Author: Kathryn

Reader of books and player of games. College professor and pokémon trainer. Writes about Japanese fiction, media, gender, and society. In love with monsters and magic. https://digitalfantasydiary.com/

A Record of the Calamity

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This collection of meta essays explores the worldbuilding and cultural background of Hyrule and its inhabitants during the timeline of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.

Ninja Lore in Breath of the Wild
On the historical precedents of the Sheikah, the origins of the names “Yiga” and “Kohga,” and how the culture of historical ninja is referenced in the story and setting of Breath of the Wild.

Governance in Hyrule
On the nature and questionable necessity of the Hyrulean monarchy in comparison with other systems of governance in Hyrule.

Zelda and the Calamity
On how Zelda’s repressed emotions may have surfaced in a tragic explosion of chaotic power.

Ganondorf as an Agent of Change
On Ganondorf’s role as the villain of a heroic fantasy, the existential challenge he poses to Hyrule, and the necessity of disruption to an otherwise closed system.

Ganondorf’s Design in Tears of the Kingdom
On the Japanese cultural references incorporated into Ganondorf’s visual design.

The Two Kings in Tears of the Kingdom
On the fantasies of Japanese cultural identity represented by Rauru and Ganondorf, and why the power structures associated with the two kings are disavowed by Zelda.

Bloodborne Background Lore

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While waiting for the Elden Ring DLC to be released, I decided to try my hand at Bloodborne, a gorgeous and atmospheric gothic action adventure game that somehow manages to withhold even more of its story from the player than Elden Ring. I haven’t seen a concise and accurate summary of Bloodborne’s background lore, so I thought I’d take a shot at creating one.

Before anything, it’s important to establish that Bloodborne is loosely based on H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, whose premise is as follows:

The earth is billions of years old, and it has supported multiple civilizations that rose and fell without leaving any trace of themselves behind. One of these civilizations was that of the Great Ones, whose fungal bodies allowed them to benefit from long lives and peaceful societies. The Great Ones developed technology that assisted them in communicating across time and thereby making contact with other civilizations on the planet, including humans. Because the Great Ones are so physically and mentally inhuman, however, these connections are flawed. Sometimes human communication with Great Ones invokes fear, and sometimes it invokes madness that results in aberrant behavior. 

In order to facilitate more productive communication, the Great Ones created dream spaces that exist alongside the waking world as separate dimensions. In Homestuck terms, these dimensions are “dream bubbles” that function as self-contained terrariums. In other words, a dream bubble preserves a certain place at a specific moment for the educational benefit of whoever accesses it, kind of like an interactive movie. Time doesn’t flow inside the dream; it repeats. This means that you can trap someone in a dream and use it as a type of prison. In the most famous example, this is what the Great Ones did with Cthulhu, a priest of malevolent cosmic elder gods that would destroy organic life on earth if the planet came to their attention.

Using this mythos as an inspiration, the world of Bloodborne has been shaped by three broad categories of Great Ones.

The first is a group of Great Ones who have tried to communicate with humans. Humans have taken blood from the immortal physical bodies of these creatures. In small doses, the administration of this blood cures illness and prolongs life. In larger doses, the blood induces physical transformation. A coalition of surgeon-scholars called “the Healing Church” has established itself as a religious organization in the city of Yharnam so that they may perform “blood ministration” on the populace, whom they’re using as test subjects in their experiments to bring humans physically and mentally closer to the Great Ones.

The second group of Great Ones eschews this sort of direct contact and communion between Great Ones and humans. Their motives have little to do with the welfare of human beings, but they’ve nevertheless acted in opposition to whatever is going on in Yharnam. One of these Great Ones, called “the Moon Presence,” has created a dream bubble for the ostensible purpose of training hunters to kill the humans maddened and transformed by blood ministration. This is the “Hunter’s Dream” that serves as the central hub of Bloodborne.

The third faction is a loosely federated group of spiderlike Great Ones called Amygdala, who have created their own set of dream bubbles. Some of these dream bubbles are maintained in cooperation with humans seeking eternal life in a timeless space, while some were created seemingly for the purpose of feeding from the human souls trapped inside them. I believe the version of Yharnam that the player-character navigates exists within a dream bubble created by Amygdala. 

