When it comes to Final Fantasy VII, I think there tends to be a general fixation on Midgar as a centralized point of identity for the game. And while I do think it's one of the best opening segments in maybe any videogame, what makes it work so well in the grand scheme of things is just how introspective the rest of the game feels when juxtaposed to its explosive sense of grandiosity.

Final Fantasy VII's globe trotting adventure isn't primarily defined by it's sense for theatrics, but by it's mellow tone and somber sensibilities. The towns you come across are oftentimes humble and restrained, carefully crafted with precision point environmental design and delicate cinematography. There's a tender sense of balance to found throughout the whole affair, as it seeks to comfort you just as often as it alienates you. That push-and-pull dynamic it shares with the player is such a key focal point as to what make the worlds of VII and VIII feel so utterly compelling to me, and I can't help but feel that the unquestioned contrast between the science and fantasy elements plays a major factor in how sheerly effective that relationship it is.

Aerith's fate is something I'll never forget, not just because of the effective dramatization found within that one moment, but because of how silent and truly felt her absence is across the rest of the game. A lot of people give this game grief for putting the snowboarding segment not even like twenty minutes later, but the fact that the game just moves on afterwards without dwelling on itself too hard is exactly what I think makes it brilliant. Final Fantasy VII allows its punctual moments to breathe and sink skin deep, and it knows that no amount of self indulgent dialogue commemorating Aerith would ever hit as hard as opening the party screen just to see a missing slot there.

Cloud might not be the person he says he is, but what he becomes through learning to open his heart to other people and show compassion makes him more of a hero than any mere SOLDIER could ever hope to be. He never has any major transformation in regards to physicality and utility, he doesn't have to. Just as he doesn't need to be told by someone that he's finally enough, he always was.

For every magnificent setpiece Final Fantasy VII has, there's a slew of soft spoken moments of beauty that truly make this game what it is, even up to its final moments. It ends the same way it began, a friendly face amidst a writhing future of uncertainty. That faint shimmer of hope shining just as bright as it always has.

My journey across The Planes has taken me to places that most men believe exist only in the realm of thought. These places I travelled to, the people I met, and the conversations I had fundamentally changed me as a person. I don’t fully know how, but regardless, I know some sort of change occurred. Perhaps writing about my experience with Planescape will help me better understand these changes and the person I am today.

When I was 14, I discovered Planescape: Torment, and while I thought the game was awesome, I could never really engage with the questions the game posed to me. I mean, how could I? What would the question “What can change the nature of a man?” mean to a 14-year-old who was only beginning to grapple with the concept of its own being? Looking back, it meant nothing to me. Now that I am an adult, however, the question means much more to me. Part of me is ashamed to admit I haven’t always been a ‘good’ person. Learning to be kind, understanding, mature, and responsible took me many years of struggling and hardship to achieve. Even today, I still struggle with this, but through that struggle, I came to learn more about myself and my nature. I can’t fully codify into words what my “nature” or “self” are because they are concepts that exist beyond language. Language can at times be limiting, so I look to art to help me look inward and better conceptualise these thoughts and feelings. I feel as though Planescape stirred the part of my soul that sought these answers, and despite it not giving me concrete answers, I feel satisfied with the new questions it posed to me. To me, good art never seeks to speak for the reader but instead provides them with the tools necessary to create subjective meaning from the experience they have with it. I believe Planescape does this quite well; I’d even go so far as to argue that it fully agrees with me here. When The Nameless One is posed the question, “What can change the nature of a man?” the game does not have him provide a concrete answer to the player. Instead, we are left with the game giving us the tools necessary to begin constructing our own answer to that question as the credits roll. Currently, I don't have an answer to that question, and I'm not sure if I will even have one a decade from now, but I'm okay with that. Part of growing up meant that I had to learn to be content with not always having an answer for everything; perhaps not every question needed an answer.

There’s more I could write, but perhaps it’s best that some things remain unwritten. I would love to endlessly navel-gaze, but that wouldn’t do me or you, the reader, any good. I apologise to anyone here who expected a formal review and was met instead by my self-indulgent introspection. There's really not much I can say about Planescape that hasn't already been said; it's an awesome ass game, and it deserves the reputation it has made for itself, enough said.

Anyways, I’d like to end this short write-up by saying that if you haven’t already played Planescape: Torment, you owe it to yourself to take that journey across The Planes. Sigil is known as the ‘City of Doors’, after all, so why don’t you look inside and see where one of them takes you?

Fire Emblem 7 is my personal favorite video game ever made.

I received it for Christmas of 2003 from my aunt along with my new Flame Red Gameboy SP from my mother. I don't know why she got it for me, nor will I ever question it. Cause it changed my life, for better or worse.

The original Fire Emblem games by Shouzou Kaga were smash hits in Japan. Kaga wanted a strategy game wherein "each character is a protagonist in their own right, and you can actually get attached to them, making it closer to an RPG[.]" I always wax poetic about "player expression" whenever I am reviewing games nowadays, and that was what Kaga wanted in his series. When asked about it in the same interview, he opines, "I think this is something people understand once they play the game, but most of the characters are usable. And characters who at first seem like crappy, throwaway characters–if you take the time to build them up and nurture them, they can become incredibly powerful. We made a lot of characters like that."

