4 reviews liked by Lawren
Hollow Knight
2017
"Because it's there." - British climber George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Everest (also me, when my wife asks me why I want to finish the burger and all the fries when I'm no longer hungry)
It's no Everest, but the world of Hallownest is huge, intimidating, and wondrous; in a game where the 'plot breadcrumbs' style of storytelling means a general lack of narrative thrust, the mere existence of Hallownest is reason enough to want to explore it. Hollow Knight is sensationally good at worldbuilding through level design, and even through the so-called "slow start" I found myself wanting to get down and dirty exploring every nook of the game world; it helps that a huge portion of the world is almost immediately accessible without extra movement abilities, meaning that my journey of discovering Hallownest for the first time felt unique by virtue of how Hollow Knight seems more open-ended than other Metroidvanias.
Better writers than me have discussed the mechanics in much depth, but I do have to mention them anyway. Combat and movement is tight, consistent, and refined - this is evident in the sheer depth that your relatively small moveset brings to the boss fights, but also in how each new movement option adds more fluency and expressivity in how you traverse each area, bringing a joy to exploration that even the game's slight over-reliance on 'gotcha' hits cannot extinguish.
The 3.5 score at the top of this entry is probably a spoiler that there is a pretty big caveat to my praise above, and that comes in the form of something seemingly inconsequential to anyone who hasn't played the game: the benches (reload points) are on many occasions placed so far from bosses that it feels borderline spiteful. My issue here isn't that the game is hard; I think the difficulty level of the bosses is perfect and it really makes you earn your victories! But punishing failure with 5 minutes of backtracking so you can try again, only to get your ass kicked in 30 seconds, only to repeat the process ad nauseam, is a really frustrating way to git gud. It doesn't help that a fair few of the pre-boss 'gauntlets' are rather unengaging (the tunnel mazes before facing Nosk, or waiting for the series of elevators leading up to the Soul Warrior + Follies).
And much like the affliction that has spread to even the furthest reaches of Hallownest, this 'little' issue of bench placement has infected many other aspects of the game. The bosses are one of the big highlights of Hollow Knight but the bench placement makes the process of learning how to beat them more frustrating than it needs to be. And even the exploration is not spared - backtracking from bench to boss reduces the wonder of charting a living breathing world to a perfunctory and linear commute through a series of rooms I've seen dozens of times before, its effect on my play experience not unlike a long unskippable cutscene in the way it kills my momentum.
It would be easy for me to sum up my experience as thus: Hollow Knight is an otherwise-nearly-perfect game which was tarnished by one small flaw. And yet it's not that simple either! After completing the game and watching the end credits, I found myself experiencing not relief (as I usually do on finishing long games I'm ambivalent on) but profound melancholy. I watched excerpts of speedruns. I watched some videos on the the lore. I reloaded my save and tried some of the challenges that I previously decided were not worth my time cough White Palace cough. Tried and failed, but still. It's hard for me to leave it behind and move onto the next game - there's something alluring about the ruined world of Hallownest and I feel it will occupy my mind for some time.
Because it's there.
(101% completion, standard ending)
It's no Everest, but the world of Hallownest is huge, intimidating, and wondrous; in a game where the 'plot breadcrumbs' style of storytelling means a general lack of narrative thrust, the mere existence of Hallownest is reason enough to want to explore it. Hollow Knight is sensationally good at worldbuilding through level design, and even through the so-called "slow start" I found myself wanting to get down and dirty exploring every nook of the game world; it helps that a huge portion of the world is almost immediately accessible without extra movement abilities, meaning that my journey of discovering Hallownest for the first time felt unique by virtue of how Hollow Knight seems more open-ended than other Metroidvanias.
Better writers than me have discussed the mechanics in much depth, but I do have to mention them anyway. Combat and movement is tight, consistent, and refined - this is evident in the sheer depth that your relatively small moveset brings to the boss fights, but also in how each new movement option adds more fluency and expressivity in how you traverse each area, bringing a joy to exploration that even the game's slight over-reliance on 'gotcha' hits cannot extinguish.
