Well here's the thing. There's a difference between having ideas for a story and designing a game. I don't know how far either of those ideas made it into the actual design. I do know that possessing sligs came pretty late in the game compared to lots of other things, and I'm pretty sure the original gameplay wasn't actually designed with it in mind. Someone - possibly an executive - decided Abe was too scrawny and he needed some way to fight back more beyond throwing rocks.
I don't think you can say the game where you escape the factory powerless, go on a spiritual journey, and then come back to save your pals is bad design though. It would probably be a very different game.
Also the game doesn't actually teach you how to chant until monsaic lines, so for lots of people they wouldn't even know about it in RF1 until the 2nd time through.
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