Fast forwarding to 2003, Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade follows the same design philosphy. Tohru Narihiro, a producer at Intelligent Systems states in a May 2003 interview that "The primary focus was to enable people do not play SRPGs to enjoy it." It is a simple game, released 6 years after Final Fantasy Tactics, the game most people (myself included) would credit as having popularized SRPGs in the west.

Firstly, I will get the obvious out of the way. This is an absolutely beautiful game with stunning pixel art and an incredible score. It is an absolute aesthetic masterpiece, with much of the groundwork laid out by its predecessor The Binding Blade. These two games are some the best looking and sounding titles in the entire Gameboy Advance library. That honor is owed to two veritable superwomen of the genre who do not get enough credit. There was Sachiko Wada, who did the character portraits as well as in-game CGs. Her art was the stuff of dreams for me, and it honestly still is. She can nail quiet beauty to war-weary stoicness; adorably cute to horrifically ugly and everything in between. Her art gives the game so much of its character- it wouldn't be FE7 without Wada's portraits. As much as I really like the art from the older entries, her work is the Fire Emblem platonic ideal. Her designs really do form the baseline by which I often compare other characters, even in other games. Wada has only worked on the Fire Emblem series to date and she is seriously incredible. She still does artwork for the Fire Emblem Heroes gacha and some commemorative pieces as well, all of which can be checked out on her Pixiv. Then there is the game's composer, Yuka Tsujiyoko. Tracks like “Wind across the Plains,” “Companions,” etc. have become iconic pieces within the series and that is all thanks to Tsujiyoko’s virtuosity. “Bern - A Mother’s Wish” deserved a real sound chip! As much as people hate the squeals and scratches of the hardware, she made it sound wonderful, particularly on the main theme, which to this day is my favorite rendition of such an iconic leitmotif.

Fire Emblem’s story is segmented into three different “modes,” one of which is a prologue and two of which exist as parallel timelines, each focusing on one of three central protagonists.

Lyndis, the first protagonist, acted as a model introduction for so many people into the world of Fire Emblem and strategy RPGs in general. It is comprised of ten simple maps and appropriately scaled narrative- a tight well constructed intro arc of a young woman of the plains discovering she is of royal birthright. Lyndis meets friends and foes alike who each introduce core concept of the games mechanics - the weapon triangle, siege maps, rout maps, terrain bonuses, party organization, enemy reinforcements, fog of war, etc.

Lyndis is a strong character, never a damsel in distress, neither beholden to expectations of her ethnicity nor her gender. Her journey through a war torn Caelin hints at far greater forces at work, but keeps things focused on her own personal odyssey and growth. Lyn Mode does have it’s fair share of criticism, particularly the forced tutorial aspects which has annoyed veteran players to the point that removing it has become a staple for ROM hackers. Lyn Mode is very easy too, but it is supposed to be, because it’s supposed to be an introduction to major gameplay concepts. It is a tutorial that has gone a step beyond, with a likable character arc and some of the most endearing playable units in the entire series. One of my main criticisms of the game is that Lyn ends up being less useful from a metagaming standpoint, because she is one of my favorite characters in any video game.

“The nomads of the plains do not abandon their fellow tribespeople. Eliwood and Hector are my dear friends… Their sorrow is my sorrow. Their anger is my anger.” - Lyndis in Chapter 31E/33H, Light

Then the world opens up to Eliwood’s story, the game begins a proper progression into an extensive and oftentimes challenging strategy game. Eliwood is a comparatively tame and even boring choice of protagonist compared to Lyn, sort of the picturesque shonen hero that we associate with earlier Fire Emblem. He even has the big sword to boot. Yet as the world opens up and we meet the cast, learn of the surrounding nations and their inhabitants, his story arc still maintains high quality. Eliwood mode, for better or worse, is the way we are introduced to the meat and potatoes of the game. You fight your way through sprawling maps with scores of enemy units, conveying a desperate struggle as the flames of war engulf the surrounding landscape. The political intrigue and stories of love, loss and betrayal convey great emotional weight; they serve as amazing backdrops to particularly difficult maps. The game oozes despair as armies of unfeeling humanoid killers descend on Prince Zephiel in the dead of night, or when Ostia lays under siege. The constant threat of the mercenary group The Black Fang, whom have sentenced you to death “softly, with grace.”

“In the name of the Fang, I sentence you to death. Do not blame me for your fate. It is your own doing.” - Lloyd Reed, in Chapter 23E/24H: Four-Fanged Offense

Of course the real star of the show is the game’s third protagonist, Hector, he of the blue-haired and brash Fire Emblem family. Hector Mode is considered Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade’s greatest triumph- specifically “Hector Hard Mode” (HHM) which is considerably more difficult than any of the other game modes. Hector was the proto-Ike, a gigantic presence on and off the battlefield. He feels much more magnetic than Eliwood, but their brotherhood is what serves as one of the best parts of the game’s narrative. Hector essentially abandons his post as a royal to help his friend and must deal with the consequences and his own regrets. Eliwood’s story is fully complemented and two’s stories intertwine in perfect harmony as both come to terms with the realities of the war. Hector’s path also opens up several different maps, all quite difficult; and also serves as the basis for unlocking all the hidden lore within the game. Once you have experience HHM, you really have experienced the full breadth of what this game can offer- it is an immensely satisfying and well balanced experience with a great trio of protagonists.

