You need to set your expectations right with this one to appreciate it. Pacific Drive is much more of a chill and occasionally spooky atmospheric looting/scrapping/crafting game with a focus on vehicle customization than it is a stalker-like or death stranding-like where death and danger are constant concerns. Initially I was disappointed by how loot-oriented it is, stopping your drive every 30 seconds to sift through a copy-paste interior with generic crafting mats is repetitive and not very interesting, but I eventually got into the flow of it. Moreso I feel the true letdown here is the anomalies: I think it would be gauche to want actual “monsters” - it’s not that sort of game, but the array of benign atmospheric hazards that comprise the bestiary here don’t really instill much tension in the gameplay; even in the final and supposedly most dangerous zone, there’s not much here that can’t be circumvented by just driving a little bit around it, and anomalies like “corrosive mist”, “shock mist” and “irradiated ground” just feel very uncreative considering they take up the same slots as tourists and wriggling wrecks that feel like genuine anomalies. The first time I got to the “Eerie Darkness” zone I was shitting myself at every random atmospheric noise, but once you come to the realisation that nothing is really out there and nothing will ever be there, the game kinda loses a lot of its mystique. Even from the perspective of the survival mechanics, the game is very easy - once you load your car up with reserve tanks and batteries, you’ll basically never run out of fuel or charge, and the result is that you can just gun it wherever without much regard for resource management in the lategame. In this sense I think it was a bad idea to make the game revolve around returning to a home base over and over - a continuous journey without free recharge/refuels could have introduced more long-term ramifications for bad decision-making, and it would have made me think about using all those oil barrels lying around that I never needed to touch or battery jumpers sitting in my trunk all game, and more linearity could have allowed some actual level design to be introduced into the game instead of endless proc-gen (it’s telling that the story missions that use preset layouts feel much more interesting than the proc-gen stuff).

Still, the atmosphere is so good in this game that I enjoyed it quite a bit, the driving mechanics are very well executed, and the quirk mechanic in particular is pretty genius; letting your car develop unique traits that further endear you to it, which is weaved in with the overarching narrative themes about obsession and letting go. I feel the whole narrative package would be a lot better if the ending was better though. [spoilers incoming!] I really thought the game was building up to a moment where you would have to sacrifice your own car, and I thought this would be really powerful. Every character in this game is wrestling with some sort of obsession that’s keeping them tied to the zone, and the game ends with Oppy overcoming hers and finally letting go of Allen’s death, and a very good parallel moment with the Driver needing to let go of their own car, which they’ve forged a connection with throughout the game, seemed like an obvious choice, but the game instead goes for a very video-gamey “you just unlocked Free Play mode!” ending where nothing really happens, which feels like it misses The Point in a narrative where letting go is the main theme.

Pretty cool game overall if you can take it for what it is, but I do think the same concept could be executed better, which I would like to see because the concept of this game is so good. In general I really like the “long haul through a hostile environment with gameplay revolving around logistics instead of combat” archetype and would love more games like it. Maybe I’m just looking forward to Death Stranding 2…

”The SRPG Masterpiece That Nobody Has Played”, or, ”Why I Dream of Hexagons”

I don’t suppose myself to be a particularly strong purveyor of obscure games, despite my admiration for them. I tend to prioritise playing stuff that’s both widely and strongly regarded, so it’s a bit auspicious that a few years ago, many months into Covid, going down the rabbit hole of Fire Emblem, coming to the realisation that Thracia was my favourite one and that this Kaga guy was “kinda cool” and deciding to check out his other games, was an event which conveniently coincided with the finalization of a fan translation of Berwick Saga, and that such an event led me to discover one of my favourite games of all time and, in my limited estimation, one of the most underappreciated games of all time, with only a measly 68 plays on Backloggd as of writing.

Berwick Saga is a masterpiece, it’s a sweeping, sprawling labyrinth of shockingly thoughtful SRPG design, linking and weaving together a romantic military drama with gameplay entirely in concert with its themes throughout the entire runtime, it’s the culmination of the long, decades-spanning evolution of design sensibilities from the father of Fire Emblem and a game that, in one fell swoop, solves and revolutionizes the perennial problems facing Fire Emblem-like games, in some cases, years before they would even come to prominence. Know that it’s with great love, then, that I say that it’s entirely understandable why the game has languished in obscurity for almost 18 years: the game only received an English fan translation in February 2020, and it was explicitly designed by Kaga to appeal to hardcore fans of strategy RPGs, much like Thracia 776, which was one of the lowest selling Fire Emblem games. Writing on his blog, Kaga even said that “though people wouldn't appreciate me saying such things, this one might not be suited for people who aren't that good with [SRPGs]”. Shockingly, the game still outsold Path of Radiance, which is more of a testament to how Fire Emblem was struggling in this period rather than Berwick Saga’s success, but It’s this combination of only existing in Japanese and being very niche that have left it hidden from people for so many years. I think it’s time will come, (maybe when a certain youtuber brings attention to it), but speaking more selfishly, there’s a certain joy in having what feels like a secret in videogame form, it’s become a yearly tradition for me to do a playthrough of this game, a game which is not only perfectly suited to my interests but exists for so few, and every time I discover new things and refine the clockwork strategy with which I navigate through it, a love the game reciprocates in how it rewards this kind of obsessiveness, it is, in short, a game for freaks.

Let’s rewind back in time, who is Shouzou Kaga? A simple explanation would be that he’s the original creator of Fire Emblem and the lead designer of the first five games in the series, from 1990 to 1999, but to many of the hardcore fans of Fire Emblem he’s much more than this, he’s an icon, a titan of game design, and a man with a strong creative vision. One of the oft-remarked facets of Kaga’s design, especially Thracia, is his commitment to ludonarrative harmony, and this facet was baked into the very concept of Fire Emblem, speaking with Final Fantasy’s Sakaguchi, he stated that “I wanted to make a strategy game that was more dramatic, something where you would really be able to feel the pain and struggle of the characters.”, it was a core ideal that he would gradually refine in the following years and finally perfect with Berwick Saga, and in this interview we see the kindling of what would eventually become another burning ideal for him - the idea of a sprawling, multi-game, military epic:

“With Fire Emblem I’ve made a “role playing simulation” game, but at the same time, it’s very linear. And I think players who spend so much time building and developing their units will probably feel like, for all that work, they didn’t get to use the units very much. So for the next game, I’m thinking of some kind of simultaneous, multi-scenario setup, where there’s a number of different paths to explore.”

We could say, straightforwardly, that Kaga was the creator of Fire Emblem, but much more profoundly, he’s a man trying to create the videogame version of a multi-book war novel, the videogame version of War and Peace, it’s a dream that he’s still trying to fulfil to this day, and understanding this dream contextualizes his actions following 1999. During the development of Fire Emblem 64, Kaga would abruptly leave Nintendo, dissatisfied with the hardware limitations of the N64, specifically how it handled saving and its inability to transfer saves between games. Recognising that the PS1 was much more suited to the fulfilment of his dream game, he would found Tirnanog, his own company, and begin development of TearRing Saga. I won’t exhaustively cover the events that follow (you can watch this if you’d like to know the full story, albeit in a sensationalized form), for our purposes, all we need to know is that Nintendo would file a lawsuit against Tirnanog for its similarity to Fire Emblem, and that Tirnanog was ordered to pay a 76 million yen fine to Nintendo.

Thankfully, TearRing Saga was still allowed to go onto store shelves, it would still recuperate its development costs, and Tirnanog was financially solvent enough to create another game, but this time, it would need to be significantly different to Fire Emblem.

