually step on their own toes; they retread certain plot points repeatedly, while leaving others hardly touched. If Pyre is better written or its ideas better communicated, then I will certainly be glad to see that. But if it's just the same quality of writing with greater clarity in the plot events, then I wouldn't be pleased with that aspect of it. At any rate, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts, and thank you for your kind words about the video.
Well, I think Pyre is a change of direction for Supergiant. Bastion and Transistor drop you into the aftermath of the major narrative event, and the player pieces it together, while Pyre has the plot and drama happening on-screen and there’s an ensemble of characters you interact with, and Hades is going very much in that direction too. I love Transistor, and it pushes my buttons in all the right ways, but Pyre is definitely more ambitious than Bastion and Transistor, and not constraining themselves to a single narrating voice and a world devoid of other characters frees the writing to be expressive
it literally shows Red get teleported out after she gets attacked at the Empty Set. That's how the Camerata lost the Transistor. How it teleported her and the Boxer? Who knows. Still did it though. I think spelling things out for everyone explicitly would have lessened it though. I feel like asking for such things to be super explicitly spelled out would be like asking a character in a film to stare directly at the camera and state their motivations/backstory.
I wonder if perhaps you didn't quite make it to the conclusion section? This video isn’t a general complaint about ambiguity. It’s a complaint about a disconnect between the clarity of plot and story implied by the characters and terminals, and the opaque nature of the actual plot and story that is present. Characters routinely talk as though mysteries have been solved and settled in front of us when they haven’t been solved at all. As I put it in another comment here, "I try to make it very clear in the conclusion of the video that I don't need or even want Transistor to be more clear and less symbolic. Rather, it is the game itself that makes myriad attempts at clear storytelling---through terminals, unlockable character biographies, unlockable process notes, and extensive narration. Those attempts just continually step on their own toes; they retread certain plot points repeatedly, while leaving others hardly touched." It’s the only Supergiant release that I feel does a poor job of matching its lore and story with its plot and dialogue.
As I understood it, they wanted to make a more permanent version of the city, based on the design of a few chosen individuals, that they would use to charge up the transistor. As in, they were selecting the people whose combined vision would make up the new city.
That sounds like a nice coherent goal for them to have! Unfortunately, it clashes with one of the few explicit statements that is made about their goals in the game, when Asher says (in voiced narration), "We love our city the way it is. We didn't want to see it fade because someone out there didn't like the color of the sky." Reshaping Cloudbank according to the vision of a few chosen individuals is in contradiction with 'loving their city the way it is.'
@@TheGemsbok I'm a bit late to the party as i've only recently tried out and finished the game. That being said, to content with the contradiction of asher statement, the "answer" can be seen from how the camarata chose the selected indiviuals to be absorbed. We know that our main playable character red is one of the chosen indiviuals to be absorbed that will persumbley be of input to the combined vision for the new unchanging city. It is shown throughout the game that red is extremely popular, being a main invited singer to the stage for 5 years in a row. In a way, she is of a popular choice based upon the whims of people in cloudbank in the artisitic / musical department of cloudbanks culture. It can be said that red is at this point an integral part of the cities culture. As the camarata chose red as one of their target for the new city vision, I think their choice of people for this new vision would have been people integral to cloud bank representing one part of the culture as a stable. So the camerata essentailly chose the ones best represented the people / culture of cloudbank and make it a forever stable (with the power of transistor) for cloudbank that doesn't changed based upon the single whim of a person or some minority disagreeing with the choice. In a way, they are perserving the old city (current culture) by creating a "new city" with the vision best respresentig the people current wants / culture, which means the new city vision they are creating equate to the current old city in their view. (I mean if they really want to create a new city by changing everything completely, why bother absorbing people with huge relevance to creation of the old / current culture, instead whoever wields the transistor can bypass the votes and change the cloudbank however they want shown as red can do just that later in the game) The camarata did in fact love the current city so as to perserve it not change it. Hence ahere to what royce says through his proxy bot in fair view : "when everything changes, nothing changes" (kinda remember the quote but might be not be accurate word for word).
About the plothole of Red and her lover traveling so far with a sword through his chest: I'm pretty sure, and this is also what I understood from the cutscene of the attack, that they teleported.
Also, about Red and her lost voice: I always imagined that the Transistor traps and sort of "digitalizes" a persons' unique characteristic. And that during the attack, Red was attacked with the Transistor (whatever that means, maybe you only have to be touched or hit, not outright impaled) and a part of her (her defining voice) started to get digitalized. But her lover interrupted the attack, which is why a part of her is in the Transistor, and is an available attack. Or maybe, to gain control over the Transistor, you have to connect yourself with the weapon by giving up a part of yourself.
Interesting! You are the first person, in the 3 years since this video was published, to say that the cutscene of the attack depicts a teleportation. Do you just mean because the cutscene ends by panning to where the game begins, and then Red warps in for the gameplay segment? The issue there is twofold. First, teleportation is not even hinted to be one of the abilities of the transistor anywhere outside of the possible implication of that visual. And second, if she does teleport there somehow, she's not in contact with the transistor when it happens. Both Red and the narrator's body are there, and Red's 'appearance' there is after his. So the transistor would have to have teleported her there after it already teleported away itself. If you don't have to be anywhere close to the transistor to interact with it, it would still make no sense for the Camerata to have lost it. Any way you slice it, the chronology doesn't add up. And as to the voice . . . like I say in the video, the game doesn't depict her as missing her voice except in two moments of 'lore.' You can hear her making vocal sounds throughout the game. The notion feels like a vestige of an early story concept. I'm not saying your solutions aren't viable ways for the game to have handled these aspects of it. They are. There are many possible explanations or minor alterations a player might supply on the game's behalf, to address issues highlighted in this video. What I'm saying is that the actual presentation of them in the game is needlessly inconsistent, and so doesn't seem to have been thought through by the devs as well as it is being thought through by you.