Essentially, the world of Bloodborne is a dream inside a connected network of dreams that can be accessed by the player-character as they dream. While the Hunter’s Dream exists as a sanctuary for would-be hunters, the dream that contains Yharnam is something like a training simulation. Your character can only wake from these interconnected dreams (meaning: finish the game) by completing the task they are given as they fall asleep during Bloodborne’s opening cutscene: “Seek Paleblood to transcend the hunt.”

It’s not entirely clear what “Paleblood” refers to, but the game offers two primary interpretations.

The first interpretation is that Paleblood is the blood of the Great Ones that caused the scourge of beasts in Yharnam. Once the player-character understands the full extent of the effects of Paleblood on human physiology and society by witnessing the downfall of Yharnam, they are qualified to become a hunter in the waking world. At the end of Bloodborne, the player-character’s mentor Gherman offers a choice. He can release them from the Hunter’s Dream, or they can best him in combat in order to earn the (highly dubious) honor of replacing him as its warden.

The second interpretation is that the term “Paleblood” refers to the human-adjacent children of the Great Ones, who cannot produce offspring on their own and must rely on human hosts. The conditions for the creation of Paleblood children are unclear, and various factions of the Healing Church have undertaken ghastly experiments on the population of Yharnam in order to pursue this knowledge.

If the player locates and consumes three umbilical cords from unsuccessful Paleblood pregnancies, it’s possible for them to be reborn as a Paleblood squid baby (and future Great One) within the Hunter’s Dream. According to the interpretation suggested by this ending, the Hunter’s Dream was created by the Moon Presence in order to select and nurture potential candidates capable of becoming its child.

The game’s title, Bloodborne, therefore refers to the player-character’s ultimate goal. Either they will be reborn as a fully-fledged Hunter after awakening from the bloody chaos of the Hunter’s Dream, or they will be reborn as a Great One after inheriting the Paleblood of their “parent,” the Moon Presence. 

The story of Bloodborne (such as it is) focuses on the player-character’s journey through the city of Yharnam and its outlying areas as they fight the humans who have been transformed into monsters by the blood of Great Ones. The game’s DLC, called “The Old Hunters,” provides additional background information concerning the origins and establishment of the Healing Church through dream encounters with the key figures in its history.

For an excellent synopsis of the story presented by the DLC, I recommend this article: https://www.eurogamer.net/bloodborne-whats-going-on-in-the-old-hunters

For a deeper dive into Bloodborne‘s story presented in well-organized chapters that arrange the aspects of the plot in chronological order, I’d recommend checking out this fan-created wiki, which can be read like a novel: http://soulslore.wikidot.com/bb-plot

変な家: A Mysterious Story of Real Estate

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変な家 (Henna ie) is a collection of short horror stories about houses with strange and uncanny floorplans.

The book has four chapters, each of which takes the form of a series of conversations between the narrator, their architect friend, and various people who have seen the houses in person. The first three chapters explore three different houses with extra rooms and mystery spaces, and these explorations are liberally illustrated with diagrams in which certain sections of the floorplan are highlighted and annotated to clarify the text.

Each of these first three stories is like a locked room mystery, except the mystery starts with a floorplan from which the narrator gradually builds a story about what sort of upsetting behavior that type of strange space might enable. In the final chapter, it’s revealed that these houses (and, presumably, many more like them) are all connected to an old and wealthy family with a terrible secret.   

I flew through this book and loved every page. The conversations are easy to follow; and, thanks to the diagrams, the spaces are easy to visualize. I enjoyed the slow build of the overarching mystery, and the revelations about the bizarre family at the center of the strangeness were beyond anything I expected.

It’s worth noting that the first story in this book was originally written as a script for a twenty-minute video on YouTube, which you can find with English subtitles (here). There’s also a manga adaptation. The first three chapters, which form a complete story, have been scanlated and are available to read (here). And finally, I’d like to share a more substantial review posted on one of my favorite book blogs (here). I’ve got my fingers crossed that this strange little book (and its sequel, which is rumored to be even better) will somehow find its way into English translation.

Inside

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Inside is a 2.5D puzzle platformer originally released for the Xbox One in 2016. The near-future dystopian sci-fi setting contains strong elements of horror, and players should expect to experience numerous violent deaths. The game takes about four hours to finish, although a longer completionist run that involves accessing hidden areas will be rewarded with a secret ending.

