My Zelda + Loftwing amiibo arrived today! I love, LOVE the colors on this figure.
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Andy JoeWe claim the land for the highlord!The AdirondacksRegistered Userregular
edited July 2021
The BotW post-apocalypse is definitely pretty cozy and doesn't have a ton of melancholy, relatively speaking, but on the other hand everyone's behavior seems in line with what I expect from video game NPCs. Even the best Hylian fighter can hold off a single Bokoblin at best, these guys aren't gonna take out Guardians any time soon.
The BotW post-apoclaypse is definitely pretty cozy and doesn't have a ton of melancholy, relatively speaking, but on the other hand everyone's behavior seems in line with what I expect from video game NPCs. Even the best Hylian fighter can hold off a single Bokoblin at best, these guys aren't gonna take out Guardians any time soon.
The melancholy is in what's lost and the sheer number of people who died. There are ruined structures being reclaimed by nature all over the place, because all those people are gone. There's an entire huge fortress that stands empty, with rusting cannons.
The flashbacks talk about active scientific research and experimentation that was happening before the calamity. In the present, it's mostly subsistence farming and scraps of knowledge that have survived as folklore. People were cut off from their knowledge base (not surprisingly, since most of the records are in the castle).
The BotW post-apoclaypse is definitely pretty cozy and doesn't have a ton of melancholy, relatively speaking, but on the other hand everyone's behavior seems in line with what I expect from video game NPCs. Even the best Hylian fighter can hold off a single Bokoblin at best, these guys aren't gonna take out Guardians any time soon.
The melancholy is in what's lost and the sheer number of people who died. There are ruined structures being reclaimed by nature all over the place, because all those people are gone. There's an entire huge fortress that stands empty, with rusting cannons.
The flashbacks talk about active scientific research and experimentation that was happening before the calamity. In the present, it's mostly subsistence farming and scraps of knowledge that have survived as folklore. People were cut off from their knowledge base (not surprisingly, since most of the records are in the castle).
Yeah, to go back to the comparisons with other Zelda games, it usually seemed like things were on the verge of being lost, but if you won out, people’s lives would largely go on as they had. You were protecting the kingdom as it was.
In BotW that battle is long past - the usual way of things has been gone so long that there’s not really much left to ‘save’. It’s more about reclaiming the potential for Hyrule to come back to life as something more than a group of scattered farmers.
I felt the latter a lot more keenly than the former. Everybody telling me I’m the last in the line of Hylian knights who always save the day meant less than looking at what happened when it didn’t work out that way and trying to fix it.
I kinda liked going to the Zora community first of the four beasts, because the long-lived Zoras actually have a full concept of what all went down. The older ones have some people who hate Link. Like, "Why are you showing your face here? You failed." The other communities know about what went down, but the Zora have a unique perspective.
Not that I recall but sure. Due to game constraints they’d have to be across an impassable chasm to the north and west, across the eastern sea or deeper into the desert.
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Andy JoeWe claim the land for the highlord!The AdirondacksRegistered Userregular
The BotW post-apoclaypse is definitely pretty cozy and doesn't have a ton of melancholy, relatively speaking, but on the other hand everyone's behavior seems in line with what I expect from video game NPCs. Even the best Hylian fighter can hold off a single Bokoblin at best, these guys aren't gonna take out Guardians any time soon.
The melancholy is in what's lost and the sheer number of people who died. There are ruined structures being reclaimed by nature all over the place, because all those people are gone. There's an entire huge fortress that stands empty, with rusting cannons.
The flashbacks talk about active scientific research and experimentation that was happening before the calamity. In the present, it's mostly subsistence farming and scraps of knowledge that have survived as folklore. People were cut off from their knowledge base (not surprisingly, since most of the records are in the castle).
Yeah, but that's all pretty abstract. In practice most of the living Hylians are pretty upbeat.
The Yiga clan definitely had a presence well before the Calamity, so there's at least one "internal" enemy. Banditry is pretty much a given in a medieval kingdom of any appreciable size. And then, as others have said, Hyrule isn't the only country on Earth.
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
it's weird to think about though because Link and Zelda are clearly the heroes of Hyrule, yet they are realistically saving the whole world. If ganon gets the power of the triforce, everyone is screwed. Time for those other nations to show respect!
