Rather than ape DOOM/Duke Nukem or Borderlands, this time around Shadow Warrior is aping Doom 2016/Eternal in many ways impossible not to notice. Shadow Warrior 3 has most of Doom 2016/Eternal’s fundamentals down pat, but in doing so it also inherited Doom 2016/Eternal’s core flaws: an overreliance on “scramble encounters”[^1] coupled with forgiving resource replenishment and non-committal mobility/weapon selection in a campaign whose encounters start blurring together once it stops introducing new combat elements. Encounters may be technically distinct in terms of enemies used and arena layout, but they are not meaningfully distinct in terms of the strategy required to approach them. It’s like a Pacman game where new stages only have different layouts but no notable gimmicks. Here SW3 is no exception. However, SW3 does make some tweaks to the formula that may or may not work out.

The most noticeable one is that unlike Doom 2016/Eternal, there is no scaling on health drops. DE would increase health drops on enemy kills if you were low on health, but in SW3 this scaling is nowhere as present. Health is usually replenished at a linear rate rather than in big bursts; it is always dropped when hitting/killing enemies with guns. The main consequence of this is that you can’t easily make big comebacks like in DE. At low health you actually have to start thinking a little about how to stay alive long enough to restore your health[^2]. This also means that compared to DE you are way more reliant on item spawners in arenas to stay stocked. It helps that there is no secondary health/armor bar in SW3, too.
The increased reliance on item spawners opens the possibility for arena design to finally play a greater role in resource management. Rather than running laps around the arena on auto-pilot, you could be moving towards specific points and items in the arena with some intent in mind. One recurring issue in Doom Eternal and similar “arena shooters” is that staying on the move is more important than moving towards a specific spot. You’d need to spawn in a massive boon or threat like a power-up or Buff Totem to get the player to start thinking of a route. A lack of routing led to the majority of a given encounter taking place in a random corner of the arena or generally kind of everywhere, in turn playing a major part in making encounters and arena designs feel too identical to one another. If you were to draw a value diagram for most arenas in DE, most of them would look like an even spread of minor advantages and disadvantages, but rarely ever something major.

Despite item spawners playing a greater role, SW3 is no exception here either. What the greater importance of item spawners does accomplish is that you’ll be making laps around the entire arena more often to pass by as many spawners as possible, but how or when or where you must go about making these laps is rarely ever fundamentally shaken up—the old problem of being technically different but not meaningfully different. It’s not like parts of the arena are somehow gated off or affected by environmental hazards or intentionally guarded by enemies or present some temporary opportunity/threat that takes priority. There is even an area-of-denial type enemy that spawns mines all around itself, but it doesn’t seem to intentionally seek out item spawners to camp. Had SW3 gone out of its way to obstruct access to item spawners more or emphasize their importance, it’d give levels something more to distinguish themselves from one another, while still allowing the player to generate some resources on the fly and avoid having to memorize all item spawns to stand a fighting chance.

SW3 makes two tweaks to DE’s resource economy: one to make ammo management more important, and one to do the very opposite. First one is to double down on DE’s reduced maximum ammo limits: your grenade launcher even when upgraded can only carry 7 shots max., while your railgun’s ammo capacity can’t even be upgraded beyond 4 shots. Do keep in mind you also have six weapons with their own ammo pools vs. DE’s 4 ammo pools that multiple weapons can share, and a reliable melee option with very useful special attacks[^3]. Your power weapons (railgun and grenade launcher) have comparatively the least ammo, so their continued use must involve playing the resource economy.

The second more counterproductive change to the resource economy is to have every ammo pick-up refill a percentage of every ammo pool. There are no ammo items for specific ammo types—minor and major universal ammo packs are all you get. You get a percentage back for every ammo type, but this percentage is skewed massively higher for ammo types with a lower maximum: one item refills 3 revolver bullets out of a maximum 54 or two shells out of a maximum 20, but 1 or 2 grenades out of a maximum 5/7 and 1 railgun shot out of a maximum 4[^4]. Frequent use of power weapons is more sustainable than with the rest. With how tanky most enemies are on average, having such reliable access to your power weapons is actually desirable in a way. At the same time, being able to reliably generate power weapon ammo on the fly curbs the potential importance of any static ammo items. To fix this, you could bring the percentage of ammo refilled for the power weapons in line with other ammo types, remove the ability to spawn ammo on simply striking enemies rather than killing them, or we could have ammo items for specific ammo types. Perhaps different ways of killing enemies or killing certain types of enemies drops items for specific ammo types. SW3’s focus on the fire-ice-electricity elemental triangle seems like it could provide a good thematic justification for what kinds of ammo gets dropped and from what.

Still, the larger problem with universal ammo items is that the context of the player being able to approach any scenario with all weapons becomes hardcoded on a mechanical level. Encounters cannot explore the concepts of ammo scarcity for certain ammo types, or use ammo items for desired ammo types to create “islands of value”. Individual arenas as they are cannot change how the mechanics work—once again depriving encounters of a way to distinguish themselves from one another. Because resource replenishment is so directly tied to enemies, the only way you can enact some form of ammo scarcity is by restricting the presence of existing fodder enemies that make for easy resource farming, but with only three fodder enemy types there isn’t a whole lot you can do in this regard. Alternatively you could devise new enemy types that very directly interact/interfere with your ability to replenish resources like ULTRAKILL’s Stalkers, but to have to model, rig, texture, animate, voice and program a whole new enemy type and all its attacks just to realize this seems rather expensive. If changing how the resource economy works or adding new enemy types isn’t an option, then perhaps a more flexible approach would have been to regularly introduce new modifiers/mutators/(environmental) gimmicks across the campaign that directly ties into the resource economy or some other mechanic.

Much like DE, your offense in SW3 heavily revolves around swapping often between weapons, and here SW3 makes some welcome tweaks. One is that unlike DE, most of your guns must be reloaded.[^5] This may seem like a pointless inclusion for the sake of realism, but this ends up providing an intuitive incentive to skip the reload animations by swapping weapons. If you do feel inclined to keep using the same weapon, you can swap from another weapon back to yours and find your gun instantly reloaded. This does however raise the question why you’d waste development resources animating reload animations or including a reload button if 90% of the time players are going to skip reload animations and instantly reload guns by swapping to other weapons instead.

Second thing is that SW3 puts a cap on the potential damage of quickswap combos. There is a minor but noticeable wind-up to shooting your burst damage weapons (i.e. the grenade launcher and railgun). The grenade launcher has a slight delay after firing until the grenade is launched, and the railgun needs to be charged for about half a second before it can fire. It works around DE’s issue where with a fast weapon swap speed, you could swap between burst damage weapons like the Ballista and Precision Bolt so fast for absurd DPS. It became hard to balance around since there’s such a massive DPS variance between not quickswapping and quickswapping at maximum speed, it ends up making individual weapons feeling indistinct if you’re only going to use them as part of a combo, and arguably strains your wrist by making you swap that often[^6]. And personally, such absurdly fast quickswap combos were unappealing to look at. By introducing a little wind-up time to your burst weapons, SW3 manages to cap your potential DPS to a degree where the designers can reliably predict your potential maximum DPS and balance around it accordingly, without having to sacrifice universal weapon swap speeds or denying you the ability to cancel recovery/reload animations.

Also like DE, SW3 fills the downtime between arena fights with platforming segments, to the point where later levels have more platforming than shooting. To SW3’s credit, these platforming segments rely on the actual movement skills you’ll be using in arena fights. It’s not like DE’s obsession with wall climbing. You were not going to climb any damn walls in the middle of a fight. Still, it shares DE’s problems where these platforming segments almost never ask more of you than the bare minimum, and often repeat the way they test you on your movement skills. Late-game wallrun and grappling hook segments don’t differ too much from early-game ones. Clearly these platforming segments were the designated downtime segments of the game during which most of the dialogue could happen, emphasizing a flow state over challenge. But for an FPS campaign this short (like ~6 hours on a first playthrough, 2-3 hours on replay), is it wise to dedicate around half of it to lukewarm platforming? It may reduce potential frustration while playing, but you’d have to crunch the numbers on whether that outweighs the frustration of realizing you spent 50 bucks on a 3-6 hour campaign. Besides, by getting spicy with platforming segments, the player could have been more prepared to deal with such spicier elements in arena layouts.

Despite having only 11 enemy types, I believe Shadow Warrior 3’s enemy roster is more effective at controlling space than DE’s roster of ~24 (+ TAG1/2’s eight or so “real” enemy types)[^7]. You have your basic fodder and tanky chasers and ranged threats, but SW3 adds the Clyde to the Pacman ghost quartet that was missing from DE’s Binky, Inky and Pinky: enemies capable of controlling space more indirectly. Slinky Jakkus will run away from you while randomly laying around highly-damaging mines, while you’ve also got enemies that look like DMC1 Nobodies with a furnace strapped on their back that will stay in one place while spamming mines all around them. Then you’ve also got mole enemies who can go underground and temporarily turn the floor into lava wherever they go. Enemies like these are excellent at blocking off routes, something that DE rather lacked. They force you to turn your mind back on and rethink where to actually move towards, because those mines will take off over a half of your health bar. The mole enemies then truly emphasize the difference between low-ground and high-ground in arenas, where the high-ground offers a brief escape from chaser enemies while giving you less cover from ranged enemies, and vice versa for the low-ground.

In SW3 ranged enemies are no slouch either. Laser Shoguns are more than capable of long-range sniping for massive damage, the Shokera are like Cacodemons if they had incredibly accurate tracking, whereas SW3’s Mancubus is an ultra-tanky pseudo-hitscanner that will make you break line of sight if you don’t want to get hit. One key detail that makes these work is that said ranged enemies can’t be easily removed without some commitment. A common issue with sniper enemies is that because they’re usually given wide vantages, it’s also very easy to get an angle on them with your own long-range gun and remove them before the rest of the fight starts. Laser Shoguns are then completely impervious to frontal damage, forcing you to either get close and hit their rear weak spot, or wait for them to open up their shield as they’re charging their shot. The Mancubi can’t be easily removed simply because they have the most HP out of all enemies. The Shokera on the other hand have low enough HP that you can easily remove them, but by looking up to aim at them you’re also losing sight of what’s happening on the ground. Combine them with the chaser and indirect enemy types, and you have an enemy roster capable of controlling space and making individual encounters play out differently in dynamic unpredictable ways.

