i think I may have schizophrenia
The 25th Ward: The Silver Case is a game about the internet, viewed through the lens of an authoritarian government that monitors its citizens and wipes them out with impunity via their government-sanctioned murderers to maintain the illusion of peace.
It's a game about how even in a "perfect" society where the people up top maintain an iron-grip on every minuet detail of its citizens lives, the biggest threat is the power of the individual and the propagation of ideas.
It's a game about the dehumanizing effects of violence, how those charged with keeping the peace are volatile, reckless goons who kill without remorse and never receive any kind of punishment for it. How killing is innate to the human experience, and how the will to kill resides in all men's hearts.
It's a game about trans-humanism. People turned into biological supercomputers built to retain petabytes of information. People who gain identity on the net. AI's so sophisticated that they become indistinguishable from their creators. People who ascend beyond the biological to become ideals, the purest form of information, unlimited by the notions of life or death.
It's a game about games and the people who play them. The relationship between protagonist and player. The rejection of industry norms. The eschewing of any kind of notion of traditional understanding.
The 25th Ward is a game I have a hard time writing about. It juggles a lot of topics, and yet, it sticks the landing with each and every single one of them in a way that is hauntingly prophetic for what was originally a 2005 flip-phone text-adventure game. It's a bit of a cop-out answer, but after a day or two of writing and rewriting this review, I really do feel it's an experience beyond words. It's a game that resonates even more today in the modern internet age, and it's view of the internet via a fictional social experiment of a city where the line between net and reality is non-existent is an intensely interesting backdrop for the triad of storylines that each explore a facet of this society and how it parallels the modern age.
"Don't depend on the net. Depend on the net. God lives in the net. The net will guide you to all answers and wisdom. Doubt the net. Save the net. Kill the net."
It's a game about how even in a "perfect" society where the people up top maintain an iron-grip on every minuet detail of its citizens lives, the biggest threat is the power of the individual and the propagation of ideas.
It's a game about the dehumanizing effects of violence, how those charged with keeping the peace are volatile, reckless goons who kill without remorse and never receive any kind of punishment for it. How killing is innate to the human experience, and how the will to kill resides in all men's hearts.
It's a game about trans-humanism. People turned into biological supercomputers built to retain petabytes of information. People who gain identity on the net. AI's so sophisticated that they become indistinguishable from their creators. People who ascend beyond the biological to become ideals, the purest form of information, unlimited by the notions of life or death.
It's a game about games and the people who play them. The relationship between protagonist and player. The rejection of industry norms. The eschewing of any kind of notion of traditional understanding.
The 25th Ward is a game I have a hard time writing about. It juggles a lot of topics, and yet, it sticks the landing with each and every single one of them in a way that is hauntingly prophetic for what was originally a 2005 flip-phone text-adventure game. It's a bit of a cop-out answer, but after a day or two of writing and rewriting this review, I really do feel it's an experience beyond words. It's a game that resonates even more today in the modern internet age, and it's view of the internet via a fictional social experiment of a city where the line between net and reality is non-existent is an intensely interesting backdrop for the triad of storylines that each explore a facet of this society and how it parallels the modern age.
"Don't depend on the net. Depend on the net. God lives in the net. The net will guide you to all answers and wisdom. Doubt the net. Save the net. Kill the net."
This town has been taken over, too. By countless, faceless ghosts. ▋
The Silver Case at its surface is a story of what can happen when you try to kill your past. Can you kill the past? Play the games and find out, but it is an indisputable fact that attempting to do so will lead you into strange directions, which is what lies beneath the surface. More likely than not your past will end up changing you. Consumed by the past. Consumed by the darkness. This is why it has to be killed, or else it kills you.
The 25th Ward is a twist in perspectives of how the past is tackled by different people. Some face it head on, some have to find it, some are so consumed by it that they are unaware of what it truly is. These are Matchmaker, Placebo, and Correctness respectively (at least that’s how i interpreted it). Just like the original game, all of the storylines bounce off one another while still filling in each other’s story gaps in a focused on-the-edge-of-your-seat way.
I’m gonna be real with y’all I have almost no fucking idea what to write next. I broke up my play sessions to give myself time to absorb the story. I spent two days after finishing it contemplating what the hell I was even going to write, and now I’m here. Sitting alone in my living room listening to Phantogram’s Eyelid Movies in somber over a video game. I still don’t know what to say. Video games have impacted me heavily in the past but none as strangely and uniquely as the Kill the Past series so far. The 25th Ward is the perfect embodiment of Suda’s expression in the industry and how far he can go. A complexity of ideas and themes intertwined to articulate, at its core, human ideologies. It’s all paced so well that when I reached the end I thought, “That’s the end?” but not necessarily in a negative way at all. Every point the game strove to get across was proven effectively, I was just a bit sad to see one of my favorite video game stories come to a close. I wanted more because it was so amazing. Admittedly I also wanted more time to figure out what the fuck had happened for the last 13~ hours lol. I wish I could go more in depth but if I did I would probably be spouting nonsense regarding spoilers and whatnot.
What I CAN explain though is the expertly arranged presentation and soundtrack. The boxed-in contemporary style of the original game is modernized and accentuated to an extreme. This could possibly be my favorite visual style of any video game. Background elements are now more distinctly interesting and support the themes of the current chapter even better. The color palettes used are also a lot more colorful which I’m absolutely down for. The artists for each of the storylines did spectacularly; I especially love the art style used for Correctness with its black and white pastel tones accompanied by infrequent splashes of color to make everything pop. Everything is just a marvel to look at. The typewriter sound is unchanged just the way I like it. I find it to be an insanely satisfying sound that’s just the cherry on top of everything else the game has to offer. The soundtrack is exactly what I love in electronic music and it's incredibly fitting. Love beat bumpin’ shit like the classic Metropolitan Edge and groovy Galaxy Glitch Groove by Akira Yamaoka of Silent Hill fame, while also vibing hard with Sandalwood and DRIFT. Every track hits me in the feels in incomparable ways. All of this is in tandem with one another becomes, what I feel to be, an unparalleled artistic composition in gaming.
The 25th Ward: The Silver Case is a wildly intense game that will continue to float around my brain for a long time. If you couldn’t tell already, this is everything I loved about the original Silver case and more. There’s honestly nothing I would change about it. Every character is identifiable and the writing stays consistently engaging throughout. Love Jabroni, love Tokio (as usual), love Osato (he’s a little bit of a quirked up white boy). This is a video game for me. It doesn’t conform to industry standards and does its own thing in an astounding manner.
I wish a great rain would fall on this town. And that everything would melt in the rain and be washed away. To the bottom of the ocean. ▋
The Silver Case at its surface is a story of what can happen when you try to kill your past. Can you kill the past? Play the games and find out, but it is an indisputable fact that attempting to do so will lead you into strange directions, which is what lies beneath the surface. More likely than not your past will end up changing you. Consumed by the past. Consumed by the darkness. This is why it has to be killed, or else it kills you.
The 25th Ward is a twist in perspectives of how the past is tackled by different people. Some face it head on, some have to find it, some are so consumed by it that they are unaware of what it truly is. These are Matchmaker, Placebo, and Correctness respectively (at least that’s how i interpreted it). Just like the original game, all of the storylines bounce off one another while still filling in each other’s story gaps in a focused on-the-edge-of-your-seat way.
I’m gonna be real with y’all I have almost no fucking idea what to write next. I broke up my play sessions to give myself time to absorb the story. I spent two days after finishing it contemplating what the hell I was even going to write, and now I’m here. Sitting alone in my living room listening to Phantogram’s Eyelid Movies in somber over a video game. I still don’t know what to say. Video games have impacted me heavily in the past but none as strangely and uniquely as the Kill the Past series so far. The 25th Ward is the perfect embodiment of Suda’s expression in the industry and how far he can go. A complexity of ideas and themes intertwined to articulate, at its core, human ideologies. It’s all paced so well that when I reached the end I thought, “That’s the end?” but not necessarily in a negative way at all. Every point the game strove to get across was proven effectively, I was just a bit sad to see one of my favorite video game stories come to a close. I wanted more because it was so amazing. Admittedly I also wanted more time to figure out what the fuck had happened for the last 13~ hours lol. I wish I could go more in depth but if I did I would probably be spouting nonsense regarding spoilers and whatnot.
