I grew up in the early 2010's, and a lot of my earliest gaming opinions were formed based on the videos that I consumed at the time from content creators that I looked up to. I don't really agree with this methodology anymore, of course - it's much worse than simply playing games myself - but as a kid who didn't really have access to emulation a lot of the time, it was an easy way to pretend as if I had played a game and did know what I was talking about. I never played Metroid Fusion back then, but I'd insist that it was basically a horror title, because YouTubers claimed it to be.

Many of these YouTubers I watched at the time were around my age (then 10 years old) when they first played The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. So, as adults, they were filled with nostalgia for the game, and that would manifest a lot in their videos. Oftentimes, this would additionally manifest as a distaste for the critical acclaim that Ocarina of Time had garnered, and they'd preface almost all their praise of The Wind Waker with statements about how overrated Ocarina of Time is. It was pretty overbearing, but it resonated a lot with me as a child. These people were the most prestigious authorities on gaming there were to me.

So, even though I grew up with Ocarina of Time, I always held a certain disdain for it. I saw it as the inferior Zelda, the one that was the most generic of them all. (Ironically, I praised Minish Cap often, which is what I would now say is the most generic title.) It was only a few years ago when I finally replayed it as an adult that I realized just how important this game is to me.

Even divorced from any and all critical acclaim, Ocarina of Time is a masterpiece. A masterpiece I could only really understand with the context of the act of maturing, one that this game is fundamentally about. A classic coming-of-age story where part of the protagonist's journey is to literally mature, and at that point, everything gets harder. Dungeons become more complicated. Your guide is no longer an overbearing owl who speaks in clear directions, but a strange and enigmatic ninja who waxes lyrical about environments through poetry. Nothing is clear anymore. Nothing is safe anymore. Enchanting locales from your childhood such as Goron City and Zora's Domain have been decimated and run down. They're no longer as magical to you as they were as a child.

It was not until I experienced this firsthand, being thrust into the job market after high school, that it finally began to truly resonate with me. The constant uphill battle of adulthood, to truly exist in a society that distinctly does not want you to succeed - Ocarina of Time captures it completely. The world feels like the destroyed castle town. Bleak, hollowed-out, and full of people who don't care anymore. People who've long given up on the idea of happiness.

But eventually, it does get easier. You become more familiar with the world. You get the tools you need, and one day, you're finally ready to defeat the dark lord of your anxieties that diminish your personal growth. Despite everything working against you, you find a place you belong.

With the world's permission or not.

There's something arresting, calming, and yet so powerful about taking a walk in the middle of the night.

The noises of the city envelop you, the people you see often seem out of place amongst the empty streets, and there's an ever-palpable sense of dread. As if something is going to jump out of the shadows at you at any moment, and that you're only counting down a timer to when it does by staying out longer. What is watching you?

The threat in Majora's Mask is much more palpable of course. The moon hangs over you at all times, a grim reminder of what's to come if you run out the game's time limit. But there's still that air of dread that suffocates you every time you go down a moonlit street in Clock Town. Those final hours capture every evening stroll I've had perfectly. The people you meet all with bitter acceptance of their own oncoming demise, some facing it with grace and others with fear, the ethereal and haunting melody of the music that plays during this time, the reverberating sound of the moon inching closer toward the earth and the bells ringing.

It just makes me want to give up. It's too powerful. If it can be stopped, then why hasn't anyone tried and stopped it?

The emptiness, that blanket of fear that those final moments create - that is what Majora's Mask is to me. An atmosphere that always manages to make me feel deeply upset, one where you watch tragedy after tragedy play out over and over again in front of your eyes. Where no matter what good deeds you've done, your progress must be undone and forgotten by those you've helped.

Link has already experienced this twice - he left behind the timeline he saved from Ganon, and is no longer regarded a hero by the familiar faces in his home. Then the second: he enters a world full of people who refuse to even recognize who he is, despite them being identical to his loved ones. And now we have to experience this tragedy of memory over and over, a loop of futility with minimal progress until finally, you're close to getting a break-

There's something arresting, calming, and yet so powerful about taking a walk in the middle of the night.

The best art is art about people. It's art about experiences. It's art about life. So many pieces of art try and fail at this, and even more don't even try to accomplish it. Something like Fallout: New Vegas, for instance, is more of an exploration of political ideologies than anything else. Characters are often reduced to caricatures. While it's one of the greatest games of all time, it's not one that I have a deep emotional connection to. It's more out of a respect for its mechanical web of interactions that I love it than anything else.

