Making a game and thought we'd give a brief overview of the story to see what you all think. (second in a series) Zen is an angry, cold man who brought down a corrupt corporation, for revenge, that was running the city. In his struggle, the woman he had feelings for,. Sakura, died as a result of him choosing to kill his final enemy over saving her (unintentionally). In the several years that have passed since then, he has been living in recluse, and now returns to release his feelings for Sakura, only to discover that she is alive, and was only missing, and now she is angry towards him, yet still feels for him. Staying in the city to try and reconcile with Sakura. He fears that if he attaches himself to someone that he will be hurt. In the mean time, new threat has taken control and once again the city is in danger. Zen's recklesness and sense of danger carries him on the path to reveal the new threat. Although this is the storyline, the game is based on the personal development of the main characters. For Zen it is expressing his feelings, and the only way to reach this is through Sakura. So what do you think? Thanks <update> Well the game starts with zen returning to her grave. the city is starting to rebuild, but is still in a state of disorder. The style of the game will be grity, grey, dark and forbodding. If it was a film it woud be a thriller rather than an action movie. But as a game it is a rpg third person beat them up. [Edited by - independentCreations on November 24, 2005 12:12:20 AM]

You can't name the guy "Zen."

why can't he be called Zen, you have to have an excuse.

Quote: Original post by independentCreations
why can't he be called Zen, you have to have an excuse.

Because that's the kind of terrible BS they get away with on Saturday morning cartoons. It sounds like a code-name from GI Joe; thoroughly played-out with little bearing on his character so much as his "special skills" in combat.

You get an extra special discredit if that's his real name. Who would name their kid "Zen"? If it's just a code name, it's not nearly as bad.

You could have Zen be a nickname and thus use it to your advantage to show something about the guy's character. The problem is that one doesn't generally associate Zen with vengeance and an "angry, cold man."

well, if your aim is to portray the Zen philosophy (or whatever it is) as emotional withdrawal, I think that could be quite interesting.

There are a lot of possibilities here, because this is one of those good old stories that's been told before and will probably be told until the end of time. I don't know how deeply you're assigning meaning to things like "the city" and "the corrupt corporation" but I'm liking that part a lot. You should emphasize that your character became angry and cold necessarily, because to defeat the corporation he had to learn to think that way. In other words, victory was his object, and his attitude was a necessary development to acheive victory. At least that's how I'm reading it. Who is he revenging?

Anyway, you can't name him "Zen" because even if you want that association, (and you'd better have more or less comprehensive knowledge of what Zen is if you're goign to reference it so blatantly) and even if you acheive what you want to do with the reference, it's probably going to be seen as sloppy writing. You can write an absurdist political satire with people named "Republican" and "Democrat," or an allegory like "Everyman" with characters named "Greed" and "Friends," but you only do those things if you want the story to scream "DO NOT TAKE THIS LITERALLY! THIS HAS SYMBOLIC MEANING!" Most people are more impressed with writers who make some attempt to obscure their grand metaphorical design.

Even if you're going with the allegorical approach, though, it might be a little silly when the player realizes "I'm making Zen philosophy punch this guy" or "I'm commanding Zen philosophy to run down this hallway." This isn't like FF7 where you can arbitrarily name a guy "sephiroth," since probably 99% of people don't know what a sephiroth is, but 50% of them have heard of Zen.

And of course, if you just thought the name "Zen" was cool and picked it out of a hat, so to speak, it should be obvious by now why you shouldn't name him "Zen."

[Edited by - abstractimmersion on November 27, 2005 9:22:11 PM]

Ok, there was no intention of linking the story with the Zen Philosophy, if the player/audience wants to look this deep into the story and link it, i guess that is a good thing. I guess it means that the story has immerssion.

If the name was inspired from anywhere it was inspired from, a guy I knew, who happened to be called Zen. We are filling out the story constantly, smoothing out holes and trying to make a balancestory and gameplay.

My only input with this much to go off of would be to change some names around. Between Zen and Sakura, your naming conventions come off as very trash-pop-culture-ly japanophilic, which isn't going to hold much serious respect from the outset. That is, unless you're just pandering to the pop culture crowd, but I doubt it.