When I wrote my Backloggd Review of EarthBound about a year ago, I tried to shave down my impressions and interpretations into something concise, digestible, and spoiler-free. I’m not going to do that with this one; I want to take this as an opportunity to speak freely and honestly about the MOTHER series and its genre cousins without worrying myself over the burden of design, if I can (already I’ve rewritten these three lines maybe six or seven times, but we’re loosening up). Let’s leave a little less on the cutting room floor this time, how ‘bout that. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, we’re goin’ all the way in.

On MOTHER 3 (Or — "Ticket to Nowhere”)

If EarthBound feels like “hanging out” with a weird, kind, fascinating person, then MOTHER 3 is the story of her life. That’s the way it starts, anyway. It’s fantasized and spun out into a broader and heavier story than she ever intended, but it’s true to her lived experience nevertheless. She’s a liar, but only in the way my parents were liars when they told me that babies are made out of eggs and fish. MOTHER 3’s practical jokes are kinder, because its story and world are darker. She can still be funny about it, she still has excellent taste in music, but she has nothing to hide anymore. The end of our last conversation (EarthBound) saw her opening up about the sadness and trauma that lingers behind that smile, so there’s nothing left to give but the whole truth, and nothing but (and “truth” is not always synonymous with “fact”). We just had to wait twelve years before we were old enough to hear it.

We hunted for Melodies in MOTHER to sing to the ghost of our great-grandma (who babysat an alien) to fix her ghost amnesia. We acquired Melodies in MOTHER 2 as part of becoming a wiser, more thoughtful person. In MOTHER 3, the Melodies are people who die when we pull their needles. And we don’t pull all of them.

MOTHER wasn’t so much about Ninten himself as the lore surrounding his family and their association with extraterrestrial forces. There’s little reason to believe that Ninten is anything other than a vessel for the player’s personality, like his Dragon Quest forebears, and I think it’s as beautiful here as it is there. It isn’t visually a first-person perspective, but a first-person story stitched together through the player’s investigation, where Ninten is the player’s mind. It’s unique to videogames, and for a game whose world is already unique among videogames, I think it’s handled well. You are Ninten, plain and simple.

But MOTHER 2 plays around with that expectation; it’s very much about Ness’ relationship with the player. Yeah, Ness begins as maybe the most down to earth protagonist in the genre’s history — a silent avatar living in a modern suburb with his family — but he gradually develops and asserts his own identity as new experiences inspire deeper personal reflection. We first read flickers of his childhood memories in each Sanctuary location, then his thoughts written out in Lumine Hall, then his feelings and flashbacks visually represented in Magicant, until finally, he speaks. The game even seems to reinforce this initial link between Ness and the player by addressing him in the second person during both the Coffee and Tea Breaks. And all the while, it's chipping away at that connection by breaking the fourth wall, reaching out to the player and asking for their real name, and then pleading for their prayers at the end.

Unlike Ninten before him, Ness has a past separate from the player’s, and he remembers it. We’re simply here to guide him through that journey, give him strength, and share in that process of reflection and growth. In doing this, he loses the innocence he had at the start, and in the strangest way. As many do, he grew up believing that Evil was a corruptive force, separate from the world he knew. Evil radiated from Giygas, pulsed through the Mani-Mani statue, and swayed everyday objects and animals and people to violence. If there’s anything we learn about Ness in Magicant, it’s that he still views Pokey as a friend, even after everything they’ve been through. Surely, he’s just another one of Giygas’ innocent victims. Like Mr. Carpainter, like Monotoli, he’ll snap out of it as soon as Giygas is out of the picture. But Giygas dies, and Evil does not die with him. After the final battle, Pokey pops in to let us know that he hasn’t changed a bit, and winks off to spread his influence elsewhere, elsewhat. He even has the last word, after the credits have rolled. And so, Ness’ last discovery is that Evil is as human as Love. My favorite thing about EarthBound’s ending is that we still walk home together, with Paula, after learning this.

Lucas picks up where Ness left off. He discovers the dark side of humanity early on in life, and has no illusions about where it came from. We know that Lucas doesn’t blame the Dragos for his mother’s death. The only monsters in the UFOs circling over Tazmily village are people. We can put a face to Lucas’ absent father. We know why he’s gone all the time. We don’t call him for favors. Lucas speaks early on in the game, we see his reactions and his memories and his feelings all laid out in front of us. MOTHER 3’s “Shower Break” in Chapter 4 already addresses Lucas in the third person. We don’t even play as Lucas for an entire scene before switching over to another playable character. The game asks the player their name mere tens of minutes into the first chapter. The sight of the “Chapter 1” title card alone might already tell us all we need to know about the game’s structure and its priorities. It’s “Shigesato Itoi’s Dragon Quest IV” (just as MOTHER had been Itoi’s Dragon Quest II, and MOTHER 2 was analogous to DQIII). Right from the start, we aren’t invited to “live” in MOTHER 3 as we had in MOTHER 2, we’re invited to perform it. EarthBound was a mirror, a conversation. MOTHER 3 is a play. And what a production it is.

In plainer terms, what I’m saying here is that MOTHER 3 was and is the logical next step for this story. We can’t go back to what we had. We’ve already grown beyond our childhood, so Lucas doesn’t have one. Po(r)ky is knocking down his door, and this time, we’re all complicit. It no longer makes a secret of the fact that it knows we’re there, because it knows that we know that it knows we’re there. The question of which is the “better game” feels ugly to me, most of the changes to the series’ staples feel more like a result of the different intent of this game than linear “improvements” on the others, though they’re worth talking about anyway.

MOTHER 3 has far more animation, its art style smooths over EarthBound’s rougher edges, there’s a run button, full recovery stations are easier to come by, you can save and manage money with frogs, there’s a slot for key items, the menus have groovy music and so on and so forth, but more interesting to me are the considerations made to the battle system and enemy encounters. On the whole, enemies are more deliberately positioned and have more varied behaviors, so the ability to sneak up on them is easier to take advantage of. Duster acquires just about all of Jeff’s status-afflicting abilities immediately (alongside a few additions) and they occupy their own menu, meaning this game is more interested in battle turns as a resource than it is in inventory slots (one of the designers might’ve considered that, because you can only pick one per turn, and they don’t deal damage (progress toward victory), and you’re liable to take damage every turn, and most enemies are only susceptible to certain tools, the more interesting decision is simply the matter of using them, and deciding on the one for the job. Not a bad idea). Buffs and debuffs are more effective than ever, and there seems to have been a lot of attention given to the general turn order. Boney always going first (and having no special offensive or PSI abilities) means he’s best utilized as the “item guy,” Lucas’ status buffs and recovery spells have to be planned out in advance, since he’s usually going to go last. Kumatora's healing isn't quite as powerful as Lucas’, but she's much faster in a pinch. That’s important to take note of, because “Rolling Health” is given much more prominence in this one, it really comes into its own. Party members are afforded larger amounts of Hit Points to work with from the very start, and there’s a more gradual overall “roll” speed (it slows down to a crawl if you use the “defend” option, which is especially thoughtful), which, when coupled with the Rhythm Combo system, is nothing short of brilliant.

Rhythm Combos are perfect, and I want them in everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if Itoi wanted to put something like this in every MOTHER game, he probably tapped the ‘A’ button to the beat of Dragon Quest II’s battle theme in 1987 (it starts with this repetitive, percussive “boop,” so I can see it). It turns the music into an essential obstacle for the player; an active and skill-based, but not at all obtrusive addition to JRPG combat which strengthens the value of the standard physical “attack” option incredibly. It’s strict, but if you’re tuned all the way in and tap to the beat of the music, you can land more than double your normal damage. The songs themselves mess with this, having weirdo time signatures and skips to throw the player off and get them to choose their moments carefully. If your health is rolling down, you might still be tempted to squeeze in a few extra hits before the next turn, making for some excellent tension. It imbues so much personality into not just the enemies themselves, all of them having their own variants or entirely unique tracks, but the characters. When you get hit, a sound effect reflecting the enemy’s personality will play in sync with the backing track, but that goes for your party as well. It’s only fitting that a series so in love with music should allow the player to wield it. Master the rhythm battle system, and your crew becomes a band to rival the DCMC themselves (revealing that maybe every JRPG is far less about killing monsters than they are about people learning to work together). Funny though it may be to admit, it’s a key reason I’ve picked up the game as many times as I have, only to see it through to the end.