You play as a ten-year-old boy, and you begin the game alone in the woods. The boy has presumably escaped from a shadowy research facility, and he’s being chased by dogs and men with guns. The boy will be killed if he’s spotted, so the player’s initial goal is to move to the right side of the screen while evading capture.

After the boy escapes from the woods, he emerges onto a farm littered with the carcasses of parasite-infested pigs. It’s here that the game introduces its central puzzle mechanic, which involves using a headset to control the mindless bodies of adult humans. When the boy makes his way out the farm and into a decaying city, it becomes clear that these mindless bodies were once marketed to the general population before the apparent collapse of human civilization.

Inside eventually finds its stride, but the puzzles at the beginning of the game have the potential to be frustrating for a first-time player. In order to progress through one of the barns on the farm, for example, the player has to backtrack to the left in order to open the barn’s back door. Opening this door allows a gaggle of chirping chicks to enter the barn.

The game has never previously asked the player to move from right to left, and there’s no indication that the chicks exist other than a faint chirping on the other side of the barn’s back door. It’s therefore not immediately apparent that these chicks are a necessary element to solving a puzzle that already has half a dozen moving parts. The game becomes much better about broadcasting puzzle solutions as it progresses, but it might be necessary to consult a walkthrough at the beginning.

The first quarter of the game also features another type of frustrating puzzle that involves crossing long distances to escape from attack dogs. If the boy dies at any point during one of these sequences, the player has to start over at the beginning, thereby losing up to six or seven minutes of progress. Repeatedly playing through one of these sequences only to fail at the end isn’t fun.

Thankfully, Inside becomes much better at managing respawn points after the boy leaves the farm. Many of the game’s later puzzles involve a combination of careful timing and brutal death, but they allow the player adequate space to stand still and assess the situation.

Tiny birds and bloodthirsty canines aside, Inside is visually striking from start to finish. The sound design is brilliant, and the audio works alongside the graphic design to create a palpable sense of danger and menace. Unlike Playdead’s earlier game Limbo (2010), which was more abstract and fantasy-themed, Inside is grittier and more focused on portraying a disturbingly realistic apocalypse.

As I played Inside, I could envision its story evolving in two ways. My first theory was that the boy is a host for the same parasite that killed the pigs on the farm; and, if he escapes into civilization, the infection will spread and the world will be doomed. My second theory was that the boy is being controlled just as he controls the mindless bodies; and, after he accomplishes his mission, he will be unplugged.

The actual endgame story developments are nothing even remotely resembling what I expected. Instead, Inside gradually transforms into a meditation on bioethics and subjectivity that’s all the more striking because of the player’s interaction with the story. I’m still not sure how to interpret the ending, but the path to get there involves one of the biggest ludo-narrative surprises I’ve ever had the pleasure to encounter. I usually don’t have any patience for concerns over spoilers, but I’d recommend going into this game spoiler-free. The ending of Inside genuinely has to be experienced to be believed.

Oxenfree

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Oxenfree is a horror-themed teenage friendship drama conversation simulator set on a haunted island in the Pacific Northwest. Originally released in 2016, Oxenfree is available on all consoles, and it takes about four and a half hours to finish the story.

You play as a teenage girl named Alex who takes the last ferry out to Edwards Island with her pothead friend Ren and her edgy stepbrother Jonas. They plan to spend the night on the beach, where two girls named Clarissa and Nona are waiting for them with a cooler of beer. There’s an urban legend that old-fashioned transistor radios can pick up strange signals on the island, and Ren leads Alex and Jonas to a sea cave where the signal distortions are rumored to be strong. By tuning into the radio transmissions, Alex ends up opening a portal to a parallel dimension.

I really enjoyed Oxenfree, both when I first played it and when I revisited it earlier this year. The graphic design is gorgeous, the OST is ambient and chill, and the elements of horror are genuinely creepy. The story of Oxenfree is intriguing, and walking across the island while navigating Alex’s relationships with the other characters is a fun and interesting experience.

Still, as a game, Oxenfree suffers from two major problems.

The first of these problems is that Alex walks very slowly. This makes sense, as a major element of gameplay is choosing Alex’s response in real time during ongoing conversations. The relaxed speed of travel also encourages the player to enjoy the scenery and the ambiance. Unfortunately, backtracking is a slog. The frustration engendered by Alex’s sluggish walking speed is exacerbated by the fact that the load times between screens are obscene, usually exceeding sixty seconds. As a result, I felt strongly discouraged against unguided exploration.

