I played EarthBound without any nostalgia for it and with relatively few expectations. My overall impression was that it was broadly enjoyable despite its moments of tedium; frequently clever and fun, but never really taking its oddball setting much farther than vague pseudo-satire. It's storytelling meanders between a delightfully absurd jumble of earnest heroism, creeping horror, offbeat comedy, and wild psychedelia, all of which help to keep the experience varied and unexpected.

The game has a number of small mechanical twists that demonstrate its "not like other JRPGs" philosophy pretty nicely, as well as a number of aesthetic changes to the usual genre trappings that are fun to puzzle out (e.g. figuring out what the heck the "crying uncontrollably" status does).

Actual moment-to-moment gameplay can be rather tedious to at times, despite the twists; I recommend leaning on emulator save states (if available) to avoid retreading a dungeon if you whiff a boss fight. There is an in-built hint system that's also quite handy, so you'll pretty rarely need to look up anything even if you're playing casually.

A lot of folks have a deep connection to this game that comes from playing it at a formative time, and I can certainly appreciate how impactful that can be. For me, EarthBound didn't manage to pull on my heartstrings at all; its own irreverence and paper-thin characters got in the way of any real emotional investment.

That said, it was consistently fun to see what kind of nonsense the game had hidden around each subsequent corner, and that's a perfectly good reason to play. I liked it well enough!

"Character action" has never done it for me. I feel the floaty combos and distant cameras really dampen the impact of combat. I'm so glad that we live in the timeline where instead of representing the future of the Resident Evil series, Devil May Cry became its own franchise. Resident Evil 4 was a game that Capcom attempted to make several times, before begging Mikami to come back to the director's seat, and even he scrapped a couple of false starts before he settled on the game he ought to be making. The change in camera was the big thing that players talked about, but it was the shift in focus and tone that really made Resi 4 so beloved by its biggest fans. Mikami had gained skill, establishing multiple complementary mechanics and tying that to a campaign, but he was also more confident in his own sense of humour and whimsy. Resi 4 was a game with a real sense of personality, but it was compromised by the pressures of the surrounding franchise, the publisher and the fanbase. For his next game, he'd disregard all these aspects and make it entirely for himself.

When I first played God Hand, it took about five seconds before I knew I loved it. It's very much built on the back of Resi 4, but makes no apologies for its eccentricities. It takes the weight and impact of Resident Evil 4's shotgun and puts that behind each punch. Resi 4 utilised the sensibilities of modern games just enough to adopt a mostly useless camera manipulation system to the right analogue stick, but God Hand foregoes those conventions entirely, tethering it to your critical dodge system. God Hand doesn't care about any other game. It's fully confident in what it's doing.

God Hand's vibe is a very divisive thing, and not something you can choose to opt out of, but a truly cultured mind will undoubtedly side with it. Its sense of humour comes from a very specific place. It's a deep affection for Fist of the North Star and low-budget 70s kung fu films, but there's so much fondness for late-80s and early-90s action games, too. It loves the ridiculous, digitised voice clips from Altered Beast and Final Fight. The greatest joy is when you encounter an absurd, one-off, late-game disco miniboss, and he hits you with the same audio clips as the standard grunts from Level 1. This is a game full of explosive barrels and giant fruit. Shinji Mikami started production on Resident Evil 4 trying to fulfil the obligation to make his scariest game ever, and by the end, he got so bored with that direction that he created a giant stone robot Salazar that chased you through brick walls. God Hand was the logical next step for him.

There's a focus to God Hand's ambitions that implies Clover really knew what they had with it. A few ridiculous bosses and minigames notwithstanding, the levels are typically fairly boxy and nondescript. All the attention is on the distribution of enemies and items. It's spectacularly un-fancy. Flat ground and big brick walls that disappear when the camera gets too close to them. It doesn't care. The fighting feels great, and we're having a great time with all these stupid baddies. Fuck everything else.

Your moveset is fully customisable. Between levels, you're given the opportunity to buy new moves, and apply them to your controls, either as specials tethered to a specific button combination, or even as part of the standard combo you get while mashing the square button. It offers players real versatility as they figure out their preferred playstyles, and what works for them, while trying something less intuitive can open you up to new approaches. There are quick kicks and punches that overwhelm opponents, heavy-damage moves that take longer to pull off, guard breaks, and long-range attacks that can help with crowd control. There are certain moves and dodges that are highly exploitable, and risk breaking the game's balance. Clover are aware of this though, and whenever they found a strategy that made the game boring, they made sure to penalise you for using it by boosting the difficulty massively whenever you try it.