The zelda games are so built on mythical feelings and qualities that it's always kind of weird to me when people try to bring real world concerns into them.
The zelda games are so built on mythical feelings and qualities that it's always kind of weird to me when people try to bring real world concerns into them.
i don't stay up late sweating about it. i just think its fun that botw pulled in a lot more world building elements which just lead to more questions! Look at the difference between alttp and botw just in terms of scope. alttp felt huge at the time but botw has actual towns with people and suddenly i'm like, wait, were the hylians warring against the gorons at some point? did everyone just live in peace? i like that there are unanswered questions out there. I like that the games keep building on the mythos. Give me zelda feeling bigger and more magical than ever before.
You can block attacks, yes. IIRC, you do the shield bash to raise it. But there is also a degradation system in play. The more attacks the shield takes (not counting attacks deflected with the shield bash), the more damage it’ll accumulate. If it breaks before you repair it, you need to buy a replacement.
Also, different types of shields block different attacks. You don’t want to try and use a wood shield to block fire, or a metal shield to block electricity.
But there are two shields that are respectively unbreakable and nearly-unbreakable (the latter because it regens its durability at a healthy clip), so you can more or less ignore the issue at endgame.
The shield bash has an extremely generous window and you can parry almost everything. It’s much easier to just shield parry bokos than to try to fake them out with sword positioning.
Shield bash -> spin attack -> fatal blow
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The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
The zelda games are so built on mythical feelings and qualities that it's always kind of weird to me when people try to bring real world concerns into them.
the games are, yeah, but the games are also frequently set hundreds if not thousands of years apart
I say unbox all the collectibles. I feel like leaving them in the box ruins their appeal as display items. Otherwise your house ends up looking less like a home and more like a store. Just in case they're worth marginally more if you ever decide to sell them?
I say unbox all the collectibles. I feel like leaving them in the box ruins their appeal as display items. Otherwise your house ends up looking less like a home and more like a store. Just in case they're worth marginally more if you ever decide to sell them?
But I want to give the person who cleans out my house after I die a more streamlined and profitable experience.
Technically this update is from two play sessions, but the first didn't have a lot happening so I'm combining them together. We traveled to Eldin, did the key stuff, completed the second dungeon, traveled to Lanaryu, and got to the start of the desert area.
Highlight moments
-All the Mogma (the mole people you help) got fun, Jersey accents which the kids love
-Running up ramps to the limit of the stamina bar was quite thrilling for the kids
-LAVA! THE FLOOR IS LAVA! EVERYTHING IS LAVA! DON'T TOUCH IT! LAVAAAA!!!!
-Rolling the boulder around in the dungeon was great
-Bomb bowling puzzles and defeating enemies was much beloved
-The robots insulting Link brought the laughs
It took us a whole play session to find the 5 key parts, partly because I couldn't remember how to get the last two pieces (I thought the burning area was off-limits until later....oops!) and partly because we're potty training my son, so there was a lot of focus on him.
Digging spots were loudly and excitedly pointed out when I came across them. My daughter decreed that if "gems" came out, then there was definitely no key pieces. How true my dear. My son was a lot better about monsters scaring him. Well, until we got to the Earth Temple boss. Once it sprouted legs and opened it's mouth, he noped the fuck out and ran upstairs to mommy. Firey ball with spider legs and a monstrous mouth? Yeah, I don't blame ya' kid.
After getting the third tablet, I saved and said we were done for the night. My daughter was so into it she started begging and crying to keep playing. So I told her that we could play more, but that meant a super short bath and no Ranma book tonight, both activities they love. She quickly agreed and he played through to the desert area.
From what I can tell, they're both still extremely invested in the game. I'm starting to wonder if this might be one of her childhood memories that she fondly recalls. Not so much the gameplay itself, but just fond the memory of vaguely playing a Zelda game with her dad. I have vague memories from around 5-6 like that, so I'm hoping she has the same.
Finally, and this is just from me, but there's something about this update to Skyward Sword that really makes it more enjoyable than the first time around. I think it's all the QoL changes, better loading times, tighter controls, and updated look and feel. I always remembered SS as an OK game, but I'm having a lot more enjoyable time with it this time around. It's so all-around solid and deserving of a playthrough, especially if you passed on it the first time around.