It was a blessing in disguise. The legally imposed requirement to change the fundamental characteristics of his games would allow Kaga to return to the drawing board, inject his years of lessons from making SRPGs, and create something that was far superior to his previous works on an elementary mechanical level. Instead of a square grid, maps were now composed of hexes, a seemingly superficial change with radical implications: Instead of each flank having one side to be attacked from, now there were three. Defending units from attack was now much more precarious and required much more consideration of placement. Instead of the Fire Emblem alternating turn system, where you move all of your units and then the enemy moves all of theirs, now you and the enemy take your turn simultaneously, proportional to how many units you have. This mechanically reinforces the feeling of being outnumbered since, if the enemy outnumbers you two to one, they will get two actions for every one that you get. Reflecting on the superiority of this system to the old one on his blog, Kaga wrote that “In the usual alternating turn system there's no escaping the homogeneity of tactics, specifically the "baiting" tactic. No matter how complex you make the computer’s thought process, the player will always have the advantage. But with the simultaneous turn system, [...] the standard tactic of "keep the distance, bait them out and gang up with overwhelming numbers" cannot be used, and the player is forced to adapt to each situation.” To accompany this, Berwick Saga sees a much more sophisticated enemy AI than any existing Fire Emblem game, which determines and re-evaluates which actions should be prioritised in the turn and where zones of activity are occurring after every action. The simultaneous turn system both requires and allows for much more complicated strategy and care in the order of your actions, my favourite tactic is the ability to abuse the fact that the player always gets the first action of the turn, meaning you can use the last and first action of a turn to take two turns before the enemy has a chance to act. All of these changes iterate and improve upon the thematic precariousness that was expressed in Thracia 776. In that game, the hit rate was hard-capped to 99, such that at any given moment, the player could be required to adjust their strategy spontaneously. With Berwick, the same thing has been achieved more elegantly by baking it into the core systems.

And much like Thracia, the story and resource management reinforce this theme of precariousness and being at the mercy of your environment. Reese, our protagonist, has been called from the remote lands of Sinon to serve in the Berwick League. Their side are losing the war and it’s not pretty. Funds and equipment have to be scrounged together from odd jobs, bounties, or captured enemies. The grizzly reality of war, the abuse of prisoners of war, the corruption and incompetence of those in command, the flood of refugees and proliferation of orphans, all of these are brought to the forefront throughout the story. Unlike any previous game, many units in this game are mercenaries who have to be hired with money, slowly depleting your stock of funds. Decisions have to be made like “do I hire this strong unit or do I save my money?”, “Do I buy good weapons or save up for something else?”. Even the missions build into this: Because the Knights of Sinon have a lot of cavaliers, they’re sent on many guerilla missions where they have to achieve an objective under a time limit - free these prisoners before the sun comes up, protect these injured soldiers as they escape a war zone, then escape yourself, it all has to be done in 24 turns. While many of these time limits aren’t hard to satisfy, they still lead to a frantic, building tension where you escape just in time with imperial forces swarming you, breathing down your neck.

More than any particular bleakness, what I find fascinating about this story is how Reese is merely a part of a much larger epic. As I mentioned earlier, it was always Kaga’s dream to create a multi-game war story, which lends his games a unique feeling of smallness. Easily my favourite map in TearRing Saga is map 21, in which our protagonist Holmes is saved by a group revealed to basically be the real heroes. A completely independent, unplayable troupe of holy relic-wielding badasses undertaking their own quest. It’s a great moment of displacement. In one disempowering instant you understand that, no, you’re not the centre of this story or this universe. Berwick Saga is the same, intended to be just one side of a larger story. The evil emperor and the evil pope of this game are defeated off-screen by two different handsome tragic heroes who could have easily had games made about them instead, of which we only see snippets. Kaga himself summed all this up with the statement that “[Berwick Saga] is not a heroic fantasy, it's a human drama taking place on the stage consisting of history and war“. This is why the game has the (admittedly ridiculous) subtitle of “Chapter 174”, it evokes the feeling of picking out a random chapter in the middle of an enormous chronicle.

Previously, I pointed out how Berwick Saga solves the perennial problem of baiting from Fire Emblem, but this is really only the surface of what it gets right, I’ll touch on two more: Mounted units and supports.

The balancing of mounted units is one of the most infamous recurring problems in Fire Emblem. Kaga himself was responsible for the overcentralizing presence of mounted units in Genealogy of the Holy War, but while in 2005, Path of Radiance witnessed one of the most overpowered incarnations of them, Berwick Saga had already solved it, releasing merely one month later. Cavalry are strong in Berwick, they have 7 move instead of the usual 4 and have the usual Canto skill, but there’s a twist. Horses in Berwick have their own health bars and can die just as their riders can. Once their horse dies the unit is now stuck walking until you buy or assign them a new horse. Buying a new horse (or at least, one that won’t die in two hits) is a significant financial commitment in a game where money is a precious resource. So instead of making mounted units less fun to use by nerfing them directly, Kaga found an outside-the-box way of balancing them which further reinforces the themes and systems of the game, and the fact that Fire Emblem is still struggling to solve this speaks for itself.

Supports are another system that Fire Emblem hasn't solved, which has been relitigated rather recently, Berwick, as usual, solves it in a creative way. Every mercenary has a hidden happiness number that goes up when you hire and deploy them, which unlocks scenes related to their side stories and recruitment, they even have entire hidden paralogues in there! All of this allows specific character moments and developments to be contextualised by occurring at specific moments in the story, avoiding the FE support problem. Members of the Knights of Sinon have entire paralogues devoted to their personal stories, events even occur within chapters themselves, often requiring the fulfilment of some side object, all of which weaves character and gameplay together in a much deeper way than disjointed support conversations.

The unit design is easily Kaga’s best from a gameplay perspective. With Genealogy, Kaga discovered that personal skills were one of the best ways to bestow each individual unit with a different feel and function. He iterated upon this through Thracia and TearRing Saga, until he perfected it with Berwick Saga. Every unit here is radically different and some of the skills are game-changing. There are several playable units who, at base, have the incredibly strong “breaker” and “bane” skills, which in nu-Fire Emblem were strictly reserved for advanced classes, there are units with the skill “Deathmatch”, which puts them into 5 rounds of combat with any given enemy, radically improving their player-phase combat potential, other units have similarly strong but radically different skills, “Pulverize”, for example, allows a unit to double their attack in exchange for not moving, giving these units a stationary turret feel. Not only are the skills strong and individuating, they’re expertly crafted to fit the maps. Kramer, for instance, has the skill “Climber” and “Arrowsbane”, meaning he doesn’t lose his avoid on cliffs, and has extra avoid against all arrows, perfectly suiting him to Chapter 11-1, in which you are tasked with scaling a cliff defended by ballistas and crossbowmen. Esteban has the ability to see further in fog-of-war and negate enemies' forest avoid bonus, perfectly suiting him to chapter 12-1, a fog-of-war map in a dense forest. I could go on for almost every unit. What I want to stress is that every aspect of Berwick Saga is masterfully sculpted to feed into and reinforce every other part of the game: The maps are designed to fit the units, your ability to pick the right units is related to the mercenary system - the happiness and side-stories of the characters, your ability to fulfil these is reliant on your resource-management, which is reinforced by the struggle occurring in the narrative, the narrative intertwines with the maps, and so we come to a full circle in which every part of the game is hermetically bound together.

Speaking of map design, I’m not gonna sugarcoat it, Kaga’s map design is so many leaps and bounds more sophisticated and interesting than Fire Emblem’s that it causes FE fans to have existential crises. At times it can be almost too intricate. Berwick Saga maps are a joy, especially the main chapter maps, not merely because of the tension from the aforementioned time limits, but because of the sheer wealth of side objectives and optional events. To give you a sense of this, I’m going to overview a map, Chapter 3. In this map, Reese has been tasked with escorting three priests to a temple, but there’s a twist, the three priests are all old men who stubbornly disagree on the best route to take to the temple, so they decide to all go different routes. The player is tasked with splitting up their 12 units into a top, middle and bottom lane to cover the priests as they advance. Even worse, waiting for them at the temple is a bandit who is able to stack buffs onto himself with the Battle Cry skill, so the player needs to get there first and clear the way. On the way, all three priests will trigger different events: On the lower route is a superboss that the playable unit Faye will attempt to duel and fail, furthering our awareness of her backstory. In the middle is an assassin who attempts to kill the priest, only to be saved by a mysterious Knight who will later become a playable character, and on the top path the priest encounters another playable character, Owen, in an event that hints at his burgeoning secret. On top of this, around turn 20, the playable character Esteban shows up as an enemy and can be convinced to stand down by Christine, citing his financial troubles which the player can help with by later hiring him as a mercenary. Around the same time, the bounty target Garos turns up on the bottom of the map, he’s a tough enemy, boasting the “Obfuscate” skill, which hides his stats, and an assassin knife, which gives him a whopping 80 crit, but if you take him down before he escapes you get rewarded with a handsome 5000 gold by the mercenary guild. On top of this, there’s a locket in the centre of the lake that can be recovered by Axel, the only unit capable of walking on water tiles, four search points strewn through the map, and a Razite cleric who drops the Darkmend spell, useless to the player, but sought after by the collector Ertzheimer. The player must attend to all of this while also juggling regular combat duties, in a word, it’s dense. This is just one map. And if you’ll forgive the constant comparisons to Fire Emblem, whose maps (especially post-Awakening) are often just flat terrain with enemies randomly strewn about with no side objectives or optional events, it’s not even a contest in my mind.