To sum it up, Shadow Warrior 3 makes a lot of welcome tweaks to DE’s formula that are worth looking into, but a lot of the fundamental issues remain. Enemy design is stronger and player/enemy balance is better (on Hardcore Mode at least), but the absence of static elements in arenas and unchallenging platforming still lets down the game. I still hope Flying Wild Hog survives being Embraced to release a Shadow Warrior 4 and/or Evil West 2, because they have the skill and talent to break their 7/10 curse should they ever decide to iterate on a formula instead of changing gears with each game. Although knowing the Shadow Warrior series, SW4 will most likely change gears yet again to become a roguelite.

Addenda:

- I should say that I’m not a huge fan of swapping weapons insta-reloading all your guns. SW3 puts a large emphasis on “comboing” weapons by canceling recovery animations with weapon switching, but instant auto-reloads also allow you to just shoot while swapping between the same two weapons or even the same one weapon if you swap using the sword. Beyond ammo restrictions and relying on your power weapons, there isn’t much too much thought involved in how you must swap your weapons. To put it in fighting game terms, every move can cancel into itself. There isn’t much reason to get fancy with quickswap combos or consider what sequence you are going to swap your weapons in, so whittling down heavy enemies using quickswap combos is often done on auto-pilot. I think it would be neat if SW3’s auto-reload implementation took after that of Half-Life 2 or Serious Sam 4, where unequipped weapons are only auto-reloaded if an amount of time passes equivalent to how long it’d take to normally reload them. Means you can’t keep swapping to the same weapon or same two weapons and need to branch out your swap sequences to your weaker guns. Following what I said earlier about there not being much of a point to normal reloads since you can always swap-cancel them, you could have auto-reloads take longer than normal reloads for if you really want to keep using the same gun.

- The lack of any significant static elements (think turrets, environmental hazards, barriers, enemies that cannot move, or just any kind of gimmick) in arenas has been a long-standing issue with Flying Wild Hog, right from the very beginning with Hard Reset. It nor any of the three Shadow Warrior games nor Evil West really try to have arenas be anything more than a flat space or a skatepark layout with enemies spawning in and some items placed around. Towards the end of these games they all feel like they’re running out of steam once they stop introducing anything new. Doom Eternal started figuring out by its Master Levels and The Ancient Gods how useful such static elements could be in breathing new life into old enemy combinations. SW3’s only real shake-up in this regard is that some arenas have traps you can trigger that insta-kill any enemy they meet, but these are basically fancier versions of explosive barrels. They’re tools to get free kills with. While they can hurt you as well, it’s trivial to trigger them from a safe distance, and no arena is going to deprive you of the space to move to safe ground. It would be more interesting if these traps came at a greater cost or risk to the player, or altered the arena in more indirect ways, or could even be used by enemies themselves. Compared to Bulletstorm or DESYNC these traps are very one-sided.

- That said, there are also the literal elemental explosive barrels littered around arenas, which oddly are more fun to play around with than the proper traps. You actually have to use your grappling hook and Chi Blast combined with proper positioning to pull and push these barrels at the right time and angle into a group of enemies, which takes more finesse to pull off than waiting for enemies to walk over a trap. The fact they’re ambiently scattered around means that making good use of barrels will be more of an improvisational spur-of-the-moment decision where the crux lies in how to make the most out of a given opportunity (i.e. aiming barrels where they can hit the most enemies), as opposed to insta-kill traps presenting an obvious effective strategy that override most other gameplay dynamics, with the “where” “when” and “how” of making the best use of them already being very set in stone.

- The writing in this game achieved the amazing feat of making over a thousand attempts of humor across 6 hours and not having a single one land.

Footnotes:

[^1]: Freeform encounters that focus more on improvisation, reflex and short-term tactics over strategy. I think this is what strategy players would call micro vs. macro.

[^2]: Here SW3 does offer some (admittedly appropriate with how seemingly hard to avoid certain attacks are) survival leeway in the form of a Last Stand mechanic and a Finisher ability that lets you insta-kill enemy for a quick health refill and a Gore Weapon/health overcharge, however the former is limited by a cooldown and the latter by a slow-to-fill gauge, so you cannot always come to rely on them the same way that the Chainsaw in Doom Eternal is basically always available to you to refill ammo when needed. That said, the Last Stand cooldown is rather generous, and later arenas do tend to be a bit too liberal with giving you Finisher orbs to fill your Finisher gauge.

[^3]: One of your sword’s special attacks lets you fire a penetrating ice wave that can freeze entire groups of enemies. When you consider that enemies take extra damage while frozen and the charge time for this attack is minor, it really is borderline broken.

[^4]: For what it’s worth, ammo items in SW3 do yield less ammo only for the gun you have currently equipped. It’s a good idea for getting you to stop relying on one weapon and switch more often, but it would have been more effective if the weapons with a low shot count didn’t have such a high percentage refilled per ammo item.

[^5]: People might complain about weapon durability or stamina or meters in general arbitrarily preventing them from being able to keep using certain weapons, like weapons breaking in Breath of the Wild. Yet almost no one feels compelled to judge reloading weapons as arbitrary because That’s Just How Guns Work, even if magazine capacity and having to reload is really just another meter/resource in disguise. Another one of those strange shibboleths. Don’t underestimate the power of appealing to intuition and “common sense” to trick players into swallowing abstractions. It should however be noted that this isn’t guaranteed to work if you’re going to add reloading to an established franchise that never used to have it, because Series Tradition is a stronger shibboleth than Common Sense.

[^6]: Cuphead had an issue at launch where there was no cooldown or delay on swapping between weapons, and because of the shot limit on your weapons, the best way of dealing damage was to shoot while swapping between your two weapons really really fast. Several speedrunners were mashing the controller like mad. In the interest of sparing the wrists of anyone wishing to speedrun, a minor weapon swap delay was patched in to prevent being able to swap weapons that fast.

[^7]: Admittedly one major factor for why enemies in SW3 have an easier time controlling space than in DE is the SW3 grappling hook being significantly weaker. You can use it to pull yourself towards small enemies but you can’t release it mid-grapple to build up massive momentum and go flying. It could be fun to swing around like Spiderman in DE, but enemies there could barely keep up with you if you did that. SW3 does feature grappling hook points prominently, and you can technically have infinite air time by just swinging on the same point, but you have to eventually come down to collect ammo items.

“Knowing you
You might hurt someone
Or yourself
You would tear
Everything apart
If you found out
Everyone you loved, loved someone else”

- God is a Circle, Yves Tumor

.

Another graceless morning in Leyndell.
Queen Marika was driven to the brink. The great golden tree is her address and she will never open those eyes again.

"God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." - Saint Augustine

A sun of tar leaks onto my surface. When whispers spread of the existence of a third and final Dark Souls - and months later when that game finally lodged in memory - one image stayed with me. In it, an unnamed knight stands on the end of the world, all kingdom from ages past converging against the bleeding of a dark sun, pressed-in on themselves, moved to collapse as if by saga's collective consciousness, subtext springing forth like rattle-snake in my face, a vision so terminal it verged on parody which nevertheless remains the most pregnant piece of iconography produced by that opus alone. Hell, what a view. With both feet firmly planted on the ashen sand and hands cusped in penitence to the eclipse, I lay my precious cinders to rest - and yield. Many places demand such reverence (few attain it) and in the recesses of Londor only this Kiln of the First Flame moved me so. The old world is dying, and the new one struggles to be born; nigh is the time of monsters like me, like us. What creature more terrifying than a power creep?

Egg cracks, yoke burning like an oil spill. Inside the withered arms of Princess Filianore is a truth - that the cycle has run its course, that come the epilogue all that could possibly remain was you and Uncle Gael, two dogs fighting each other to feed on the blood of their ancestors. C’est la vie. A promise to “paint a new vision” is all that kept a player like myself going within these rote confines - still, there's something to extract from the spaces these games put us in. Many a poisoned swamp have seen my fucked-up little guy drown at the bottom, deprived of ore and oxygen. Grey skies. A spear danced through my innards in Caelid again. Places that are cruel like that have made me patient, made me into a resentful hater - hood over my head to block out any hint of personhood within my avatar in wait of the good and gentle precipice. My time will come.

A Shattering, in so many ways, differs from a fading fire, yet is all the same for it. Much has been made of Elden Ring's affiliation to Dark Souls II's episode in experiments (for good reason, it is a game that contains multitude and seeks to go beyond its own scope at times) and while I tend to err on the side of historicity - recognize that Aldia offers a clear red-herring for understanding where things have come and gone both from a gameplay standpoint and in the franchise’s aesthetic evolution - Elden Ring remains an object primarily preoccupied with this blur of time and space made manifest through the Lands Between, its world of atomized particulars spread about a now-open vault, the lone melancholy island, the freedom plateau with a blackened being called player-character at its center, eyeing us at last, to say :

«Hello, other you.»

We were always compromised, morally bankrupt and torn between notions of ideal/optimization that see us scurry about the wet rubbles of Limgrave like the rats that we are, like the butchers that we will inevitably become in search of supremacy over the fragmented mythos; out of all the knaves and backstabbers engendered by FromSoftware's ravenous ethos us players might be the worst of the lot. We’d swallow the whole world if left to it, such is the nature of our curse, but these Lands are redacted, belong to no one, and will never give themselves wholly to the records of history. Ambiguous scriptures give way to conflicting accounts of events that morph entirely outside the delimitations of game narrative and into full-on theological approaches of the source material - death and rebirth become matters of philosophical debates between factions, heresy or sainthood redeemed, reversed, let loose in the hands of folklore - sometimes discounting the fact that losing yourself in the labyrinthine districts of Yharnam was often an act of evocation and evocation alone. Against this fog of war, Elden Ring posits a twin motion: Inside us are two wolves, the rushing, hypercompetent pillager borne out of a decade of iteration over the same design ideas – a body of work accumulated through bloody chess-pieces, us, the sole moving power in a series of stagnant vistas – and the vibes guy, who likes his decrepit kingdoms and bad knights just like so, oozing out of form and meaning one power structure over the corpse of the other ad vitam æternam.

