I've always felt like the most underappreciated aspect of any gaming system is the ability to have fun with it even if you don't have any games. Granted it wasn't until a certain stage of technological development that this really became practical; at least in the early days, many consoles simply checked to see if there was something in them and then booted it up. Starting somewhere around the fifth generation of consoles, though, your fancy box might actually be able to do more than just look for software. Whether it's the PS1 and its fancy CD player, the Nintendo DS's Pictochat and the 3DS' extensive Streetpass suite, or the Wii's plethora of superfluous little Channels - even specially made pack-in titles like Astro's Playroom - it's always nice to have a reason to power on no matter how barren your shelf might be. Amongst them all, though, Nintendo's Satellaview felt weirdly ahead of its time in a few key ways, and I can't think of anything else quite like it even today.

The Satellaview is an oddity that I've always found deeply charming but have unfortunately never had the opportunity to experience myself. If you're not familiar, Nintendo developed a satellite modem add-on for the Super Famicom alongside broadcasting company St.GIGA. Released in 1995, it connected to the bottom of the console and gave subscribers access to all sorts of content - primarily games, and you could keep one downloaded and stored until you replaced it. But you could also access popular gaming and news publications of the time such as Famitsu, as well as audio broadcasts ranging from music to celebrity interviews. (You might have gleaned as much from the blurb up above.) There were even games designed to have live voice acting provided during gameplay. Yes, live! Can you imagine? It's the kind of thing that, unless somebody had the foresight to record it, could only be experienced once. Eat your heart out, Amazon Luna. Of course, the Satellaview had remarkable third-party support for the time, and there were games released for it that have never been re-released (and some that have been, though not in quite the same form). Some noteworthy examples are a remake of the original The Legend of Zelda and a sequel of sorts to A Link to the Past, as well as the first release of Radical Dreamers, which served as a "bridge" between Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. I'm not really here to talk about any of that, though. I want to talk about the Satellaview itself and how it presented itself to the player.

Upon booting up for the first time, you'd be greeted by a talking TV who would ask you for your name. After this brief introduction, you'd be dumped into a little city that positively smacks of Mother/Earthbound. All around you were buildings that weren't just for show: While some were there to provide services to the player character, others served as gateways into the Satellaview's various features. A hub level, if you will. This contextualization of a console's menus as a physical location to explore is absolutely adorable and if it's been done elsewhere, I'm struggling to think of examples. Of course, while not being especially game-y on its own, you do have an inventory and currency and can purchase items or upgrades for your character. There's ostensibly a plot of some kind to follow; I'm not totally sure what it is myself, but if the name is anything to go by, I'd assume it involves a town that had its name stolen. It even comes with a sweet little OST of its own! It's an outrageously cool concept, and I'd love to see somebody pick it up and go even further with it. How about some kind of Animal Crossing-style life sim that likewise runs on the system's internal clock? You could decorate your house with goodies from games you've played and visit the houses of friends you've added, which might show up in your own personal town. Maybe you could freely move buildings around for ease of access and get everything set up just the way you like it. I'm not gonna spend all day dreaming about it, but it has a ton of potential. Of course, I reckon it's fair to assume that most devs would pass on it simply because of how much effort would need to go into it when a simple menu interface would suffice. But it would do a ton to add to the charm of a device, especially considering how dull systems like the Switch are before you actually launch some software.

Sadly, just getting your hands on an old Satellaview system and plugging it in won't avail you of much. Nintendo's relationship with St.GIGA soured towards the end of the add-on's lifetime and the service was ended about five years after its launch. St.GIGA itself went bankrupt and was absorbed into Japanese media company WireBee. There's nothing to find on the air anymore, and even if there was, there were so many one-time broadcasts that you'd never get the full experience. Hasn't stopped people from trying to restore what they can, because of course it hasn't. Whether it's the BIOS or the games themselves, there are still ways you can recapture that magic, even if only for a moment. As always, I salute those who are so dedicated to preserving the past - because there's so much I'd miss out on if not for them.

They got me good. They got me young.

I first encountered this nightmarish inversion of Tetris on one of my designated "Good Job, Sport" A+ report card reward trips. Dad took my brother and I to the local arcade/minigolf spot and gave us a couple of twenties. Told us to have at it. And have at it we did. But while my brother was off playing Skee-Ball or some shit, I was eyeing bigger prizes. Crane games and coin pushers and... What was this? A game where you stack blocks? For a Game Boy Micro? Surely it can't be that easy.

I suppose it isn't entirely straightforward. You start off with three blocks, which slowly move back and forth until you lock them into place with a button press. Then, with your base set, you must stack additional blocks upon it until you reach the very top, the speed of the blocks increasing to an almost maddening pace as you progress. If you mistime your press, you'll overshoot it and lose any blocks that extend past the edge, or lose all of them if you missed completely. Of course, the game gradually forces you to shed blocks as time goes on, so even if your play is perfect you will only have one by the end. As such, perfect is the only thing you can be if you choose to go for gold. And gold is very much what you're striving for, with the major prizes almost universally being desirable high-dollar items. There is a minor prize tier - also assuredly populated by miserable little toys and trinkets, the kind you can get at the redemption counter for a paltry sum of tickets. It's just a distraction. You know what you're here for.

It took me a few tries, but eventually I got a good rhythm going and was able to make it to the top effortlessly. And then it happened. A mere five plays in, I managed to clear the top. The machine flashed and strobed and let everybody in the immediate vicinity know that I was the rightful owner of a brand-spanking new Nintendo device. I felt like a winner. I felt like a king. A god.

I was the tender age of twelve years old.

Ever since that day, I'd been chasing that high. Every time I saw that pillar of perfidy I was there, slamming in my ill-gotten dollarydoos, brain trained on whatever Playstation Portable or iPhone was being offered. Each go-around, I would blow past that "minor prize" line. Tattoos? Silly Bandz? Who wants 'em? Those are for chumps, and I'm no chump. I'm a fucking gamer. And somehow, even after watching that final block plummet once more after flushing ten bucks down the drain, I was still sure I could make it worth my while. Just one more try, I says. Just one more! I've still got it in me! I can do it again! What a fool I was.

I know my timing was impeccable. I've made it to the final tier countless times. My nerves were steely; my palms were dry. Yet still the block fell. Perhaps I was just too complacent. Perhaps I just needed to adjust slightly, and then the grand prize would be mine. But every time I made it up to that ultimate drop, no matter how precise I was sure I was in halting that oversized, overactive pixel, it would plummet all the same. And that's because it goes willingly. You've seen it, too. That split-second shift just barely perceptible to the human eye. Even if you could not have been any more precise, that squalid square will take one broad step off the edge and unto its doom. Once you see it, you will never forget it. After that, the fault for any pain you suffer by insisting upon engaging in this Sisyphean endeavor lies squarely with you.

More than any other "skill" game I can think of, Stacker gaslights you and it gaslights you hard. Its gameplay is so hilariously simple (it's in the damn name) that it tricks anybody and everybody into thinking they have a shot. And then right as you're on the precipice of greatness, it yanks the rug out from underneath you and spits in your face. Nice job stacking those blocks, dumbass! Try again! Everybody knows these games lie to you. Everybody knows these aren't meant to be won, like carnie games at the state fair. But Stacker is like playing the basketball toss, and instead of having a bent hoop, they had Shaquille O'Neal hiding behind an unusually tall rock and slapping the ball away every time you came so much as close to scoring. After you see it happen once, you know you have no chance. The only way that ball is getting in there is if the meister of Shaq Fu decides you're worthy of it. You may as well be playing a slot machine, but this armless bandit likes to prey on kids (and adult-sized kids) with more money than sense.

If I knew who was responsible, I'd lock them in a dank cellar and demand they build a ten-tier tower of cards in order to be released. And then I'd turn on the six strategically-placed industrial fans right as they were reaching for the final pair.

By the by, since I already had a GBA, I ended up giving that Game Boy Micro to a girl I was sweethearts with at the time. I should have kept it. Being able to produce Golden Sun out of thin air is a massive flex that I was only able to experience once.

Dreadfully dull reinterpretation of 2013's Tomb Raider reboot as a rail shooter. You don't even play as Lara; obviously to justify how there can be up to four players, but also presumably because you wouldn't be able to see her otherwise.

The gameplay really isn't much worth talking about, so I won't. Biggest disappointment for me is that the design of the gun makes the idea of dual wielding highly impractical at absolute best - racking the slide is kind of fun and tactile but demands an extra hand. I know this Lara isn't really known for it, but surely being able to go solo/2-player with guns akimbo would have been a much more entertaining prospect. But I guess if your local arcade didn't have much else on offer (mine largely doesn't) this would satisfy the urge to point and shoot at something.

Between its dark and gritty aesthetic, its Trent Reznor soundtrack and its intimate relationship with the pop-culturization of the Internet, there may not be a more distinctively 90's game than Quake. There may also not be a more influential one, and while that can be readily debated, the one thing you can't debate is that Quake is everywhere.

It's really hard to find other games that have had such a profound effect on gaming as not only a hobby but an art form. This was where having that fancy extra dimension really started to make sense. The shareware version of Quake dropped one day before the original Japanese release of Super Mario 64. More than a quarter of a century later, both of these games not only continue to be The Guy To Wanna Be for their respective genres, but also serve as platforms upon which speedrunners and other sick, twisted individuals can demonstrate their digital wizardry. That's before mentioning Quake's hand in popularizing speedrunning and the online deathmatch. And of course, there's all of the other classic titles directly inspired by it or based off of it, such as the OG Team Fortress and Half-Life itself (with GoldSRC being a modified version of the Quake engine). While I didn't grow up with Quake, I've been feeling its influence my whole life.