I always try to land a full sixteen hit combo as Claus at the beginning of the game, just to jam out to his sitar sound effect the only time you can.

But yes, that production. Replaying it now, after about a year away from it, I’m surprised all over again at how efficiently the game manages to convey this beautiful sense of community between the people of Tazmily. It isn’t long at all before it feels like it could be home, and it it isn’t long after that that it begins to fall apart. The careful attention to NPC placement and changing dialogue depending on the situation is nothing short of meticulous. I couldn’t help smiling at Mike’s “slightly unclean and not very tasty” cookies, Nichol’s “the Funshine Sorest is on tire!”, or Wess’ grumblings about how “nobody’s aware of how strong [he] really [is]” because he looks like an old, balding man (and he is). Everyone pitches in to help Flint out in some little way, and it’s devastating to watch — in the series’ most animated moment to this point — as he takes out the full force of his horrible grief on the people who care about him. This is one of those scenes everyone remembers and talks about when they talk about this game, and it’s a testament to the character writing that we feel it as much as we do. Flint himself is completely silent up until this point, but he never had to say anything for this moment to land. The game never has to tell us, in his words, why Lucas doesn’t want a Happy Box. It doesn’t have to tell us why Duster has a bum leg. We could control Flint before and now we can’t, because he can’t.

It’s incredible that the game never seems to let up in this regard, it’s as densely written at the beginning as the crushing finale, so rich and full of ideas that it has to provide designated pit stops between major sequences. It fills its presents with fireworks and reggae beats and spills over with sad beetles to whom we can offer dung in exchange for experience points, all in the name of encouraging us to smell the roses. And we should smell those roses while we can, because the world is changing. The people we love are changing. They’re coming to throw rocks at us, spit on us, and make our lives hell…or…is that the mushrooms talking…? The Nowhere Islands don’t give easy answers.

If MOTHER 2 is about a boy growing up and losing his innocence, 3 is about how a world can lose theirs. These are people who wanted so badly to return to a state of innocence after the End of the World that they had their memories trapped in an egg, and still they become corrupted by forces promising to bring them happiness and salvation from dangers they caused. Could the people of Tazmily have continued living peacefully in this Rousseauian society, or was it destined to come to an end? Porky seems to think that humanity will always fall victim to cruelty and evil, and though he's hardly the most trustworthy character in the story, he didn't invent any of the methods he's using against the Nowhere Islands. He's just taking them to their logical extreme. Not to absolve him of blame, of course, Porky is one of the most pitiful and terrifying characters in videogames. It’s quietly horrible to watch Isaac admit to Salsa in Chapter 3 that he just wants to see if happiness really is as easy as buying a Happy Box, too naive to recognize the happiness that’s available all around him. Because we’re duped all the time in that same way, riding the hype of new products and falling for advertisements, ever encouraged to wonder just how much happier we might be if only we had that one thing. If we’re lucky, those things come with genuine sincerity and authenticity. If we’re luckier, we can share them with people who love us. We’re rarely so lucky.

Not for nothin', but Dragon Quest V’s portrayal of slavery felt pretty toothless after MOTHER 3 made me push claymen around for a whole afternoon at the factory (I’m sorry Dragon Quest V, I still love you). It doesn’t take very long, but it feels humiliating and wrong to help the enemy in such a tedious exercise, knowing that some of the villagers do this all day, every day, for a pithy reward. Knowing that everyone in the village is being molded like these claymen. Some of them even become Pigmasks. To call out the absurdity of MOTHER 3 is to feel alienated by the absurdity of our everyday lives. If we’re already feeling that way, it’ll be an eerily validating experience.

But is it too much? Is it too heavy-handed? The MOTHER series had always been such an understated thing, and now we’re just saying the quiet parts out loud. But could it be any other way? Maybe I do have to listen to Samba de Combo while considering the ramifications of materialism on our fractured world and the meaning of happiness. Maybe I need to fire a pencil rocket at a bass guitar. It’s a game of so many paradoxes. It’s a game that loves being a game, yet is wary of its own place in the world. It has such a zest for life, but lingers on destruction. How are we supposed to feel about Wess, or Flint? The islands’ sworn protectors are selfless immortal nonbinary psychics who are frequently described as “strange,” but “good-natured,” and I’m frankly not one thousand percent sure how to feel about that portrayal. One of them betrays the rest and becomes an evil monkey-torturing mechanical chimera made out of brass instruments, but is still loved by a mouse. MOTHER 3 is two brothers wrestling friendly dinosaurs. It’s those same brothers breaking down in tears because everything they love is gone. I played this game for my brother once, performed it like a musical. He asked if I was crying during those final moments. I don’t remember if I was.

I always tell people to play MOTHER 3 on a DS Lite if they can (it’s two Happy Boxes for the price of one), or another portable console of their choice, because the game is designed to be the player’s companion. The plentiful save points and hot springs are part of that, but there’s something about having this world in your pocket, by your desk, on the train, in line at the airport, in your hands, which makes it feel so much more intimate. That’s ironic in its own way — the DS Lite was new when MOTHER 3 came out, a game that wanted us to think about the nature of technological progress, and now our “portable” consoles don’t even fit in our pockets anymore. Take it from me, you don’t want to play MOTHER 3 on your iPhone. The physicality of the buttons is necessary. The lack of notifications and other applications is especially necessary.

Both MOTHER 2 and 3 end by reaching out to the player. MOTHER 2 fills our screen with Giygas, so we’re face to face with the embodiment of Evil. MOTHER 3 fills our screen with Nothing, so we're face to face with our own reflection.

But why go to such pains to separate the Player and the Character? Why draw so much attention to us? Why did I waste so much breath emphasizing the importance of that growing divide throughout this series?

Because it doesn’t want us to think of this experience as an “escape.” It doesn't give us anywhere to run. It wants us to take it with us. It wants us to do something with these feelings and memories. These are games we play as ourselves, whoever we are.



...Wherever we are.

I don’t want to fold my laundry right now, so here’s a review of Half-Life 2.

I kinda miss those opening moments when the only discrepancy I cared about was my ability to huck physics objects halfway across a given room without being regarded as a psychopath by anxious bystanders. The state of the world is conveyed instantly, and we’re forced to live under the squalor of this totalitarian regime alongside everyone else. A lot of us probably stood there and listened to Breen’s entire self-serving speech before advancing past the first area, his face filling those massive screens and lording over the train station. It’s chilling. And then, the game remembers that it’s a sequel to a New York Times Bestseller, and it’s time for a family reunion. What’s that? The Combine are beating people in their homes? They’re rounding up the humans? Nonsense, we have headcrab merchandise to sell! Remember the HEV suit? Remember Barney from Blue Shift? Oh, don’t forget your trusty crowbar! We love you, Gordon Freeman!

THE LONG VERSION:

Half-Life was all about making the player feel like this horribly outmatched scientist hurled into an unmitigated disaster, to the point where I called the player’s success tantamount to a non-canon “what-if” scenario. The Gordon Freeman of Half-Life 2 is a monster. You know that dinky crowbar from the first game, the one you found lying around on the floor? It might as well be Excalibur. Stormtroopers fall by the dozen. I never found myself without a surplus of bullets. Why does everyone know who we are? Why does everyone have intimate knowledge of what we did in that top-secret government facility? Why are we suddenly so nostalgic for the alleged greatness of Black Mesa? Weren’t they up to some extremely questionable stuff back there, or was that just my imagination? Why do we suddenly have a fawning girlfriend, and why are we playing fetch with her robot dog? Aren’t we just some guy? Why aren’t we just some guy?

The game’s at it’s best when it’s treating you like just some guy. We enter Ravenholm, and it might as well have nothing to do with anything going on in the rest of the game. There’s a man facing off against a horde of zombified villagers, and there’s intrigue surrounding his identity, his sanity. Eventually, he tosses us a shotgun at an opportune moment, and we work together to drive back the beasts. We snake through the winding architecture of this ruined town, we activate physics traps which feel naturally integrated into the situation, we panic when a poisonous freak knocks us down to a single hit point. This was more “Half-Life” than anything we’d been doing, iconography be damned. I cared more about this one guy than any of the returning characters for his direct involvement and cooperation. I knew Valve had it in ‘em. Everyone else made me feel like I was in the Truman Show.