Video games in particular ignore this a lot. So many of them elect to say nothing or say things about themselves. Even one of my favorite video games, Undertale, is mostly about metatext. It doesn't use art to further a point about anything other than the medium itself, and while it's still a very interesting and compelling point, it's still a point about games. It's possible to translate into a context outside of games, but it's difficult. To me, its discussion of the value of completing tasks in games and how we treat the universes of games with a hollow "complete it all no matter what is threatened" mindset can be carried over to genuine compassion to others outside of games, but you still have to do that work yourself.

Silent Hill 2, however, is one of the most palpably human works that I've ever come across. Each character feels tangible. Each character feels real. James' struggle with his own memories, and later, his guilt is something that I've had to come to terms with myself as well. Though not in the same way - I never killed one of my partners. One of my boyfriends killed himself years ago and I've spent that time grappling with that. Was there anything I could have done to change that? What should I have done? I still don't know, but I still think about it every day. It hurts and Silent Hill 2 just... gets it. James literally drowns in his own guilt surrounding the awful thing he did. What he did was obviously much, much worse than what I did, but I still relate to him. How his guilt eats him from the inside through monsters that are his literal inner demons, how it manifests in the form of Pyramid Head, a monster who leads him deeper and deeper into finding out the truth. It's harrowing how tangibly painful it is.

Though she died long before the events of the story, Mary herself is someone worth talking about. James' drive to find her, even though he knows deep down that she's gone, is what motivates him for most of the game. In addition to this, James' "idealized" version of Mary, named Maria, is a phantom who follows James around. We understand Mary through her for most of the game: she's a more sexualized and less argumentative version of her. One who isn't ill, which is something that James hated. James' resentment of Mary's condition is something that I fear my own partner feels as well. I don't have a terminal illness, but I have borderline personality disorder, which is a mental disorder that is volatile and hard to understand. It can be hell for him to deal with me and to take care of me. When Mary talks in her final letter about how James must hate her, it made me cry. I know what it's like to feel like you're a burden. How it feels to rely on someone, and how it feels to constantly worry that that person you love is suffering for it. It's a personal hell.

Speaking of personal hells, Angela's own is represented beautifully in her final scene, with everything burning around her. As she says that it's what it's like for her all the time and storms off, I truly felt her pain. Transgender women are in a constant uphill battle for survival. While not entirely comparable to her situation of being sexually abused by her family, I have been hurt that way before. I've been forced to do some unspeakable things that I won't go into detail about here for fear of triggering others' traumatic memories. Just know that the amount of power the game gives Angela despite her being a victim is breathtaking. She's the one who deals the final blow to her abuser. She's the one who chooses to walk away at the end, and ultimately, we don't get to know her fate. It's not her job to tell us what happened to her. Angela's erratic speaking patterns are highly relatable, and her fear of men is haunting. She's one of the best instances of a survivor of sexual abuse I've seen in a game.

Even the child character of Laura has some aspects of her that reflect the player back at you. Sure, she's spontaneous and often annoying, but who isn't sometimes? Laura is a scared child, who came to Silent Hill to find Mary as well. She also received some letters, strangely enough, though her situation isn't elucidated on much throughout the game. We know that she was close friends with Mary before Mary's death through her letter to Laura, though. Mary even goes as far to write that if she wasn't terminally ill she would have adopted her. Laura, in a lot of ways, was how I lashed out after my partner's suicide at the time. I was... angry. I hurt people. I cried. I couldn't take it. I felt like my emotions were out of my control, even more than usual. It was a nightmare. The unrestrained suffering of losing someone dear to you is perfectly represented through a child because in that moment and its aftermath, you feel as helpless as one might be.

When Eddie first entered the story, I rolled my eyes. Fatphobia is pretty common in art, and gaming even moreso. Fat characters typically only exist to be made fun of by others. However, I'm willing to overlook a lot of things if the art itself is powerful enough, and surprisingly, I don't think I even had to overlook it. Eddie's weight is made fun of by other characters, but the game treats his struggles with complexity - the abuse he suffered for his weight is what led him to fall further and further into his own fears and insecurities about himself. It eventually turns him into a killer, someone who's so afraid of everyone else's judgement that he's willing to end their lives. It's tragic, and even though he's the one who attacks you, killing him feels very dour. As someone who's been harassed my entire life for... obvious reasons, I really felt for him, in spite of his murderous tendencies. One of the biggest things that stands out to me about it is how respectfully it's treated: his plight is given a lot of depth despite what it makes him become. For such a small role, Eddie's grief is given time and importance to it.