It's especially remarkable because Quake is a far cry from the original vision its creators had for it, designed first as a more fantastical and RPG-ish third person action game. The title stemmed from the player's key weapon, a mighty and magical hammer that could blow away foes with the sheer force of its swings. The name Quake ended up being terrifically apt regardless of this departure, not only for the way it shook up the industry, but also the way its troubled development fragmented id Software. How many success stories like Quake do you know of that effectively killed the company they spawned from? It's also another great example of how taking the "safest" path arguably led to the greatest returns. While it might be interesting to see what would have happened if Quake had stayed true to its earliest concepts, I'd be deeply concerned as to what the rest of the gaming landscape would look like in the absence of Quake as you and I know it.

And, y'know, it's still pretty fun to play. So there's that.

If quad damage were real I'd use it to cook a chicken with one slap.

What’s the deal with Elden Ring?

No, seriously, what’s the deal? Remember when all we had of this was an enigmatic little teaser that From seemed uncharacteristically tight-lipped about? Remember when that carried on for so long we thought it was potentially vaporware? And then suddenly the game came out? It’s funny; it felt like I waited a long time, but all things considered, announcement to release really was much breezier than you’d typically anticipate for a game with that much hype behind it. But for all the talking that’d been done about it before it hit store shelves, and the discourse that naturally followed, I can’t help but feel that even with DLC on the way, the air surrounding Elden Ring has been strangely… Quiet. Like there just wasn’t as much to say about it as some of From’s other more famous (or infamous) offerings. That’s obviously just my own perception, and I’m sure I can attribute it to the fact that I’ve made a pointed effort of avoiding conversations about it. Probably because I wasn’t looking forward to the inevitable looks of confusion when I said I just wasn’t especially smitten with it.

As to how I could end up spending 200 hours in it regardless: Elden Ring’s open-world design and designated Loot Caves prey upon the part of my mind that loves to comb vast tracts of land for baubles and blades. Indeed, my fondest memories of the game were of arriving in a new area and diving into whatever caught my eye first. I’d work my way down or up to whatever boss was waiting for me, spend some time trying (and eventually succeeding) to kick its ass and then walk away whistling with whatever new weapon or spell I’d yanked out of the box behind it. “Always something new” was very much the thought on my mind as I explored the Lands Between, and it did an excellent job of scratching the itch that TES: Oblivion awakened in me all those years ago. So many secrets, so little time. Of course, there are some things that From just does well, and that holds true here. The proper “dungeons” here are broadly well designed and places like the Haligtree or Raya Lucaria impressed in style and scale. I warmed to a good few of the characters quickly (Blaidd, Millicent, Alexander, D, etc…) and my only complaint is that I didn’t get to see more of them – and sometimes I could have if not for reasons. The story does inspire intrigue in the beginning and the potential it had isn’t hard to see. While a bit janky at times, I did like riding to and fro on my trusty magic steed and hopping from place to place with my shiny new jump button. The platforming was very hit-and-miss but I appreciated the extra dimension it added to the combat. My first impression of Elden Ring did a solid job of holding up to the lofty expectations built around it, but as the hours wore on the cracks started to become a bit too obvious for me to ignore.

While I would readily agree that the traversal, visual direction and overall game-feel are generally better than what a lot of the other players in this arena are doing, I would also never deny that the game is suffering a bit of an identity crisis. The attempt to apply the design sensibilities of the Souls series to this popular contemporary template falls apart where the compact and deliberate world design was propping everything else up. Locales such as Lordran were constructed top-to-bottom with a certain experience in mind. Even when you could take more than one path, you were pretty much guaranteed to see and hear enough along the way that you felt like the journey was worth your time, and you were often rewarded for following the breadcrumb trails being left out for you. You could arguably say the same for Elden Ring, but when a developer that is typically counting on you to stumble into your next thread adds NPC markers to the map after overwhelming pressure from the playerbase, something is very obviously amiss. You’re egged on to do things any way you want and whenever you want, but at some point you are going to wave a few too many invisible flags and end up consigning a storyline or two unto the void. Not unique to Elden Ring whatsoever, no matter what you might dare to compare it to, but I still couldn’t help but feel a bit cheated when I was off having a merry old time only to realize I had run the timer on some piece of intrigue I had set aside for later. That feeling was always in the back of my head, breeding hesitation when proceeding to my next objective, keeping me unsure of what the further-reaching consequences of my actions might be. If you’re going to make a game three times the length of the ones you usually put out, there’s wisdom in not instilling a sense of fear that one might have to do the whole thing over again just to tick off a handful of checkboxes.

This quarreling of concepts seems to have infected the gameplay itself in ways that I was never fully able to reconcile with. Combat in From’s games has been engaging in a slow but unmistakable war of escalation with itself, consistently increasing the speed and visual flair while not moving away from the very deliberate back-and-forth at its core. This seemed to have reached its final form in Dark Souls III and Bloodborne, which incentivized more aggressive playstyles while still leaving room for other strategies. One might assume that in being another successor to the lineage Demon’s Souls began, Elden Ring would largely pull from those books for inspiration. Instead, it feels the chosen reference was Sekiro, or perhaps something like Devil May Cry. That would be fine if the core gameplay systems had also changed to match, but even with all of the fancy new tricks and godlike powers afforded to your Tarnished, you overall still feel like a Dark Souls character. Some of the bigger engagements felt lopsided, being lengthy, multi-part affairs and featuring bosses with movesets that were high in flash but low in readability or engagement. Yes, you look very cool as you rest upon that pillar and rain sword beams down onto my head. Would you kindly come back down so we can resume our dance where you take ten swings and I take one? At their most extreme, fights felt like they were absolutely begging to be cheesed, as the alternative would be to play by rules that were very obviously written without your enjoyment in mind. How do you deal with a tracking, seconds-long, area-of-effect flurry of blades that can potentially undo several minutes of progress even if you survive it? The short answer is you don’t. The longer answer is you can after a significant amount of labbing and dying, and by the time you arrive at that conclusion you’ll realize that you had perfected the other 95% of the fight long ago. Almost every major boss in the game suffers from this flaw to some degree, up to and including the perverted retread of OG Dark Soul’s iconic 2v1 (I still can’t forgive Dark Souls II for doing much the same, but at least the Throne Bros. aren’t as much of a pain in the ass as the Godskin Duo). There’s no denying that the action onscreen is exciting to watch, but I can’t say in good faith that it was always thrilling to play.

The narrative is one that I didn’t care much for in the end, and I know I didn’t because I can’t remember enough about it to articulate the finer specifics of why. Much was made of Big George Double-R’s involvement in the game and I remember feeling a deep apprehension when it was first announced. I was not well-familiar with his work (still ain’t), but I probably would have been a bit concerned about a collaboration with just about any writer of note. Fromsoft stories are a very love-it-or-leave-it kind of deal and I wasn’t sure they’d work for just about anybody if you tried to introduce a “star chef” to the kitchen. I can’t place any blame on it, though, because aside from a few of his well-known trademarks I can’t actually tell you where his input stops and where From’s begins. Nonetheless, what is here is a story that is just as nebulous and enigmatic as those in previous From works but decidedly lacks purpose. I never felt much of a desire to theorize or question what was happening around me because there’s simply so much of it going in so many different directions. Tons of players on the stage who are all reading from pages that feel like they were ripped from different scripts. The one thing that seems to unite everybody is the motivator of “become Elden Lord”, but the game never successfully convinced me that it was a goal worth pursuing. I didn’t have enough investment in the realm or its inhabitants. The characters I had any affection for tended to have disappointingly short questlines that almost universally ended with some sort of tragedy. Not shocking given Elden Ring’s pedigree, but perhaps a bit more painful given how much harder I needed to work just to arrive there. I think this aspect of the game would have benefitted greatly from a narrower view and an ounce of thoughtful direction. What’s here just doesn’t grab me the way I was repeatedly told it would.

And yes, some builds are inherently better than others and some abilities were clearly not playtested for balance and the perennial PvP loop gets to feels a bit rote when every third opponent is running Rivers of Blood, to say nothing of the shaky netcode or whatever I’m supposed to blame for my sessions constantly getting dropped, but I can overlook all of that because I’ve become comfortable with (or desensitized to) it. Big Swings ™ have seldom been the most viable route to go and so I powered through with my fancy greatsword not for spite of the challenge but for the love of it. Even still, I was always acutely aware that the game shot me in the foot with the starting gun and I wasn’t making my life any easier by insisting upon using both legs. Maybe I was only managing one or two bonks per minute, but I had the last laugh when I finally managed to stagger the latest cartwheeling asshole and lay them out with a satisfying animation and sound effect. Was it worth it? Probably not. But I’m a wizard of principles and I refuse to let poor boss design get in the way of my fun. Biggest complaint I can give in this regard is that a game of this size still refuses to give you unlimited respecs, and if the point of doing so is to compel me to hop into new game plus, I assure you that there are better ways to accomplish that.

I think my overall ambivalence towards Elden Ring was cemented right as I reached the end of the game, an achievement that was 120 or so hours in the making. The “penultimate” fight is one that genuinely entertained me – one with minimal gimmicks, easy-to-parse mechanics and a phase change that elicited a thumbs-up rather than an eyeroll. Tied in with how it actually made good use of that jump button, it kind of felt like perhaps everything was coming together right at the finish line. That feeling stuck with me just about until the moment the “final” boss was immediately followed up by yet another damage-sponge lore-tumor that very clearly emphasized spectacle over intentional design. I felt a tad put upon as I chose my desired ending and watched the credits roll, but also strangely relieved. It’s that increasingly-familiar kind of relief that springs from realizing that the worst of my troubles have ended. It just so happens that those troubles were hounding me throughout my entire experience.