Let’s address some criticism. People say this game is slow, personally I use the word “suspenseful”, but I won’t deny it’s true. Because hit rates are so shaky and hitting or missing has such consequences, the animations are very slow to give each outcome an air of gravitas. However, this does become a problem when you have to reload and redo progress, it can threaten to become tedious. If you’re new and struggling and constantly reloading (which you will be because this game is HARD), those slow animations can become torturous and I’m sympathetic to this. Kaga himself actually suggested only playing the game in 5-turn bursts because of this.

The durability system is weird. Instead of numerical uses, equipment has states of disrepair that each have a chance to break associated with them. It’s possible for a brand new sword to trigger a 1% chance to break upon being used for the first time, which unfailingly makes you want to punch a hole in your wall.

Personally I find these things to be superficial blemishes on what is unambiguously a masterpiece of game design. Despite that, this is not the videogame version of War and Peace that Kaga wished to make, as it’s only one game. Tirnanog would dissolve before any other sides of this story could be told. Hopefully Vestaria Saga can evolve into that, but it’s still a shame that because of the limitations of SRPG studio, Berwick Saga will likely forever be the peak in terms of combining his game design with a unique art direction. While at times it feels like my personal hidden gem, I do hope that this game gets the recognition it deserves one day. To paraphrase a certain critic, if we can all help the cream to rise to the proverbial crop, we’ll all benefit in the long run, and there are ideas in here that desperately need to be injected into the standard praxis of SPRG design, so, long live Berwick Saga, and if you got this far, thanks for reading!

And, if you do decide to give it a try, just remember, trust in Dean. Dean will see you through.

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Translation of Kaga’s blog, I altered some of this in the text to make it scan a bit better.
Favourite OST

I think your mileage with this will heavily depend on how much you can forgive it for being so derivative, but I think in this case it’s worth forgiving. Personally, I have no problem with stealing souls systems like bonfires, estus, stamina management, parries, rallies etc. but there are points where I think Lies of P crosses a line: talking to sick people through windows, a not-fire-keeper calling you “clever one”, slowly pushing open heavy double-doors, the same damn item pickup and menu sounds, I think these kinds of choices are needlessly derivative and will only serve to remind people of other, better, games. A more thrifty approach could have taken the meat of souls without also taking the chaff. Even things like attacking, running and dodging animations are uncannily similar to fromsoft titles, which is a bit of a double-edged sword: On the one hand, this is one of the precious few souls copycats that actually feels great to play, because it takes the finely-tuned animation cadence of fromsoft so wholesale (the other souls copycat that feels good, Nioh, relies on the years of action game experience that Team Ninja has, so it’s maybe preferable for an inexperienced dev to simply steal in this case). The negative side of this is that everything which feels “off” or out of place will stick out all the more severely. Level design is pretty obviously inferior to fromsoft’s games, as linear as it is with a bunch of superfluous shortcuts, lacking the overlapping and layered tracks that define the best souls levels (ds3 undead settlement is a perfect example) and lacking any real side areas. But elsewhere I have to say that as the game went on, I found remarkably little to complain about: Environmental design and the art direction is alarmingly good for a debut game, enemy variety is surprisingly great - one of the critical things that separates good souls from mid souls, I was really taken aback by how the game has unique minibosses that are only used once or twice whereas basically every other souls copycat is defined by excessive reuse. The quality of the animations is universally top-notch, everything flows great and so many weapons have enjoyable movesets and bosses have subtle variations in their combos to signify what they’ll do next.

All creativity is about stealing to some extent, though this is admittedly on the more extreme end of that spectrum. Still, I think a fixation on its similarities - both superficial and meaningful - can cover up the actually original things that are here: Glossing over the neat durability and weapon-fusion mechanics, I love the parry/blocking system in this game and think it's an ingenious fusion of Sekiro and Bloodborne that actually improves both. The boon of Sekiro’s posture and parry mechanics was that it allowed bosses to have flashy, dynamic, extended blockstrings without feeling like you were just waiting for the boss to be done (i.e Elden Ring), because parrying those blockstrings did damage to the enemy. The flaw of Sekiro’s mechanics, for some people at least, was that parry was the only meaningful way to engage with a lot of situations, which Lies of P solves by requiring posture breaks to be activated by a charged heavy, forcing you into finding an opening and not just reacting with parries. Bloodborne, on the other hand, was all about hit-trading, thanks to its rally mechanic, and the boon of this was that getting hit was equally an opportunity just as much as it was a punishment, the flaw, however, was that in some cases it could promote mindlessly aggressive play, where you just hit-trade a boss to death without even trying to avoid their attacks (Bloodborne mostly got around this with clever enemy designs, but some bosses still have the problem). Lies of P fuses these two by locking the rally mechanic behind blocking, while retaining the parrying mechanics of Sekiro. The result is an interesting risk-reward pipeline: Risk a parry to get their posture down, if you miss and get a regular block, now you’re encouraged to go on the offensive to get that health back, getting hit is unequivocally bad and dodging remains very relevant as a repositioning tool. It’s interesting and, for me, very satisfying to engage with, though I wouldn’t say it’s perfect: It’s a little too insistent on parrying with the armour and tracking that bosses/elite enemies sometimes have, the fact that it doesn’t show you the posture bar so that you can’t factor in how close an enemy is to staggering into your decision-making also seems like an odd choice, and the “perilous attacks” beating both block and dodge can get a little ridiculous, but for the most part I really like the systems here.

The deciding factor for me is that the bosses in Lies of P are genuinely fantastic, all with loads of varied, amazingly animated attacks and interesting gimmicks, there are some lacklustre ones, especially the two lategame rematch bosses, but the run of bosses from Andreas with his side-switching gimmick, the Black Rabbits aka "O&S but with 3 different Ornsteins", King of Puppets, Victor and the Green Monster with the clever reuse of the Watchman is just banger after banger, they're all so creatively designed, and if I could commit some blasphemy real quick, I think this boss lineup is better than any other soulslike game, fromsoft included.

It comes with the caveat that this is a very difficult game. I love that, personally, the level of difficulty means that encounters demand you respect them and learn their moves rather than stumbling through, but it won’t be for everyone, and I think if you go in with the mindset that it’s just a copy, you’re not going to want to give it that respect. It’s a little sad that the general reception seems to be so lukewarm, and it’s hard to pinpoint whether this lies in the difficulty, the feeling that it’s a “knockoff”, a vindictive idea that any good soulslike is a threat to fromsoft, or just general fatigue with soulslikes. Regardless, a lot of the takes about how the game is unfair or feels “off” just don’t ring true to me at all; I think this is the real deal, it’s a damn good game, and I honestly find myself feeling that it’s going to be my GOTY, but hey, I loved Bloodborne and Sekiro, so it was probably a given that I would love a fusion of the two as well.

Pretty lukewarm on this, which is unfortunate since Zeroranger is one of my favourite games and I was looking forward to this quite a bit. It definitely has retained some of the strong points of that game, not least the music, which is just as amazing (at least in the levels) and is honestly worth playing the game for by itself, but it’s also brought along some of the weaknesses and exacerbated them. It was clear in Zeroranger that Project Erasure like to indulge in “anime” tropes, which I thought was acceptable there because of the connection between Super Sentai and STGs, and the generally lighthearted tone of Zeroranger also allowed them to indulge in a bit of cheesy anime stuff without really detracting from the overall effect of the game. I don’t think that applies here, the immediate tone of the game is thick and tense, the mechanics engender deliberate, thoughtful movements, and this immediately clashes when you are presented with the corny theatrics of the first dream sequence, full of anime-esque character tropes and pop-culture references and (i’m sorry to be this mean) genuinely terrible writing, littered with colloquialisms and slang expressions and a super schlocky plot with unbelievably saccharine piano pieces playing in the background. It shows its hand far too early and a lot of the intrigue and general interest in where things were going completely evaporated for me from that point. In hindsight I appreciate how minimalist Zeroranger was with its story.

