My least favourite FO3 expansion is ironically the one I enjoy talking about the most because it's uniquely terrible.

On the surface it's (ostensibly - I may be putting too much faith in the writers) a straightforward parody of what was, at the time, every shooter on the market: You are simultaneously a nobody and a legend, the entire US military cannot do anything without you, and there's no real way to engage with the world beyond murdering people in linear, grey hallways.
This is only aided by the in-universe notes/audio logs that make it obvious the simulation is massively detached from reality at the behest of an insane, sinophobic American general. So it's an in-universe parody as well an out-of-universe one.

There's just one big stinky winky dinky problem:

The parody doesn't work because the core of it is what Fallout 3 already is.

Fallout 3 at its core is a game where you walk through unwieldy shooting galleries in boring environments, endlessly massacring nearly everything you come across in areas that're 99% of the time either linear hallways or intersections that lead to linear hallways.
The only meaningful difference between OA and the game it's bolted onto is that Fallout 3 very occasionally pretends to be an RPG and lets you talk to someone. Even then, 9/10 times you either kill them or having a big prompt that lets you do so.

Perhaps what makes OA so much worse is that it's a thinly-veiled excuse to deposit some loot on you. Your incentive to do the DLC isn't "see this cool place", "free some slaves", "finish the main story" or "aliens, right?", no. You're told in no unclear terms that you should do this DLC for the loot that's in the vault. That's it.

I'll speak on it in more depth when I finish the actual Fallout 3 review, but the actual rewards you get really compound the game's overall issue with loot being meaningless. Namely, OA is perhaps the only part of FO3 that features a reward dump that isn't shit. The stealth armor, winterized T-51B, shocksword and gauss rifle are all excellent regardless of one's build, and given how easy OA is they're functionally free.
But there's a lot in the vault that I can only describe as nothing more than shelf-filling garbage. Upon slogging through OA and opening it, you'll be met with uh... A Chinese Assault Rifle, some ammo for it, and a Missile Launcher, alongside lots of mines and grenades. All incredibly common loot in the wasteland, to the point where I don't blame anyone for thinking the vault is bugged when they see so much trash loot.

And, all things considered, it probably is bugged or at least unfinished. As is the norm for Bethesda games, there's a bevy of cut content for this DLC and the vast majority of it is stuff that'd fit in the loot vault - most noticeably reskins of the sim weapons but without the bloated HP. Which would still be unremarkable, but at least it'd be unique - that simulation exclusive Chinese Assault Rifle looks gorgeous.

The extra 0.5 of a star rating only comes from me having played this through Tale of Two Wastelands, which makes it less of a slog (due to your armor's DT/DR outclassing that of your enemies) and fills the vault with all the aforementioned cut content - plus some other goodies.

The only saving grace to this DLC is that it's perhaps the first and only time I've agreed with people who're fans of Bethesda's Fallout: They hated it at release, so do I.

They still hate it in 2024, and so do I.

Game's cool. You play as Meatwad. It’s filled with smartly designed puzzles, making engaging use of an oddball toolset that rewards out-of-the-box thinking… but only so much. Beyond manoeuvrability skill checks that are satisfying enough to clear, and a few cool mechanical revelations, there wasn't a lot of head scratching here for me. Animal Well is tremendously well-accomplished for a solo project, I had a great time with it! It's just lacking a certain star power for it to really raise the bar.

For complete transparency, I had this game sold to me as an ‘Outer Wilds-like’ - and upon seeing that it was a sidescrolling metroidvania, I was beside myself with hope that I’d get a few notes of La-Mulana in Animal Well, too. In practice however, I think the more apt comparisons for Animal Well would be games like Environmental Station Alpha, Super Junkoid, A Monster's Expedition, or Knytt. The distinction is important, to me at the very least, because I approached Animal Well with pure intentions but spent most of my runtime hoping for an experience that never actually came. This isn’t a game about losing yourself in the sprawling tendrils of a world’s unfolding internal logic - Animal Well is an array of screens containing pressure plate puzzles. The world feels utilitarian, and even with the animal themed ruins that politely aim to conjure a sense of dread and mystery, it’s all misaligned and mismatched in a way that lacks the cohesion of a place with a history worth learning. The latter end of my runtime was characterised by backtracking through areas to collect the final few tools, but it was made excruciating by way of the fact that practically all of the screens merely become desolate roadways once you’ve solved their focal puzzles. I don’t think I spent any more than five minutes on any given puzzle in the first ‘layer’’ of the game, and for as much as I like how left-field the player toolset is, their interplay with the puzzles themselves is usually shockingly obvious and leaves very little room for doubt.

There is, undeniably, an inclusion of outtadisworld ARG-like puzzles that at the time of writing are still being unfolded by dedicated Animal Well researchers, but I’d be lying if I said I value things like that remotely as much as game content I can be trusted to learn and master on my own. Will the community uncover a secret back half of the game that turns the whole joint on its head Frog Fractions-style? I kind of doubt it lol. I’m a sicko that completed La-Mulana 2 on launch week before any guides were even written, the distinction here is that that series takes great pains to contextualise its puzzles in multiple ways - through cryptic hints and also through things like inferred historicity and synergy. Animal Well doesn’t do this, it scatters codes and event flags around the map in obscure nooks in the hopes that a friend group is putting together a Google Doc.

I don’t want to talk TOO much about the part of Devil May Cry 5 where you PLAY it because, let’s be real here, you know, right? I’m late to this party. We all KNOW that this is simply one of the finest video game action achievements, the culmination of fifteen years of promise since DMC3 set us down this road. One of the few games with a modern AAA level of fidelity that by and large emulates the quick, snappy responsiveness of the PS2 era that grandfathered it. We’re all maybe a little sad to see the puzzle elements fully reduced to an aesthetic touch and the challenge dressing on levels discarded entirely (is this the first DMC without a stage where your health constantly reduces in the main progression path?), but we’re also all well aware that these things along with the discarding of all gimmick enemies betrays an absolute confidence in the core experience, a confidence well-earned. We all know this is Dante’s most perfectly tuned, well-balanced move set, without a chink in its armor; we all know that the addition of devil arms lends a feeling of completeness to Nero that finally makes him feel like he competes with the big boys in potential along with a truly unique layer of strategy that expands upon his already technical skill set; I’m sure you’re all as impressed as I am at how weirdly intuitive V is to play as, a stealth highlight of a campaign that was truly joyful, near frictionless.