When all is said and done, I enjoyed Elden Ring and booted it up plenty of times even after my first run had ended. However, it feels like Fromsoft has taken one step too far outside of their comfort zone, here. A company that I think was historically held in high regard for being unapologetically “themselves” despite industry trends has decidedly done a bit of trend-chasing. Given the formula used is one that has essentially fostered a full-blown subgenre of its own, the end result feels like a game that is familiar in a very uncomfortable way. It’s like when your dad shaves. Yeah, it’s obviously still him, but without those whiskers framing his face he just looks… Wrong. Elden Ring is Dark Souls cleaned up for date night and it lost some charm in the process. It still avoids a lot of the pitfalls of today's AAA environment, and it's not a bad game by any means, but it's not the revolution I think many people were expecting it to be. It is, by its very nature, less than revolutionary.

Godsdamnit.

Yeah, I bought the game. I offloaded a ton of Steam inventory to get there, so I only paid ten of my own dollars for it, but I still bought the game. And sixty hours later, my feeling is that Dragon’s Dogma II is indeed Dragon’s Dogma but II, and more in the sense that it’s Dragon’s Dogma times two instead of Dragon’s Dogma again but better. I’m not super happy about it, but I still enjoyed my time with it.

I’m pretty scatterbrained at the moment so I’m just going to start spitting takes. Also, no explicit spoilers, but I might spoil how you feel about it in the long run so there’s that to consider.

THE GOOD

The flaying and slaying feels as solid as ever, and definitely has more weight to it. I haven’t played all of the vocations yet, but the ones I have feel potent (for the most part – I’ll get to that) and intuitive, and their abilities have just the right amount of flash and punch so as to be satisfying. Warrior in particular has really benefitted from the way your attacks interact with foes, as the ability to pin, fling and smash smaller enemies makes greatswords and hammers feel as visceral as swinging around a slab of iron really ought to. Combat is the high point here just as it was in the first game, and balancing issues aside is one of the few places I can say Dragon’s Dogma II definitely made some marked improvements.

When Dragon’s Dogma’s systems work, they feel great. Very few things beat the raw thrill of staggering a cyclops upon a cliff’s edge, watching your pawn topple the hulking brute with a swift blow to its knee, and delivering the finishing blow by plunging your sword directly into its skull after a mighty leap. I pierced a hobgoblin with a running charge and stopped just shy of the river’s edge, sending the poor bastard flying into the briny depths. One time I wanted to slap a griffon in the face with my claymore but couldn’t quite reach it, so I stood on an oblivious ox to give myself that extra bit of height. Once the griffon was sufficiently weakened, I told my pawns to halt their attack while I leapt onto the beast’s back. It fled with me in tow, and it took me all the way back to its nest, whereupon I finished it off and looted the wealth of treasure it was hoarding. The captain of the guard entrusted me with a one-size-fits-all goal key and asked for it back once I was done. Which I happily obliged… After making a fully functional copy of it for my own purposes. The guards never bother to confiscate it from you when you get arrested so crimes are basically free. I then later used it to release somebody from their cell (who probably didn’t deserve to be freed but I just wanted to see what would happen). Didn’t feel like scaling a cliff one time so I just swan-dived unto the pavement and revived myself with a Wakestone. It works. You can sneak into at least one area in the game by disguising yourself with the correct clothing (and a handy face-mask). Even when it all works against you, I can still respect it. One time I got slapped around by an ogre and was bounced to and fro for so long I never even had the chance to recover before I died. It was brutal and it didn’t feel good, but I made extra sure never to put myself between an ogre and a hard place again. Or, you know, just watch this. And yes, I am a proponent of Dragonsplague. It’s fair that they’re looking to adjust how it works but the idea is cool as shit (and the ingame tooltip explaining it dulls that edge somewhat). There’s a lot of weird stuff in here, and a lot of opportunities to just try things and see if they stick, and it’s always satisfying when they do. Dragon’s Dogma doesn’t have as many of these moments as I would like, but it still has way more than other games of its ilk, which is part of why I love it. There are still places it could be improved, though, for sure (lots of invisible walls here, and the game reset my pawn’s position after I chucked him through the window of a locked house, which was dumb).

THE PRETTY AIGHT

Outside of cities, the game looks and runs great. Both Vermund and Battahl are filled to the brim with lovely scenery and I never felt bored just taking it all in. Character models and (most) animations are also well-made and the real-time cutscenes are of a very high quality. Also, the kit available looks awesome and my only complaint is that you can’t use dragonforging as a means of making lower level gear endgame-viable. Playing dressup would be a lot of fun so I hope they look into this for an update.

The way your stats work is definitely better compared to the first game for people who aren’t trying to min-max. The fact that your base stats are adjusted to suit the vocation you’re switching to means that even if you were a string bean sorcerer for the last fifty levels, you can still end up being a half-decent warrior in time. This is good, because it lets you stick with a favored vocation for longer without needing to drop it purely because you’re concerned about making future vocations unviable.

THE EH

Dragon’s Dogma II’s open world is as big as ever and is still a lot of fun to traverse but the lack of friction the tied in systems provide definitely undermines its staying power. The Loss Gauge is an interesting inclusion and would, in theory, reduce the amount of time you can spend out in the open before you start putting your party in a dangerous position. However, in practice, this really isn’t a problem. Campsites are easy to find, an upgraded camping kit isn’t too hard to come by and barely weighs its carrier down, and while the game constantly warns of potential monster attacks I think I had it happen to me a single time throughout my entire playthrough. Never mind that you can make camp in any kind of weather. Weight management feels less important in general, at least partly due to the fact there are no objectives centering around it or tools that you need to carry in your pack to do stuff (where’s the pickaxes?). Otherwise, there are very few “survival” type mechanics or punishments for coming to a fight unprepared. Curatives are easy to stock up on and the more insidious status effects like poison can be trivialized with a pile of antidotes (or a mage). Petrifaction is like quicksand – the game had me convinced it would be a way bigger problem for how often it’s mentioned, but to the best of my knowledge there’s a single enemy type that can inflict it so you might not ever need to worry about it. And where’s torpor at? Where’s the drama? Where’s the lamb sauce? What if you needed to dress for certain kinds of environments to avoid penalties? What if there was a hunger mechanic and you needed to loot and hunt to stay in good health, or at least drop some coin at your local tavern? I know a lot of people are probably dog tired of these types of mechanics being shoehorned into every possible game these days, but I think they would complement a game like Dragon’s Dogma really well – one where the threat isn’t just in the monsters you face, but also in the environment. The world does not feel nearly as harsh and unforgiving as it should.

Speaking of the open-world, encounter design is sorely lacking with regards to making the world feel organic. First of all, the idea of “the main road is safer” is a load of crap. You’re going to encounter a ton of enemies no matter where you go, so the idea of having a quiet stroll through the woods just isn’t going to happen unless you’ve already cut a path through recently. This definitely makes it a bit hard to appreciate “the journey” at times because you can’t hardly go more than a minute or two without combat. And what’s more, you’re going to start becoming acutely aware of when a fight is about to break out because enemies seem to spawn in mostly the same spots with little (if any) variance. This is something that was true of the first game as well, but it’s more noteworthy here given the seeming emphasis placed on making the overworld feel more natural in design. All of these interesting little nooks and vantage points end up feeling like very intentionally constructed setpieces where monsters are supposed to go. Spots that might initially feel like clever ambushes will lead to you approaching it the fifth or sixth time with your shield up and a sigh in your chest. Good luck getting the achievement for using a cyclops like a bridge without encountering one of the few points that were obviously made to facilitate it. Remember when the trailers showed off those spots where you could bust open a dam and knock over enemies with it? There's like three of those in the game, the first one shows up in the tutorial and the game actively draws your attention to it. It all feels very artificial and can suck you out of what could easily have been one of the more immersive open worlds out there.

Pawns are just not as charming or cannily competent as they seemed to be in the first game. This is at least partly due to the system they’re tied to, which I’ll talk about soon, but there’s a bit more going on here. They’ll point out chests and riftstones (and ladders), offer to lead your way on quests and do their utmost to assist you when you’re in danger during a battle. But the constant nudging to head here or there when you have a clear goal in mind or are simply trying to take in the landscape without distractions gets grating fast – never mind the inclusion of a map and quest markers largely erases the need for any kind of guidance. They draw from a remarkably shallow pool of dialogue and very rarely have anything of interest or import to say with regards your circumstances or the world around them. Question: How many times did you leave town without a camping kit after swapping out pawns? I know my forgetful ass did more than once. What if one of them chimed in with a simple “ought we depart without a means to make camp?” if we hit the road without one in our inventory? It’s a handy reminder and leads to them feeling like they are aware and looking out for things you might not be. Maybe they could warn of an impending ambush and offer an alternative route or make note of landmarks as you pass. Maybe they could tell stories hinting at the locations of quests or make purchase recommendations (“I espied a rather handsome bow at the smithy, Master”). I mean, just anything to make them feel more alive. The pawns are intended to be somewhat hollow because lore and blah blah blah but that doesn’t mean you have to make them uninteresting. I also take issue with how the AI hasn’t improved much in ways that matter – can’t tell you how annoying it is to have an archer in your party that doesn’t prioritize flying enemies, for starters – but more on that later. I will also note that the ability to take direct control of a pawn, even if it needed to be unlocked or had some other kind of caveat, would have been a great addition for when you need them to do something that you can’t contextually command them to do. But at least you can give them high-fives…

As to NPCs – whatever they’re doing is not nearly interesting enough to justify the performance hit in cities heavily populated areas. Given the game seems to perform quite well otherwise, I can’t even begin to imagine how they’re tanking framerates the way that they are. Capcom says they’re looking into it, but I have my doubts. This seems like the kind of problem that nobody caught after a year of development and now it’s just baked in.