What I CAN explain though is the expertly arranged presentation and soundtrack. The boxed-in contemporary style of the original game is modernized and accentuated to an extreme. This could possibly be my favorite visual style of any video game. Background elements are now more distinctly interesting and support the themes of the current chapter even better. The color palettes used are also a lot more colorful which I’m absolutely down for. The artists for each of the storylines did spectacularly; I especially love the art style used for Correctness with its black and white pastel tones accompanied by infrequent splashes of color to make everything pop. Everything is just a marvel to look at. The typewriter sound is unchanged just the way I like it. I find it to be an insanely satisfying sound that’s just the cherry on top of everything else the game has to offer. The soundtrack is exactly what I love in electronic music and it's incredibly fitting. Love beat bumpin’ shit like the classic Metropolitan Edge and groovy Galaxy Glitch Groove by Akira Yamaoka of Silent Hill fame, while also vibing hard with Sandalwood and DRIFT. Every track hits me in the feels in incomparable ways. All of this is in tandem with one another becomes, what I feel to be, an unparalleled artistic composition in gaming.
The 25th Ward: The Silver Case is a wildly intense game that will continue to float around my brain for a long time. If you couldn’t tell already, this is everything I loved about the original Silver case and more. There’s honestly nothing I would change about it. Every character is identifiable and the writing stays consistently engaging throughout. Love Jabroni, love Tokio (as usual), love Osato (he’s a little bit of a quirked up white boy). This is a video game for me. It doesn’t conform to industry standards and does its own thing in an astounding manner.
I wish a great rain would fall on this town. And that everything would melt in the rain and be washed away. To the bottom of the ocean. ▋
what metaphysical pussy does to a mf
what the fuck do you mean 100 endings
Bitches be like: "ACAB" and then start drooling whenever Shiroyabu appears
Overly indulgent and exasperatingly ironic-insincere in ways that remind me of a punk band on their fourth or fifth album, tired of heartfeltedly raging against the machine and more resigned to punishing their audience because they know their audience like feeling like shit about themselves and their place in a world and the world at large. It's no surprise to me that Suda 51 loves Mogwai, because this is his version of The Hawk Is Howling / Hardcore Will Never Die, but You Will (Music for a Forgotten Future). (As an aside: as a Glasgow denizen, it's heartening to see at least two or three references to Glasgow-byproducts in every single one of his games, even if I did take serious offence at Edo McAllister saying Rangers are his favourite football team) It's fascinating to me that this game came out in 2005, when Suda hadn't yet been chewed out by the system at large, because everything about its tone and principle leads me to believe it was made by someone being haunted by their own afterimages of cynicism and doubt; formerly directed at the systems at the top of their world, but now, with self-awareness of the futility of the exercise, the ghosts have nowhere to go but inward.
In other terms of style, rhetoric and ideology - if TSC was Adam Curtis's Hypernormalisation, 25th Ward is Can't Get You Out of My Head; a much longer journey to the same essential points, made years later, that plays the same beats too many times - a bit like the drone of those fucking Mogwai albums. (Silver) case in point - the sex chat dialogue loop is funny the first time, very funny the second time, but headachingly boring on the third, fourth, fifth and sixth runs. The same goes for countless other tasks in this - the infamous Dungeon Crawls and Apartment Hunting being the most immediately painful examples. Suda obviously loves to labour the point that video games are repetitive wastelands where personal time goes to die, but as I said in my Moon review, I find it kinda contemptuous when a game designer decides to critique the time-wasting abilities of video games by making something even more soulless and uneconomic than the object of their censure. We get it - anyone who is at a point with video games where they're playing postmodern Japanese visual novels is well aware of what they've done to themselves, man. Show us the light, and how we can move forward.
When I look at my Steam hours for this game, I can't help but lament the fact that I would have gotten the exact same value out of the game if it had made all its points only once - there are movies I could have watched, books I could have read, art I could have made, if only I wasn't mindlessly step-by-stepping my way through a 3D school corridor to get to the next part of the game with genuine worth. If we've stuck with Suda this long, surely he can trust us to understand him the first time he speaks? As the game itself posits, we are all creating increasingly esoteric languages that we hope to use for finding people who understand us, and the Film Window Engine is one of Grasshopper Manufacture's most fluent languages; Suda/GM's grammar and speech here are overly-verbose, ridiculously-redundant and full of grand grammatical errors at the structural level, but it's still a deep pleasure(?) to read and click through... Though maybe consider hiring an editor who understands what you're saying and can make sharper points that leave deeper wounds next time. (I don't envy that position) The 25th Ward is a beautiful work of technospeculative net-fiction that deserves to be considered for a place among the digi-annals of Neuromancer and Snow Crash, but it's buried deep within tapes and tapes of junk data that will no doubt leave it as an esoteric relic that only the most determined data-miners will ever find. It would be even funnier if this thing had stayed a flip-phone exclusive for all time.
Look - maybe I am just experiencing hardcore Suda 51 burnout. I have spent the past three months reading volumes upon volumes of inscrutable clickity-clackity text and having my time aggressively wasted in the name of video game artistry. I don't deny that a lot of that time was more valuable than say, plodding between objective markers in The Ghosts of Us II: Call of Zero War, but there's just so much that just wasn't, to the point where I do feel genuine pangs of sadness that I devoted so much time to exploring-exploring-exploring-exploring-exploring Suda's past. You could watch Andrei Tarkovsky's entire ouevre five times over in the time it takes to play the TSC trilogy!! And I've wasted even more time writing up this damn review!!! Gah!!!! The next time someone asks me to recall a six-digit code for a locker or computer login or apartment buzzer and whatever else, I fear I may go full Kamui Mode. It's exhausting! I'm so tired! (He says, putting the Travis Strikes Again game card into his Switch)
Anyway... It was all worth it to see Old Master Lv. 99 Tokio hit that vape tho. (Tokio deciding to quit tobacco for health reasons the day he finds out that the world's governments and top assassins all wanna kill his ass is some top tier Suda Writing, lmao)
In other terms of style, rhetoric and ideology - if TSC was Adam Curtis's Hypernormalisation, 25th Ward is Can't Get You Out of My Head; a much longer journey to the same essential points, made years later, that plays the same beats too many times - a bit like the drone of those fucking Mogwai albums. (Silver) case in point - the sex chat dialogue loop is funny the first time, very funny the second time, but headachingly boring on the third, fourth, fifth and sixth runs. The same goes for countless other tasks in this - the infamous Dungeon Crawls and Apartment Hunting being the most immediately painful examples. Suda obviously loves to labour the point that video games are repetitive wastelands where personal time goes to die, but as I said in my Moon review, I find it kinda contemptuous when a game designer decides to critique the time-wasting abilities of video games by making something even more soulless and uneconomic than the object of their censure. We get it - anyone who is at a point with video games where they're playing postmodern Japanese visual novels is well aware of what they've done to themselves, man. Show us the light, and how we can move forward.
When I look at my Steam hours for this game, I can't help but lament the fact that I would have gotten the exact same value out of the game if it had made all its points only once - there are movies I could have watched, books I could have read, art I could have made, if only I wasn't mindlessly step-by-stepping my way through a 3D school corridor to get to the next part of the game with genuine worth. If we've stuck with Suda this long, surely he can trust us to understand him the first time he speaks? As the game itself posits, we are all creating increasingly esoteric languages that we hope to use for finding people who understand us, and the Film Window Engine is one of Grasshopper Manufacture's most fluent languages; Suda/GM's grammar and speech here are overly-verbose, ridiculously-redundant and full of grand grammatical errors at the structural level, but it's still a deep pleasure(?) to read and click through... Though maybe consider hiring an editor who understands what you're saying and can make sharper points that leave deeper wounds next time. (I don't envy that position) The 25th Ward is a beautiful work of technospeculative net-fiction that deserves to be considered for a place among the digi-annals of Neuromancer and Snow Crash, but it's buried deep within tapes and tapes of junk data that will no doubt leave it as an esoteric relic that only the most determined data-miners will ever find. It would be even funnier if this thing had stayed a flip-phone exclusive for all time.
