![]() ![]() ![]() It feels like a single important event, told in exactly as much detail as required, perhaps not in real-time but with little in the way of editing. Though it feels like the game never makes good on the intimacy this relationship promises, it captures something else: The sense of one last wild ride, one last night, as the world is dismantled in place. They say the Camerata stole Red’s voice, but now how can we even tell what she was trying to say? By placing us more intimately in relation to the protagonist, the fact that she still feels a stranger to me seems more jarring than it did in Bastion. This difference places you, the player, as the main character, instead of as an external force driving her – and yet, in the end, Red seems as much as cipher to us as The Kid of Bastion ever was, and we’re left to only know her through her music, and rare appearances of personality, just as the people of Cloudbank must have known her. The same voice speaks to you throughout both games, but, while in Bastion he tells you the protagonist’s story as a third-person narrator, in Transistor he’s a close friend of the character you play, Red, and is directly addressing her with each line. Regardless of how one describes it, the games are closely related, and yet strikingly different from each other in a number of crucial ways. It’s a style of kinship between two games that seems rare nowadays, when most studios would rather make a series of explicit sequels than toy with any kind of variation on a theme. Is Transistor a successor? A spiritual sequel? A sister game? The relationship between the two is similar to that between two Final Fantasy games, where thematic and aesthetic similarities belie core gameplay systems that are, once you look past the superficial, startlingly different. It’s hard to put a name to the relationship between Transistor and Bastion.
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