Treasure and gear! Where is it? Never mind that variety isn’t that great, but there’s not much sense in hunting for it either. You can definitely get armor and weapons as drops on rare occasions. However, it was probably only once or twice where I actually found something out in the field that was better than what I was carrying, let alone better than what the latest vendor had to offer. Even as I reached the endgame, the shops seemed to always have the best gear available. Maybe I simply haven’t played enough and have missed a few things, but while this does make gearing up a fair bit less grindy and RNG-based, the cool factor of digging a badass magic sword out of a cave that’s miles better than what you got from the local smithy just isn’t there. Maybe not everybody will care about this, but I certainly do.

Heck, as long as we’re talking about gear, how about the upgrade system? Having different upgrade “paths” is kind of neat, but I do miss the ability to skip stages if you already have the materials required. It was a fun little shortcut. I also don’t like how dragonforging works in this game, as even though it’s sensible and more consistent, it just doesn’t feel nearly as cool. Not to mention you can’t use it to potentially improve an entire set of fresh gear just by fighting dragons. I mean, if you could just fight dragons all day long to skip the material grind, wouldn’t you?

Really, items in general are kind of underwhelming. It feels like there’s less of them compared to the first game and less possibilities for crafting. That’s before getting into simple stuff like throwable pocket rocks and what have you that you could use as distractions or at least to screw around. There isn’t enough weird junk in this game to play around with.

Leveling happens way too fast, likely as a result of how many combat encounters there are. You’ll rapidly outpace what Vermund has to offer, turning most of your fights into facerolls, until you finally reach Battahl and then maybe find fights a bit more difficult until it happens again. An optional hard mode or similar probably wouldn’t have been a bad choice, especially since the OG had one.

Oh, and not being able to disable the overhead NPC subtitles without disabling subtitles altogether is dumb. It was distracting in The Witcher 3 and it’s distracting here, too. Get rid of it!

THE REALLY NOT SO GREAT

Enemy variety in DDII is absolutely not where it should be for a sequel. If you’ve been following this game’s release at all, you’re assuredly already familiar, but I’ll reiterate the sentiment: I really hope you like fighting goblins, saurians, bandits, wolves and harpies because that’s going to encompass the bulk of your gameplay. Even once you step across the border, you can look forward to more of the same, just stronger and considerably more annoying. While the list of bigger monsters has changed somewhat, you’ll rarely ever encounter some of the new additions, as they’re either hard to find in the first place or unique (or both). Not to mention how frequent boss encounters seem to be in general. Thus, look forward to getting those cyclops and ogre medals without too much trouble. It’s already sad enough that anything was taken out at all (farewell to cockatrices and hydras), but the fact that you’ll be seeing the same foes over and over again really just dampens the excitement of encountering them. At least they’re still just as fun to knock over as before.

Dungeon design. Caves caves caves caves caves. So many caves. Rather organic in design, but still caves. Not a whole lot of “constructed” locations as per the first game, like Bluemoon Tower or the Watergod’s Altar, and especially not like the Everfall. This is decidedly lame and really puts a sour taste in exploration, as there just aren’t too many locales I discovered that actually wowed me. Very much a quantity over quality type of thing going on here.

And weapon variety. Not great. Lots of stuff left on the table. Actually, yeah, a general lack of variety is easily one of Dragon’s Dogma II’s biggest weaknesses.

Balancing is rough. Take it with a grain of salt, because as previously mentioned I haven’t played every vocation in the game yet, but if nothing else some vocations just flat out feel more potent and useful than others. Archer and rogue are probably the biggest offenders here, as the split to diminish the strength and versatility of the first game’s strider vocation doesn’t solve how the individual classes are still very powerful in their own right. Rogues can still do insane single-target damage with their knives and they have an ability that can utterly trivialize most encounters. Meanwhile, archers can quickly down anything with a weak point with little risk to themselves and can effortlessly keep bosses reeling with explosive arrows. Compare with the fighter and warrior, who – while still strong in their own right – don’t have nearly as much stopping power as you would expect, especially in the case of warriors who still have very poor damage output relative to their lack of utility and the compromising positions they must place themselves in. Mages and sorcerers have had some of their more potent abilities nerfed, but they do have access to ice magic, which might be just a smidge too effective at freezing crowds of enemies and even bosses on the spot. IN all, a lot of the vocations really lack that “oomph” and feel rather compromised in overall efficacy. The biggest question mark for me might be the trickster vocation, which is very interesting in theory but relies on too many different factors (like party composition, AI behavior and beneficial terrain) to be worth playing. It feels like it was designed for a different game entirely. Maybe if you could play with other people… But oh well.

Characterizations and interactions are about as dull and shallow as they’ve ever been. There are a few more “in-depth” optional character quests that have cutscenes and all that good stuff but they’re about as involved or interesting as they were in the first game. This is with the return of the “Beloved” system which is also completely unchanged. You can give NPCs gifts and do quests for them or generally just not try to murder them and they’ll start to like you more, and eventually they’ll blush when they see you and they might feature in your story at another point or what have you. But again, it’s not at all explained and making buddies with NPCs serves basically no purpose unless they’re a vendor. You’re seldom going to unlock any unique items or services or sidequests or cutscenes by going around making friends with anybody. And much like in the first game, what hurts the most is I actually quite like a lot of these characters with regards to their designs, backstories, what have you, but you’ll never get the chance to explore them. This is your story; everybody else is just an accessory to it.

And before I forget, what is going on with those facial animations? Not in cutscenes, but in gameplay. It’s usually not a problem but when NPCs are particularly pleased with you, their visage will contort into the most cartoonishly grotesque grin you’ve ever seen. Come late game I had a horde of fans following me around and their ear-to-ear grimaces frankly freaked me out. Surely somebody had to have realized how creepy they look.


THE BAAAAAAAAAAAAD

So this is going to sound a bit strange given how many seem to feel this was one place where the first game struggled the hardest, but Dragon’s Dogma II is weaker in the story department. Much, much weaker. Compared to the first game, though, this has a lot less to do with what’s there as opposed to what isn’t. While things obviously got a bit more convoluted further on and especially towards the end, the original Dragon’s Dogma had a very simple and potent motivator for the player. You fought a dragon, the dragon stole your heart and dared you to take it back. This makes you Arisen, and your destiny is to slay the dragon and bring peace to the land. But while the why of it might be of interest to some, the real conflict was between the player and that ruby-scaled force of nature. Travel the world, grow stronger through your battles and eventually become a warrior worthy of your charge. You’re urged on by the dragon himself, who regularly reminds you that he is awaiting your challenge. You frankly didn’t need much more than that to make things interesting, but there is another plot wrapped around it that is enthralling at the best of times but also very messy and undercooked at its worst. In Dragon’s Dogma II, you start out as an amnesiac. Never a good sign, but never fear, for your destiny is revealed to you in less than an hour of gameplay. Yes, you are once again Arisen, and your “crowning” moment happens much the same as it does in the first game. Only problem: The dragon is pretty much completely sidelined in favor of a hilariously shallow game of political intrigue, which – if you make a pointed effort of running through the main story quests – is resolved as quickly as it is begun. What follows, then, is an endgame with a semi-hard limit on how long you can play it and a conclusion that really only manages to convolute the lore behind the world of Dragon’s Dogma. The lack of the dragon’s presence throughout your journey makes your inevitable showdown feel hollow and underwhelming, and that’s a huge disappointment itself. But even the “true” ending is not nearly as poignant or emotional as the original’s, and that definitely stings as well.

Oh, and the pawn system. They streamlined it. Man, did they ever streamline it. Originally, pawn inclination was broken down across a whole bunch of different aspects of behavior but would boil down to a primary and secondary inclination. Pawns would react to your playstyle and commands and would change their behavior over time, giving the illusion that they were learning from their experiences. How much influence any of these systems ultimately had on your pawn’s decision making and viability is, at best, fuzzy to me. I also know a lot of people found it annoying that you would eventually need to sit them down and readjust their mannerisms once they grew out of your preferred inclination. However, it did a lot to add character to the pawns and made the overall system feel much more dynamic. The right choice would have been to expand upon this system and make it more granular while also demystifying it a bit and giving the player more ways to influence it. But that does sound hard, so obviously they instead opted to simply make four different inclinations which you can freely choose from and never change on their own, and gave you an insultingly limited list of secondary attributes that you can assign to your pawn. Boring! If streamlining the system is the way they’re going to go, then at the very least they could have given us more options. But no, you get the four inclinations and the six “specializations”, one of which enables pawns to do something they should be able to do to begin with (Chirurgeon), one that should not require a pawn for the player to utilize (Woodland Wordsmith), and one that could have just been an option in the game settings (Aphonite). For how integral the pawn system is to the overall Dragon’s Dogma experience, and how much they market your relationship with your pawn in gameplay, the fact that they regressed it instead of advancing it is a major letdown.