Look - maybe I am just experiencing hardcore Suda 51 burnout. I have spent the past three months reading volumes upon volumes of inscrutable clickity-clackity text and having my time aggressively wasted in the name of video game artistry. I don't deny that a lot of that time was more valuable than say, plodding between objective markers in The Ghosts of Us II: Call of Zero War, but there's just so much that just wasn't, to the point where I do feel genuine pangs of sadness that I devoted so much time to exploring-exploring-exploring-exploring-exploring Suda's past. You could watch Andrei Tarkovsky's entire ouevre five times over in the time it takes to play the TSC trilogy!! And I've wasted even more time writing up this damn review!!! Gah!!!! The next time someone asks me to recall a six-digit code for a locker or computer login or apartment buzzer and whatever else, I fear I may go full Kamui Mode. It's exhausting! I'm so tired! (He says, putting the Travis Strikes Again game card into his Switch)
Anyway... It was all worth it to see Old Master Lv. 99 Tokio hit that vape tho. (Tokio deciding to quit tobacco for health reasons the day he finds out that the world's governments and top assassins all wanna kill his ass is some top tier Suda Writing, lmao)
Go fuck yourself Suda
This review contains spoilers
is haunting discovering that kurumizawa is not only the 25th ward personification in a fictional way but also in a metafictional one. even scarier when you realize that it doesn't matter: reality it's defined by the observed and interpreted by who is observing - if the roles changes, whatever! the next kamui uehara can solve the problem - but wich one? the silver eyed boy who doesn't know how to eat mont blanc properly? the bald psycho jabroni? the real one (not really!) that is suposed to be the protagonist? the japanese dirty harry.. oh, that's ayame, it's even more powerful. i can ask to turtleguy for advice, if he's not already killed by private postal service - instead of delivering your mail, they are delivering your death. for the sake of others, of course, so behave yourself! we can pick anyone. everyone is a potential kamui, maybe you are too!
This review contains spoilers
one can only dream of being lent 50,000 yen
"kill the life"
Nigga im killing MYSELF
Nigga im killing MYSELF
This review contains spoilers
i'm just like Shiroyabu except doing all of the 100 endings is what made me go bald
2012, Hell, USA. 2 years after Avatar released Mark Wahlberg, known for his roles in The Bourne Identity and making burgers, once said "If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn't have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, 'OK, we're going to land somewhere safely, don't worry.' " in regards to the tragic accident that occured on that fateful day of September, 2001. I lean on believing him, his claims supported by the fact that his hamburguers are 100% 9/11 proof. It's obvious that he was a man who marched through life to the rhythms of some drum I would never hear.
How do you even wax philosophically about this game? From the utterly incomprehensible neo noir mystery of Correctness, the spook POV of Matchmaker, and the kifsdoeupjvei3esdz0dgfombghoijzw3 of Placebo, this game refuses to be understood. Sheer style carries it while it jumps from one horror inducing plot point to the next like a gibbon in the jungle.
The best way to resume of this game would be "Conspiracies are real, fuck you. Also Twin Peaks The Return rules". It's acutally kinda interesting how it mirrors a lot of the stuff David Lynch had to say in 2017 but in 2005 and in Japan. Your role in this...thing is that of an observer, made privy to the secret and terrible beauty of the modern world. Hard boiled detectives trying their hardest to not succumb to their old wounds in an urban hell that just won't let sleeping dogs lie.
The leviathan we call internet is extremely present through all of this, it's teenagers telling me to kill myself vividly present alongside actual useful information about the shadows that lurk in the 25th Ward. More than in Silver Case, here the net appears as both the messiah and the anti christ, cursing and assisting the protagonists during their journies of self-discovery and unmasking the lethal intentions of bureaucracy.
In summary, I made this review solely to try and get Josh_The_Fourth and have more likes than him like I did on Flower, Sneed and Rain. I didn't get shit on this one, I just wrote stuff to sound cool. I guess society is bad or something? Fuck the Police or the shadow police? There's a high schooler there somewhere too. She sees ghosts I think. Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish—a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow—to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested. Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.
How do you even wax philosophically about this game? From the utterly incomprehensible neo noir mystery of Correctness, the spook POV of Matchmaker, and the kifsdoeupjvei3esdz0dgfombghoijzw3 of Placebo, this game refuses to be understood. Sheer style carries it while it jumps from one horror inducing plot point to the next like a gibbon in the jungle.
The best way to resume of this game would be "Conspiracies are real, fuck you. Also Twin Peaks The Return rules". It's acutally kinda interesting how it mirrors a lot of the stuff David Lynch had to say in 2017 but in 2005 and in Japan. Your role in this...thing is that of an observer, made privy to the secret and terrible beauty of the modern world. Hard boiled detectives trying their hardest to not succumb to their old wounds in an urban hell that just won't let sleeping dogs lie.
The leviathan we call internet is extremely present through all of this, it's teenagers telling me to kill myself vividly present alongside actual useful information about the shadows that lurk in the 25th Ward. More than in Silver Case, here the net appears as both the messiah and the anti christ, cursing and assisting the protagonists during their journies of self-discovery and unmasking the lethal intentions of bureaucracy.
In summary, I made this review solely to try and get Josh_The_Fourth and have more likes than him like I did on Flower, Sneed and Rain. I didn't get shit on this one, I just wrote stuff to sound cool. I guess society is bad or something? Fuck the Police or the shadow police? There's a high schooler there somewhere too. She sees ghosts I think. Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish—a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow—to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested. Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.
So the best mobile game of all time was made for flip phones I guess
I cannot explain to you what happened in this game. I could try, but this is too dense of an experience to ever be able to fully understand. It has much to contemplate, but even the themes and characters on a surface level make this a once in a lifetime experience.
The music, the graphics, the art style and the stories all perfectly combine to provide something special. Placebo and Correctness were obviously brilliant and while Matchmaker does feel like it lacks that special KTP factor, Tsuki and Osato more than make up for it. Tokio, Meru, Shinko, Shiroyabu and Kurumizawa are all obvious favourites too, and the Sumio and Kusabi cameos perfectly border between fan service and genius, especially Sumio’s involvement in the best chapter of the game.
I won’t be forgetting this game anytime soon.
The music, the graphics, the art style and the stories all perfectly combine to provide something special. Placebo and Correctness were obviously brilliant and while Matchmaker does feel like it lacks that special KTP factor, Tsuki and Osato more than make up for it. Tokio, Meru, Shinko, Shiroyabu and Kurumizawa are all obvious favourites too, and the Sumio and Kusabi cameos perfectly border between fan service and genius, especially Sumio’s involvement in the best chapter of the game.
I won’t be forgetting this game anytime soon.
If you explained homosexuality to Jabroni he would stare into the sunset and go "Ok..."
This review contains spoilers
once, we all lived inside the bottle. but without us noticing, without us hearing, little by little, crack by crack, the bottle broke. and all worlds became one world. the inside became the outside.