How is Void Stranger as a sokoban then? It’s ok, pretty good, I wasn’t amazed with the solutions and I rarely felt like I had to get truly creative to solve things until a lot later and even then it was rarely satisfying. It’s probably unfair to compare this to Stephen’s Sausage Roll since that’s probably the best sokoban I’ve ever played but almost every puzzle in that game required me to expand my perception of what was possible within the mechanics, which this isn’t nearly as good at. I’m also apprehensive about the lives system of the game. Having extra lives be earned by solving difficult optional puzzles is an excellent idea for a puzzle-roguelike! But when you run out of lives you can either restart from the beginning of the game or accept receiving a narrative “punishment” in exchange for infinite lives and neither of these are interesting. It’s uninteresting to repeat puzzles you already know the solution of, and the “void” mode feels poorly considered: Pretty much all of the tension diffuses when you’re given infinite lives and you never get a rewind ability or a quick-reset ability, so it’s kind of a worst of both worlds situation where you lose the tension of limited lives but don’t get the quality of life options that other infinite-attempt sokoban games give you, which gets annoying in the more complex levels. Sokobans are notoriously persnickety; solutions can often be ruined by one single move being out of order, which is especially relevant in this game as there are a lot of enemy movement cycles to take into account, so losing one of your limited lives and/or having to re-do an entire solution because of something very small can really get frustrating and adds up to that feeling of trial-and-error. Theoretically, everything here is deterministic, so it should be possible to calculate the solution without even moving or risking anything, but in practice I feel it's not common to play this way (I certainly don’t).

The big appeal for a lot of people will be the secrets, which I’m sure will be gradually discovered by the playerbase in weeks to come, and I’m sure some of them will be interesting. Personally, I really don’t care about that stuff, I feel like discovering cryptic secrets without online help is just an exercise in a lot of trial-and-error which is only enjoyed by a certain subset of players that I am not in and I would rather have interesting things presented to me in a structured way (which Zeroranger is excellent at, ironically).

To be honest I should really play more of this but I'm 6 hours in and not really enjoying it. I took a peek at some people further than me and it seems to just be more of what I don't like: More bad anime-esque story, more loops and repetition, so I think I'm just gonna give it up.

Very happy that this is strongly an AC game spiritually and not just “robot souls”, but I don’t think that’s stopped people from projecting the conceptual framework of souls onto it. It’s undeniable that the last 10 years of fromsoft games has had significant influence on this, not just the healing and lock-on and chapter-ending bosses but more generally the animations and level design and art direction, at the same time it’s also been frustrating to see people treat so many game design decisions that are characteristically Armored Core or at least conscious modernisations of it as being solely extensions of Elden Ring. Fromsoft has been making punishing games long before Demon’s Souls was even a twinkle in Miyazaki’s eye and that was originally much more to do with how it cohesively fits with the bleak atmosphere that their games try to evoke rather than any notion that “this is what the hardcore gamerz want”. Souls fans hypostatized this into the “hard but fair” slogan and we’ve ended up in a situation where so many people mistakenly think fromsoft’s games are hard just for the sake of being hard (which is partly the fault of marketing and party the fault of DS2 and partly the fault of the fans), but even then I feel Armored Core has always had a very different “fight bullshit with bullshit” approach to difficulty that’s often more puzzle-like than a mere test of execution or reactions, and the reception to this title more than any makes the difference clear as swathes of soulsheads struggle to make the transition or simply assume that they're struggling "because it's meant to be hard" rather than their build being bad.

I hate feeling like I’m wading into “discourse” but rattling off “bad difficulty curve” as if it’s some objectively bad thing is exactly the kind of abstract “good game design rules 101” thinking that I hate about so much game critique - acting like there’s a universally correct standard of difficulty instead of trying to concretely reflect on the wider context of the thing in front of you. One of the things I like about Armored Core is how it is principally about difficulty spikes, how it attempts to weave together incredibly easy morbid power-fantasy missions where you effortlessly stomp on people who don’t really deserve it and incredibly memorable walls like Nine-ball or White Glint or Balteus who kick you back to the drawing board and force you to engage with the customization without much regard for how predictably-structured or player-friendly the outcome is. This isn’t to say that disliking this blend or any of the boss design here isn’t valid, in a very general sense the flow is not traditionally Armored Core so I understand why oldheads would be turned off by that, nor is it to say it’s “good because it’s different”, it’s good because it works within the uniquely unconventional gameplay texture of this series, in spirit if not literally. If every game had a perfectly smooth difficulty curve, they would all be homogenous and sterile, and one of the things I love about fromsoft is how they’ve always been willing to flaunt such rules in pursuit of more holistically sublime experiences: Common game design dictates that Demon’s Souls’ final boss should have been the epic showdown against King Allant, not a mercy-kill against a defenceless blob, common narrative design dictates that Armored Core’s stories should be conveyed in appealing ways instead of frigid corporate Zoom calls - but I think both are better and more unique and interesting for ignoring such refrains.

This is all to say that Armored Core will alienate people. It’s a game that will be defined by its reception, by the clash between its uncompromising vision of excessive stat spreadsheets, difficulty walls and corporate bleakness against the expectant fans eager to experience Miyazaki’s new game with the souls series as their standard of quality. If anything, I think the cautionary attempts to inject some souls tropes into the affair have actually backfired: Chapter 1 starts incredibly slowly so new fans can be eased into things, but this mostly just creates a poor first impression and bores experienced players while also slowing down NG+ runs. There’s healing now, but the existence of checkpoints means that souls fans expecting something estus-adjacent will be disappointed, and the checkpoints themselves mostly (from what I’ve seen) trick new players into trying to brute force bosses instead of backing off to try a new build, which is admittedly discouraged by the mission structure requiring you to re-do the whole level leading up to the boss if you want to back out to buy new parts, despite the mid-level assembly option. There’s a lock-on now, and there has been an attempt to balance it, but it still mostly serves to make the game less unique and feel less like AC.

All that being said, there’s a lot to love here: Boosting around in your AC is more smooth and responsive than it’s ever been (though not as wild as 4A), so many of the new weapons here are unbelievably satisfying to use, the animations are gorgeously well done and the sound effects are top notch. While I wished to explore them a bit more, some of the environments are stunningly intricate and grand. The charming arena descriptions are back, Balteus’ theme slaps so hard, Rusty feels like AC’s version of Pixy from AC, Cel 240 reminded me of the final boss from Panzer Dragoon Zwei (though this is probably the only boss I would consider outright overtuned in its second phase), and I love how explicitly this game picks up on the thread of augmented humans from older games, I especially love making absolute freakshow mechs and giving them pretentious names and some of the new options here like the tetrapod legs are really unique.

Still need to delve deeper into NG+ and beyond, but I’ve been pretty damn satisfied with this. It’s certainly not without flaws but I think there’s just so much potential in this new style of AC that I can’t help but want it to succeed, and I would love to see it iterated upon and see some of those confused fusions between souls and AC ironed out and working properly. I think 4A might still be my favourite AC overall but this is definitely a promising revival for the series.

Final Fantasy Marathon Pitstop #2

I’m glad to have played VI and VII in this context. Going through the series chronologically really makes it apparent how big of a leap they both were, and VI and VII are interesting to compare as late 2D and early 3D games respectively so playing them back-to-back was quite fun.

