Didn’t expect another absolute banger of a game about a murder mystery in a Benedictine monastery in early modern era Europe several months after Pentiment, but here I am having finished Misericorde Part 1.

Misericorde actually makes an interesting compare and contrast with Pentiment in several ways, their protagonists for one. Pentiment’s Andreas Maler is an outsider to Kiersau Abbey and the rural town of Tassing, he’s a well-educated and well-traveled artist hired by the Abbey as a manuscript illustrator who is unaccustomed to both the monastic and pastoral life. So when his good friend at the monastery is accused of murder Andreas finds himself in over his head in the murder investigation and the conflicts between the town and monastery. Misericorde’s Sister Hedwig is also an outsider to Linbarrow Abbey, but in the complete opposite direction. Hedwig has lived the majority of her life as an anchoress, locked away in a cell in Linbarrow since childhood to become spiritually closer to God. Hedwig does not know life outside of the books she reads, the Scripture she copies and illustrates, and the people who come to the slat in her door whom she cannot see. When one of the sisters is murdered, one who was the closest thing Hedwig had to a friend, Hedwig is forced out into the wider world of the abbey to investigate. Even though she has technically lived there for decades, the cloistered halls of the monastery are still an overwhelming and alien presence to her as she struggles to actually interact with her fellow nuns for the first time.

Misericorde is head and shoulders above much of its VN brethren and one major reason for that is that it actually feels literary. The game avoids so many of the clichés and archetypes that crop up in the genre and is a truly engaging work; you can tell the dev actually has experienced things outside of the purview of bargain bin anime and light novels. While it doesn’t dive into Early Modern European history and society nearly as hard as Pentiment did, because Josh Sawyer is a huge nerd, Misericorde still does a superb job bringing the late 1400’s English abbey of Linbarrow to life. The whole main cast of sisters at the abbey are all fleshed out and complex characters. Hedwig is a really strong protagonist as well; she’s a great example of having a protagonist be a rather useless asshole but still be totally engaging in a real human way as she develops over the course of the game. The prose is also nicely done and the game is paced so well. There was never a moment that I felt that the game desperately needed an editor to take a chainsaw to it which even a game I adored like Great Ace Attorney Chronicles couldn’t avoid.

Aesthetically the game is fantastic too with the usage of stock photographs covered in black and white dithering and grain. This aesthetic gives the game a uniquely melancholic and mysterious tone and feel well befitting a murder mystery in an old monastery. The character art is really good too, it’s in an anime-esque style that differentiates the characters design well even though the majority of the cast are wearing the same habits. The soundtrack also goes frigging hard as hell with like a hundred individual tracks and it’s all great. You wouldn’t think drum and bass would fit with a game set in a 15th century monastery but it does.

Obviously as you can glean from the title this is the just the first part of the game so the game’s narrative and mystery is not resolved. I do have a few worries that the next part might go into a direction that could potentially ruin the game for me, but even in such a worst case scenario Part One is still fantastic and a must play. Just an overall wonder of a game that deserves so much more love, easily going to be one of the best games of the year for me no question.

Read this fucking vn so I can see more of this vn.

A compelling mystery drama about isolation, religion, the different faces we perform to different people, and the identities we try to cling to amongst it all.

Edit: I need to talk about this more.

The core clash between Hedwig and the other nuns is such a tragic issue of communication. Hedwig, as the anchoress, has spent her entire life trapped within four walls. She's never talked to anyone for more than a few minutes. She's only had her scripture to copy. She's completely unprepared for the reality of what a convent is versus what she's been told. She struggles to process the idea that being a nun was not a choice for most of these women. She flip-flops between viewing everyone as sinners to desperately craving their approval. Craving joy and happiness. Fearing happiness.

The other nuns, even as they're aware of Hedwig's issues, can't fully comprehend what that's like. They shift between sympathetic and angry because they don't have the tools to understand her issues. At the same time, they don't have the tools to understand themselves. Each of them has been forced out of society for one reason or another and this home is all they have. There's love and resentment in equal measure.

There's a lot of characters with hidden traits right now, with only this first volume to read for now. But you can feel all the layers hidden away. The tragedy and pain and how they all cope with the life that's been laid out for them.

I have to rot13 this next part.

Bu, Rhfgnpr.