Characters act more like tour guides than residents of this world, even walking backwards to gently usher the player from place to place (and show off that facial animation, I guess). The push toward “realism” was only natural, but I didn’t anticipate just how far Valve would go in removing them from the context of the gameplay. Half-Life’s NPCs weren’t compelling because they were “believable,” but because they were as vulnerable as the player. Some of them could fend for themselves (somewhat), while others needed the player’s assistance. If you weren’t careful (and sometimes if you were), you might’ve found yourself responsible for the death of a fellow scientist. They wanted key characters and development this time, so that’s not gonna happen. Can’t jeopardize our award-winning plot. Not our precious Alyx. I know they were striving for emotional range here, and that’s a worthy cause, but I might’ve cared a whole lot more about these people if I was worried something might happen to them. Heck, I’d have cared more about them if I had to personally press the “interact” button while facing them to receive their dialogue.

Maybe it’s worth sifting through some thoughts about narrative design. This is sort of tangential, but why not — The best games in the JRPG genre use its gameplay conventions, its mechanical language, in ways which feel congruent with the story. “Talking” is a major verb, it’s only natural that some of that talking would be dramatic. Combat takes place in a separate mode of play, so there’s no expectation that everyone will be involved with it (and in many games, we don’t directly initiate fights in the first place). In that way, Dragon Quest’s mechanics feel congruent with its storytelling. I’d describe Half-Life 1 similarly. Its mechanics are mostly congruent with its story and characterization. The “plot” is happening all around the player in real-time, and all of that stuff has direct ramifications on their forward progress. Why give games like Zelda and Sekiro a pass? Maybe it’s simply that we choose to talk to NPCs, that’s our method of agency in that situation. The characters can respond to us, just not in every possible way (because Link and Wolf wouldn’t kill those people, but they would talk to them). In Half-Life 2, characters talk at us, and don’t acknowledge our agency in the setting. It pains me to say it, but many of Half-Life 2’s character interactions would work better as cutscenes. The benefit of the persistent game state is that the core mechanics are always or could always be relevant, but that’s rarely the case here. If I’m not in a mode of play where interactivity is expected, I suppose I don’t groan as hard when I have to sit through it. Something to consider.

Oy, talking about this game makes me feel like a petulant child (there’s so much attention to detail, but you can still look around when you’re dead). I can’t think of too many games which have outright disappointed me. I mean, if I don’t like it, I can just…do something else. Maybe refund the game. Who cares? Still, I can’t help feeling that Half-Life 2 represented such a fascinating opportunity. That first game is right on the cusp of something incredible. A bit sloppy, a bit janky, but with a clear vision for the future of experiential game narratives. I was hoping to see its Super Mario Bros. 3, a deeper and richer iteration on that original idea. This one doubles down on the first game’s contrivance-filled pathfinding. Half-Life wasn’t lacking in realistic physics puzzles or jet-ski sequences or monologuing holograms, but interesting risks and alternate paths and weightier character interactions. I’m glad that so many people found what they were looking for in Half-Life 2, though maybe I’m better off checking out Deus Ex than waiting another decade for that third installment. Something tells me Valve won’t be looking back.

In Morrowind you will spend hours and hours shooting your bow and never hitting your target. You will aim directly at your target, you will pull the bow string completely taut, you will have the best arrows you can afford. Even with all of that you will still miss your target.

In 2022 Morrowind is a hard game to play. It is clunky and janky and, by modern standards, looks pretty gross. What Morrowind can offer, however is something that I haven't been able to find anywhere else. This is a game that feels mysterious and threatening but also, if you put in the work, you can understand it and master it and break it over your knee.
The world is fascinating, the mechanics are just obtuse enough to be interesting but not frustrating, the jank is charming and can be used as a weapon in the player's arsenal.
By the end of my adventure in Morrowind I was casting powerful spells, stealing powerful weapons, crafting powerful potions, and, most importantly of all, hitting every damn shot with my bow.

The first issue of Nintendo Power that I ever read (#231) included a segment titled “BEST OF THE BEST,” where Chris Slate and the gang ranked what they considered the twenty greatest games for every Nintendo console. As an eight year-old sitting in a seven-week summer camp where videogames were absolutely off-limits, this was a treasure trove. So much had already stoked my curiosity for my pastime’s past, Nintendo’s in particular, and this magazine was a whole gallon of kerosene on that tiny lil’ flickering spark. It’s here that the seeds of intrigue for the Legend of Zelda series were first planted in my brain, seeing as it always seemed to narrowly edge out the guy I was there to see (up until the dedicated Wii page, where Mario Galaxy reigned supreme), but in the small collection of those that stood up there with the Big Boys was a glaring anomaly. The GameCube was my introduction to the medium, emblematic of Mario Kart and Sonic Adventure, but here, it was host to the grungiest entry on the entire list. Scary, even, for a kid as timid as I was. That fiery screenshot, with its grotesque giant towering over a gun-toting action hero, branded itself onto the grooves of my gray matter. And right beneath it —

01 – RESIDENT EVIL 4

Somehow, the whimsy and imagination I so craved had lost out to the brutish violence I'd glimpsed in more “MATURE” content, and on its home turf, too…I might’ve been a bit put-off, but I had the whole rest of the summer to think it over. I knew that if even the staff of Nintendo Power had to hand the cup to Capcom (themselves acknowledging how rare it was for a “third-party game to top Nintendo on its own system”), there must’ve been something to it.

Fast-forward another fourteen years, and Resident Evil 4’s reputation has become impossible to ignore. Its third-person shooting is so legendarily perfect that it “killed” its own series, cutting off any and all future for fixed camera angles, but also never quite being succeeded by anything that managed to improve on its gameplay. There’s even been some renewed vitriol levied against RE4 in recent years now that the series has managed to finally recapture some amount of its success with something closer to an A-Horror aesthetic (at least among fans I know), but either way, the conversation has never seemed able to escape from the devouring whirlpool of that fourth entry. I still hadn’t gotten around to any of ‘em myself, having decided I wasn’t a horror guy or a shooting guy for most of my life, but that was changing as I was gradually broadening the scope of my personal taste. Eventually I figured that, if I was ever gonna get around to Resident Evil, I’d be one of those diehard fixed camera haunted house puzzle box fiends, decrying 4’s abandonment of all that is subtle, terrifying, and holy. It was too colorless, too vapid to catch the interest of one with taste as REFINED as myself. Right. As if.

No, I’m not too good for Resident Evil 4. Not even close, and I knew it within the first fifteen minutes. It takes no time at all before we’re fending off crowds of parasite-infected villagers as the most adorkable government operative this side of Solid Snake, and if the goofy “rEsiDeNt eeEEviLLL…fOOOUUuurRRR” on the title screen didn’t gear me up for a schlock-fest, Leon’s indelible “bingo” quip did the trick. Even as an MGS fan, I don’t know if I’d have guessed how well that balance between the tense, sometimes genuinely fear-inducing gameplay and the campy fun of the story would work for me. Metal Gear’s cartoonish stealth often straddles the same line between silly and serious as its cutscenes, but the shamelessly corny character interactions here were a relief, a chance to laugh before plunging back into atmospheric danger, and that made it much more endearing than I’d expected. I understand the pushback against some of the nonsense here, especially with such a strong opening area, but it was just too entertaining to ever strike me as some kind of tragic missed opportunity. I never thought I’d enjoy quicktime events, and escort missions are rarely done well, but the occasional button-mash and the presence of a companion both counterbalance the thrilling dread of the regular gameplay in all of the right ways (and RE4’s gameplay somehow manages to measure and expand on both ideas).

Despite the recent ubiquity of the genre, I hadn’t actually played a dedicated third-person shooter before this game (so my bewilderment over its greatness is probably not that far off from players of its day), but my impression of the sixth console generation had always been, when it came to the big names, an eschewing of tightness and gameplay depth in favor of breadth and spectacle. I was more wrong than I realized. Resident Evil 4 is almost, if not as dedicated to its core hook as the original Super Mario Bros., and its ability to take a minimalistic and intuitive system and spin it out into dozens of dynamic situations is about as well-documented too. The temptation to build a game around a narrative concept or theme can be strong, but RE4 is a textbook example of what happens when a designer picks one verb and rolls with it all the way, come hell or high water. You don’t need me rattling off every little nuance, but its handling of the interplay between ranged and melee combat is so sick that, even without a plot, the promise of getting to set up and execute the next head-smashing suplex would’ve been enough to carry me through the entire game both times.