Interesting video, and some of the points you bring up are I think justified (a certain lack of definitive cohension between the different elements of the plot is a very defensible criticism) but I think a lot of what you bring up becomes less significant as a problem or clearer if you deviate from wanting a very wiki-friendly "this is how things work and this is what happened" reading of the game, which it pretty clearly resists. I wont go into much detail there both because a youtube comment is decidedly not the right medium for long form analysis. However, on the level of plot details and narrative, there's a few points where I think you missed the mark. In terms of how Red and the Transistor got across town after the Camerata's attempt on her life, it's pretty clearly implied that they teleport in some way or another (at the start of the flashback sequence after fighting Sybil, Red appears out of nowhere amongst a flurry of golden particles, and it doesnt seem like this is purely an aesthetic flourish). This, and Red lacking her voice (which is both symbolic and literal, the humming bit really seems like you're somehow trying to miss the point) can be chalked up to the Camerata fucking up the attempt on her life (the cutscene hardly reads as a strictly literal retelling of it) causing the ownership reset, the teleport, her losing her voice, etc. The Grant and Asher thing is really baffling too, have no clue why you'd jump to estranged cousins or any of the other things you mention given you acknowledge it's a pretty explicitly romantic relationship, it just happens to be one with a rather significant age gap (regardless of whatever moral imputations you place on that).
Thank you for taking the time to write that response! If you scroll up to just below the video, you will find a pinned comment in which I single out the exact three points you've addressed as being minor curiosities, not intended as important parts of my main argument. (I pinned that comment last week, after deciding that the phrase I used to transition into those topics in the video doesn't make that sufficiently clear.)
Quick note: Since I'm pretty sure it's the part of this video that people are most likely to take issue with, I feel like I should point out that the section between when I say "Even details that should be obvious are sometimes obfuscated" at 9:27 and when I say "Whenever one of these questions seems close to having an answer" at 13:23 (basically the parts about the start of the game, Asher and Grant, and Red's voice) are relatively minor points, and the bulk of my argument is in the material before and after that section.
I'm rather late to the party, but I figure I may as well add on a personal detail to this excellent analysis. This concerns a frustration I felt with the ending. The events play out as they do, until they lead us to the final boss - Royce and Red facing off for the chance to escape the transitory and return to Cloudbank. In this moment, the world outside the transistor is very nearly destroyed with a handful of desperate survivors hiding away in the ruins of their now-mostly-empty but thankfully process-free reality. Royce continues to be motivated to wield the power of the transistor to build a better world - something that his knowledge should enable him to do if he were to escape the transistor - and has expressed what seems to be genuine remorse over the ethically questionable methods his ground once took to pursue that goal. As is established in the video, it's unclear why they took those actions if they had the transistor but we see that in the end Red can use the transistor to rebuild so it follows that Royce would now be able to pursue his goal - only this time the world needs his help more than ever, and his actions and regrets indicate that he would provide that help in a moral fashion. So this sets the state for the final boss. Red fights him, beats him and thereby seals him in the transistor. She returns to cloudbank, makes a halfhearted attempt at rebuilding and then decides that she's rather actually go back to the transistor and hang out with her boo - leaving the vitally important blade (that now holds and is responsible for the continued prosperity of their "souls") laying on the sidewalk in a mostly ruined world. It's so frustratingly short-sighted. Had she simply agreed to Royce's terms and knelt down in the transistor to be defeated then everything could be fine - Rocye would be free in cloudbank with the transistor to allow the survivors to rebuild a better world (whilst also protecting the transistor itself, and thusly those within it) and Red would be free to hang out with her significant other. But Red fights him for no reason beyond, perhaps, spite or anger and then, once having received the responsibility of winning, decides to cast it aside. If this had been presented differently this could be a tragic ending or a commentary on the motivations that drove Red/the player. But the game frames this as a poignant and ultimately happy ending with Red and her beloved standing in a beautiful field of grain, so it feels more to me like an earnest "happy ending." It's maddening, and the self-absorbed, selfish thoughtlessness of Red makes me regret "helping" Red along with her little mission. The only alternative I'm offered to this, though, is simply quitting the game at the final boss and pretending that things work out. It's a shining exemplar of the style-over-substance, "deep" profoundness - complete with the sad themes, pretty presentation and lack of actual meaning - that's mentioned in this video and it's a shame that the game goes out on such a note.
Thank you for an excellent comment! I am very impressed by the depth of your analysis, as you have illuminated something that should have been obvious to me sooner---that Red fights Royce to get out of the Transistor, only to immediately put herself back inside, thereby canceling out the (already small) claim that the boss fight had to importance. I suppose it could be argued that she doesn't decide to exist forever in the Transistor until after she has already defeated Royce and escaped, or that the player is supposed to feel that Royce is unredeemably evil for some reason---but neither of those guesses do anything to address or justify what a strange narrative choice it was by the game's author(s).
I really thank you for highlighting this. Not only did I fail to notice this fact (which seems blindingly obvious to me now, in retrospect), but not a single one of the comments on this video or in a forum post about this video mentioned it either, back when I published it. Just goes to show how distracting the game's style can be from its ostensible plot, I suppose.
Great analysis. I just finished playing the game through and found myself feeling frustrated and dissatisfied at the end. Your video hits on all the points I had in my head but couldn't put into words, especially the part about not ever really knowing the Camarada's motivation. I felt like I couldn't connect emotionally to any of the characters because I didn't have a good read on why anyone was doing what they were doing, and that took the buzz out of it for me, despite the gameplay, design, and music.