THE UGLY UGLY UGLY UGLY UGLY

The soundtrack of Dragon’s Dogma II is pathetic. I can’t really mince words on this one. I am sitting here now a few dozen hours of gameplay later and realizing that I cannot remember a single track from the game besides the title theme, and I don’t even particularly care to remember that one. Seriously, what happened? If there was anything about the OG Dragon’s Dogma that I would have said was indisputably upper-tier, it was that OST full of dramatic and forceful orchestral pieces accented by a hearty helping of shredding electric guitar. By comparison, Dragon’s Dogma II’s music, when it’s even present, is just… Music. It’s completely uninspired and more to the point, doesn’t inspire me to get out and do some crazy Arisen shit. You barely even need to look any further than the very start of the game – simply compare and contrast the character creation music from the first game with that of the second. Hell, even the best tracks in the game are ripped whole cloth from the first, and then the instrumentation is far weaker! I can only assume the original sound team must have departed the company or was otherwise disposed (and I can imagine Inon Zur’s schedule being pretty packed, at the absolute least), but the fact that not a one of the original composers returned for this project is criminal. If there’s any full black mark on Dragon’s Dogma II, it’s this. I also couldn’t help but notice there’s paid DLC that lets you insert certain tracks from the first game into the second… Yeaaaaah.

THE WHAT WHY

Alright – lore implications aside, is there any particular reason why you didn’t ask David Lodge to voice the dragon this time around? Not saying Grahame Fox didn’t do a solid job, but c’mon, everybody who played the first game adores Lodge’s performance. His absence was most definitely felt.

You can’t get the armor on the box art in-game. Seriously. The helm doesn’t exist and the rest seems to be cobbled together from other bits of pieces that are available. That is… Very strange.

Can’t sell items from storage in towns. At least not without jumping through a square-shaped hoop. Makes no sense whatsoever.

Still using needlessly obtuse descriptions for augments and ring effects and the like. Probably for the best, because everything I’ve read suggests some of the bonuses these augments give are pretty damn pathetic. A balance patch is sorely needed.

Yeah yeah the meat looks pretty but this is also coming from the company with the other Big Monster Slayer franchise and they already invested in making their digital meats look mouthwatering. You can’t fool me, Itsuno. Where’d the meat money go? (Also, did you talk to the Monster Hunter guys at all while working on this? I think they probably could have given some good advice in a few places)

--

I reckon I could keep going but… I think I’m just out of steam. I started a new game right after the credits rolled, as one does with Dragon’s Dogma, and was still enjoying running to and fro and swapping vocations and slaying beasts. But it really is the raw strength of that core gameplay loop that grabs me, and nothing else about the sequel. This game feels like a sidegrade at absolute best; some aspects of it are better, but some are definitely worse, and it doesn’t shift far enough in either direction to allow me a firm decision on which game is superior. However, I will say this: The game ain’t worth 70 dollars when you can play the original for at most a third of the price. Dragon’s Dogma II is not the complete package, something that will be painfully obvious to anybody that plays it. There’s just so much empty space anywhere that you look. With that in mind, I’m once again left with this hollow feeling that after about a decade of waiting we haven’t gotten anywhere. If this is Itsuno’s complete vision, then I have to question if he really knows what makes Dragon’s Dogma worthy of a second chance. This game has not gotten the love it deserves. And even if it has its “Dark Arisen” moment and gets a heaping pile of updates and paid expansions (which I think it certainly will given it seems to be doing numbers), I can’t say with any degree of certainty that it will be enough. Capcom was given another chance to make an absolute masterwork and slipped up once more.

It's actually weirdly appropriate given the core themes of Dragon’s Dogma. A story about destiny, strength of will, conviction, existentialism, entropy, and the futility of an existence dedicated to resisting change. There was so much potential here, but every player followed their part to the letter and so we are left exactly where we started. Not to get needlessly metatextual about it, but this game made no attempt to break the cycle, and for that I fear it is doomed to be forgotten. And as much as it pains me to say it, it may not be until this cycle’s next turn that we finally cast off the yoke of fate and find meaning in the struggle.

Maybe Dragon’s Dogma III will hit the mark. If I LIVE THAT LONG

Gonna be straight up with you: I'm leaving a rating, but this isn't so much a review as it is a fuzzy-brained retrospective from somebody who hasn't touched this game since high school. There's a fire in my heart that demands to be unleashed, so I will now talk about WarioWare D.I.Y. for a few paragraphs.

WarioWare and the Nintendo DS are two things that I personally consider to be "peak Nintendo". Both are the company and its developers at their absolute best: A conglomeration of a bunch of weird, out-there ideas that somehow manage to blend into a unique and delicious smoothie. I'll hold off on gushing about the Nintendo DS for today - perhaps on another game's page (or the system proper if they ever add pages for hardware), but the original WarioWare effortlessly won my heart when I first played it on my GBA way back when. The concept of "microgames" - effectively minigames but mini-er, generally with a runtime of mere seconds - being the focus of an entire game might have seemed strange at first blush. And it is. But Nintendo knew what they were doing, and the full collection of over-in-a-flash trials melded together into a chaotic mess of increasing speed and anxiety that was accessible to anybody. Complemented by brain-bending narratives and visuals, sweet tunes, and a handful of proper minigames for good measure, the OG was and still is one of the most iconic titles for the Game Boy Advance. For a short while there, the WarioWare series would be used as a sort of benchmark for Nintendo’s new hardware, demonstrating every possible gimmick through their new catalog of microgames. And not only was it a (mostly) successful experiment in its own right, but it also managed to breathe new life into the Wario franchise, giving Mario’s yellow-clad rival a brand new world of his own complete with a full new cast of characters. Since adding “money-grubbing game dev” to his resume, Wario has gained more infamy than ever, and he’s been cemented as the primary face of the “weird” side of Nintendo (a title Waluigi might claim for himself if they ever threw the poor purple bastard a bone).

But at one point Nintendo decided that simply letting people play the games wasn't good enough. In 2009, they released WarioWare D.I.Y., a game where Wario introduced players to the world of unpaid internships firsthand. While still containing its own curated selection of microgames for you to play, here they existed mostly to fill an obligation and to demonstrate what you’d be capable of once the reins were handed over to you. For included with D.I.Y. was a full suite of creation tools – not only for programming the games, but for creating the art and music as well. And you know it works, because all of the microgames included by default were created by the developers themselves, using the same tools. Along with a full interactive tutorial to help you understand the fundamentals, a great job was done on the staff’s end to demonstrate exactly what they wanted you to get out of D.I.Y. But just as they wanted you to get inspired by their own creations, there isn’t much sense in making games that only you will ever play. Thus, there was also included an online catalog hosted by Nintendo themselves, where you could upload your creations and share them with the rest of the world. They even incentivized it by holding themed contests, challenging players to fit the proposed prompt with the promise that any stand-outs would be spotlighted for all to see. Thus you have your task, and your inspiration – so get to creating!

The D.I.Y. experience is a straightforward and streamlined one, both with regards to the way you create microgames and the ways in which you can play them. The game follows a very simple object-oriented programming style that lets you set behaviors, variables and triggers for the entities you create. At the same time, you’d draw out the graphics with your stylus and create music in a composer not unlike the all-time classic featured in Mario Paint. In this way, D.I.Y. condensed the game development process much in the same way as the broader series has the very act of playing games. Making a game isn't so daunting when it's only going to be played for eight seconds at the most! However, you can't reach the level of complexity of games featured in the likes of Touched! purely because of the limitations of the engine provided and the fact that your inputs are limited to just taps. This low ceiling definitely trims back the possibilities of what you can pull off in your games... But it speaks volumes to the ingenuity behind D.I.Y. and the people that played it that plenty of impressive little projects were made regardless. Ones that manage to make an impression through their art, music or even mastery of the simple tools provided (and some that have gained infamy for other reasons, but let’s not talk about that here). Plenty of people have documented their favorites, either self-made or from others, in places like Youtube. And of course, you can still pick up a used copy today to experience it all for yourself, and there might even be a few creations left behind from the previous owner if you’re really lucky. D.I.Y. did a fantastic job of translating multiple aspects of the game dev experience to something that was understandable and accessible to just about anybody, and did so while maintaining all of the goofy charm you would anticipate with the WarioWare brand.

Oh, and it has Body Rock.

Sadly, however, Nintendo shut down their Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service in 2014, ending any sort of online communication and hosting for their Wii and DS games. No more visits to friend's towns in Animal Crossing: City Folk, no more online battles in Pokémon Black/White, and no more submissions to WarioWare D.I.Y.'s online catalog. The march of time is inexorable, and all these things and more now belong to the past, living on only in our memories - no more to be enjoyed as they were once meant to be.

... Except I LIED

Naturally, because people are absolutely nuts and will preserve anything and everything, you can still browse and play games made in D.I.Y. via the Internet. Not only can you still share your games by various means, and of course play ones others have shared as well, you can even browse and play them right in your browser! When I first discovered the DoujinSoft site, I wasn't surprised so much as just thrilled that somebody cared enough to go to all this trouble for wee little D.I.Y. Hell, their efforts to preserve the microgames from yore were so thorough I even found a game I made and submitted to one of Nintendo's contests! If you want to talk about some heady nostalgia, very few things have hit me quite as hard as seeing - and playing - something I created that I thought I was lost to time. In short, WarioWare is cool, and people are cool too.

There's very few games out there like WarioWare D.I.Y., and as desperately as I crave some kind of follow up, the time for it is long past - it was already on the perfect handheld for creators, and the other perfect one has also long since been put out to pasture. Would I have preferred an overdue WarioWare D.I.Y. 2 over the likes of Game Builder Garage? Perhaps, but I know deep in my soul that it wouldn’t have hit the same. D.I.Y. was a perfect storm at the perfect time, a simple but charming jewel that inspired creativity in myself and many others. Perhaps it isn’t as prolific or well-remembered or ambitious as others of its kind, but it was one that clearly understood the innate joys of making, and for that it will always have my love and respect.

Oh, I guess I didn’t mention Warioware D.I.Y. Showcase. It exists.

One of the best games that I never want to play again!