Where we choose to position ourselves in this mess has always underlined the fact that the dramatic tension at the heart of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s works is often a moot point; the forces stirring us into conflict overshadow our efforts by untold eons of conspiracies whose ramifications will remain shrouded beyond any meaningful change the player might be tempted to enact upon the Lands Between. We're nothing but specks of dust on the grand 'ol clock and so the only rational act of affirmation for us is to seek power and power alone - in Marika’s own lying words: “The Erdtree governs all. The choice is thine. Become one with the Order. Or divest thyself of it. To wallow at the fringes; a powerless upstart."

Are you ready to limp yet?

It all starts with a man. Shabriri, most reviled in history and whatnot. I meet Shabriri way high up the Mountaintop of the Giants. At first nothing much happens amidst these snow-strewn ruins. Through us the dead wander, old foes grow monstrous, new ones die just as quickly anyway and disseminate more loot, more power, more of Elden Ring than any of us could stomach in a lifetime. Nothing happens here in terms of play production, nothing except Shabiri. This lived-in blizzard tires, yet burgeons in the loops and strings, the little narrative touches etched in the caves and corners of this dying world like a spirit reunion, two sisters afforded a common resting place among the cobblestone, the kind of moment that’s both sweet and grotesque and in truth the mark of storytellers at the peak of their ability to weave affection out of pixelated dots on the cosmic scale, the macro being fluidly defined by the micro in ways that seek to distill feelings over storied delineations - and gone is some of the tightness, along with authorial intent, the intersected-branching of physical space in relation to its mythology, and in goes the anime energy, the fatigue and frenzy, in goes a man like Shabriri, talking to us, being - here and now - a terrible other that sent shivers down my spine with the simplest of prayers. “May chaos take the world.”

To follow his path is to embrace the logical endgame of our own post-modernities. Gouge our eyes out at gold’s mere view, and slouch towards Bethlehem to be born again. Shabriri’s duality lays bare the FromSoftware player-project as a fundamentally meaningless endeavour in which hero meets edgelord and aloneness - all it entails, and every interaction such a state also curtails - becomes the defining characteristic of our embodiment. Therefore cynicism is a natural attitude towards this fast-approaching point of no-return. We are chasing after nowness - this idea that computers will save us - yet there is, essentially, very little left to tell through the framework Demon's Souls established fifteen years ago. Every journey hence both ripped and ruined the language of its predecessors, be it through lure or paleblood, by pulling on a hand that always had too many fingers - lost in this need to embed cycles within systems and vice-versa, a rich sense of interconnectedness slowly diluted in increasingly complex canvases that seemed to exist only for their own sake - until finally each of these thread would coalesce at the foot of the Erdtree to form the Tarnished who, likewise, looks inward and wrestles - really - with an image of self, physically substantiated in one of Elden Ring's funniest sleight of hand by the birth of Mimic Tears.

Thou art yet to become me. Mimic tears, I think, are telling hints of what's at stake here. Their use and abuse as body doubles by the community reflects what we've turned into; apocalypse consumers, yes, but also deeply reflective digital beings who know exactly what they want every time they come back to the club craving for a particular fragrance of realm. The Mimic Tear, for all the ways it facilitates and trivializes many of the game's encounters, isn't just a cracked-out design accident (or mere concession to wider audiences) put in place to solve the escalation of enemy movesets and effects in contrast to the golden tricorn of dodge-rolls, stabs and parries, it's evidence to Elden Ring's attempt to resolve a live-occurrence of identity crisis manifesting at every echelon of play, from the way its open-world structure informs the narrative as a whole to finer details like passé progression systems and combat frameworks whose malleability incentivizes sleekness at all costs. Elden Ring is ever-brilliant and as such trapped in the scale of its reflexivity. There is only one tree, and only its branches, says the severed head of Godrick the Grafted at my feet; and only by replica - by deep, exhausting dives into eternal cities and clever asset duplications - can we ascend to true lordship. An eye for an eye. To look in the mirror and see nothing else than oneself, what a horrible thing to ponder. I'd sooner raze this place to the ground.

There is nowhere else to go. We've been here before. Killing gods, killing time. Going through the motions for memory's sake in the hope that this once-colourful palette would conjure up a lost song - how many Artoriases and Farum Azulas has it been now? We follow Melina in blind faith because our detachment from the journey paradoxically means we care on some level about the fate of these characters. All across the Lands Between a fair maiden spawns from thin air to dispense knowledge and strength like the good waifu that she is in opposition to her radiant, all-encompassing mother who we come to know through cause and effect, tracing her body alongside the bends and ridges of lore prose, within each fold of this world-enveloping cloth of religious dogma and ambition. The Miyazaki engine produces fatigue and excitement in equal measure and Elden Ring knows this, better yet runs on - and away with - it because in the process of scattering the archetypes of its anthology in the four corners of the map - of becoming its own sparse cliché - the game produces an earnest vulgarization of the prototypal FromSoftware fashion in which we’re both nowhere and everywhere at the same time, driven to carve the depths of this content circle - to see and taste every variation - much like Marika was before us and come away from the world with violence as its sole legible way towards catharsis. Lineage in service of posterity; the more we know of this precious tree, the more urgent its destruction. To bathe the Lands Between in ogre red or sickly yellows. There is beauty in that, is there not? So many flames in this game that I can’t help but giggle. I can’t help but to have fondness for Elden Ring, for its insistence in repetition, for the way it uses space in order to parlay with the player. Through both Melina and Marika the game charts an open-world romance whose non-linear nature affords us all the digressions and drama that ensues. Distance becomes desire and breeds contempt. Sorry honey but I really had to burn that shit down. I’m Frenzied. But I’ll get to fixing it soon, I promise, and maybe one day we can live in our house together again. And if not, let my hand rest upon you, for but a moment - but also please don't, and now continue, and also also also and and and and...

And maybe Marika is Radagon or maybe it was really just us.

Hence Elden Ring's seminal image:

This auburn-haired god letting the hammer fall onto the world. A magnificent beast, doomed to ruin.

Elden stars. When from Radagon's corpse the beast emerged I gasped. Hallowed wings from down under. The living embodiment of Order - a Moonlight Butterfly draped in gold. I was always struck by the comparison. For all their scarlet maladies and familial crises unwound over unfathomable amounts of time the stories of these worlds have always acted in the name of precisely such a creature. Not the arrogance of Man, or the folly of the Cosmos, or all the Devil's bastard children, but a lone being destined to be put to the sword because no ones knows any better - not Ranni’s blood-soaked quest for self-determination under the guise of a dark moon, not Fia and her Manhattan-clam monster, not even based guy Goldmask in his gilded silence. Each of these questlines taken as their formidable intersecting whole form Elden Ring's thesis statement; we all tried and our perambulations have led us back where we started, back to the golden address - back to her. This needs not be final. However ruined this world has become, however mired in torment and despair, life endures. Births continue. And by putting the monster front and center as their game's final showpiece, to suggest that the Moonlight Butterfly could essentially be a metaphor for the entire series, FromSoftware formulate a beautiful admission of artistic defeat.

The work has reached its limit - lest kind Miquella returns to us - at entropy's base, two become one.

And in me, a constellation. The many freaks and the many stories. A stronger, loving world.

Played up through the 7th badge (these games go by quick with 10x speedup!) I was actually surprised at my bad reaction to G/S: in my childhood mind, these were the best two games. Likewise, I was surprised how good R/B felt.

To my surprise, G/S feel a bit flat. The locations and landmarks feel more touristy than anything: rather than the way that R/B's world was a little denser and intertwined and felt like it was drawing on some kind of Japanese childhood/adulthood, G/S's map feels a bit more arbitrary with various 'tourist destinations' dropped in here and there, weirdly intertwined with Team Rocket and Rival stuff, scouring the maps for missed HMs. I appreciate the effort to tie real world history to the game, but it feels a bit dropped in - the mythology of pokemon themselves don't feel that tied to the systems - being a kid and getting badges, fighting pokemon.

The Radio, night/day, new balls, phone calls, etc - these are all new and sort of cute but they also don't feel super relevant to the main game based on what they amount to.

Overall there are still some nice moments: I liked the underground walkway with trainer fights this time! The way the northern/northwestern reaches of the map seem more steeped in forests and caves is an interesting contrast. Seeing regions guarded for cultural reasons (Dragon's Den guarded if you don't tame dragons, Tin Tower if you're missing a badge) - these border on interesting, but they still feel detached from the main character - a little kid who for some reason ends up catching Gods and taking down terrorists.

You can really see the pokemon formula start to take shape here: new pokemon, a new villain group, another kid who for some reason ascends to divinity-level strength against a world which contradictory..ly tries to stay grounded. A world obviously inspired by some real place, but that canonically refuses to be linked to that real place.

I have no doubt that some of the later games manage to balance the battles, complexity, and story better - but none of those things are really what made Red/Blue so interesting to begin with.

Pentiment has an official reading list, partly composed of some of the books that the team used for reference when building the game's art, plot, and characters. They're an interesting collection of books, and since my love of Pentiment overflowed after finishing it originally, I poured that excess enthusiasm into reading them. Now that I have read them all and replayed Pentiment with the knowledge in hand, I thought it would be interesting to dive into the inspirations and how they helped me to have a more complete understanding of the historical and cultural background of the game. Hopefully it won't be too dry, but also bear in mind that this is a very loose analysis. I'm not going to go back and find passages to cite unless they're super important to the point I'm making. I'm enough of a nerd to read five books for a backlog review, not for an academic article.


First things, the books: I read the following from the reading list, which you can find here: (https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2022/11/10/recommended-reading-of-medieval-history-from-josh-sawyer/)

1 The Name of the Rose: Umberto Eco

2 Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen Richard Wunderli

3 The Cheese and the Worms, Carlo Ginzburg

4: The Return of Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis

5: The Faithful Executioner, Joel F. Harrington

6 Dürer's Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist—Susan Foister and Peter Van Den Brink


The Name of the Rose is perhaps the most important book on the list in terms of understanding the inspiration behind Pentiment. I admit I watched the film before reading the novel, but they are rather different beasts. Besides certain common elements between Pentiment and Name of the Rose, like the fictitious Abbey, certain elements straining the credibility of the historical setting (tassing having all strata of social classes present, the 15th century scriptorium vs. a random ass mountain abbey having a gigantic labyrinthine library), and main characters borrowing from real historical figures who are name-dropped in the story (William of Ockham in Name of the Rose and Albrecht Durer in Pentiment), the main connection is that they both use the classic detective murder mystery setup as a framework to explore both theology, historical moments, conflict, etc.