Bastion is one of my favorite games of all time; the ending is still heart wrenching for me. This game just didn't have that. Perhaps that's on me for expecting this to be "Bastion 2.0" but to be fair, that's how it was marketed.
Very well said! It's never an automatic problem for a story to be ambiguous---but when the characters all behave and talk as though there is total clarity for the audience, the audience will inevitably feel dissatisfied when there isn't. Anyway, thanks for the nice comment; I'm a big fan of Bastion as well.
Yo, this is super high quality. Love it.
Nah, it's just 1080p. Ha. Thanks for the nice comment.
Yeah man, that's the good stuff. Sweet analyzing. Thank you, Mr. Gemsbok.
Glad you like it! (Told you more game stuff was coming.)
Hey man, cool analysis, I agree the story leaves perhaps a few too many blanks for you to fill, though I think a few questions you had I thought were kinda clear (in an ambiguous indie game kinda way).
The terminals in Cloudbank offer you chance to vote on various things, anything from architecture to the colour of sky, it is implied that the whole society of Cloudbank runs like this, on a shared consensus that changes with the whims of the people.
The Camerata felt that as creative and high society types this constantly shifting consensus was detrimental to the city, they and various cultural leaders could do better, they knew better, they gained access to the programming behind Cloudbank and we're using the transistor to capture the essence of various cultural influences, artistically the best of the best in Cloudbank, they were going to use their combined essence in the transistor to make an artistically perfect Cloudbank without the need for consensus and constant change to please the people. That's how I read it anyway .
With Reds voice I think the part they absorbed was her words not her ability to make noise hence the humming, this doesn't really make sense in any scientific way but if we've suspended our disbelief this far it's not that much of a leap.
Really enjoyed the video though, agreed that it's a pretty great game overall.
Thanks for your comment! I think your assessment of the current reason for the voting terminals is solid. But as it stands, there are at least three such terminals (bridge to Fairview, the weather, and Red vs. Facsimile) and two of them are re-used twice during the game; there are even at least three more if you count the process ailments and twice-used Junction Jan's terminals. All told, even if two or three were retained for the purpose you describe, that still leaves a lot of redundancy, at least five opportunities for additional world-building that are skipped---and that's already setting aside all non-voting-related terminals.
And your guess as to the reason for the Camerata integrating people is as good as any I've heard; it at least brings together the stuff in the limiter logs and Royce's biography (about wanting to change things) with the stuff in Asher and Grant's biographies and narration (about them not wanting anything to change ever again). But that's still got the hard-line "We love our city the way it is" stuff from Asher to contend with.
Aye, I think I was definitely hankering for more world building but I guess from my point of view that's a testament to just how intriguing and interesting a world they have built with this game actually is.
I think the fact that certain aspects of the story make us have to think and interpret the world and the motives of the antagonists to fill in the blanks is a deliberate one, it's quite on form from Supergiant.
I guess the question did they lean too heavy on that with this game to point of it being frustrating? Yes a little bit I guess, but how many years on now? and the game still invites interesting discussions.
On those points, I can say we are in almost total agreement.
Now I’m interested on what you think of the game The Silver Case and 25th ward .
To be honest, this is the first time I've ever heard of them, but that's not too surprising as I haven't delved much at all into the VN or 'classic adventure game' genres. But I am aware of the developer's other notable project Killer7, so who knows? I might check them out some day.
Awesome video
I fell in love with this game and it's music so deeply that I failed to noticed these plot holes at all lol!
Solid work, keep up making these videos. Subscribed!
Yep, more on the way soon. Thank you!
Royce says at one point that the transistor will “take you away” when you kill someone, so it’s implied that they teleport since the sword was thrown, depicting loss of ownership. They mention influential voices, who are the main targets, and it is usually inferred that the Camerata takes them to find what the people want. They wanted to get a hivemind to find what the people want, and the transistor was a tool to build the hivemind. The only theories I’ve heard about the process is that it’s a digital world, and that the transistor is an admin tool, which is used to control the process which was what allowed the digital world to change the world quickly. The transistor failed because Mr nobody wasn’t registered at all in any database, and there was no data for the transistor to find. Royce even says that the process does busy work behind the scenes, and the transistor was to “put it center stage”. That’s all I know from my meandering throughout the internet and my many replayings of this game. It’s unclear, and could have been told better, but it’s there. Thanks for reading this ramble of mine
How would changing Cloudbank based on a hivemind that represents what the people want be a noticeable change from the existing system, where changes occur based on polling the population to find out what the people want?
@@TheGemsbok As Royce mentioned in his autobiography(writing looks like his own), he mentions that the city and the voting comes in cycles. Something from parks to bridges to railroads and back to parks if I can recall. The structures that he designed that were permanent were unpopular, and he became frustrated with the impermanence. When everything changes, nothing changes, and it became boring. Given that that was the creed, it’s safe to assume that that reasoning was for the whole Camerata. The most culturally significant people who know what the public wants would help bring a permanent good of cloudbank. “Everything changes” on the daily, and so “nothing changes”.
Edit: I forgot to answer the prompt. The hivemind is designed to give a permaneant idea. They all consider it, all know what they want, and collectively a decision with the best representatives is made. Public loses their control, but the Camerata gives them what they need and don’t think they need. That’s what changes would be made through a hivemind
Right, but that still clashes with one of the few explicit statements that is made about their goals in the game, when Asher says (in voiced narration), "We love our city the way it is. We didn't want to see it fade because someone out there didn't like the color of the sky." Reshaping Cloudbank according to the vision of a few chosen individuals is in contradiction with loving their city the way it is.