Slim resources are a fine way to get the player to pick their shots carefully, but this added layer means they’re also weighing where and when to aim to get the most out of every bullet. Headshots open the door to sweeping roundhouse kicks which can topple an entire tide of lurching foes, but, unless I could afford to spend some shotgun ammo, I never wanted to be too close to the horde while I was at it. I found myself sizing up a situation, firing off some careful headshots from afar, and then closing the distance to cash in on that splash damage. Shooting below the knees is best when looking to take out an individual enemy with a spectacular skull slam. That simple decision makes it so much more than your typical “glory kill,” it always rewards the player for thinking several steps ahead. ‘Course, you’ve got more on hand than just a couple of guns and Leon’s ridiculous muscles, and RE4 rarely disappoints the desire to use the environment in creative ways. In one of the best moments in either of my playthroughs, I threw down a flash grenade while surrounded by goons, and quickly took advantage of the resulting stun effect to kick all of them, one by one, down a hole in the center of the room. Unless any other third-person shooter can offer anything nearly that good, I'm afraid I’ll have to kindly ask the genre to sit down. This game goes in so many directions with its core mechanics that I don’t even feel much of a need to play any of its successors, spiritual or otherwise.

If there is a downside to that insatiable exploration of concepts, though, it’s that it reveals just how narrow the range of RE4’s excellence really is. Its pacing is just about perfect almost all the way through, dialing the intensity up and down with tremendous care and drawing from a seemingly endless barrel of ideas (it can’t be understated that just about every encounter features a distinct spin of its own that makes the engagement unique), but somehow, it didn’t quite manage to wow me in the end. I’m talking about the very end here, just the final few setpieces. Maybe capping off such a crowd-focused game system on a more traditional one v. one final boss fight wasn’t quite the right move, perhaps the insanity of that second to last segment was just a little too messy (despite being succeeded by a pretty great little zone), maybe the game had already hit such a spiraling high just a little earlier that the final stretch couldn’t possibly have lived up, or maybe it really did need a bit more weight to its drama to make that ending sing. Whatever the reason, it’s hard to criticize RE4 for failing to “stick to its guns” when it does so fantastically over the course of the whole game, but it clearly does best in those explorable combat arenas, filled with ins and outs and enemy types to strategize around. When the conclusion finally did roll in, it seemed to have already exhausted just about every possible configuration of those parts it could dream up, but it’s a good thing it ends only a little after it stops playing to those very particular strengths. Surprised as eight year-old me might’ve been to hear this coming from himself, that just makes it all the more enticing to hop back over to the start and climb Resident Evil 4’s rollicking “Tower of Terror” over again.

I guess Chris Slate was just me all along...

A tantalising glimpse of what Nintendo EAD was capable of when allowed to step off the family-friendly Mario-Zelda-Mario hamster wheel: a 2000 AD Comics adaptation of Death Race 2000 that uses the word “Death” far more casually than just about any other Nintendo game that’s ever existed.

It’s interesting to me that some of EAD’s biggest mold-breakers (Starfox, F-Zero, Pilotwings) ended up being sourced out to Namco and Sega in the succeeding games generations, as if Nintendo were afraid of being directly responsible for games where your soul could run wild, blow big things up and flirt with death-destruction. I was very much in the “Mario Kart 8 IS the next-gen F-Zero!” camp until I replayed this at the weekend and realised that X is as much about its presented attimood as it is its precise handling. It’s hard in ways Nintendo games simply aren’t, usually - in MK8 you can’t make Mario break 1400mph and lose his fine-tuned grip on a deep-space heavy-metal mag-lev, screaming “noooOOoOooOooOoo!” while plummeting painfully into explosive oblivion. This is a once-in-a-lifetime Nintendo experience - GX carries its torch, but it isn’t really a Nintendo game; this right here is something you could plausibly imagine Shigeru Miyamoto observing on his coffee break, and that makes it particularly special.

As far as an actual game review goes - Santa gave me Ocarina of Time and my brother F-Zero X on Christmas Day, 1998. 24 years later, we both still refer to this day as “the best Christmas ever”. That should tell you everything you need to know about this game and its quality.

I'm probably gonna continue this for another month or so but really, I don't see my thoughts changing soon.

It's weird to say I was disappointed by this cause it's basically a "what you see is what you get" case, it's (technically due to the original release being on the N64) the first game in a series that has long since expanded (and seemingly in New Horizons' case, cut away from) its technical and mechanical outputs, and as obviously reflected on the rating I still like the game, but considering this has a pretty big cult following I was expecting more than something so... simple. Like yes, simple is good, simple is what makes this game stand out among later entries, but when I already feel like I've had my fill on what I could possibly do each hour or two session a day, that begs the question: What else does this do differently than the others?

Like sorry HardcoreACGamer2001, I don't think the square acre layout is all that different from the logroll in later entries, in fact I find it slightly more annoying to navigate the world. I don't think the villagers are as nasty as people say they are, it certainly IS a little more exaggerated like getting called a "freak mental case" out loud but for the most part my villagers were pretty normal, and the "meanness" aspect comes from you yourself not living up to their request... which is something later AC titles also do. I'm also annoyed it takes longer to get tools you need to DO anything important, there's no reason my chances of getting a fishing pole or an axe should be left up to chance despite having played this for almost a week and a half now, and the bell output feels so astonishingly stingy compared to later entries (which is saying something since Wild World, City Folk, and New Leaf also had its own issues with Bell obtainment) that I had to use a code be instantly handed 30k, something I have never done before. In fact, probably my most damning and extremely personal thought on this title, the fact I have such little to do and is more focused on me relaxing and having a good time, the thing people praise this game the most in comparison to later titles... actively made me more anxious and worried on what I could possibly do to keep my mind busy. It's the inverse of what's keeping me from playing New Horizons, instead of having too much to do for something I'm not particularly invested in, I have so little to do I can't get invested in things I already liked before.

Now granted, part of me is bitter that I grew up with the later games taking up a large part of my time, and seeing people go "nah that shit's for babies, this one's REALLY where it's at", so it's hard to finally sink a decent amount of time into this and not feel "oh it's more or less the same only it was before the franchise became a megahit and doesn't have a lot of Stuff to it". If you take it as its own thing then yea it does do things better that later entries either skimp out on, or lack completely.

For one thing, despite my comment on people exaggerating on villager nastiness, I do think they feel more distinct here. The personality mechanic is a thing, obviously, but here it does feel like they have Actual Characteristics to them that makes them stand out to the others. It was a genuine shock to write letters and then be replied back with "what the fuck are you saying?", even if I did so in a way that was funny. The only ones I felt were similar to each other were Maddie and Goldie, and even then the former's a little more... self-centered, I guess to put it, than the latter can be. I still largely think people exaggerate on villagers being more cookie-cutter later on - particularly in New Leaf since that's when the complaint became vocal - but I can at least say I get where people are coming from, it's been a while talking with numerous villagers I've never seen before grow on me really quickly, two of which becoming new favorites: Midge, who's sweetness is just infectious, and Boris, who's honestly just a riot with how aggressive he is.

The serenity of this is also just, impeccable, almost to a rather uncomfortable degree. I'm pretty sure this game was the first time I willingly went out of my way to get letters since it's pretty much a necessity this time around, even if I pretty much left letters to the Museum empty cause it's faster that way. I dunno if the OST will beat out NL for me, but it's a VERY close second regardless, especially with tracks like 1AM, and 2PM. I wish there was a wee bit more to at least do to keep sessions from feeling repetitive, but I understand that A) that'd ruin the appeal, and B) this is a port of the N64 original that didn't have much to begin with either (although that being said I do NOT know why they regulated shit to the e-reader and GBA, even if I have the means to get them thanks to emulation it's just, why?).

Again, it's really hard to express that much disappointment to this title since it's before the games really branched out and did a lot more, and it has such a strong following to this day for a reason, but I must've simply missed the boat on getting so enamored to this title due to having access to the newer titles instead, which in turn made me feel a little more burnt out. It's not like Wild World, which I feel is the middle ground between this game's aesthetics and calmness and later game's busy taskforce, nor is it like New Leaf, which had me mentally preparing tasks and what to do nearly daily when I got to it. I even have a hard time saying it's better than City Folk, as while this feels more distinct compared to CF's expansion-like status, I can at least say CF kept my attention more often. I wanna say it is the better game for the time being, but this might change later on. I know most of this has been me moaning about the game, so it getting something like a 3.5/5 is VERY curious to people, but like... it's Animal Crossing. Despite everything, it's a title I'm gonna have a goodass time with anyway and vibe away on.