“Listen, Mark. You know how Eliwood is. Never wants to burden anyone else… Takes all responsibility on himself… Now, more than ever, we have to support him. Let’s go, Mark!” - Hector in Chapter 28E, Valorous Roland

Much of what we understand as the modern conception of the "SRPG" is owed to Kaga's production of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light; which on its own was produced to be a more accessible, character-driven answer to strategy games prior. Indeed, Fire Emblem throughout the years has relied on rather simple calculations for its different gameplay functions. Take the calculation in Blazing Blade for Attack Speed (which determines if you will attack twice during the fight, referred to a "doubling"):

AS = (Speed) - (Burden)
Burden = (Wt) - (Con); negative Burden values are set to 0
Wt = value of unit's equipped weapon's weight
Con = value of the given unit's constitution.

The calculation for whether or not you can "double" is as follows:

[(Unit's attack speed) − (target's attack speed)] ≥ 4

This is something that can very easily be calculated in a couple minutes just looking at a unit's stat spread and their weapon stats. Everything is simple to understand. You can tell just from looking at the Mani Katti weapon that is effective against infantry. What does that mean in the context of the game? It simply deals bonus damage; calculated as 3x the amount of damage you do (which has its own calculation.)

The best part? You don't even need to know this math in FE7. If you can double, it gives you a x2 indicator next to the might, which is calculated for you. Effective weapons will have glowing text. The weapon triangle is a relatively simple Rock Paper Scissors mechanic as well. This sort of simplicity is what makes the game’s combat intuitive for me to play even back in 2003. It has a high skill ceiling yet isn’t obtuse. The ultimate accessible strategy RPG, a direct descendant of the forefather of the genre itself.

Throughout the development of the series, Kaga noted that some people found the games too simple on a mechanical level; to this, he responded that "Well, that is an understandable response from the perspective of hardcore strategy buffs... [b]ut for Nintendo-made products, the baseline for the development is always that it be easy to play to the end, something “anyone can pick up and enjoy.” And I think that is a perfectly fine approach in its own right." Hironobu Sakaguchi, who had the very same design philosophy for Final Fantasy, would agree; and he was in fact a fan of the series himself.

I have great reverence for Final Fantasy Tactics and I think it is one of the greatest contributions to the entire corpus of strategy games. Just from playing the first few maps of Tactics I understood implicitly that this game had depth far and beyond anything produced during the SNES or GBA era of Fire Emblems. Tactics pushed the boundaries of the genre, both from a mechanical and storytelling perspective and I love the game. Yet I wouldn't recommend Tactics as an introduction to the genre to most people. Sure, it popularized the genre to people who didn't know anything about strategy RPGs prior, but I think Blazing Blade is in fact the real perfect introduction to the genre and works as a gateway into the wider world of the genre- which includes Final Fantasy Tactics in its unfiltered glory.

The units in Tactics are for the most part faceless generics, whom allow you complete freedom in how you shape you army. By contrast, every playable unit in Fire Emblem 7 has a face, a story and a unique role with stats to complement. These approaches both have merit. I love the generic soldier concept, especially in games without permadeath systems like the fantastic Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark. We have Final Fantasy Tactics to thank for that.

The strength of Blazing Blade's approach sacrifices individual unit freedom for the prospect of forming emotional bonds with the characters, whom have established backstories and personalities. I always enjoyed Serra’s love-hate relationship with Erk, even if both units were weaker and harder to train. I felt a strong connection to them as characters and had a vested interest in raising them within the army. As a kid, I simply wouldn't have been able to fully appreciate the gameplay freedom inherent in FFT’s generics in comparison versus the strong personalities of Erk and Serra. I certainly would not have felt as compelled to reset a map to save a generic, faceless unit if there was a permadeath mechanic.

The approach towards unit death in strategy games has always been traditionally one of the numbers game, especially in games that try to hew closer to realism. Julian Gollop taught the world with XCOM: UFO Defense that overconfidence invites disaster and we must learn to manage our losses- not everyone is going to make it out ok and sometimes your best soldiers have to be sacrificed to make it through the mission. Real-time strategy games are so often about throwing hordes at one another, because that is truly what war is.

Kaga took this approach with the initial games in the series because he "wanted to create a game where the player could get more emotionally invested in what’s happening." He wanted a refutation of the numbers game, and this is often highlighted by each character’s individual death quote if they are slain in battle. Any Fire Emblem player can tell you stories of the permadeath system and the psychological impetus it puts on your actions in this game. I remember running through Four-Fanged Offense in my first playthrough as a kid. Doing everything right, and I understood implicitly I had put in serious progress for my overall army's strength. All of that... just to lose my underleveled Guy to a terrifying guerilla attack from the boss. I was in tears of frustration. Then I reset the game and did it all again. I did that despite the fact I didn't even need Guy to continue on through the game. I did it because I was invested and I wanted him to be stronger and see it through to the end. I could've continued, replaced him in the army. But that wouldn't be Guy in my army. I couldn't just replace him with a identical, perhaps even stronger generic unit. He would be lost forever, and dead from a narrative standpoint. Lost as a casualty of war while the other characters pushed through to victory. I couldn't deal with that. This is something Fire Emblem really became famous for among gaming circles.