Players may supply their own answers and theories here. But there's nothing within the game that would definitively settle the contradiction between their goal being 'keeping everything as-is without change' and their goal being 'changing everything to something better.'
To be honest, the more I think about it and the more responses to this video that I read, the _less_ I feel these and related elements were thought through during development. The writing is the only aspect of this otherwise excellent game which feels somewhat sloppy.
@@TheGemsbok “because someone” implies a singular person, random citizen, and they wanted a vision of perfection. They didn’t want the city to fade from voting, and created a perfect city. It would fade due to idiotic voting, and their goals stop that
Well, that is a wonderful demonstration of what I meant when I said players would be able to supply their own answers or theories about this.
Yet they nevertheless say that they like their city the way it is. Unlike the notion of a perfect city, that part's verbatim.
It's been a while since I played but I think even before the end of my first play through I definitely got the sense that the Camerata was targeting "visionaries" in Cloud Bank because by assimilating their personalities into the Transistor they would be able to create a more "perfect" version of Cloudbank once they were ready. They don't really articulate what perfect means to them, but honestly I felt like the impression that it was *their* version of perfection and that they were willing to murder to achieve it was enough to convince me that they were the bad games as far as I was concerned. I also remember getting the impression that they target Red for her "voice", as in her ability to sway the hearts and minds of her audience and that her SO intervening it disrupted her "transfer", leaving her with her life but without her voice and vice versa for him. I mean, she can still hum and still type sentences, but they did successfully take her ability to sing provocative songs, which is what she was known for in Cloudbank. There are still definitely holes in this theory (like why are the functions of these people just lying around as you find them? Why did Red and SO seemingly teleport across the city?). The whole "Asher" age discrepancy is larger than most couples (which the dialogue *heavily* implies they are one), but imo not improbable enough to be worth being viewed as a plot hole, especially since the devs have a record of taking a relatively liberal attitude towards relationships. Honestly I've just learned to tolerate plot holes in video games in particular because devs go through a lot of changes mid-development. Levels get cut, dialogue and exposition get rearranged on the fly, that sort of thing. And in a video game about an entire society in a simulated reality with no knowledge of an outside world is going to create a *lot* of question regardless of how much exposition the game offers. Thanks for the great video!
Thanks for your comment! Yeah, that all sounds pretty reasonable to me. But that doesn't explain why Asher would say, in voiced narration, "We love our city the way it is. We didn't want to see it fade because someone out there didn't like the color of the sky." The conflict between 'we want things to change' and 'we never want things to change again' is only partially resolved through that viewpoint. As to the issues of Red's voice and the relationship age gap, I would direct you to my pinned comment above; those aren't really important aspects of my overall argument in the video, just a few extra curiosities I thought people might be interested in.
@@TheGemsbok I will say that just to satisfy your curiosity about the age thing, I think it’s literally just because the gay community accepts and very often celebrates the “daddy” kink, which is when the idea that someone younger is dating someone older. So basically it’s just a gay thing lol. Again, just satisfying your curiosity lol
I LOVED Transistor the first time I played it, like top 10 best games EVERY contender, back when it was released, but played it again last year and just could not get into it like last time around. I mean I played it all the way through, but the deep mystery that engulfed me back then, felt a bit... ungenerous. Frustrating. Will be replaying Pyre soon, which I consider Supergiants magnum opus, so I'll see how my experience with that game will be this time around. :)
This is really, really great work! I feel like the people in the comments who are trying to bicker about specific plot points are really missing the big point of this video. Maybe they only play a lot of games, and don't also watch a lot of movies or read a lot of books. Or maybe they only watched part of the video, because the really important stuff is in the last 25%ish. There are ways of telling stories that are vague, but still form a cohesive meaningful set of ideas and give enough material to put together a proper analysis. He shows a clip from Shadow of the Colossus, because it's a game that does exactly that. And all of the directors named in the conclusion do that too. It's not a problem that there is ambiguous stuff in the game. It's a problem that the ambiguous stuff affects the biggest ideas in the game and comes across as completely unintentional. That makes the themes of the game half-baked and only barely open to meaningful analysis.
Thank you for your comment! Yes, you've got it. A game with three tiers of biography unlocks for both main and peripheral characters, unlockable enemy descriptions, journalistic nodes, and constant narration is a game that is trying to tell a particular story. The characters speak and act as though the intentions of the Camerata and the nature of Cloudbank's administrative organization are transparently clear---especially the primary narrator after leaving Bracket Towers. But when you comb through the game's presentation of that story (as I did, with the original intention of simply providing an analysis of the game), you find such a huge number of loose threads, holes, and inconsistencies that a well-founded interpretation is only possible in terms as vague as those employed by the game.
The notion that it is intended as an impressionistic tone poem lacking in concrete narrative, or something of that nature, strikes me as an obvious error because it requires ignoring such a huge amount of specific (albeit inconsistent) plot details. Meanwhile, the notion that it is actually a very clear tale with no ambiguities is also an obvious error, as demonstrated by the number of guesses and speculations that must be made in order to uphold that point-of-view. It is very telling that there are people trying to defend the game's story along each of those diametrically opposed lines.
I've known about the game for a long time, but this the first time I've heard anyone talk about the story. Now I know why.
Would also recommend Codex Entry's interpretation.
I think you missed the forrest for the trees, friend. This is one of the problems with most youtube critique. Great audio, editing and video quality, I Just think your analysis stays a bit on the basic side of things. Which is ironic since you're complaining about the lack of depth. I will keep an eye out for your content. Looks interesting.