This is the part where the movie most differs from the book; it makes sense given that you can't really fit all that into 90 minutes. It chooses to keep the juicy murder mystery and some background political intrigue but dispenses with the broader narrative of the book, which is about apostolic poverty and the Avginon papacy. Essentially the gravity of the murders add a sense of urgency in solving them because the Abbey is defending its political independence as neutral ground for a meeting of the pope(or anti-pope really)'s men and several monastic orders and representatives of the holy roman emperor to debate the merits of how the church should function, if it should reject all property and live as paupers, which has both a religious significance but also a political one in the conflict between the Avignon Papacy (essentially for a while the pope left Rome and went to France and this had a pretty massive impact upon european politics of the time with a politically ascendant France) and the HRE and the various religious orders like the Benedictines and Franciscans. This is mirrored in Pentiment, which also uses the murders of Baron Rothvogel and later Otto as a framework to highlight both the purpose of historical memory, the nature of justice and peace in early modern Europe, the importance of religion in their communities and how alien that can feel to modern audiences in rich countries, life, death, our ideas of the past and how they influence us in the present, and a whole bunch of related themes.

Similarly, in Act 1, the murder is also presented as politically inconvenient for the abbot, who seeks a speedy resolution to the issue much like the abbot in The Name of the Rose does, but for the different reason that his Kiersau Abbey is an oddity in the church, maintaining practices such as a double monastery, which have long been frowned at by the catholic authorities but have simply remained unnoticed due to its insignificance. A long, embarassing murder investigation could bring the hammer down on them, which leads to the Abbotts callously attempting to throw Andreas' mentor, Piero, for the murder so that the monastery may continue without issue. There is also the matter of the scriptorium and adjacent library with a secret entrance by the ossuary in Name of the Rose and Crypt in Pentiment (though in truth, I think Brother Volkbert confirms that the crypt just holds bones, so it's probably also appropriate to call it an ossuary) being direct references.

In both stories, the skill of the detectives is a bit suspect. In the case of William of Baskerville, whilst he is definitely closer to the Platonic ideal of your Sherlock Holmes figure, being less of an unbelievable omniscient who has information, the reader doesn't like many of the examples of bad detective fiction (cough cough, BBC Sherlock). His assumptions and thought processes are reasonable (for the most part), but he sure takes his time in solving the case. In fact, he arguably fails pretty much everything he sets out to do. Seven people lie dead, the library got burned down, and the matter of apostolic poverty they had come to debate eventually led to it being branded as heretical, though the Avginon papacy did disappear in due time as the seat of the Holy See returned to Rome. Of course, he does have a sort of moral victory over the reactionary Jorge who set the murders in motion to hide the existence of a lost tome, which would, in his view, help to elevate comedy and laughter, which he views as subversive and leading to heresy and the corruption of the divine truth. It is fitting given the frequent debates in the book that the climax would involve essentially a philosophical discussion. This parallels somewhat Pentiment's ending, wherein Father Thomas brings down the Mithraeum below the church to erase the proof of St. Satia and St. Moritz being essentially just Diana and Mars, pagan figures worshipped before the Bavarian Christians settled on tassing. Andreas is also not the greatest sleuth, though, in large part, being an interactive medium, the character of Andreas' skills depends upon players' actions. Nevertheless, the constant of Andreas having to make difficult choices using incomplete information is a constant; it's impossible for him to ever fully uncover the truth of the matter with the limited time and resources he has to investigate the murders, and much like many things, including historical events, it's not really possible to actually 100% discover the "true" killer. There are likelier candidates, of course, and a good argument can be made for the most reasonable culprit, like in Act 1, where it is rather doubtful that Ottilia did it; I think Lucky is almost certainly the murderer; and it's interesting just how much a second playthrough can change a lot of what I thought. In Act 2, it's rather less clear, with Hanna and Guy both having threads pointing to them.

Either way, there is also the matter that Andreas and Pentiment as a whole are also concerned with the perception of truth rather than the whole matter of it, similar to the Name of the Rose: case in point: when Andreas returns to Tassing a few years later in Act 1, the Innkeeper will refer to a warped version of the events of the original murder, suggesting that either way the truth of the events has already passed into unreliable folklore. There is an angle to consider when choosing a culprit in both acts when considering the consequences for the community. Its still refreshing to me in an industry that still has seemingly not moved on from boring black and white low honor vs. high honor binary choice bullshit that Pentiment presents you with the infinitely more interesting to my mind issue of Ottilia Kemperyn. An old, misanthropic, heretical widow whose husband's death was caused by the murdered Baron Rothvogel's savage beating has essentially given up on life. Her house is just about to be taken away from her by the church because she has no heirs and cannot own property herself. If one were to invent utilitarianism in the 15th century, one could argue that letting the obviously innocent Ottilia take the heat for the murder of the Baron is the optimal choice; indeed, standing up for her by challenging the church's claim to her house does cause her to retain the house onto Act 2, but the church is predictably angry at your actions, and you've done little more than buy a woman a few more miserable years of her life. Of course, in doing so, you will be utterly perverting justice and sentencing a woman to the executioner, whose only crime was being born a peasant woman in the 15th century, with all the trials it entails. These tough choices are not limited just to Andreas, with Act 3 the townsfolk are still reconciling their choices in dealing with Otto's murder in 1525 and subsequent burning of the abbey (which mirrors the ending of The Name of The Rose with the Abbey and Library burning down also) and whilst they all have different perspectives on the issue, its interesting that some regret the foolishness that brought the hammer down on them and resulted in bloodshed whilst also recognizing that that very sacrifice led to their current positions, there is some optimism in the ending, with some arguing that the Abbot's ecclesiastical authority being replaced with the lord's secular one has been beneficial, with slightly less strict oversight and Lenhardt being murdered at least had temporary material improvements for the peasants who wouldn't be completely gouged by the new miller. As with everything, one can only move forward; the wheel of time stops for no man, and making peace with our mistakes and seeing a broader perspective is supremely important to life.

Peasant Fires doesn't cover the more famous 1525 German Peasant rebellion, but rather the lesser known Niklashausen rebellion of 1478, wherein a drummer whipped up a mass of pilgrims to rebel against the ruling authorities, claiming that he had received a divine vision of the virgin Mary, who called on him and the faithful to overthrow the corrupt church and kill the priests, that god had ordained for all land to be held in common and the feudal lords of the time had corrupted his will. The book explores the role of festivals in medieval Europe, with some serving as outlets for repressed anger at the authorities, like carnival being a time of playfully "reversing" the established relations of nobility, royalty, and peasantry. It highlights how, for most peasants, the calendar would be seen through the lens of the various public festivals throughout the year, from Christmas to Carnival to Lent to Easter, etc. Despite the much harsher working conditions, there were many more public holidays for the Europeans of the 15th century than there are for the Brits of today. Its influence is most apparent in Pentiment's Act 2, with Otto claiming a holy vision has revealed that the Lord is with the townsfolk of Tassing against the increased taxes and restrictions of the Abbot, mirroring the drummer. Otto's murder occurs during St. John's Eve, a very popular summer festival, with anger boiling over with the Abbot threatening excommunication to anyone he finds in the forest getting up to mischief. In both examples, the peasants are drawn to revolt against ecclesiastical authorities due to the increasing restrictions on their rights and material conditions. In Tassing, there is a noticeable decline in living standards, with the poor Gertners being particularly destitute due to increased taxes.

In the 1478 rebellion, the drummer started rallying people to the cause by preaching near the pilgrimage site of Niklashausen. In Pentiment, the Abbot further angers the peasants by closing the Shrine of St. Moritz, which is also a pilgrimage site and source of some religious comfort to the Catholic denizens of Tassing who often prayed to Saints for deliverance. The book goes into some depth regarding pilgrimages in the early modern period. While the sale of indulgences is much better known given its importance to the reformation, it is often overlooked that pilgrimages served a similar purpose. The idea of purgatory was such that pilgrims could reduce the suffering of themselves and/or deceased relatives by visiting a site of pilgrimage and receiving a partial indulgence for time in purgatory. It was another way in which the peasants would be essentially emotionally blackmailed into either donating or traveling to a holy site, which of course also had the effect of increasing the prestige and economic power of a church that hosted one of these relics, like the hand of a saint, a piece of the true cross, or what have you.

The main issue with the book is that the sources are very spotty, and so the author basically speculates on a large chunk of them. He at least admits that this is the case and makes clear what is his own imagination and what’s supported by the evidence, but still, it's a rather short book to begin with. Its illuminating at the very least regarding just how fucked medieval peasants were economically, the role of festivals and pilgrimages, and the power of mystics in inciting rebellion.

The Faithful Executioner is a work of microhistory focused on the life of the executioner of Nuremberg during a particularly busy time for such a professional. It has the advantage of drawing upon an unusual source: a detailed journal written by the said executioner during his time working for the city. It was rare for a man like him to be able to read, much less to leave such thorough notes about his work. It's a very interesting tale, which I recommend picking up. It's both a greater history lesson about the role of the executioner and the specific conditions in 16th-century HRE, which led to a significant increase in their work, and the personal story of a man’s quest to advance his and his family’s station from the unfortunate place it was put in. It also does a lot to make us understand the perspective and social attitudes that influenced this institution, which is, to our modern eyes, quite cruel and ghastly, without just making an apology for the indefensible. Its relation to Pentiment is obvious; it is a work that is deeply concerned with justice, crime, and punishment, and the appearance of justice and truth is often times more important than the actual thing itself. In chapter 1, whichever culprit gets selected will get executed violently and publicly, either by the executioner’s sword in the case of the male suspects of lucky or ferenc or being choked to death in the case of the female suspects. Interestingly, in the faithful executioner, we are told that execution by sword at the time was usually reserved for the nobility (even often times being the result of a bribe to the judges to forgo the more slow and painful executions down to the more “dignified” decapitation). I imagine, though, that the choice of the sword was more of a creative decision, being the quickest way to show the culprit being killed. In the case of Prior Ferenc’s execution, it was slightly botched, requiring three slashes to finish him off. In the case of the faithful executioner, part of the titular executioner’s great reputation, which allowed him to eventually appeal his status (executioners were part of the official underclass, unable to perform “honorable” professions, and were oftentimes banned from joining a guild and other legal discrimination), came from the fact that he very rarely botched an execution; indeed, the executioner himself could be in danger when performing a beheading, and it was common for crowds to turn on the executioner if it took more than 3 strokes to fall the criminal. Its not surprising to me that states eventually realized how counterproductive public execution was, with modern ones being performed in some prison room away from the public. The fact is, and Pentiment explores this as well, that it's all well and good to believe that someone deserves to die or that they had their brutal end coming to them; certainly, there are many rapists, murderers, etc., and even if one opposes the death penalty on principle, we would not be sad to hear that they were killed. And yet, I dare to say that if you were to witness such a person being violently killed, well, most well-adjusted people would respond with horror and even sympathy for such a situation.