In order to uncover the full story of what’s happening, the player needs to embark on a scavenger hunt to collect a dozen letters scattered across the island. Because of the slow character movement and unbearable loading times, I had to give up on finding the letters myself. I was reduced to searching for spoilers online, which isn’t ideal.

As far as I can tell, a Cold War era submarine somehow managed to get itself caught in a dimensional paradox just offshore, and the Edward Island’s “ghosts” are the manifestations of the sailors trying to free themselves. These ghosts are secondary to the main story of Oxenfree, which is about the relationships between the teenage characters.

Although I think the friendship drama might have been more compelling if I had encountered the game at a younger age, Oxenfree’s second major problem is that its writing feels strange and awkward, at least to me.

I really wanted Alex to spend time with the two other teenage girls on the island. I like Nona and Clarissa a lot. I found them to be interesting characters, and I wanted to know more about them. Unfortunately, Oxenfree doesn’t give Alex many dialogue options to interact with either girl that aren’t petty, condescending, or downright bitchy. This isn’t the way that normal people talk to one another, even if they’re teenagers.

It’s clear that Oxenfree expects Alex to spend the majority of its playtime with Jonas and Ren, both of whom tend to respond poorly if the player chooses conversation options that don’t read as stereotypically “masculine.”

To give an example, after something terrible and upsetting happens, Jonas tells Alex that he’s scared. If she demonstrates sympathy or empathy by responding with “Are you okay?” or “I’m scared too,” Jonas will become annoyed or openly hostile. Meanwhile, the uncomfortably callous response of “You’re fine, let’s keep going” is configured as “correct” and doesn’t result in a string of passive-aggressive insults.

There are several different variations on Alex’s personality that the player can choose to express, but Oxenfree doesn’t give the player many opportunities to be chill, or friendly, or sincere, or emotionally vulnerable, or just curious about what’s going on. Each conversation choice generally has three options, but there’s always an additional option of not saying anything. As I played, I gradually found myself “choosing” not to say anything, especially not to the boys.

In other words, the opportunities for roleplaying the character of Alex are limited. I don’t think Alex is supposed to be unsympathetic, but the writer/director’s understanding of how interpersonal communication works feels very specific to a personality and worldview that I don’t understand. The portrayal of these teenagers – especially the teenage girls – is just so mean. The voice actors all give wonderful performances that help the player better understand the characters, but I wish the writing were as nuanced as the acting.

Granted, Alex ends up being the villain of Oxenfree II, so another interpretation might be that she is in fact a bad and selfish person who doesn’t care if she hurts people. If this is indeed the case, though, I wish that the writing had signposted her personality more clearly, or at least given more concrete hints regarding how the true nature of the situation on Edwards Island has affected her character.

Oxenfree has been universally praised, and I’ve even seen people refer to it as a “cozy game,” meaning that it presumably creates a sense of warmth in the player by being unchallenging to play while focusing on a story with themes of friendship and personal growth. I can understand the affective positivity of this reaction, but I also think it’s important to explain why Oxenfree can be difficult and frustrating, especially to someone playing the game in 2024.

Oxenfree is gorgeous to look at and features engaging conversation-based gameplay mechanics, but this is a horror game with slow movement speed and long loading times in which characters are often seriously unpleasant to one another. I maintain that Oxenfree is a unique and interesting game that’s well worth checking out – especially given its relatively short length – but it’s always good to have an accurate understanding of what you’re getting into.

While doing some research about the game’s reception, I learned that Netflix acquired the Oxenfree development team, Night School Studio, in 2021. Netflix produced Oxenfree II, and I read that there’s a live-action series adaptation of Oxenfree in production. This sounds nice, to be honest. Crossmedia adaptations don’t always succeed, but I get the impression that Oxenfree might actually work much better if it weren’t an interactive video game.

Gender and Magic in Final Fantasy VI

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Final Fantasy VI is deeply concerned with the relationship between human beings and technology. The game borrows many elements from Western fantasy and science fiction, yet the story and action are centered around two teenage female protagonists, Terra and Celes, who are variations on the “magical girl” and “beautiful fighting girl” archetypes of Japanese popular culture.

Back in 2016, I published an essay about “Gender and Magic in Final Fantasy VI” on the website of the sadly defunct gaming magazine Kill Screen. Since then, I’ve made substantial edits for clarity, and I posted the updated version on AO3.

