DesLife wrote:spiraldoor wrote:iHeckler9 wrote:Also, if you two could stop arguing like an old married couple the portal wouldn't be clogged up as much..
Say that to the French. The mutilation of the portal is all they’ve done this year.
I wonder what you mean by that. I guess that your contributions to the forum are much more worthy than ours then. But mutilating the portal was orsum.
Please spiral, teach me the ways of being a good member. I hope I'm worthy of your teaching.
The French forum is a bit pointless these days. All you guys do is quote each other recursively, tearing the portal into shreds. Perhaps it would be better to just delete the entire French forum once and for all.
ParadoxJuice wrote:I agree, Rayman is at a decent level of consistency, however, I think Ubisoft could strive for greater.
They certainly should, as long as their efforts to maintain consistency are careful and intelligent and do not devolve into a reboot-worthy mess, as happens with most comic books. Bad explanations would not help the consistency of the series.
ParadoxJuice wrote:I still disagree. What possibility? That Ubisoft will cover it in a future story? Clearly not Ubisofts intention. If they actually gave the plot hole some thought before the fact ("What happened to Polokus?" "I don't know, Rayman". Yes, this is too blatant to have any place in the games. No, I'm not a good writer.), than I could believe that this is Ubisofts intention. Even if they did cover it later and it made a great plot, than good for Ubisoft, they noticed a plot hole and covered it up. But I don't think you should intentionally make plot holes to cover in a later plot.
As I said, ‘Bad explanations render good explanations of
any sort impossible’. That includes both official explanations and unofficial explanations. It would be better to leave the games somewhat ambiguous than to clog it with stupid, stupid explanations. If it is ambiguous, then we can ignore the ambiguity or examine it imaginatively as we see fit. Stupid explanations are both more difficult to ignore and more restrictive upon the imagination than ambiguity.
You continually refer to Polokus’s absence from Rayman 3 as a ‘plot hole’. That is not what it is. It is an unexplained aspect of the story. It contradicts nothing; it creates no logical flaws or paradoxes. It allows for the possibility that Polokus may return in a future game. It allows for you to fill in the gaps with your own interpretation if you wish. Has your enjoyment of the game been severely damaged by the lack of any mention of Polokus? Of course not; it doesn’t matter. If you really need an explanation so badly that you cannot do without one, just say ‘Polokus went back to sleep’. And there you have it. There was no need for the developers to spell it out for us in black and white. We’re not fools.
Consider the Force in the original Star Wars films. It was a vague, ambiguous and mysterious stary element. It was never explained. Did you think that this was a ‘plot hole’? I guess you must have been pretty pleased when the prequels came out and George Lucas ‘revealed’ that the Force was actually made of midi-chlorian bacteria, right? A bad explanation, but better than no explanation at all, right?!
ParadoxJuice wrote:spiraldoor wrote:ParadoxJuice wrote:Again, Shadow of the Colossus was intentionally vague, Rayman isn't.
Do you have any proof of this? And why should the developers’ ‘intentions’ matter when the results are the same?
Wait, wait, wait...did you just propose that Ubisoft accidentally wrote something better than what they ought to be capable of?
Shadow of the Colossus benefits deeply from its ambiguity. I see no reason why the Rayman games should not benefit in exactly the same way. Do you? I enjoy the ambiguity; I delight in it. Do I care whether the developers wanted to achieve this most excellent effect? As long as they keep doing it right, not at all. Do you have any proof that the Rayman games are deliberately meant to be ‘not vague’? Any quotations from the developers saying ‘We want to achieve exactly the opposite effect to Shadow of the Colossus’ or anything like that? The Mario series has a similar level of vagueness to the Rayman series; do you have similar issues with its ‘plot holes’, as you insist upon terming them?
ParadoxJuice wrote:Not explained, huh? This is basically what I'm expecting from writers when it comes to plot holes. An explanation. Not a ridiculous explanation that grinds the story to a halt. The explanation doesn't even have to be good, it just has to be present, at least that way the writer shows they acknowledged it.
HAL did not explain why he was trying to kill Dave Bowman. This is left a mystery in the film. His response is vague and arguably evasive. Why do you think it’s a substantial benefit if the writers merely ‘acknowledge’ that something is mysterious? So hanging a lampshade on an unexplained story element without actually explaining it will make everything fine? In case you were wonder, the book 2001 was based on contains more information regarding the source of HAL’s attack on the crew:
‘HAL’s crisis was caused by a programming contradiction: he was constructed for ‘the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment’, yet his orders required him to keep the discovery of the Monolith TMA-1 a secret for reasons of national security. This contradiction created a ‘Hofstadter–Moebius loop’, reducing HAL to paranoia. Therefore, HAL made the decision to kill the crew, thereby allowing him to obey both his hardwired instructions to report data truthfully and in full, and his orders to keep the monolith a secret. In essence: if the crew were dead, he would no longer have to keep the information secret.’
There’s the explanation to the mystery. Is any of this mentioned in the film? No, not at all. Is the film a masterpiece? Yes. Do you think that HAL’s madness in the film is another ‘plot hole’? Do you really think that you could enjoy the film more because you know exactly what is causing the problem? I notice that you haven’t even attempted to counter my point regarding the profound ambiguity of the monoliths... this is wise.
ParadoxJuice wrote:Polokus can do absolutely anything while touching the ground. There is absolutely no reason he couldn't wish the hoodlums away. Or rather, dream up a being specifically designed to fight the hoodlums. He could do it in the blink of an eye, and even if you come up with some explanation, the games don't outright explain why he doesn't do just that. What possibility? Something for a later story to touch upon? Well, if that was Ubisofts intention from the start, fine, but I doubt it.
None of this is true. Nowhere in the games does it say that ‘Polokus can do absolutely anything’; in fact, his powers are shown to be quite limited, as he requires the external assistance of Rayman to free him from his dreams. He cannot do so himself. Nor is there any indication that Polokus can control his dreams and so manipulate them into spawning some sort of Hoodlum-destroying creature. (It’s also clear from Rayman 2 that his power does not depend on whether or not he is touching the ground, but whether or not his target it; however, that is beside the point.) If Polokus is asleep during Rayman 3, then he obviously cannot be reawakened without Rayman gathering the four Masks together once more (and that’s assuming that they can even be used more than once). I see no reason why the writers need to explain Polokus’s absence from Rayman 3; all the answers are plain from Rayman 2.
ParadoxJuice wrote:The explanation would be too easy to handle for a good writer, which Ubisoft clearly isn't if they can't come up with one and work it into the story. You can come up with a good explanation, you say? Great! You're a decent writer. But you're not Ubisoft, and you're not writing the game, and no one will see what you wrote except for those who go to the Rayman Pirate Community.
Who says that the writers are obligated to explain Polokus’s absence from Rayman 3? Why should they? How would it benefit the game to do so? The answers can easily be found by playing Rayman 2. Do you think that Stanley Kubrick was a bad writer because he chose not to include an explanation of the monoliths in 2001, leaving their origins, workings and purpose a ‘plot hole’?