That's the big feature. The difficulty. God Hand starts out really hard, and when the game registers that you've dodged too many attacks or landed too many successive hits, it gets harder. This was a secret system in Resi 4, but in God Hand, it's part of your on-screen HUD, always letting you know when you've raised or lowered a difficulty level. Enemies hit harder, health pick-ups drop less frequently, and attacks become harder to land. The game's constantly drawing you to the edge of your abilities, and if you die, you have to try the entire section again from the start. It never feels too dispiriting, though. You retain all cash you've picked up after you died, and you feel encouraged by a drop in difficulty. If you do well enough on your next attempt, it won't take long before the difficulty gets back to where it was. There's also some fun surprises for those who get good enough to maintain a Level 3 or Level Die streak for long enough, with some special enemy spawns and stuff. You feel rewarded for getting good, but never patronised or pandered to. Your reward is a game that felt as thrilling as it did when you first tried it.

It's the little eccentricities in God Hand's design that I really admire. Pick up a barrel and Gene will instantly shift his direction to the nearest enemy, eliminating any extraneous aiming bullshit, and pushing your attention towards the opportunity for some cheap long-distance damage. If an item spawns, it remains there until you pick it up, giving you the opportunity to save it for when you really need it, even if the backtracking route becomes a little ridiculous. Since the camera is so stubbornly committed to viewing Gene's back, they've implemented a radar system to keep track of surrounding enemies, and it makes little sense in the context of the scenario, but the game doesn't care about that stuff. It's another thing that makes the fights against gorillas and rock stars more fun, so run with it. Between each section of the game, you're given the opportunity to save, or warp to a kind of mid-game hub world, with a shop, training area and casino, which you can use to unlock better moves and upgrades when you need them most. You can gain money by taking the honest route and chipping away at its toughest challenges, or take the less honourable route with slot machines and gambling on poison chihuahua races. It's blunt, utilitarian, and it's entirely complementary to the way God Hand feels to play.

It's the consistency in tone and intention that completes the package. God Hand knows what it is, and how it feels, and it never betrays that. It doesn't obsess over lore or characters, but it really has fun in introducing new baddies and scenarios to put you in. And I really like its taste. I like that all the big bosses meet up at a secret hell table to exchange barbs between levels. I like the fight on an enormous Venetian gondola. I like the dumb, weird, repetitive soundtrack. The developers are world-class talents, and they just wanted to make a dumb, stupid, fun game.

I probably ought to give the soundtrack a little more credit. This is from Masafumi Takada, out on loan from Grasshopper Manufacture before he became a real gun for hire, working on Vanquish, Kid Icarus: Uprising, Danganronpa and Smash Bros Ultimate. He's great at elaborate, high-energy compositions, but his work on God Hand is some of his dumbest stuff. It's great. The constant Miami 5-0 surf rock, the warbling Elvis boss fight music, and the Flight of the Bumblebee guitar for the fight against a giant fly. He's having the time of his life on this one, fully liberated from the pressures to convey a consistent tone or atmosphere. It's stunning work, and he makes the correct call every time he has to write a new piece of BGM for God Hand.

Shinij Mikami is a bit of an enigma, and his work on Resident Evil has unfortunately typecast him as a horror director, but he's never expressed a real affinity for the genre. He was put into that position under an obligation to Ghouls 'n Ghosts' Tokuro Fujiwara, and the game he ended up making was full of corny heroes and giant snakes. The subject matter was a shock to audiences in the mid-nineties, but in reality, it wasn't that far removed from his work on SNES Aladdin. By my estimation, God Hand's the closest we've come to seeing the real Mikami through his work. He's made Resident Evil 4, and he wants to leave that behind him, but EA and ZeniMax kept dragging him back to his biggest hit.

God Hand feels like the only point in history God Hand could have happened, and it's pretty wild that it did in the first place. I mean, it makes sense that once you hand Capcom the Resi 4 Gold Master disc, they'll let you do whatever you want, but they were so rattled by the result that they fired all of their key talent and started making calls to Canada to produce Dead Rising 2. Confidence in Japanese development was at an all-time low after 2006, and the PS3 and Xbox 360 resulted in some of the most embarrassing entries in many legacy franchises. The PlayStation was born out of a SNES project, and that ethos was what drove the first decade of Sony Computer Entertainment. Afterwards, a new game proposal would not be greenlit without referencing the design of the latest Grand Theft Auto. The Konami, Namco, Square and Capcom that we have today don't reflect who they were in the nineties and early 2000s. To me, God Hand feels like the final page of that chapter. But, man, what a fucking statement to close out on.