Fur jnagf gb serr Urqjvt. Fur jnagf gb pbageby Urqjvt. Fur xabjf Urqjvt vf n ivpgvz bs pvephzfgnapr. Fur erfragf Urqjvt sbe gnxvat gur cynpr bs ure qrnq sevraq. Fur nqberf Urqjvt. Fur ungrf Urqjvt.

Fur ungrf fvyyl guvatf. Fur yvxrf n tbbq cenax. Fur jnagf gb or nybar jvgu ure obbxf. Fur jnagf gb fcraq rirel zbzrag jvgu bguref. Fur jnagf gb cnegl jvgu sevraqf. Fur jnagf gb uvqr sebz gung qra bs ivcref.

Fur jnagf crbcyr gb gehfg ure. Fur pnaabg gehfg nalbar.

Rirel qrpvfvba fur znxrf vf zbgvingrq ol guvf pbagenqvpgvba. Fur arrqf Urqjvt gb haqrefgnaq ubj qnatrebhf ure vairfgvtngvba vf. Fur arrqf Urqjvt gb cynl vg fnsr vafgrnq bs chfuvat gur vaivfvoyr oneevref va gur pbairag. Ure svefg nggrzcgf gb fvyrapr Urqjvt jvgu n Fpbbol Qbb cybg vf rdhny zrnfher znyvpvbhf naq pbafvqrengr. Fpner Urqjvt njnl, xrrc ure fnsr, rira vs vgf cnvashy. Jura gung snvyf, fur'f sbeprq gb or ubarfg. Fur'f sbeprq gb cyrnq jvgu Urqjvt gb yrnir gur pbairag. Fur bcraf urefrys gb dhrfgvbaf naq pynvzf fur'f ernql gb nafjre nalguvat.

Ohg fur pna'g or ubarfg. Orpnhfr gb or ubarfg njnxraf gur cnva bs qvfpbirevat ure sevraq'f pbecfr. Bs pyrnavat hc gur zrff. Bs gur genhzn naq qnatre fvggvat va ure zvaq.

V ybir ure fb zhpu. V'z tbaan ebgngr ure va zl zvaq sberire.

This vn is incredible. Please read it.

I was pretty quick to dismiss Mario Wonder when it was originally announced on July 21, 2023. It screamed all style no substance; the revamped graphics compared to New Super Mario were no doubt some sort of improvement, but I thought it looked somewhat ugly, and the Wonder mechanic especially seemed like a shallow addition, compounded with the talking flower and the very plain level design made it feel as if Wonder, despite aspects of it being promising, would be a disappointment. I didn't really pay attention to the rest of the news cycle other than what I learned from osmosis, but when I heard of a totally legal way to play it early, I decided to give it at least the benefit of the doubt

Two worlds in, I shut off the game. Yep, classic Mario. I thought I saw everything it offered. And after a few minutes, I turned it back on and went back to play it. By the time I left to watch a play, I had left off at World 6 of 7 (sort of 8?), and felt a slight thirst to keep going. It was very small, but a very small part of me was hooked to the game, unable to escape from its appeal.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is both classic 2D Mario action and its own thing. Taking more cues from Super Mario 3D World than it does from the New Super Mario series, it's able to rejuvenate a dead style with a strong combination of excellent level design, new but familiar aesthetics and a new array of powers. A lot of emphasis must be placed on the level design of Super Mario Bros. Wonder as it is bar none some of the best the franchise has seen, with a wide variety of challenges to be encountered. The absolute large amounts of levels with branching paths and secrets to be found is immense, and the levels have a decent balance of challenge; none feel utterly hard, but they aren't always cake walks. If anything is amazing in this game and must not be taken for granted, it is how this game can cultivate such a strong sense of discovery through short levels, making every run through them interesting. The Wonder flower adds to this, as unlike my first impressions, it isn't a cakewalk to reach these always nor are they boring gimmicks, but rather fundamentally change your play style to bring upon a different challenge that couldn't be done without the game wanting to pull the rug from under your feet. A Wonder flower can change the plane to a Sonic 3D Blast ripoff, making it a top-down perspective, or it can change your character to a ball and implement more momentum-based platforming, or it can create a musical that has you play to the beat of it to succeed.