Permadeath is so contentious that the series itself changes its attitude towards it as it attempted to garner more mass appeal. Permadeath in the later entries like Three Houses is now locked behind “Classic” modes while consequences are far lighter in casual or normal gameplay difficulties. That feels like a poignant descriptor. The specter of permadeath and its affect on your gameplay is just quintessential Fire Emblem to me. There isn’t a better word to describe the experience of Fire Emblem 7 than “classic.”

"[Interviewer:] There is a scene where an important character dies along the way. What was the reason behind including this death scene?

[Tohru Narihiro:] This is a recurring theme throughout the series. The game is one with fighting, but is not just about fighting. The underlying theme of the series that we want people to feel is the foolishness and fickle nature of war and battle. This has been the continuous theme of the series."

Simply put, I don't think I would have been able to appreciate Final Fantasy Tactics as that kid back in 2003, and possibly not have forged the same relationship with strategy games (and games in general) as I did with Blazing Blade. I don't think that lessens Tactic’s impact as a seminal piece of art. I think it just speaks to why my connection to Fire Emblem 7 feels more significant.

Playing as an adult, the game hasn’t remotely lost its luster to me. I don’t even view this as a product of nostalgia- Fire Emblem 7 stands proud among its compatriots with a well designed ratio of difficulty, strong characterization, implicit depth, intuitive game design, and player expression. You can take the road of ruthless efficiency, sacrifice units if you have to, and achieve your low turn count mastery of the game. You can raise your favorite units and see them through to the end. You can do a little of both. The game is amazing regardless.

I love Fire Emblem, I love strategy RPGs and I have this game to thank for that.

Beneath the surface of Resident Evil 4 Remake’s 4K high-definition models, textures, and overly-polished sterile gameplay lies the rotting reactionary corpse of modernity. Resident Evil 4 Remake represents the logical end-point for art under late-stage capitalism, where creators are in a petrified state of artistic stasis where everything old must be modernised, updated, and ‘fixed’. I cannot bring myself to care about this game or the two remakes that preceded it. It’s become a homogenous and trite blob of nothingness, void of any soul or integrity.

"...you can make a wonderful film about nothing. Look at Fellini. The most important thing in a movie is the actor, and everything which is in front of the camera. And the decadence of the cinema, and we have a certain decadence, comes from the glorification of the director as...being not the servant of the actors, but his master...the job of the director is to discover in the actor something more than he knew he had. The job of the director is to choose what he sees. And to an extent, to create. But a great deal of what is applauded as creation is simply there. It was there, when you put the camera...that actor, that bit of scenery, that veil that hung over the river - it was there! And you're intelligent enough to shoot it...the director should be very intelligent, preferably not intellectual. Because the intellectual is the enemy of all the performing arts." - Orson Welles, 1982

The cutscene that plays when using the dynamite on a battle is the single best thing ever implemented in any videogame in all of human history and I’m only mildly exaggerating.

A macabre festival where the dance never ends, a fever dream made out of bones and clay; Hylics manages to perfectly capture the feeling of a nightmare that seems to be completely absurd, yet it manages to craft meaning within the spiral of chaos. Places with random names located in islands that make no sense; mazes and entire worlds inside machines down ladders that somehow connect, and half of the odd weirdos you come across seem to speak in riddles and the other half take the insanity of this realm as another Tuesday, but all share the incredibly exaggerated animations, that range from the smoothest hand and clay movement you could think of in battles to just three frames for each walk cycle, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

If Hylics delivers something in spades, it’s definitively a sense of style, of harsh clay figurines and contrasting colors, of poems and jokes, with mountaintops populated by cone-shaped cultists and an afterlife full of fishes and a couch. I could list every single area and enemy in this game and say, ‘’WoAH! That was pretty weird and cool!’’, but I think the fact the game is just that, an avalanche of nonsense and weird shapes—and somehow finds a way to make an actually pretty simple tale and a world that has some sort of meaning and makes sense—is far more impressive than the weird moments themselves.

The harsh and quiet melodies, the special moves you get by watching the TVs, the pals you meet along the way; it’s really hard to talk about individual aspects of Hylics because everything seems intrinsically connected with each other and totally unique at the same time, which ironically makes it so some of the moments that stand out like a sore thumb are those in which it feels like the game doesn’t go nuts enough with its ideas.

