From Aerith’s farewell in Final Fantasy VII to Sif’s farewell in Dark Souls to The Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3 and Lee in The Walking Dead, there was no doubt material to be spent all night on the subject of separations definitive. But it is under the sign of the intimate and the essential that our two wandering Japanese artists bring a final touch to the iro·iro adventure. One and only one game per person, The Granstream Saga for Pierre-William and Shenmue for Victor, was chosen to launch this very last exchange.
An exchange that is offered to us with always the same pleasure, the same didactic desire and the same desire to weave enriching links between our familiar games and all kinds of unsuspected cultural references. Dare to transition between the necessary sacrifice of the loved one in the dark The Granstream Saga of the PlayStation and the death of Pauline de Beaumont in Memories from Beyond the Grave de Chateaubriand, it’s the kind of split you’re exposing yourself to (all of you, not just Premium subscribers) by hitting the play button. Good road gentlemen, it was an honor.
Cultural references
Video games
The Granstream Saga (Shade, 1997)
Shenmue (SEGA-AM2, 1999)
Movies
Shinji Somai, Move1993.
Gus Van Sant, Paranoid Park2007.
Makoto Shinkai, Suzume no Tojimari2022.
Literary works
Chateaubriand, Journey to Italie1827.
Chateaubriand, Memories from Beyond the Grave1849-1850.
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, The wisp1931
Francis Pongé, The bias of things1942
nonfiction
The concepts of mujo, wabi-sabi, itterasshai and ittekimasu, mono no aware.
Francois Julien, Praise of blandness1993
Rémy Tessonneau, The Death of Pauline de Beaumont and The Texts of The “Relation” By Chateaubriand (Unpublished Documents). Review of Literary History of France. 52nd Year, No. 2 (1952), pp. 178-193