There's a thread you may have noticed here throughout all of these people: Silent Hill 2 is a story about how we deal with abuse. Through these incredibly human portraits of people who have dealt with some form of abuse, we begin to understand how it affects people. It causes them to lash out, and sometimes, do horrible things to each other. It leaves generational scars that take longer than we know to heal. It can irreparably damage everything.

It's interesting to me that I often see people say that Silent Hill 2 isn't connected to the first entry. I was told to skip it entirely by most people, as the second entry didn't require any prior context from the first one. While the game is still a masterpiece without that context, I think the context enhances the experience. Silent Hill is a game about the abusive power structures of religion. It's a game about social ostraciziation. However, we never get to see these ideas in any context other than as an observer. We enter Alessa's headspace as a victim of abuse very late into the game's narrative, and we see it play out in front of us in a twisted retelling of her past. It's haunting in how childlike but off kilter the whole thing is, with the mind-defying spatial design. It's masterful.

Silent Hill 2, though, opts for a much more direct approach that works better to me. You are thrown directly into the lives of these characters - you're forced to experience their abuses with them, and discuss them, and dissect them. Silent Hill was the building blocks for Silent Hill 2's undercurrent of abuse. Playing Silent Hill will prepare you for the topics here and enrich your understanding them. Having been the viewer, you can now participate.

Silent Hill 2 is a game about people. Every one of them represents a facet of who we are. James' guilt. Mary's fears of being a burden. Angela's trauma. Laura's innocence. Eddie's insecurity. These people will make you reconsider yourself and everything about you. By the end of the game, you'll have been transformed. When you stare into the abyss that is Silent Hill 2, the only thing that stares back will be yourself, as unrecognizable as the pyramid on your head may be.

Even three years from now, I'm sure the town of Silent Hill will be a fixture of my restless dreams. And I'll be reminded of one of the greatest pieces of art that I ever had the chance to experience.

The way we interact with narrative is part of a narrative. It's why so many reviews go into their experiences with a game. I will always love Final Fantasy VI because of it being hugely formative to my understanding of storytelling. Video games have a special method of tapping into this interactivity. They directly speak to the player and make them feel empowered in a narrative unlike any other medium with the amount of direct control you exert over them.

Undertale manages this flawlessly. The metatext intersects with the text in a beautiful way, the game recontextualizing the nature of video games themselves. When Flowey tells you that to 100% a game is to exhaust it of its meaning, of it being a world you could inhabit (not in those exact words, mind you, that would be a little too blunt for my liking) and draw upon his experiences a player-like entity, it made me think about the way I played video games. The way I interacted with the art form on the whole. Had I been making games worse for myself by 100%ing them? Had I been stripping them of their meaning by hollowing them out?

Doki Doki Literature Club! doesn't bother with messaging. Doki Doki Literature Club! consists of a game that interacts with metatext but only in its aesthetics, it uses it to say nothing and do nothing. When you reach the big twist of the game about halfway through, that it was actually self-aware akin to a creepypasta game, the game doesn't ever move on from that. It wears the guise of making commentary on visual novels, but never says anything specific. What am I supposed to take away from this experience?

What even is Doki Doki Literature Club! about? Who is it about? It's often cited as a satire of visual novels, but satire has to have direction behind it. It has to have meaning. This is just a game that aims for nothing. It uses the nature of metatextuality and shock horror in order to pretend it's saying something profound but it has no claims to make. It's wearing the husk of a better game.

Some people may be surprised to see that I dislike this game so much because I relate so heavily to Yuri's struggles with borderline personality disorder prior to the obnoxious creepypasta-ification. I do like Yuri and her portrayal.

I just wish she was in a game that stood for something.

Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces is many things. It's a piece of literature about stories, one that seeks to analyze texts from the past and take notice of patterns in their archetypes and monomyths. It's where our idea of the "hero's journey" comes from. It's also something that is often taken as gospel by storytellers and artists, not as analysis but as rigid structure, which is simply not its intent. Campbell only intended it to be an observation of storytelling structures that existed, not a particular endorsement of them (though its mere existence, as we see, endorses them.)