The 3.5 score at the top of this entry is probably a spoiler that there is a pretty big caveat to my praise above, and that comes in the form of something seemingly inconsequential to anyone who hasn't played the game: the benches (reload points) are on many occasions placed so far from bosses that it feels borderline spiteful. My issue here isn't that the game is hard; I think the difficulty level of the bosses is perfect and it really makes you earn your victories! But punishing failure with 5 minutes of backtracking so you can try again, only to get your ass kicked in 30 seconds, only to repeat the process ad nauseam, is a really frustrating way to git gud. It doesn't help that a fair few of the pre-boss 'gauntlets' are rather unengaging (the tunnel mazes before facing Nosk, or waiting for the series of elevators leading up to the Soul Warrior + Follies).
And much like the affliction that has spread to even the furthest reaches of Hallownest, this 'little' issue of bench placement has infected many other aspects of the game. The bosses are one of the big highlights of Hollow Knight but the bench placement makes the process of learning how to beat them more frustrating than it needs to be. And even the exploration is not spared - backtracking from bench to boss reduces the wonder of charting a living breathing world to a perfunctory and linear commute through a series of rooms I've seen dozens of times before, its effect on my play experience not unlike a long unskippable cutscene in the way it kills my momentum.
It would be easy for me to sum up my experience as thus: Hollow Knight is an otherwise-nearly-perfect game which was tarnished by one small flaw. And yet it's not that simple either! After completing the game and watching the end credits, I found myself experiencing not relief (as I usually do on finishing long games I'm ambivalent on) but profound melancholy. I watched excerpts of speedruns. I watched some videos on the the lore. I reloaded my save and tried some of the challenges that I previously decided were not worth my time cough White Palace cough. Tried and failed, but still. It's hard for me to leave it behind and move onto the next game - there's something alluring about the ruined world of Hallownest and I feel it will occupy my mind for some time.
Because it's there.
(101% completion, standard ending)
Demon's Souls
2020
"This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game."
man. this was so bad that it made me start getting really annoying about gaming remakes on twitter which I'm continually embarrassed by, but it's hard for me to not be cynical about this thing on a level greater than 'i don't like what they did to a game that i think is good' bc to me it speaks to almost everything I find frustrating about the games industry at the moment
and like, I don't like to be miserable about media that isn't actively harmful! so what a shame that this remake feels actively miserable about the original game itself. it feels like the gaming zeitgeist at large sometimes have to be told when they're allowed to like old games instead of giving them the sweeping dismissal we generally give to anything older than a decade. if a game hasn't had a popular youtube essay about why it's good, actually, then it needs a remake to be playable in the modern age, right? jim ryan got absolutely demolished for asking why anyone would want to play a ps2 game nowadays, but we'll still eat this up because it has pretty lighting or w/e?
anyway to actually speak about the game itself, I think a lot of really questionable details in its presentation were largely overlooked when it came out. most people agreed that the new UI kinda sucks, but I've seen much less focus given to the janky facial animations (which will look worse in a few years than the original's lack of animation does now btw, there's a reason fromsoft straight up didn't bother) and questionable cutscene lighting and direction. a lot of scenes that from's team evidently gave a lot of care to in the original, like the dragon cutscene in 1-1 and king allant's entrance, look flat and lifeless in comparison - perhaps lit more realistically but cinematographically botched and much less effective. NPCs emote too much when they don't need to, and too little when they do, and every edge on most of the character designs has been sanded down to an unreasonable degree. the voice acting is a huge step down, the animation is all more weightless, etc, etc
fromsoftware are such an unlikely success story, and demon's souls has a weird place in their catalogue where it often gets dismissed as a kind of janky dark souls prototype instead of being taken on its own merits, so it kinda sucks to see it finally given mainstream attention only when its original paint job is stripped away in favour of something that exists primarily to show off the ps5's ability to push polygons. fromsoft's name isn't even attached to this in public, the vast majority of their original work taken out and replaced with presentation that's completely detached from the original's quiet, subversive style, despite bluepoint insisting that it's the same because they kept the gameplay intact or w/e
