6 Ocak 2019 Pazar

Why do I Write Reviews&Retrospectives

This article is a sample piece that will be written as My Patreon reward. If you want to see more articles like this, you can access to them by pledging to me.
This is a quite silly title, no? The answer is obviously clear. I am a huge nerd and I like to talking about stuff I consume. So, if you like video games, anime, books etc. enough, just write stuff! Shoot an article or prepare a script for the video. That's it, thanks for the reading everyone!..
...
...Why are you still here?
...Oh, yeah, right. Things are never so easy, are they? It's not easy to what to write about, how to write about and how much to write about.
One regular method I see quite often used to just take a game or film and pick apart its indiviual parts to express your opinions then wrap it up to make general judgements about it. This is the dominant style of the game reviews in websites, magazines, and YouTube videos, videos which often sprawls through 10-20 minutes to several hours. Now, people often express their criticism at this type of review, but I will not trash it here, in fact it's a style I sometimes enjoy too. There certainly is a reason why this format is popular, because it simply works. It's useful for the reader, they can just look at the game and find stuff they like in it. It's useful for the writer, they deliver reviews in a regular manner while maintaining certain standards.
However, that format just doesn't click with me, personally, for some reason. Way back then, I tried to write about Dragon's Dogma. It's a very good game, I can find a lot of things to praise for, and some things to criticize for. I even took notes about what I was going to write about, categorized things nicely, but then... nothing came. It's not like I couldn't think of anything. It's just that I lacked the passion to write. But wait a minute, I definitely did want to talk about the game, why then I didn't have the passion?
I was able to find that passion in my very first blog post, the Half-Life Retrospective, I wrote about it because the game impressed me in a specific way and I wanted to wrote about that. I wanted to talk about how the atmosphere in Half-Life affected me. I wanted to talk about how atmosphere is built with level, even with old visuals. I wanted to convince the reader of some ideas.
Ideas, that's really the breaking deal. Even though I liked Dragon's Dogma a lot, it didn't just sparked an idea to write about. In all of my reviews, I had the same goal. I often don't review the games entirely, just look at the parts I want to focus instead. If a review that fully covers everything comes out, that's because the general idea just allows me to talk about it. In cases like Trails in the Sky, where the games are so big and have a lot of ideas in it, I can write a lot of articles with each merely focusing on one idea. In Trails in the Battlefield, I tried to break some misconceptions about turn based battles, in Trails in The Hymns, I wanted to write about how much music can impact a video game.
This is why just picking a game, anime, whatever and talking about it doesn't sit right with me. A general argument, a certain feeling to convey; I need that fire in everything I write really, but with reviews and retrospectives I am fully aware why I am writing about something.
If you struggle with writing, searching for a general idea might just help. Find that idea and then try to reflect in every word you use. Once again, I am not implying it's the best method or anything. It's just right to me. It might just help you too... or not. Look, I am not some master writer or anything, I just feel like writing something and write about it. But at the very least, I am confident to say that finding out why you are feeling like to write is important.


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