Everybody KNOWS this stuff. We’ve all played DMC5, we’ve all talked about it, the game is simply sick as fuck. We all love Pull My Devil Trigger, it’s the best song ever made, this is just true! It’s Just True. So I don’t feel like writing about that stuff any more than I have, other people have surely done it better. I try not to read reviews before I’ve finished writing my own, but I’m sure people have done it better right here on Backloggd. I’d rather talk about the way this series has very organically transitioned from something I laugh along with, that’s maybe a lot smarter about its application of gothic theming than I would have expected, to something that’s emotionally invested me on the level I care about, like, I dunno, Naruto or whatever, to something that I think has, over time, crafted a genuinely touching story of a family wounded by trauma and their ability or inability to overcome a great social and generational violence. I don’t think this has been there the whole time, but by allowing the series’ now-regular main credited writer since DMC3, Bingo Morihashi, a consistent creative voice in the franchise, he’s taken characters who have been portrayed disparately across two decades and used these gaps and these disparities as a tool to demonstrate the ways that time and experience do and don’t change us, especially when we’re molded by intense experiences early in life. I think this has been happening for a long time in this series, but DMC5 gives the context necessary to fully solidify it as a feat of characterization.

I don’t think that either of the twists in this game are particularly shocking if you’re paying attention to anything anyone says or does in DMC4 or this game but I am gonna toss out that there are a couple of big bombs in this game and I’m gonna talk pretty openly about them, and as I’ve mentioned I think the writing in this is pretty fuckin sick so if you care about that, now’s the time to duck out!

Devil May Cry 5 is a game about The Boys. Everybody tends to take their turn in the limelight in this series but as is often the case in this genre of story a lot of the time they just kind of hang out after their story is done? Like, there’s not really a good reason for Trish and Lady to be in DMC4 and 5 from a narrative perspective and they don’t really grow as characters, we’re just happy to see them because they’re Cool, right? Vergil didn’t even get to like, BE in DMC4 he only got to be a bonus character in a RE-RELEASE of it seven years later lmao. DMC5 is unique in the series in that it’s the first time we get a story that gets to focus entirely on characters we already know and whose schtick we’ve already seen and, importantly, whose schticks have not changed in a meaningful way. And this is ultimately the problem, right? The crux of this story, and in some ways, ultimately, the crux of every Devil May Cry story, is that Dante and Vergil refuse to change. They’re unable to do it on their own, and they don’t have anyone willing to force them. But they have to change, or they’re going to die. They’re going to kill EACH OTHER, and Nero is probably going to kill like a million more people, but they’re going to kill each other too, and that’s like, that’s sad, right? It sucks. These are Our Boys. Let’s talk about them.

I’ve alluded earlier and in my DMC4 review that Dante is a character who is something of a chameleon in this series – he wears a lot of different hats. He can kind of be whatever he needs to be, symbolically. A romantic hero, a gothic one, a gay icon, a harlequin. And it works, he’s a complicated guy, aided by the fact that he’s the character who most often straddles the fourth wall, playing most directly to the audience. But no matter what Dante is in a given moment there’s something he always is, unerringly: closed off. Dante’s most consistent trait, more than loving pizza, more than being a loud mouth, more than thinking violence is sexy, is being unwilling to let other people in on his own turmoil. He doesn’t lack for it! When your dad is Cool Satan and your mom dies saving you from demons when you’re only a wee lad, right in front of your eyes, as your house burns around you, surely that would fuck you up. Dante is kind of an asshole but he IS an innately kind person; he’s made it his mission to hunt demons and he does it mostly altruistically (he is clearly not raking in the bucks at any point in the timeline we meet him on) and throughout the series he’s looking out for other people, trying to do right by them even if it’s often in a paternalistic, self-sacrificial way.

But while he’s happy to be there for other people, emotionally and more often physically, he’s loathe to let anyone be there for him. After Vergil rejects his offer of family Dante essentially shuts down and he’s on a downward path for the rest of his life. We see it at the end of the third game when he stoically rejects Lady’s attempt to comfort him in his obvious grief, physically turning away from her to hide the evidence of his tears as he verbally denies their existence; we see it in 1 where he only talks about his feelings for Trish after he thinks she’s dead, and when she’s back at the end he frames all of his tenderness towards her insecurities rather than as a projection of his feelings; 2 is perhaps his most obviously wooden state in all directions and gives him no obvious opportunities for connection; and in 4 he essentially fails to act normal towards Nero until the actual ending, when there are multiple points where large parts of the story could have been entirely averted or assuaged had he just taken a moment to let Nero in. I don’t JUST mean when he’s first meeting Nero and Nero tries to kill him either, I mean once Nero is suspicious of the church and Dante clearly knows what’s going on; just chat him up in the jungle bro! But he can’t, that’s his whole thing. Dante is like 40 years old in DMC4, and he’s had no reason to get better about his hangups and many reasons to get worse since Vergil amplified them twenty years prior. By the time of DMC5 it’s no wonder why he tries to forcibly remove all of his friends from a dangerous scenario even before he realizes how personal the conflict is to him, and why he works so much harder once he does connect the dots – he’s fully given up on trying. And after getting away with having people at arm’s length for so long, why not? It’s going fine. So in 5 he repeatedly tries to psych Nero out of hanging around, eventually starts telling him flat out to leave, and he refuses to talk to Trish about Vergil, again framing it as for her own benefit when she’s wounded as an excuse to avoid his own feelings.

I feel like Dante is largely a pretty classic variation on the post-war Japanese delinquent type of guy who exists explicitly in opposition to the conservative society that he largely was spawned from, or even the post-delinquent kind of scrappy hero you'd see in the post-Nikkatsu studio boom (thinking about early Imamura type protagonists - although Dante's sexuality is more implicit to his being), and oftentimes this character comes with a bleeding heart of gold that may be hidden to varying degrees, to further drive home his separation from the straight lace he opposes; except that Dante clearly sees his vulnerability as a weakness to be hidden, fully erecting his facade, which DMC5 offers the most cracks in. Throughout the game, especially in the last few missions as things become more dire and he’s starting to sweat, you can see Dante’s happy-go-luckiness slip. Not that it’s a mask all the time, but that in these moments he has to work for it. There’s a degree to which he would rather fake his normal personality than deal with his shit. I don’t think Dante’s totally putting it on or anything, like I think when Vergil is like “if I 1v1 nero and win it’s like I beat you okay” and Dante replies jokingly to it I think that’s a genuine response to the absolutely unhinged thing Vergil said, but I also think it’s an effort to enact a Nothing Is Wrong Tee Hee personality All The Time, and he loses it a lot at the end of the game.