The combat system, as crazy as some of the attacks get, is still pretty light; there are some cool things about it, like how it connects to the afterlife, some item interactions, and how the game’s own openness makes meeting allies and gaining abilities completely up to you. But I think that’s where the interest peaks, in how the combat is pretty determined by what you do outside of it, and when it comes to battles themselves, while there are some interesting bosses, it soon became pretty clear others are just damage sponges and that you can become pretty powerful very easily, and that plus how the areas are designed often makes combat seem more like a chore you sometimes do to get past a certain point or gain meat and money, and that otherwise evading conflict is often the faster, less annoying option.

And again, it’s in these battles where some of the more abstract and impressive animations can be found, and if anything, the final area and boss fight will ask of you to have gotten many special secret moves and quite the amount of bucks, so it isn’t completely valueless to engage in combat, but in a game with such a crazy atmosphere and universe, I was hoping for something far more engaging.

I was hoping to see more of the party members, who seem to lose their mouths the moment they join you. I was hoping for some of the puzzles to be more out there. I was hoping for more of its insane style to slip into other areas, like the menus or the secrets… Hylics presents an impossibly creative world, and even if it doesn’t last longer than it needs to and it's full of amazing stuff, it feels as if its full potential has yet to be achieved.

But what was accomplished is unforgettable; despite wishing I got to see more of their personalities, the yellow devil and his three friends singing and playing in a bar in the middle of nowhere and plowing through the forces of the moon before facing the final fiend are some amazing moments that made me laugh despite no words being said. Wade is a menace, but not one that has to be locked up; in fact, it should be let out even more wild. Godspeed, you crazy bastard…

Also, big fan of Somsnosa, it’s always nice to see another hat with horns appreciator…

Something that attracts me to this genre is that it’s sort of like Game Design as Album, and it lets the player participate in the songwriting and performance each time. The game has to showcase all its mechanics and systems in as few as 20 curated minutes. That’s a very tight timeline on which to take the player on an entire journey, though like the best records, the best shooters use their limited time to create a very dense and rewarding experience, and invite endless replays to drink it all in.

As an album, DoDonPachi is fierce, loud, progressive, deliciously paced, and so catchy that after practicing it for hours I can sing you the full layouts of entire stages.

You’ve got the graceful refrains in Stage 1, where the game teaches its chaining system by having you continuously sweep all the way across the screen from left to right and back again, like hitting every key on the piano as you clean throngs of enemies off the screen. It’s a wonderful, destructive warmup exercise.

Stage 2 introduces big, tanky enemies and obstacles that take extra time to kill while you deal with the smaller threats at the same time, creating a bass-y drone of suspense. Having to kill different enemies that die at different tempos complicates the composition; to really jam with DoDonPachi you’re gonna have to ride those different grooves simultaneously.

My favorite part of Stage 3 has a feature that DoDonPachi only rarely dabbles in: bullet cancels. As numerous big enemy fighters spawn on screen and unleash a cacophony of bullets, you can destroy the nearby frigates to completely wipe out all the bullets on screen, giving you just a moment’s rest. You don’t want to blast these frigates immediately, you need to wait as long as you can before firing, letting as many bullets rain down at you as you can manage before pulling the trigger and throwing the screen into silence. Here DoDonPachi lets you play the conductor, and as they say, the notes you don’t play are just as important as the ones you do.

The boss of Stage 4 is about making the record skip. There’s a glitch you can trigger where if you survive its initial onslaught, then get its health to within a few pixels of a certain target, you can get it to freeze in place and become a sitting duck. To do so you’ll need impeccable timing as you dodge between and then fire during the rhythm of its twin cannon shots. Bam, bam. Bam, bam. Bam, b-... Bump the table right at the end of the measure and the needle slips, and the boss is helpless, the song of its cannons turned into an interminable rest.

If pulling one over on DoDonPachi and taking control of the song in Stage 4 felt empowering, Stage 5 is hellbent on taking that feeling away. The stage is infamous for a section that throws a sheer curtain of hundreds of enemies and bullets at you for the better part of a minute straight. If other encounters in DoDonPachi bring a prog rock sensibility to the genre, this section is a dive straight into harsh noise. It’s blunt, it’s punishing, it bangs and screams and scrapes at the same note on and on. But if you don’t crumble under the reverberating waves of death hurled at you, you will find a moment of peace on the other side. The boss of the stage has an exploit that allows you to sit in a safe spot right in front of its face. Inside that bubble of tension, the game offers a few breaths of serenity.

The finale occurs across the whole of Stage 6, where DoDonPachi brings to bear every trick, lick, dynamic and instrument it has in an attempt to blow you the hell up. It’s a two-and-a-half minute maximalist concerto and as the star soloist you had goddamn better know your part. Giant high-speed tanks slide onto screen and slam percussive, bunched up globs of bullets your way 40 at a time. Massive metal bees spawn repeatedly from the same spot while you try to deal with everything else, forming a downbeat for you to keep up with lest they have a chance to rev up and overwhelm you. The final boss has an array of deadly patterns it moves through in a set order, a last song-within-a-song for you to master. If you’ve made it this far and can still listen to what DoDonPachi is playing over the sound of your own heartbeat on this last track, you’ll be properly rewarded as all the lights go up, all the pyrotechnics flare, and the boss goes down with one final deafening power chord. Wipe the sweat off your brow, take the earplugs out, show’s over.