--#006: PLASTIC --
playing this game and reminding myself that it came out in 2005 and not in 2018 is wildly difficult because this feels like a game so perfectly aligned with the current Moment that it's absolutely surreal that it was originally beamed to Japanese flip phones a decade before we heard the word "hypernormalisation".
if the original Silver Case explored the anxieties and changing face of a world slowly becoming digitized, then The 25th Ward is a true sequel, exploring a world where there is no difference, no boundary, between the digital world and the physical world, between the person we present and the person we are, and whether it even matters enough to make a distinction. tokio plugging his eye into a computer through an enormous analog cable is one of the most evocative images of the game, but it goes so far beyond that.
in the 25th ward, people have become pieces of data moving through a system filtered out by antivirus software made of the opinions and thoughts the system breeds them to have. the cast of the 25th Ward are far less distinct than the original's more eclectic cast, a deliberate contrast made clear by the points at which the original cast show up, and that more muted palette for these people is the result of the planning of this city turning each person within it into a piece of a wider machine, circuits in a system, receivers for the Word of Kamui.
work. consume. report suspicious activity. die. and when the experiment has run its course, they switch it all off. and the 25th ward crumbles into the sea. planned obsolescence. make sure to buy the Next Ward.
that machine takes the shape of the game itself. The 25th Ward is positioned as part of the "kill the past" universe, but I honestly believe that any attempt to view it as part of some wider universe where the characters exist in any way other than how we interact with them here will fail to derive anything meaningful from that read. when The Interface Itself is a character that the people inside these windows framed inside abstract void spaces can interact with and respond to, you have to abandon any attempt to apply verisimilitude as we traditionally understand it in order to survive. the style is the substance. everything is real. everything is virtual. everything is the same, all at once. is there a difference? does it matter?
as people become part of this machine, their selves become digital, and spread outwards, into and throughout the net. people become fictional characters. Kamui Uehara manifesting in the Matchmaker chapters in the form of Tsuki, a generic Ex-Yakuza man with a generic Dark And Troubled Past, navigating around his partner slolely being transformed into another Kamui by the Powers That Be.
people become other selves. Placebo has been cited as the highlight of the game by numerous people and while I don't know if I'd entirely agree, I can't deny the tremendous impact the story contained within had on me. Milu's existence hit hard for me, a fragmented individual spread across multiple real and unreal versions of herself each one shaped by the perceptions of others beyond the control of the original/format Milu, a wholly digital existence that is still tethered to a weak, dying, incorrect body that causes her pain on many levels.
even before The Unprecedented Times shifted even more of it onto digital spaces, I lived a life that I would have struggled to call my own outside of the internet. not just because I've never felt truly safe enough in the world outside my window to express myself fully within it, but also because the explorations of my self and my gender take up fragmented, distinct, and often contradictory forms that I try not to let intersect for fear of the friction that their ill-fitting will create. which of these forms is the real me? what makes the me that types these words with physical hands more real than the me created when the words are read? am i the name the structures of my 25th ward place on me, or am I the name I choose and have people online say? i don't feel like me outside. i don't feel like me when I look in the mirror. i feel like me when draping myself in images, when hiding myself behind makeup and voice training and cameras and filters. i feel more like me prancing around as a gay catboy in an online game than when I go out to buy milk. am I ignoring reality, or is this just another part of it?
i don't know. maybe there is a true me, out there, with a true name and a true face. maybe the real me is out there somewhere. or maybe this is all the real me, and every single contradiction and lie and false assumption is truth.
all i know for sure is that I believe these words I say, these things I feel, and these people i know are real.
i choose to believe in the net. what else is there to believe in?
this is an uneven work. despite being better paced than most VNs and certainly featuring less mandatory timewasting than its predecessor, the pacing still feels drawn out past the point of purposefulness. much like this review, it often feels...meandering.
i also feel compelled to bring up a part of the game that has gone largely unremarked upon on this site: Correctness 3, boys don't cry, which is where the game goes too far in my opinion and plays with the sensitive subject of rape in a way that feels extremely ill-advised, crass, and exploitative. when criticism of content in such a way is brought up in critical spaces like this there is a tendency by some to dismiss it out of hand as being unable to handle sensitive content and wishing everything to be sanitized of such frictions, so let me clarify that I do not think games should never discuss rape and I don't inherently want to avoid a game where it is discussed and to underline that point i want to stress that i think suda has been better about this subject in other works, but in this instance, he fucked up. this bit isn't bad because it's a rape scene, it's bad because it is a badly done scene. the vibes are rancid in that chapter, folks.
despite that, however, and other minor complaints, it's hard not to be blown away by the 25th ward. it's such a thematically dense and stylish work, with so much to say and so many ways to say it. if Umurangi is the macro experience of life today, then The 25th Ward is the micro, the day to day life of living inside and outside a screen at the same time, of being a different person to different people, of existing in a thousand spaces at once and not really knowing who I am in any of them.
sorry about this review. it's a bit of a mess. i'm a bit of a mess, after finishing this game. but it's ok. it's all right. I can fix it.
I just need 50,000 yen.
KAMUI UEHARA WILL
I
I
I
KILL THE PAST
I
I
I
KILL THE LIFE
I
I
I
JOIN HOLOLIVE
TO BE CONTINUED -- ?
--#006: PLASTIC --
playing this game and reminding myself that it came out in 2005 and not in 2018 is wildly difficult because this feels like a game so perfectly aligned with the current Moment that it's absolutely surreal that it was originally beamed to Japanese flip phones a decade before we heard the word "hypernormalisation".
if the original Silver Case explored the anxieties and changing face of a world slowly becoming digitized, then The 25th Ward is a true sequel, exploring a world where there is no difference, no boundary, between the digital world and the physical world, between the person we present and the person we are, and whether it even matters enough to make a distinction. tokio plugging his eye into a computer through an enormous analog cable is one of the most evocative images of the game, but it goes so far beyond that.
in the 25th ward, people have become pieces of data moving through a system filtered out by antivirus software made of the opinions and thoughts the system breeds them to have. the cast of the 25th Ward are far less distinct than the original's more eclectic cast, a deliberate contrast made clear by the points at which the original cast show up, and that more muted palette for these people is the result of the planning of this city turning each person within it into a piece of a wider machine, circuits in a system, receivers for the Word of Kamui.
work. consume. report suspicious activity. die. and when the experiment has run its course, they switch it all off. and the 25th ward crumbles into the sea. planned obsolescence. make sure to buy the Next Ward.
that machine takes the shape of the game itself. The 25th Ward is positioned as part of the "kill the past" universe, but I honestly believe that any attempt to view it as part of some wider universe where the characters exist in any way other than how we interact with them here will fail to derive anything meaningful from that read. when The Interface Itself is a character that the people inside these windows framed inside abstract void spaces can interact with and respond to, you have to abandon any attempt to apply verisimilitude as we traditionally understand it in order to survive. the style is the substance. everything is real. everything is virtual. everything is the same, all at once. is there a difference? does it matter?
as people become part of this machine, their selves become digital, and spread outwards, into and throughout the net. people become fictional characters. Kamui Uehara manifesting in the Matchmaker chapters in the form of Tsuki, a generic Ex-Yakuza man with a generic Dark And Troubled Past, navigating around his partner slolely being transformed into another Kamui by the Powers That Be.
people become other selves. Placebo has been cited as the highlight of the game by numerous people and while I don't know if I'd entirely agree, I can't deny the tremendous impact the story contained within had on me. Milu's existence hit hard for me, a fragmented individual spread across multiple real and unreal versions of herself each one shaped by the perceptions of others beyond the control of the original/format Milu, a wholly digital existence that is still tethered to a weak, dying, incorrect body that causes her pain on many levels.
even before The Unprecedented Times shifted even more of it onto digital spaces, I lived a life that I would have struggled to call my own outside of the internet. not just because I've never felt truly safe enough in the world outside my window to express myself fully within it, but also because the explorations of my self and my gender take up fragmented, distinct, and often contradictory forms that I try not to let intersect for fear of the friction that their ill-fitting will create. which of these forms is the real me? what makes the me that types these words with physical hands more real than the me created when the words are read? am i the name the structures of my 25th ward place on me, or am I the name I choose and have people online say? i don't feel like me outside. i don't feel like me when I look in the mirror. i feel like me when draping myself in images, when hiding myself behind makeup and voice training and cameras and filters. i feel more like me prancing around as a gay catboy in an online game than when I go out to buy milk. am I ignoring reality, or is this just another part of it?