anyway this review is way too long and idk if i'm even allowed to post this here when it's so irrelevant to the game itself but I think this thing's mixed reception should prompt a lot of us to reconsider how we think about criticising games. is it an example of obnoxious purism when someone criticises the sweeping change in architectural style here, or the brighter colour palette? personally I think we should appreciate those details a lot more even before a new studio arrives to replace them wholesale, I have a lot more fun getting nerdy about the little things in games than I do trying to not be pretentious about them, and I think the push for better game preservation is allowed to point this stuff out without being shot down for nitpicking or w/e
(mask off, I think bluepoint are artistic terrorists and sotc ps4 was just as bad as this! give me my atmospheric haze or give me death, cowards)
man. this was so bad that it made me start getting really annoying about gaming remakes on twitter which I'm continually embarrassed by, but it's hard for me to not be cynical about this thing on a level greater than 'i don't like what they did to a game that i think is good' bc to me it speaks to almost everything I find frustrating about the games industry at the moment
and like, I don't like to be miserable about media that isn't actively harmful! so what a shame that this remake feels actively miserable about the original game itself. it feels like the gaming zeitgeist at large sometimes have to be told when they're allowed to like old games instead of giving them the sweeping dismissal we generally give to anything older than a decade. if a game hasn't had a popular youtube essay about why it's good, actually, then it needs a remake to be playable in the modern age, right? jim ryan got absolutely demolished for asking why anyone would want to play a ps2 game nowadays, but we'll still eat this up because it has pretty lighting or w/e?
anyway to actually speak about the game itself, I think a lot of really questionable details in its presentation were largely overlooked when it came out. most people agreed that the new UI kinda sucks, but I've seen much less focus given to the janky facial animations (which will look worse in a few years than the original's lack of animation does now btw, there's a reason fromsoft straight up didn't bother) and questionable cutscene lighting and direction. a lot of scenes that from's team evidently gave a lot of care to in the original, like the dragon cutscene in 1-1 and king allant's entrance, look flat and lifeless in comparison - perhaps lit more realistically but cinematographically botched and much less effective. NPCs emote too much when they don't need to, and too little when they do, and every edge on most of the character designs has been sanded down to an unreasonable degree. the voice acting is a huge step down, the animation is all more weightless, etc, etc
fromsoftware are such an unlikely success story, and demon's souls has a weird place in their catalogue where it often gets dismissed as a kind of janky dark souls prototype instead of being taken on its own merits, so it kinda sucks to see it finally given mainstream attention only when its original paint job is stripped away in favour of something that exists primarily to show off the ps5's ability to push polygons. fromsoft's name isn't even attached to this in public, the vast majority of their original work taken out and replaced with presentation that's completely detached from the original's quiet, subversive style, despite bluepoint insisting that it's the same because they kept the gameplay intact or w/e
anyway this review is way too long and idk if i'm even allowed to post this here when it's so irrelevant to the game itself but I think this thing's mixed reception should prompt a lot of us to reconsider how we think about criticising games. is it an example of obnoxious purism when someone criticises the sweeping change in architectural style here, or the brighter colour palette? personally I think we should appreciate those details a lot more even before a new studio arrives to replace them wholesale, I have a lot more fun getting nerdy about the little things in games than I do trying to not be pretentious about them, and I think the push for better game preservation is allowed to point this stuff out without being shot down for nitpicking or w/e
(mask off, I think bluepoint are artistic terrorists and sotc ps4 was just as bad as this! give me my atmospheric haze or give me death, cowards)
Final Fantasy V
1992
This review contains spoilers
Initial review: https://www.backloggd.com/u/gyoza/review/59235/
This has the distinction of being the first game I logged on this site, being my favorite game and all, and I promised myself I wouldn't write another review since I could probably write a novel on the different ways I love this and it would just never end. But today being the day I completed it for a milestone 25th time I suppose I can make an exception.
This was the RPG that made me realize that if a single aspect of a game is strong enough, it can carry the entire game. This is the Sistine Chapel Ceiling of RPG gameplay and balancing, and it doesn't matter that my motivation for playing was not "oh no I need to hurry and save the crystals to save the world" but "oh yeah I need to hurry and let the crystals shatter so I can get more sweet sweet jobs" - the point is, I was motivated to play. And 25 playthroughs later, I'm still motivated to play.