Vergil, then, as ever, is Dante’s opposite. He didn’t get those last few moments of parental love before their mom died, because she died looking for him after she sheltered Dante, so the lesson Vergil took away from that night was that the only person he can ever rely on is himself, and he needs to become strong enough that no one can hurt him ever, ever again. That is, of course, a starting point, and a driving element of his personality that we were missing before DMC5 shows us those moments in detail. Crystallizing the moment of trauma also crystallizes these two as people rather than fun but shallow shonen protagonists. Vergil may ultimately be an enormous prick with no empathy but he’s not like that for no reason now and I do think that’s worth something.

So where Dante is a red-blooded rebellious asshole Vergil is prim and proper, clothes suggesting angular lines and rigid posture. His speech is formal, his sword is more classically elegant, an ornate katana vs. Dante’s gaudy hot topic ornament broadsword. He evokes classical samurai imagery in more than his sword – it’s in his cruel demeanor, his manufactured regality, the way that much of this is a facade, and the way he considers power a justification in itself. The strong dominate the weak – he has experienced this firsthand, as the weak, as a boy – and so in pursuit of becoming the strong, nothing is off the table, and more than once he does some intense mass murder to get to where he needs to be. He essentially has the same image of the ideal man in his head that modern Japanese fascists do but he at least has the justification of terrible childhood trauma driving his insecurities.

The thing about Dante and Vergil though isn’t just that they’re opposites - they’re also twins. They perceive themselves to have the same problem: they both think that to be vulnerable is their ultimate weakness, and to cope with that they’re both performing idealized images of masculinity, they just have different ideas of what that looks like. Dante’s is obviously less harmful to the world at large because he hasn’t murdered anyone over it and he never voted for Shinzo Abe, but he’s doing the same fundamental thing Vergil is doing in his own way. And sure, Dante is in a healthier place overall; he has friends who love him and whom he loves, and I think it’s telling that when he commits symbolic seppuku among their mother’s ashes he is empowered by absorbing the last earthly relic of their father where Vergil does the same thing and it intentionally separates all of his empathy into a separate guy while he becomes a buff, shitty monster dude. But at the same time, when we get like 90% of the way to a resolution and Vergil is back to himself and Dante is there with him for the first time as real equals in over twenty years, Dante does not recreate the events of DMC3. He doesn’t reach out to Vergil. He doesn’t even try to talk him down this time. He just wants to kill him and be done with it, or die. He’s been burned too many times. He simply can’t be that guy again.

It would be the setup for a genuine tragedy, two men trapped in a cycle of violence that reaches back (and as we will soon see, now forward as well) generations and leads them to destroy their family. It would be if not for the fact that there is a Third Boy at play. We gotta talk about Nero.

One of the most charming things about Nero is that in a series where everybody else is acting Like That all the time he is basically just a normal guy? Like yes he used to have a fucked up demon arm and yes he can rev his sword like a motorcycle but like, all this man wants to do in the world is hang out with his fuckin girlfriend bro. He’s just a nice little grumpy guy. He kind of tries to do banter with guys he fights but he’s not very good at it, and it’s VERY easy to rile him up. Really wears his heart on his sleeve. He’s pouty. I love this guy dude, I just want to make him an ice cream cone with like three scoops on it. I wanna put him in a little glass jar and shake it up. Great guy, Nero.

But he’s got his own shit, right! He was adopted by some important people in the cult church from DMC4, I forget if they had a name, it’s not important, kind of raised by his girlfriend’s brother, whom he will later kill in self-defense (5 brings this up in a pivotal moment as something that motivates Nero in the present, which I appreciate), and he has that fucked up demon arm, which he feels compelled to hide for his whole life because he assumes his church will not be cool about it, unaware that they are actually a demon cult. So when things do start popping off and the only institution that he’s known a tenuous sort of safety and family with turns on him and endangers his found family in his girlfriend Kyrie, it’s fucked up! Gets him all mad, gets him all sad! But Nero doesn’t bottle shit, he doesn’t hide it. Nero might give himself more responsibility than he’s liable for but he’s a guy who understands the value of what he’s got and sings about it loudly; we don’t know as much about his circumstances as we do Dante and Virgil’s so it’s hard to know for sure what his childhood was like or how he feels about it, but it seems that his support network and his experiences have given him perspective and the ability to deal with his feelings in a healthy way, even as he’s really put through the ringer.

So when he finds out that Vergil is his dad and everyone knew this but him he’s pissed, because Vergil DID cut off his arm and murder like a million people lol, but when he finds out that this ends in Dante and Vergil killing each other he’s confused, because Nero is a normal guy and this doesn’t make any sense from the outside. You get the vibe that Nero has always wanted a family, a place to unconditionally, belong, and now that he finds out he has one everybody’s just acting like it’s an inevitability that it has to destroy itself, and that’s fundamentally unacceptable to him. In a series where I think every single game is about people somehow killing people they consider family (except maybe 2? I don’t remember if that guy was Lucia’s dad I think he wasn’t), Nero, affirmed by a conversation with his found family in Kyrie insists that this cannot be the way. In a series where people hold their shit inside, where everyone is constantly posturing like sick badasses, Nero spends an entire boss fight yelling as his dad to knock it the fuck off and act like an adult. All it took was someone without context, with eyes unclouded by a lifetime of participation in the cycle they had created, to fight for the family instead of against it. This also activates his devil trigger for the first time in a direct inversion of how that happened for Dante in 3 – a powerful protective, loving impulse rather than the urges of despair.

And it works, mostly. Things are not fully repaired, and Dante and Vergil are not new men overnight, but they do work together to stop the apocalypse Vergil had triggered, and they do consign themselves to an indefinite co-solitude in hell where they can duel each other in a friendlier way than they have in the past, because on one hand this is truly the only way they know how to communicate and on the other, as half-demons it’s demonstrated throughout the series that violence is a form of positive communication for them. This is good, I think, to demonstrate that people so stuck in their ways can’t just fix their shit in one conversation, in one act. But Dante and possibly Vergil both wanted this, and they’re happy to have it.

This is what makes DMC5 so good; Morihashi has taken all of these disparate threads from twenty years of games, each of them with very different stories and very different ideas, and builds upon each of them to create a work that is thematically satisfying and narratively conclusive for characters who didn’t necessarily have distinct narrative arcs before this. I love these characters, they’re Cool Dudes and now they’re also compelling characters, more after this than ever before. I don’t know if this is the end of Devil May Cry but I think it very well could serve as one. I hope that’s not the case, though. Not only do I think it would simply be criminal to leave the world wanting another action game this fuuuuucking sick, but they keep proving there’s always more to mine from these characters and their world. I think it would be a shame not to take another shot at it.