Certainly, I don’t weep at the thought that some of the hanged nazis at Nuremberg were actually left choking for quite a few minutes before expiring, but even with them, were I to be in the room, I would look away from such a horrible sight. Humans are empathic for the most part, and it's hard to see such things without feeling bad.

It's a sobering moment watching the execution of Ferenc, who might be suspected of performing occult rituals and murdering a man in cold blood, but it's another to see him praying for mercy before being brutally cut down. The victory is hollow; there is a reason why Sherlock Holmes stories end with the suspect in custody and not Sherlock Holmes gloating in front of the gallows with the criminal’s corpse hanging forlornly from the scaffold. Okay, okay, that's enough unpleasantness. Let's move on from this grizzly subject.

The Cheese and the Worms is another work of microhistory, this time on the subject of Mennochio, an eccentric miller in 15th-century France who used his rare literacy and access to a variety of books passed around by his neighbors (who were unusually literate for the time also) to develop his own eclectic brand of religious thought, which eventually got him into trouble with the Inquisition, who were mostly baffled by what seemed to be a unique brand of heresy invented by essentially one random peasant guy, far from the norm of wandering preachers, secret societies, and the like. Its influence is most apparent in the figure of Vaclav, a Romani knife sharpener who will share his equally weird beliefs if you’ll indulge him, which, funnily enough, if you do, he gets burned at the stake for heresy, as evidenced by the town-wide family tree next to the mural in the game's ending. In the case of Vaclav, they’re a weird syncretism of gnosticism, Christian mysticism, and just his own blend of strange esoteric religious theories. The role of increased literacy and the printing press allowing more people to read “dangerous ideas” is brought up often during Acts 1 and 2, with Father Thomas and others being wary of the effects it could have in riling up the peasantry and the danger of certain ideas spreading. The elephant in the room is, of course, the protestant reformation and the 1525 peasant rebellion, which were greatly aided by the increased availability of the written word, further increasing the demand for a translation of the Bible written in German and other vernacular languages as opposed to Latin, which was mainly spoken by the priesthood. Its no surprise that this eventually led to an explosion of different Protestant denominations, as anyone who could read the Bible for themselves could develop a novel interpretation of the scripture.

In the case of Menochio, while from a modern perspective it seems very repressive and authoritarian to be jailed and later executed for having unorthodox beliefs like the universe being created from a primordial cheese eaten by worms who became God and his angels and created the world, it's hard to be sympathetic when the dude just could not shut the hell up about his beliefs. Like, idk about you, Im an agnostic or atheist or whatever, but if I could possibly be executed for it, I would not go around telling people about how god is fake and cringe. Its also funny reading the accounts of the inquisitors, who for the most part, whilst obviously terrible and repressive, would let most cases like a single heretical peasant off with essentially a slap in the wrist, say you’re sorry, do a penance, your priest vouches for you being a good man and for the most part be allowed to rejoin society, but bro just couldn't do it. The number of executions the inquisition actually did was a lot less than we would think; it was usually reserved for wandering preachers, big religious leaders who were trying to get a schism going, etc.

The Return of Martin Guerre is interesting because its “plot” is basically 1-to-1, almost adapted into Pentiment’s character of Martin Bauer. The book was written by Natalie Zemon Davis, a historian and advisor to the French film of the same name based upon the real-life historical figure of Martin Guerre. After her experiences with the production, she decided to write a more “official” account of the story without the necessities of a 3-act structure and cinematic storytelling. Martin Guerre was a peasant in what is now modern-day Basque Country (part of Spain and France) who one day disappeared from his town and, unbeknownst to them, went off to Spain to join the army and eventually got wounded in battle during the Italian wars of the mid-16th century. Meanwhile, a man claiming to be Martin Guerre who bore an uncanny resemblance to the man arrived in Martin’s home town and, after some initial skepticism, was able to slide into his old life through his appearance and seemingly access to knowledge that only the real Martin Guerre could know. It also highlights that under the law of the time, Martin’s wife would not be allowed to remarry, and the way in which women were treated, her standing in society, and her ability to fend for herself were adversely affected by having an abandoned husband. Even worse, the real Martin could have died off in battle, but even this would not necessarily be enough to be able to remarry unless she could somehow prove her husband had been killed. It's not surprising then that she may have been, let’s say, willful to “be fooled” by the impostor, knowing that this was a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to solve her situation. Even more so after “Martin” received his deceased father’s inheritance and greatly increased the wealth of his household.

In Pentiment, Martin Bauer similarly runs off during Act 1 after stealing from the murdered baron and “returns” before Act 2 to take over the household after the death of his father. If pressed, you can uncover the fact that this man is actually Jobst Farber, a highwayman who ran off with Martin and eventually, when he died, used his resemblance to the man to take over his life. Similarly, in Pentiment, Martin’s wife Brigita seems consciously or unconsciously aware of the deception but begs Andreas not to rat him out of town, as he’s been a much better husband than Martin ever was, and in a purely utilitarian sense, his identity theft is seemingly the best outcome for everyone. If one remembers Act 1’s Ottilia Kemperyn, households without children or men to inherit property are very much unprotected, and it's easy to see why Brigita prefers to turn a blind eye to this Farber character’s lies. In the real-life case of Martin Guerre, the prosecution was initiated by Martin’s father-in-law who suspected foul play, but “Martin”’s wife was supportive of her impostor husband. Indeed, what ended up resulting in his execution was actually the return of the real Martin Guerre to the town, who, amusingly enough, seemed less able to answer the questions of the judge in regards to information that the real Martin Guerre would know than the fake one! Thankfully for the wife, sometimes misogyny works out in women’s favor, and she was essentially unpunished (and the real Martin Guerre was reprimanded for abandoning his wife and family) for what could have been considered adultery and false witness with essentially the old “ah well, she’s a woman, it makes sense her feeble mind would be fooled by a talented huckster like this” argument. Not as much of a happy ending for the impostor who got executed but was surprising apologetic, much like Martin Bauer is if you accuse him of murdering Otto Zimmerman during Act 2 of Pentiment.

The final book, I’ll admit, is one that I basically skimmed because it was really fucking boring, and I already read a biography of Albrecht Durer a while back, so a lot of it was just stuff I already knew. It was worth owning, if nothing else, A3 copies of Durer’s famous works. Albrecht Durer informs the character of Andreas quite a bit (though he is also a bit William of Baskerville and Andrei Rublev); indeed, his Act 1 design is heavily inspired by a famous Durer self-portrait. They are both painters from Nuremberg; they both (in Act 2) seem to really dread returning to their wives, which they hate back in Nuremberg; and during the lunch with Brother Sebhat, when a kid is having the concept of different ethnic groups and skin colors existing, Andreas chimes in that in the Netherlands he saw art from the New World that was greater than anything Europeans had ever done, echoing Durer’s admiration for New World art in particular made of metal; him being the son of a goldsmith, it makes sense he’d feel particularly fond of such things.

The use of Durer’s famous Melancholia 1 painting is a key aspect of Andreas’ character journey. In Act 1, his inner psyche is depicted as a court composed of King Prester John (a mythical figure in European folklore often thought of as the Ethiopian emperor), Beatrice from the Divine Comedy, St. Grobian, and Socrates. Whenever Andreas is debating a difficult decision, they can be called upon to give their two cents in a sort of id, ego, and super ego-type arrangement. In Act 2, however, it is only Beatrice who gives advice, her moderation and temperance having devolved into self-doubt and fear. At a key point, Andreas finds his court trashed and all absent safe for Beatrice, sitting in the pose of the famous aforementioned melancholia print: “Now I am all that remains, the melancholy of life’s autumn,” a manifestation of essentially a mid-life crisis for Andreas after becoming a successful artist but feeling hollow inside. Its fitting as well given the beliefs about mental health, a common conception of artists and creatives at the time as “melancholics," and a conception of depression and mental illness as markers for creative genius that sadly persists to this day.

4500 words later, and I'm both embarrassed by how long this has been and frustrated by how much more I could have gone into details on each of the entries, but I think that's enough for now. If anything, I hope this encourages anyone who’s played pentiment to check out one of the books and maybe draw their own connections I might have missed or forgot to include. Whenever I think about what differentiates a 5-star game from a 4.5- or 4-star game, I think this is it. A 5-star game will get me to read six books totaling probably like 1000+ pages. I’m currently reading through The Brothers Karamazov as part of The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa’s readable books list (so far I’ve read Winesburg, Ohio, Confessions of a Mask, and Rumble Fish), and maybe I’ll write a similar piece at some point for each (though bear in mind I started reading the first book in this collection a year ago, so y'know).

This game is such an interesting abstraction of the Japanese cityscape and countryside: I would say it feels most not like a central-Tokyo but like it was designed by someone who lived in one of the major cities an hour or two from central Tokyo. You get the occasional dense area with a skyscraper or two (Saffron City), dense collections of single family homes (Celadon City), but there's still the countryside running through mountains and forests, farming towns here and there.

