The Citadel is a really fantastic piece of work. I agree with
much of what Ichor says, but I've been looking at this stuff for a while and have some input of my own.
Yes, obviously the guy is a fan of Marathon. He likes the idea of a
literary approach to what is superficially a "first person shooter" or "fps". But like Bungie's games what he's making isn't really one. In the sense that he's not building around the mechanical experience/challenge of
shooting. Especially not in any game sense. He is absolutely not making a "boomer shooter" as certain idiots have insisted.
He's doing what Bungie did, and what the Japanese pretty much always do, which is building the game around sensations and impressions and ideas. And then presenting from a first person perspective. If Marathon was something like a science fiction novel broken up and presented through "first person shooter" levels, tropes, and form, The Citadel is that too. But while Marathon was
mostly a literary work, with some visual and architectural flair and expression, The Citadel is far less literary and far more viscerally visual. Idiot boomer shooter slave makes a "game" and then contrives some looks and sounds to sit on top. Bungie made a literary "story" and then made a shooter "game" to frame it. Citadel Man I believe is starting mostly with
images in his head, ideas and sensations, and then builds a game to frame them. As far as sensibilities expressed within "fps" go he has more in common with Bungie than anybody else in
the business.
Bungie were weirdly
oriental all along because they were artfags working from ideas rather than the idea of firing a weightless laser tag gun at goblins. They were also pretty good at
sensation because of their experience making Myth. Which was about sensation-ideas rather than literary ones (this is why Mandalore is retarded and his video tells you nothing about the games). Halo was where these instincts met and peaked together. Myth is shallow and kind of pointless despite what Mandalore Americans will tell you ("Did you know it's inspired by The Black Company?"). Marathon has the conceptual ambition on the literary end, but relatively primitive ideas on how to use the elements of a "video game" to that end. They have some good ideas with levels, playing with meta ideas, virtual architecture, but they also have you do switch puzzles, take too much of the form of Doom for granted for my liking, etc. Too many elements feel vestigial and
in the way. I don't like feeling like I'm doing chores to see the interesting part.
But that's a bit of a tangent now. My point was that I believe that there is a
literary side and a
sensation side to this game's inspirations which have been identified so far. Yes, there is Marathon in this. Both in the very harsh and severe science fiction setting and a few of the particulars. Vague in media res
lore slowly revealing the world from within (Bungie did not create this, but they did have the idea to do it in a video game to an advanced and serious extent).
Yes. I believe there is obviously Marathon influence. And
maybe also Brutal Doom, but I'd like to take a moment to comment on ethnic dispositions towards art, objects, and tactility. The Citadel is Japanese. Brutal Doom is Brazillian. I believe that what looks like influence may in fact be convergent evolution. Even if SergeantMarkIV and CitadelDev were looking at the same things (I believe they often were) I believe that they liked different parts but still ended up creating similar successor works.
SergeantMarkIV's
Brutal Doom got a lot of shit for a long time from people who considered themselves true Doom fans (or posed as them, I actually suspect many of its vocal critics in random 4mex threads didn't play it much) for messing with the finished game form of Doom. But that's missing the point. SergeantMarkIV did not believe that he was improving the weapon sandbox or making the base game objectively better along its original or community standards. He was making a new sensation experience based on a certain idea of DOOM, which was arguably closer to the original intention than the community's eventual treatment of the game as mostly a formal puzzle-game type of standardised form. I'm not calling any position right. I'm saying they were different. SergeantMarkIV is a kind of artfag. A kind, because there are multiple ways to do this.
Brutal Doom's guns are more elaborate than those of the original game. They have heavy, metallic sounds and are handled with a lot more hands on detail which some might call
realistic. But they aren't really made for realism, or even an appreciation of guns or an idea of guns. They're made because Brutal Doom is about
brutality. And a more elaborate, grounded, and metallic gun
is a more violent one. SergeantMarkIV has a vision, so his mod does not succumb to cancerous feature-bloat. He is building towards an ideal, and that ideal is violence. He adds as much depth and substance to the guns as he feels is necessary to reach this end, then stops.
There are mods which go further. SEAfunmaxxed Brutal Doom submods which add more functions, more weapons, hideous new graphics effects on everything, etc. And there is
Hideous Destructor, the genuine details-oriented mod which does seek for perhaps a deranged ideal of
realism and
hardcore depth which makes every feature of the game more elaborate. It feels more like modded STALKER than any kind of Doom experience (STALKER modding is a subject that deserves its own post). It feels less like a particular vision of Doom, and more like a general
Video Game fantasy of maximal
hardcore realism according to memes. I don't have much to say about this, just look it up if you want to see how restrained SergeantMarkIV actually was in adding features.
SergeantMarkIV built for sensation and a certain aesthetic ideal. Crude and silly maybe, but this is what he was doing. And it succeeded fantastically. As I've said elsewhere, the only successful single player "fps" games made since mostly owe their form and style to him.
Now most other "boomer shooters" made since are retarded poser derivations with no purpose or coherent authorial intent beyond being "a boomer shooter guy (or girl)". A million Brutal Doomvaniabornelites set in chunky cyberpunk funky noodle vendor hopecrustcore dystopias starring butch anime lesbians
because that's what being a cool boomer is about. Or something obscene like that. Posing and guessing. Impersonation of someone with vision.