Alright guys, cards on the table – Dark Souls represents so much of what I love and aspire to in videogames that not loving it felt like some kind of divine prank. In 2018, I finally got my hands on this Super Metroid/3D Zelda/Classicvania hybrid, complete with immaculate, intertwining level design, nuanced environmental storytelling, and a deep respect for the player's curiosity, persistence and attention span, and my impression was all the way down the middle of the road. Was it the jank? The stagnant, entropic world? The overblown expectations from myself and others developed over years of game design-y conversations with friends? Was it just too hard? Most of Dark Souls went by with a sigh instead of a smile, and I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to puzzle out exactly why. After beating Ornstein and Smough by waiting an eternity for their recovery animations to line up enough times, the game simply lost me, and not without some hard feelings.

Just so you know in advance, this review is going to be terrible. It’s going to be long and rambling and nitpicky, because I’ve struggled for years to figure out how to articulate my opinion on this game. However any of this may come across, I’m not trying to tell you you’re wrong, I’ve just gotta work this out for myself.

I think I was afraid of what it could mean for me to not resonate completely with this pillar of a medium I've devoted so much of myself to. If Dark Souls was not for me, was I in the wrong place? If I diverted from the lessons of this biblical text, could I make something of worth to anyone but myself? I had to pick it apart and ascertain some reason. Sounds ridiculous when I put it that way, but Dark Souls seemed to haunt me no matter where I went. The series' values turned up time and again in discussions with my professors and peers. Like the game's map, there seemed no topic that couldn't bend back around to Dark Souls, so it was inevitable that I'd be drawn back to Firelink Shrine myself. After all, it's a synthesis of so many textbook design concepts that it has become the textbook, but for me, this leads to some of the game's bigger problems.

Before we unpack any of that, though, let me first say that I found more to enjoy this time around than before, but a lot of that has to do with the amount of knowledge I had going in. People online like to make a big stink about how cryptic the first Zelda can be, but I struggle to imagine how I might've learned half of Dark Souls' mechanics just by playing the game. Noah Caldwell-Gervais' excellent video about the trilogy centers around how deceptively accessible it is, and perhaps I went in with the wrong mentality, but I didn't quite find this to be the case. From kindling bonfires and summoning spirits to unraveling the nature of the game's equipment and stat mechanics, Dark Souls either mires its details in maximalist menus, or leaves them to the birds. I want to emphasize that I don't have an issue seeking out external sources or making use of prior knowledge when it comes to delving into a game's deepest depths (I'm one of those weirdos who replays games an awful lot, often a great game only truly blossoms after the first experience), but without a foothold in the nature of the system or what it expected of me, it didn’t seem possible to make interesting decisions. Dark Souls’ solution is to bring the internet into the world, allowing players to offer each other tips and hints through messages left on the floor, but, as with most internet-related things, your mileage may vary. Having said that, I absolutely respect the confidence of this approach, and the intention to get people talking about its systems. The experience of discovery on a first playthrough sometimes equals and even outweighs the joy of making decisions with knowledge of a game’s intricacies on a replay, but in Dark Souls’ case, I don’t know if that applies for me. Maybe that’s an ego thing, I don’t want to have to ask someone what “kindling” is and what it does, I don’t need someone telling me how “poise” works, or what the magic system entails, or that kicking can be used to bypass enemy defenses, I’d like to be able to learn at least most of this stuff on the back of my own perseverance. Yes, one of my problems with Dark Souls is also one of my problems as a human being – I’m very bad at asking for help, and I’ll sooner resign myself to a challenge I don’t enjoy than swallow my pride and reach out to others (yes, I have seen Neon Genesis Evangelion). Dark Souls knows it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and I know that’s one of its strengths as a cultural artifact, but I think it’d be a little more considerate if it didn’t make me confront my personality flaws in the process. Jokes(?) aside, I’ve often heard the game compared to Super Metroid, but in this regard, I’d say they’re almost polar opposites. On a first Metroid playthrough, the process of learning where everything is through discovery results in constant upgrades and lessons which keep the player almost too powerful in an effort to teach them the lay of the land. With that knowledge, they can take the game’s challenge to beat it in faster, tougher, and more creative ways on subsequent attempts. This isn’t quite the arc that Dark Souls is after, but the resulting effect on returning playthroughs is similar.

Using the Master Key and some persistence, I skipped the Capra Demon and the Gaping Dragon and rang the Bells of Awakening in just a few hours. I charged up Sen's Fortress and slammed my head against Ornstein and Smough for a second time. Having accumulated some suspicions about Frampt's intentions (both intuitively and having gathered a few tidbits from outside sources), I avoided him and decided to seek out another way, and somehow managed to actually find it (though it’s a bit of a shame that the objectives themselves aren’t any different, only the sequence). However mixed my feelings might’ve been, I wouldn’t have been caught dead deriding Dark Souls’ level design even in 2018. It really is a triumph of digital architecture whose exploration is, for me, the game’s greatest joy. Watching it always manage to somehow loop back around to Firelink Shrine is almost a running gag, and navigating its ever-increasing network of shortcuts to tear from one side of the map to the other in search of leads to new discoveries is engrossing. I’ll take its tightly wound approach over Elden Ring just about any day for the rest of my life. Its sense of total seamlessness never fails to amaze me, as is its Symphony of the Night-like seeming endlessness. Each individual area plays more like a classic, straightforward Castlevania level in the moment, but fits into the larger world in a more intricate way. When Dark Souls is immersing the player in its creative variety, its shortcut-full pathways, its internally logical spider web of a world, it’s at its absolute best. I often viewed Dark Souls’ setting as a pastiche of dark fantasy tropes, but Lordran always manages to take ownership over whatever cultural touchstones it swipes, both in its lore, and the ways they’re implemented into the game design. The skeletons in the graveyard to the left of Firelink which pummel every unsuspecting player are the videogame skeletons, as is the dragon which makes its powerful entrance in the Undead Burg. Mario Odyssey’s dragon will forever be known as the “Dark Souls Dragon” (despite having as much in common with the one from Shrek), because Dark Souls owns videogame dragons now, that’s just the world we live in. Every archetype is presented with a sense of grandeur and scale, both visually and mechanically, which unites them under Dark Souls’ banner. That creative variety extends to so many of its scenarios and locations as well. Ceaseless Discharge, Sif, and Priscilla all go out of their way to provide memorable experiences beyond simple tests of skill, as do the trickery of Sen’s Fortress and the horror of The Abyss (and it seems obvious to me now that Ornstein and Smough are trying to get the player to bring their own buddy along to even out the odds). The Hydra is an incredibly clumsy encounter, but I’ll be darned if it won’t forever reverberate in my brain as the hydra for the rest of my days. As I became comfortable with the game’s systems and its medium-speed rhythm, and accumulated enough resources to expand my breadth of possible strategies, all of these things became far easier to appreciate. Prior knowledge of the map allowed me to make interesting decisions about which areas and objectives to tackle and in what order. It’s satisfying to develop plans and map out routes, develop my character and make progress on my own terms (which goes to show just how much Dragon Quest III is hiding in Dark Souls), but the satisfaction of actually overcoming the obstacles within this world varies wildly.

Dark Souls' combat generates a lot of praise for its sense of weight, the balance of its stamina system, and the satisfaction of overcoming its punishing enemy design, but it's a pretty passive affair. The level of punishment only further prolongs the process of waiting for the enemy to attack and retaliating yourself, and a good lot of the rogues gallery isn't receptive to the game's only two counter tactics, it's inconsistent. I can't say so with any kind of authority, but one on one systems like this most resonate with me when they're tugs of war between contenders for moments of dominance, but that sense of back and forth only vaguely applies against the most lowly of foes. The system is serviceable for most encounters (at its best, it's about provoking the enemy to leave an opening at the cost of making the environment itself more perilous to navigate (see: Quelaag)) but the dearth of depth is felt as the game grows long. There's little means of pressuring the opponent and they only occasionally react to taking damage, so encounters scarcely branch out of a neutral state. To be clear, I'm not defining this as some sort of hard and fast rule. After all, Hyper Light Drifter is also about dodging and attacking enemies who hardly flinch, but the perspective and player moveset allows any given moment to be far more active, enemies don't have to rotate to track the player's movement, and every opponent can be designed with the knowledge that they'll be responding to the same set of tools. It's particularly because this system relies so heavily on animations that it feels lacking in this way. Against most enemies, the best method of responding to an attack animation cycle is by rolling, and, with the exception of some environmental obstacles, that's about as dynamic as it ever gets. You roll at the right times and punish, but not so much that you'll run out of stamina and find yourself unable to roll away. No doubt this is a consequence of the level of build variety on offer. The game is more interested in delivering a swiss army knife than a singular, refined tool – you can cast spells and wear different kinds of armor and wield any combination of weapons in both hands – but as Dark Souls' most pronounced form of interaction, it doesn't have much going for it.