At the height of maritime trade in the Atlantic, an English craft dubbed the "Obra Dinn" sets out for the Cape of Good Hope with sixty people aboard. However, it never makes landfall at its destination, and it is assumed lost to the depths after a year without contact. Some four years later, the ship miraculously returns off the shore of its home port... With not a single member of its crew to be seen. You play the role of an insurance investigator working on behalf of the East India Company, who has been tasked with recording what might have happened to the unfortunate vessel. A less-than-enviable charge for just about anybody. Blessedly, a mysterious individual by the name of Henry Evans has given you a significant boon: A magicked timepiece called the Memento Mortem, which grants you the ability to witness visions of a person's final moments. In exchange, Evans has asked only that you remain steadfast in your investigation and not rest until you have unveiled the full truth of the Obra Dinn's grim fate.

Return of the Obra Dinn managed to do something not many games can pull off these days, which is make me refuse to budge from my seat until I had seen it to its conclusion. Granted it ended up being pretty much the perfect length for it, at least in my case - it's a runtime that I'm sure varies wildly depending on one's powers of observation and deduction. However, I think that is exactly where the bulk of Return's strength lies. It introduces the concept and the concern, slaps a journal and a cool pocketwatch into your hands and says "don't step off this boat until you've puzzled it out". The singular tool at your disposal would be any homicide detective's dream come true, but where such a powerful artifact would lead to a breezy day of work at Scotland Yard, here you are responsible for discerning the fate of sixty individuals. A daunting mystery, to be sure, but one that does compel: Just how does a crowd of that size disappear, and moreover, how does their ship make it home without them? Thus you will go to your task with that burning question in your chest, and will scour every inch and ponder every angle as you unravel this nautical whodunit. The lack of hand-holding and thoughtful design results in a riddle of logic that is deeply satisfying to solve, and you can rest assured knowing that each eureka moment you arrive at is well-earned.

Concerns? Well, the way each new scene is introduced did start to grate after a bit, permitting you to wander around your newly discovered "momento mortis" for a limited amount of time before kicking you back out to present day. Oftentimes this felt like an arbitrary imposition, as I would usually want to jump back in right away to continue taking notes. The soundtrack, while by no means bad and perfect for the setting, felt just a bit too same-y across the board with no real stand-outs. The retro computing-inspired visuals, which I'm sure will hold plenty of appeal for some, wore out their welcome for me by the end - if for no other reason than its monochrome palette not being a great choice for a game centered around careful observation of your surroundings. I admittedly cheated a smidge at one point just because I was completely lost on what to do next, only to realize the clue I needed was pretty much staring me in the face. If only I could see it! And while I know it's all in the name of establishing a sense of progression, the fact that the book will periodically confirm your findings for you feels a bit... Cowardly? A part of me wishes the game would force you to fill everything out and submit it with no way of knowing you were correct until the end, but that's probably just the masochist in me speaking. When I think about it, I doubt I would have been willing to go back through the full game just to correct one or two mistakes. This is the kind of experience that only hits with full force the first time around. To its credit, though, this mystery does have a bit of open-endedness in how you can resolve it, so that may be a bit of a draw for those seeking to dive back in.

I think if there's anything that truly hurts the experience in the long run, it's that the narrative at the center of it all, for all of the fantastical elements surrounding it, ultimately feels rather mundane. This didn't need to be a problem, mind; I would argue that the more grounded elements of the story are what lends it the gravity and intrigue that it does have. The failure, then, is making the more out-there aspects seem a bit shoehorned and unimaginative by comparison. I won't pick it apart here in case you intend to play it, and hopefully your opinion of the tale of the Obra Dinn will be brighter than mine. I simply felt that the conclusion arrived at was a little lackluster given the setup.

All in all, Return of the Obra Dinn is an excellent adventure in deduction that trims away a lot of the fluff typically associated with other games of its ilk. It knows the story it wants to tell and drops you right into the center of it, leaving it up to you to fill in the blanks. While I don't know that the ending will satisfy everyone, I think this is definitely one situation where the journey is more important than the destination. Hopefully I'll be able to give Lucas Pope's other claim to fame a proper shake in due time.

uuuuuUUUUUUUUUUUUGH

This is not really a review, just an opportunity for me to rant - because the gaming industry is currently at an absolute low in some ways and I'm sort of reaching a boiling point about it.

So I love the original Dragon's Dogma. It is, to me, the perfect game that just happens to be woefully imperfect. I love its worldbuilding, I love its gameplay concepts, I love its open world. I love so many things about it, but almost every aspect of it that I enjoy comes with a big ol' asterisk that prevents me from being able to give it the bright shiny gold star that I so desperately want to confer. Unfortunately, it languished in that lukewarm spot between "cult classic" and "abject mediocrity" that had me resigned to the sentiment that it would never get a re-release, let alone a sequel.

Of course, my fears ultimately ended up being unfounded, with the game receiving a fantastic PC port in 2016 and a sequel being officially announced a few years later. Seldom in my life have I ever been so excited for a release, and you'd better believe I was there each time Capcom finally loosed new details on the game. And now it's here!

The prevailing sentiment amongst those who have played Dragon's Dogma II seems to be that it is very much the original experience with some nips and tucks. To some, that might be massively disappointing - but to me, that is an absolute godsend. As far as I was concerned, the OG was a rock-solid concept that simply needed some careful polishing. The idea that Dragon's Dogma II could be loosely described as "Dragon's Dogma but better" is the very definition of a perfect sequel for me. As such, my excitement since its release has absolutely rocketed through the roof... Or that's really what I want to say, but the truth is Capcom's really managed to hurt my feelings this time around.

I'm not as flummoxed by these practices as I think some are because I was there when Capcom was shipping games with characters already on the disc that you had to pay extra to unlock. They were very much trendsetters in the hellscape that is the world of in-game purchases, and as a result their more recent monetization practices seem almost amusingly mild by comparison. In the case of DDII, it seemed to me that at the extra purchasable content was purely to "skip the line" with regards to features that already exist in-game, and thus were simply of the bog-standard "baiting the impatient" flavor. Note that I'm not blaming the "impatient" in this equation - I totally understand how irritating it can be when things such as character modification are arbitrarily gated off, and dangling an opportunity to unlock it at any time in exchange for a few extra bucks is unquestionably a dick move. However, it's not being excised from the base game altogether to be sold to you, so at least in that respect you have the option of ignoring it and simply working your way around it. To me, that's much more benign, even for as lame as it is at the end of the day.

But it IS lame. And so is the $70 price tag, and the shitty PC performance, and Capcom's usual shrugging off of player's complaints, and the fact that I have to reckon with all of these things if I want to play this game that I have eagerly been awaiting for years. I just moved to a new house - a life event that I am very glad for, but also one that is unquestionably a drain on one's finances. I'm really not in a position where I can go tossing every spare cent I have at the next big shiny thing, which already makes my primary hobby a very difficult one to entertain in 2024. However, more and more I'm running into the issue that even if I was the kind of person that could afford to pick up every new release, I don't know that any of these companies actually deserve it. Sony and Microsoft are selling $500 Netflix machines with barely any software to actually justify their existence. Nintendo is out here knocking over emulators and fan projects as if it's ever going to prevent people from pirating their games. Rockstar's assuredly going to ride off of Shark Cards from Grand Theft Auto 6 until I'm in a retirement home, CD Projekt Red is doing their best to pretend like they didn't sell lies to a whole generation of gamers based almost wholly on their Witcher 3 clout, Todd Howard found a way to resell Skyrim another time by dressing it up as a space sim, Konami is proving they will abuse their IPs as many times as it continues to make them money - and yeah, it's still making them all money! People are still buying the games! Day one! Repeatedly! Knowing full damn well it's probably not going to be worth it! And yet, the reason why I'm so miffed about this is because for once I feel like it absolutely would be worth it - because Dragon's Dogma II really does seem like it's the game I've wished for, but does that mean I should be dumping my wallet out for Capcom yet again? I don't know that I should. I know that if I buy the game in its current state, no matter how much I ultimately may enjoy it, it's going to make me feel dirty. And I hate that. I love games and I hate this. It makes me want to tear my hair out.

I can't roast anybody who has purchased the game and is having a good time with it right now. Life's hard enough and damn, if you're having a fun enough time that it makes your 70 bones feel like they were well-spent, who am I to deny you that pleasure? But just once - just once - I wish everybody would be willing to throw their hands up and say "I don't care if this game is the next coming of Digital Jesus, I want you to quit jerking me around". Because I'm tired of getting jerked around. I have massive respect for the people who worked a bajillion hours to make this game match the vision they had in mind for it. I know this isn't their fault. I want to reward them for their hard work by making this game a success, and I know my dumb ass is probably still going to buy the game once I can afford to (and once the game isn't melting people's CPUs). But another year of this and I'm likely to start writing off modern gaming as a whole in favor of diving into the "good old days" - because even if I feel like an old codger for saying it, there was at least a time when I didn't have to feel like a jackass for being excited about my hobby.

“This castle is a creature of Chaos. It may take many incarnations…”

I’m a very easy wizard to please. Give me an entertaining game with a tight aesthetic and a killer soundtrack and there’s a solid chance I’ll at least remember it years down the line. Castlevania has always managed to check all of those boxes for me. The tale of a family of badass vampire slayers dedicated to putting a stop to Dracula’s plans generation after generation is all I really needed to get invested. And yet, I must admit that while I had played nearly all of them up to a point, I couldn’t claim to have actually beaten one yet. I could come close, but for some reason, none of the games ever quite managed to sink their claws deep enough into me that they could convince me to make that last leap. I’ve since rectified that, but even back then, I could tell right away that Symphony of the Night was something… Different. When I first dove into it some fifteen or so years ago, I became so entranced by its pale moonlit glow that I was briefly concerned that I might never leave. I suppose, at least in my mind, I never did.