What Wonder does best, as you've probably assumed, is variety. The game is filled with ideas, making every level unique in some way with the unifying tie being the world's motif. World 5 comes to mind as the prime example; where the last few levels are a long stretch in-story of an old temple, and you're required to explore the level properly to find the Wonder flower, or else when you reach the "end" without it, it'll just end early with a "Course Cleared...?". Dialogue with the NPCs will also point out that this search is necessary, and you can't just bumrush your way through the level. Finding the Flower is never hard, but it did trip me up once, and more than anything I respect the dedication there is to making each World its distinct scenario, rather than all of them having Bowser Jr. appear and fuck things up. World 3 is another example, where rather than finding Bowser Jr. and kicking his ass, the leader of that area presents you with various trials to see if you are worthy of the Royal Seed as some sort of tradition. It makes the end goal feel less repetitive as each world is unique in its formation. World 4 had me scratching my head still, where most of the difficulty isn't in the stages, but actually finding the stages in the World Map. I still had a good number missing until postgame and had to ask for help to figure out the location of some.

The World Map in general is interesting as Super Mario Bros. Wonder does not attempt to have a linear structure after the third World, allowing the player to go through World 4-6 in any order, before ending with "World 7", which is more so a hub that connects the other worlds. Alongside that, Wonder introduces "breaks", which are more bite-sized levels that focus on a different style of gameplay other than pure platforming. There's a pretty large variety, but I don't find it too important to point all of them out since they're usually just about a minute or two long, with the exception of the Search breaks, which jesus christ yeah I was only able to do one the others I saw I could not fucking wrap my head around them. Regardless, they're nice additions that give you an extra Seed, and the Badge stages also give you a new badge if you beat them.

Speaking of badges, this is when we veer off from pure praise to more conflicting opinions. The Badge system allows you to equip one badge to vary your options, be it an extra move for traversal, a passive buff like a coin magnet, or one of the Expert badges. I'll be honest and say that for the action badges, I'm more confused on why these are optional equipments instead of proper upgrades to a base arsenal. Your character in this game is barren. Things like the Triple Jump are changed from a basic traversal ability to a badge, and for some like the grappling hook I never used because the level design simply didn't accomodate for it. Some of the passive badges would also be more useful if I didn't use my sole slot for higher speed; if there were more Badge slots than just one, or if you could equip both one action badge and one passive badge I would see this system as something more useful, but as is I felt it a waste because so much possibility for level design is limited by making these movement options optional.

I did think the expert badges to be more of a fun gimmick comparatively, though; I'm only missing one, but all changed the way the game played in a more unique way that makes it more logical that it is an option, and especially one aimed at harder play. I can see myself going back and utilizing the dash, for example. Regardless, the badge system is more of a minor complaint at some missed potential in level design; same goes for the playable characters playing basically the same? As I said, this game takes a bit more from 3D World's controls and style than it does from New, but one thing 3D World had that this didn't is the character variety in control styles. Wonder does have 6 playable characters, and an additional 6 that no one will play, but I do miss the idea behind the characters having more individual styles such as Toad's faster run speed but smaller range in jumps. Maybe it's a bit of wishful thinking to have both the great level design of this and the unique characters of 3D World... but it stuck out to me so I'm mentioning it.

Something else that stuck out to me is the power-up selection. Not counting the Wonder Flower because it's more similar to a Mega Mushroom than anything, there's only four, and only one is a returning one; the Fire Flower. No comments on that, you've played Mario, you know what it does. The other three are the Elephant, the Bubble, and the Drill. I'll be honest I only really liked the Bubble powerup; it goes through walls and you can jump on the bubbles themselves, and they move somewhat slow so lining up jumps with it is doable. It also instantly kills anything the bubble catches, so it's both a great addition to your movement and a great offensive weapon in most situations. The drill is one I would have liked to love, but unfortunately its implementation is a little off. It lets you dig into the ground and the ceiling, as well as being able to hit enemies with your head. It's useful for some stages, but otherwise just doesn't really do much. The Elephant is in theory pretty nice except I hate looking at it. Fuck it. It instills in me a sense of rage I rarely feel. It's also just a little off; it's more of a close range dealer that breaks blocks, but it can also absorb water to rejuvenate some plants, and yeah whatever it works? But I don't like it and I don't like using it.