"Video games are supposed to be fun" - the motel clerk in Lake, whose name I never learned

I feel that boiling games down to purely "was it fun?" is a bit of a reductive stance... but when Lake itself said it, it distracted me. I wasn't having fun. And all told, while my favorite games are generally constantly active things like Mario or Doom, I do have quite a soft spot for small experimental titles that revel in their own weird quirks... but Lake wasn't clicking at all. And while the hotel clerk isn't even remotely presented as a likable character (at least as far as I spoke with him), his annoying griping struck at the heart of the biggest issue I was having with the game; even being down to see what it has to offer, I wasn't having any fun engaging with this game.

There's a moment near the end of Lake where you go up to a secluded cabin in the woods and deliver a package. An annoyed voice complains about you disturbing his writing process, and you have a back and forth with this pretentious author. After all, he's the one who ordered a package in the first place, what right does he have to complain about it being delivered? You drop that on him before leaving to do the rest of your route as he awkwardly gives a half-assed apology and goes back to writing his Alan Wake story. This is the kind of thing I was hoping would happen more often in Lake, mundane but mildly amusing encounters with random locals, but there's really only two or three moments like this throughout the game. We get plenty of setup for fun moments, too, but they're often just left hanging. In particular I'm thinking of what I assume is meant to be an Evil Dead joke, where you deliver a giftwrapped chainsaw to an abandoned rundown cabin. That was a moment where it felt like something could have happened, be it a spooky musical sting or maybe Meredith saying "groovy", anything at all. It was a complete softball to setup a punchline, and instead you simply knock on the door, Meredith has a voiceline expressing confusion that nobody is answering (??????), and you leave the item and go. Even something like Meredith asking why there's a delivery to an abandoned house would have been SOMETHING, but for my playthrough she remained silent as she does after leaving any package at the door. That's the majority of your deliveries, being done to relative silence - the best you can hope for is a few randomly selected canned responses from Meredith that you'll get tired of hearing. Otherwise, they're simply a means to force an interaction with an established character in the cast. In principle this isn't even really a bad thing, after all it's kind of what I knowingly signed up for, unfortunately I didn't find the locals to be even remotely compelling. The little moments just aren't really something that the game is interested in delivering despite feeling like the obvious thing to pack this game to the brim with, because what Lake thinks it's meant to be about is big meaningful moments to drastically change Meredith's life instead of smaller moments that make life feel more vibrant.

Where I find Lake particularly confusing is that the general concept is hard to swallow. Meredith has been away from home for 22 years, and she is 40 years old. She's apparently got enough of a good relationship with her parents that it's easy for her to spend her vacation house-sitting and substituting for her dad at his job so he can go on vacation instead, but she also hasn't been back here once for over half of her lifespan. It's almost a bit ridiculous how long a time she has been gone, and the way her parents and neighbors talk to her makes it feel like she's supposed to be younger, but instead she's middle-aged and with a well established job that she's eager to bring up and talk about with others. It's very clear that Meredith is proud of her job at Addit. The game then spends a good portion of its runtime trying to tear down her independence at her tech job, essentially saying "return to an idyllic small town away from a corporate tech job to regain your soul". And what's weird is that they could absolutely build up Meredith having some nostalgia for the town with some flavor text, but she only has around two or three nostalgic remarks and as a result it makes the idea of her even wanting to move back very difficult to sell. I remember her saying something about having her first kiss at the campground, but aside from that she didn't have much to muse about and it made her feel disinterested in being home. When she is offered to take her dad's job and her parent's house permanently, if you do not show interest her parents are taken aback and offended; frankly that interaction was kind of a harrowing moment. The game was pretty clear in its messaging that it felt that was not the right choice, but what it tries to say with that is that she should simply fall over and allow her parents to thrust her into a permanent change to her life because they're having a great time being drunks in Florida. Honestly, no wonder Meredith hasn't been home in 22 years if that's what she had to deal with for her first time back, and they act as if having a 20% stake in a company that's about to make millions of dollars off of her dedicated work is some silly impetuous whim. Listen - I'm not someone that's super motivated by seeking profit and personal gain, but it's absolutely jarring to have your mom scold you like a teenager for being on the ground floor of something like Apple because you're not jazzed about a bait and switch plot to move you back to a dead end place you've spent the majority of your life avoiding!

And speaking of changing up your life, there's romance in this game. I opted to seek out neither romance route simply because I found both of them to be almost too painfully telegraphed as romantic interests. That's not really fair to Lake, but it just didn't feel natural for me so I opted to simply not engage that way - I called them both as love interests off of their very first sentences and I was right. Props to Lake for some bisexual representation here by having an option for Meredith to go either way, but I wasn't feeling either of them and opted to just be a professional upstanding postal worker and go about my business politely. Even with that behavior though, you'll get Angie calling you "babe" as if you've been flirting with her too, and you'll get Maureen telling you that Robert has a double meaning with "trying to keep pretty things in PO". It's nice that there are dialogue options to try to blow people off, but it really doesn't matter and it often doesn't feel like what you say has any impact at all upon the characters and their interactions. It feels like the game thinks you're pursuing romance with your every interaction until the point where those plotlines end, and that sure does get a bit uncomfortable feeling at times when either Robert or Angie are clearly angling at you despite showing no reciprocation.

And speaking of Lake ignoring your inaction, your actions never have any consequences. The crazy cat lady wants you to help her with her sick cat? Doesn't matter if you don't! I mean, I'm glad the cat didn't die, but I said no (I'm the postman, I have work to do, you clearly have a car right there in your driveway lady) and it made no difference. I said no to hanging out with the hippies who I spoke to twice, both times incredibly brief encounters, and yet I was still forced to go say goodbye to them and listen to the guy's bad singing while they passed around a blunt - if ever there was an encounter I wanted to not do, it was this one. Hell, I'm actually just surprised that there weren't more events that I was forced to do like that. One such event I thought would be a shoo-in for a forced encounter, if you don't help Robert save the town from new apartments (who are they going to put into those apartments??? we're in the middle of nowhere and have a tiny population, who are we renting to?), he will still succeed at rallying the town to stave off the construction. If you do or don't help Angie with her movie rental store, it will always fail and she will always leave... and honestly I'm surprised that you even had the option to say no to helping her, she wanted you to do deliveries and that's what the game is all about. Most egregiously, your boss at Addit will repeatedly pester you to do work off the clock to help ensure their multi-million dollar deal goes through - I blew him off every single time he asked and not only did the deal still go through, I was still offered a huge stake in the company too. You can simply sleepwalk through Lake, never once engaging with anything, and your inaction doesn't matter. I was cordial but distant to Meredith's former best friend Kay (I'm shocked at how abrupt her storyline is, I was expecting a more natural moment for them to reconnect and it didn't really happen), and after days of being treated the way you would treat an inoffensive customer at a retail job she just decides that you're still her best friend and she'll go asking you favors and being super chatty all the time. She asked me to babysit her kids so she could go see Journey, and I didn't - she still ended up seeing Journey anyhow. Your actions don't matter, aside from whoever you choose to kiss or where you decide to go in the end. You can even be kinda rude to most people and you'll still get a radio sendoff where the town says they'll miss you if you leave town at the end.