As far as that comparison goes for VII, I’ll start with the biggest negative first; I think the turn-based combat of VII is worse than VI in virtually every way, in fact, if I’m being especially mean, I think it might be worse than every SNES FF. The reduced complexity of going from 4 party-members to 3 aside, the party members in VI were far more unique in terms of fundamental mechanics: Sabin’s Blitzes, Edgar’s tools, Cyan’s bushido techniques, etc. These were fundamental commands that set these characters apart from the rest of the crew and gave them an identity, whereas in VII a lot of that idiosyncrasy is locked behind limit breaks, which are a very good and fun mechanic, but don’t distinguish party members on a turn-by-turn basis. VI’s esper and relic systems were excellent because they perfectly synthesised the customization and long-term character planning of V with the fixed job-identities of IV. Materia, which follows the same philosophy, levels up independently of characters, so there’s little need to engage in any long-term planning, the stat changes they inflict are so miniscule that there’s no reason to care about that aspect of them either, and unless I was doing something wrong, materia levels up so slowly that you’ll spend the first 2/3rds of the game confined to the most basic spells and techniques. The ability to freely reassign materia would work well in the context of a game more willing to force you to switch characters, but again VII pales in comparison to VI in how it handles this. VI was ingeniously structured into a linear first half and an open second half, with the first forcing different party combinations and the second bringing all those different characters together for its brilliant multi-party dungeons. In comparison, unless you’ve innocently and/or ignorantly committed yourself to using Aerith, VII will rarely take you out of your comfort zone, there’s an incredibly brief section where Cloud and Tifa are taken away from you but aside from this you can just pick a team at the start of the game and stick to it throughout 95% of the runtime. Elemental weaknesses are much less relevant this time around, so very often encounters just boil down to holding the attack button, and this lack of complexity feels like part of the reason why the difficulty has been massively turned down from VI - if there’s little variety then asking the player to replay sections after a failstate becomes unattractive. The appeal of the combat feels much more attuned to the novelty of seeing your moves in 3D, the oft complained-about long summon animations being a symptom of this, they are cool and the 3D is great, don’t get me wrong, but I think the result is a combat system that’s more comfy than mechanically interesting, which is not really my preference considering VI arguably fulfils both of these functions.

Thankfully, VII is leaps and bounds ahead of VI in terms of its aesthetic sensibilities and thematic core that I consider them to be pretty similar in quality (that is, very good). As wonderful as the pixel art Final Fantasies are, all of those worlds were a little generic. VI had some steampunk/early industrial vibes but it wasn’t cohesive in the way that VII’s bio/cyberpunk themes are: The reactors and the slums, the vast lifestream and whirring machines of Midgar set against the struggles and drama of the tiny, downtrodden people who are trapped within it. The iconic, timeless soundtrack with its funky synths and intricate pre-rendered backgrounds catapult this setting into a whole new realm of artistry. I always think of the Shinra mansion basement with the dutch-angle shot where Those Chosen by the Planet plays in full for the first time - a type of cinematic moment that just wasn’t possible in the 2D era - as the sort of thesis statement for this specific aesthetic combination of fixed-angles and crunchy synths.

I played this with a retranslation patch, and as this is my first time I can’t really compare them fully, but I am somewhat surprised that the original translation is still so widely used to this day, from the few excerpts I’ve compared it seems very bad. That being said I enjoyed how this steps things up from the SNES era. VI’s story was well executed and full of drama and great moments, but it was nevertheless a classical heroes vs villain setup, where a ragtag band of charming characters team up to save the day from evil. VII feels like a generation step to a modern, more introspective, more subversive type of narrative: A protagonist who, out of shame for his failure to live up to his childhood expectations, supplements his broken identity with the illusion of heroism, supporting characters who struggle to reconcile their desire to set things right with the realisation that systemic, planetary forces beyond their control will ultimately render their heroics meaningless, a story where the cheerful, wide-eyed and eminently plot-relevant connective tissue in the protagonist’s love triangle dies suddenly for seemingly no reason, leaving the rest of the cast scrambling to find meaning in her death, only for the spell she sacrificed herself to cast to nevertheless leave presumably most of the world’s inhabitants dead - saving the planet but not its people. It’s not hard to see why it’s had such staying-power as a cultural object, despite the bad translation. I think Disc 2 lacks a lot of momentum compared to 1 but that arguably complements the aimlessness and lack of certainty felt by Cloud & Co at that point, and even if you don’t agree with that justification, the fact that it invites this kind of interpretation is what signifies its hefty ambition.

Anyway, it’s a classic, I don’t think I can offer any radically new perspective on it, if it had better gameplay it would probably be one of my favourite games but I still really enjoyed my time with it!

Onto VIII!

I feel it’s a two-steps-forward, one-step-back kind of entry, that is to say it’s mostly improvements but with some caveats. While the job system is excellent, it loses the ludonarrative advantage of fixed jobs that 4 capitalised on, and I never felt that anything in this game reached the holistically great moment that was Cecil’s arc from Dark Knight to Paladin in 4. I think it’s unsurprising that, in a series increasingly concerned with narrative, 4 ended up being the blueprint for most of the series in this regard. On the bright side, the return to free job-switching is much better than 3. With 3, it often felt quite gimmicky; you have a section where you get miniaturised and have your physical attacks rendered useless, which invariably must be solved by changing all 4 party members to magic users, and when it was over you just changed back to your regular team. In 5, however, encounters have a more flexible range of solutions, and progression is much more easily tracked. Not only does dabbling in a variety of jobs have a much better reward, thanks to the ingenious decision to allow job abilities to be freely transferred, the way that mastered jobs carry all of their stats and abilities over to the non-job/mimic allows for a long-term planning that makes this kind of system sing. I’ve long subscribed to the idea that the secret to successfully designing strategic gameplay lies in integrating and creating a tension between short and long-term decision-making, and with jobs, not only do you have to consider your composition with regards to the current boss or dungeon, you have to consider how the investments you make affect your final composition. The replayability this gives is excellent too. In terms of gameplay though, I’m still not a fan of how the late/endgame plays out in these early FFs, where it feels like in order to provide a challenge for the player who now has a very strong arsenal of abilities, they just start spamming insta-kill moves or status effects at you, which is by far the biggest source of frustration.

Narrative is definitely a step back for me. I can’t tell if this is solely explained by the aforementioned lack of characterisation that fixed jobs provides, but party members in 4 felt much more meaningfully implicated in the events of the plot; almost everyone in that game had some personal relation to Cecil, and the direction of the plot felt naturally directed by his goals and desires, whereas this feels like a return to the “four randos save the world” plots of 1-3 (Galuf being the weird exception). Exploration and tone have been changed accordingly. 4 had sparingly few moments where you could go out of your way to discover an optional area that you wouldn’t just go to later anyway, whereas here there’s an effort to open up the world much earlier and provide more significant avenues and rewards for exploration, it’s a great change and the added freedom thematically complements the freedom of the job system, but it’s a change that also accompanies a much more meandering tone. 4’s plot was ultimately goofy, I won’t deny that, but it was goofy in this innocent, melodramatic manner that resulted from earnestly trying to take itself seriously and deliver an emotional story. This is purely speculation, but 5 feels like an attempt to bashfully acknowledge how goofy 4 ended up being by playing up that goofiness instead of trying to really isolate and develop what made 4 great. The fact that 6 ultimately ended up doing that is why I think 5 has had (at least in my perception) so many positive reappraisals, it’s not only because it wasn’t localised, but because it feels like a potential style of Final Fantasy that was lost to history in favour of iterations on 4. The story has its moments, mostly comedic, that did make me laugh, and nothing misfired as hard as, for example, the fight against Edge’s parents in 4, but that potential for misfire is what I think is missing - that swinging for the fences of creative spirit set against the glaring hardware limitations and miniature sprite animations is what I think makes early Final Fantasy so captivating to this day. Don’t mistake this for me saying that 5 is “soulless” or some other nonsense - it’s full of soul, it just comes from a different, more whimsical/gameplay-driven place. The music did strike me too. As soon as I finished 4 and started up 5, the improvement in how well-rounded the bass felt instantly hit me, there was definitely a dramatic step-up in the team's handling of the sound chip (though if I’m being totally honest a lot of 4’s melodies still stick with me more strongly!)

I think, despite all that, I slightly prefer 5 overall - though I go back-and-forth on it. A lot of that is because - if you asked me whether I would rather replay 4 or 5, I would pick 5 in a heartbeat, thanks to that job system. I think the way ABP grinding works in tandem with random encounters actually changes things quite a bit. Both 4 and 5 have very high encounter rates, but whereas in 4 encounters are mostly just a drip feed of experience and a drain on your resources, in 5 they’re also progressing your job, which tips the psychological experience of getting into a random battle ever so slightly over into the positive side. It’s interesting how the subjective enjoyment of a game can rest on such a mental razor’s edge, but I think it’s a testament to how effective integrating different mechanics together really is.