Time to go conquer the desert and save Zelda?!
Need a voice actor? Hire me at bengrayVO.com
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051 Steam ID Twitch Page
@MNC Dover I want to ask you a parenting question, and please feel free to tell me to shove off if it's not something you want to explore with some random Internet schmo (and also this strictly speaking may not be the thread for it, I guess): As you play this Zelda game with your kids, how do approach the fact that Link is a cold-blooded murderer who does some murders before getting breakfast in the morning, then grabs his bagel or whatever, and then murders some more? And when new creatures move in to occupy the now-emptied space (perhaps wondering but never suspecting what happened to the previous inhabitants), Link sweeps in with a cold glint in his eye to do another round of murder?
This is not limited to the Zelda series, obvs, but man, even the family-friendliest games feel like they're built on killing. I have a three-and-a-half-year-old, and I sometimes entertain the notion of exploring e.g. Breath of the Wild with her, just a little bit, just to show her what video games be like, but the constant killing is holding me back. We've started talking to her about death a while ago, we don't want that to like... be a surprise at some point, or have to suddenly do an abridged primer if a relative passes away, but explaining that death can be done to other people is not a threshold we've crossed so far. I don't know if I'm ready to cross it, or when I will be ready. I've got a whole ton of Transformers posed around bookshelves, and at a certain point I started taking their guns off and putting them in a drawer because I don't currently know how to explain "These are devices that are used to take away the lives of others, they are perhaps one of the greatest evils of the modern world, also we live in a culture where we think guns are fukken' dope as hell , check out the sweet scope on this bad boy, even I - your dad, who thinks that all guns should be removed from the world - will pose these dopey action figures with care to emphasize and brandish their death-dealers".
(I am incredibly privileged to live a life where I don't need to be introducing my toddler to the concepts of killing and gun violence just yet.)
I guess that's going far to the other extreme, but even in Mario or Donkey Kong Country or something, when you bop a thing on the head, they go flying off the screen. In a Zelda game, you swing pointy swords at moblins and they do the same to you, and eventually one of you poofs out of the game. How do you present this to the kids? Is it an "oh, they just go to a special 1-1 upstate where they can walk left forever", or is it more authentic to what is actually happening?
When I was a young man, I was really firm and clear on where I stood - "violent media is fine, people can tell the difference, kids are smart, I played DOOM when I was like a pre-teen and look at me, I'm fine". The older, lefter, and dadder I get, the harder it is for me to reconcile the kind of media I consume (and enjoy consuming!) with the kind of world I want my daughter to live in, the kind of window into it I'd want her to have. There are alternatives, of course, we can play an Animal Crossing instead, but there's no amount of excising and curating that I can do to remove our culture from our culture. I know none of this is new, but it's new to me, and since your play logs made me think about it again, I figured I'd ask for your take on it.
I have a similar problem with my niece. She's 6 now and very sensitive, and she doesn't like the idea of anyone or anything fighting. I tried to play some Pokemon with her but she didn't kept telling me to run away from the wild Pokemon because she didn't want to fight them. She watches me play Super Smash Bros sometimes, mostly because I console her that all the characters are friends and they don't actually hurt each other, they're just fighting like it's a sport, like fencing or whatever, and they're always unharmed at the end (hence the loser applauding the winner when showing the score, etc).
The problem isn't exclusive to video games; she can't even watch most Disney movies all the way through because she gets too scared. And I'm the uncle, not the parent, so it's not like I have a ton of control over how she gets acclimated to that sort of thing. But I was really hoping that now that she's starting to read I'd be able to share video games with her more broadly, but even something as peaceful as Stardew Valley has combat in it.
@Delduwath I can't speak for some of your position (I am not what you would call pro-gun control), but if you can concede that *some people*, say, police officers or soldiers, need access to weapons to protect society (even if you believe they shouldn't carry them all the time), perhaps you can frame Link as being in a similar protective role? Moblins, Bokoblins, etc. are capital-e Evil, they are created by evil magic, and although the games never depict it, I think it is implied that they would gladly kill and possibly eat Hyrulians, given the chance. In that respect, Link plays a role of protector. If he doesn't intervene and kill these monsters, a greater harm is done. Perhaps outside of the game you can discuss how society often treats other people as evil just because they're different, but in real life there's no evil magic that's summoning terrorists that have to be stomped out, and in reality we're all the Hyrulians.