That is easily Pokemon Blue's most interesting trait: it's a world based on reality, but not in the direction of an Earthbound that's more focused on constantly parodying America or people. Pokemon Blue is a game more interested in the idea of adding a layer of mystery (world of pokemon) and exaggeration (everyone catches pokemon!) to the mundane normal everyday life. I imagine this (and the affordances of the Game Boy and the 151 pokemon, and the marketing efforts of Nintendo) is what helped to capture the minds of the initial millions of players! I'm not sure how much of that exists today, where the series feels a bit more phoned in and calculated.

It's honestly quite disturbing the extent that Satoshi Tajiri's artistic idea become full-on media-mix/anime-ified - most symbolic of this is how sprites underwent slight revisions between the original JP red/green to US red/blue to yellow to bring things 'more in line with the anime' - a direction which, I think, informs the series direction today: something that's more interested in doing only what's necessary to keep the brand going, rather than an interest in the kind of design fundamentals Tajiri/team had that allowed them to conceive of Pokemon Blue in the first place.

The story in Blue is most interestingly not at all much of an anime story. Nobody is really fleshed out except potentially Giovanni, the game feels like a series of vignettes where the sport-like Pokemon battling at times briefly overlaps with the reality of our world. Lt. Surge fought with pokemon in a war, Mew is from South America, the moon landing happened in 1969, people are addicted to gambling, there's a crime syndicate, pokemon can die and become ghosts. There's a lot of room for your imagination to think about.

I loved the underground walkways that feel like the long, underground train station walkways in Japan, or even arguably underground shoutengai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Dtengai). How the Celadon "Mansion" is a mistranslation of the Japanese Manshon (often a 5-10 story apartment or mixed use building), how it has the Game Freak devs. The department store inspired by big Japan department stores.

I think the first 2/3 of this game (through Silph Tower) is really well paced, I love how you go between countryside exploration and weird little dungeons in urban settings or caves. The last 1/3 of the game feels a bit more out of place - the 'science' angle, while interesting, kind of starts and ends with Cinnabar island. Seafoam Island and Victory Road are fine, but they feel less connected to the whole game's sense of place compared to e.g. the rocket base or mt. moon. I don't think this detracts from the strength of the game, but the game did feel like it was dragging by that point - the fact it began doing block puzzles might be symbolic of that. (Ha ha)

An aside: The core of the "trainers are multiple pokemon, random encounters are one pokemon" is a brilliant design choice - they can express trainer personality through this, they can characterize spaces like dungeons or caves based on who is there. I actually wanted to see more of the Viridian Forest-type dungeon - where not everything is a random encounter tile.

--

After playing, it does feel like the game is at a bit of a crossroads. I think Tajiri definitely had more he wanted to do with his vision, but they may not have been in-line with the more obvious routes to 'improving' the game.

The more obvious routes, to me, neither of which interest me personally, are:

- Increasing the traditional storytelling: clear villain characters, more cutscenes, more regularly paced villain-related levels. This could help attract an audience put off by the way Pokemon Blue feels like falling into a story at times (which I personally prefer, haha). It would also increase franchise tie-in and business synergies!

- Making the battle system 'better' and not a pushover. Make the game more technical, increase training options, create harder battles or challenges - as this would be the only way to 'balance' the game from becoming too easy. This lays a lot of weird traps though, and I think pokemon's devs fell into most of them: stark divides between the 'true combat postgame', many compulsive traps around perfecting stats/builds (rather than letting you teambuild freely), etc.

Personally I would have liked it if the game went harder on the weird influences and level layouts, maybe experimenting with a smaller level range or different methods of training other than bland 'QoL' features to help even leveling... but hey! I'm not the billionaire company here...

Longing for fulfillment all the way until the end of the world. Living in the literal day-to-day culture, with fleeting attempts to amplify their voices within the cacophony of people, trying to fill their hearts with SOMETHING and yet the only thing that matters is, did they really find what they were looking for beneath the circuitry? Everyone's answers is made for them, even the ones with the strongest Voice, usually in service of someone else's attempt. The only one that matters at the end of the day is the one who lived for compassion and love. That's what so many living figures in this world seemed to miss. The last and most central thing that exists isn't you, it's who you are with.

For what it did, this game is immune to criticism.
You can just pick up any 5-star reviews written in backloggd and I would mostly agree with their points.

However, I really hated the late-game part.

My line of thoughts is that Rain World's strength is never a precise platforming action. Maybe it's the issue of playing the game with the joystick only, but adjusting the minimal movement in the corner or over the ledge always felt like picking a sticky rice with chopsticks, and the static camera shot didn't help the intuitiveness when it moves the screen vertically.

What I liked about this game was mostly about making improvisational choices while weaving through heavily detailed wild animal AIs, which is still pretty brutal, but has some respect for players, because the failure state isn't always black&white, and there are (most the time) plenty of solutions and prep time for given situations.

The continuation of Five Pebbles, Chimney Canopy, and Sky Tower was probably the lowest point of my overall enjoyment because there are slippery death pits everywhere. At that point, I felt like I was playing a trial-and-error platformer but with RNG vultures sprinkled over it. The fact that those levels are gated by the Karma gates didn't help it too.

Also if I had to pick two more nitpicky stuffs....
- I hated that the time limit for the day cycle is randomized but then it doesn't penalize you for resetting right away to get a better day cycle. What's the point of this, rolling a slot machine or something?
- Maybe the ending sequence is too long and too visually aimless. If you have seen the ending, you would know that it would be really difficult for players with darker monitor settings. I was that poor hypothetical player btw.

Basically, that minus one star came from my pettiness.

Same people who lament no longer having interesting manuals to read in modern games mad about dead simple mechanic that's explained in the manual, making an average map the "big filter"; RTFM.

Booted this up somewhat on a whim to explore kind of what I consider to be a throughline of sorts for the kart racer subgenre, because while I wouldn't exactly call this one of em (some might, I prefer "HIGH OCTANE ACTION ARCADE RACER"), it left a noticeable imprint for how courses are designed (inc. hazards) and people usually make the connection whenever any other kart racer implements some kind of boost/meter/hybrid system (not a "boost" item).

Was very pleasantly surprised by the little comic that fleshes out the characters, enhancing their personality immensely and explaining some of their driver habits, like Pico's bloodthirsty driving style, and sure enough in races it felt like he had the least restraint when it came to ramming into me. Makes me want to go check out the OVA/series they made for this, honestly feels like the premise was ripped by Redline (2009) LOL

Anyways the game absolutely rips, the level of stage readability for a mode-7 racing game while keeping such a raw sense of momentum is fantastic. The granularity in maneuvering is also surprising for the time, when most of its contemporaries feel like glorified lane-racers or were arcade titles with both unfair, copious levels of specialized hardware and unfair level design. I adore the presentation, having one of my favorite compositions on the SNES (the melee rendition being one of my favorite tracks in all of gaming)

"When the first Grand Prix race was held, people were angered at the brutality of the competition. The organizers had, during construction, placed various obstacles and traps along the raceway. But as time passed, and people grew used to these dangers, they soon demanded even more excitement in the race. In time, winning this race meant earning the highest honor that could be bestowed on anyone in the Universe.

In a very short time, people came to call this Grand Prix simply, 'F-ZERO' "

Really liked this one, but it has obvious holes that keep it from entering the upper tier of action games; it’s sort of a riff on the Arkham-style counter based combat against groups of enemies, the main distinction being that you’ll be faced with overlapping attacks you can’t simply defensively bait out, and so you have to use props in the environment to whittle down groups and make certain high-value targets vulnerable. While it is possible to fight enemies with just your sword and defensive kit- it’s suboptimal, and the best moments here are when you blend the environmental takedowns with the more traditional forms of combat: knocking them down stairs, kicking boxes at them, and dropping chandeliers on their heads to name a few.

The result is a combat system that ends up being much more playful than its influences, where the toughest enemies aren’t necessarily meant to be fought honorably, but tossed around with some swashbuckling gusto. Was also very pleasantly surprised to see that this extends to the major bosses as well, the majority of which are just as susceptible to environmental hazards and throw regular enemies into the mix as well- nicely avoiding the “boss as rhythm game” design that’s made many parry-centric games feel so rote. This means that the big, climatic moments here end up as some of the biggest highlights, as they push the combat into its wildest and most improvisational moments, and the few times you do fight an enemy one-on-one being so rare and novel that they feel like a genuine break from the rest of the action.

Over the course of its four-chapter campaign, it introduces a lot of ideas and a number of bespoke maps, and I was really excited when I saw that there was an “Arena” mode in the menu, something I expected to be a straight shot of action if the running through the campaign proved to be too diluted, but instead of chasing high scores and really learning each of the individual arenas, it’s a weird roguelike mode. The randomness here comes from the positive and negative modifiers you’ll get after completing each map, with the negative effects being pretty negligible and the choice of buffs being game-ruiningly powerful. Winning the last challenge had less to do with any accumulated sense of crowd control or map knowledge, and was far more a result of constructing a busted build that let me heal constantly and stun enemies whenever they tried to attack. Feels like a waste of a mode, especially since the basic gameplay hook seems like it would lend itself so well to something where you had to consider the ramifications of every stunned guard and hurled piece of cutlery.

Lots of room for improvement and expansion in future, but it’s wonderfully breezy tonally and solid enough mechanically that it should satisfy for the moment. (And consider going for a no-death clear of the campaign on hard if you really want to get some extra mileage out of it.)

In keeping with the free-flowing, improvisational spirit of Final Fantasy VII, a series of semi-connected thoughts:

- Lots of people are hung up on the minigames for one reason or another, and they are worthy of discussion, though not about whether they belong here (of course they do) or if they're any good (most aren't), but how their purpose has shifted between the original and this iteration. In 1997, they were tonal interludes meant to show off what a strange, crazy planet we're fighting to protect, bursting with unexpected things to see and do. In 2024, they're blown up in length and number to serve as narrative delivery devices, neatly structured to grant further dimension to one or more of your party members while also conveniently padding out the playtime of your $70 luxury consumer purchase.

More than that, even, they're ways of delaying the inevitable. Rebirth isn't really a game about a doomed planet, but a doomed woman, and everyone with the faintest knowledge of FF7 is aware of this. No matter how many sprawling overworld maps or Gold Saucer diversions or matches of Queen's Blood you throw yourself into, you're still on a beeline toward tragedy. Consider Cloud and Aerith's last "date" and how they never get exactly what they want - the candy, the tchotchke, the photo. Our choices in this world, like any other video game world, are merely a dilation of time, a hopeless attempt to forestall the medium's great historical trauma, gamer 9/11.