Of course, for the very best players, DoDonPachi lets you flip it over for a Side B that runs through all the same songs as before but with even more intensity, and with a special bonus track at the end: “Hibachi.” A true final boss to terrify even the most seasoned STG player, a blistering speed-metal apocalypse that I can only dream of getting good enough to experience live one day.

Like all the best albums, DoDonPachi rewards listening close, spinning it again and again, and picking out new nuances every time. It’s an impeccable journey, a delicately balanced and focused project, and a badass jam.

No greater indictment of the gaming press than the scorn for one of the most innovative games to come out since Demon's Souls. It's a game all about intrinsic reward as really most platformers are but in something like Super Metroid there is a reward in the way of powerups, the reward in Rain World is simply living to the next area and seeing what practical joke will be played on you.

I haven't seen a game that showed this much restraint since Ico. The game could've given you upgrades, a final boss, a significant crutch, a more present story, really anything your usual metroidvania would do but it didnt. The few concessions to minimalism like the map and the titles of the areas being shown never dampened the extreme immersive quality this game granted me.

Despite being quite game-y, this game probably bridges the cold reality of the world to the player in the best way possible, not simply because the game is "unfairly designed" but because it does actually feel like a real breathing ecosystem, the scavengers or lizards arent just obstacles for the player to engage in, they act like how animals would in real life, they go on living their life independent of the protagonists existence.

Very sad that in the mid 2010s indie game hype wave, this genius title comparatively got left out. I had only learned about this game in 2019 from Matthewmatosis and put it on the backburner till now.

within a span of two months, from september to november of 2019, i lost an old friend and former lover to bone cancer at 23 years old, and my father revealed to me that he’d been diagnosed with stage 2 lung cancer. this would indicate a nearly three year journey to where i am now - a sequence of events which tested the limits of my perseverance, willpower, camaraderie, self-love, and actualization of community. my life underwent severe changes throughout this period; essentially revising my entire outlook on my relationships to patching up and mending my relationship with my dad which had resulted in some pretty catastrophic gaps gashed out pretty equally on both sides. some outside events completely reformed how i lived, the safety and love i had to provide myself for my own wellbeing, and fostering a lot of growth and evolution out of a patch where what i’d known and what i held onto were slipping through my fingers.

during this time, my father set an example of how he would choose to live. he combatted cancer and heartbreak with rudiment, structure, dedication and iron will. i watched him break on more than a few occasions. but it was through his search for that light where he found his own branch of buddhism, practice of meditation, and a new outlook on his life. he began to teach me the lessons he’d taken away - both of us being that type of person with loud, constantly-spewing minds. he instilled and internalized the idea that meditation and serenity are not about clearing the mind of thought, but finding a means to acknowledge the thought and move on from it. it was only along the lines of that practice that we both began to unbox our trauma - both conjoined and individual. it was only then when we could cultivate growth, hope, and those first rays of light.

i had no access to therapy or professional help at the time. i was between jobs when i wasn't crammed into ones that abused and berated me and my time. my greatest resources for self-love, as they are now, were my loved ones and my then-cracked-yet-unbroken devotion to art. traumatic attachments kept me apart from those things i loved most, but in the process of recovering from a sequence in time in which i felt like i’d lost myself, figured it took recessing back to those works which had so clearly defined attics of my life to that point to regain shards of who i’d been, and define who i would choose to be moving forward. over the next year, i would play final fantasy vii six times to completion, twice with friends, four times on my own. the hanging threads of grief, trauma, self-actualization v. dissociation, lack of direction - these things culminated in a story which more and more i felt whispered answers directly to me, for my consumption alone. it’s in those moments where a bond is made between art and audience where the attachment becomes not just inseparable, but near essential.

final fantasy vii doesn’t hand you answers for the questions you come to it with. there isn’t a resolution to the trauma, there isn’t a solution to the pain or the grief. it is an embrace, and a hold of the hand, and a gentle call; “here is how you live with yourself. here is how you learn to be alive again.” the sociopolitical conflicts, the internal struggles, the budding seeds of affection and fraternity don’t reach a natural apex - they hum in anticipation of a deciding factor which never comes. perpetually trapped within the question, but offering you the means to provide your own answer in life. the final shot of the game isn’t a conclusion meant to be expanded upon. it’s simply a closing of the cover, the final page turned before the index of note paper before being passed to you with the command - “apply yourself. turn this into something that matters.” so i chose to.

and i found myself in midgar again, with new friends and a new outlook.

you come back to the slums of wall market and sector 7 with a new worldview and appreciation each time. there’s a different purpose, when your relationship with this game is as intimate as mine, for coming back here. i know the smog, the street life, the feeling of inescapable, walled-in urban destitution well. you grow up in any city poor enough and you get to know midgar intimately. it’s a familiar setting with a familiar social agency. the seventh heaven crew, they’re all faces i’ve known, fires in bellies i once shared, and now understand in a different light. they’re old friends i knew in my activism years as a teenager, they’re people i looked up to and lost through the years. i’ve lost a lot of people and a lot of faith over time. it might seem like a quick moment to many but the sector 7 tower fight reminds me of people and things that exist only in memories now.