The plot does its best at staying out of the way to let the gameplay shine, but calling it merely an 'excuse plot' is doing it a disservice. Sure it isn't the best story in the world, but it has some surprisingly effective story beats, and the ending sequence in particular is very satisfying - when you realize the full significance of the crystal shards you've been carrying around all the while. All I'm saying is, if one experiences the story on its own terms, it can be far deeper than the 'Saturday Morning Cartoon' description that is often ascribed to it.
Here's to another 25 playthroughs, and if you've indulged me this far then many thanks. May you have a video game that resonates with you as much as this does with me!
This has the distinction of being the first game I logged on this site, being my favorite game and all, and I promised myself I wouldn't write another review since I could probably write a novel on the different ways I love this and it would just never end. But today being the day I completed it for a milestone 25th time I suppose I can make an exception.
This was the RPG that made me realize that if a single aspect of a game is strong enough, it can carry the entire game. This is the Sistine Chapel Ceiling of RPG gameplay and balancing, and it doesn't matter that my motivation for playing was not "oh no I need to hurry and save the crystals to save the world" but "oh yeah I need to hurry and let the crystals shatter so I can get more sweet sweet jobs" - the point is, I was motivated to play. And 25 playthroughs later, I'm still motivated to play.
The plot does its best at staying out of the way to let the gameplay shine, but calling it merely an 'excuse plot' is doing it a disservice. Sure it isn't the best story in the world, but it has some surprisingly effective story beats, and the ending sequence in particular is very satisfying - when you realize the full significance of the crystal shards you've been carrying around all the while. All I'm saying is, if one experiences the story on its own terms, it can be far deeper than the 'Saturday Morning Cartoon' description that is often ascribed to it.
Here's to another 25 playthroughs, and if you've indulged me this far then many thanks. May you have a video game that resonates with you as much as this does with me!
Final Fantasy X-2
2003
This review contains spoilers
I try to go into every game I play as 'blind' as possible with as little expectations as possible, but I couldn't in this case. What little I heard about this game was that it was essentially FFV with cute girls, and as I started up the game I was expecting the story to be bad (another thing I'd heard a lot) but also that the gameplay would be so good that I would love the game anyway - just like my experience with FFV. In the end, the game ended up subverting my expectations in several ways.
Firstly, I really enjoyed a lot of the story, and I liked the new direction they took Yuna and Spira in. Juxtaposing the end of FFX and the beginning of X-2 comes across as jarring and bizarre, but it's only to be expected. Rikku makes this point in Eternal Calm (an additional cutscene meant to take place between the two games). If Sin is gone, Rikku argues, why shouldn't Yuna change? And if she was ready to sacrifice her happiness and life to defeat Sin, why shouldn't she now do what she wants? Apply this to all of Spira and the new setting makes a lot of sense. I'd say the game does a great job of exploring the new Spira by revisiting the supporting characters from the previous game and seeing how they adapted to the world around them changing so fast. The game explores some great themes in a very on-the-nose way, but that doesn't bother me since subtlety isn't my forte! The main issue with the story for me is how much there is and in its pacing. It's nice to revisit all the places I visited in FFX in a new light, but there's simply not enough going on to sustain interest, especially since I had to visit every single location in every single chapter in order to get the full experience. As a FOMO player (like 99.9% of the JRPG players out there), the late game ended up feeling like a complete chore. This is especially sad as the latter half is where the payoff for all the little story arcs is - but by that point you're likely to not care so much because of a loss of momentum.
I have to say that the gameplay hooked me in very early on, and I spent much of the first chapter wondering where in my FF top 5 the game would end up. It was slick, it was stylish, it was fun. The outfits being jobs and the characters being able to switch jobs mid-battle with Sailormoon-esque transformation sequences was endearingly campy, and there seemed to be limitless possibilities and options! However, this game is much closer to FF3 than FF5/Tactics in the job mechanics in that there is little mixing and matching that you can do between jobs and skills. I realize this part is personal preference, but I really wish I could have made a warrior with the berserker's counterattacking ability, or a white mage with the dark knight's status immunities - this mixing and matching was what made FF5 and Tactics the Kings of the job-system Hill for me.