To a retard, one might take The Citadel as another of these. But extra quirked up and zany because it's Japanese. That would be retarded. This does not share the creative geneaology of the Brutalvaniabornelites (ripping off brutal doom and pretending to be a bald Quake 3 turbo autist cool hardcore guy who also stands up for valid trans girls). It actually doesn't even share a source with Brutal Doom, though Brutal Doom may have contributed several ideas. There are fundamental differences between doekuramori (Citadeldev) and SergeantMarkIV. For SM4 guns are a means of violence. Making the guns more gunlike is making brutal doom more violent. The Citadel is violent. And it has elaborate guns. There is some connection here. But a clear difference exists in that
doekuramori is an object fetishist. His guns are elaborate beyond the service of violence. They are elaborate for the sake of the guns themselves. What Mark wants to realise in violence via guns doekuramori wants to realise in the guns themselves. A brilliant experience of pure
gun is his intention. Not gun to facilitate cooler or more realistic first person shooter. Or for more realistic or in depth infliction of violence. The gun is a sufficient end.
Isn't this interesting?
FPS / Gun simulator hybrid.
He probably didn't put a lot of thought into saying this, but he might be the first one to ever identify this point so succinctly. The form of the "FPS" is
not a gun simulator. I believe that if you develop a true interest in guns as guns, or objects, there is only so much appeal to you on that front in the average "FPS", with many potentially being downright offputting or disappointing. Question for you,
is Brutal Doom a Gun simulator? I think not. How many first person shooter games would you say really are? In how many do you feel this joyful exploration and expression of guns as guns?
The trend I notice, in general, is that this is a very
oriental thing. The
European games that do this are eastern european, particularly Ukrainian and Russian (STALKER, Tarkov, World of Guns). And the other strongest ones are Japanese (Metal Gear Solid, The Citadel, Resident Evil). I believe that when Slavs do this it's because they are at the same time capable of autistic asian object fetishism,
and the western autist obsession with received form. They make very formal "FPS" games with a distinct consideration of guns as objects, rather than means of constructing a mere "FPS" game scenario. While the Japanese I don't think have ever made an "FPS" for the sake of "FPS". The Japanese pretty much always seem to start developing from scenario or ideas. They don't make "FPS" because, if you ask me, "FPS" is not actually a very natural or good form for the realisation of many ideas. You can make a linear, almost rail-shooter like movie-game (I think things like Call of Duty campaigns might as well be on rails, as I may have said here or elsewhere I actually really like rail shooters conceptually), and not much else. Otherwise there's just the pure "FPS" game form, which as I may have said or implied already, is basically a completed game form. Fun as it is, infinite potential variations and fun, infinite potential for expression, as long as it's a DOOM level running on DOOM parts.
The Japanese don't make "FPS", but
why should they? Was the West really well served by its long fascination with a gun taking up half the screen walking along shooting people constantly? How many memorable experiences did this generate for the trouble?
I raise all this just to get you thinking. Why did Citadel Man make The Citadel? And why is it an "FPS"? Did he suddenly catch our retarded poser compulsion to make a remixed clone of a boring form that already exists a thousand times over? I think absolutely not. He made The Citadel because it was a rare case of a form actually being very well suited for what he wanted to do. With the different elements that make it stand out all being built for purpose, as opposed to the western
mad libs variation to stand out approach. He is fascinated with guns. He is fascinated with weird hard science fiction with heavy western influences. And there's one more influence that nobody but me seems capable of pinning down. I'll let you in on this secret before trannies find out and repeating this becomes Hazel-coded.
Does
The Citadel not look an awful lot like this old Sega Saturn game called 'Baroque'? One of these screenshots is in English, but its original release never actually made it outside of Japan. It has remakes, further confusing its reputation and legacy.
The Japanese have not made many 'FPS', but they have made many 'First Person' games, and many games with Guns. Did doekuramori make an "FPS" because that's a type of video game? Or did he make an "FPS" because he's both an object-fetishist who wanted to create a hands-on gun experience,
and he's a fan of Baroque and Japanese artfag dungeon crawlers? Of course he did also make "FPS" inspired by actual "FPS". He says himself he loves Marathon, and tweets now and then about other western "FPS". But they are at most one third of the source of this thing if you ask me. And those other two, which are very unique, artisan inspirations and very novel approaches among the field, are the sources of the game's overwhelming uniqueness and style.
An idiot might look at 'The Citadel' and think it's a boomer shooter with a Marathon derivative plot. This would be very ignorant. And would give you a very skewed idea of where innovation comes from. doekuramori is not another derivative boomer shooter idiot who got a lucky roll on his variation elements on the formula. He's a man who was approaching from a completely different angle to everybody else. The final forms might superficially feel quite similar between this and a million western cyberpunkimmersivesimvaniabornelites starring anime dykes, but if the differences really were incidental, the quality chasm between the impressions they make would be so hard to explain.
I can only think of stupid insults to accurately describe how the average "retro" coded shooter strikes me. But there is so much more going on in The Citadel. It's a JRPG Dungeon Crawler with guns. It's an adventure game with guns. It's virtual architecture in the vein of Nihei and serious science fiction. It's personal, it's fetishistic, it's just
fundamentally unlike everything else that it looks like.