As with other games where discovery is so crucial to the game’s appeal, I recommend you experience the game for yourself before reading this review.

Five years after Dracula’s defeat at the hands of Richter Belmont, the titular castle suddenly reappears, decidedly ahead of schedule. Unfortunately for humanity, Richter himself is nowhere to be found. With seemingly nobody else up to the task of investigating this regrettable turn of events, Alucard, the son of Dracula, reluctantly awakens from his self-imposed eternal slumber with the intent of infiltrating Castlevania and putting a stop to this aberration. As he combs the darkest depths of the place he once called home in search of answers, he uncovers a conspiracy that threatens to resurrect the Dark Lord – and a long and bitter family feud comes to a head.

With Symphony of the Night being as revered as it is, both in the past and present, it can be a little hard to remember that it was (and still can be) divisive with a select few for being both too different and not different enough. As far as Castlevania as a series is concerned, forgoing the previous stage-and-score based gameplay with a heavy emphasis on platforming challenges for something much more RPG-ish and exploratory in nature didn’t sit well with absolutely everyone. Given its nearest neighbor in that respect, it’s not too hard to see how some might have been apprehensive about it. It also didn’t always impress on a technical level due to insisting upon retaining the 2D visuals and gameplay when 3D was very much the hot new thing. As time has demonstrated, however, this experimentation in style not only helped to inspire a whole new genre, but it also allowed the game to age much more gracefully than it might have otherwise.

The game’s greatest strengths lie in where such differences become most pronounced. Rather than playing as the latest in a long line of vanquishers, you instead control the main antagonist’s estranged progeny, who chooses the path of forgiveness while his father seeks bloody revenge for mankind’s transgressions. Alucard is a far cry from any Belmont, Morris or Lecarde, or even Belnades, being capable of many of the supernatural feats one would expect of those with vampiric heritage. And also unlike most of his predecessors, Alucard is not a static avatar – his equipment and statistics change throughout the course of the game, and consequently he can grow in ability and power. Gone is your linear and segmented tour through Dracula’s domain, and while many sections are initially kept just out of your reach, you will eventually find ways to overcome your obstacles until not a single inch is off limits to you. Being given the keys to a realm only seen in snippets throughout past games fleshes out the world of Castlevania and makes it much more tangible. Even from an audiovisual standpoint, things have been turned on their head: The original style inspired by classic horror films painted a dark, dirty and frightening picture of the eternal struggle between the Belmonts and the forces of evil. Here, Ayami Kojima’s rich and luxurious art direction accentuates the darkness while giving the characters and their surroundings a much more regal and majestic feeling. You really get a taste of the more decadent and intellectual lifestyle the Ţepeş family was at one point accustomed to. This is complemented by Michiru Yamane’s absolutely impeccable soundtrack, which is at different times dramatic, mysterious, eerie, or even funky, but always, always perfect for the scene it accompanies. These parallels even seem to be represented in the level design itself: After you pick over the castle once, you’re presented with a version of it that has both literally and figuratively been turned on its head, forcing you to reacquaint yourself with something you were only a short while ago intimately familiar with. When all of its aspects come together, the game manages to break free of any expectations and provide an experience that feels remarkably fresh, both in spite of the venerable foundation it’s built on and the trends of its era.

This concept is probably best exemplified in the game’s balance… Or its lack thereof. When you start the game, Alucard is absolutely busted. The handful of enemies you encounter in the castle’s entrance hall may as well be ants for how easily he can stomp all over them. You might briefly wonder if this game is going to be an utter cakewalk from start to finish. Then Death shows up and yoinks your fancy gear, and suddenly you feel pitifully weak even compared to the relatively mundane protagonists of previous games. A lot of time in the early-to-middle game is spent leveling up and scrounging for new equipment, whether by picking up drops from enemies or nabbing treasures. Each time you pick up an item, you’ll be cracking open that menu screen to see where any improvements lie. Over time, though, you’ll accrue a fearsome arsenal. As you scour the castle from top to bottom (and then bottom to top again) you’ll discover many secrets and hopefully learn a few new tricks along the way as well. Eventually you’ll get to know Castlevania like the back of your porcelain hand and will probably have stumbled across at least one of the various game-breakers on offer. That sampling of power you had right at the beginning grows into a feast. I imagine the first person who found a Crissaegrim nearly peed their pants when they realized they’d just picked up a weapon that almost automatically wins the game. Did you know you can equip two of those at once? How about the absolutely nutters Shield Rod combos – especially when you’re using the Alucard Shield? Did you master the input for Soul Steal? Level up your familiars to their maximums? How about other ways you can trivialize things? That doppleganger was pretty irritating, huh? Equip that otherwise useless Red Rust and you can completely shut it down. Wow, this bonus boss’s attacks really sting. Slip this magic circlet on your head; it’ll make your life a lot easier. Symphony of the Night does not care if you cheat. It encourages it. This is your house. If you’re so inclined, you can turn it into your playground, and once you get bored of it you can head off to curbstomp your nuisance of a father and get on with your life. I would never call this game especially difficult. However, it establishes a certain kind of power fantasy for the player and lets them indulge in it, which I can definitely respect. Anybody who tells you they wouldn’t want to be a pretty dhampir with a big castle and a cool sword is either lying or hasn’t played SotN.

And yes, the uneven difficulty can just as easily be a turn-off for somebody who was accustomed to the more daunting challenges of earlier games in the franchise. Your wandering will certainly feel a bit aimless at times, an attribute of many of SotN’s descendants that I know a few people wish would have remained squarely in the past. Some foes can be a real chore to deal with, which in turn makes some areas the kind few would ever wish to retread. The second half of the game can feel like padding, and not every part of the game feels quite as good to explore upside-down. It’s easy to balk at the cheesy voice acting and dialogue (though I personally feel the excessive ham is a perfect match for the game’s aesthetics, and I have a real soft spot for Robert Belgrade’s performance as Alucard). And to the person who simply cannot leave any stone unturned: You definitely have your work cut out for you if you pass on using a guide. However, while I think Alucard’s adventure can be a little weak at times, I still find myself unable to resist the occasional urge to return to that castle and recapture the magic I felt in uncovering its wealth of secrets. Even for as many other games like Symphony of the Night I’ve played, within or without its own series, none of them have quite succeeded in providing me with the same dignified pleasures as that first moonlit stroll. Not bad for 1997.

By the way, the “updated” version included in The Dracula X Chronicles tries to remove all of the delicious cheese, so please don’t play it. But you probably won’t listen to me anyway, will you?

To a lot of people, DC’s Superman was and still is a symbol of virtue. A powerful and heroic figure who, out of love for the little blue planet that gave him a second chance at life, uses his godlike abilities to protect the weak and punish the wicked. The character of Superman has undergone many revisions, re-imaginings and reevaluations over the 85 or so years since his debut. However, for all the many different things that big chest-emblazoned “S” has come to represent over the years, there is a certain population amongst whom it only heralds one thing: Terror.

I was one of the unfortunate many who played Superman: The New Superman Adventures (most commonly known as “Superman 64”) when it was still relatively new. I wish I could say I was one of the unfortunate few, but that would be a bit disingenuous – the truth of the matter is that despite its questionable quality, it still managed to sell reasonably well. How much of that was out of genuine interest or a perverse fascination, I can’t say. What I can say is that I was at least a moderate fan of Superman as a child and thought that being able to play as him on my fancy new Nintendo 64 would be a lot of fun. As an adult, I’m not especially fond of the character – and I don’t want to wholly attribute that to my time with this game, but…

So what is it exactly that makes Superman 64 so horrid? Is it the poor controls? Is it the sparse and unappealing presentation? The preposterous scenario? The irritating level design? The haphazard programming? The laughable combat challenges? Or is it the complete and utter waste of a well-liked intellectual property that should have been a prime candidate for video game-ification? The answer to that question is all of those things, which conglomerate into some kind of frightful chimera. Most grim of all, though, is surely how devoid of joy the experience is, with bugs and glitches that are more likely to infuriate than entertain, and missions that will spit at your attempts to take any kind of shortcut. Even those who gain sick joy from watching disasters unfold before their eyes will likely find little to enjoy here. Trying to wrest love from Superman 64 is like trying to squeeze water from a stone.

As a personal note: In retrospect, one particular aspect of its infamy really tickles my funny bone. The game had a rather poor draw distance that was masked by a sickly green “Kryptonite fog”, the developer’s means of explaining away the technical hiccups and the weak-feeling Superman you were given the reins to. It’s worthy of at least a derisive chuckle, but just a few months prior in that same calendar year, another game was released that utilized a very similar tactic. Needless to say, it went over a little better by comparison.

As of 2024, tearing into “The New Superman Aventures” just feels like shorthand for not having a whole lot of interesting things to say about video games as an art form – like waiting until the schoolyard bullies stop pestering the little orphan kid so you can creep over and make an ironic “your mom” joke. It’s well-documented that the game is bad. It’s indelibly bad; it’s certifiably bad. It was bad twenty-five years ago and it’s bad now. It will, barring some grand and catastrophic shift in perception on what’s valued in gameplay, never be broadly considered good. But the devs weren’t some Lex Luthor types wringing their hands and preparing to unleash a devious prank upon the unwitting public - they were just ordinary people who were dealt a crappy hand and had to make the most of it, or at the very least just needed to make it to their next paycheck. In light of that, I no longer see the point in dangling its desiccated corpse in the middle of the town square, as it would likely only be for the benefit of ignorant younglings and the local drunkard. If you have any doubts that its unfortunate reputation is well-deserved, you can dig up its grave any time you choose with a few mere clicks. The only thing it’ll cost is a bit of your time and perhaps a crumb of your sanity.