That never came up when my kids started playing video games. They knew it was pretend, knew it was monsters, and knew it wasn't actually murder. Maybe because we'd been watching more realistic cartoons at that point so they already knew about fighting and pretend. Dunno. I mean, from a parenting perspective (mine are 8 and 6), I'd definitely start the discussion by not calling it murder because it really isn't. I'd start by calling it pretend and somewhat explaining the difference between real world and the not real world. But as they say it's different with every child.
edit: I will say my son hasn't played anything outright violent though or where humans are getting attacked really. The closest was watching me play Horizon but that was years ago and he never really noticed when I was slaughtering camps of bandits. Or I avoided that part of the game when he was around, I don't remember.
I think it's kinda silly to call what Link does murder. Sure, I think there should be more non-violent games, but we don't need disingenuous arguments.
Hmmm...well to be honest, the topic of killing hasn't really come up. Right now, the monsters are all "invading" each area and I'm just defending the beings that live there. Most enemies are pretty aggressive and charge towards you, so I could always write it off as self-defense, not murder.
Don't get me wrong, it's a potentially deep rabbit hole to deal with and I'm not looking forward to it. I've often said that it's just a game and nothing in it's real in order to help them detach from more intense scenes (for example, those damn crab/snail things in the desert).
Need a voice actor? Hire me at bengrayVO.com
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051 Steam ID Twitch Page
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
edited July 2021
The monsters all poof into smoke, so I don't know if killing is even right. Would the technical term be "vanquishing?" :P I think the fact that they've got a BotW mechanic to explain how they respawn due to moon magic kind of separates them from like, normal people and animals.
The monsters all poof into smoke, so I don't know if killing is even right. Would the technical term be "vanquishing?" :P I think the fact that they've got a BotW mechanic to explain how they respawn due to moon magic kind of separates them from like, normal people and animals.
It crossed my mind today that though the Bokoblins in BotW and the Moblins from, let's say, Link's Awakening, both burst into puffs of smoke when their HP is depleted, the Bokoblins make piggish distressed squealing noises as they "die". I can see where it would be more disturbing is what I'm saying.
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
I think it's kinda silly to call what Link does murder. Sure, I think there should be more non-violent games, but we don't need disingenuous arguments.
On this side of the monitor, my tongue was pretty far inside my cheek, but that fact probably didn't make it through the Ethernet cable intact. Apologies.
I wrote and then deleted like three different posts attempting to lay out my conflicting half-thoughts on all this, but in the end decided to delete them all because I don't want to derail the thread anymore, and y'all have already been more than patient with this detour. The TL;DR is
1) I'm overthinking it because literally that's the only kind of thinking I'm capable of
2) It's all philosophical onanism with no Right Answer
Ultimately, I guess my question ostensibly about a video game was actually underpinned by a different question: How do you tell a child that people kill people? Sometimes intentionally? That's a question that I should probably take to my friendly neighborhood parenting thread, and not a thread about Tingle and his less-famous occasional supporting cast.
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The melancholy is in what's lost and the sheer number of people who died. There are ruined structures being reclaimed by nature all over the place, because all those people are gone. There's an entire huge fortress that stands empty, with rusting cannons.
The flashbacks talk about active scientific research and experimentation that was happening before the calamity. In the present, it's mostly subsistence farming and scraps of knowledge that have survived as folklore. People were cut off from their knowledge base (not surprisingly, since most of the records are in the castle).
Yeah, to go back to the comparisons with other Zelda games, it usually seemed like things were on the verge of being lost, but if you won out, people’s lives would largely go on as they had. You were protecting the kingdom as it was.
In BotW that battle is long past - the usual way of things has been gone so long that there’s not really much left to ‘save’. It’s more about reclaiming the potential for Hyrule to come back to life as something more than a group of scattered farmers.
I felt the latter a lot more keenly than the former. Everybody telling me I’m the last in the line of Hylian knights who always save the day meant less than looking at what happened when it didn’t work out that way and trying to fix it.
Blizzard: Pailryder#1101
GoG: https://www.gog.com/u/pailryder
I always figured bokoblins, lizalfos, and moblins were a regular thing and the military always kept them off the roads and out of towns.