I also don't like the talking flower. Nintendo strikes back with their my way or the highway mentality because you cannot turn off the flower completely. You can turn off the voice and it somewhat helps but it's still distracting to see text that does nothing but spout Whedonisms. YES I can see that weird shit is happening, I don't need the game to reaffirm that weird shit is happening. It's just an odd addition when the rest of the game is all-in on wanting you to immerse yourself into the Flower Kingdom, seeing the different groups and how you interact with them, to also attract attention to it in an odd, fourth-wall way. They don't give advice or hints. They're entirely there to just tickle your brain if you somehow enjoy the sort of dialogue it spawns.I don't like it. It do not tickle my brain. It does the opposite.

Another small disappointment I have is with the postgame levels in the Special world, only having nine stages and all of them being pretty short and the challenge coming more so from precise application of gimmicks than any strong platforming. I don't mind this approach for the normal levels because part of the appeal is the variety that sprouts from it, but the levels never really felt like a proper challenge because of it. I wish the last stage was longer and harder.

The bosses are fine, there's only really three; Bowser Jr., the ship's, and Bowser himself. Bowser Jr has a pretty set moveset that changes less because of him and more of what the world's general gimmick is. The ship's is more akin to Bowser's fights in Mario 1 where the goal isn't to kill him but to reach the ax. Bowser's fight was a strong and fun spectacle, but not really hard. I wish there were more? Not for every World, I think they all do a good job at variety, but I think there could've been a better way to implement a set piece boss alongside the Wonder flower's effects.

I do think that perhaps Wonder's biggest issue is that it is not a very deep game; not in terms of plot but in terms of gameplay. There's not much avenue for a strong application in gameplay since the game functions much less as something focused on Mario's movement kit and much more on a visual spectacle, pulling the rug off your feet. And Wonder is great for that! But when it also attempts to pose a serious challenge, it starts faltering.

Wonder shows a lot of wonderful spectacle, but stumbles in a few key aspects that still show promise for the evolution of 2D Mario and how it can change and evolve.

For a long time fighting game developers, and game developers in general have tried to reach out to a broader audience by simplifying core mechanics, on the surface this makes sense, a lot of really popular games are also really simple. But if you think about it for two seconds it's actually fucking stupid, because a lot of really popular games are also utterly byzantine to a normal person- DotA, LoL, the entire genre of MMOs, anything that Europeans push to the top of the steam best sellers, etc. And many more games pretend to be complex to cover their simplicity, such as every single game that is the subject of jokes like "increases semen retention by 2.5% on a Tuesday" or has a skill tree that unlocks basic abilities that should have been in the toolkit by default. Capcom decided to make SF6 an order of magnitude more complex than their last game, their accessibility tool is forcing you to choose between two radically different control schemes with far reaching gameplay implications, and a practice mode with a dozen pages worth of settings to tweak for every conceivable scenario so you can skip "training" and jump right into human growth hormones. Naturally they've been rewarded for this with a wildly successful game.

John Romero is gone. Carmack remains.

You can feel his absence in every single ounce of Quake 2's single player. It's sprawling hub world design. It's sci-fi setting. The choice to turn power ups into deployable weapons. Its limited application of repetitive music. All of these are the what happens when you take a work of art's identity, right down to its creator, and strip it all out for the sequel.

Released in 1997 originally, Quake 2 is the story of a soldier who ends up stranded on a planet full of evil STROGG. At least....I think they're evil. Anyways. Its your mission to lead a one man army into the STROGG base on the planet with a goal of dismantling the base and murdering its leader. That's it. What little story there is is disseminated through text objective updates, brief radio transmissions, and the game's opening cutscene. I have to give credit where credit is due - they really did try something here with giving Quake some sort of storyline to roll with.

They just appear to have traded story ambitions for any hint of real atmosphere.

Just like with the loss of the gothic horror themes of Quake, Quake 2 is a brighter, far less interesting game to navigate. Gone are the complex mazes and simple puzzles of Quake; they've been exchanged for a hub world structure that loosely ties series of levels together with a few loading screens and an objective that eventually sends you screaming back through a previous level to deposit a disk or unlock a door. There are plenty of secrets to discover and movement puzzles to traverse, but many of the levels feature simple geometry that's easy to traverse, instead exchanging enemy count for ingenuity. Many of the later levels of Quake made you feel smart like solving a Zelda puzzle makes you feel. Many of the later Quake 2 levels made me bored with their rote layout and visible, but boring color scheme. It just doesn't hit the same.

