It has become obvious to me that there's no way I'm going to finish this game before the 20 hours are up. In all likelihood, I won't even be able to finish it before the 21st, though I'm expecting I'll get an easy 30-40 hours by then. Call it a hunch. Call it "me having heard before that The Witcher 3 has a ridiculous amount of content" But whatever it is, I'm certain this is a game that will last me for a long time.
Which is kind of nice, when I think about it. It will make for a seamless transition from blogging games to just playing them as a civilian once again. The Witcher 3 just happens to be exactly the game I want to play right now, and I'll wind up playing it in exactly the way I've historically played games like this - futilely chasing 100% completion and then eventually giving up when the remaining tasks get too hard or something new catches my eye. The circle of life.
I have managed to advance the plot just a bit, though. I wound up clearing all the side missions and map markers in the first area and was forced to move on to the next. It was kind of interesting. I got to meet an emperor. And for once Geralt's and my opinions happened to line up well on the subject of monarchy (neither of us is a fan). I got the feeling that I was missing a lot of subtext from the second game (and the end part of the first), but it was pretty cool that Yennifer turned out to be working as a vaguely menacing plenipotentiary agent of this sinister king.
And I like the thrust of the main plot, in general. Geralt raised and trained this young girl, Ciri, who was a very precocious student of the witchers' arts, but it turns out that she was related to this sinister king fellow (Geralt probably knew that all along, but it came as a surprise to me) and now the king wants her to come home. Except that she's on the run, probably from her past and definitely from the ghoulish undead/faerie spirits who are chasing her like a pack of starving dogs. So my first task is to track her down using Geralt's ye olde CSI techniques and it looks like, as I find the major waypoints on her trail, I will have to play brief side missions as Ciri, using meaningful echoes of Geralt's own skills as a way to establish a powerful emotional connection between the characters even if they share no scenes directly.
My only worry is that Geralt is going to try and fuck her.
It's probably groundless. Undoubtedly this is just residual trauma from the sex trading cards of the original game and I'm being completely unfair. The codex described Ciri as Geralt's "adopted daughter," and that's got to mean that the writers are aware that a relationship between the two will have creepy, incestuous subtext. And Geralt has always been portrayed as a stand up guy, even when he's being a bit mercenary with his witcher services. There's no way they'd go there.
And yet, Ciri went from being a cute little kid in the opening dream sequence to a svelte, platinum blonde battle vixen in her playable scenes. This is undoubtedly done for the benefit of the game's male fanbase (or perhaps so reflexively that no one even considered going another way), but it feels like Chekhov's male gaze. When Geralt and Ciri eventually and inevitably meet, the only course that is sensible, responsible, and humane is to treat it as a reunion between a father and a daughter. Geralt will express worry and relief, and Ciri, being a spunky action heroine, will make some quip about him taking too long to find her and they will continue on as a cool adventure team.
Except I just know that there are sleazeballs out there who won't care anything about that and simply relish the idea of seeing Ciri in a state of digital dishabille. And I worry that they might be a powerful enough faction that the developers would see fit to cater to them, even if just in an optional side path.
I mean, if this game were made in the 50s, it wouldn't even be a thing. Geralt would just look her up and down and quip, "my, but you have grown," and that would be it. It would never even occur to them to question the relationship. Of course adult men will be interested in romancing the barely post-adolescent women they once knew as children. That's what barely post-adolescent women are for.
I have to confess. A part of me was prejudiced against this game going into it. I'd heard that it was popular among gamergate types and that they would often hold it up as the ideal of what video games should be. It's only because I'd also heard it praised by virtually everyone else that I didn't immediately dump it into the "never in a million years" pile. I'm certain that if the game had that kind of stinking turd of a subplot, I'd have picked it up on social justice twitter or something and the praise would have been a lot more one-sided.
So there you have it. Twelve hours into the game and I waste everyone's time by writing five paragraphs on an unjustified anxiety that just popped into my head when I saw Ciri's ye olde medieval bra strap. What can I say? If not for asides like this, all my posts would be variations of "I just spent six hours dicking around in the woods chasing map markers. Man, this is one well-realized dark medieval fantasy world."
And I've got to save something for the finale.
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