From Captain Quasar, who’ll moderate our discussion.

While the other members of the initiative have their nostalgic games that reminded them of a certain era, a la Mario or Mega Man, I had Supergiant Games’ Bastion, released in 2011.

It was quite a mature story for the age I played it at, dealing with an interracial conflict that leads to the quasi-apocalypse, with added themes of morality and found family. Obviously, I was more interested in my choice of weapons and the funny man with a raspy voice that I most certainly tried to imitate with little success. I recently made another return to Bastion after I finally repurchased it on steam to round out my Supergiant collection, and the playthroughs I did reaffirmed my love for every aspect of the game, recognizing how it shaped my tastes in art, music, and video games as a whole.

However, I was stopped in my tracks near the end of my first replay by my realization of the most obvious allusion the game was trying to make, one that made me slap my face out of disbelief for how I could have missed it for 12 years straight: how the game was an allegory for American-Japanese relations and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

How does Bastion present a 21st century American perspective on what happened in 1945? Does the fast action the game features present Ludonarrative Dissonance with its themes? And did anybody cry during that one scene in the game? Because I certainly didn’t, stop asking.

On Thursday, September 7th, at 8:30 Eastern and 5:30 Pacific, this critical issue will be hashed out in the secret backchannel of the VGHVI Discord Server. See you there!