Well, that makes perfect sense to me. The script for this video originated from me setting out to write a full close reading and analysis of Transistor's story. In the process of doing that, unfortunately, I found that there were so many gaps and incomplete ideas in the worldbuilding that writing a well-founded, deep interpretation of the game would be needlessly difficult without doing a fair amount of guesswork and speculation. So what remains is what little can be said with certainty: that the game treats certain themes, although exactly what it says about them is anyone's guess. Anyway, thanks for your comment.
Unfortunately, moving on with the series, Pyre might have been a step up narratively, but it was SO BAD mechanically
You pinpoint a lot of the issues I have as well. This was very refreshing as I am a bit bummed by people referring to Transistor as their best title.
Well put, now I have to ruin your beautiful session with some *quick rankings* oo. I hope you've played Pyre. Love it to death. Yet all their titles are so closely matched.
My table of rankings, where rank 1 2 3 get 3 2 1 points respectively.
*Soundtrack* - Pyre, Transistor, Bastion (Korb has upped himself every time. Bastion ost is no slouch but still is outmatched by the later ones.)
*Songs* - Transistor, Bastion, Pyre (Actual vocal songs carry a lot of weight in Supergiant Games. Of course it needs it's own category for the fact that I find Pyre soundtrack incredible but the standalone songs in Transistor makes the game shine. All the while I thought I ranked the three Bastion songs as the one of the best gaming moments I've ever experienced. Says a lot about the musical competition between the games.)
*Gameplay* - Bastion, Pyre, Transistor (Yeah I never really enjoyed the gameplay in Transistor much. Pyre was lots of fun. Bastion hack and slash is timeless.)
*Story* - Pyre, Bastion, Transistor (In a way one of the weaker elements of the games. They sport great world building, especially Pyre, but most of the plot comes down to ambiguity. I mean I still dig the overall content.)
*Art* - Pyre, Transistor, Bastion (The visuals just gotten better and better. In a way world building taps into this category as well.)
*Feels* - Bastion, Transistor, Pyre (Dividing this from the Story category felt right, these games really get to you alright?
Pyre 13
Transistor 11
Bastion 12
Very thorough rankings! If Pyre is indeed a touch stronger than their other works when taking every element together, then I guess I'm in for a real treat when I play it. Thanks for your comment.
Isak Ronestjärna Pyre has the best story/characters easily and the dynamic OST always made reading fun. But the AI in combat was the biggest flaw easily as it was brutally difficult one match and piss easy on another . Still a great game
@@denzelromero4796 Yes I agree on all your points. :) Also was surprised by the fidgety difficulty level, some games being snooze fests where you score in a second time, while some games you were on your toes literally 5 points away from a loss and the enemy making mind boggling fast offensives.
Aight, lemme try my hand at this..
The kidnapped people are reduced to functions. There's no indication that any of them are alive or dead, but presumably they're chilling in a meadow somewhere inside the transistor. Regardless, their lives, skills, impact on the world, etc. are reduced to a sort of essence that then manifests based on how the user sees fit, implying that there is an 'essence' and then a 'function,' although they are collectively referred to as 'function' within the game.
My guess is that the Camerata's goal is actually not the same for each of the members, with Sybil having her own ambitions, alongside Grant and Asher, and then Royce. Sybil was willing to jeopardize the transistor (albeit possibly due to lack of technical know-how) in order capture Red, or perhaps eliminate Red's unknown friend. Grant and Asher seemingly have some grand goal of progress to triumph over superficiality, which I guess can be seen as a pursuit of 'truth,' some sort of meta-reality that doesn't waver to the whims of people. Given that this kind of 'truth' is defined by people, it doesn't seem to me to be a fair way to then exclude people from participating in determining what it means - ultimately, the truth is reduced to something like white blocks. [NOTE: include Royce]
The Process is indiscriminate. My reading of the Process is something like nature, or perhaps science, or perhaps scientific truth. It acts indiscriminately, and it has no intention or purpose other than whatever its programming happens to be. To control the Process is then an act of domination. The Process can be 'controlled' in the way that a cow can be controlled to plow fields, or water can be controlled to generate electricity.
idk how Red and her boyfriend ended up on a roof in the middle of nowhere. She teleported up there, and when she arrived he was lying there already. who tf knows tbh
I don't know how Grant lost control of the Transistor. Maybe it's something incredibly arbitrary, like whoever happens to be holding the handle. Maybe, when Grant threw it at Red to absorb her, the boyfriend 'grabbed' it by getting stabbed with it and interfering with its intended action. It might explain how they were subsequently teleported out of there (presumably, not the intention of the Camerata), and how he knew there was a nice-ass bike waiting for them downstairs.
Red's 'voice' was taken by the transistor. I think it's fair to make a distinction between her literal physical voice, her vocal cords, and the music that she made, which was sung. It would be fair to then ask why she was still able to write words when it was the words that were taken out of her songs. My reply is that there is something special about having words be accompanied by song, and vice versa.
There are several points of failure within the world of Transistor and the downfall of the city, which maybe we can try to point to in order to derive some sort of moral from the story.
Firstly, the city exists.
>The city constantly changes on the whims of its inhabitants
>Four individuals come to want to surpass the whimsical cycles
>They take control of the transistor and use it to absorb functions
>They fail to absorb Red and lose the transistor in the process
The first two points are a classic starting point for any story where characters pursue truth, or perhaps merely something more than their mundane existences. They then learn to control and manipulate the world. Sybil deceives the Camarata when they go to obtain Red (for some unknown reason), telling them that she is alone, which one can interpret as human failure. This ultimately leads to their failure to obtain Red and also lose the transistor, losing control of the mechanism through which they controlled and manipulated the world. The conflict is resolved once the transistor is restored to its rightful place in the cradle. I find the idea of the lover's suicide to be quite boring, which is why my reading of Red's suicide is that she didn't want or didn't need to have the transistor, or even that no one should own the transistor for themselves. It makes less sense, but I enjoy the idea more.