Probably the strangest plotline in the game for me is the bit with Frank and his gambling addiction. The man is using his federal job to run an illegal gambling ring to better himself. The postmaster general gives you a threatening phone call to do postal policies correctly, and then shows up in town to ask about Frank. I actually completely spilled the beans about Frank, saying that yeah, he's misusing his position and doing some kinda corrupt shit. Listen, I don't WANT to acquiesce to the police like that, but honestly yeah Frank was kind of a shitty person for using his job to do that kind of stuff so I figured screw it, let him have some consequences for abuse of his position. Frank is then suspended for a single day, and the postmaster general immediately gives up with the provided reasoning that he didn't wanna talk to the crazy cat lady again and that Frank has some lawyer friends who scared him off. What do you MEAN this backwoods doofus has lawyers who got the federal government off of his back when he was in the wrong? The game even tries to portray Frank as the hero who is in the right here! Come on man, misuse of federal funds and shit like that, why do you want me to root for Brett Favre?

What I'm left with in Lake is a game that feels like it wasted my time. I didn't like the cast, and frankly that's all the game was really about - without that, it's nothing. The gameplay loop is to walk slowly (hold down a button to walk 1% faster), drive a clunky unresponsive van, and fight the map with its icons that rarely feel like they're in the right place for most houses. You'll chat to some locals, and if you aren't interested in them you have nothing to latch onto. The sound effects often broke, I'd constantly see massive 8 car pileups happen entirely on their own in random spots on the road, there's about 3 songs on the radio, and when I finished the game the credits song didn't even play. Maybe that's because I did what the writers clearly felt was the bad ending? It's hard to tell whether that was intentional or not when so many other things broke so frequently, but it did lead off the credits with the name of the song so I doubt that was the point. This game wants so badly to have the vibes of Life is Strange, but all I could feel the whole playthrough was how much I wish the town could be the setting of a successor to Deadly Premonition instead of what it is. It's a shame, because I wanted to find something in this game, but I felt unfulfilled the whole adventure. I guess the answer was to simply just not go back home.

Clickbait intro: Game so bad it makes notorious diehard videogame preservationist pray that it's lost to the sands of time.

You know, I had about 1400~ words of an incomplete real review typed up for this one, but I tabbed back in to keep playing and just.

Man.

I try to be fair to the games I play, even if they're ass. I like to sit with them, ponder them on my morning walks, look into their creation. I believe that all art contains a variable amount of love and that love should be, if not appreciated, at least acknowledged. I think games are art, and my desire to treat them the same way I've treated music for decades is what made me create this Backloggd account in the first place.

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands makes me wish I reneged on that personal promise.

It's difficult to describe this term using language, because the game just feels like pure hate. So much of it is steeped in contempt for someone or something that it actually borders on staggering.

If you care enough about videogames to even use Backloggd you probably already know about Borderlands Humor so I'm not gonna devote a mini essay to it. I'm also not gonna pretend I never liked Borderlands; up until around 2018 Borderlands 2 was a game I'd replay yearly.

Borderlands humor now grates on me in my old age, but the jokes at least have setup and punchlines even if those punchlines are of debatable... everything.

Wonderlands' jokes confound me, because oftentimes the punchline is "a thing exists". It has all the same energy of your debatably conservative uncle nudging you with his elbow at a wedding party and saying "Polish people, right?" except it's some quip about tabletop game/player stereotypes that the writer found by going on Tumblr and sifting through the TTRPG tags.
At least 95% of the dialogue in this game is jokes like this, or orphaned punchlines that feel as though they're responding to a nonexistent setup.
The other 5% is... Dated. Borderlands humor gets even more dated as each entry comes out and betrays the sad, unmoving time capsule that the directors live in, but Wonderlands is somehow worse than the prior entry because it feels like it came fresh out of 2012. I only played Portal 2 a month or so ago and this game could've been its contemporary.

I know riffing on a Gearbox title for not being funny is a bit redundant, it's like riffing on Gears of War for having cover or riffing on Skyrim for having dragon shouts or riffing on Halo for having Spartans or riffing on Baldur's Gate 3 for being bad. But I dunno, this game came out in 2022 and it's somehow a step backwards from everything before it. It boggles the mind. Even as I type this I find myself endlessly confused, wondering who they used as focus testers that anything in this game writing-wise got approval.

I think the sticking point for me is that this game is very ostensibly a parody of tabletop games and tabletop gamers, but there's a bit too much venom for me to really call it a parody. Many of the TTRPG related jokes feel mean-spirited and cheap, not unlike the Saints Row reboot. These don't feel like jokes for tabletop players, they feel like jokes about tabletop players.
The ones that aren't mean feel very... "How do you do, fellow kids?", to the point where even calling them "Reddit-like" is inaccurate

The spiel about games and love up above wasn't just a fillerbuster, it's something I genuinely have been pondering this entire time.

Wonderlands doesn't feel like it was made with any love.

I question who or what the target audience for this game looks like because just from observing the text, I get the feeling it just fucking hates everybody? It clearly has no love for tabletop players given both them and their hobby are the butt of the joke, it has no love for Borderlands players either because its parent series is barely present and is only wheeled out to keep the player awake, and it clearly has no love for sensible people because it forces you to listen to Ashly Burch's ulcer-bustingly racist Tiny Tina voice for a full game's runtime.

What really confounds me is just how desperate the game is, though.

In 2013, they already did this game. It was a DLC for Borderlands 2 titled "Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep" and it was... Okay, I suppose. I'm not the biggest fan of BL2's DLC for numerous reasons, but it was this game down a T except with like... Not even better writing, it had writing to begin with.
I harp on the jokes so much because that's basically all this game has, besides Will Arnett phoning in a performance to get a paycheck now that the Arrested Development and Bojack Horseman mines dried up.
There's a story which, prior to playing the game, I'd seen hyped up as "Better than BL3's". After playing it, I wondered if I'd bought a secret copy that lacked any plot, because there basically isn't on.

Wonderlands does have gameplay which, as is the running theme here, is just BL3's but infinitely worse. God I miss Moze. What were they even cooking here? Were BL fans begging for less interesting gameplay?