the moment the world opens up and the main theme plays, while unscripted, is one of the most powerful in the game to me. i retain that this title track might be my favorite piece of video game music and such a perfect encapsulation of the game’s philosophy and emotional core. stinging synth strings meet acoustic woodwind and orchestral drones. playful countermelodies give way to massive, bombastic chords in a rocking interplay that rarely fails to inspire, intrigue and invoke. uematsu-sensei, unquestionably at the apex of his mastery here, provides his most timeless score. i think about, am inspired by, and draw from his work here intensely. the artistry pours out from every nook of final fantasy vii - the models, the cutscenes, the background renders, the gameplay systems, the story, the use of diegetic sound, the pacing, the designs - everything came together in a way that somehow evokes equal feelings of nostalgia, futurism, dread, fear, warmth, love, hope, and utter timelessness. streaming and voice-acting this entire game with my close friends was one of the best experiences of my year. hitting each turn with a decently blind audience provided both knowing and loving perspective and the unmitigated rush of first experience - in tandem, a passing of the torch, an unspeakable gift of an unbroken chain shared between loved ones. if final fantasy vii saved my life once before, this was the run which restored its meaning and direction.

i’ve been cloud, i’ve been tifa, i’ve been barret, i’ve been nanaki. i’ve been zack, i’ve been aerith. there are lives lived in the confines of final fantasy vii which i hold as pieces of my own, countless repetitions of those stories with those resolutions my own to meet, different each time. there was something magic about the ability to, a year after that painful strike of all of that anguish, that death, that loss, that fear, sit on the end screen as the series’ endless “prelude” played amongst 32-bit starfields and openly sob for a half hour surrounded by the voices and words of my loved ones. that was the day i learned to live again. it’s more than a game when you know it this intimately. it’s more than an experience when you share these scars. it’s more than art when you hold onto so dearly. there isn’t a classifier for what final fantasy vii means to me other than, “a lot”. sometimes, less is more. i don’t have a conclusion beyond that for you. the experience recalls everyone and everything i've ever loved and lost, and all that i've come to gain and hold dear. goodbye to some, hello to all the rest. true, reading this, it may have been a waste of your time, but i’m glad i was able to share this with someone. i hope this reaches at least one of you on a level you needed today, or maybe it invokes something in you about something you love so dearly. i’m here to tell you - this is how i learned to live again. if you need someone to tell you, today, that you can too, here it is. you aren’t alone. go find those answers for yourself.

please don't step on the flowers on your way.

8-bit games often feel strangely lonely and alienating to me. Do you feel like this? I can't really put my finger on why, exactly. Maybe it's because so many of them are such well-trodden ground by now, that it feels like everyone else has been and gone, leaving me alone, crawling amongst the wreckage the words of others have left behind.

Few games tap into that feeling more than the much-maligned Final Fantasy II. There's really no way to say this without sounding hyperbolic/unhinged/pretentious, but it's a game that I am absolutely convinced has a true Soul, one that exists beyond the cartridge, and in the heart and imagination. In the same way that many people develop emotional attachments to their cars and end up attaching human characteristics to their errors and singularities, evolving them into quirks and endearing character flaws, Final Fantasy II's straining ambition gives it an utterly human character to me, a mess of quirks and ideas and wholly distinctive character traits that are entirely its own. Even when the game has serious issues that can impact my enjoyment - namely, the dungeon designs, the one part of the game I find largely indefensible - I find myself endeared to it completely. "Oh, you, FF2!"

There is no other game quite like Final Fantasy II, and there probably never will be again, simply because we now have so much ingrained knowledge of how systems like these are supposed to work, how stories like this are supposed to be told. The lessons learned from games like Final Fantasy II have taken root in the future, but in so doing, the games themselves have been left to languish in retrospect's austere halls.

If I had to sum up the soul of this game, I'd say that it's character can be drawn out through one of my favorite anecdotes in video game history (https://twitter.com/woodaba2/status/1331685180285874176?s=20), the story of how Ultima, the spell sought after by the heroes that Minwu, the most stalwart and useful of the guest party members, gives his life to unseal, only to find it ultimately useless. Although "fixed" in subsequent releases, the emotions this bug inspires live on in the "correct" implementation of Ultima, that being it growing in power the more spells you have mastered, and it takes quite some mastery to push it beyond the bounds of Flare. Even if you do unleash it's full power, that power comes from the user, not the spell: in the hands of a party member without spells, Ultima is powerless.

Unintentional though it may have been, this moment is core to the heart of Final Fantasy II and why it remains incredibly impactful to this day. Common storytelling logic - and, indeed, the original intention of the script - holds that Minwu's death would allow the heroes to find the weapon they need to overthrow the evil Emperor once and for all, but the programming of Final Fantasy II, astonishingly present thanks to the myriad bugs and systemic quirks the game is infamous for, rebels against this idea. "No," it says. "Ultima is but the loudest cry of a far bygone age, echoing almost silently into the future. Minwu died for nothing."