This meta essay situates Final Fantasy VI within the cultural context of Japan in the 1990s in order to discuss how the game explores its posthuman themes through the bodies of its female characters. I demonstrate how Final Fantasy VI uses gender as a lens for its exploration of the intersections between biology and technology, and I argue that the otherness associated with Terra and Celes serves as a powerful analogy for anxieties surrounding the future of the human species in relation to seemingly magical biotechnologies.

You can read the essay on AO3 here:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/53596483

The cover illustration was created by Palliceart, an artist with a dual specialty in magical girls and beautiful fighting girls. You can find her gorgeous and ethereal artwork on Twitter (here), on Instagram (here), and on Tumblr (here).

Giraffe and Annika

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Giraffe and Annika is an extremely chill 3D adventure story game with anime-style character designs and panel-by-panel manga cutscenes. The game takes about four hours to finish, and I suppose that whether it’s worth $30 depends on how much you value this type of experience. I played Giraffe and Annika in short stretches during the day to get a bit of emotional sunshine, and it was lovely.

You play as Annika, a ten-year-old catgirl who mysteriously finds herself on a beautiful forested island. There’s a bit of an Alice in Wonderland flavor to the scenario, as Annika doesn’t worry too much about where she is or how she got there, and she begins the story as something of a blank slate. After investigating an empty house belonging to someone named Lisa, Annika goes back outside to find a blue-haired catboy named Giraffe waiting for her. Giraffe tells Annika that she has special powers, and he asks her to visit three dungeons on the island in order to restore starlight to a magical pendant.

The dungeons are themed open-air environments inhabited by roaming ghosts that will drain Annika’s health meter if they get too close. Thankfully, the dungeons are also filled with numerous health-restoring crystals. At the end of each dungeon is a boss battle that takes the form of a simple rhythm game. It’s possible to die from ghost attacks and other environmental hazards in the dungeons; and, in fact, I died a lot. Thankfully, save points and respawn points are so frequent that this isn’t an issue. There is zero stress in this game.

By clearing the dungeons, Annika will unlock exploration abilities such as a floaty space jump and the ability to swim underwater. She’ll also perform small fetch-quest tasks for NPCs who will help her bypass other obstacles. There are various objects that Annika can interact with across the island, but the optional collectibles are just for fun. Objectives are clearly marked, and you’ll never be in danger of getting lost or going off-track from the main quest.

The island is very lush and green and beautiful, and there’s a short day-night cycle that adds a touch of visual flair. I also appreciate the cuteness of the designs of the game’s sizeable cast of NPCs. In order to access the second dungeon, for example, you need to feed carrots to a sea turtle; and, to get the carrots, you have to round up a family of rabbits. The rabbits look like a Studio Ghibli adaptation of Beatrix Potter, and they’re adorable. Meanwhile, the sea turtle is completely photorealistic, which is a good illustration of the game’s gentle sense of humor.

It’s always a pleasure to encounter and interact with new characters, and I really enjoyed the manga-style cutscenes, which play out panel by panel. The character art is comically expressive, and the bright pastel colors are lovely.

It’s difficult to critique Giraffe and Annika, as it’s very sweet and competently constructed. Still, the main 3D playspace of the game can feel a bit textureless, and I also felt that the game wears out its welcome when it starts trying to challenge the player at the very end. I actually appreciate the occasionally amateurish design, as it fills me with a sense of nostalgia for the early 3D adventure games of the PlayStation era. Even though Giraffe and Annika sometimes looks as though it was built with out-of-the-box 3D graphic assets, it’s clear that the creators put a lot of effort into creating unique environments with a distinct sense of character.

Giraffe and Annika probably won’t appeal to someone looking for a deep story or challenging gameplay, but I can imagine that it would be a perfect starter game for its target audience of younger players. As for me, it provided a pleasant and much-needed mood boost during a dismal week in February. Giraffe and Annika is a bright and simple fantasy adventure with cute characters and no unnecessary cooking or crafting elements, and sometimes that’s exactly what you need in your life.

Zelda Horror Zine Preorders Open

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I’m excited to share a preview of my story for Blood Moon Rising, a Legend of Zelda horror fanzine.

