Brutal Legend: The Aesthetic
Where Brutal Legend could be said to succeed most clearly is its aesthetic.
Motorcycle pipe trees.
Massive stone highways melding an epic fantasy aesthetic with a more familiar sight to make something fantastical, with stone highway signs to match.
A mountain-scale wall of speakers.
Massive half-buried car engines...
... vehicular wheels that dwarf humans...
... even more massive partially buried car engines, big enough for a small village to live inside.
Fields of stones sprouting out the ground you don't pay any attention to...
... until you notice that they form hands making assorted rock-and-roll-related signs.
Trees that look ordinary enough...
... unless you look closer and see the tops form some kind of metallic blade.
Spiders made of chrome that spin the best guitar strings of the land.
Headbanging being translated into a combat unit, with an appropriate appearance for such a bizarre concept.
Stage lights and so on within fantasy cavern-esque environments.
Chains reaching into the sky... and a stone hand grasping at a stone guitar.
A more distant look at the stone guitar, and its more archetypically-fantasy surroundings.
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Brutal Legend melds together rock and roll with swords-and-sorcery to create things that are visually striking and make a surprising amount of sense. The result is distinctive, unique, and manages to strike a lot of notes fantasy often strives for. Wandering the world of Brutal Legend leaves one feeling like you're wandering through fields once molded by beings vast and alien, with little to infer what and why but the oddities they've left behind. The rock and roll aesthetic often blends surprisingly naturally in; rarely does something seem jarringly out of place, and yet much of it is fresh and interesting, not something you'll have seen in some other game, or indeed probably not another piece of media period.
It fades a bit once you're done with the game's first act, but it never fully goes away. For one thing, it's built into the army aesthetics, such as how the Drowning Doom has goth sub-culture stuff meshed with assorted undead/mad science tropes.
It's really too bad the game got rushed, and that the gameplay is so fundamentally flawed. Brytal Legend is one of a handful of games whose visuals are compelling on their own .
Motorcycle pipe trees.
Massive stone highways melding an epic fantasy aesthetic with a more familiar sight to make something fantastical, with stone highway signs to match.
A mountain-scale wall of speakers.
Massive half-buried car engines...
... vehicular wheels that dwarf humans...
... even more massive partially buried car engines, big enough for a small village to live inside.
Fields of stones sprouting out the ground you don't pay any attention to...
... until you notice that they form hands making assorted rock-and-roll-related signs.
Trees that look ordinary enough...
... unless you look closer and see the tops form some kind of metallic blade.
Spiders made of chrome that spin the best guitar strings of the land.
Headbanging being translated into a combat unit, with an appropriate appearance for such a bizarre concept.
Stage lights and so on within fantasy cavern-esque environments.
Chains reaching into the sky... and a stone hand grasping at a stone guitar.
A more distant look at the stone guitar, and its more archetypically-fantasy surroundings.
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Brutal Legend melds together rock and roll with swords-and-sorcery to create things that are visually striking and make a surprising amount of sense. The result is distinctive, unique, and manages to strike a lot of notes fantasy often strives for. Wandering the world of Brutal Legend leaves one feeling like you're wandering through fields once molded by beings vast and alien, with little to infer what and why but the oddities they've left behind. The rock and roll aesthetic often blends surprisingly naturally in; rarely does something seem jarringly out of place, and yet much of it is fresh and interesting, not something you'll have seen in some other game, or indeed probably not another piece of media period.
It fades a bit once you're done with the game's first act, but it never fully goes away. For one thing, it's built into the army aesthetics, such as how the Drowning Doom has goth sub-culture stuff meshed with assorted undead/mad science tropes.
It's really too bad the game got rushed, and that the gameplay is so fundamentally flawed. Brytal Legend is one of a handful of games whose visuals are compelling on their own .
Brutal Legend is a game that'd have loved if it was a third person shooter or a Diabloid ARPG in this setting. The most I enjoyed this game was when I was just by myself, driving in this amazingly weird world, riding giant Wolves or cruising in my car and admiring the superb landscaope straight out of a Metallica album cover.
ReplyDeleteIt's a pity that the majority of the gameplay is this very flawed, made-for-consoles hard to control RTS thing that would work far better with a top-down view and a mouse control where you could select units. I never finished the game due to how clunky the controls are when you have to control your armies.
Something like a 'real-time-with-pause' party-based RPG in this aesthetic could've been amazing. (And kept the aspects of being backed by Headbangers and whatnot!)
DeleteIt's too bad a sequel will likely either never happen, or if it does happen it will likely either try to stick to the flawed RTS gameplay or switch to some style that loses a lot of the cool rocker teammate stuff.
Honestly, if this game was made today, I bet there would have been some sort of animated movie or anime to accompany it, and I'd be ALL in for that! I mean... Dante's Inferno got one...
ReplyDelete