Well done! I think that's a great effort at bridging many of the gaps left by the game itself. Thank you for the comment. But I should clarify that I never said (nor intended to say) that it would be impossible for someone to build a relatively coherent set of narrative details on top of the material in the game, and then provide an interpretation of that set.
Rather, this video is about a disconnect between the clarity of plot and story implied by the characters and terminals, and the opaque nature of the actual plot and story that is present. As I put it in another comment here, "I try to make it very clear in the conclusion of the video that I don't need or even want Transistor to be more clear and less symbolic. Rather, it is the game itself that makes myriad attempts at clear storytelling---through unlockable character biographies, unlockable process notes, and extensive narration. Those attempts just continually step on their own toes; they retread certain plot points repeatedly, while leaving others hardly touched."
It's when working only from the details of the game itself (as in literary analysis), with no significant guesswork or conjecture involved in answering the many unanswered questions and even seeming contradictions, that I believe only superficial themes can be reliably derived from the work.
@@TheGemsbok
Idk, I've never felt that more was necessary than the superficial framework. Once the narrative is sufficiently coherent, I get to play a kind of game of narratives with the spaces in between, which is an exercise that I enjoy. If there's a disconnect between the supposed clarity offered by the game and lack of actual clarity, that's not something I'm concerned about.
Have I been summoned?
So let me preface this, with “I hear the words critique and Transistor, and I immediately want to fight you.”
Let’s begin. So, the OVC is has proven to be an unreliable source of information. The OVC insinuates that Red is dead at one point. Furthermore, “suspicious activity” that started at the Empty Set could conclude far from it with the starting events of the game. Anyway, this section of your critique seems kind cumbersome (get it?), as you start to focus on how heavy the Transistor is. Sometimes she literally levitates it with her mind so...
The process seem to be running amok because the Transistor has to be returned to the cradle, at least according to Royce. Likely, without the influence of the Transistor, the Process that enables Cloudbank corrupts over time. It runs unchecked, erasing without the corresponding act of creation.
The major ambiguity in the game are the events involving the transfer of the Transistor permissions to Red, but whatever happened, Blue was impaled, and Red lost her voice (perhaps she was grazed).
Red hums internally during her turns, and you can also hum using the Transistor as an instrument, but in terms of employing her voice *as a voice, emanating from her body,* she can’t, it was literally ripped from her. The is an instance of a similar thing happening, Royce’s trace is partially integrated into the Transistor to create Flood().
I think this is a ginormous stumbling block for you. The lost voice isn’t figurative. Red loses her voice, Blue becomes nothing but a voice. Anyway, now to keep watching the vid.
Ok, back! My understanding of the Camarata is that they were on paper opposed to a city that changes on the whim of the people, on fads. They perceive the Absurdity of their existence. But you are correct that they do not point at anything at the object level that they dislike about the city. Just that things are arbitrary. I understand them as consolidating power to influence the city by capturing the talents of influencers and impersonating them, or their works. They’re deeply elitist, and it’s ambition and lust for control that drives them wrapped up in the condescending tagline, “when everything changes nothing changes.” Who says they need to have a pithy bullet point platform about what they want to institute? They want control, surreptitious and invisible control by seizing the talents of others. The city and its denizens are more like a canvas, than meaningful people with agency to the Camarata. The reason to fight Royce is simple: your lover, disembodied, your defining talent taken, the world destroyed, all because a hubristic autist wants to play God? Is that not good enough?
I've heard a fair number of responses to the video in the past week since it released. Yours is the first to really try to address almost all of my specific criticisms with specific rebuttals. So on that point, I commend you.
But when I say toward the end of the critique part of the video that you can't get further than a surface-level analysis without some degree of guesswork and speculation, I'm more-or-less referring to the kind of material in much of your response. There's nothing in the game to suggest that Red's humming is internal or that she's using the transistor as an instrument when doing so---she just leans on it while humming. There's nothing in the game to privilege your interpretation of the events preceding the game, to explain why the transistor is sometimes still able to control the process without the cradle, or to explain why the traces of the people apparently already integrated by the transistor are found strewn around the city.
Moreover, it would only matter whether the information in the OVC terminals was accurate if the information in the OVC terminals provided enough info to inform an analysis; very few things reported in the terminals fall outside the purview of what can be independently verified by the player anyway (through gameplay, narration, cutscenes, etc). The events at the empty set are also recalled by Red . . . when she's at the empty set. Where Sybil is still present. Sure, you could suppose that all of the evidence (the terminal describing the events at the empty set, the cutscene that occurs there, and Sybil’s presence there) are all misleading, and they really all intend to communicate events to the player that took place across half of the city somehow, but that's just another guess.
On the point about the Camerata's goal, we are in complete agreement that the Camerata despised the arbitrariness and whims of existence in Cloudbank. Yet there is still blatant contradiction in the game between two motives: 'they wanted everything to change' and 'they wanted nothing to change.' Most people say, in response to this, that they wanted everything to change to something better and then never change again after that---that seems to be what Royce's biography is implying. But Asher states outright, in a line of spoken narration, “We love our city the way it is. We didn't want to see it fade because someone out there didn't like the color of the sky.” There is really no reading of the phrase “we love our city the way it is” that leaves room for wanting to change things. Again, one could guess that Asher is lying, but that would be yet another guess to add to the pile.
Finally, to Royce: *Grant* disembodied the narrator, took Red’s talent, and destroyed the world. And Grant is dead. It’s conceivable that Red could blame Royce if she were being deeply illogical, but the player likely doesn’t feel the same; people tend not to credit the manufacturers of rope with all of the nation’s deaths by strangulation.