If there’s any one takeaway about Superman 64 for me, it’s how effectively it demonstrates the kind of legacy a broken game used to be able to leave. In an era of constant disappointments, games are consistently released in sorry condition only to be patched or reworked into a (hopefully) acceptable state over time. Hell, even as far as older experiences are concerned, people are now making marked efforts to improve games that they’ve deemed as just needing a bit of love. It can be hard to remember that there was once a time where releasing a game to the console market wasn’t something you could easily just “take back”. Over the last decade, we’ve typically associated miserable experiences like our on-trial Titus offering with budget Steam bloat or the innumerable “free” games flooding mobile marketplaces. As for the bigger players in the gaming landscape, any blunders are promptly picked to pieces on social media and all the noise surrounding it could ward off any potential buyers. Any ado about any given title is quickly swept away by the next mass of mediocrity. Back then, though, things were a little different. Devils in disguise generally had equal billing with the winners on your store shelf (at least until they hit the clearance bin), and unless you were Internet savvy or subscribed to some of the gaming circulations of the time, word of mouth was all you had. You could arrive at the shops with your Christmas money in hand, go “ooh, Superman!” and bring it home without a second thought. And once you slotted the game in and experienced that pain, pain was all that remained. Hopefully you rented it – if not, then hopefully you could return it - and you could tell your friends about it to spare them that dismal fate. But there was still no reversing what had been done. There was no hope of a patch, no hope of updates – no hope of it getting better. Superman 64 ala 1999 is a static creation, incapable of change, incapable of learning. That gray cartridge stands as a monument to the hubris of mankind, and even once the very last one has rotted away, unable to be played, the ghost will still exist through swathes of reviews, anecdotes and archival sites… And most importantly, the memories of those unfortunate enough to have been trapped within that virtual hellscape.

WELL DONE, YOU MANAGED TO GET YOUR FRIENDS OUT OF THIS NIGHTMARE…

BUT IN THE REAL WORLD, LEX IS STILL THERE.

Forewarning: It's basically impossible to talk about this game in any detail without spoiling key aspects of it, so if you want to experience it for yourself I recommend staying away from this review (or others) until you've played it.

My brother, at one point in our childhood, managed to get ahold of a PS2 and a stack of games to go with it. The end result was the two of us coming into contact with a great many experiences that had eluded us due to only owning Nintendo devices previously. This included series like Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy and Grand Theft Auto. Of all the games we had managed to accumulate, though, one particular 2005 release titled “Shadow of the Colossus” really seemed to command his attention. I tried it for myself and ended up spending one lonely day bathing in its pale golden rays. There were times when I kind of wanted to tear my hair out… But I kept on regardless. Those eight or so hours have stuck with me for a long time.

The tale Team Ico is telling here is as simple as they come. A youth named Wander has entered a cursed and forbidden land with three things in tow: A valiant mount named Agro, an enchanted blade, and the lifeless body of a girl. He brings this body to an ancient shrine and is approached by a spirit known as Dormin. Wander asks if the girl can be brought back to life. Dormin suggests it is possible, but only on one condition – Wander must scour the Forbidden Lands for sixteen colossi and slay each one. Only then will Dormin have the power to grant Wander’s request. The boy unflinchingly accepts. Led by a mysterious light emanating from his sword, he sets off to fulfill his end of the bargain. There are hints that nothing here is quite so straightforward as it seems, and while some of the shadows surrounding this narrative are dispelled with time, just as much is kept obscured.

Every aspect of the game feels intentional, even when there’s fair reason to assume otherwise. Wander is a skilled rider and bowman, which is translated through gameplay. What is also translated through gameplay is that the poor fellow has clearly never held a sword for more than a few minutes, wielding his ancient blade with all the finesse of a child playing with a handsome stick found by the creek. A shame, then, that flinging what may as well be toothpicks at your towering targets will predictably avail you of naught. And Agro, while being as trusty a steed as they come, is clearly of different stock than the gravity-defying horses that inhabit the province of Skyrim. You’re going to have to get up onto that walking tower under your own power and give it a good stabbing if you want to have any hope of bringing it down. What follows is a gut-wrenching dance wherein you desperately seek an opening to clamber up to that glowing weak spot, striving to avoid being crushed like a bug or flung unto the hard and uncaring earth. Each move the colossus makes causes your controller to vibrate violently, and even the Playstation 2’s hardware seems to falter beneath the utter weight of the tragic monstrosities it endeavors to display. All the while, a sweeping orchestral soundtrack swells from menacing to triumphant as you slowly but surely manage to accomplish the impossible. The staggering sense of scale and the accompanying drama have rarely been matched by other games in the past two decades.

And as you would probably expect of any deal with the devil, this exercise involves no small amount of pain. The Forbidden Lands, while eerie and beautiful, are also barren and lifeless, save for a few decrepit structures and a light sprinkling of flora and fauna. Every new mark seems more distant and difficult to reach than the last, and you will become intimately familiar with each empty stretch of this realm in your travels. You really feel Wander’s relative weakness and scaling each boss can be a deeply frustrating task, which is in no way helped by the awkward controls and combative camera. Nothing quite boils the blood like getting shaken off one poke away from felling your foe. If the sheen of the spectacle wears off somewhere between scene one and scene sixteen, there isn’t much left for you here. Aside from one or two little secrets, this world is just as empty as it feels. Thus, if the idea of exploration for exploration’s sake doesn’t grab you, then you will find very little reason to persist. And as previously suggested, the framerate does chug at times. I doubt this will be too much of an issue for most, but it is worth mentioning.

What will probably make Shadow of the Colossus hardest to stomach for some, though, is the moral ambiguity surrounding its protagonists and the nature of your charge. Wander is not some righteous and just warrior facing off against an unquestionably dangerous villain. Dormin may or not be a benevolent entity and is decidedly not a beloved one. The religious enforcers that pursue you might seem to be wantonly zealous at worst, but what if they have very good reasons for rushing to stop Wander? As to your targets - the sixteen colossi seem perfectly content to exist in perpetual solitude, peacefully milling about until you arrive. Even then, some of them only seem to attack out of animalistic instinct, some pay you no heed at all until you actively threaten them, and some outright flee from you. Video games have long been centered around the simple task-reward structure of giving you a treat and a pat on the back for completing your objectives before urging you on to the next stage. This transactional nature is very much present in SotC and is mirrored in the narrative, as each titan you topple puts you one step closer to saving a life in addition to making Wander just a touch more able. However, the intrinsic feeling of triumph that is typically associated with these experiences can potentially be snuffed out by the tragic tone that underscores each encounter. While you might be capable of understanding your character’s loss and their desperate desire to right what has gone wrong, you might find it much harder to accept that the ends justify the means. You are not a hero in this tale. You are a hunter. You may end up questioning if any of this is truly worth the blood you’ve shed. You might wish for an alternative.

Maybe you don't need to slay the colossi at all. Maybe you can abandon your quest, find a nice patch of grass and quietly sit with Agro while taking in the bloom and gloom. Maybe you can eke out a living riding to and fro and subsisting off fruit and lizard tails. Maybe you could just turn off the console. Loss is a natural part of life. Your beloved is gone. Shouldn’t you accept that and move on? Shouldn’t you leave this forbidden land - the denizens of which are seemingly guilty of no crime under man or god – to continue to exist forgotten and undisturbed?

But then I guess there wouldn’t be a game.

The simple fact of the matter is that this is Wander’s story, and he didn’t steal a magic sword and travel untold miles with his girlfriend’s cadaver in tow to just give up the second he started feeling a tinge of guilt. Once that first colossus hits the ground, there’s only one path left. The dying groans of your unwilling victims and the somber music that accompanies their demise might leave a bad taste in your mouth, but if Wander is having second thoughts at all, he doesn’t let it show. And maybe you can stop playing any time you want, but I get the distinct impression that if it was somehow possible to turn control over to your avatar, he’d jump right back into his killing spree without an ounce of hesitation. The game never asks you to take a side; it’s been chosen for you already. It may be that Dormin has nothing but ill will for humanity, and perhaps they will betray you in the end. Perhaps they were never capable of fulfilling your wish in the first place. None of that matters. Opportunities to cheat death don’t come every day. If life isn’t worth living without her, then what alternative do you really have?

Ultimately, pyrrhic is the only word that can be used to describe your eventual victory. The true nature of the ending is left as uncertain as everything that came before and may raise just as many questions as it provides answers, not only unto itself but also with regards to Team Ico’s namesake and maiden title. For me, at least, the mood was intensely somber but not without a spark of hope. After playing so many games with endings that are bittersweet at absolute worst, having those sentiments flipped on their head was definitely something that I needed at the time.

Shadow of the Colossus did not attempt to offer what I think most would consider a broadly enjoyable gameplay experience. Strip away the story and aesthetics and all that remains is a clunky, choppy collection of boss fights preceded by lengthy hallways. However, while some may be able to fully divorce in their minds the game proper from the package it’s wrapped in, to do so for a title like this one is to perform a disservice. They are deliberately and irreversibly intertwined. To me, SotC is a game that feels like one of the rare opportunities for an industry-backed developer to turn their nose up at convention and make an experience that conveys their intended vision. Many critics considered it a success, and many players have similar feelings. Maybe you feel it’s a masterpiece or just another overrated piece of artistic intrigue, or anywhere in-between. In my opinion, if nothing else, it’s an experiment that definitely left a mark on both me and my hobby, and one that I think we gravely need to see more of.