Live A Live eschews this structure inherently by introducing its own format, a rejection of it. Seven disparate stories of varying lengths that all add up to become both a subversion and a passionate love letter to the history of artistic expression itself. Each chapter, each story is a microcosm of a genre, one that speaks to their themes in loving homage instead of cynical parody. A western is an atmospheric and tense piece, one where finding traps and laying them under the gun of a timer is crucial to getting the one-on-one gunfight at the end to be a bit easier on you. A distant future featuring no combat is defined by its walks through cramped corridors and the dread of being perceived by both mechanical and organic beings much more powerful than you. Even our present day manages to speak to the fighting game genre perfectly as an RPG, one where you grow and learn the strategies of your opponents as you fight them and adapt to them. It's utterly masterful.

However, the thematic connection between the seven chapters does not become clear until the eighth. The tale of Oersted the knight, one indicated by lavish prose and haunting imagery, is one of the most potent in Square's oeuvre. The rejection of the hero's journey is at its most potent here. A stark image of a knight standing against darkness, one of humanity's oldest and classical heroes, but there's a simple twist which reveals that the knight himself was the true villain - a man who felt so entitled to everything that he got that it led to his own downfall, killing his own king after seeing a spectre of his own paranoia. The demon king was nothing that wasn't already present in the hearts of men. Our oldest stories are not safe from our own darkness.

While Live A Live could easily dwell on this misery, a condemnation of human art, it chooses not to. The final chapter is a stretch that argues that in spite of everything, of all the failures of old stories and all the demons that we possess within us, humanity has one very strong tool in its arsenal: we continue to reinvent our stories. The artistic works of the 80s and 90s from kung fu flicks to cavemen manga to mecha anime all come together to form a reinvention of the same ideas that formed Arthurian legend and to destroy the traditionalism that prevents art from moving forward, the great demon king that forever antagonizes it. Live A Live is not only a love letter to artistic expression, or a condemnation of traditionalism and a refusal to reinvent and explore new ideas, but also a beautiful reinforcement that art continues to grow and change and evolve with time, no matter what.

Campbell's observation is often taken too closely to heart, a repetition of monomyths of old into the modern day by authors who are unfortunately afraid it's the only way to write. Live A Live dissects this mentality thoroughly, not only through its structural dismissal of it but its own twisted hero's journey.

It's simply beautiful.

The technocapital singularity is a unique and flashy hell.

It’s a hell full of spectacle. The city glows with lights at night, people have cybernetic augmentations that enhance them in different ways - some people are even just brains in jars. It’s truly something to behold how far technology has come, the way that talking dogs and people with vestigial cat ears walk into bars without so much as a second glance. Robots with advanced artificial intelligence are citizens of this city and are just as much human as you or I.

But no matter how much glitz and glamor permeates its outer shell, the city is still a hell.

It’s a capitalist dystopia, one where nanomachines are implanted in every person from birth in order to control them and track them and sell their data. People talk like they’ve been on the internet constantly because all versions of the self have been consolidated, capital allows no room for privacy or identity outside of its own simplistic understanding because nuance isn’t profitable. A company has complete control over the city’s laws, with a bumbling fool as a front for the malicious actions committed by it. A group of military police funded by said company runs the city, one that’s above the laws and commits atrocities against the people frequently with beatings being on the regular.

In all this, there’s a single glimmering light in the darkness. Through the depths of hell, as one travels down further and further through its nine circles with Vergil, one comes to a member of heaven's nine spheres sitting idly in a small corner on a street. It’s a small, slightly run-down, bar called Valhalla.

Well, not really called “Valhalla”, that’s just the nickname for its designation name, which is VA-11 Hall-A. However, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that such a place would be named after a place where noble warriors fly when they die in combat, the drinking hall of the gods. In a similar fashion, this is where those who fight the everyday battle of work go for respite, though their rest is only temporary instead of permanent.

Our time in this world is through the eyes and ears of Jill Stingray, a bartender who works here and talks to all of her clients about their troubles. All of which are caused directly by the city that made things this way, the corporation that controls their lives. It’s a hopeful yet depressing game, one where despite everything every character is able to hold on, if only because they have each other.