I wrote about the undead princess of Zelda II, as well as the decision that Impa is forced to make in dooming the princess of the original Legend of Zelda to the same fate. The two NES Zelda games are deeply dystopian, and I enjoyed going full Dark Souls while exploring the decay of their horrifically postapocalyptic settings.

Preorders of the zine are open until March 15, and all proceeds will go to Medical Aid for Palestinians. There’s some truly frightful work in this zine, so please check out their social media if you’re interested!

🩸 https://bloodmoonzine.carrd.co
🩸 https://bloodmoonzine.tumblr.com
🩸 https://twitter.com/BloodMoonZine
🩸 https://bloodmoonrising.bigcartel.com

My House Is Haunted!

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I’m excited to have a short story appearing in the latest issue of Ghostwatch.

My story, “The Sweet Blue House,” is based on a property I viewed while househunting in the suburbs of West Philadelphia. There’s nothing paranormal about what I saw, but some houses don’t need ghosts to be haunted.

Ghostwatch is a really neat publication. I have zero belief in the supernatural, and what I love about Ghostwatch is how it collects odd and interesting bits of folklore and documents local and regional cultures in the United States while maintaining a supremely chill attitude. The zine’s account on Instagram is a lot of fun too.

If you’re interested, you can order the “My House Is Haunted” issue here:
https://www.ghostwatch.us/product/vol-23-my-house-is-haunted

Retro JRPG Lessons from Final Fantasy Mystic Quest

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In 2023, I tried to play about a dozen indie retro JRPGs. I’ve always loved the JRPG play cycle of slowly gaining strength and resources through turn-based battles and dungeon exploration, and I don’t necessarily find repetitive simplicity boring. Still, I bounced off almost all of the games I tried within the first hour.

In order to think through why I’ve had so much trouble getting into more contemporary retro JRPGs, I returned to Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, which was originally released for the Super Nintendo in 1992. Mystic Quest was intended to introduce American console gamers to the conventions of JRPGs, and its various ease-of-use features allow the player to complete the story in less than five hours. Despite its primitive graphics and gameplay, I had a good time with Mystic Quest, and I took away five lessons about why this simple-as-bricks game works for me while so many contemporary retro JRPGs don’t.

(1) If the game is more than an hour long, there needs to be actual gameplay.

I have a soft spot for indie retro RPGs in which the player does nothing but walk around and talk to people, but there’s a limit to how much of this I’m willing to engage with. Even in a story-focused game, there needs to be some sort of activity that isn’t reading text on a screen.

(2) The player needs to experience this gameplay within the first ten to fifteen minutes.

I think a major aspect of what people liked about old JRPGs is that the player could generally progress from the first town to the first dungeon right at the beginning of the game. Exposition and worldbuilding are important, but not as important as the game being fun to play. Even Final Fantasy VII, which has a famous opening cutscene, sees Cloud and Barret fighting enemies and navigating a dungeon within the first five minutes.

(3) Battles with minor enemies should be over quickly.

This is especially the case at the beginning of the game, when the player is still getting a feel for how everything works. If every random battle is two minutes long, these minutes add up. It doesn’t matter how clever the battle-specific character dialogue or flavor text is; it loses its charm when I see it repeated dozens of times across dozens of random battles.

(4) There should be a bell curve for complexity.

The opening of a game needs to demonstrate the game’s aesthetics and mechanics in a way that shows the player what the game is about. This doesn’t need to be dramatic or flashy or cinematic, and the point is definitely not to overwhelm the player with a giant town filled with NPCs or endless text reels of exposition. All of that should come later, when the player is already invested and eager for more. A game should start simple and gradually become more complex before opening up somewhere in the middle. By the end of the game, though, the complexity needs to decrease as the player becomes more focused on finishing the story. Structure is important.

(5) The player should be able to interact with the environment in region-specific ways.

This is the key ingredient that makes the Legend of Zelda games work so well, and even standard JRPGs like Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy VI incorporate elements of environmental exploration as well. If I’m in a forest, I want to be able to find an axe that I can use to chop down trees. If I’m navigating the sewer system under a castle, I want sluice gates that raise and lower the water level. If I’m in a seaside merchant town, I want there to be secret passages filled with treasure. Exploration is infinitely more enjoyable if the player has something to do.

Okay, one more:

(6) It’s fun to be able to jump.

I’m not going to elaborate on this, because it’s a self-evident truth: It’s fun to be able to jump. Also, if there are cute animals, the player should be able to pet them.