Quake 2 also just feels like a huge step backwards in terms of encounter design - the entirety of the design, playing the game on the hardest difficulty, just felt like more encounter. Just wave upon wave, followed by a hidden wave that swoops in from the sky to further muddle your progress. The conversion of power ups into collectible items that you're free to deploy at will takes them out of the encounter design equation entirely. You just get the sense that although the graphics of Quake 2 are wonderful, that without the magic of Romero and his design philosophies that the id Tech crew just didn't have the same juice for level design.

They also don't really have the juice for enemy design either - enemies in Quake 2 are limited in variety as they were in Quake, but none of the STROGG feel nearly as intimidating or interesting to grapple with. These new sci-fi aliens just don't hit you the same as a SHAMBLER does in Quake - I never once feared for my life as the enemies in Quake 2 came at me. They designed each level in such a way that I always had enough ammo to simply dispatch them, or duck away from them. Variety, as a result, in encounter design, is awfully limited.

Where Quake 2 succeeds is with its series of weapons; the shotgun, grenade launcher, chain gun, and the newly added railgun are all a delight to turn on the dastardly strogg. Movement is also excellent; players can still glide and use explosive weapons to send themselves soaring all over the place to their heart's desire. Although Quake 2 is bland in terms of overall design, it IS an incredibly smooth experience controlling your space soldier.

Quake 2 just doesn't have the same sauce that Quake does, and it never has. It succeeds mostly as a multiplayer endeavor and an exercise in abusing a known brand to cover up for lack of capability otherwise. It only has like 5 music tracks! Like. Give me a break!

It is still fun in limited bursts. But if I can't get chased by a massive, limb ripping shambler, I ain't coming in next time.

Way of the Samurai is a pack of red Marlboros for people who never smoked.

The age of the samurai dawns. Two families fighting over a single metal foundry. A desolate town suffers. The Meiji government looms over the valley, a force larger than any man ever will be. Time marches relentlessly. You are here to witness the end.

The game presents a delightful PlayStation 2 depiction of a samurai western. As you walk around the map scenes happen, most of them consequential, and if you are there you can affect the outcome. There is an illusion, that the story progresses whether you are there to witness it or not. Sometimes you save someone from being kidnapped, other times you take a baby on an evening stroll. Almost all of the fighting you will do are the consequences of these scenes. This makes them all meaningful, gives them a natural place in the plot. You never slaughter 200 faceless goons "because thats how video games are supposed to be". The restraint shown from the devs really pays off. Gameplay and plot form a cohesive narrative with elegance that even the most regarded creators of this field can only dream of. It's remarkable to find such an early example of this type of storytelling.

After selecting the difficulty the arcade sensibilities become imminent. There is no save point to go back to when you die. You have to start over from the beginning. You get some points for failure, that mostly unlock extras, but nothing that will get you closer to beating the game. For that you'll need stronger swords, things that are mostly available at the end of the story, and you don't get to keep them if you are defeated. Cowards may visit the blacksmith and have their sword delivered, if they have the funds for it. The bold must go for a clear and risk losing it all. This makes early runs very interesting, but becomes kind of meaningless as you start to amass a pretty big collection. Still, it manages to circumvent a lot of problems roguelikes face by simply discouraging suiciding. Rewards are at the finale. The game has more class than to shower you with garbage for a cheap dopamine kick.

The tutorials are ironically modern. Only one features gameplay, it's about how you press the circle button to speak to other characters. Rest of them get unlocked via the progression system, and are all just videos of advanced techniques. It reminds me of some fighting games, where your only resource for game mechanics are crusty YouTube tutorials. These videos the game gives you don't even have voice over, just subtitles. I kinda love this. Definitely a read the manual game.

One of the advanced moves you learn about early on are the off-balance techniques, the star of which is the push. While doing weak attacks you can push the other to break their defense. This feels realistic, as almost all the injuries I got from kendo were from people pushing like this. There was a girl there who started a few weeks after I did. I was assigned to spar with her. We crossed our swords and I looked into her blue eyes. She seemed like she was ready to kill me. She hit real hard too. I kinda loved her. Anyway the game puts a big emphasis on the push but its very situational. If you want to humble them I recommend kicking their shins.

It was such a joy to have this in my library. The design makes it excellent to pick up for an hour and leave fulfilled. A quaint samurai diorama behind my screen for me to behold. If you gonna stop playing video games for good, this might be the one exception you should keep.

“Really sorry about your ass.”