(As an aside – I’ve heard it compared to Punch-Out!!, but that game better rewards successful attacks by retaining the player’s stamina and causing hitstun, and mastery requires counter-punching and acting on even the slightest tells. Weighing whether a body-blow, face punch or star uppercut is the right move in any given situation is a more impactful decision than any light or heavy attack in Dark Souls, and the right move at the right time allows the player to press an advantage. Some attacks are best dealt with by blocking, countering, or ducking underneath them. Even a wayward punch at the wrong moment incurs a response from the opponent, rather than being ignored outright. Of course, this aspect of Dark Souls’ combat has the effect of evoking helplessness in the face of insurmountable odds, but it makes for a repetitive and tedious dynamic)

By and large, I'd say the game is well served by its degree of punishment. It lends a real sense of credibility to every obstacle the player comes across, but where difficulty often reveals the deepest nuances of a system, the one-dimensionality and tedium of the combat is only exacerbated by this decision. I'm only waxing on about it because Dark Souls leaves so much in the hands of this system, it wouldn't bother me to the same degree if it weren't such a significant focus. Thirteen years out from Demon's Souls, I'm sure this is old news for a lot of you, and yeah, I've come to agree that it's most charitably viewed as a vehicle for Dark Souls' method of delivering atmosphere and varied situations. If there's any benefit to be had from this prioritization of breadth over depth, that's it, and its best areas know this. The aforementioned Sen’s Fortress isn’t made of difficult combat encounters, but awkward walkways and hidden traps. Like so many of the game’s best setpieces, it doesn’t feel designed for the player’s convenience. The boss of the area is more like a climactic punctuation mark than a punishing fight meant to keep the player stuck for hours on end. The Iron Golem is one of the few who can be severely staggered, and given how easily the nearby bonfire can be missed, the tension comes more from the threat of having to navigate the entire tower again than the battle itself. The Painted World of Ariamis is peppered with damaging, but squishy groups of enemies who can be deftly dealt with if the player keeps a clear head and some distance. It’s one of the most architecturally varied and visually enthralling environments in the game, and it’s capped off by a boss who requests the player leave her in peace. When all of the pieces align in just the right ways, Dark Souls achieves an immersive quality that just sings and keeps me arrested in its setting. I could just as easily romanticize many of the game’s other moments using this kind of language (the Bell Gargoyles, the Four Kings, the Capra Demon, the Tomb of the Giants, etc.) because it isn’t hard to make the process of overcoming punishing challenges sound glamorous, but that would be disingenuous, because the moment to moment experience can feel clumsy and unrewarding. Dark Souls is often best served by foregoing the traditional methods of challenge scaling, because while it does contain moments that reveal the potential of the combat system, It only works so well as a straightforward action game; I was best able to appreciate it when I stopped viewing it through this lens.

Dark Souls is very much cut from the cloth of its RPG forebears (the likes of which I have far more experience with today than I did at the outset), which should’ve been obvious, but I felt it best when I hit a wall in the form of The Four Kings, and ventured across every corner of the setting in pursuit of treasures, routes, and resources that could strengthen my character. The game put me up against several of what I could only describe as Dungeons and Dragons parties, and the more of them I encountered, the more I began to feel like I’d been doing a solo run of Dragon Quest III the whole time. I’ve never exactly felt that action games benefit from these kinds of progression systems, and frankly, I’m still not entirely swayed, but if we view Dark Souls’ stamina system as some iteration on Chrono Trigger’s ATB mechanics (it’s better compared to Secret of Mana in this respect, but let’s make like Dark Souls and roll with this comparison), all about taking turns and exchanging numbers with the added benefit of being able to avoid damage through positioning, it clicks together a little more nicely in my mind. Still not an entirely favorable comparison, since the most interesting feature of any RPG combat system is the management and development of multiple characters who all balance out each other’s weaknesses, though the multiplayer features do make an effort to close that gap. Given the prominence of Humanity (the resource), the online features, and the game’s inclination to punish death with the removal of the player’s Humanity, I’ve gotta wonder if the intention was to incentivize players to make use of multiplayer as often as possible, using Dark Souls as a digital D&D campaign. There are multiple boss encounters which might support this, but, conspiracy theorizing aside, that’s simply not how I’ve played it (or how the community treats it), so I can’t provide much insight either way.

Whatever the case may be, Dark Souls’ most basic progression system remains divisive in my mind, and for a number of reasons. Legend has it that Yuji Horii’s theory in implementing the concept of grinding experience in Dragon Quest was that the player’s hard work would always be rewarded with some gains. The player levels up immediately upon reaching the experience threshold, and doesn’t lose those points after dying, so they’re always making some sort of progress. Dark Souls punishes the players who need those experience points most, and best rewards those who don’t. Souls have to be retrieved after death at the spot where the player died, and that spot can be locked behind a boss door, at which point the only way to keep them is by killing the boss. If a new player manages to reach a boss door with a whole lotta souls, their best option is simply to turn back and level up their attributes. Of course, they’re not going to do this. At its worst, this mechanic disincentives players from leaving an area for later and pursuing another which might be more manageable for their skill level, because they’ve already invested so much in their current run (I consider this an issue in Hollow Knight as well, because it undermines the game’s breadth of exploration with an incentive to stay in one place).

The risk/reward aspect can be compelling, but I’ve gotta question how effective it is when the game has to offset that system with collectible items which contain large quantities of souls. Of course, losing experience points forever is a staple feature of the series, and I don’t consider it a misguided concept for a game that prides itself on developing an oppressive atmosphere through challenge and punishment, but some of its quirks don’t seem to be implemented to the benefit of the game’s progression system, or the player’s engagement with it. Yes, that’s part of the intent, and those aforementioned soul items and boss drops might make up the difference, but at that point, the motivation to engage enemies begins to erode somewhat. Several areas have sharp enemy placement which deeply discourages players from ignoring threats, but just as often, it’s optimal to run directly past them and get to the boss, and the risk of gaining souls by fighting punishing enemies isn’t worth it when the player is endeavoring to learn the boss’ patterns across various attempts. It might’ve been possible to mitigate this problem by applying some sort of multiplier to the boss’ souls for every enemy killed along the way, maybe with a cap to prevent the optimal strategy from becoming too tedious. It’s not impossible to bank experience in the boss’ room by repeatedly retrieving one’s souls on arrival, but that’s not particularly better than grinding the area’s enemies at any point after the boss’ defeat, so you tell me.

It’s taken me a while to come around to the lore, mostly because of how often fan culture seems to fixate on trivial details and factoids rather than the broader meaning of a work, but the effect of distributing the game’s story throughout its item descriptions, environmental design, and occasional NPC dialogue is a potent one. Even if I only gathered a fraction of Dark Souls’ background on my own, the cohesion between the game’s rules and its themes is admirable, and even without explanation, the aura of rot is palpable. This isn’t the last time FromSoft would explore stagnation as a result of undeath, a rebellion against the natural order which prevents the world from moving on and highlights the importance of death in the cycle of existence. It might not even be the best exploration of that particular idea, but this method of storytelling, the process of archaeologically piecing together the history of Lordran, feels more appropriate here than in any of its successors. In the past, I’ve derided Dark Souls’ lore for ultimately amounting to little more than explanations for why bosses are sitting in rooms, just waiting for the player to kill them. For me, that quality undermined the verisimilitude of the setting, but that fails to account for the plots running underneath this basic structure. Solaire and Siegmeyer are on similar quests as the player, as are the various other travelers which can be confronted along the way. There are character motivations which drive subplots throughout Dark Souls, and that their quests parallel your own and similarly orbit around this stagnant setting serves to highlight that quality even further. The world is trapped in the Age of Fire, and the only people left with any kind of agency are those seeking an end to the curse of the undead (and more often than not, they succumb to the madness as well). It’s a no less convenient premise for a videogame, but it’s also uniquely suited to being conveyed through this medium. Its greatest disappointment is that either ending or prolonging the Age of Fire requires the same set of steps, simply shuffled around. These actions don’t reflect the differences in motivation behind them, and one might say that’s indicative of the fact that both goals are equally suspect, but that seems a little generous. Still, I’m willing to forgive that concession for the sake of providing an equally engaging experience regardless of the player’s decision. At the very least, it’s not an unreasonable solution.