Inessential.

Despite the many quality-of-life changes meant to bring this more in line with the rest of the series, like updating the Zero-G sections and letting you use your kinesis more offensively, the broad strokes of the game are surprisingly close to the original. A change I was really looking forward to was the “Intensity Director” which is meant to dynamically alter the mood of areas and what enemies will spawn, but in practice, this mostly seems to determine whether or not you’ll get ambushed while backtracking instead of radically altering the major combat encounter. It’s a nice thrill to occasionally get surrounded by enemies, but as with so many of the new features of the remake, it doesn’t wholly commit to this idea, more a proof-of-concept that could be really transformative if it was expanded on somewhere else. Basic Necromorphs are also substantially less threatening due to the fact that it’s surprisingly easy to stunlock them by stomping on them once their legs have been shot out, and for the sheer effectiveness of these newly revamped kinesis powers (encounters and the ammo economy needed to be dramatically changed to make threats meaningful the player).

Given that this production seems to owe so much to the success of the recent Resident Evil remakes, I wish it would’ve taken a cue from them and include some bolder pieces of design and pacing- throw in an extra Regenerator fight, change the order of levels, or go all the way and pull the best enemies from the entire series to give these fights an extra edge. There are earnest discussions to be had about what function the RE remakes serve (if they’re replacements or reimaginings) but at least they’re distinct- I’m compelled to go back to them from time to time!

Really, I think the hesitance to change to radically alter the structure and encounter design speaks to the real intent of this remake, which seems far more interested in making the narrative flow more seamlessly between this and Dead Space 2. Isaac Clarke more or less had to be invented as a character in the sequel, and that made the amount of screentime that was devoted to his guilt over Nicole all the more weightless- retconned baggage that hardly landed. The attempt to expand their relationship mostly works, the revelations here about how their relationship ended are much better about setting the groundwork for their arc in the sequel. For as strong as this dynamic, it seems to have come at the cost of much of the supporting cast; compared to their original versions, everyone on the Ishimura comes as the lifeless versions of themselves. Dr. Kyne and Dr. Mercer were amazing presences thanks to great performances by Keith Szarabajka and Navid Negahban respectively, but without that prior context, I’m not sure these new iterations of the characters will stay in the minds of those who’ve only played the remake.

The biggest sin is that the remake ends up being dreadfully boring to play through in practice, the threats so similar to the original that the horror doesn’t land and the action so easy to break that it actively feels like a regression from the constraints of the earlier version of combat design. There’s obvious passion for the project here, especially in some of the granular details, but seemingly not the broader vision needed to successfully combine the old and new ideas together.

Once severely maligned by casual players and hardcore fans of the series alike, Final Fantasy 13 has been nothing but vindicated by the success of Final Fantasy 7 Remake. A hybrid combat system with both real-time and turn-based elements. A strong focus on characters and vistas. The presentation of the world as a sight-seeing tour through mostly linear corridors.

This might feel very contentious to a lot of people, but it’s true that a lot of 13’s DNA is present in 7R, and for the most part, 13 just does it flat out better. This game has a strong focus on its central mechanics - the combat system. It’s the central way of engaging with the game, and – spin-offs excluded – it’s one of the most combat-heavy Final Fantasy games to date, with even the more exploration-heavy areas having combat as their main reward.

The combat is designed really well - a very compact system that lets you do decisions about a meta-level of play that any sensible player already knows how to employ if they ever touched a turn-based combat system. As the developer correctly surmised, there is no challenge anymore in menuing to a Cure spell every other round to keep the party alive, especially for JRPG veterans. Final Fantasy 13 still seeks its identity in an idea adjacent to ATB, although the real-time component of older Final Fantasies mattered too little to actually make the quick menuing dangerous to your party. Final Fantasy 13 solves these problems: It relieves you of the burden to micromanage and additionally makes the real-time component integral to the challenge by constantly pressuring you to make quick decisions.