Yeah, but that's all pretty abstract. In practice most of the living Hylians are pretty upbeat.
Blizzard: Pailryder#1101
GoG: https://www.gog.com/u/pailryder
i don't stay up late sweating about it. i just think its fun that botw pulled in a lot more world building elements which just lead to more questions! Look at the difference between alttp and botw just in terms of scope. alttp felt huge at the time but botw has actual towns with people and suddenly i'm like, wait, were the hylians warring against the gorons at some point? did everyone just live in peace? i like that there are unanswered questions out there. I like that the games keep building on the mythos. Give me zelda feeling bigger and more magical than ever before.
Blizzard: Pailryder#1101
GoG: https://www.gog.com/u/pailryder
Shake the left joy con or click the left stick to pull it out
Also, different types of shields block different attacks. You don’t want to try and use a wood shield to block fire, or a metal shield to block electricity.
But there are two shields that are respectively unbreakable and nearly-unbreakable (the latter because it regens its durability at a healthy clip), so you can more or less ignore the issue at endgame.
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Shield bash -> spin attack -> fatal blow
the games are, yeah, but the games are also frequently set hundreds if not thousands of years apart
we gotta lotta Lore to fill in there!
Posed with her big sis. What great looking amiibo. Absolutely worth the premium price, IMO.
Yeah I couldn't resist taking her out of the package. Some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.
But I want to give the person who cleans out my house after I die a more streamlined and profitable experience.
If it doesn't have the option to push the toilet on top of the hand demanding the paper a la Oracle of Ages what is even the point
Technically this update is from two play sessions, but the first didn't have a lot happening so I'm combining them together. We traveled to Eldin, did the key stuff, completed the second dungeon, traveled to Lanaryu, and got to the start of the desert area.
Highlight moments
-All the Mogma (the mole people you help) got fun, Jersey accents which the kids love
-Running up ramps to the limit of the stamina bar was quite thrilling for the kids
-LAVA! THE FLOOR IS LAVA! EVERYTHING IS LAVA! DON'T TOUCH IT! LAVAAAA!!!!
-Rolling the boulder around in the dungeon was great
-Bomb bowling puzzles and defeating enemies was much beloved
-The robots insulting Link brought the laughs
It took us a whole play session to find the 5 key parts, partly because I couldn't remember how to get the last two pieces (I thought the burning area was off-limits until later....oops!) and partly because we're potty training my son, so there was a lot of focus on him.
Digging spots were loudly and excitedly pointed out when I came across them. My daughter decreed that if "gems" came out, then there was definitely no key pieces. How true my dear. My son was a lot better about monsters scaring him. Well, until we got to the Earth Temple boss. Once it sprouted legs and opened it's mouth, he noped the fuck out and ran upstairs to mommy. Firey ball with spider legs and a monstrous mouth? Yeah, I don't blame ya' kid.
After getting the third tablet, I saved and said we were done for the night. My daughter was so into it she started begging and crying to keep playing. So I told her that we could play more, but that meant a super short bath and no Ranma book tonight, both activities they love. She quickly agreed and he played through to the desert area.
From what I can tell, they're both still extremely invested in the game. I'm starting to wonder if this might be one of her childhood memories that she fondly recalls. Not so much the gameplay itself, but just fond the memory of vaguely playing a Zelda game with her dad. I have vague memories from around 5-6 like that, so I'm hoping she has the same.
Finally, and this is just from me, but there's something about this update to Skyward Sword that really makes it more enjoyable than the first time around. I think it's all the QoL changes, better loading times, tighter controls, and updated look and feel. I always remembered SS as an OK game, but I'm having a lot more enjoyable time with it this time around. It's so all-around solid and deserving of a playthrough, especially if you passed on it the first time around.
Time to go conquer the desert and save Zelda?!