A character who begins frequenting the bar after the first day is Sei, a member of the aforementioned military police I mentioned. Sei is an interesting character because she’s someone who does everything right by the standards of society. At first, it appears she’s going to be an argument for police. After all, how could these terrible fascists be so bad when there’s such a nice girl working with them? Of course, it’s not that simple, and she’s quickly used to turn that image around. Sei, despite doing everything right and going above and beyond to be the model member of her organization, like saving people who she was instructed to let die or bringing medical supplies to doctors in need of them in her free time, ends up betrayed and abandoned by the people she fought so hard for. She’s left behind, locked in a terrorist situation inside a bank, and only manages to escape by casting aside her identity as one of them. When they disband, she doesn’t know where she’ll end up going next, but she’s glad to have broken free from them. Sei is a character who is bound by the rigidity of capital and seems to be doing fine, but then she’s cast from it and it’s revealed how even working hard won’t save you from the realities of systems that don’t care about you.

Dorothy Haze is a complicated character to talk about. A 24 year-old sex worker robot who willingly never upgraded her model from that of a child’s in order to get a leg up on the competition, she represents a disgusting truth about the fetishization of youth presented by capitalism. When she appears, it’s always uncomfortable. She’s never meant to be titillating for the player, seeing as how she is never as sexy onscreen for them, only serving as a grim reminder of what capitalism at its extremes is: that is to say, its obsession with youth, which we see in our understanding of beauty standards. A lack of wrinkles, a lack of body hair, smaller frames and facial features - these things that our society values so much are a microcosm of this utterly vile conclusion. Younger people are prized in our society because they’re more easily influenced, more easily made to work and become “efficient”. This fixation becomes fetishization, if youth is good… then it must be attractive. That is how we get these beauty standards, and how this pedophilic look on life is something that goes part and parcel with capitalism. She even has her own existential dread over this. She wants to age normally, she wants to be able to have those human experiences, but because that would entail a disadvantage in her field of work created by societal predilections, she chooses not to. She’s a stark testament to how much capitalism fetishizes youth, the logical extreme of when that happens.

Even some of the smaller characters, who you never end up really meeting, end up factoring into this. Mario, a delivery driver who shows up twice at the bar, is someone who feels as if he has to hide his true identity. Capitalism divides us into groups so it’s easier for us to be controlled and marketed to, so he feels as if he has to fit into being the “tough biker type”, even if he’s quite sweet at heart, and jeopardizes parts of his personality for this. It’s only through embracing that sweet side that he finally gets to be happier, instead of insulting everyone all the time in half-hearted aphorisms. The dogs that frequent the bar, Rad Shiba and his boss, both have trouble finding funding for their dog rescue organization. The commodification of living is too much for them to handle, let alone extend to hundreds of other animals. So many characters hide who they are, or can’t fully achieve their potential because of capital. From brains in jars unable to find love to pompous critics putting on a front to bury their past created by police corruption in order to find a new future.

Then there’s our protagonist, Jill Stingray. While she initially seems as if she’s just a blank slate for the player to project onto, it turns out there’s more to her than meets the eye. A relationship Jill adored being in, one that she ended three years ago, haunts her because of the choices she was forced to make in order to preserve her autonomy. As stated, capitalism forces people into groups and to decide what they want to do with their life at a young age, no matter how ridiculous an expectation that is. Jill went through all of college and got a job at a research station, which was her ordained role in life, but realized she didn’t want to do that with her life - but breaking free from the trodden path that profit had laid out for her came with the cost of her lost Lenore. Despite this, she keeps going, she mixes drinks, and she banters with her coworkers and clients. She’s part of what makes VA-11 Hall-A, well, Valhalla. Without her, it would not be complete. Even though she’s lost everything, she keeps going. No matter what happens, even when she’s evicted, she never gives in.

One of the nine spheres of heaven rests in the depths of the circles of hell. Though Dante didn’t write of it, it’s a place for those beleaguered by the battering of fiscal burdens to come and relax for a while. It’s a place of sagacity - if only for a little bit.

And that’s really all you can ask for, sometimes.

A toymaker sits over the miniatures they've created. They ponder them for a bit, and glance over each and every one. The features that they carved into them, the paint that's worn thin in places. Each figurine given such care and detail. They give a warm smile to the world they've created in miniature.

Though it is a world that has no life outside of themselves, the world of these toys is as real as can be to them. The names and faces of the people they've created, each reflected in their beady eyes, run through their mind. The stories they've spun, the relationships each toy's been a part of. Their desires, their hatreds, their fear. All of them a reflection of the toymaker's own, in some way or another.