For added context: This is mostly just charting my progress with the series. At the start of the year I had only played 14 (which I have way too many hours in) and 15 (which I played at launch and despised), so I was long overdue to make my way properly through all the games. Needless to say, I’m very excited to play 6 next…

There’s still plenty of games by Treasure that I still haven’t played and hope to play, but I think I’m starting to get a good idea of what makes their best games so captivating, not incidentally because it’s showcased so strongly here. Treasure have this sort of repertoire of mechanics which serve as a constellation around a central idea - encouraging the player to view and approach encounters in different ways - which is always surprising the player with the extent of the interactivity of the experience, and I’ve noticed that how much I like each game can be strongly correlated to how frequently and strongly this central idea is expressed. I understand that this is very abstract, so let’s try and make it more concrete:

Treasure loves parries; the idea of taking a projectile being fired at you and turning it back around. The frequency with which this mechanic occurs in their games really just makes it seem like somebody at the studio thought it was cool as shit (which it is), but it also serves a wider purpose: Projectiles are rarely just obstacles to be avoided, they’re just as equally potential tools. The best iteration I’ve seen of the idea is Mischief Maker’s Cerberus Alpha but Sin and Punishment makes major use of this idea too to provide moments of realisation for the player in a variety of ways. Enemies which initially seem to be threats because they fill the screen with more projectiles are recontextualised as things which help you through your own skill to deal with them, and this is integrated with decision-making; it’s not just “Oh, I can parry this projectile” but also “Oh, I should kill this guy with the rocket launcher last, because he is just giving me rockets to parry.” It's a really great complication to the simple loop of shooting everything that appears on the screen which can make a lot of shmups feel homogenous sometimes.

The second expression is the use of alternate modes, an idea which has gone through several evolutions in Treasure’s history. In the transition from Gunstar Heroes to Alien Soldier, it was decided that allowing the player to switch aiming modes mid-level was superior to a one-time choice, not only because it was more flexible, but because choosing the best mode for the situation in real-time is a deeper expression of skill and knowledge. The next evolution, occurring in Sin and Punishment, was that this choice can be integrated with the skill curve of the game. The lock-on mode of Sin and Punishment drastically helps the player reduce their mental stack, but it makes you do less damage than the manual aiming, so while it’s always ideal to manual aim, every section is essentially asking the player “do you think you have the skill to dodge all this shit and aim simultaneously?”, which rarely has a static answer. Sections where you relied on the lock-on in one playthrough you might “graduate” to manually aiming in the next, and this is such a dynamic, player-driven approach to difficulty.

I would say almost objectively that Ikaruga is the highest expression of this connection between mode-switching and a skill curve (for reasons that I probably don’t need to explain but could probably spend way too long doing anyway), but I really like this incarnation of it simply because of its connection with the early 3D era of the N64. This was Treasure’s first foray into true 3D and their use of it in this game is so joyous and imaginative. Part of why the use of lock-on as a tool for dealing with the mental stack is so effective is because it tasks you with aiming at enemies in the background, enemies above and below you, enemies next to you and even enemies in the foreground in front of you, all of whom can be sending projectiles your way in different 3D planes, it’s a lot to deal with, but that only enhances the foundational shmup satisfaction of feeling like a god because you just dodged a seemingly undodgeable pattern of bullets - which would not be as effective if you were only fired upon from one dimension. The way the game uses shifts in perspective is incredible: traditional rail shooting and run-n-gun blends together in subtle combinations, but then you’ll suddenly fight a boss in an arena where you can rotate 360 degrees around a central point, other parts, like the railcar section evoke a shooting gallery, and there’s a full Gunstar Heroes-esque run-n-gun section in the final level, and the pace of these shifts is so fast that it feels apt to call it a tour-de-force of various 3D shooting-game concepts.

The third expression is the interplay between close and long-range combat. Treasure shooting games very often break up purely ranged combat with degrees of close-quarters combat, an idea which bookends Treasure’s major works, beginning with the claustrophobic fight against Orange on top of a plane in Gunstar Heroes and ending with the fistfight against Deko Gekisho in Star Successor, Radiant Silvergun found a way to sneak in a sword into a genre traditionally dealing only in bullets, and Sin and Punishment’s moments of melee combat are some of the best in the game - flinging Radahn off a cliff and Brad through a window just doesn’t get old. It works, again, because you have to think about the situation and choose which type of attack is best, further fostering this interactivity that purely moving a reticle over an enemy and holding down the shoot button doesn’t.

I wouldn’t say having these elements alone constitutes a good game, but harmonising them to create a complex experience is why I think this and Treasure’s other games are so great. That isn’t to say that Sin and Punishment doesn’t have its own unique things going on though: I think the approach to story here is quite interesting and complements the short yet highly-replayable structure really well. On the first go, story beats like the dream sequence or characters like Achi or even allegiances and motivations of certain characters are incredibly hard to parse, but the fact that they’re so confusing gives the story relevance beyond the first playthrough, since it makes progressively more sense each time. It’s something that I’m surprised more developers don’t take advantage of, kind of like how the way Hades’ story is structured complements its repetitious roguelite structure, this complements the replayable arcade structure.

The music is also really great. Toshiya Yamanaka has remarked that this was thanks to some programmer at Treasure who was capable of programming the N64’s pulse-code modulation, which results in higher sound quality. I don’t really understand that myself, but the music here goes hard, even if it does have some questionable repetitions.

The difficulty modes are also incredibly well done. Easy, medium and hard aren’t just differentiated by damage sliders, sections can be quite radically different on each difficulty as there are added enemies and new attacks, which is basically a perfect execution of difficulty selection in a game like this.

I would be remiss to not mention some of the flaws as I don’t think this is a perfect game. The voice acting is terrible. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some campy, trashy voice acting, but this game is clearly going for a more serious tone and that really clashes with the bad line deliveries. While I prefer the conciseness of this game in general, Star Successor has a better version of melee options, as it’s too easy in this game to spam the attack button to parry anything you want, whereas the sequel demands timing. The first level is also such a snoozefest, even on hard, that it sometimes feels like a chore to go through on a fresh run. Having such an easy first level isn’t even necessary for new players since this game already has quite a good tutorial.

On the whole though this is probably my favourite Treasure game I’ve played so far and the flaws are really not that big of a deal. Really looking forward to playing the Treasure games I haven't played yet (Dynamite Headdy, Gradius V, Bangai-O, Silhouette Mirage, possibly more)

Evaluated as a port and a remaster, this is a pretty good offering and it gets an extra half-star just for that. Between the jump from 30 to 60 fps and the ability to play without motion controls, this ends up having quite a strong game feel, at least in the fundamental act of controlling Link. On top of this, a lot of Fi’s interruptions are now optional, the text boxes that appear when first collecting an item no longer reset upon starting a new game session, and you have the ability to quick-scroll through text boxes, all of this goes a long way in mitigating the default plodding pace of Skyward Sword. I’m not entirely convinced that all of this amounts to $60 worth of changes to what is basically a 2011 Wii game with slightly improved textures and quality of life changes (one of which requires you to shell out even more cash) but taken inherently, it’s a fairly good package, especially if you upscale to 4k in an emula-Nintendo hitman fires blowdart into my neck, killing me instantly

But enough about the port, how’s the actual game?

It’s not hard to see why this entry was maligned for so many years, and with this being the final “traditional” Zelda before Breath of the Wild, there’s a very obvious narrative that Skyward Sword becomes saddled with; a Zelda game so problematically linear and patronising that it prompted Nintendo to scrap the entire formula altogether in favour of something that was the polar opposite. Scepticism of such narratives is healthy, and I don’t doubt that we’ll see plenty of “Skyward Sword was good, actually” takes from the content-mill in the future, but properly putting this game in the context of the series and Nintendo’s design tendencies during the Wii era doesn’t put it in a positive light, and I don’t think that’s a perspective which is going to be so easily swept aside, even in the future where the new open world Zelda formula inevitably becomes tired and people begin to yearn for what came before.

For as homogenous as their major franchises sometimes feel, each entry is imbued with the design philosophy of the console generation it accompanies, and this one is where Nintendo really leaned into their “family friendly” image. Nintendo’s interpretation of this philosophy in connection with their game design has always been dubious, but the way it materialises here is probably the most egregious incarnation of it. Link can’t have a single moment of hands-off exploration without the game checking in to make sure he knows where to go, when to go there, how to get there, whether this is in the form of Fi’s constant dialogue interruptions or dowsing or the general linearity of the levels or the many other pacebreakers, it’s all the same phenomenon from different angles - a design philosophy that prioritises “no person left behind” at the expense of everything else. I’m not the first person to make this observation and I won't be the last, but smoothing down an experience such that there’s nothing to inconvenience or frustrate the player anymore also leads to an experience where there isn’t any tension anymore. Putting snags to progression into your game will always frustrate some people, sure, but the mature thing to realise is that the memorable moments in an adventure are the snags. The very first Zelda was momentous (in part) because of how well it understood this, so it’s disappointing to see it so thoroughly misunderstood here.

