If you were to ask me if I were more proud of this video or my Metroid Prime: Echoes analysis, I’m not sure I’d be able to tell you. My only disappointment in this one is that I felt it necessary to not go too in-depth with certain matters. Perhaps a wise choice, as there are a few minor details I never noticed or considered until the editing process. Typically this is where I start to be disappointed, but while it might reinterpret some of what I said, much of my argument remains intact.

I’ll get into that a bit further down. First, some of that classic “behind-the-scenes” talk. I think the hardest part of this script for me was discussing Pacing, and even then I’m not sure I did a suitable job. It is the weakest aspect of this video, though largely attributable to how large a topic it really is. There are several different ways the term “pacing” can be applied to a game, and to try and cover good and bad examples of them all is its own demanding project. As long as YouTube is a hobby I don’t think I can ever truly dedicate the time necessary to such a video, and so I may have to return to it later.

I can only hope otherwise that I sufficiently made my points well regarding characters, their similarities, and their conflicts. The original script called for a far, far deeper dive into Agent Black, but it took too much attention and time away from other matters I wanted to discuss. I don’t know if I’ll have the time to do minor videos on some of these characters, but I certainly have plenty of footage to use.

Now then, Steve and I will be recording an episode on Iconoclasts for the podcast that I’ll also be posting onto YouTube. In there I’ll likely further delve into two observations I only made after editing. Caution, as there will be spoilers beyond the screenshot.

You see that gun the ChemiCo Contra character is holding? For some reason, despite two playthroughs of this game, it never occurred to me that it was the same type of weapon He would use against Royal and Robin towards the climax. It’s one of the reasons I chose the child diving onto the stage as footage for the end of my video, implying further things to discuss. There’s a lot in this game to also be said of anxiety and doubt, and He tries to use that as a weapon to weaken His opponents. I really wanted to discuss Robin’s fight with her own anxieties, and perhaps I could have in the Mise-en-Scène segment, but it just felt like too much embellishment. So instead I chose to feed into providing evidence towards a single theme rather than the whole.

Another minor detail I realized was sifting through the footage of the Master Controller, the giant robotic beast that Robin has to flee vertically and horizontally from. Seeing the triangular top of it, Royal refers to it as divine. While the One Concern manufacture controllers, the suggestion is that they’ve merely replicated existing technology rather than construct their own. This leads me to believe His people discovered the ivory pustules that latch onto ivory-based technology and figured out a way to manipulate them. However, the controllers themselves are clearly designed to work the planet’s spines.

This is all still theory and conjecture. The part of my argument that is weakened is the notion of leaf-vs-leaf, but I think the dichotomy remains intact. It just takes a new form. Seeds versus Controller still embodies the notion of lifeblood of the old world clashing with the lifeblood of the new world.

These discoveries do not disappoint me. Sure, my video could be better with these revelations, but it goes to show how rewarding a third playthrough would still be – and I will certainly be playing a third time once Iconoclasts releases on Nintendo Switch.