The toymaker sets down the green-clad figure that they had pondered. After he puts the set he so carefully crafted to rest, he reclines on a nearby rocking chair. Through the jostling of the chair back and forth, the warm old wood inviting them to the realm of sleep, their jumbled thoughts create two clear questions:

What is real?

Does it matter?

The land of dreams and the land of waking may not be so different after all.

"open hearts never break forever."
- Woodaba, a writer I deeply respect.

Breakups are hard, especially when you have BPD.

Borderline personality disorder is challenging. It's as if you're covered in emotional third degree burns all over your body, and even the slightest touch or irritation can lead to a spiral. Relationships can be particularly difficult with it, obviously. Even without the stigmatization of the illness that exists in a lot of discussions of romance due to that being such a neurotypical space, being so vulnerable all the time naturally leads to you opening your heart as much as you can to people and loving them fully. Despite how painful it is, it's a comfortable feeling as well, to open up so much to people. It's a blessing and a curse.

One aspect on the curse side of things is that when you love other people so much, you start to lose part of yourself in that love. You define yourself so much through it that it's hard to remember who you were before then. It's something that I know that I've struggled with a lot, and I know many other people who don't have this disorder have struggled with it. It can be hell to repair the pieces of you that have been left behind when part of your identity has torn itself from you.

In Sayonara Wild Hearts, we follow the journey of someone doing exactly that. She journeys through her own subconscious and visits all the aspects of the self that she had forgotten were a part of her. Her friendships, her love of nature, her emotions, her virtual identity and even her own relationship with mortality itself are all manifested as bosses here - all represented through different members of the major arcana in a tarot deck. Instead of closing off her emotions from the pain, she searches them. She feels them. When she resurfaces from her slump, she's ready to love once more.

When you're as vulnerable as I am, this cycle should seem familiar. You've been wounded, and you have to take time to process who you really are again. At the end of that, though, you come to a new understanding of yourself and the world around you - just like all emotionally challenging things. This disorder is agonizing, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but without it I wouldn't understand myself as well as I do. I wouldn't be so emboldened to love and feel the highs of emotion.

Without my open heart, I would have never recovered from my ex-boyfriend taking his own life almost two years ago.

Back then, I had told myself I would never love again. But I found it once more. It took a long time to find the pieces of my broken heart to put myself back together, and even then I still don't quite know how to process some aspects of his death, but I keep going. I keep living. I keep loving.

Welcome back, wild heart.

Throughout the Mega Man X games, there's been a consistent throughline in all of their narratives. X and Zero are essentially operatives of a fascist state, one that kills all that it sees as opposition to its tyrannical rule. It is a world governed by human interests and oppression of the other, the robots that are functionally human but are treated as slaves. The games seem somewhat aware of this dichotomy yet always agree with the fascist views of X and Zero by the end. That ultimately, what they're doing is correct and should be continued. It's quite frustrating.

Mega Man Zero, though, decides to buck this trend entirely. Zero has lost all his memories and been recruited into a guerilla resistance cell, one fighting against the same hunters that he used to call himself a part of. You are the ones labeled as defective, the ones that need to be disposed of. Now you know what it was like to be hunted in the X games and it's handled brilliantly.

In many ways, it reminds me a lot of Final Fantasy II. Something incredibly palpable about that game is the sense of fruitlessness all of your actions as a group of rebels truly has; that regardless of your actions the conflict will continue on without you. You blow up the Empire's greatest weapon, a gigantic warship known for decimating entire cities, and it barely even affects their progress. You find an incredibly powerful piece of ancient magic, the classic Ultima spell, and find out that it's so antiquated in its damage output that it can't possibly be of any help to you. In Mega Man Zero, there's a similar relationship with the enemy - your rebellion does little in the grand scheme of things.

A particularly striking moment had to do with a factory that Zero takes over pretty early in the game for the resistance to find a substitute fuel source. Immediately after taking back said factory, it is nearly blown up by one of this game's robot masters and you have to save it from exploding. One step forward almost becomes two steps back. A hidden base of theirs you capture nearly has all its data wiped from it by them in order to prevent you from accessing it.

The game ends with you killing a copy of X, one that represents the original X series, and leaving all of the baggage that it has behind. Though the revolution is far from over, the game ends with a large modicum of hope that things will get better in the future. Things have already gotten better, even if only in a small way.