i don't know. maybe there is a true me, out there, with a true name and a true face. maybe the real me is out there somewhere. or maybe this is all the real me, and every single contradiction and lie and false assumption is truth.
all i know for sure is that I believe these words I say, these things I feel, and these people i know are real.
i choose to believe in the net. what else is there to believe in?
this is an uneven work. despite being better paced than most VNs and certainly featuring less mandatory timewasting than its predecessor, the pacing still feels drawn out past the point of purposefulness. much like this review, it often feels...meandering.
i also feel compelled to bring up a part of the game that has gone largely unremarked upon on this site: Correctness 3, boys don't cry, which is where the game goes too far in my opinion and plays with the sensitive subject of rape in a way that feels extremely ill-advised, crass, and exploitative. when criticism of content in such a way is brought up in critical spaces like this there is a tendency by some to dismiss it out of hand as being unable to handle sensitive content and wishing everything to be sanitized of such frictions, so let me clarify that I do not think games should never discuss rape and I don't inherently want to avoid a game where it is discussed and to underline that point i want to stress that i think suda has been better about this subject in other works, but in this instance, he fucked up. this bit isn't bad because it's a rape scene, it's bad because it is a badly done scene. the vibes are rancid in that chapter, folks.
despite that, however, and other minor complaints, it's hard not to be blown away by the 25th ward. it's such a thematically dense and stylish work, with so much to say and so many ways to say it. if Umurangi is the macro experience of life today, then The 25th Ward is the micro, the day to day life of living inside and outside a screen at the same time, of being a different person to different people, of existing in a thousand spaces at once and not really knowing who I am in any of them.
sorry about this review. it's a bit of a mess. i'm a bit of a mess, after finishing this game. but it's ok. it's all right. I can fix it.
I just need 50,000 yen.
KAMUI UEHARA WILL
I
I
I
KILL THE PAST
I
I
I
KILL THE LIFE
I
I
I
JOIN HOLOLIVE
TO BE CONTINUED -- ?
The 25th Ward was a serviceable sequel to The Silver Case & Flower, Sun, and Rain. In terms of the story, it didn't captivate my interest quite as much as its predecessors but it was still a solid experience. My rating from favorite to least favorite parts of the game are Placebo > Matchmaker > Correctness. Gameplay wise it's an improvement though. The puzzle solving was easy for the most part and the areas where you walk around are more linear compared to The Silver Case, which prevented my dumb ass from getting lost like I did during the final part of that game. Overall this is a good game and a must for those who want to play all of the Kill The Past titles.
[post-25th ward face] haha ummmm yea!
first thing to get out of the way: the presentation here is a beast, even by grasshopper's standards. if it weren't for killer7's audio design i'd call 25w their aesthetic peak, so it follows then that this is some of the coldest atmosphere in games ever. you'd think the original silver case was the mobile game.
i mentioned in my flower sun and rain review that i expected 25th ward to be a "return to the grime" after the vacation away, but it turns out that's not entirely the case. 25 coming after 24 implies sequentiality, certain concepts and people do make a return, but the 25th ward--both the game and the setting--won't provide as much continuity as you might assume. in fact it will at many points try to shatter that continuity, and then dare you to look for it anyway. the 25th is influenced by the 24th, its a more rigidly enforced and even more claustrophobic city box, but its acceleration and sterility also makes for a keener sense of meditation on itself from so many angles, honing on in not just the city-net idea but also on the dynamics of surveillance, identity within gender/work/metafiction, exorcising the past, anachronistic reflection on the work from the authors, and games and the player-character.
this is best felt in the interactive space of the game, hugely improved and more considered than its direct predecessor. tsc tries to connect urbanization with cold unfeeling logic by having you solve codes to unlock doors and shit, but they are too infrequent and don't have much behind them beyond the numbers and ciphers themselves. 25w by comparison utilizes wizardry-esque navigation thru indoor hallway mazes, sex chat as repetitive dialogue trees, and constant password/pin entering (i don't make a lot of comparisons to fsr but this element feels the most like that game) to hone in on tsc's original thesis, expressing it more starkly and confidently. one really vivid example for me being when you are dropped into an apartment complex of four 7 floor buildings with 10 rooms per floor, in order to find a man hiding out in one of those 280 rooms. the "city" has been crunched down to "the apartment building" as a database, dehumanized yet also video gamey, onto itself; your partner is a "searcher" who can feel out where he is, so you search by building/disk, then by floor/folder, in order to target a piece of data that is a person.
that said i really had to think over this one, i practically immediately replayed it to sort feelings on it. tsc has the clearest sense of "character development"--how i took it anyway--guiding it and concludes on a more directly emotional note, and the interplay between its two scenarios feels the most effective compared to 25w's further and further divergences between its scenarios. BUT 25w is much tighter its in thematic construction, managing to be ballsier and THE most weapons-grade cryptic shit without completely toppling its jenga tower, and its more fun to think about after the fact in some ways. your preferral of tsc or 25w may depend on, at the risk of oversimplifying what its doing, how willing you are to accept characters that are more seemingly static in their personality, or at least foggier (the big exception being in matchmaker, imo the weakest scenario that feels unfinished by its end but is enjoyable on its own terms for having the most bluntly dynamic arc for its characters) for the sake of interrogating their role in the world. in many cases the players perception of them changing with their understanding of the story is what matters, and that is admittedly used to great effect with further readings. but its difficult to say how i mean this kind of thing exactly
i was ready to call it my least favorite of the trilogy after first finishing it but now it may be slightly better than tsc? im still not 100% sure where to place this, other than that i know fsr was basically predetermined to be my favorite so i can say its not at that level for me, but ultimately all three games are bangers so yeah. did my best to make a review that wouldn't need a spoiler-tag but my god at this point i am just constipated to get into this more
first thing to get out of the way: the presentation here is a beast, even by grasshopper's standards. if it weren't for killer7's audio design i'd call 25w their aesthetic peak, so it follows then that this is some of the coldest atmosphere in games ever. you'd think the original silver case was the mobile game.
i mentioned in my flower sun and rain review that i expected 25th ward to be a "return to the grime" after the vacation away, but it turns out that's not entirely the case. 25 coming after 24 implies sequentiality, certain concepts and people do make a return, but the 25th ward--both the game and the setting--won't provide as much continuity as you might assume. in fact it will at many points try to shatter that continuity, and then dare you to look for it anyway. the 25th is influenced by the 24th, its a more rigidly enforced and even more claustrophobic city box, but its acceleration and sterility also makes for a keener sense of meditation on itself from so many angles, honing on in not just the city-net idea but also on the dynamics of surveillance, identity within gender/work/metafiction, exorcising the past, anachronistic reflection on the work from the authors, and games and the player-character.
this is best felt in the interactive space of the game, hugely improved and more considered than its direct predecessor. tsc tries to connect urbanization with cold unfeeling logic by having you solve codes to unlock doors and shit, but they are too infrequent and don't have much behind them beyond the numbers and ciphers themselves. 25w by comparison utilizes wizardry-esque navigation thru indoor hallway mazes, sex chat as repetitive dialogue trees, and constant password/pin entering (i don't make a lot of comparisons to fsr but this element feels the most like that game) to hone in on tsc's original thesis, expressing it more starkly and confidently. one really vivid example for me being when you are dropped into an apartment complex of four 7 floor buildings with 10 rooms per floor, in order to find a man hiding out in one of those 280 rooms. the "city" has been crunched down to "the apartment building" as a database, dehumanized yet also video gamey, onto itself; your partner is a "searcher" who can feel out where he is, so you search by building/disk, then by floor/folder, in order to target a piece of data that is a person.
