The bullet hell minigame style battle window in undertale and deltarune occupies a very similar narrative role to the songs in a musical film and would translate very elegantly to such, does anyone understand what I mean
Yes! They further the narrative and flesh out the characters through sequences of nonliteral imagery, and often these communicate things the literal side of the work could not have expressed as easily, just as a musical character’s singing style reveals facets of their personality
If it were an animated musical, the fight against papyrus would be a symbolic sequence of the main character surviving a zany roller coaster obstacle course of bones while he sings about himself.
This can possibly be said of boss battles in various other games, but most of those take place in what represents a more literal environment. Think of when characters like spamton actually mess with the bullet hell window or break its established laws; what would that even represent without that gameplay format? What “real events” could even capture the impact that’s meant to have? Well, I think that’d be a lot like a villain suddenly interrupting a musical sequence and using the song itself to attack a hero, for instance, breaking the usual division between what’s “real” and “just part of the song.”
AAAAAH I wrote my master’s thesis on this phenomenon and it makes me SO HAPPY to see people talking about it because (at least of 2018 when I was handed my degree) no one in the academic world is TALKING about this and I think its SO IMPORTANT to recognice mechanic design as important to video game art. The closest is Ian Bogost’s theory of Procedural Rhetoric but it always seemed sort of divorced from art and character, and plus I think there are more games now leveraging mechanical design part of the narrative for lack of a better term then when he wrote that theory.
Yeah these games are an extreme example but there’s so much emotion and meaning game mechanics can convey differently from any other medium. The amount of control the player has is important to the story at every moment for example. You can’t do that with anything else.
