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[moonmagic]

I'm going to third Tekkonkinkreet; I love Treasure Town and especially the theme park at the end. The narration feels noir but effortless, too. It reminds me of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

As far as a space setting where people are still people, how about Alien? It's one of my favorites because it has the huge Giger weirdness but still very dirty, human characters and an understated corporate mythology. I also love claustrophobic sci-fi with small casts.

edit: Transmetropolitan is fantastic. I like to think of it as a more feasible take on The Zap Gun.

[poorwill]

Thirding Moomin Valley.  Totally agree on Miyazaki - he is very, very good at creating a sense of place.  Tekkonkinkreet is a cool pick too.  I guess I should get around to reading the comic one of these days.

Also:

Twin Peaks.  Interesting take on the dark side of humanity in a town near the woods, lots of interesting characters.  Too bad about (most of) the second season.

Little Nemo in Slumberland!

Under Milk Wood.  Created totally with words.  More about the characters in the place, but you get a good sense of the village.

Jim Woodring's Frank - the environments in these are amazing.  All from one brain.  http://www.jimwoodring.com/

Alice in Wonderland.  I mean, come on.

Flaming Carrot Comics - Iron City is an awesome blend of the mundane and the unreal.

Moebius created a lot of rad environments.

The Neverending Story - the book is really great and the movie doesn't come close to capturing that.

Brian Froud's work on The Dark Crystal and Labrynth should not go unmentioned.

Sesame Street!  I'm serious.  Fraggle Rock too.

Barbarella - this is an awesome movie and has rad locations/set design.  The 1980 Flash Gordon is kind of similar too.

Judge Dredd's Mega City 1 is pretty cool in a lot of ways.  Often depends on who's writing it.

In the Realms of the Unreal - a massive story/world created by a very, very strange man called Henry Darger that was discovered only when he was on his death bed.  There's a great documentary on it:



The Lovecraft Mythos.  Portrayed a weird version of New England in an awesome way.

Lego!  I remember looking at the catalogs when I was a kid and being pretty amazed by all the stuff.  They had at least one that was like a photocomic, following the adventures of two characters through the lego world.  No words, just pictures.

Puff n Stuff (sp?) - Sid and Marty Croft's masterpiece.  Well, I liked it when I was a kid.

EDIT:  Dr. Seuss' various works
Where the Wild Things Are/In the Night Kitchen
The Little Prince. 
There are a bunch of cool things.

[brog]

1001 nights / arabian nights.

djinns, dervishes, kings, princes, sultans, viziers, slaves, eunuchs, thieves, porters, barbers, sailors, merchants, sorcerors.. weird fantastic magic, religious conflicts, and lots and lots of sex.  what more could you ask for in a setting?

[Aaron G.]

I always thought the Zelda games had a sort of unique, if not underdeveloped, take on the fantasy setting.

Blizzard games have painfully unoriginal settings, but they do have a very fleshed out history that makes spending time in those settings (however familiar they may be) a lot more fun.

Shadow of the Colossus has an overwhelming sense of place, but I don't know if I would really call it a setting.  The game world feels very real, but we know next to nothing about it beyond what Wander comes across in our brief time with him.

I guess one facet of setting is how much of it you explicitly reveal.  All three of the above games have pretty standard fantasy settings but each one leaves a very different impression on the player.  I wouldn't say one is better than the other, either, and I think how much of your setting you expose to the player is just another thing to consider when thinking about the overall experience you want to create.

[fraxcell]

Samorost 2 had a visually fantastic setting.
Okami was also very visually pleasing, and also quite unique.
George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. The setting is amazingly detailed and realistic.

[Nava]

George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. The setting is amazingly detailed and realistic.

Heh, I was going to say that....
George RR Martin has built quite a spectacular world, at once grittily realistic and fantastical. It feels nearly lawless, with the sense of impending doom for even the most popular, established characters; no one is safe. And the sense of old magic clashing with new technology is really pervasive and enthralling- it feels almost like the world itself is rebelling, seemingly on its last legs, against destructive technologies and political shifts and the imbalance that they've wrought. Love it.

Also:

House of Leaves - by Mark Z. Danielewski. The setting of the House itself is unbeatable, for me, in terms of creepy atmosphere.... for some reason, nothing is more alarming to the imagination than a completely textureless, lightless, endless, black hallway. Doesn't translate to games well though 

I don't even think Tolkien needs any explanation here.

I agree with Aaron G about Zelda games. I love Hyrule (and its extensions/derivations) as a world; there is always this completely magical but tragic sense of old fantasy struggling to survive, fading out against whatever new threats are introduced into the land. And then when you purge the land of that threat and the game ends, nothing ever really goes back to normal (i.e. in OoT you're just sent back to being a child, but you always remember the horrors that had touched the land). It's kind of a nostalgic tragedy of forgotten childhood, and I really love the way the entire world embodies that feeling.

The Raw Shark Texts - by Steven Hall. Not the whole book, but there is one stretch of it that takes place in a "conceptual" world of words and text. I can't really accurately describe it, but the characters have to travel through a long tunnel made of old book pages and navigate through the words that exist there, and later use letters pulled from pages to construct a physical reality. I guess I like the idea of using concept as a physical setting.

BLADE RUNNER & CARNIVALE (someone already said both....)

Romeo + Juliet. Yes I just said that. Because Baz Luhrmann is the man for spectacular, surreal/ultra-real settings and sets.

Pushing Daisies, the television series. Unfortunately it was cancelled in its second season, but it had the most charming, colorful, imaginative settings I'd ever seen on tv. You'd really have to watch it to feel the effects though...

[JLJac]

Haha that looks nice

There was someone who mentioned tekkon kinkreet a while back, but I just have to mention it again: tekkon kinkreet. Youtube it pals.

[inkBot]

Aw someone already mentioned Psychonauts .

I really enjoyed Skies of Arcadias setting. The fact that there is a surface world below everything grounded the setting immensely for me. There wasn't much said about the surface, probably because no-one living in the game world would know what happened to it, and it added some believability to the world (as far as flying islands is believable) while also providing some mystery, as if there wasn't enough.

As far as fantasy goes in games, books or whatever, the world of the Farseers takes the cake  in my opinion. The world is very fleshed out over the course of the books and the Fantasy feeling is there with little to no fantastic creatures (of course excluding the dragons) and   a take on magic that in direct comparison to "classic" magic, makes a whole lot of sense.

Now I'm all for bombastic fantasy with epic battles and whatnot, but the subtlety I find in Hobb's books wins, hands down.

[Renton]

I hope they make a tv movie or something to finish the pushing daisies story.