that said i really had to think over this one, i practically immediately replayed it to sort feelings on it. tsc has the clearest sense of "character development"--how i took it anyway--guiding it and concludes on a more directly emotional note, and the interplay between its two scenarios feels the most effective compared to 25w's further and further divergences between its scenarios. BUT 25w is much tighter its in thematic construction, managing to be ballsier and THE most weapons-grade cryptic shit without completely toppling its jenga tower, and its more fun to think about after the fact in some ways. your preferral of tsc or 25w may depend on, at the risk of oversimplifying what its doing, how willing you are to accept characters that are more seemingly static in their personality, or at least foggier (the big exception being in matchmaker, imo the weakest scenario that feels unfinished by its end but is enjoyable on its own terms for having the most bluntly dynamic arc for its characters) for the sake of interrogating their role in the world. in many cases the players perception of them changing with their understanding of the story is what matters, and that is admittedly used to great effect with further readings. but its difficult to say how i mean this kind of thing exactly
i was ready to call it my least favorite of the trilogy after first finishing it but now it may be slightly better than tsc? im still not 100% sure where to place this, other than that i know fsr was basically predetermined to be my favorite so i can say its not at that level for me, but ultimately all three games are bangers so yeah. did my best to make a review that wouldn't need a spoiler-tag but my god at this point i am just constipated to get into this more
this marks the end of my journey through suda's "kill the past" series pre-no more heroes. this has indeed been a wild ride. perhaps the wildest. i don't know man. i genuinely have no idea what to say about this game. i'll try and somehow culminate my thoughts on this one, along with these games as a whole in due time, but i'm still processing just what the fuck this game made me feel. incredible highs all around
thank you, suda51
thank you, suda51
This review contains spoilers
i did all of the 100 endings for what amounted to be a 50,000 yen joke and it was completely worth it
suda is the only person in the industry that will make life-changing fiction for flip phones and also have it be crucial to understanding the thread he's been weaving through his games for decades. unhinged
This review contains spoilers
Spoilers for The Silver Case and Flower, Sun & Rain within.
I'd really like to see where I stand on this game in a few months' time, because based on initial impressions, I don't know if I've ever been so frustrated by a game I still, in part, loved in my life. I absolutely trust Grasshopper and their vision in the Kill the Past era: The Silver Case, killer7 and most especially Flower, Sun & Rain stand as some of my favorite games of all time; games which I feel explore ludonarrative devices dealing with and exploiting intentional monotony and hazy obtuseness in ways really only the prime works of Suda51 could. Miraculously, I think The Silver Case pretty much immediately nails this right out of the gate, with an always-morphing aesthetic and narrative that twists meaningfully from the profound to the absurd (and likely somewhere inbetween) to result in a Y2K powerhouse which screams "love" at the heart of a cold and dying world. Flower, Sun & Rain completes this cycle by completely folding its predecessor inside out - exploring a lush paradise with a Man Behind the Curtains, only to pull away the sheets and reveal a final act about atonement with oneself and securing the ability to move on and live in spite and because of ones past. So here sits The 25th Ward, revived from the clutches of pre-smartphone mobile obscurity, brought to new life in a way that overshadowed the tremendous news of its predecessors' localization. Suda in fact claimed that it was essentially like recieving a new game instead. Admittedly, I have some skepticism about the direction his writing has gone since the turn of the decade. It seems the Western journalist flanderizaiton of Suda's works as being defined as loudly quirky and crass has begun to infect his works - while I find titles like No More Heroes fun enough, there's definitely a substance and pathos to his early works missing in his 2010s catalogue. Knowing that this is a game he's only one-third responsible for writing, and the final chapters he wrote nearly twelve years after the original five - I should've seen the signs coming.
The base concept of 25th Ward is made pretty clear from the start: three cases, three protagonists and their respective demons to face and pasts to kill. Suda's Correctness seeks to essentially boil down the previous Transmitter chapters to its basic elements - a he-said she-said rugged cop story leading an emotional climax as the truth is revealed about a new Kamui Uehara. However, where Transmitter soared in its psychological examination of Kusabi and Sumio, Correctness never quite gets there, giving us a third-person lens to view Shiroyabu through that never ultimately reaches any emotional connection - much less Kuroyanagi, who's ultimately given no depth or focus beyond her relation to the narrative blueprint. Where Silver Case's HC Unit all felt like meaningful additions to the cast with their own morals and agencies, the Correctness side casts feels at best like narrative assets and at worst filler text despots. No one has any focus here, and the sudden come-and-go of Sumio and Kusabi feel aimless and purposeless. And really, even if the events aren't literally 1:1, what's being said here that wasn't already covered with heart in the previous titles? What does 25th Ward say about self-actualization and reclamation despite ever-encroaching nonindvidualism in urban dystopia with any more, or hell, equal heart than Silver Case did? I'll touch upon the ending later, but I really do not understand why this didn't end with Case 6, which at least wraps up the narrative purpose of Shiroyabu's story on a meaningful note. Emotionless and ultimately indepdent to the game's actual heart, but purposeful within the context of Correctness itself.
Outright, Match Maker is a fucking mess. This is the mobile-phone tier writing that I should've been worried about, and despite initially really clicking with its core cast (certainly more cohesive than Correctness), my friend group and I ultimately found ourselves asking what the point of it as an addition to the game even was. You could make the argument that this is a story about a haunted man in search of himself while also trying to protect his young protege from something he doesn't understand, but again, that's The Silver Case. That's already been done, and with characters that served as more than mob-story stand-ins and quip dispensers. In order to stir things up and perhaps maintain interest, elements of both Correctness and Placebo are interjected throughout Match Maker, but to neither the benefit or even the progression of either Match Maker or those respective cases. There is no purpose to Morishima's or Kuroyanagi's parts in Match Maker. The story begins with promise but ends with a nothing-burger of a plot revolving around yet another Kamui replica in the works (which ultimately as a plot point does nothing that Shiroyabu's arc somehow doesn't do better) and a relationship between this Kamui and the protagonist which ultimately goes no deeper than quippy workplace banter. The single most frustrating story in Kill the Past.
I want to save the third of this game I loved the most for last, because I know this has come off largely negative so far but there is a good deal to be loved about this game. I think when the art direction actually serves the story, which it does more often than not, it's striking. The minimalism is played to even stronger effect here, which really benefits the sterile, lifeless 25th Ward particularly in Correctness. I don't feel this is effectively handled as well in Match Maker, but that entire scenario could be dumped with nothing of value lost. Where the game truly shines artistically is in its character art and soundtrack remixes by Akira Yamaoka: both serve to bring out the feral heartbeat and terror that lies underneath the surface of this post-urban death-land in such striking and significant ways. These elements allow those moments of true beauty, of color and light, to truly shine when the covers are pulled back and the life truly brought to the forefront.
This is as good a segue as any into Placebo, where I'm happy to say 25th Ward earns its wings and becomes a genuinely worthwhile experience. By this point in the series, Sumio's tenure as overarching protagonist has really come and gone, and Morishima, perhaps the character most emblematic of the themes of Kill the Past of all, is given his due spotlight. Here, all of the purpose and heart of 25th Ward is afforded - its lengthy and profound statements about the bustle of the online post-apocalypse, of camgirls and AI and lonely nobodies; of the essence of "humanity" and what it means to live and take a life. How we define friendship, how we define relationships - perversion, taboo, death wishes and moments of clarity. If 25th Ward exists to do anything, it's to show Tokio Morishima that life is beautiful, and that his is one worth living even in spite of all the danger. It's to give Suda's best character a little closure, and to pass the torch on. To give him some rest. And shit. Suda didn't write this one.
... And I'd like to say that final epilogue, where all of the themes are explored and the loose ends meaningfully left to be closed are closed up. And yet - "blackout". I certainly don't mind the abstract nature of choice here in concept - I find some of the potential answers humorous, some thought-provoking, but none meaningful. Nothing here actually carries any substance. And if this was Suda's attempt at a "commentary" on the illusion of choice, that wasn't a meaningful theme explored in the series prior. Kill the Past has always been a story about triumph and assertion of freedom in the face of totalitarianism and oppression. I don't need that spoonfed to me through psuedointellectual garble meant to close out a game well closed-out already. And hey, Suda, if it's just meant to be an inside joke, then give me the epilogue scene after one, or even a handful of these instead of wasting my time going through 100 of them. The monotony was meaningful in the first two games and served a genuine purpose from a game design and narrative perspective. If you're a fan of Twin Peaks: The Return like the ending suggests, maybe a rewatch to see how it's really done is in order. That David Lynch guy seems to know what he's doing.
