I'm told that this whole story in the mountains is basically just an extended preamble, and that the game opens up a lot after that, which is what I'm hoping.
Two great gaming experiences like that I can remember... one was "Zelda: Ocarina of Time" and the other was in "X: Beyond the Frontier". With Ocarina, you start off in baby Link's village, which for the time, at least for me was a fairly big environment/map with an open/world'ish layout where you could go anywhere, until you got to the "wall" which was essentially the forest, whereby you needed to go through specific tunnel/logs to enter the woods... which you couldn't do anyway because you had to accomplish other tasks to be properly equipped to leave the village into the woods.
At any rate, the point is, that there was plenty to do in the village and the woods, and I had no idea about the scope of the game because I had never played it or read anything about it. So when I finally got to the point where the guards would let me leave the village into the larger world, I was a little taken aback, because you leave the village into this seemingly vast open plain where you can go anywhere, in any direction, towards what seems to be an endless horizon. That was the first time I got a sense that the game was much bigger than I first imagined it to be... I realized for the first time that it was a bigger world than my last Zelda game, "Zelda II: Adventure of Link", but this time in a beautiful, 3D polygon open-world format instead of the combo overhead bird's eye map/side scrolling map. It was really my first 3D "open world" game experience, unless you include FPS games, which I don't.
I think I may have described my experience with
X: Beyond the Frontier before on these threads, but this was on another level in terms of mind blowing. Again, I had no experience with the game and had no idea what it was about so I went in totally blind. I don't even remember why I decided to try it. So many great things I could say about the game, but two turning points in particular really stand out. The first, is that you start the game in what is essentially a mini-game/tutorial/preamble, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the game, except for the fact that it gives you a chance to practice the controls before the real game starts. Once the tutorial ends and the "game" actually starts, its a real "We're not in Kansas anymore" moment, as you immediately get the feeling that everything you had just been doing is now totally irrelevant and you're now playing an essentially brand new game from scratch.
But that wasn't even the biggest mind blowing moment of the game for me. Again, in the tutorial part feels small, like a training mission, so although you're technically "out in space" and can literally fly anywhere you want, there isn't really anywhere to go. But once the tutorial ends you are thrown into this environment where you are completely overwhelmed with endless places to go and no idea what to do next. But that isn't even what blew my mind. Once I had been playing the game for a really long time, hours and hours of play over the course of several days, if not weeks, I had finally gotten into a rhythm where I had learned how to play, what I was generally able to accomplish, and started the process of surviving, upgrading my ship, communicating, trading etc. I had even gotten to the point where I could establish my own small base/port and i had a nice trading routine going. at this point, just finishing simple trade missions between the ports and stations available could take hours flying time. the game really makes you feel like you are "living" on the ship IRL, because you can put the ship on auto-pilot, go make lunch, eat and finish just in time to arrive at your destination. It makes the game even more immersive in a strange way.
Anyway, around this point, I noticed, for the first time, way in the distance, far beyond any station, asteroid, ship, or anything else worth flying to... way out in empty space a tiny, strange, barely visible, jet-black circle that I'd never seen before. It was hard to notice because it was jet black against a jet black background of deep space. At first I thought it was just a polygon glitch/seam in the graphics of the map. So when I finally went to investigate it... my mind got blown because...
it’s like gta but way sillier and over the top, but done right spoofing the genre yet still fun.