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
Steam ID
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This is not limited to the Zelda series, obvs, but man, even the family-friendliest games feel like they're built on killing. I have a three-and-a-half-year-old, and I sometimes entertain the notion of exploring e.g. Breath of the Wild with her, just a little bit, just to show her what video games be like, but the constant killing is holding me back. We've started talking to her about death a while ago, we don't want that to like... be a surprise at some point, or have to suddenly do an abridged primer if a relative passes away, but explaining that death can be done to other people is not a threshold we've crossed so far. I don't know if I'm ready to cross it, or when I will be ready. I've got a whole ton of Transformers posed around bookshelves, and at a certain point I started taking their guns off and putting them in a drawer because I don't currently know how to explain "These are devices that are used to take away the lives of others, they are perhaps one of the greatest evils of the modern world, also we live in a culture where we think guns are fukken' dope as hell
(I am incredibly privileged to live a life where I don't need to be introducing my toddler to the concepts of killing and gun violence just yet.)
I guess that's going far to the other extreme, but even in Mario or Donkey Kong Country or something, when you bop a thing on the head, they go flying off the screen. In a Zelda game, you swing pointy swords at moblins and they do the same to you, and eventually one of you poofs out of the game. How do you present this to the kids? Is it an "oh, they just go to a special 1-1 upstate where they can walk left forever", or is it more authentic to what is actually happening?
When I was a young man, I was really firm and clear on where I stood - "violent media is fine, people can tell the difference, kids are smart, I played DOOM when I was like a pre-teen and look at me, I'm fine". The older, lefter, and dadder I get, the harder it is for me to reconcile the kind of media I consume (and enjoy consuming!) with the kind of world I want my daughter to live in, the kind of window into it I'd want her to have. There are alternatives, of course, we can play an Animal Crossing instead, but there's no amount of excising and curating that I can do to remove our culture from our culture. I know none of this is new, but it's new to me, and since your play logs made me think about it again, I figured I'd ask for your take on it.
The problem isn't exclusive to video games; she can't even watch most Disney movies all the way through because she gets too scared. And I'm the uncle, not the parent, so it's not like I have a ton of control over how she gets acclimated to that sort of thing. But I was really hoping that now that she's starting to read I'd be able to share video games with her more broadly, but even something as peaceful as Stardew Valley has combat in it.
@Delduwath I can't speak for some of your position (I am not what you would call pro-gun control), but if you can concede that *some people*, say, police officers or soldiers, need access to weapons to protect society (even if you believe they shouldn't carry them all the time), perhaps you can frame Link as being in a similar protective role? Moblins, Bokoblins, etc. are capital-e Evil, they are created by evil magic, and although the games never depict it, I think it is implied that they would gladly kill and possibly eat Hyrulians, given the chance. In that respect, Link plays a role of protector. If he doesn't intervene and kill these monsters, a greater harm is done. Perhaps outside of the game you can discuss how society often treats other people as evil just because they're different, but in real life there's no evil magic that's summoning terrorists that have to be stomped out, and in reality we're all the Hyrulians.
edit: I will say my son hasn't played anything outright violent though or where humans are getting attacked really. The closest was watching me play Horizon but that was years ago and he never really noticed when I was slaughtering camps of bandits. Or I avoided that part of the game when he was around, I don't remember.
Don't get me wrong, it's a potentially deep rabbit hole to deal with and I'm not looking forward to it. I've often said that it's just a game and nothing in it's real in order to help them detach from more intense scenes (for example, those damn crab/snail things in the desert).
I wish I had a better answer for you @Delduwath.
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
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It crossed my mind today that though the Bokoblins in BotW and the Moblins from, let's say, Link's Awakening, both burst into puffs of smoke when their HP is depleted, the Bokoblins make piggish distressed squealing noises as they "die". I can see where it would be more disturbing is what I'm saying.
He’d just kill them all anyway. Then go smash all their pots and cut their lawns. Link is a special type of insane.
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
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On this side of the monitor, my tongue was pretty far inside my cheek, but that fact probably didn't make it through the Ethernet cable intact. Apologies.
I wrote and then deleted like three different posts attempting to lay out my conflicting half-thoughts on all this, but in the end decided to delete them all because I don't want to derail the thread anymore, and y'all have already been more than patient with this detour. The TL;DR is
1) I'm overthinking it because literally that's the only kind of thinking I'm capable of
2) It's all philosophical onanism with no Right Answer
Ultimately, I guess my question ostensibly about a video game was actually underpinned by a different question: How do you tell a child that people kill people? Sometimes intentionally? That's a question that I should probably take to my friendly neighborhood parenting thread, and not a thread about Tingle and his less-famous occasional supporting cast.
Again, thank you for humoring me, folks.