Something I've found myself drawn to over the years is fictional worlds that have something completely unique about them. I've seen medieval, sci-fi, post-apocalyptic, modern, and everything in between. Every now and then, though, a world comes along that in some way does something unique, unexpected, or just weird. Let's talk about a few of them here today.
Just a note: I'll try not to spoil these worlds too much.
Terry Pratchet's Discworld
Okay, hear me out. The world is flat. At least Discworld is. The world that more than 40 novels is set in is a flat disc held up by four elephants riding on a giant turtle.
Hunter X Hunter
(Geographic spoilers. Minor plot spoilers)
At first glance, Hunter X Hunter's world seems pretty standard. Hell, its continents are directly based on the real world. So what's so odd about it. Well, all of the oceans of the world go by another name:
Lake Mobius.
Not ocean, lake. All of the continents of the known world in Hunter X Hunter are mere islands in a lake. That lake is only a tiny part of an unfathomably large land mass known as the Dark Continent.
Blame!
Blame! (pronounced blam) is a manga series I was made aware of while watching a youtube video on megalophobia. Written by Tsutomu Nihei, It tells the story of a man named Kyri and a woman named Cibo traveling through a post-apocalyptic sci-fi world. But really, Blam! is about the world itself. Blame! is about a city, though it's only called a city for lack of a better term. It's not so much a city made for people as it is a semi random complex of metal, rooms, hallways, large openings with megastructures. The city is also big. How big? A country? A continent? The whole earth? The city is so large that there are sections at least as far out as the orbit of Jupiter.
Library of Babel
The Library of Babel might be one of the scariest to me. Not so much in a physical way, but an existential one. The Library of Babel comes from a short story of the same name by X. It tells of a library that contains one book for every combination of characters.
Gravity Rush
Gravity Rush as a whole is a super underrated game. Released on the ill-fated Playstation Vita. It just sort of fell through the cracks for a lot of people. I only played it because i got a used Vita that came with it. But I quickly fell in love with the game.
Gravity Rush's world consists of a city called Hekseville. That's it... maybe. The city itself is connected to a giant spire that extends indefinitely both up and down.
Xenoblade
Finally, we have Xenoblade Chronicles. In my opinion, one of the most iconic unique worlds. Its very first cutscene begins by explaining the world. The world exists on a plane that is nothing but an infinite ocean in all directions. One day, two titans called Bionis and Mechonis appeared and began doing battle for an unknown time. Finally, after eons. Only the corpses of the titans remained. The entire world of the game is these titans. Locations are often named after the body parts they are on. For example, Gaur Plain, one of the game's most famous locations, is part of the Bionis' leg. Sword Valley, where a battle at the beginning of the game takes place, is the sword that the Mechonis drove into Bionis, bridging the two.