All in all, I am struggling to come up with a meaningful conclusion here, or even say anything nice. Saying "it's just bad" is boring, and something any goblin with a keyboard can tell you over in the Steam reviews, but... It's just bad, dude. I got this game for £12 and I'm genuinely regretting not using it to get a nice haul from Greggs. A pack of sausage rolls for the fridge, a Mexican chicken oval bite for the evening and a packet of their spicy chicken bites for lunch... Mmm.

Some people, usually Bloodborne fans for some reason, will tell you that they wish they could wipe their memory and play a game for the first time all over again.

I wish I could wipe this game from my memory.

Which, given the next Honkai Star Rail update is all about memory, sure does feel prophetic.

     ‘You have freed the one with yearning eyes whose lot was hunger tragic.’
     – Gary Gygax, The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, 1982.

Players of the tournament adventure The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (1976) were greeted, after some exploration, by prismatic lights dancing on the walls, contrasting with the pile of dark rocks in the centre of the room. Far from being an end in itself, this hall was merely the gateway to the Greater Caverns, where countless secrets were hidden amidst strange stalactites and rock formations conjured from a demented imagination. The treasure of Iggwilv, mysterious as it may be, was only for the bravest of souls. In the 1970s, the development of PLATO, a computer system linking several thousand terminals around the world, led to the emergence of a community of creators who generally made no secret of their inspiration for the dungeon-crawling style typical of the printed RPGs of the time. These first forays set a trend. Among these, Oubliette (1977) perhaps stands out for its remarkable depth for its time: the source of inspiration was clearly Dungeons & Dragons (1974), but the inclusion of attribute tables for the different classes and races, as well as a rich magic system, placed it at the forefront of computer games.

     A formula based on Dungeons & Dragons rules

Unlike PLATO, mainstream computer systems did not have the same computing power and early titles could seem like a step backwards. In 1978, Robert J. Woodhead, who had already gained a small notoriety for plagiarising dnd (1975), decided to replicate the system and experience of Oubliette in his own version, promoting an original adventure. The Dungeons & Dragons system is used quite faithfully, and any veteran can create their characters without getting lost. Since multiplayer was not an option, Wizardry recommends creating a team of six characters – or less – to explore the ten underground levels that make up the adventure. As a result, by appropriating the ideas of Oubliette, the title established a canon of standard rules and codes that would have a lasting influence on the dungeon crawler genre.

The player assumes the role of several adventurers whose goal is to venture into the catacombs beneath the castle of King Trebor. Having gone mad after the wizard Werdna stole a precious amulet, he sends young mercenaries to the first floors of the complex where the wizard is hiding. He hopes to find adventurers strong enough to reach the deepest part of the catacombs to kill Werdna and recover the amulet. The tone is rather light and the adventure, though rough in its progression, is punctuated with comic messages; there is something strange about exploring Wizardry, as a light-hearted theatricality contrasts with the often serious and merciless nature of the early Dungeons & Dragons modules.

From the outset, Wizardry requires an investment from the player, who must build their team based on attributes, classes and alignments. A balanced approach is preferred, with three characters in the front attacking with melee weapons, while the backline provides defensive and offensive support with a variety of spells. Character creation oblige, it is possible to abuse the system to get the best possible scores and start with a comfortable roster; likewise, creating characters to take their money is a viable strategy, allowing the player to properly equip themselves before even entering the Proving Grounds. This freedom is reminiscent of the shenanigans possible during TTRPG sessions, and adds to the idiosyncrasy of Wizardry at the time of its release. Traditional reflexes are thus rewarded: the cautious and savvy player will exercise extreme caution, taking care to map effectively and intelligently identify any items recovered from the dungeon.

     Some diverse but often obsolete mechanics

The Famicom version, released in 1987, retains these gameplay features, but improves the title with better graphics. The port is largely faithful to the original, with the exception of some floors in the second half of the game, which have been completely redesigned. Even in the Famicom version, the player has to progress slowly and draw their own map to avoid getting lost. However, the first few floors are particularly enjoyable to explore. Wizardry opens elegantly, with Floor 1 divided into quarters, making exploration more digestible. In the first one, the player learns that opening doors is the most common way for the party to engage in combat, and only then can they find chests containing gold and sometimes equipment. Exploration feels organic and natural, with the compartmentalisation ensuring that the player is not drowned out by overly large rooms. Floor 2 follows the same logic, introducing the importance of key objects in the progression: indeed, some areas are inaccessible if the adventurer does not possess the figurines, and the game takes good care to communicate this information through its pseudo-labyrinthine design. Mapping is still fairly straightforward, but takes a bit more time to complete due to the many twists and turns.

At the same time, the player will slowly become accustomed to the combat system. While the backline is generally of no help at the start of the game, as it has no spells, it will gradually become more useful. Once characters have gained enough experience, they can rest at the inn to advance to the next level. Wizardry complicates the process, as not only can certain stats be lowered, but time spent in the inn will cause characters to age and their powers to diminish, before they eventually die. This system may come as a surprise, as it encourages the player not to use the inn excessively as a means of healing. The system does force the player to use the Cleric's spells, but the process tends to be lengthy and the menus are rather cumbersome.

Furthermore, the shop, while useful at first, quickly becomes redundant. The stock is relatively sparse, and the player will easily equip themselves with the best gear available long before exploring the floors where better weapons and armour can be obtained from the monsters. This element makes character progression heavily reliant on enemy grinding – and luck on the chests' table – but renders some mechanics obsolete. In practice, gold coins are only used to visit the temple and remove negative statuses. A similar problem exists with the promotion system: once the attribute and alignment requirements have been met, the player can change a character's class to diversify their options. The problem is that they start with the lowest stats for their race, and it is necessary to grind experience from the start to make the character viable. This emphasis on grinding is at the root of the structural problems in the second half of the game.

     Exploration abandoned in favour of grinding: an artificial approach

While the adventure up to Floor 4 remains organic and natural, with a forced encounter forming the game's first genuine obstacle, the following floors lose all interest in ergonomics and decide to take a very aggressive route. The floors become much more complex, with devious traps and frustrating hidden doors. The title introduces anti-magic zones, which severely neutralise the party's abilities – although enemies suffer the same effects. Where the backline, with its crowd control and area attacks, became paramount towards the end of Floor 4, the player is deprived of these options during exploration, making progression much rougher and more difficult. The problem is that the middle floors, 5 to 8, are completely optional. After collecting the Blue Ribbon, players can use the private lift to go directly to any floor between the fourth and ninth, which opens the way to Werdna's lair.