(some spoilers for OG FF7’s first ten hours, no spoilers for FF7R)

I started this review series by listing my absolute favorite games; both because being positive feels good, but also to provide a kind of baseline for what to expect here, I suppose. In that same vein, I feel it’s also important to show contrast: if my favorites are all about pure mechanical expression and smooth, organic interactions, then FF7R, conversely, represents everything that holds games back to me. This thing is so rigid and limited that it somehow manages to feel more outdated than the turn-based 90s RPG it’s remaking. While FF7’s original design-ethos was built on detailed one-off environments, contextual storytelling and intuitive yet flexible battle mechanics, FF7R completely tears down all of these pillars, leaving in their place the kind of nightmare-hyperbole-parody that weebs are describing when they talk about the latest Call of Duty or Uncharted.

Action-adjacent Square RPGs like Dissidia or Crisis Core can have this tendency to not ground your actions in the game world very much — it’s the difference between button presses triggering canned interactions between actors, or throwing out an actual hitbox that I need to connect with the enemy. FF7R feels like the final form of this in the worst possible way: for as gnarly as the impact of Cloud’s flashy sword combos on enemy grunts may look on the surface, there isn’t actually any real physicality to how your attacks throw them around, nor does the addition of square-mashing add anything meaningful mechanically when compared to FF7. You quickly realize that your standard attacks don’t actually do appreciable damage and solely exist to pad out the time between ATB moves, a process that previously moved along on its own. No amount of alibi-action disguises the fact that this is, at its heart, still a turn-based RPG, where enemies weak to fire need to be hit with the fire spell and damage can’t be reliably avoided. You get about five hundred different ways to “parry” attacks, none of which actually require any careful timing on your end, but interact with enemies in ways that are completely arbitrary. The final boss in particular is a hilarious display of just how bad this game wants to look like a Devil May Cry, while still working under NES JRPG rules and refusing to adopt things like consistent telegraphing or hit reactions. In those instances, it’s some of the most shallow and repetitive action-gameplay imaginable.

Countless FF7R skill videos do show how much this new combat system can pop off, since it gives you control over when and how to queue up party attacks and provides some unique states for active positioning on the battlefield. What those videos all have in common though is that they're exclusively shot in the game’s VR challenge missions with precise Materia setups; ideal conditions for the system to shine that flat-out don’t exist in the rest of the game. Campaign mob fights run the gamut from boring to soul-crushingly tedious (those goddamn sewer fish guys,) while any fun you could be having with bosses is knee-capped by absurd damage gating and forced cutscene transitions that will eat any excess damage you put out that moment. This aspect should’ve been a top priority with the boss design considering how much combat revolves around slowly building up this Stagger bar, where the majority of the fight is spent purely setting up the boss for when you can finally lay the smack down (which, just like for FFXIII, already does a lot to make individual actions feel linear and meaningless.) The way all that damage will regularly evaporate into nothing due to factors completely outside your control feels like having a bag of Tetsuya Nomura-shaped bricks dropped right on your nutsack just as you’re about to cum.

Under that light, the proposition of digging into the Materia system and trying to get the most out of it is absolutely laughable. I can’t even begin to tell you how many boss fights I went into only to realize halfway through (after some kind of form-change or mechanical switch-up) that my setup wasn’t optimal, forcing me to either slog and fumble through the rest of the battle, or back out and start from scratch with this new knowledge. All that’s on top of the godforsaken menus you’re forced to work with that hit this abominable sweetspot between clunky stone-age level interface design and the suffocating swathe of meaningless skill trees you’ve come to expect from modern AAA games. How is it possible that healing outside of battle literally takes longer in this game than it did in Final Fantasy (just Final Fantasy. 1. the first one.) on the NES?

FF7R’s final Shinra HQ invasion has to be one of the worst isolated parts of any game I’ve ever played and represents a microcosm for how little it respects your time. Every issue I’ve discussed so far is amplified now that your party is split in half, with no way to quickly transfer setups between the two teams. Fights are now sandwiched between “””platforming””” sections that have Tifa monkey bar-ing by transitioning from one excruciatingly slow canned animation into the next. To get back to what I was saying in that second paragraph: for as much as Uncharted’s climbing for example is brain-dead easy, it at least provides some vague sense that I’m in control of a character in a physical setting, instead of giving commands to a robot on the fucking moon. The least you could say about Uncharted, also, is that it gives you shit to look at. What is the point of remaking the most popular JRPG of all time as this PS4 mega-game when that entails turning all of its handcrafted backgrounds into featureless copy-paste tunnels and compressed-to-shit JPEG skyboxes, all of which now necessitate what feels like hours upon hours of squeeze-through loading?