I'd really like to see where I stand on this game in a few months' time, because based on initial impressions, I don't know if I've ever been so frustrated by a game I still, in part, loved in my life. I absolutely trust Grasshopper and their vision in the Kill the Past era: The Silver Case, killer7 and most especially Flower, Sun & Rain stand as some of my favorite games of all time; games which I feel explore ludonarrative devices dealing with and exploiting intentional monotony and hazy obtuseness in ways really only the prime works of Suda51 could. Miraculously, I think The Silver Case pretty much immediately nails this right out of the gate, with an always-morphing aesthetic and narrative that twists meaningfully from the profound to the absurd (and likely somewhere inbetween) to result in a Y2K powerhouse which screams "love" at the heart of a cold and dying world. Flower, Sun & Rain completes this cycle by completely folding its predecessor inside out - exploring a lush paradise with a Man Behind the Curtains, only to pull away the sheets and reveal a final act about atonement with oneself and securing the ability to move on and live in spite and because of ones past. So here sits The 25th Ward, revived from the clutches of pre-smartphone mobile obscurity, brought to new life in a way that overshadowed the tremendous news of its predecessors' localization. Suda in fact claimed that it was essentially like recieving a new game instead. Admittedly, I have some skepticism about the direction his writing has gone since the turn of the decade. It seems the Western journalist flanderizaiton of Suda's works as being defined as loudly quirky and crass has begun to infect his works - while I find titles like No More Heroes fun enough, there's definitely a substance and pathos to his early works missing in his 2010s catalogue. Knowing that this is a game he's only one-third responsible for writing, and the final chapters he wrote nearly twelve years after the original five - I should've seen the signs coming.
The base concept of 25th Ward is made pretty clear from the start: three cases, three protagonists and their respective demons to face and pasts to kill. Suda's Correctness seeks to essentially boil down the previous Transmitter chapters to its basic elements - a he-said she-said rugged cop story leading an emotional climax as the truth is revealed about a new Kamui Uehara. However, where Transmitter soared in its psychological examination of Kusabi and Sumio, Correctness never quite gets there, giving us a third-person lens to view Shiroyabu through that never ultimately reaches any emotional connection - much less Kuroyanagi, who's ultimately given no depth or focus beyond her relation to the narrative blueprint. Where Silver Case's HC Unit all felt like meaningful additions to the cast with their own morals and agencies, the Correctness side casts feels at best like narrative assets and at worst filler text despots. No one has any focus here, and the sudden come-and-go of Sumio and Kusabi feel aimless and purposeless. And really, even if the events aren't literally 1:1, what's being said here that wasn't already covered with heart in the previous titles? What does 25th Ward say about self-actualization and reclamation despite ever-encroaching nonindvidualism in urban dystopia with any more, or hell, equal heart than Silver Case did? I'll touch upon the ending later, but I really do not understand why this didn't end with Case 6, which at least wraps up the narrative purpose of Shiroyabu's story on a meaningful note. Emotionless and ultimately indepdent to the game's actual heart, but purposeful within the context of Correctness itself.
Outright, Match Maker is a fucking mess. This is the mobile-phone tier writing that I should've been worried about, and despite initially really clicking with its core cast (certainly more cohesive than Correctness), my friend group and I ultimately found ourselves asking what the point of it as an addition to the game even was. You could make the argument that this is a story about a haunted man in search of himself while also trying to protect his young protege from something he doesn't understand, but again, that's The Silver Case. That's already been done, and with characters that served as more than mob-story stand-ins and quip dispensers. In order to stir things up and perhaps maintain interest, elements of both Correctness and Placebo are interjected throughout Match Maker, but to neither the benefit or even the progression of either Match Maker or those respective cases. There is no purpose to Morishima's or Kuroyanagi's parts in Match Maker. The story begins with promise but ends with a nothing-burger of a plot revolving around yet another Kamui replica in the works (which ultimately as a plot point does nothing that Shiroyabu's arc somehow doesn't do better) and a relationship between this Kamui and the protagonist which ultimately goes no deeper than quippy workplace banter. The single most frustrating story in Kill the Past.
I want to save the third of this game I loved the most for last, because I know this has come off largely negative so far but there is a good deal to be loved about this game. I think when the art direction actually serves the story, which it does more often than not, it's striking. The minimalism is played to even stronger effect here, which really benefits the sterile, lifeless 25th Ward particularly in Correctness. I don't feel this is effectively handled as well in Match Maker, but that entire scenario could be dumped with nothing of value lost. Where the game truly shines artistically is in its character art and soundtrack remixes by Akira Yamaoka: both serve to bring out the feral heartbeat and terror that lies underneath the surface of this post-urban death-land in such striking and significant ways. These elements allow those moments of true beauty, of color and light, to truly shine when the covers are pulled back and the life truly brought to the forefront.
This is as good a segue as any into Placebo, where I'm happy to say 25th Ward earns its wings and becomes a genuinely worthwhile experience. By this point in the series, Sumio's tenure as overarching protagonist has really come and gone, and Morishima, perhaps the character most emblematic of the themes of Kill the Past of all, is given his due spotlight. Here, all of the purpose and heart of 25th Ward is afforded - its lengthy and profound statements about the bustle of the online post-apocalypse, of camgirls and AI and lonely nobodies; of the essence of "humanity" and what it means to live and take a life. How we define friendship, how we define relationships - perversion, taboo, death wishes and moments of clarity. If 25th Ward exists to do anything, it's to show Tokio Morishima that life is beautiful, and that his is one worth living even in spite of all the danger. It's to give Suda's best character a little closure, and to pass the torch on. To give him some rest. And shit. Suda didn't write this one.
... And I'd like to say that final epilogue, where all of the themes are explored and the loose ends meaningfully left to be closed are closed up. And yet - "blackout". I certainly don't mind the abstract nature of choice here in concept - I find some of the potential answers humorous, some thought-provoking, but none meaningful. Nothing here actually carries any substance. And if this was Suda's attempt at a "commentary" on the illusion of choice, that wasn't a meaningful theme explored in the series prior. Kill the Past has always been a story about triumph and assertion of freedom in the face of totalitarianism and oppression. I don't need that spoonfed to me through psuedointellectual garble meant to close out a game well closed-out already. And hey, Suda, if it's just meant to be an inside joke, then give me the epilogue scene after one, or even a handful of these instead of wasting my time going through 100 of them. The monotony was meaningful in the first two games and served a genuine purpose from a game design and narrative perspective. If you're a fan of Twin Peaks: The Return like the ending suggests, maybe a rewatch to see how it's really done is in order. That David Lynch guy seems to know what he's doing.
I may update this more later as I piece together more in my head because I'm CERTAINLY not done thinking about or even playing this, but for impressions about an hour after I finished, this was unbelievably amazing. Not that I currently understand much aside being able to follow the plot and themes now that I've pieced it together a bit (this is how the series has been for me, but so far what I understand I adore), but what the hell does that matter anyway when this was gripping enough that I could be engrossed for hours despite just being along for its ride. At that point fully understanding this game and the themes and moments within just elevate it to a whole other level. Honestly whatever I have to say on all that anyway would take way too long and would just take away from the game speaking for itself and your own piecing together of the games themes and events. The Silver Case as a series is really unlike everything I've played before, and 25th Ward is the shining example of that. It'd be remiss of me to at least not mention the stellar presentation in terms of art and music and just vibes. Gives the game an extremely cool and unique identity. Totally understand this review is just kinda unhinged compared to what I normally do but I honestly don't know what else to say here. Game just blew me away.
Yeah, "comprehend"...
I could talk in depth about the soundtrack, or the artwork. It’s all excellent.
But I’d rather talk about what the game is trying to say.