To be honest, the more I think about it and the more responses to the video that I read, the *less* I feel these elements were thought through during development. To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, an author can leave a lot of details out of their writing without causing any problems, provided that they know the details they're omitting.
But I should close this lengthy negative comment by reiterating that I truly do think Transistor is a wonderful game. There are literally thousands of games with worse writing and larger plot holes. The only reason I’ve singled out Transistor for this video is that its somewhat sloppy story is the only part that is not truly exceptional. It has top marks in every other category: art, music, design, pacing, and so on. I don’t see any reason to spend 20 minutes criticizing the story of a more mediocre game, because a more mediocre game never came anywhere close to unfettered excellence. If people want games that are great works of art which can stand alongside the greatest works in other categories of media (and I surmise from the subtext of your comment that you agree with me that games have that potential), then people can’t just heap unrelenting praise on a game simply for being better than other games. Games have to be considered in the broader context of art, by even-handed criticism as one would apply to literature or film.
> you can't get further than a surface-level analysis without some degree of guesswork and speculation, I'm more-or-less referring to the kind of material in much of your response.
That’s fair, you have to do guesswork, alot of guesswork. But I generally prefer that to the opposite extreme, where things are over-explained and contrived, things explained merely to be explained. I never felt exposition-ed at, where other games would probably have some character spout exposition in a 3rd wall breaking way.
> Yet there is still blatant contradiction in the game between two motives
The Camarata doesn’t seem contradictory to me. Cloudbank would continue to change according to the whims of the people, and eventually any trace of the past would be erased. They wanted to exert lasting influence on Cloudbank, instead of a memoryless amble controlled by majority. That’s how “We love the city the way it is” can be reconciled with seizing control of it.
> people tend not to credit the manufacturers of rope with all of the nation’s deaths by strangulation.
I think Royce is to blame. Not it a direct sense, but he’s totally unremorseful, and what happens to Blue and Red and the City is a direct result of plans he set in motion. He’s just like “Oops, I guess you’re miffed about your boyfriend, aren’t you?” Grant is a pawn of Royce. They set out as a group to hurt people and people got hurt. So yeah, Royce just nonchalantly fucks everything, and then is like, “Whatev’s, I’ll just get the Transistor back and build a new city at my leisure.”
> There's nothing in the game to suggest that Red's humming is internal or that she's using the transistor as an instrument when doing so
I’m sorry, I can’t see it any other way, the humming during turn() is totally non-diagenic, (when Royce uses turn() a bass guitar comes in, but there is no literal bass guitar in game) and when she hums by holding L1 i’m so convinced it’s coming out of the Transistor. She rocks it back and forth and clutches it close, like she’s trying to feel her voice resonating in her chest. She’s voiceless, until the end of the game in the credits.
> But I should close this lengthy negative comment by reiterating that I truly do think Transistor is a wonderful game.
Oh, I can tell you love it too. It’s my favorite games along with Gris, I beat it 4 times in one sitting when I first played it, and I had a computer science exam in grad school the literal next day. (I think i only stopped because I had to go to it) Anytime i get to spill a whole bunch of words on the internet about it, I will. :)
I’m really happy you made this video, and Pyre honestly addresses your narrative concerns, everything is much more concrete, but I love the vague, impressionistic story of Transistor.
Again, your take on the Camerata does seem like a suitably reasonable position to me, but it contains too much speculation to form a strong foundation for a close reading of the work.
To your note about Pyre, though: I try to make it very clear in the conclusion of the video that I don't need or even want Transistor to be more clear and less symbolic. Rather, it is the game itself that makes myriad attempts at clear storytelling---through unlockable character biographies, unlockable process notes, and extensive narration. Those attempts just continually step on their own toes; they retread certain plot points repeatedly, while leaving others hardly touched. If Pyre is better written or its ideas better communicated, then I will certainly be glad to see that. But if it's just the same quality of writing with greater clarity in the plot events, then I wouldn't be pleased with that aspect of it.
At any rate, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts, and thank you for your kind words about the video.
Well, I think Pyre is a change of direction for Supergiant. Bastion and Transistor drop you into the aftermath of the major narrative event, and the player pieces it together, while Pyre has the plot and drama happening on-screen and there’s an ensemble of characters you interact with, and Hades is going very much in that direction too. I love Transistor, and it pushes my buttons in all the right ways, but Pyre is definitely more ambitious than Bastion and Transistor, and not constraining themselves to a single narrating voice and a world devoid of other characters frees the writing to be expressive
Interesting! That does sound quite different for them. I'm sure I will play it at some point. Thanks again.
it literally shows Red get teleported out after she gets attacked at the Empty Set. That's how the Camerata lost the Transistor. How it teleported her and the Boxer? Who knows. Still did it though. I think spelling things out for everyone explicitly would have lessened it though. I feel like asking for such things to be super explicitly spelled out would be like asking a character in a film to stare directly at the camera and state their motivations/backstory.
I wonder if perhaps you didn't quite make it to the conclusion section? This video isn’t a general complaint about ambiguity. It’s a complaint about a disconnect between the clarity of plot and story implied by the characters and terminals, and the opaque nature of the actual plot and story that is present. Characters routinely talk as though mysteries have been solved and settled in front of us when they haven’t been solved at all.
As I put it in another comment here, "I try to make it very clear in the conclusion of the video that I don't need or even want Transistor to be more clear and less symbolic. Rather, it is the game itself that makes myriad attempts at clear storytelling---through terminals, unlockable character biographies, unlockable process notes, and extensive narration. Those attempts just continually step on their own toes; they retread certain plot points repeatedly, while leaving others hardly touched."