All that begs the question: what exactly did I push through this trash heap for in the end? I categorically reject the notion that a game this mechanically regressive can still come together purely as a vehicle for cutscenes or something, but even entertaining that idea for a minute has me confused over what the big deal is. My impression is that FF7R managing, against all expectations, to not be some Advent Children-level train wreck sapping any and all life out of these characters, is enough for it to come across as this masterful reexamination of the original story to many players (also that the whole cast is hot.) The reality is that, while some of the dialogue and character interactions does hit, this game is 40 hours long and naturally a lot of that extra time is padded out by your party members giving each other directions to hopefully not get lost in this FFXIII-ass level design. It’s pure filler and adds little of value to the existing story.

FF7R’s most crucial mistake, and why I’ve now realized this remake-series was an awful idea to begin with, is to think that just knowing wider information about a character will automatically make us care about them more. I first played the original in 2015, and back then, the deaths of Biggs, Wedge and Jessie legitimately shocked me. And it’s not because I was particularly attached to those characters — instead, it was all in the execution: sudden, unceremonious, unfair and way too soon. That’s the whole reason it worked, and it was a way to make you hate the faceless corporation that was Shinra that actually felt earned. FF7R not only tries to endear us to Avalanche by giving us exponentially more time with them, it bone-headedly draws out their deaths in a way that’s so corny and obvious it borders on parody. You’d think giving the villains more screen-time would be a harmless at-worst change, but presenting them as these hot badasses only makes this feel even more like some generic Shounen anime and less like the systemic fight against capitalism that was the original.

I’d be lying if I said the way they contextualize this remake within FF7’s overall story wasn’t kind of clever, but my gut tells me this twist is only gonna feel more lame as time passes. It’s already at the point where it derails any and all discussion about the game; where somehow being a little bit meta means all the shit about it that makes me want to off myself is actually intentional and smart. The literal first numero uno side-quest I did in FF7R involved crawling into some back-alley, killing a pack of rats, going back to the quest giver to be told I “didn’t kill the right rats,” heading to the same spot again and finally killing the new rats that just spawned there. The starting area this quest takes place in has to be one of the ugliest sections I’ve seen in any AAA game, with hazy washed out lighting and NPC animation that hasn’t evolved a bit from FFX on the PS2.

The most poignant experience I had in my time playing FF7R was in Wall Market. It's easily the most gassed-up part of the game online, mostly to do with the fact that it’s a vehicle for wacky anime cutscene shenanigans and how the characters ramp up the horny to the max of what a Square Enix game is comfortable with (that Don Corneo confrontation is cringeworthy with all the awkward pauses between lines.) In Wall Market, you can enter this bar. The barkeeper will ask you to sit down and have a drink. You can’t do either of those things; you just stand there as the NPCs around you gaze into the void.

FF7R is not the fully-realized mega budget dream version of Midgar we've all been salivating at the thought of, and it’s not some clever meta commentary either. No, I’m pretty sure it just sucks.

new year's update from the abode: just finished the ff7 end credits crawl right as I closed out of the game I missed the ball drop. a bit of a shame but oh well... got a bit crossfaded and had a steamed pork bun so I was relaxed all the same. just sitting here pondering... why is this game the go-to "old-school classic game that's also political"? metal gear solid came out just a year later and has a much more coherent (if sort of uninspired) political statement, whereas ff7 is just totally all over the place. the effects of shinra's power plant experimentation on the lifestream are incredibly well-documented throughout the game, so the bedrock of the environmentalist message is there (the way it's presented reminds me of princess mononoke, released the same year), but the direct action via ecoterrorism part is fumbled so bad. there's a scene where barrett (leader of ecoterrorist insurgency AVALANCHE and party member) basically turns to the camera and says "hey I was thinking about it and I realized blowing up the energy reactors was actually wrong, sorry about that!" with absolutely no nuance or discussion at all, much less even presenting the reasoning that led him to that in the first place. the anti-capitalist stuff... like shinra is a "corporation" but it's functionally a giant malevolent social entity somewhere between a militant nation-state and an international empire/world order. if the name had been "people's republic of shinra" and no other content was changed I'm sure we would get puffy right-wing doughboys extoling the game's "critique of totalitarianism" in an equally baseless way. it's not that the intent isn't there - ff7r did a better job interrogating the class hierarchy of midgar while at the same time attempting to rectify AVALANCHE's contradicitions - but it's insubstantial to the point where I'm not sure I would even classify it as a "theme." I think it may be fair to say that the game has an anti-capitalist aesthetic, or setting.