The focus in the battle system lies on choosing the correct strategy and not telling each character exactly what to do. These strategies are defined by the “roles” each character has, and these roles define what moves a character has and how they will behave. There are 6 roles in the game, each character has 3 of those 6 roles as their “main” roles, in which they excel. Each possible role combination of the 3 active characters is a “paradigm”. One of the genius parts of this battle system is that you can only choose 6 paradigms before each battle in your load-out, which means you have to leave a lot of possible options on the table and still have to be prepared for all eventualities that might occur in the battle. The game would arguable devolve into just another form of micro-managing if you could assign roles individually during a battle, so I welcome this limitation. There will always be some fights where you won’t have the optimal paradigms equipped, and still winning quickly despite that is what makes you feel like you really understood the ins and outs of the game.

During battle you only directly control your party leader, meaning the other characters behave autonomously according to their role and the current state of the battle. The fact that the automated characters almost always (and by almost I really do mean 99+% of the time) make sensible choices in combat is a testament to how simple the rules of menu-based combat usually are. Even for the party leader, the game gives you an option to preselect the character moves for you, still abiding by the thought that what you have before you is probably an easily solvable problem, as long as you have the correct strategy in mind. You can – of course – always manually choose the inputs of the party leader to optimize everything a bit further, and that is sometimes a key component of harder boss fights, but micromanaging one character in a tight situation is a far cry from inputting moves for every character each round regardless of the current battle complexity.

This all begs the question, if everything is automated, surely the game must not be very challenging? The answer is: Kind of. Final Fantasy 13 can be an easy game if you just try to play it safe and survive at any cost, but playing that way is highly discouraged through fostering intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The really smart thing about this combat system is how the game tries to get you to overextend yourself, and it has 2 main ways of doing this: The ranking system and the stagger system.

The ranking system is very simple, but elegant for this purpose: The faster you complete a battle, the better your rank is and a better rank means you get better items. This gives you an additional extrinsic motivation for optimization and going for offense, and it cost me quite a few battles just because I really wanted a full 5 star rating and made an unsafe decision because of that. It’s very to the point: “You could have been faster“, and holding this over your head alone is a great motivator and factor that keeps pushing you into new strategies.

The other way the game tries to goad you into making mistakes is the stagger system. Most modern Final Fantasy games have the stagger system as a bar that fills upon attacking the enemy until it – on completion – stuns the enemy for a brief period of time and gives you a damage multiplier on your attacks during that period. The interesting thing about this is that 13 is the first FF to ever employ this system, and it’s still by far the most interesting iteration. In this game it’s not only designed to give you catharsis through a bigger damage output through upon completing the bar, it actually has a few more purposes that feed directly back into the idea of letting the player make more mistakes.

The stagger bar in Final Fantasy 13 isn’t just a constantly filling bar that rewards you with a damage multiplier at the end, it consistently rises and increases the multiplier with each hit. The bar also constantly reduces (not the multiplier!) and only resets when you do a hit to the enemy. Upon the bar reaching zero, you lose the current damage multiplier and you effectively have to start your offense over again, only keeping the HP damage you did to the enemy up to that point. This, of course, means you have to constantly keep pressuring an enemy if you want to end up doing substantive damage, not to mention that keeping an enemy in check during stagger is much easier, since he is more easily interruptable.

Playing defensively is of course still an option, and having a paradigm only consisting of defensive roles is sometimes even necessary to survive, but keep that formation running for too long and you potentially nullify all effort you have put into the battle offensively. Again, this constant feeling of push-and-pull to keep going is great at getting you to overextend yourself and make bad decisions. You might be able to put all characters into an attacking role and fill the stagger bar before any of your characters die, but making the right judgment call when you go for the final part of the stagger bar is crucial. There are bosses in this game that attack relentlessly, finding windows to attack and quickly fill their stagger bar always feels like a gamble, but at some point you want to take the proverbial leap of faith and go into complete offense, lest you turtle even longer and lose that sweet 5 star rating. All systems in the game interlock masterfully to give you this one goal: Minimal defense, maximum offense.

Of course, all of this would be useless if every battle played the same. Luckily, the game understands this and has a wide variety of enemies and enemy formations that each require different strategies. The further you get in the game, the more enemy combinations make it hard to map out the encounter strategy in your head: Who should you deal with first? Can you get through this with a short buffing period? Should you have a safety healer on hand or just bumrush the enemies with a completely offensive strategy? Which offensive strategy? Is debuffing key here or not? These questions constantly turn up in play, and it’s basically guaranteed you will keep dying and learning to deal with new formations thrown at you throughout the whole game. As the game progresses, paradigm changes will happen quicker and you will sometimes change up the strategy to simply execute a single move and then move on to the next paradigm. The challenge escalates and the gameplay becomes more frantic as you go, which is an impressive feat for 30+ hour game.