Here’s the twist that, for some of you, might discredit that whole heap of words you’ve so generously combed through (thank you for that, by the way, you’re looking great). Right now, I’m sitting in the Tomb of the Giants, right in front of Nito’s fog door. I’ve been sitting here for the last two days, without progressing, just trying to unpack everything I’ve felt over the cumulative fifty nine hours I’ve spent with Dark Souls. Am I going Hollow? I used to play this game while listening to “Boy Oh Boy” from LISA: The Painful, because its dedication to silence bored me as much as its combat. I don’t do that anymore, I don’t even hate the fighting system now. Dark Souls is a whole lot of ancient, timeless game design principles swimming in a vat of acid. They rarely coalesce into something greater, but on the rare occasion that every ingredient is balanced just right, there’s a real magic that can’t be denied. Almost everything that Dark Souls attempts is done better in other places, but its level design and premise and its best moments are worth the experience, and, if nothing else, seeing those ideas come together in real time, through uninterrupted gameplay, is thoroughly novel. I’m not certain I’d have returned to Dark Souls at all, though, without the knowledge that every last one of my nitpicks and criticisms would be validated by a certain other FromSoft game. As far as I’m concerned, Sekiro was Hidetaka Miyazaki’s gesture to me, personally, that I wasn’t a moral failure for dropping his most famous game. Maybe we’ll talk about that one some other time, but for now, I stand before Nito, weighing my options as Anubis weighs hearts on a cheap kitchen scale. Do I care enough to see it through? Has this long and rambling inner monologue spilled out every last drop of Dark Souls-related emotion in the depths of my own soul? Is this Age of Fire destined to burn on interminably, never to confidently reach a decisive verdict, or will I put it to rest and allow the Age of Dark to begin?

Does it matter?

POST-SCRIPT

After some time, I did finally find it in me to dust off the ol' save file and see it through to the end. Within an afternoon, the gods were slain and I was left staring down the credits — from Seath, back to Nito, and through the Bed of Chaos (with a bit of a detour taken to see what all this "Artorias" business has been about), before, at last, putting Gwyn out of his misery. Seems I'm far from the first to recognize how...shoddy this last leg of the journey feels. I'd always considered its surrounding gameplay systems a mixed bag, but there's a confidence and unity to Lordran's layout and aesthetic which begins to slip away, and the deeper I went, the more flummoxed I became that this was the same "Dark Souls" so often whispered about in the tomes. I never stopped respecting its desire to maintain visual and mechanical variety (so many works would kill for this level of creativity) but, even as someone who doesn't particularly love this game, it was a bit sad to see it reduced to a parody of itself. Running back through long, boring zones to engage in half-baked boss fights again and again, I had to wonder if anything was cut from the final product. These areas aren't without their moments, but at this point, it seemed Dark Souls was struggling as hard as I was to stay awake.

This is, of course, with the exception of the game's DLC and final areas. In the Sanctuary Guardian and Artorias, it's already possible to glimpse Hidetaka Miyazaki gearing up for Bloodborne and Dark Souls III (heck, Bloodborne himself is hanging out close by), with timing specifically built around acrobatic light rolling, tight windows for retaliation, and little opportunity for recovery. I've still not been converted into an outright fan of this highly evasive style of 3D combat, with its unflinching bosses and more or less prescribed moments for offense and defense (which isn't to dismiss the game's build and weapon variety so much as it is to highlight the nature of the game's enemy design and stamina system), but I'd be lying if I said that the pace of these meat and potatoes heavy action setpieces weren't (quite literally) more my speed than almost anything else in the game (and it was especially cool to recognize that Sif had adopted many of her owner's techniques. That's Dark Souls for ya). Yeah, I do hold that the game is at its most engaging and interesting when it’s doing away with “traditional” methods of challenge scaling, but the Artorias gang makes a clean case. Their wind-ups and telegraphs were excellently done for the most part (and both have striking designs, even if one is just a straight-up Manticore), but I did note that both of these bosses had the ability to sometimes extend otherwise normal attacks into combos. This isn't anything insane on its own, but the severity of the game's stamina management and the inability to cancel actions once committed made this feature a little more questionable than it might've been otherwise. If the player can't reliably know when damage can be dealt and has to guess at whether the boss is finished attacking after every swing of the sword, attacks which can kill immediately and look identical to their single-hit variations, then every time the player waits for a combo that doesn't come, they've given up on some amount of progress through the fight, and every time they don't, they're putting themselves at risk. This isn’t the worst thing in the world, Artorias does always open up at the end of his combos, whenever they may arrive, but I found myself wishing those extended chains were given more distinct telegraphs to plan around and reward observant play. Gambling can be a welcome addition to a combat system, but I can't say I was thrilled to find it here, where I lacked a moveset dynamic enough to switch up my responses, and the stakes can involve immediate death and an inordinately long trek back to the arena. I don't consider this as big a problem against Artorias as, for example, the Margit boss fight in Elden Ring (where his combos will sometimes only come out if you decide to attack), but it was surprising to find this early in the FromSoft canon. I still had a good time against these bosses, but I thought I'd be thorough, since I spent so much time discussing my thoughts on the combat mechanics back in my last write-up. I'm aware there's more DLC stuff to be found beyond this point, but, for me, that may be better left to another life. It was time to leave.

The Kiln of the First Flame might just be one of the most striking pieces of visual storytelling in Dark Souls. Mounds upon mountains of grey ash surrounding a man too far gone to know just what he's wrought, or even what it is he's so bent on defending. Here, I wouldn't have needed the guidance of Darkstalker Kaathe to realize that Frampt and Gwynevere's cause was more than a little questionable, that linking the fire and continuing this age of stagnation and rot was nothing but a mad conservative dream. After finally managing to parry Gwyn's sword a whole fifteen times in a row (I didn't count), the future was left in my hands. In one last bit of gameplay/story integration, the act of linking the fire is identical to lighting a bonfire anywhere else in Lordran, only with a different text prompt. It tempts the player forward with a familiar sight, but I had no love for this place. I turned around and walked out of the chamber. Maybe this whole mess could've been prevented if I'd done so earlier. Then again, if the immediate start of New Game + is any indication after the credits, perhaps not.

And that was my Dark Souls. For all the time and attention I've given it in-game and in writing, I don't love this game. Some of the time, I don't even like it. More than anything, I'm fascinated by it as a work of world design, and as a cultural artifact. Fascinated enough to head down to Quelaag immediately after finishing the game and ring the second Bell of Awakening on New Game +, if for no other reason than some subconscious, poetic desire to leave this playthrough where it began. Still, I never did quite get to feel out and achieve a sense of oneness with the rhythm of Dark Souls' moment to moment gameplay, and only flickers of its emotional highs ever managed to truly land. To me, there's no question that From and Miyazaki would go on to make stronger, more consistent games which resonate more deeply with me (or at least one), but, as far as the rest of The World is concerned, they will always live in the shadow of this one. I'm glad I experienced it for myself from front to back, but I think it's high time I extinguished this weight from my mind and finally found it in me to walk away, even if I've gotta do it alone.

It’s easy to point to the late 90s and early 2000s as the collective “moment” when videogames truly began harboring cinematic ambitions. That third dimension brought with it a whole new bag of tricks, and no one was shy about dumping them out. We might be tempted to blame that generation for some modern triple-A trends, but of course, this desire is about as old as videogames themselves. Even if we don’t count the evocative text adventures of the 70s and 80s, the parser-based adventure games pioneered by Sierra and the then-titled “LucasFilm Games,” early CRPGs, game adaptations of movie scenes like The Empire Strikes Back on Atari, and ventures like the barely interactive Dragon’s Lair all sought to marry the theatrical qualities of more prestigious media with games’ unique ability to put you in the driver’s seat. Some of these efforts paid off in fulfilling their own respective goals, but what they couldn’t and often still rarely accomplish is a cinematic cadence and consistency. Playing The Secret of Monkey Island, it’s impossible to truly feel that everything happening at all times carries real dramatic weight. Action games are almost always predicated on a fundamental asymmetry between the player character and everything else — goombas can’t interact with fire flowers — or otherwise bespoke elements whose rules don’t apply to the rest of the game world — Ocarina of Time’s eye switches are only affected by arrows, and cannot interfere or be interfered with by any other means. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this kind of design, I’ve singled out a couple of the greats to make that as clear as possible, but it’s this general lack of internal consistency across the medium which makes 1989’s Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia stand out.