This is all theoretically interesting, but also has the unfortunate effect of imbricating the story's emotional slam dunk with the grim maximalist demands of the AAA market. You get what you came for... after 100 hours of wildly quality-variable content, of course. Even the Fated Event itself is compromised by a ludicrous boss rush, your characters all barking out their combat sound bites as if nothing has happened, multiversal fanservice rearing its ugly head for no discernible reason. (I ask this with no malice in my heart: why do people care about Zack enough to justify how much screentime he gets here?) In many ways this is a very simple game, but in the one moment that truly called for simplicity, all of the dubious worldline hijinks Nomura planted in the first game got in the way.

- I did find myself moved by one scene toward the end where the game briefly puts you in the shoes of a sad, scared little girl. The original FF7 made remarkable use of modifying your control scheme to convey shifts in your characters' emotional states; in Rebirth they generally overdo or mishandle it, much like everything else, but it worked well here.

- The combat is generally quite enjoyable. It's comforting to know that SE can get an action RPG right after FF16. Even with one installment worth of practice, though, some characters still feel better thought-out than others. Aerith sucks and Barret is truly just sad - what if you wanted to play Bayonetta using nothing but the guns? I have a few other complaints, like how ancillary and easily interrupted magic is, your characters' irritating lack of poise, and some hitbox tracking that would make Miyazaki blush, but they are ultimately pretty minor.

- Morph and Steal are so useless, what gives?

- Guarding feels terrible. No feedback.

- I liked the (PROTORELIC QUEST SPOILERS) fight a lot. It demands careful and attentive play but also gives you lots of options.

- The music is good, of course, although what other possible outcome could there be when you throw an exhausted supergroup of Japanese composers at one of the most beloved OSTs of all time? Unfortunately, the music is also a key factor in one of the game's great failures: it is almost perpetually unable to modulate its atmosphere. This shit is LOUD, all the time. There are no opportunities whatsoever to just be in a moment and collect your thoughts or size up your environment. I knew I was in for disappointment early on when Cloud and Sephiroth rolled into Nibelheim for their ill-fated flashback mission and I heard the sorrowful strains of Anxious Heart... followed by 15 different NPCs barking at me... followed by me stepping on a stool and dragging it noisily along with my character model for 100 feet. The din is constant from start to finish, and if you don't agree, Chadley would like to have a word or fifty thousand with you.

- This is a more personal gripe, but I feel that this trilogy's total inability to establish a horror tone is one of its great betrayals of its predecessor. The writing was on the wall with the Shinra Building in Remake; while that whole dungeon was badly handled in general, there was no attempt whatsoever at conveying any unease or fear. This is likely a result of Sephiroth being overexposed from the jump in Remake so there's no mystery, no terrible legend lurking around the corner. The horror in the original worked partly because Sephiroth was so brutal in a way that the franchise had never grappled with, but also because the world was more recognizably our own and easier to project yourself on than that of any other Final Fantasy: urban, modern, diseased, desperate, doomed. The Midgar Zolom incident makes you feel small and mortal, and the Shinra Mansion like you're a mere human enmeshed in something hostile and supernatural, but in this game those two setpieces are so fucking stupid that they're not even worth talking about.

- I know that everyone is nutting over the dumb dog song but for me the standout is One, Two, SABO!, which plays, as far as I can tell, during exactly one optional combat. Aggressively joyous and exuberant to the point of menace... love it! Fucking Cactuars!

- In a perfect world, both this game and FF16 falling short of SE's sales expectations would tell the company that the AAA open-world model is just not an effective container for video game storytelling, or at least the type that Final Fantasy made its name on so many years ago. It is my unreasonable hope that they will course correct for Part 3 and bring us back to a more focused experience, but as ever, the gamers demand more. Who are the devs to deny them the constant creep toward bigger and better?

- I really enjoyed Remake, but after this installment the project has lost its shine for me. No more remakes!

- One exception: if SE had any sort of cojones left, they would follow up this time dilation game with a remake of time kompression game FF8, omitting/streamlining all of the side content and churning out the most decadent 10-hour banger of all time, though they don't and they won't.

Don’t know if I’m quite as taken with this as the fanbase at large is, but it’s easy to see why it’s such a favorite; for all the fine-tuning around the progression system and the changes to the weapon lineup, it’s the big narrative moments that make this such a strong experience. With some hindsight, a real strength of the Zero sub-series is that they flow pretty naturally together when played back-to-back, meaning that all the unresolved tension of 1 and 2 are given a game’s worth of space to play out here. It can be hard to think of a portable game as ever really being “AAA,” but Inti Creates plays out these moments with such conviction that the betrayals and revelations about the characters land with some real weight, despite the tinny bombast that it’s been presented with.

Nowhere near good enough to comment on some of its deeper changes, (like, I assume the recoil rod is something you can get a huge amount of value out of if you’re a fiend- I am not that person) but structurally, it’s a massive improvement over the other titles, mainly for the fact that it bolsters the midgame by having you rematch against three bosses from the prior games, and cuts down the finale to two levels, giving the action some real momentum at a time when things would normally start to drag down into their most familiar. Combined with the strong narrative elements, and it's the entry that's the most exciting to just casually play through- compelling even as your letter grade starts to nosedive.

Despite the months-long break between playing the first two games and now this, there’s still a bit of series fatigue that’s no doubt cooled my impressions on this, but it’s undeniably satisfying seeing an entry smartly build on and improve its predecessor's foundations.

The words "confused direction" often pop up in my review outlines and they almost never makes the jump from draft to final copy. I dunno, much like "too wordy" or "nonsensical", I feel accusing a game of not knowing what it wants to be is a weirdly infantilizing complaint that often says more about the writer than the game they're talking about. In shorter terms: It's not a wise thing to say because there's a 90% chance it just makes you look like an idiot.

But for the longest time I did feel like MH Rise and its expansion had a very confused direction. Coming on the heels of MH Generations Ultimate (a mega compilation and the final sendoff to Old Monster Hunter) and MH World (the game that expanded the franchise's obscene popularity past the borders of East Asia), it struck me as an odd game because it was too much like World for me to call it a New-Old MH game but it also felt a bit too Portable for me to say that they were backstepping from World.
This only got worse with Sunbreak, which featured a much more relaxed Master/G Rank compared to World's sharper scaling yet also introduced muuuuuuuuuch more moveset complexity via switch scrolls and cooler switch skills which harkened back to the previous game. The end result was an experience that, while I didn't hate, left me so bothered that I kinda just left the game to rot for a while.

There's also the matter of Rise's difficulty to consider. 'Difficulty' in a very skill-based game is always a nebulous topic, as it's extremely hard to gauge properly. People who struggle for one reason or another tend to have bloated ideas of what constitutes 'hard', petulent scrubs tend to assume anything they struggle with is 'bad design', and people who're too good often get so far from their bad days that anything they stomp is 'too easy'. I'm in the latter camp, though I try not to assume everyone else is on my level.
Rise is an easy game. There's just not much else to say. I've played it in co-op with a fantastic variety of people and very few of them struggle without some extrinsic modifier being applied (motor issues, dyspraxia, whatever) and even those people learn to love the silkbinds and pray. The mere act of getting hit becomes a non-issue thanks to wirefalls and the name of the game for each moveset is 'safe' these days. Having a close-knit community helps on this front, as World tends to make the same people who stomp Rise struggle, which is a decent gauge for me personally.

Now, up until very recently, I assumed all of these elements were at odds with one another and rarely questioned it.

However, I've been getting back into writing fiction lately. Honkai Star Rail still has me in a vice grip, sorry, it's why my reviews have been so sparse. When I write fiction and get stalled by a scene, I have what I call the '30 minute rule': I take a break to do something - go for a walk, play a quick mission in a game, make dinner, etc etc - and come back. If my break didn't help me work out the scene, I annihilate it and try again.

Rise has been, for the last couple weeks, my 30 minute game, and in treating it this way I've come to a realization:

The aforementioned elements aren't at odds with one another. Quite the contrary, they're exceptionally harmonious.

I realize now that trying to pigeonhole Rise as either Old MH or World 2 is reductive, and also a total non-starter. Rather, I'd argue Rise is a symbiotic fusion of the two. World allowed itself to run longer and flashier because as a console game the developers were allowed to assume the player would be seated for quite some time. Rise, having launched on the Switch, instead makes the assumption that it'll be played in no longer than 30 minute intervals. It is, in a sense, an attempt to bring the spectacle and involved movesets of World to the format and demographic that initially propped the franchise up. Neither Old nor World, but something unique.

Playing both of them concurrently really peels the bandage off there.

World is a console game first and foremost. The effort involved in tracking, locating and hunting a monster is amplified massively compared to other MH games, especially once Iceborne kicks in. The 'meta' for Iceborne thus became damage centric, because even perfect play leads to relatively longer hunts. This isn't really a bad thing, but I'll dig into that discourse if I ever review World. Which, given Rise has swept most of my friend circles and I can't stop thinking about Stelle kissing March 7th, isn't likely anytime soon.

Rise, as a portable game, is operating under assumption you'll bust it out for 15-20 minutes while on the way to your soul-crushing office job and tailors things accordingly. Unless you're truly dogshit (and hey, everyone can get better), the ballpark for hunts IME is about 7-20 minutes, and it bends over backwards to hand you the tools to facilitate them. It's still 'the Monster Hunter experience', it's just been compressed a little.
There's this saying among older MH players that the series is actually turn based, and I'd concur. Using that metaphor; pre-Rise games are traditional ally-enemy-ally-enemy-ally-enemy turn based like in Dragon Quest. Rise is more like a Turn Order game (think FFX, Trails or Honkai Star Rail, Octopath Traveler or whatever) where characters still take turns but there's an incredible amount of benefit to be gained from ensuring they either can't take turns, or can take successive turns.

Hardcore MiraMiraOTW Followers might remember that, back when I discussed Wild Hearts last year, that review was more akin to someone writing out why they broke up with their ex and why their new wife is so cool.
Truthfully, I never really did discard a lot of those confused feelings about the hunting genre, but they've been replaced by me simply refusing to acknowledge it exists.