One problem the game has here is that the pacing of the variation of combat encounters could be faster in a lot of chapters. There is a lot of monotony in certain locations, even with the whole idea of optimizing the battles. Some sections drag out too long and throw too many similar enemy formations at you to keep pace with player skill – which is a shame, considering that the chapter-to-chapter escalation is really solid otherwise. It feels like the developers wanted to play it too safe at some points or that they wanted to preserve the “feeling” of older RPGs where you fight each enemy more often.

The “RPG” part of the game is really digestible: All of the customization in FF 13 comes from equipment, and every character only has effectively 3 stats: Strength, Magic and HP. The lack of any defensive stat is welcome, since most RPGs don’t actually handle the potential tradeoff between defense and HP interestingly, and it only muddles the water in what the player should invest in. Some accessories grant you defensive boosts against certain types of attacks, but these correspond to flat percentage damage reductions and are therefore easily understandable.

The game is essentially one long ride from battle to battle with some sight-seeing inbetween, but I do mean that positively – mostly. The game still looks amazing, even by today’s standards, and it’s not only impressive what Square got out of 7th gen hardware, but also how fresh and unique the environments and characters in this game feel. Final Fantasy 13 presents a world that is torn between technology and naturality and everything about its visuals underscores this dichotomy. The “gods” of this world – the Fal’cie – do not fall into any standard depiction of supernaturality, they are machinistic and technologic at their core, giant and complex machines beyond our comprehension. The designs of these beings vary wildly, but they are all cohesive in that they feel fundamentally alien and slightly unsettling, almost like a mechanical version of Lovecraft’s elder gods or the often quoted “biblically accurate angels”. This is not only a very unique design choice, it also drives home the point that these beings are at odds with the natural order of the world and with the humans that reside in it.

Even the music hones in on this theme – Masashi Hamauzu created an incredible soundtrack that underscores this conflict between man and machine by mixing up electronic and orchestral music. Some of the best music in the series is here, the somber “Dust to Dust” being one of the most powerful ballads these games have to show for themselves. Hearing the haunting vocals in the melody of the games’ leitmotif while witnessing the desolation around you is a moment that will always stay with me. The main battle theme “Blinded by Light” is a triumphant orchestral piece that never gets grating and, even at the end, had me humming along with the melody. The pop track “The Sunleth Waterscape” is (in)famous for how schmaltzy it is, but that exact type of unapologetic commitment to a corny pop track is what ends up making it so charming, and it ends up being one of the highlights of the soundtrack for it.

The pacing and story of Final Fantasy 13 are probably its weakest part – many of the emotional beats miss their mark, because the melodrama has been built up in a way that feels too convoluted. The best example here is the emotional arc between Snow and Hope, which falls flat for several reasons; The biggest one being that Hope takes way too long to confront Snow about his anger and Snow making way too many convoluted and incidental remarks that specifically only serve to strenghten Hope’s grudge against Snow. While the player already knows how both characters feel, we are strung along for a very drawn-out conflict that resolves unsatisfyingly. That’s not to say that none of these emotional beats work – Final Fantasy 13 is at its best when it’s drenched in straightforward, unapologetic pathos. Each of the characters has their own moment when they decide that they “can’t run away anymore”, metaphorically speaking, and this works better for some and worse for others, courtesy of what these characters are actually running from. Sazh’s story of grappling with his feelings as a father is probably the arc that resonates the most, and the game’s theme of pushing forward is at its most personal here, and I would argue that it also has the fewest problems with its pacing.

Another problem with the story is that some aspects keep being weirdly underexplained, even if you sift through the written datalogs. Especially the character motivations of Fang are confusing – who has a crucial role in the games’ finale. Her behaviour takes quite a bit of the hype out of the climax, despite the otherwise great presentation.

Final Fantasy 13 is one of those games that really struck a nerve with me despite its obvious issues. It will stay with me for longer and give me more to think about than most other linear JRPGs, because what I see here is an extremely interesting and highly successful attempt at deconstructing menu-based combat and trying to translate it to a meta-level, making a point to be less about singular actions and more about character behaviours, and it succeeds marvelously at that. It presents an ambitious idea at a combat system for veterans of the genre that are a tired of just hitting obvious choices in menus and already think about each fight in terms of roles and tactics.