Though it's been centuries, the right steps are finally being taken.

What is a game about? Much time is spent trying to evaluate the holistic message of an experience in gaming spaces, often to the detriment of critique. People will spend hours upon hours finding things to say about everything, to try and tie everything together into one contained point, when sometimes, art is just not that simple. Sometimes the parts of a work of art that resonate with you the most have nothing to do with its major ideas. A lot of people I meet who love Final Fantasy VI speak of it with passion and fervor, but it's never really about how it portrays nihilism - at most it ends up being a very surface level gesturing at the fact that the main villain says nothing matters and is really evil, which is not the extent to which Final Fantasy VI portrays those concepts. Instead, it's about the characters. Maybe the soundtrack. Hell, some people even like the gameplay somehow. For me, when I was young, it was Cyan. Ostensibly a side character who was one of the first video game characters to make me feel something, Cyan is one of the first things I think about when I think of Final Fantasy VI. He is far from a major character, a samurai whose family was killed by the main villain. His inner struggle and coming to terms with his guilt made him very compelling to me at 12 years old. I had never seen a character in a video game with interiority like that before. Despite the popularity of gaming critique to be about gigantic videos of holisiticity, to demand an entire work be laid bare through your writing, it should be known that it's simply not how art works. Sometimes a side tangent is what defines the work for you.

OMORI is a game that is easily defined in its major messaging, and I think it is fairly effective in that messaging in spite of it being incredibly overwritten and poorly paced. You wouldn't be able to tell that I think it's easily defined considering that I've made a frankly embarrassing four and a half hour video on the subject, but I do. It's a game about how guilt and trauma intersect. The main character Sunny's manslaughter of his older sister redefines his entire life, and the secret he shares with his best friend surrounding its cover-up as a suicide drives him into becoming a shut-in who hides in his own fantasies. The imagery is spectacularly on point in this game. I think the Something in particular is one of the most effective horror designs there is to me. A single unblinking eye on a jagged, unknown shape born out of a traumatic, foggy memory of his sister's corpse. It's extremely potent, and I love that sometimes I see it when I close my eyes after playing the game.

However, even though that is the main thesis of OMORI, it's not what I think about most of the time when I discuss OMORI. My relationship to this game is not defined by trauma and guilt, though I certainly have some strong opinions on its portrayals of those subjects both negative and positive informed by my own life experiences. No, what I think of when I think of OMORI is really quite simple.

It's her.

To the average player, Sweetheart is not notable. She's just another boss in the world of Headspace, Sunny's imagined plane of existence inside his head. I know this because I've seen it - a common critique of the game is that the Headspace sections simply don't matter. Because they aren't directly connected to the larger plot in a lot of ways, that must mean they're a gigantic waste of time. A significant contingent of people even hate Sweetheart, but at that point they're usually just misogynistic, to be honest, considering how vitriolic it gets. Headspace is often written off as a "neat concept" at best and "game-ruining" at worst, when to me, it's integral to the game itself.

When I played, I found myself much more interested in a lot of the denizens of Headspace than I was the real world. I know that, to some degree, this is intentional and actually pretty clever design. Of course Headspace is more fun. It's supposed to be. It is ostensibly a coping mechanism. There is something oddly compelling about a lot of the characters we meet there, though. Interpreting parts of Sunny's psyche and how different symbols are recontextualized throughout the game's runtime is a hugely fun part of the game for me that I return to far more often than anything in the real world sections. Captain Spaceboy is Sunny's fear of abandonment, his isolation atop a freezing mountain after a divorce a representation of Sunny's own self-isolation to protect himself from his friends finding out the truth about what happened. Mr. Jawsum, Sunny's negative opinions about bosses and work culture, is aggressively silly and not very complicated because Sunny doesn't truly understand the intricacies of capitalism's evil. All he sees it as is when guys are incompetent. Sprout Moles smell like dirty laundry because Sunny never washes his clothes. That kind of thing.

What Sweetheart represents is much more complex and interesting than any other character in Headspace to me by a ridiculously wide margin, which is fitting given that she has the most screentime of any of the Headspace original characters. This is mainly due to her role as the "distraction": she is supposed to keep Sunny from finding out The Truth, though she doesn't know that. There is a deeper reason to why she is the distraction, though. She seems vapid on the surface, just a pink lady who the game tells you is obnoxious regularly and is constantly framed as the villain in every interaction, but in reality she is something more than that (as amazing as she is already): she is Sunny's own repressed femininity. She is Sunny's desire to break out of his egg.