It's a game about a descent into a new age.
It's a game about how the internet affects our view on storytelling.
It's a game about believing the net.
It's a game about the strive for perfection and cleanliness in modern day society.
It's a game about killing your past.
It's a game about how the ignorant masses turn a blind eye to things that don't align with their worldview.
It's a game about saving the life.
It's a game about crime.
It's a game about forgiveness.
It's a game about necessary evils.
Ultimately,
I think it's a game about comprehension.
Once you have observed all this game has to offer, do you get it?
I like to think I “got” what it is about. But I doubt I’ll ever be sure.
But speculation and the opportunity to draw your own conclusions is what makes this game tick.
I went through a couple of ideas whilst writing up this review. But scrapped a bunch because they were too pretentious or didn’t really highlight the games’ strengths.
You just read the final review I came up with. Could you imagine how pretentious the other ones must’ve been?
Bravo Suda
I could talk in depth about the soundtrack, or the artwork. It’s all excellent.
But I’d rather talk about what the game is trying to say.
It's a game about a descent into a new age.
It's a game about how the internet affects our view on storytelling.
It's a game about believing the net.
It's a game about the strive for perfection and cleanliness in modern day society.
It's a game about killing your past.
It's a game about how the ignorant masses turn a blind eye to things that don't align with their worldview.
It's a game about saving the life.
It's a game about crime.
It's a game about forgiveness.
It's a game about necessary evils.
Ultimately,
I think it's a game about comprehension.
Once you have observed all this game has to offer, do you get it?
I like to think I “got” what it is about. But I doubt I’ll ever be sure.
But speculation and the opportunity to draw your own conclusions is what makes this game tick.
I went through a couple of ideas whilst writing up this review. But scrapped a bunch because they were too pretentious or didn’t really highlight the games’ strengths.
You just read the final review I came up with. Could you imagine how pretentious the other ones must’ve been?
Bravo Suda
I just started but man I don't think I'm ever gonna be able to finish this if I keep having to bust it down to these BANGER ASS TRACKS
EDIT:
After finishing the game I can safely say this trilogy, that being The Silver Case, Flower, Sun, and Rain, and The 25th Ward are worth playing 100%. There's some moments in this game that I don't think will ever leave my mind man. The main writers, Masahi Ooka, Sako Kato, Masahiro Yuki, as well as Suda51 all did an amazing job tying and creating the stories surrounding the RAB and HC Unit. This shit gave me the full range of emotions. I teared up, I laughed, I got shocked.
Really ain't much else to say but this was peak fiction.
EDIT:
After finishing the game I can safely say this trilogy, that being The Silver Case, Flower, Sun, and Rain, and The 25th Ward are worth playing 100%. There's some moments in this game that I don't think will ever leave my mind man. The main writers, Masahi Ooka, Sako Kato, Masahiro Yuki, as well as Suda51 all did an amazing job tying and creating the stories surrounding the RAB and HC Unit. This shit gave me the full range of emotions. I teared up, I laughed, I got shocked.
Really ain't much else to say but this was peak fiction.
im going to start murdering a man everytime someone puts that stupid mans face on my tl
Don't depend on the net. Depend on the net. God lives in the net. The net will guide you to all answers and wisdom. Doubt the net. Save the net. Kill the net.
One of the main themes I think connects through TSC, FSR, and 25W is the exploration of the idea that the world is made of information. Letters and numbers string everything together through an endless web of akashic data, a pulsating mass breathing just between the surface of tangible reality. To attempt to reach into that unfathomably vast sea of data is to risk subsuming oneself in it, to lose oneself in the accumulated everythings.
Now more than ever we have the ability to peek through the gaps into this underworld with the use of technology. Suddenly lifetimes of human knowledge can be combed through in the blink of an eye, the voices of both living and dead can instantly be amplified across continents. But while the physical and temporal barriers that challenged our ancestors begin to break down, newer, more abstract ones begin to rise up in their place. With access to information also comes access to the hatred, grief, nonsense, and agony felt through the universal experience and re-experience of the apathetic cruelty of existence. It’s immutable, no matter how hard we want to stop looking.
The way we live our lives has been changed forever, but I think ultimately the game (and the series at large) champions the message of embracing the complexities of humanity, to reject the yokes of machine order inflicted through bureaucratic obsession with information (kill it, if you will). This is intertwined with a critique of copaganda, societal order, etc, but I don’t know if I have another ten or so paragraphs in me to get into that right now.
Anyways, maybe I’m just a pretentious asshole, but I really like these games. The 25th Ward in particular brings something of a sense of absurdist, perhaps nihilistic comedy that I think runs well with its messaging. Its plotline is arguably much more abstract than its direct predecessor, which is perhaps a hinderance to understanding its deeper narrative, but at the same time makes it all the more interesting because of how murky its depths are. Although made of two-dimensional text and images, it beckons you to step into the z-axis, dive between its visible points. Was it really made to be objectively understood in the first place anyway?
The one thing keeping this game from being near perfect to me is the amount of anti-player fuckery included in it. While Suda seems to love his anti-player mechanics, in the other circumstances they appear in (particularly FSR) I could make a case for, its use in the latter third of the game is a bit too extensive for my (and probably most others’) liking. Otherwise I’ve come to thoroughly enjoy these works and the immense psychic damage (positive) they’ve dealt to me.
Now more than ever we have the ability to peek through the gaps into this underworld with the use of technology. Suddenly lifetimes of human knowledge can be combed through in the blink of an eye, the voices of both living and dead can instantly be amplified across continents. But while the physical and temporal barriers that challenged our ancestors begin to break down, newer, more abstract ones begin to rise up in their place. With access to information also comes access to the hatred, grief, nonsense, and agony felt through the universal experience and re-experience of the apathetic cruelty of existence. It’s immutable, no matter how hard we want to stop looking.
The way we live our lives has been changed forever, but I think ultimately the game (and the series at large) champions the message of embracing the complexities of humanity, to reject the yokes of machine order inflicted through bureaucratic obsession with information (kill it, if you will). This is intertwined with a critique of copaganda, societal order, etc, but I don’t know if I have another ten or so paragraphs in me to get into that right now.
Anyways, maybe I’m just a pretentious asshole, but I really like these games. The 25th Ward in particular brings something of a sense of absurdist, perhaps nihilistic comedy that I think runs well with its messaging. Its plotline is arguably much more abstract than its direct predecessor, which is perhaps a hinderance to understanding its deeper narrative, but at the same time makes it all the more interesting because of how murky its depths are. Although made of two-dimensional text and images, it beckons you to step into the z-axis, dive between its visible points. Was it really made to be objectively understood in the first place anyway?
The one thing keeping this game from being near perfect to me is the amount of anti-player fuckery included in it. While Suda seems to love his anti-player mechanics, in the other circumstances they appear in (particularly FSR) I could make a case for, its use in the latter third of the game is a bit too extensive for my (and probably most others’) liking. Otherwise I’ve come to thoroughly enjoy these works and the immense psychic damage (positive) they’ve dealt to me.
When Mobile Games were actually good.
Anyways this is game is just fucking retarded as hell. There was almost no point in the game where I fully understood what was going on and 100 endings? Seriously? I can’t wait to spend 20 hours going through them all (of course I will be using Cheat Engine’s speed hacks and my game timer will be fucked up but at least I don’t have to waste my time)!
“Yeah! That’s it! Hell yeah, Tsuki! Oh Christ that’s good! Fuck yeah, I’m really feeling it now! Here I go! I’m about to bust my nut!”
Anyways this is game is just fucking retarded as hell. There was almost no point in the game where I fully understood what was going on and 100 endings? Seriously? I can’t wait to spend 20 hours going through them all (of course I will be using Cheat Engine’s speed hacks and my game timer will be fucked up but at least I don’t have to waste my time)!
“Yeah! That’s it! Hell yeah, Tsuki! Oh Christ that’s good! Fuck yeah, I’m really feeling it now! Here I go! I’m about to bust my nut!”