The Z Fan

What was the connection between this and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End?

Nathan, Sam and Rafe. We don’t have Jesus in the plot of Uncharted 4 but we have an extra asshole thief to make up for it.

Nathan Drake was the repenter thief. The other two were the asshole thief who went to hell.

After Nate’s mercy counterbalanced Sam’s severity and caused Nate to fall off the cliff and Nadine to live, a loving, forgiving Elena Drake appeared above a whoozy Nathan Drake shortly afterwards. Nate was saved.

Elena’s appearance was too convenient – many said so.

This all happened soon after Drake arrived at the ancient city, which is usually where Uncharted does its supernatural twist. But this time Uncharted just had Christ blessing Nate with a deus ex machina which saved his life and rebuilt his broken marriage. Nate earned it because of his repentance – rejecting Mad Sam, risking his life to spare Nadine. Jesus approved.

Nate’s “feelings” here had a thematic connection to the sea. The game opened on a stormy sea (Nate regretted going with Sam a lot at this point), then it went to a flashback which ended with Nathan leaping into the sea (abandoning Sam), the story focused on sea-fairing pirates and even ended with Drake living peacefully by the sea. Sea dog that he is. But then the mercenary company you fought was called “Shoreline,” (see!) and its leader Nadine… check out her crucifix-arms in the screenshot of that pivotal moment where Nate earns Elena back.

But surely Nadine can’t be a stand-in for Christ. She doesn’t acknowledge or appreciate Nate’s mercy/repentance (or even just the fact he saved her life). She abandons the thieves at the end, they’re all equally fucked, in her eyes. Nate isn’t special to her…

Nadine is a feminine given name. It is the French variant of the name “Nadia” itself being the diminutive of Russian name Nadezhda.^[1] It is also commonly used amongst Arabic communities and in Arabic may mean نادين “Admonitory/Messenger,” “Showerer of blessings.”

Uh?

And Sam – Samael? The one who caused the events that tore down Nathan’s life but enabled it to be rebuilt into something nicer in the end… in the end, Nate has nothing to really hold against his brother, does he? His brother actually did him a favor by fucking it all up. That, after all, is how Nathan got blessed and ended up living in paradise.

You shouldn’t have your cake and eat it, too, Nathan. Not that you can’t…

2018 – 2020: The Strange Video Game Reporter Is Largely Gone

“Can you play it again?”

*Clicking sound*

“In the end, it wasn’t his personal vibe, it really was just what he held (in contrast with what I held). This is what set the tone that came between us. Yes, it was obvious – the man may be mysterious, but he’s not some spy or… the man before me wasn’t lining up to buy it. I could sense the intention with which he stood there, holding his copy of Mario Kart 8 for Wii U – me, with my copy of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. His eye contact gave it away. Even if I’m wrong and he didn’t plan our conversation, I was bound by the social law of the surprised to say something, to point out how we held the same game, and yet, how they weren’t the same game. One was for the Wii U. How can anything on Switch be similar to a game on Wii U? You buy MK8D to play the Switch. I’d been tormenting myself for a month and a half. Do I buy it again? But is it really buying it again? I had just started working my first job and I had an amount of money I was not yet used to, this was my first test as an adult. He noticed me as I stood there at the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe shelf. That must have been when he ducked into the Wii U section.”

*Clicking sound*

“I remember those times. I was there, hell, I may as well have been that boy buying it twice. Ah, the directionless yet unmatched anticipation of the Switch at that point in time, it having proven itself. Still little to come in the coming months but Wii U ports but you knew so damn hard that something magic was in the air that you saw that the ports somehow carried a newness to them that wiped off whatever superficial staleness they otherwise reeked of. Some kind of expansion upon what Breath of the Wild had started, somehow. The system had a voice of its own and it was talking to you.”

“It was.”

“It doesn’t anymore.”

“No, unfortunately.”

“This boy – he was doing his best to listen to the air. He knew that the box – heck, even the screen – was lying to him – it wasn’t the same game. The Switch, she grows – healthy and green – off of the dead.”

“So what happened to the reporter?”

“Outside of the Yakuza 0 guy that he was interviewing for a couple of years – now we really see why, hey – his trail runs cold. Straight-up stiffens. Who knows what really happened to him.”

“He wrote down, “GTA is King. Zelda is Queen” and walked away from it all?”

“You mean from the typing? Well, that’s what I wonder. We might not figure out what really happened to him, but we can start with one thing – he clearly loved the Switch.”

“He had an article in the works about someone transitioning to a Switch-only lifestyle. A thing of zero excess. A thing that presents itself to you ethically. Real climate disaster sacrifices that all things will eventually have to make. A true leader.”

“I caught him again, actually, but I was all by myself, playing a single-player game.”

“Which game?”

“The game that was – for a time – his game.”

“So it’s been years since you’ve seen him.”

“And I miss him. So, I was in the upper-left corner of the map.”

“Dark, snowing.”

“That’s it. Over the edge. Right off the sheer edge, where the game has nothing but space between its world and the background land that dwarfs everything – as though Hyrule really sits at the bottom of some giant hole. Land that you are so far below but can still see the plains on top of? Sailing down towards the respawn triggers. Then, suddenly, I found a spot to land.”

“A what?”

“It’s cut 6 feet into the actual side of the cliff. There’s nothing along there but some thin snow to follow. Tony, this strip goes on for miles, and it’s so far down there that the game itself loses track of where you are, respawns you into the wrong place if you reload. A space that feels, in many ways, unknown to the actual developers, as if their sculpting tech randomly carved this out and no developer ever bothered to really check what went on down there. It was there that I stood and felt his presence.”

“As for where he went from there?”

“He finally felt ready to write some kind of grand manifesto. But he never wrote it and, once this had sunken it, he felt that his blog was no longer him. Two: He’s Australian – his distance from America and Japan gave him the edge he needed to approach the art as an outsider.”

“And then Hollow Knight.”

“Exactly.”

“So he compensated by stepping back, disappearing from the industry entirely.”

“Three: Or he simply started making his own god damn game. The “internet discussion” aspect fell beneath him in the process. He’s now a man who speaks through the fun you have while playing his masterpiece. Four. There came a day where he realized everything he immersed himself in was now pointing in a single, rather serious direction. Something had crept into the very pillars below video games, video game reviews and video game forum posts. That thing was war.”