It really can’t be understated how pervasive this problem is, at no point does it stop feeling like the game is treating you with kid gloves. It’s a dead horse, and I don’t like throwing around the word “worst”, but I think Fi is genuinely one of the worst companions ever put into a video game. “Expressionless, emotionless robot who spouts random percentages to tell you obvious things” is a concept that shouldn’t have even escaped the boardroom it was conceived in, and her interjections are nothing short of insulting. Instead of being naturally drawn towards a vantage point via clever level design, Fi will take control away from you to tell you that this high point is a good vantage point, and that you should look for things from it. Walking into the sand sea for the first time is interrupted by the pacebreaking advice from Fi that “you should explore this area”, which every player will do anyway, walking into a triforce room in the final dungeon of the game prompts her to tell you that “you should explore this room”, and there are dozens and dozens of these moments. Sometimes she straight up spoils the solutions to some puzzles, the entrance to the first Lanayru dungeon being a prime example. Everything about her inclusion undercuts the possibility of a memorable “aha” moment from occurring. It’s extra baffling when you consider that this series already had the most memetically complained-about helper companion in Navi, it seems almost determined to repeat the same mistakes.

A similar kind of uncritical relationship to the series past was already going strong in Twilight Princess, but it reaches a new low here: Forest temple (x2), Fire temple (x2), Water temple, slingshot, bow and arrow, hookshot, bomb bag, swimming ability etc etc. Almost everywhere you’ll go and what you’ll find there is so predictable and formulaic, save for some exceptions like time crystals or the beetle (which the game doesn’t use to its full potential anyway). This isn’t helped by the fact that the three only areas are themed in the most boring way imaginable, let us not forget that this is the same era of Nintendo which spawned New Super Mario Bros with its repetitions of the forest world and the fire world and the desert world. With how the game forces you back into these areas over and over again in the most contrived ways possible, it really feels stretched thin, and some of the tasks you do in these revisits are insulting (specifically, the 2nd Skyview temple visit and the note collecting swimming section). Being (very) charitable, you could say that revisiting these areas to find some hidden extra area or discover some change to the world is satisfying, but I don’t think it works this way. Revisiting areas with new equipment was always part of the Zelda exploratory loop, but it was usually something unprompted and natural; you remember somewhere you couldn’t get to earlier and return there out of curiosity and a desire for resolution, which is undermined when you force players back into the same area and make them dowse for the path ahead, it makes it feel like the player isn’t actually discovering anything, just doing what they’re told. Being forced to return to the Isle of Songs after every visit is just the tedious icing on this cake, made even worse when you consider that traversing through the sky is completely devoid of interest. The one chance for exploration, in the sky islands, is nullified by being reserved for goddess cube rewards, meaning the decision to go to each island is prescribed beforehand by whether it has a chest on it that you have unlocked, which repeats the flaws of the main path rather than providing a contrast to it.

This linearity extends into the dungeons too, especially the first three, which are almost entirely constructed to require no backtracking. This might sound good if you don’t like backtracking but the result is that these dungeons feel more like very video-gamey obstacle courses than concrete locations in a world that you can explore - their design is too much signal and not enough noise. I don’t think this problem is exclusive to Skyward Sword, but it’s telling that Skyward Sword’s best dungeons - the Sandship and the Sky Keep - require you to think on a grander scale beyond the room you happen to currently be in, something which Tears of the Kingdom’s dungeons also unfortunately lack.

Item use and combat have a similarly prescribed feel. It’s very revealing that the most satisfying item to use in this game is the bug net, because of its context insensitivity and extension with your fundamental controls. With the exception of the beetle, the rest all have prescribed uses - things that can be whipped, for example, are too cleanly demarcated - which adds to that on-rails feel, like each object has a label saying “USE THIS ITEM”. This is another point in favour of time crystals, since they’re one of the few puzzle components which can be activated in a variety of ways - bombs, sword, bow, beetle, etc. This flaw isn’t unique to Skyward Sword either, but it’s conspicuous that a reaction against this type of design appears to have been one of the inspirations for Breath of the Wild’s commitment to multiple puzzle solutions.

I was initially hopeful about the combat, I like unconventional control schemes and the idea of devoting an entire chunk of it solely to sword control could have been good. It’s unclear to me whether this idea just doesn’t have legs or whether the game doesn’t do enough to iterate on it, but the final result is underwhelming either way. The fights against Ghirahim are the only ones in the game which actually feel like swordfights, the rest feel like one of those children’s toys where you put the square in the square hole. The enemy puts their sword up to the right, you slash left, it’s incredibly junior and the game iterates on it incredibly poorly. If an enemy has three arms and holds a sword to the right, one up top and one down below, the solution is still just slashing left, there’s just a little more visual noise added to the equation. There’s a variety of ways this combat could have been improved, but for me, what’s missing is spacing - there’s no threat range. Every enemy will just walk into your range and execute their little directional minigame, which totally defeats any illusion that they’re not just video-game enemies performing AI routines. Again, Ghirahim is the only one with the level of interactivity that makes him feel like an actual swordfight against a conscious being. Granted, the impreciseness of the original controls probably contributed to Nintendo’s disinclination to make this more complex - something basically confirmed by the large margins for error and minor punishments for mistakes - but that’s all the more reason for disappointment.

The story showcases a similar indulgence in the tropes of the past as the gameplay, the last-minute sleight-of-hand where the main antagonist is suddenly switched out for Ganondorf is lifted directly from Twilight Princess, but most of all I can’t stand how explicitly the game attempts to engage with the “Zelda timeline” by posturing itself as an origin story for the rest of the franchise. Not a single game in this series has benefitted from the (frankly nonsense) insinuation that they’re all connected. Optimistically, you can just frame it as just a fun diversion for fan theorists, but when the result is cutscenes which almost seem to scream “REMEMBER OCARINA OF TIME?”, it reveals this tactic as shameless nostalgia-baiting, which seems to be something modern Nintendo are all-too-reliant on. The majority of the story beats are, bluntly, filler. Link spends most of his time in this game attempting to “prove himself” or gather some MacGuffin to power up his sword, which, again, works really poorly in conjunction with game design which already feels like it’s making you do chores.

For all my problems with this game, I think, ultimately, the Zelda games have a remarkably high standard of quality, but Nintendo were unwilling to make anything other than variations of A Link to the Past for far too long, and were only willing to let it go when it was utterly clear that it wasn’t going to work anymore. A little foresight could have prevented Skyward Sword from feeling so irredeemably stagnant, but that’s unfortunately not how corporations and their extreme short-termism work. If Aonuma is to be believed, Breath of the Wild will suffer the same fate. Formulas aren’t inherently bad. Having a solid foundation of tropes undoubtedly helps with development, but a series so focused on exploration and discovery inherently has a tension with its own formulas. In Skyward Sword, when I saw that chest-opening animation for the 1000th time and Link held the bow and arrow above his head for the 6th (?) game in a row, and I saw that squid boss with a massive, obvious eye weak point and I instantly knew what to do, that tension was clearer than ever. My fear is that, as early as the second game in the new formula, when I saw the blood moon rising again, started picking up rocks to get Korok seeds again, stumbled across a dragon in the overworld again, I felt the same feeling of “I’ve seen this before”. I think it’s possible a good balance could be found, but I’m sceptical that Nintendo will find it given their bad habits and undiscerning fanbase.

I desperately want to be able to love this game, I think the fundamentals of combat are excellent and I deeply respect what it’s doing on that front. There’s a tendency in character action games, even ones I love (thinking of DMC primarily) for enemies to be relegated to being a punching-bag, whether they’re too passive or not really able to keep up with the protagonist's superior mobility. Ryu is one of the most mobile (and well animated) of them all - being able to wall run and flip over the heads of enemies while air-slashing through them, but it's cleverly counterbalanced by enemies having very quick attacks and especially grabs which can go through blocks without it being possible to react, which necessitates the constant use of that mobility to avoid being pinned down. In that sense it has a fighting game feel to it, simultaneously promoting good aggressive and defensive play. Those prone to getting frustrated would call untelegraphed, unblockable attacks “bad game design”, but its constructed in accordance with Ryu’s toolkit and gives the combat incredible stakes, often focused around who lands the first hit, and lends a very distinct thematic character to Ryu as a human at the height of training rather than someone with supernatural power, which is felt because the player has to approach combat in a similarly disciplined way. Other ideas like the essence mechanic, despite being poorly conveyed, are also very good and make charge moves actually useful when even in the best action games they’re mostly useless due to being so slow.