It’s a game that has a very strong visual and auditory identity on top of that, and I can’t really say I played another game that felt, sounded or looked anything close to it. It’s a unique gem in the JRPG sphere in both gameplay and presentation, and even if you don’t mesh with all the things I mentioned as much as I do, I would still recommend giving it a shot, because it does present something far away from the typical fare the genre is known for.

As I found myself circling a zombified grunt at the tutorial area of Elden Ring in order to perform the classic Souls backstab, I subconsciously knew right then and there what game I would be playing for the next 100+ hours, and not even that first sight of the ethereal Erdtree and its expansive surrounding landscape managed to swat away that sinking feeling.

"Dark Souls but open world" is a fairly justifiable tag line that Elden Ring earns with distinction for many, but it's one I interpret in a less charitable way. Considering how cruficied Bloodborne was over its optional chalice dungeon content, it's a bit surprising now to see a map filled with it deal with such little critical scrutiny by its fanbase, having an overreliance in copy pasted settings, bosses and mysteries that ends up homogenizing the experience of discovery and reward.

These issues are par for the course when dealing with the open world genre, and they would be acceptable had the space inbetween them provided any semblance of evolution on the Souls formula to acommodate the shift in scope. Double jumping horse aside, the unaltered Dark Souls moveset doesn't really offer compelling exploration outside of the small pockets of dungeon content, and when most of the interesting and unique content is relegated to the main story dungeons of the game, it's hard not to question if Elden Ring really needed to be open world in the first place.

The obssession with Dark Souls 3 boss design places you into a strict familiar pattern where stat and weapon experimentation are heavily punished, as most bosses have at least one "fuck you" move that one hit kills you for no reason, and weapon crafting insists on being a time consuming and expensive endeavor that forces you to hold onto the same high damage boring greatsword. It's telling that in a roster of 100+ bosses, Renalla, Radahn and Rykard are the only bosses I fondly remember, as they provide a challenge that goes beyond constant I-frame dodge rolling and memorizing fake out attacks.

And make no mistake, Elden Ring is Dark Souls 4, not just in the way it plays but also in the way it tells its story. Despite taking place in a different universe with new gods and lore to learn of and decipher, it has become evidently clear by now that Miyazaki and his team really have only one story to tell. Sure, it is still a fascinating story, but when I'm once again learning about secret crystal magic, beasts and dragons preceeding humanity, golden orders that are built upon lies, or chaotic forbidden flames that threathen the status quo, through the same obtuse and obfuscated dialogue and storytelling that defines these games, I struggle to find reason to engage with it with the same enthusiasm I once had for it.

Concepts like the Scarlet Rot or Destined Death are interesting enough to have had been the sole creative well to take from, but are forced to share the spotlight with the ever increasing and convoluted list of ideas Elden Ring has to offer that unnecessarily overcomplicate its world with a vast number of uninteresting factions, outer gods and characters that dont have the space to develop and enrich the universe of the game, robbing Elden Ring of the opportunity to create a laser focused experience like Bloodborne. Is Rykard's house of horrors that much different from every other castle you end up in Elden Ring? Or can we agree that the Dark Souls 3 formula has sanitized the world design of theses games to a point that they no longer have the capability to put you inside a world in the same manner Demon's Souls once could?

It's an odd thing to be this critical of Elden Ring, considering it still manages to be one of the most compelling triple A titles of recent years, with amazing creative art direction, original storytelling and engaging challenges to overcome, maintaining the strengths of the series that makes it stand out from everything else in the market, then and now. Conveying how threathening Caelid is by the mere act of the player walking into it represents some of the best environmental storytelling you will see, and the confidence to make so much of Elden Ring's content optional and secret turns the nonchalant reveal of a whole hidden area to explore beneath the overworld map one of the highlights of the series. It contains some of the best tragedy filled NPC questlines that characterizes the franchise, with Ranni's being a standout in the way it presents the most tradicional story arc in a Souls game and Diallos' being a noted highlight that feels like it could have come straight out of a GRRM book.