When Aerith dies in Final Fantasy VII, the party is struck by the suddenness of it, but eventually come to understand that she died casting a spell that may save the planet. They can find meaning in what she died doing, even as they mourn the death itself. But in Final Fantasy II, people die and often, their deaths are senseless and without meaning. Perhaps characters like Gordon, who dies from his wounds in his bed, marking your first real mission for the Rebel Army a failure, may have inspired tragic cutscenes in a SNES or PS1 RPG (though I should stress that this game does have the integral addition of choreographed cutscenes punctuating critical moments, but I'll let New Frame Plus discuss it better in their excellent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xapVOKEMk6A), but here, a death like this brings with it only the hole they leave in your party, a wound on the very battle screen that no one can entirely replace.

Not to say that characters are entirely mechanical, like they are in the original, but certainly the game leverages the mechanical boosts the guest characters offer you to make you truly feel their absence. Despite his sparse dialogue, Minwu, the ass-kicking white mage sporting one of early FF's best designs is beloved by fans because he is a crucial asset in battle, and his loss is deeply felt by a party that has no doubt by this stage come to depend on him. Your permanent party members, the vectors through which you'll explore the game's revolutionary levelling system - now thoroughly jacked by The Elder Scrolls, becoming the foundation for the most popular RPG in the world - wherein your characters grow organically through play from orphans who are destroyed in the first battle of the game to distinct archetypes of your own choosing. In my last playthrough, Firion became a master of bows and magics, while Maria took up Leon's fallen sword and became a dual-wielding powerhouse. You can become incredibly powerful in your chosen niches quite quickly in the remakes of this game...not that it will help you against the might of Palamecia.

Victories against the Empire are hard-won, difficult to come by, and often, negligible or even fruitless. Even slaying the Emperor in his palace only allows him to rise again, more powerful than ever before, as the Emperor of Hell itself. By the time you begin the final assault on Pandaemonium, there's a very real sense that there's not much of the world left to save, so devastated has it been by the conflict, leaving you wandering alone in the wreckage of the world listening to the crucially melancholy overworld theme (https://youtu.be/SaCLoLBdxTU). A later Squaresoft title on the PS1 leaves its world in a similar state going into the final dungeon, but it never hit me there quite like it does here because that game is filled with so much exposition and character moments that there's so much else to think about and consider. Final Fantasy II drowns you in the sensory silence of it's empty world, and it is deafening.

But still, you press on.

For those you have lost. For those you can yet save.

Because the deaths of Minwu and the others, they can't have been for nothing.

You can't let them be for nothing.

Most people don't get out of this game what I do. Heck, even I often don't get out of this game what I do in my moments of highest appreciation for it, as it exists in experiential aggregate, forgetting the miserable dungeons and the way the game is almost completely broken in it's original form. But there's no doubt in my mind that this is a special game, that does very special things. You may argue that those things are unintentional, sure, but does that matter? Games like Metroid II: The Return of Samus have come to be seen in bold and incisive ways that grow beyond their original intentions, so allow me to plant my flag and say that Final Fantasy II deserves to be acknowledged and appreciated much the same, as a defiant Wild Rose, rather than be left to wither and dry up on a sad, lonely outpost on the road to a future that left it behind.

Hold down the W-key with the entire, clenched fist.
Ram some Nails directly into the brain-juice leaking ear canal, after the Post-Void headache's single repeating riff shredded the scalp off the temporal skull. Maybe just nail the W including Keyboard to wooden desk board that gets scratched around on, to save time and that brittle table.
Not blinking till the eyes bleed out of the nessecity. To catch the first glance of the gun slinging amalgamation and the eyes their ichorous break in a blood bath.
Hydrate with gore. It's some little shit's stipulation inside this Post-Void.

Smoke unfiltered pervitin with the aim-trainer gods, as the carpet flooring starts pounding waves around us.
The chamber transmogrifies with each new hit to the face.
The Reload-Key gets spammed only to reload the run, never the gun. No need for that kind of tactic in the compulsion feeding demand by the Head-explode-simulator. Though, occasionally the pinky might spread it's leg to shift shape and gear.

Yea. This game is pretty good. I kinda suck at it lol. Only rushed past stage five once in my four-five hours of play, but I'll keep trying. Reaffirming my complete switch from controller to KBM with this game feels like an insanly chop headed idea, but also like an acceleration of that process. The first few runs I thought this game was impossible, but after staring directly into the LCD sun long enough, I realised that piece of shit plastic controller cursed me with blindness and now I finally see the light.
Still hurts to look at for too long tho.
I think I legit never had this much fun in a game with an average of fourty-five second long runs. (I really suck)
It's also absurdly simple in it's mechanical components, there is a slight risk of it getting stale for some, but for a quick half-hour+ of play it is highly nutritious in value.
The player can only carry one gun, can slide to go faster / dodge a bit and can choose an additional effect after each completed stage, but the game violently just screams "Aim for the head you fuck and never stop running for your life" at me and all I can do is blush and keep fingering my Reload-Key.

Play Post Void if you like breakneck shooters,
need a rougelite clicking-on-heads laboratory
or want to be visually overwhelmed in the best way possible a non-epileptic, Videogame enjoyer can get for only a couple bucks.