It’s the only Supergiant release that I feel does a poor job of matching its lore and story with its plot and dialogue.
As I understood it, they wanted to make a more permanent version of the city, based on the design of a few chosen individuals, that they would use to charge up the transistor. As in, they were selecting the people whose combined vision would make up the new city.
That sounds like a nice coherent goal for them to have! Unfortunately, it clashes with one of the few explicit statements that is made about their goals in the game, when Asher says (in voiced narration), "We love our city the way it is. We didn't want to see it fade because someone out there didn't like the color of the sky." Reshaping Cloudbank according to the vision of a few chosen individuals is in contradiction with 'loving their city the way it is.'
@@TheGemsbok I'm a bit late to the party as i've only recently tried out and finished the game. That being said, to content with the contradiction of asher statement, the "answer" can be seen from how the camarata chose the selected indiviuals to be absorbed. We know that our main playable character red is one of the chosen indiviuals to be absorbed that will persumbley be of input to the combined vision for the new unchanging city. It is shown throughout the game that red is extremely popular, being a main invited singer to the stage for 5 years in a row. In a way, she is of a popular choice based upon the whims of people in cloudbank in the artisitic / musical department of cloudbanks culture. It can be said that red is at this point an integral part of the cities culture. As the camarata chose red as one of their target for the new city vision, I think their choice of people for this new vision would have been people integral to cloud bank representing one part of the culture as a stable. So the camerata essentailly chose the ones best represented the people / culture of cloudbank and make it a forever stable (with the power of transistor) for cloudbank that doesn't changed based upon the single whim of a person or some minority disagreeing with the choice. In a way, they are perserving the old city (current culture) by creating a "new city" with the vision best respresentig the people current wants / culture, which means the new city vision they are creating equate to the current old city in their view. (I mean if they really want to create a new city by changing everything completely, why bother absorbing people with huge relevance to creation of the old / current culture, instead whoever wields the transistor can bypass the votes and change the cloudbank however they want shown as red can do just that later in the game) The camarata did in fact love the current city so as to perserve it not change it. Hence ahere to what royce says through his proxy bot in fair view : "when everything changes, nothing changes" (kinda remember the quote but might be not be accurate word for word).
About the plothole of Red and her lover traveling so far with a sword through his chest: I'm pretty sure, and this is also what I understood from the cutscene of the attack, that they teleported.
Also, about Red and her lost voice: I always imagined that the Transistor traps and sort of "digitalizes" a persons' unique characteristic. And that during the attack, Red was attacked with the Transistor (whatever that means, maybe you only have to be touched or hit, not outright impaled) and a part of her (her defining voice) started to get digitalized. But her lover interrupted the attack, which is why a part of her is in the Transistor, and is an available attack.
Or maybe, to gain control over the Transistor, you have to connect yourself with the weapon by giving up a part of yourself.
Interesting! You are the first person, in the 3 years since this video was published, to say that the cutscene of the attack depicts a teleportation. Do you just mean because the cutscene ends by panning to where the game begins, and then Red warps in for the gameplay segment?
The issue there is twofold. First, teleportation is not even hinted to be one of the abilities of the transistor anywhere outside of the possible implication of that visual. And second, if she does teleport there somehow, she's not in contact with the transistor when it happens. Both Red and the narrator's body are there, and Red's 'appearance' there is after his. So the transistor would have to have teleported her there after it already teleported away itself. If you don't have to be anywhere close to the transistor to interact with it, it would still make no sense for the Camerata to have lost it. Any way you slice it, the chronology doesn't add up.
And as to the voice . . . like I say in the video, the game doesn't depict her as missing her voice except in two moments of 'lore.' You can hear her making vocal sounds throughout the game. The notion feels like a vestige of an early story concept.
I'm not saying your solutions aren't viable ways for the game to have handled these aspects of it. They are. There are many possible explanations or minor alterations a player might supply on the game's behalf, to address issues highlighted in this video. What I'm saying is that the actual presentation of them in the game is needlessly inconsistent, and so doesn't seem to have been thought through by the devs as well as it is being thought through by you.
Interesting video, and some of the points you bring up are I think justified (a certain lack of definitive cohension between the different elements of the plot is a very defensible criticism) but I think a lot of what you bring up becomes less significant as a problem or clearer if you deviate from wanting a very wiki-friendly "this is how things work and this is what happened" reading of the game, which it pretty clearly resists. I wont go into much detail there both because a youtube comment is decidedly not the right medium for long form analysis. However, on the level of plot details and narrative, there's a few points where I think you missed the mark.
In terms of how Red and the Transistor got across town after the Camerata's attempt on her life, it's pretty clearly implied that they teleport in some way or another (at the start of the flashback sequence after fighting Sybil, Red appears out of nowhere amongst a flurry of golden particles, and it doesnt seem like this is purely an aesthetic flourish). This, and Red lacking her voice (which is both symbolic and literal, the humming bit really seems like you're somehow trying to miss the point) can be chalked up to the Camerata fucking up the attempt on her life (the cutscene hardly reads as a strictly literal retelling of it) causing the ownership reset, the teleport, her losing her voice, etc.
The Grant and Asher thing is really baffling too, have no clue why you'd jump to estranged cousins or any of the other things you mention given you acknowledge it's a pretty explicitly romantic relationship, it just happens to be one with a rather significant age gap (regardless of whatever moral imputations you place on that).
Thank you for taking the time to write that response! If you scroll up to just below the video, you will find a pinned comment in which I single out the exact three points you've addressed as being minor curiosities, not intended as important parts of my main argument. (I pinned that comment last week, after deciding that the phrase I used to transition into those topics in the video doesn't make that sufficiently clear.)