Nep said something up above about how it’s not the story itself but how it’s told, and really I agree with that.
What makes Oddworld the series it is isn’t the specific characters or their particular journeys, it has always very much been about the world itself – the species and their entwinement, the histories deeply engrained in the native and industrialist factions, the massive scale of destruction and atrocity being committed by the more villainous groups.
The reason I love the Quintology and want to see it finished is because it has always been the central point of our exploration of this world. Abe’s quest to shut down RuptureFarms felt like a huge endeavour, but everything we’ve seen and heard about the rest of the Quintology tells us that this is just a tiny glimpse, and there’s so much more we’ve yet to see and will see later in the story.
We know from Lorne’s interviews that the central point of the Quintology’s story is that in each instalment the scale just gets bigger and bigger, and over the course of the story we’ll get to see more and more of the bigger picture, discover more of Oddworld’s history and geography, and eventually see more and more inhabitants and their stories until we get to the highest levels of the Odworld societies and see who’s really pulling the strings behind everything.
Side games like Stranger and Fangus are perfect for telling smaller stories based around specific characters and settings, and they add additional depth and flavor to Oddworld that the Quintology just couldn’t give us. They’re a nice counterpoint to the epic tale that the Quintology is meant to be – one story which will covers the planet on a broader scale, paired with smaller stories which give us a deeper insight into specific communities or events on a smaller scale. I want to see more of these side stories and more of the color they provide, but I don’t think they can be justified without also having the larger story of the Quintology to contrast them with.
Abe and Munch aren’t necessarily the most original or interesting characters in fiction – they’re loveable little guys, but there’s hundreds of characters in fiction who follow the same archetypes as they. But their story is the vehicle for which we are going to see more and more of Oddworld as a whole on an increasingly larger scale, and that excites me.
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