So why don’t I love it? I think as early as chapter 6, the game plummets in the quality of its level and boss ideas and never really climbs back up. Every platforming section feels finicky and frustrating, the ones where you have to platform while ranged enemies shoot at you feel particularly sadistic, the military base infinitely spawning laser drones that send you flying if they hit you takes my nomination for the worst of all. I don’t mind the general difficulty of the game but these sections are difficult in a way which is not interesting or enjoyable to engage with. The swimming chapter is another example of an idea so disconnected from what makes the core mechanics good that it's difficult to imagine anyone finding it fun. Bosses were also mostly pretty terrible. Bland and simplistic movesets aside, I feel this combat is very obviously complimented by opponents similarly sized to Ryu who will react to being hit, whereas the game is content to throw these massive boss monsters at you over and over again, even having the gall to recycle a very bad worm miniboss four times in quick succession. There seemed to be a commitment to having diverse scenarios but some of its ideas are awful: infinitely spawning phantom fish that lock you into a grab animation, fights vs tanks and helicopters with awful ranged combat, grab attacks in the final tower that pull you through the floor and make you slog through the same section again, and so on.

It's fashionable to bemoan the shift of action games away from exploration and worldbuilding and towards an endless stream of combat arenas but I'll be honest and say that I found the attempt at an interconnected world here pretty underwhelming, at no point did any of its lame lock-and-key puzzles or frictionless backtracking impress me. While I agree with the overall sentiment about CAG's neglecting the importance of their worlds, I would rather not return to this particular incarnation of it.

It feels pointless to complain about the story given that nobody cares but it’s kind of impressively bad and incoherent, Rachel is a particularly trashfire character design that feels like what outsiders to gaming have in mind when they deride the gaming sphere as juvenile and unserious and every cutscene that with her in it had me looking over my shoulder to quickly get the game off the monitor if someone walked in.

The camera is a common point of complaint with a lot of players. Its permanent inverted controls (+ a very awkward activation which I didn’t figure out for quite a while) already make it inherently weak but the game seems determined to construct environments that make the camera freak out in its winding, claustrophobic tunnels. There are frequent combat arenas where enemies will just spawn behind you, requiring you to either reposition or just try to guess what the enemy is doing, which feels like playing around a bad camera rather than actually engaging with the mechanics. Context sensitivity is another issue revolving around this. Interact and attack being the same button was particularly frustrating but in terms of the most frequent fuck-ups flying swallow is inconsistent both in activation and damage and will just sometimes hit an armored part of the enemy and do nothing.

My laundry list of gripes I can only lay out in a boring manner because it's not a unified problem but a sort of consistent stream of ancillary issues that stick themselves onto a very fundamentally sound core, and so I do come out the other end still favourable towards Ninja Gaiden Black, but I am disappointed that unlike a lot of people I respect on this platform I can’t really call it one of my favourites. I will say that I think the visuals of the game are generally very good and I could easily see myself appreciating it more on a second playthrough, but for now it can sit at a strong 7.

Resident Evil is one of my gaming blind spots. Prior to this I had never played one, largely due to a disinterest in horror. After seeing everyone play the remake in the past few weeks I finally decided to take the plunge into the original, and I'm glad to report that this game is excellent, even for a newcomer playing 18 years after its release.

All of RE4s parts are individually great, but what allows it to transcend is how they all complement one-another: Crowd control, resource management, and encounter design feed into and heighten each-other. Controlling a crowd in RE4 is an art, one with strict rules and procedures. Leon's tank movement means running away from enemies is a matter of turning and then running, highly incentivizing the player to stand their ground, and the crowd control mechanics are designed around this. Shoot enemies that get close in the head and they'll stumble back and allow you to kick them back into the enemies behind them, shoot enemies running at you in the leg and they'll eat shit and have to go through a very lengthy standing-up animation, coordinate it all to line up viscerally satisfying rifle collaterals on a line or shotgun shots and grenades on big clumps of enemies for maximum resource efficiency, a conveyor belt of micro decision-making that's prompted and heightened by the limited resources. Using the knife on downed enemies would be rote and boring in any other game but it's deeply satisfying here because it flows perfectly and you know it's saving you ammo. The classic gameplay dilemma of using your green plants now or waiting to combine them with a red one later, buying a first aid in the shop or saving up for upgrades, selling the treasures now for short-term funds or waiting to combine them for bigger gains later, all of it compounds with your performance in the combat. Take a lot of damage in one section and you might be on the back foot in healing items for a long time, your actions have consequences stretching far beyond immediate combat which lends each encounter real tension - encounters that feature such incredible creativity and variety. One room might have cultists firing flaming catapults at you in a long-range setting, the next might require you to send Ashley to open the way forward as you're tasked with simultaneously defending her and yourself at different vertical levels, the next might have you navigating a maze as dogs with a bullshit grab attack hunt you down, the bag of tricks seems to never ends and it rarely repeats an idea verbatim. In its best moments, every new room seems to ask you to approach things in a radically different way, despite Leon's relatively limited set of actions and tools. Remove the horror strings and the dark gothic setting and you would still have an incredibly tense game, all baked into the mechanics. The final ingredient elevating it to all-time great status is the camp, which is consistently hilarious. Leon saying "no thanks, bro" will repeat in my head forever, probably.

I didn't expect this game to be so hard! It's probably something experienced players gloss over, since the game becomes much easier once you know what you're doing, but this game kicked my ass, sometimes in ways that I felt crossed the line. The section where you get locked in a cage with the claw guy killed me about 20 times, and while I didn't mind the QTEs that much, the ones that instantly kill you for failing them just feel mean-spirited.

Three critiques I didn't have a good place for: Ashley was a massive disappointment, she says remarkably little throughout the game and I was expecting a lot more interaction between her and Leon. Also, these puzzles suck! You know it's bad when there's a slide puzzle - the bottom of the barrel of puzzles. Finally, the island section is a bit mixed, and veers too close to generic action in places, the worst offender being the helicopter section.

A really loving fan successor to Ace Combat, it’s really good! At its best it looks, sounds and plays exactly like a hypothetical Ace Combat 8, with some pretty good ideas of its own like multiple weapon modules and greater air target variety with the airships. In particular I loved the AOA limiter, a lot more intuitive and free than the PSMs of AC7, and insanely fun. Boss fights are also pretty creative here with their railguns, which are a much needed complication from the standard dogfight. The music is also great. A lot of the time you completely forget that this is an indie game, which is a sign of how competent the execution is.

It has some limitations compared to AC, however. Mission variety is not nearly as good as AC5 or 7, with this feeling like a spiritual sibling to AC6 with its grand and expansive missions that largely just have you blowing up either air or ground targets. Tastes differ but in my opinion variety is king in these kinds of games, and some curveballs like AC7s stealth-spotlight mission or AC5s undercover camera mission would have been welcome.

The story feels like a very conscious tribute to AC0 but it’s unfortunately much weaker. The Federation’s characterisation is weaker than Belka and Crimson 1 doesn’t even compare to Pixy’s level of character arc. Crimson 1 in particular felt like a big misstep, the climactic final battle and emotional farewell to him feeling completely out of nowhere given his 5-10 minute total screen time.

Two glimmers of greater things are Prez and Conquest mode. If the fanbase’s fixation with Prez proves anything it's that these games (AC included) could really benefit from some elaborated character interaction. The fact that this entire character is locked behind 2-seater planes is a laudable commitment to realism but it also feels a bit wasteful. Similarly, Conquest mode makes me imagine a potentially better version of itself, with AC7s plane-building mechanic built in and a lot of extra unique scenarios, dilemmas and decisions that would make each run feel more unique and like a full-fledged roguelike. Regardless, it's fun and keeps me booting up the game every now and then for a run in a way that AC doesn’t really do.

If I ever bought a VR headset, this would probably be my #1 stop. Doing those AOA manoeuvres in VR would either be the greatest thing ever or make me instantly throw up, maybe both.