The above is a minor quibble, but the gameplay also stumbles due to being convoluted but very easy. There are plenty of jobs to play with, and a metric ton of garment grids with different abilities, but the storyline battles are so easy that you rarely have any incentive to explore them. It doesn't help that most garment grids require that you class-change in battle to unlock their full power, but most random battles are over in 1-2 turns anyway.
If I had to sum up the game's failings in a word, it would be 'bloat'. The sheer amount of content results in you being overleveled most of the time even without grinding, making all the cool jobs and abilities feel unnecessary - the gameplay and story bloat feed into each other resulting in a game experience that feels bloated as Sin (sorry, couldn't resist).
I know I will replay the game, as I do with anything with a job system. And I'm likely to give it a better score the second time round, as better familiarity with the content will mean I can pick and choose what I do and will trim a lot of the fat from the experience. But there's something tragic about a game that rewards experiencing everything it has to offer with bad pacing and a destroyed difficulty curve.
Firstly, I really enjoyed a lot of the story, and I liked the new direction they took Yuna and Spira in. Juxtaposing the end of FFX and the beginning of X-2 comes across as jarring and bizarre, but it's only to be expected. Rikku makes this point in Eternal Calm (an additional cutscene meant to take place between the two games). If Sin is gone, Rikku argues, why shouldn't Yuna change? And if she was ready to sacrifice her happiness and life to defeat Sin, why shouldn't she now do what she wants? Apply this to all of Spira and the new setting makes a lot of sense. I'd say the game does a great job of exploring the new Spira by revisiting the supporting characters from the previous game and seeing how they adapted to the world around them changing so fast. The game explores some great themes in a very on-the-nose way, but that doesn't bother me since subtlety isn't my forte! The main issue with the story for me is how much there is and in its pacing. It's nice to revisit all the places I visited in FFX in a new light, but there's simply not enough going on to sustain interest, especially since I had to visit every single location in every single chapter in order to get the full experience. As a FOMO player (like 99.9% of the JRPG players out there), the late game ended up feeling like a complete chore. This is especially sad as the latter half is where the payoff for all the little story arcs is - but by that point you're likely to not care so much because of a loss of momentum.
I have to say that the gameplay hooked me in very early on, and I spent much of the first chapter wondering where in my FF top 5 the game would end up. It was slick, it was stylish, it was fun. The outfits being jobs and the characters being able to switch jobs mid-battle with Sailormoon-esque transformation sequences was endearingly campy, and there seemed to be limitless possibilities and options! However, this game is much closer to FF3 than FF5/Tactics in the job mechanics in that there is little mixing and matching that you can do between jobs and skills. I realize this part is personal preference, but I really wish I could have made a warrior with the berserker's counterattacking ability, or a white mage with the dark knight's status immunities - this mixing and matching was what made FF5 and Tactics the Kings of the job-system Hill for me.
The above is a minor quibble, but the gameplay also stumbles due to being convoluted but very easy. There are plenty of jobs to play with, and a metric ton of garment grids with different abilities, but the storyline battles are so easy that you rarely have any incentive to explore them. It doesn't help that most garment grids require that you class-change in battle to unlock their full power, but most random battles are over in 1-2 turns anyway.
If I had to sum up the game's failings in a word, it would be 'bloat'. The sheer amount of content results in you being overleveled most of the time even without grinding, making all the cool jobs and abilities feel unnecessary - the gameplay and story bloat feed into each other resulting in a game experience that feels bloated as Sin (sorry, couldn't resist).
I know I will replay the game, as I do with anything with a job system. And I'm likely to give it a better score the second time round, as better familiarity with the content will mean I can pick and choose what I do and will trim a lot of the fat from the experience. But there's something tragic about a game that rewards experiencing everything it has to offer with bad pacing and a destroyed difficulty curve.
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