I was thinking the other day, when I realized I haven't played a game in a long time that had a moment in it where you you have a "whoa" realization. Let me explain:

I know Final Fantasy VII wasn't the pinnacle of gaming at the time for everyone. So even if the moment didn't have this affect on you, you may be able to determine what I'm talking about and remember a game that did have that moment for you. In Final Fantasy VII you spend X amount of time in the first part of the game. Midgard. And you can do a lot of stuff in Midgard. Honestly they probably could have re-worked the story and had everything in Midgard. It was large and fascinating. You could spend a couple hours in the opening, or a dozen hours. And then you escape, and the world opens up to you, and you realize just how big this adventure is. It was a very whoa moment for me. Not that I'd played so few RPGs having a world open up is something special. But just how it was presented was a very whoa

Another one I remember, also from the PS1 era, was in Grandia. Which I've only played once, when it was new, so forgive me if I get this wrong. But from what I remember you go on an adventure and at some point decide to head to the edge of the world. Everyone knows there's a huge wall at the edge of the world, but only legends say what's on the other side. It's more of a thing to be marveled at than conquered. And nobody really knows what's on the other side. But eventually your group decides for whatever reason they want to see what actually is on the other side, if anything at all. So they managed to climb it and peer out over the top to see a whole other world out there. Its own civilizations and religions and problems completely separate from the world they knew. I'm sure I got a lot of this wrong, but I remember climbing the wall and presented with a "whoa" moment when they got to the top

In my experience these used to happen a lot in RPGs, hence my examples coming from that genre. But I'm putting this in General Games because maybe someone got this feeling from Shadow of the Colossus, or Zone of the Enders or something. I'm sure any genre is capable of it. But I can't think of enough games that utilize this. Especially anything newer. It seems to be a bygone story-telling technique. And it wasn't even a bad one. So I don't know why nobody uses it anymore. The most recent game I can think of to open up and feel like a "whoa" was when you got to the first big plains in Xenoblade Chronicles. And nothing else recent seems to have even tried. Horizon Zero Dawn could have easily done this when you leave the beginning area. But they opted to take a more down-to-earth story-telling approach rather than the Hollywood cinematic approach (they use that approach in other areas though)

So, anyone have any games that presented a whoa moment to you? I wish I had a better way of explaining this, but I'm curious what other games impacted other people in similar ways