But at this point in time, 10+ year of Souls games, Elden Ring ironically and unintendely further reinforces metatextually the themes of stagnation and extending the life of something that has long gone past its prime. In his pursuit to perfect the Souls formula into his idealized game, Miyazaki has instead dilluted the small quirks, nuances and idiosyncrasies that made the series so groundbreaking and revolutionary all those years ago, and has fallen into a cycle of redundancy and iteration that has quickly trapped the series into a niche of comfort food. Sadly, Elden Ring is not the game we have all been waiting for that dispels the notion that open world is an inevitable flawed genre with diminishing returns, and it is also not the promise of the evolution the franchise has been desperately in need of. Maybe it is time to extinguish this flame and usher in a new age once and for all.

When Demon’s Souls released in 2009, I was going through a pretty hard crisis of faith regarding videogames. I had grown old enough to finally see their limits, the industry-imposed repetition and condescention in their design, the corners that have to be cut and padded. I blindly took the advice from a few raving cynics I aligned myself with and imported Demon’s Souls from America as a last shot before I defiantly moved on from the medium like the little drama queen I was. DeS was exactly the game I needed, I had never played anything else like it, I had my mind shattered by the way the bosses in the title weren’t so much battles as they were puzzle boxes - imposing small situations to solve, being asked to find the lone small thread that will make the beast unravel. It felt like a NeverEnding Story adventure or something, I loved it, I still do.

With every new Fromsoft game, Hidetaka Miyazaki takes the opportunity to twist the dial even further from Adventure Fantasy to Battle Fantasy, the focus becoming more oriented around a type of mechanisation I personally find diagnostic-feeling, much less fulfilling - stat optimising and gear building, rote memorisation of excruciatingly difficult boss movesets. Very disenchanting open world too; everything in every corner is there to make your character more powerful, a handful of “types” of dungeon/outpost, a truly memetic core routine that made me feel like I was just playing Genshin Impact. This is obviously just a preference thing, but you must forgive me for feeling a little left behind.

There is a lot beauty in Elden Ring’s world, if I had anyone to thank for giving me the desire to trudge through this game to the end, it’ll be the stellar art and design team. Some of the most stunning locales I’ve seen in a minute; I’m particularly fond of miquellas haligtree, crumbling farum azula, and even revisiting Radahn’s arena post-battle for a taste of what I’d personally hoped exploring Elden Ring’s open world would feel like. The monster designs are nuts too, some skirting the perfect balance between recognisable and grotesque to lend some genuine unease.

Elden Ring is a fantastic game, just not a game for me. It actually gives me a little tinge of sadness to play a Fromsoft title and be made to think “this reminds me of another game” so many times. I respect the player-hostility maximalism of the bosses and the dizzying open-endedness of character builds - and in all honestly, Elden Ring very clearly has some of the richest thematic storytelling across the Miyazaki platter right now - I would just rather watch people snap the game over their knee on Youtube than ever play this again.

2024 Addendum long after the point of writing: I'm not exactly comfortable with my "eh it's not really for me" take being among the top reviews for this game. I use this site as a personal journal more than a platform for formal academic reviews; ultimately I'm glad that I'm not alone in my perspective, but we all know how Souls fans act, and believe me I'm not pissing all over your holy object - I'm bemoaning the fact that I've felt this illustrious series slip through my fingers and take the form of something I can no longer care for.

I was actually shocked at how little I enjoyed the remake. And now I'm questioning if these games simply aren't for me anymore or if the remake's just straight up worse. It crashing three times and the boss not transitioning properly certainly didn't help.

The whole thing just felt like a braindead shooting gallery with samey enemies and environments. Exploration isn't fun and dumbed down by constantly following a literal line to the next objective and it's way too long. While the weapons are fun to use, lots of enemies just don't behave in an interesting way to make creative use of them all that enticing.

The original game was never scary and I genuinely never understood how one could think it is and the remake doesn't change that either. But at least I always enjoyed the gameplay back on PS3. I might go back and replay the original to solidify my thoughts because I'm confused rn.

Beautiful presentation, impressive art direction, incredible graphics and use of multi-media, a mindbending story that was fascinating and, at times, a little heartbreaking.

But the gameplay was tedious. A slog even. This game broke the cardinal rule of not being fun to play. A lot to admire for sure, and I think Remedy will one day make a masterpiece but they need to make sure the playing part is just as engaging as their storytelling. Enemy variety was nonexistent. Enemies were bullet sponges. A lot of tedious walking around with nothing to engage with. Tedious puzzles. And Saga’s Mind Place was a snoozefest.

Ultimately, I’m pretty disappointed because the potential for this to be amazing was definitely here. Maybe next time.