some of it might be lost in translation too: it's shocking that modern ports of this game are still using the original translation. a presumably much richer text lies obscured behind a fog of awkwardly terse dialogue riddled with mistakes and typos. the clumsy cursing is charming to be sure, especially for a game of its era, but this script should have been cleaned up ages ago. it's really a shame, and one that has me wishing I had chosen to play the retranslation instead... especially since I find the HD versions sort of ugly with how much the clean polygonal characters stick out on the low-res backgrounds. I'd be much happier playing it in 240p with everything blended together as originally intended.

regardless of all of the above though, the story is a legitimately fascinating and grim refutation of the typical jrpg tropes of hero, past, sacrifice, and redemption that few other works can attest to, much less any that also simultaneously introduced much of the world to jrpgs in the first place. it's not just the lack of a fantasy setting that is surprising but the shockingly-fresh fusion of early industrial age ephemera with japan's distinct flavor of body-horror cyberpunk. that beginning chapter in midgar, the power plant raids, the MBV sign, the cathedral, wall market, and the assault on shinra tower all flow past the player as something uncompromised in its design and totally divorced from what had come before. midgar is a husk of a metropolis filled to the brim with refuse and abandoned buildings, and when cloud and his party finally venture from beyond its walls, it becomes quickly apparent that their world is completely beyond saving as well. much of the middle sections of the game focus on lifeless landscapes filled with mutated creatures and interspersed with dots of human survival. cloud himself is broken and often a passive force, and his self-realization as a victim of shinra and yet a vital agent of change serves as the hingepoint from where the game shfits from dejected wandering to assertive heroism (though the details of his past are probably better explained via the wiki than in-game). in a lot of ways, the protagonists - who tbf are rather shoddily assembled beyond the characters from the midgar section - are united on their will to succeed despite having already lost virtually everything. square's unflinching ending further subverts expectations by not rewarding the heroes for their actions: their civilization was on its death knell regardless of their intervention.

ff7 also just has some goddamn good jrpg combat, the kind I think about when I'm picturing comfy turn-based action in my head. every character is fully modular thanks to materia, which determines all skills, magic, and stat bonuses for each character. with virtually no grinding you can pick and choose your preferred tools and build your characters to taste; for most of the endgame I had cid handling barrier magic and taking potshots while cloud tanked and red xiii handled heal, time, and black magic. the limit break system in play here is also an incredible mechanic that gives players powerful tools when serious damage has been taken that opens up a lot of potential for amazing comebacks. the way you snap to your next turn once the gauge fills removes all of the stress of taking a particular large blow and having to wait to recuperate... just totally flawless. boss and encounter design is rock-solid as in the previous titles, and for what the game lacks in difficulty thanks to the flexibility of materia it makes up for in spades with the flashy combat visualizations. putting so many resources into lively battle animations and appealing summons shows that square more than understood the power of next-gen for jrpgs more than perhaps any other studio (team andromeda nonewithstanding?). there's quibbles I have for sure: it can be hard to tell which direction to click to select a character in some cases, and summon animations really should've been skippable. dungeon design is also underwhelming thanks to the unwieldy and often visually cluttered pre-rendered backdrops. however, just sitting down and playing this is comfier than perhaps any other ATB-era ff game... three characters, great low-poly models, awesome animations, and flexible battle mechanics.

overall it's a classic, a lovely romp through the minds of square's best creative talent, and satisfying to complete. it's hard to pinpoint for me what puts this one just out of masterpiece range... it pretty much comes down to the pacing being so incredibly uneven, the official translation being terrible, and the dungeon design feeling lackluster (though the scenery is almost always gorgeous). if anything I really need to replay this with the retranslation on my ps2 and see if getting a more authentic experience pushes it over for the edge for me. still fantastic regardless, and a perfect way to cap off the year.