More specifically, the Blue Ribbon is necessary in the progression, as the ninth floor can only be reached by this particular lift. It turns out that the intermediate floors have no other purpose than to be grinding areas. Naturally, the player begins by mapping out the rooms, but when they visit the ninth floor out of curiosity, they realise that all this work is pointless. Because the grind cannot sustain its formula, especially with such a bare interface, the temptation to brute-force the last floor and fight Werdna as quickly as possible is strong. My experience was very similar to the speedrun strategy, as I decided to grind the Giants on Floor 10 to unlock the most powerful offensive spells. Once my Mage was level 13, the final challenge was to survive the gauntlet on the final floor and reach Werdna; at this point, a simple Haman to teleport the boss group ends the game with minimal fuss.

Wizardry remains a challenging title, and the strong dichotomy between the first and second halves is surprising. Could it be that the change in gameplay philosophy is the result of contrasting inspirations? Oubliette offered a fairly straightforward map that, while more open than the early stages of Proving Grounds, was natural and pleasant to explore. Here, the later floors are riddled with cruel traps, such as the three rock columns that instantly punish teleportation with Malor by killing the party with no chance of recovery. This ruthlessness must have been too much for the Japanese team working on the port, as they decided to implement their own floors, which are much more explicit about their optional nature: the hidden stairs in an infinite corridor have been removed, and it is not possible to find the stairway between Floors 7 and 8 without a deliberately creative use of Malor.

The title was an important trailblazer that inspired entire genres of video games, both in the West and in Japan. If it is still possible to experience it in 2023, it is worth remembering the extent to which Wizardry embraces game design ideas that are now considered archaic. The game does not hesitate to punish careless actions and shows no mercy towards unprepared parties, even to the point of permanently eliminating them. The emphasis on grinding, although facilitated by the lifts that allow easy access to the surface, is frustrating. Before reaching level 13, a party can suffer from an encounter that is a little too crowded with enemies, and the player is pressured to reach this threshold before attempting to fight Werdna. As in Tsojcanth, obtaining the Blue Ribbon is only the beginning of the adventure; far scarier things and devious traps await the player, but Wizardry never conjures up the poetic strangeness of these rainbow caverns where unknown and wondrous crystals glisten.

Well, look before you meme, I guess. I don’t know what I was really expecting with this one, but this game definitely managed to fall short of most of my hopes. The general structure and battle system of Live A Live were recreated pretty well, but a lot of the adaptation work misses most of the best parts of the original.

For instance, what if the China scenario had only one disciple you train for slightly different stat boosts, dulling the decision making and removing the strongest story beats of the original? What if Wild West had the enemies come in easy waves, and the boss on her lonesome, meaning there’s no point to picking up items, which was the entire challenge? Even the chapters I enjoyed like Ninja tend to coast off the successes of the original instead of improving anything. So many things don’t come together that one of my friends, watching my downward spiral playing this game, called the developer a type of fan who only saw Live A Live as a cool obscure game to copy off of.

And I find “fan” to be apt as Touhou A Live also trends towards really vapid shoutouts of both the original and other games. At the very least, the undeniably true Touhou lore that Yun LiveALive trained Meiling is funny, and most of the Live A Live cameos don’t take up much space. Meanwhile, the generic video game references were what really got to me. Like, Wild West has you play as a fox person, so Mad Dog is named after James McCloud and names you Fox! (In fairness, this one could be part of the translation, but there’s so many other references that it seems likely the joke could be in the original) The evil cavemen are crows, which obviously means Zaki has to be a Murkrow for some reason and his boss fights are you baiting out Brave Bird recoil damage. I guess this isn’t the biggest deal in the world, but it just gives off the vibe that whoever made this is like… really annoying about why Cube should be in Smash, if that makes any sense. These sorts of basic callouts really sap the immersion out of any story when they happen.

Speaking of the story, it’s a complete mess. The most immediate example is the end of the Knight chapter, something that in the original evidently inspires lots of thoughtful essays, including on this platform, from people probably better at writing than me. Here it’s just… Marisa mad that she’s the “Luigi” of Touhou. On some level, I get it. Touhou characters are more just funny than anything, and if Touhou A Live wanted to entirely divorce itself from Live A Live’s discussion of narratives, that would be acceptable. The Wrestler chapter is a strong example of this, with Masaru’s quest to become “the strongest” naturally imposed onto Cirno, who in typical Cirno fashion gets her shit kicked in by really strong bosses until you finally figure out their patterns. The chapter even has other good gags like the cast being 5 Touhou girls, as well as the entirely unchanged Moribe. Something silly like this is a perfect adaptation of Live A Live into the Touhou universe.

However, the narratively focused chapters still try to be “serious”, generally replacing the original plot with some incredibly insipid “who is truly correct in war” babble from a boss before a big fight. I simply don’t find a Touhou version of Live A Live a worthwhile way to examine themes like this (even putting aside hacky “we’re not so different” lines). At the point at which like, Gensokyo is planning a goddamn false flag operation to kill a whole village of their civilians in order to enrage the population to enlist in a war against Makai, the game has just forgotten what makes either of these properties appealing. And then the chapter inexplicably just becomes Knight again after this nuclear MAD false flag nonsense wraps up. The only time I think any of this works is in Mecha where you get to see the people in the process of liquefaction, which shows where Live A Live just kinda told us to care. Also, Wild West gets filled with pervy jokes towards the main character, and there’s a disgusting assault scene in the Knight chapter. The conversation around these sorts of games are usually shitposts about their general nature from people who haven’t played them, so I think it’s responsible having finished it to inform people who would play this for themselves about any disturbing content.

I know someone’s going to get on my case with “what about the gameplay though”, and general issues with chapters aside, I think the battle system is still fun here. Porting this whole real time grid thing to RPGMaker sounds like a headache, but it generally works. Sadly, in later chapters with more complex moves, “generally” often isn’t enough, and there are softlocks if you play fights the wrong way (like using a recoil move to KO a commander enemy, causing a BREAK DOWN). Of special note is the final boss, who softlocks if you KO one of the sentries while hitting another. That was very fun when my best damage dealer hit a whole row. On the other hand, the second phase glitched so bad that everyone but Cirno got stuck charging but the boss didn’t attack so I kicked her to death for like 9 minutes. We fucking take those.

Despite some mechanical issues, there are also some genuinely impressive fights. Towards the start of the Knight chapter, you need to rescue a woman from some bandits, so your main crew starts the fight in a far off corner while all the bandits surround their victim. You have to try to evacuate her ASAP since her vanishing from the field on death will cause a Game Over. This serves as a unique challenge and storytelling opportunity that Live A Live never tried. Even simpler ideas, such as a miniboss in Mecha who kills you in cardinal directions, forces you to strategize on the fly, dancing around the deadly attack while still keeping up pressure because the boss will heal too. Of course, in typical Touhou A Live fashion, this is balanced out by fangamecore bosses of “wow the mother computer goes into a third phase that instantly kills you if you dont spend 5 minutes using high update first so cool”. Taken as a whole, there are good ideas floating around in the game’s various fights despite it all.