As I alluded to up above, I've gotten good at MH. I've gotten really good at MH. I'm pretty much the only person who never carts when I play in multiplayer and I'm at the point now where the word "damage window" means nothing to me, because if I really want to land an Impact Crater or Perfect Rush, I'm going to. In replaying the game lately I found myself not actually upgrading my gear all that often because until the Afflicted/Risen monsters show up, a few levels of Attack Boost are extraneous when you're pretty much Batman beating up thugs in Arkham.

The downside to this, which I hope to extrapolate on if I ever finish that highly negative MGR review, is that the illusion of the 'hunting genre' has slipped through my fingers. It is a mirage that I got to lounge in for a while before it evaporated. 'Prep' is just refilling my consumables or making a new weapon, and honestly it's something I only do if I ever take too long on a fight. The number of fights I'm not confident in is rapidly dropping, and once I stop being afraid of Chaotic Gore Magala it'll be down to 2 - neither of which are even in Rise.

In its place, I find... A singleplayer replacement for fighting games.

I liked FGs a lot once upon a time, but nowadays I don't enjoy PVP and find the eternally shifting nature of live service FGs unappealing, yet I still yearn for a game where practice, knowledge and repetition produce tangible results in the outcome of fights.
More than anything, MH and its clones have filled that niche. Yes, I can whomp Shagaru Magala silly, but I could do it better. I could do it faster. I could hit 100% of my Impact Craters rather than 99% of them. 10 minutes is good, but it could be lower. 2 Mega Potions used is admirable, but 0 is ideal. So on, so forth.

Also, as a very brief aside, this might have the best new-monster lineup of the entire franchise, and the returning lineup is nuts too. Announcing Seregios and Shagaru Magala alongside the utter beauty that is Malzeno is a flex most developers would kill to be able to pull off. Everything here is gorgeous, and honestly if I wasn't hellbent on keeping a divide between my personal and literary sides, I'd put out an open offer for me to carry you through Magnamalo, Malzeno or any of the Magalas.

I do have two major complaints though, both of which combined have knocked a star off.

The first is that, put bluntly, the distribution of Switch Skills is very much a case of "all weapons are equal, but some are more equal than others". Every weapon gets roughly the same about of skills and silkbinds, but whether they're good or not is a whole other kettle of crabs and Sunbreak letting you have two Switch Skill loadouts basically shone a spotlight on it.
Take Longsword, Sword & Shield or Hammer, for instance. They get a collection of incredibly useful, versatile additionsthat turn excellent weapons into mythical weapons. There aren't any bad choices with them and with Sunbreak they essentially allow you to carry two entirely different weapons into battle.
...But then there's weapons like the Lance and Greatsword, whose additions are middling at best. So much so that a lot of the time it's hard to justify ever switching off of the defaults. Yeah, Greatsword gets a cool new fast-damaging combo set, but it's still a weapon focused around powerful strikes which now takes much longer to hit its True Charged Slash.

Don't get me wrong, these weapons aren't bad because MH is perhaps the one series that's managed weapon balance properly, but the difference in attention is noticeable if you play a wide spread.

The second issue is less egregious, but really annoying to me specifically:

Most of the arrangements for returning monsters aren't great. Rise's initial theming draws from the classical Japanese of MHP3rd's Yukumo, and the soundtrack thus uses more traditional instruments when rearranging. The end result is while the arrangements are impressive, many of the songs with the most impact - Zinogre's, Astalos' and Valstrax's most noticeably - have lost some oomph. I'm frankly glad Glavenus didn't come back, I couldn't stand to hear my favourite non-Elder theme get crushed.
This may seem like nitpicking, but to me music is a huge part of the MH package. At least 40% of the reason why Shara Ishvalda is my favourite G-Rank capstone is because its theme has such an incredible amount of otherworldly energy to it that the monster ends up feeling more demonic than the monsters which explicitly have demonic theming. Likewise with Shagaru Magala and Shantien.

But anyway, let me stop burying the lede for a moment.

This is less of a review and more me preaching the importance of engaging with things on their own merits. The entire crux of why I disliked Risebreak at first was simply me trying to make it seem congrous with two other games, and steadfastly refusing to engage with the game on its own merits. In refusing to just see "MH Rise", I ended up with a stance that, on further inspection, was completely nonsensical.
Sure, sequels by their nature draw comparisons to past games in the franchise, but in iterative franchises I feel the forest often gets lost for the trees, you know? MH Rise is a Monster Hunter title, yes, but if World was allowed to stand on its own two feet, why not extend that mercy to Rise? If GU is allowed to be considered its own game when it's just a compilation toybox, why insist Rise has to be either it or World?
I sure wish Xenoblade fans would learn this lesson about XBC3.

Anyway, totally irrelevant trivia for you: This review took 29 minutes to write.

Deeply frustrating. For all of its marketing as a "I just want to play video games" kind of game, a real back-to-basics game, its non-combat areas have the boring corridor navigation of an eighth gen AAA and the griminess of the seventh gen more than anything. I had to sign EULA and a form consenting to data collection on startup, for fuck's sake. The progression systems are horribly paced, remaining boring throughout the entire runtime. You go three levels before unlocking half of your core moveset, four levels before bosses get a stagger gauge, and five before you get the devil trigger equivalent, despite the plot showing it off at the end of the third level. Levels are just too long for this sort of pacing, especially when perks are dripfed at a pace of about one per level. There are thirty-six perks in the game and I finished at level twenty (to say nothing of the... twelve? weapon upgrades purchased with a second currency obtained via exploration, of which i also only had about half), which is particularly frustrating when the upgrades I couldn't buy yet are shit like "15% more health" and "your unsatisfying aoe move gets followups." Despite this, it remains incredibly fun in its combat arenas, using a flow that resembles Doom Eternal and Dad Of War on the surface but in execution feels like a strange fusion of those presentation elements with the high-flying mook-mulching of Ninja Gaiden and the deranged spam of high-tier enemies present in the most entertaining Doom wads. Any game that knows how to use an izuna drop is worth experiencing.

only took two and a half years, but through my innovative technique of playing a handful of missions every four months I have finally taken down this beast. absurd how structurally lazy this game is: 89 single-player missions, all back-to-back with no side quests or key quest system or any sort of progression/organization beyond "play a mission and then unlock the next one." it should be obvious that most of these missions bear more than a small resemblance to one another due to the comparative dearth of maps and enemy types, so throwing the player into this many mandatory missions just exacerbates the repetition. sure, this is a game oriented around an endless grind for weapon and armor drops, but evidently the game's bounty of missions vastly exceed the bounds of the game's weapon pools given that identical pools appear in many of the missions on a given difficulty and rarely give new items. the weapon level drop curve is such that even running the first couple of missions on inferno, the highest difficulty, primarily gave me weapons I already had from midgame on normal, three difficulties below it. this would be more bearable if at least the weapon pools between all four classes were shared... but they aren't, so good luck if you played through the campaign with one class and would like to switch on the next difficulty up, because you won't have shit to work with. the developers recognized these unforced errors because edf5 rectified a fair number of them (primarily shared weapon pools and an upgrade system when you pick up a dupe), but it stings a bit that this entry completely fumbles these elements here.

I'm dedicated to fencer (the armored suit class) through and through, and in this particular entry fencer gets an essential (if perhaps not intended) dash cancel that lifts the weight of the rest of the game on its back. by firing the otherwise mediocre javelin catapult directly after executing a side dash, the ending lag of the dash will get overwritten with extremely fast javelin recovery frames, enabling quick dash spam across the battlefield. a couple weapon types possess the side dash as an auxillary ability, with perhaps no one more busted than the blasthole spear lineage, which provide rapid-fire, high-DPS shots at close range. the synergy is quickly clear: hit-and-run tactics with the spears and the dash cancel can easily depose even spongier enemies as long as one manages their cooldowns. of course, if this was the whole gameplan, the game would stale over such a long campaign, but luckily the fencer uniquely possesses switchable item sets. I kept a mid-range cannon and long-range mortars on deck in the other set for most of the ride as heavy artillery to deal the majority of my long-range damage, and since these remove the incredible mobility of the javelin/spear combo, you have a comfortable role trade-off to deal with in each fight. switching sets can't be done willy-nilly, and outside of wakeup animations most recovery lag will keep you from swapping, preserving the commitment of the most truly heinous fencer weaponry. the sluggish movement of the fencer normally would not necessarily be fun to use, as it would submerge the game into wading through enemies and tanking shot after shot, but this particular dash-cancel wrinkle helps sell a hot-and-cold playstyle that one rarely finds in a third-person shooter.

scenario-wise, probably one of the best examples I can think of where simply mass-spawning identical enemies makes for very solid encounters. although my brain would like to call it a TPS musou, it really hews closer to a wave shooter or arena shooter due to the centralization of the battle around the player character. you may enter with allies to assist you, but they rarely last past the first wave, and thus the game devolves into controlling the mass of enemies following you and you alone around the map. at its worst, it's a lot of kiting, either soothed by the need to stop to unleash your best weapons or agitated by the need to build up a healthy distance from the enemies before you unleash your best weapons, depending on how you look at it. only the cheap fodder succumb to pure tracking tactics, however, and with enough alternate opponents that lockdown certain parts of the map, roam, or patrol, you can find yourself properly flanked in a way the fodder can't do alone. of these the most fundamental are the hectors: large bipedal robots with an assortment of heavy weaponry and shields. getting in one's sights can subject the player to anything from full-map range plasma shots to short-range sheets of sparks, the latter of which portends poorly for any fencer player clamped to the ground by it. the variety of these and the use of different AI routines for each make hectors an essential flavor for any environment, especially maps with lots of enemy spawn points. other large enemies are equally fascinating (the segmented quadruped deroys and their long-range leg melee are rather fierce), yet the bosses tend to make clear how much of the game relies on hundreds of adds running around the screen at once due to their gigantic hurtboxes and rudimentary behavior. perhaps this is why the final boss opts for a much smarter strategy of smothering the earth with artificial ceiling of weaponry, with the top hurtbox only accessible when openings in the ceiling plates have been cracked open.