In the route where you stay inside, more of Headspace opens up to you. You're able to return to locations to see what's been going on with characters since you last saw them. There's a very, very, very mean-spirited gag with Sweetheart here where she's forced to be a slave to another character which makes me want to vomit, but that's besides the point. In this stretch of the game, Omori, Sunny's alter ego, is given a potion that "turns him into a girl". Whatever this means is not elaborated on, but to me it is very clear: Sunny is a transgender girl, and this potion is a subconscious desire of hers manifested. It's not common for cis people to have intense lucid dreams about bottomless gender swap potions.

Sweetheart is only evil because Sunny has been influenced by a society ruled by masculinity, one where he is conditioned to act masculine, to think that way. She is constantly attacked by the game, stated to be annoying and "the source of evil" by some of Headspace's denizens who we are supposed to trust like Sunny's own distorted versions of his best friends. It makes Sunny feel safe, like he has nothing else to his gender. If she's evil, then clearly, he must be cis, right? Sweetheart is the repression of transgender thoughts that every trans person has had at some point. I know I have.

Before I came out as trans, I spent several years questioning. In a lot of ways, I lived my life as two people. There was a masculine front I had, and my other half, who was my feminine side that I only let out online. I felt terrible about it, and at every turn, I tried to squash that side. It tore me up inside, and it showed up in my dreams frequently. I even wrote short fiction about a character with the same issue, a lycanthrope who turns into a woman instead of a wolf. Eventually, it was all I could think about. Luckily, this does have a happy ending: I do get help, and I have been on HRT for seven months now. But there are reasons why Sweetheart is so deeply relatable to me. Why this character has dominated most of my thought process surrounding this game, why I discuss her endlessly, why I am so frustrated by people who hate her where they would praise a male villain for doing the same things that they hate her for.

Because to me, Sweetheart isn't just gender in the sense of gender envy. She is desire to be something you can't, how hard your brain works to stop you from becoming your true self. She represents my own femininity that I fought so hard to show to people, and seeing people dislike her confidence only makes me love her more. The awful way that she's treated by the game just makes me want to hold onto her tighter.

OMOCAT obviously intended for none of this. Frankly, I'm not sure why Sweetheart is in the game at all - she's just a punching bag for it. It's really mean-spirited, ghoulish, and a bit racist considering she's one of the only major dark skinned characters in its runtime. However, in this case, I don't care about developer intent. I have dissected OMOCAT as a person more than most people and I fundamentally disagree with her interpretations of her own work in a lot of regards.

Besides, as the great pink woman once said, "Sweetheart is for sharing!" It's my turn with her now.

My country has a history of meddling in foreign affairs. It is an empire, after all.

The United States, in order to protect the interests of capital, has overextended into other nations often. The Middle East, most famously. Vietnam as well. Brazil, closest to my heart. An untold amount of others that we simply don't know about. It's a harrowing thing to think about, a terrible pill to swallow - these forever wars are simply the end goal of the systems and structures we have created for ourselves, one that we as individuals have no power to stop.

There are many reasons for these. Resources. A simple show of strength. Perhaps to even disrupt political progress because it will bring down the empire. In Twilight Princess, it is simply revenge. A very human emotion for the machine to harbor, and perhaps too simple. Ganondorf merely seeks to capture what he perceives that he deserves, what he thinks that he is entitled to.

Maybe I'm wrong that it's too simple. Now that I've written out, I see that perhaps that motivation for tyranny is accurately portrayed, from a certain point of view.

So he uses Zant, a puppet in a nation that has been oppressed by Hyrule for aeons. One that has been exploited and segregated from the land of light for perceived crimes against systemic abusers. A vilified group of people who were shunted outside of reality. Through this oppression it was easy for a fascist such as Ganon's toy to arise, one who was used so easily as a tool for the larger game of capital. After all, a God came from the heavens and gave him something to blame. A system to believe in. Something to trust in.

Zant is a pitiable, pathetic creature. Ganon is a disgusting manipulator.

A fascist coup backed by a foreign empire in the interest of political power. Countries used as nothing more than ways to gain ever more money.

It's a story that's been played out over and over again, as old as are light and shadow.