Whether or not you feel that developing a “dramatic game system” is a reasonable or misguided goal, or if “verisimilitude” and “internal consistency” are necessary in achieving it, there’s a level of cohesion to the game’s storytelling and mechanics which I can only describe in these terms. Prince of Persia doesn’t have an incredibly substantive plot (escape the dungeon and save the princess), but the confidence with which it (mostly) wordlessly conveys and provokes the player to experience that story still impresses. It’s in the way the game doesn’t waver in its visual perspective, always presenting the world in profile even during cutscenes, never showing anything which doesn’t have direct gameplay implications. The consistency of its visual language in and outside of playable moments gives weight and narrative credibility to the time spent playing, there is no strict divide between “story” and “gameplay” moments. There are only two truly notable caveats to Prince of Persia’s otherwise spotless coherence, but both are purposeful and arguably necessary for the game to function (respawning after death, and switching between the modes of general movement and combat). Its more widely lauded successor, Eric Chahi’s Another World, though great, is stitched out of setpieces whose solutions have no bearing on the rest of the game, but Prince of Persia never introduces any rule that won’t become relevant or useful ever again. Each space is a system of interlocking parts, where the drama emerges directly from the fact that you’re given almost perfect information about the consequences of engaging with those parts.

Sounds like a pretty clear-cut platforming videogame, but there are some important distinctions to keep in mind. In the shoes of our rotoscoped hero, even the simplest geometric level design must be approached as though it were a real space. if you want to descend a platform, you must step carefully to the edge so as to avoid falling off, turn around, lower yourself down using your hands, and let go of the ledge to drop to your feet. If you want to leap further than the width of a single tile, you’re gonna need a running start to do it. Spike traps can be tiptoed across, but running or jumping will create the force needed for them to pierce through. Failing to take into account the weight and durability of your fragile human body will always result in a gruesome death, but you’re not the only one for whom that applies. Guards litter the hallways of the castle, and all of them are susceptible to the same grisly horrors as the player character. The imposing guillotines, pressure plates and falling tiles can all be used against your adversaries, they’re even as vulnerable to fall damage as you are. Prince of Persia’s environments are built out of only a handful of elements, but each one is an unalienable fact of the setting, and must be treated as such. It’s not the layouts of these levels which create that all-important sense of verisimilitude, fun as they can be to explore and find new routes around, but the consistency and believability of their laws.

The sheer amount of danger lurking around every corner and crevice coupled with the level of commitment required of the player’s inputs means it’s tempting to take a very slow and methodical approach to Prince of Persia, but we can’t have that. For it to succeed as a dramatic game, every moment has to carry a degree of real importance. To reference the canon Mechner was drawing from, one of Indiana Jones’ most prominent filmmaking techniques is “the ticking clock.” Rewatch any of those movies, and you’ll find that there’s almost always some manner of time bomb or closing door in the background of an action scene, which applies an underlying layer of tension to every fist-swinging, heart-pounding moment of struggle. It’s no less effective in an interactive setting. The game is filled with both short and long-term ticking clocks, whether it takes the form of a pressure plate which opens a gate just long enough to slip by after a death-defying leap, or the Grand Vizier’s massive hourglass which contextualizes the time limit looming over the whole game. These push the player to be bold in their performance, encouraging them to take risks in places they otherwise wouldn’t. They heighten the threat of obstacles and draw the player even more deeply into every moment of committed action. Win or lose, they’ll only have one hour to reach the end. That in itself also contributes to the game’s “cinematic” sensibility, its length makes it as digestible as a short film, and the level design is as tightly paced as any action movie. The designs of its stages are clearly considered with an eye for that hour-long playtime — their battles and sizes grow longest in the middle before becoming a triumphant string of victories leading to the final confrontation. It helps that there are no menus or extraneous elements involved. Instead, each area transitions directly into the next. Once mastered, the performance of that arc becomes a thing of beauty.

The game comes together to form an experience almost as nail-biting to spectate as it is to play, but that can’t be attributed to its adherence to these design principles alone. Rather, it’s the way it plays with the expectations those rules create which elevates Prince of Persia beyond its successors in the “cinematic platformer” genre. The game’s heart lies in the recurring “Shadow Man” who disrupts and undermines the player’s efforts at every turn, stepping on pressure plates to shut doors and stealing potions which are meant to increase the player’s maximum health. It lies in the surprise skeleton battle, the magic mirror, the levitation potion, and a penultimate encounter that had to have inspired Final Fantasy IV. It takes every opportunity to use its established rules for dramatic purposes, and never deviates from that goal. As Noah Caldwell-Gervais recently said of Sekiro, Prince of Persia is “cinematic in a way that cutscene-driven games have only ever gestured towards,” and it rallied every ounce of the Apple II to do it.

Have you ever been playing DDR, watched an arrow zip down the screen to the beat of “I Ran” by A Flock of Seagulls and thought, “Alright. What really qualifies this particular note of this song as a right arrow instead of an up arrow?” I mean, it’s a test of rhythm, right? But rhythm is about pacing, timing, getting into a perfect groove by being able to clearly predict the sequence of actions. One may or may not conclude that, in a hypothetically “perfect” rhythm game, it should be completely possible to close your eyes and rely on audio alone to carry you through to the end (this is all down to preference, of course). For this to work, your inputs would have to correspond with particular sounds instead of arbitrarily selected visual cues. DDR’s input mapping of “I Ran” can conceivably chart two G major chords from different parts of the song onto two separate arrows, making this a tricky prospect (disclaimer: I have not checked to see if “I Ran” features the G major chord), and almost every game in the genre follows a similar model. But this is still a game. The goal is delivering a simplified, digestible, and curated version of the real experience; otherwise players can just go out, learn an instrument, and join a band instead. A functional game built for this sort of thing would ideally feature nothing but songs which have all been carefully designed for this level of sonic clarity (it’s not impossible to do this with licensed or “normal” songs instead, but they’d have to be peppered with additions for the sake of the gameplay, which probably wouldn’t be welcome), but what are the odds that anyone is actually going to go to the trouble of making something like that?

Leave it to the WarioWare folks. Rhythm Heaven Fever is charming as all heck, and I’ve had so many of its goofy little tunes rattling around in my brain for years (Packing Pests 2, Air Rally, Samurai Slice, etc.), but its greatest achievement is in its layering of musical rules which come together in endlessly surprising and creative ways. Every tune in the game is well-constructed and clever on its own, all of them introducing some sort of audio cue or two or three which get explored, and are then tossed into a pot and stirred with the rest of the lot to form even more challenging oddball conglomerates of melodic cleverness. And yeah, cute as it is, Rhythm Heaven Fever can get surprisingly tough. With only two inputs, the game has no reservations about tightening up its timing requirements and asking for near perfection, especially in its home stretch, but the pressure is lifted by the bizarre situations and characters designed to represent each song. The role you play in the audio is made hilariously clear through the visuals — you know you’ve missed a “flipper roll” in “Flipper Flop” if your little seal avatar is bumping into his fellow performers — and it’s in this way that a oneness between the song and the player’s agency within its soundscape is achieved. You press a button, and your character does (or attempts to do) the same thing every time. Sounds simple, but it’s a pretty rare find in a genre where you’ll most commonly be asked to press a string of disconnected buttons while watching a barely-related music video.

Anyone looking for more “expressive” or “nonlinear” mechanical systems isn’t likely to find it in this genre, and if we look at these games as sort of gamified metaphors for playing musical instruments, that could be seen as a bit a shame, but if you want a test of your raw rhythm prowess, I’ve yet to come across anything as pure and satisfying as Rhythm Heaven Fever. Screwing a robot’s head into its body, striking a pose in front of an adoring crowd, kicking a ball and slapping a spider out of the air all feel as viscerally enjoyable as they sound when applied to the backing track at just the right moment (which isn’t to say they all hit that same mark, but even the worst bits still enjoy the benefits of the rest of the game’s “vision-optional” philosophy). It keeps up that musical creatively for longer than you’d expect, and still lands the dismount without outstaying its welcome. If nothing else, “Remix 10” has earned its spot on my pantheon of final bosses. It does for high-fiving monkeys what DOOM did for shotgunning demons.