Unfortunately, most of the best ideas here really are drowned out by the bad. I couldn’t even fit in other grievances like how the final chapter is even more bloated and dull than the original. There’s a lot of passion that goes into redoing a game like Live A Live, adding new sprites (including bombastic boss ones), even giving the whole soundtrack an infectious SiIvaGunner energy. But the mere presence of passion isn’t enough to make a good game, not when that passion goes toward a nonsensical tone and overlooks simple gameplay decisions, bulldozing over the best parts of Live A Live while seldomly providing much in return. If I wanted to be a news anchor I could say there’s still some interesting stuff here to check out, maybe the insanity of it all is compelling enough for some people, but really, this year I gained a massive appreciation of Live A Live and severe Touhou brainrot. If I could barely tolerate this game long enough to finish it for the bit, what is anyone else getting out of this?

except the best version of mecha omg stan mokou shes so fuckin epic

[DISCLAIMER: This review didn’t run away from me so much as it sprinted. It is obscenely long, sitting at around 9.4k words after cuts.]

When I wrote my initial review of BG3 I swore that I’d probably just bench the game and come back in a couple years when the inevitable Definitive Edition launched. I was hoping to just put the game out of my mind and go play literally anything else that was installed on my SSD.

But, to tell you the truth, I struggled to uninstall the game. Even after my multiplayer game was put on indefinite hold due to a party member being admitted to hospital (they’re fine now), the game continued to haunt me. Both for reasons I’ll get to shortly, and because continued discussion with my close friends either revealed things I hadn’t considered or brought up new complaints that I agreed with but never really thought about.

Ultimately, though, BG3 haunted me because I had so many questions.

Were things unfinished? Or did I just miss them?
Was the class balance really that awful, or did rolling with Paladin and the default Origin layouts give me the wrong impression?
Did Acts 2 and 3 go too fast, or did I?
Was an Origin playthrough really going to change my mind?
Does the game have a lot of useless loot, or did I just miss it?
How bad is the game’s morality bias in reality?

And so many more. Eventually they ate away at me so hard that I decided to start a Shadowheart run and see how I truly felt about BG3.

To save you a potentially long review: It wasn’t pretty.

I will give Baldur’s Gate 3 praise for one thing, though, and that’s its excellent ability to mask its flaws by pretending to have more options than it actually has. A running theme of my original playthrough was picking an option and thinking “Hmm, I wonder what a lot of those other options did”. In this playthrough, I decided to pick more of them - sometimes via save rerolling.

While I was initially so positive towards the game that I labelled the gameplay as ‘a masterpiece’, repeated exposure and a significant replay have soured my opinion quite significantly.

Hilariously, I finger-wagged Wrath of the Righteous for adding too much yet praised BG3 for its reticence.

Anyway, BG3 has too many options and could’ve done with some significant cuts. No, really. ‘This game has too much’ is going to pop up a lot from here on out.

Yes, WOTR has a lot of superfluous gunk that is best skipped. The problem is that, despite BG3 having significantly less, the ratio of usable:worthless is roughly the same.

Especially on the spell front, my god. There are so many of them, and a startling amount of them are Concentration spells - meaning you can either use only one at a time or casting them will shatter your active spell. This doesn’t affect offensive casters like Warlocks or Evocation Wizards too much, but it utterly crushes defensive/support casters like Druids/Bards/Clerics and ESPECIALLY Paladins, whose primary means of attack (Smite attacks) more-often-than-not will break Concentration. Which is a problem, because even an Oathbreaker Paladin gets an excessive amount of support spells.

You could, for example, cast Shield of Faith. It’s a concentration spell that gives your target +2 to Armour Class. Very nice. Or you could caste Haste, which gives +2 to AC and an extra entire action plus Advantage on Dexterity Throws and doubles your movement speed.

You could also cast Compelled Duel, which forces an enemy to attack only you. Or, you could not waste a Concentration slot and instead cast Command; an extremely versatile spell with a number of options that can do basically the same thing in function but also *isn’t a Concentration spell.

You could use Magic Weapon to buff your weapon and get a significant offensive edge, or you could just use Divine Smite to do basically the same thing in terms of damage output but without breaking Concentration.

This is not a Paladin exclusive problem, either. Woe betide Conjuration Wizards, Clerics, Druids and Bards for their excess of Concentration spells.

I get the intent behind Concentration as a mechanic, it’s ostensibly a means to prevent people simply steamrolling fights by pre-buffing and then walking in with like 6 actions, 45 AC, and a movement speed measured in European countries… Except you can still do this. There are a number of buff spells, many of which are obscenely useful - Longstrider, Enhance Leap, Mirror Image, Feather Fall to name an early game handful - that can easily be cast before a fight for a massive no-catch advantage.
Sure, you could argue that it’s hard to see fights coming on a first run, to which I’d say that the game telegraphs fights very blatantly and anyone who’s even slightly fluent in the unspoken Language of Games will be keyed in immediately. That, and a character only needs a mild investment in Perception to detect ambushes from ten postcodes away.

As an aside: Concentration also feels needlessly restrictive in a game with so few spell slots as it is. Paladins again get hit with this hard, as Divine Smites devour spell slots.

The issue with junk options sadly isn’t restricted to spells.

In my last review, I gassed up BG3’s action economy and praised it for always letting you do something. You can do off the wall shit involving water + lightning, flammable surfaces, improvised melee weapons, throwing loose items in your inventory, shoving, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand it’s all useless.

I try to avoid optimizing the fun out of my games. I was raised on flashy fighters and my teenage fixation was Devil May Cry with a dash of God Hand, so the need to style on enemies is in my blood. But it’s a bit hard not to play optimally in BG3 because the fun options just do paltry damage. Yes it’s cool to batista bomb someone through a barrel, but that does at best 9-12 damage in an entire turn. Even by the end of Act 1, you can do so much better than this.

The addition of Throw, Improvised Melee Weapon and Shove seemed like boons at first, but they’re really not. Throwing a molotov will always be less effective than throwing a Fire Bolt cantrip that most casters can get, for instance. There’s some merit to using Thrown weapons, but we’ll get to the Ranged Issue later.
Improvised Melee Weapon is useless given the incredibly high stat requirement to use it against humanoids, its waning usefulness as early as Act 2, and the paltry damage it does if used with furniture.
And Shove… Fall damage is also utterly pathetic. Shove does have a meagre utility for repositioning enemies, but this is rare considering how much mobility even casual players will come into, and using it for instakills often means losing useful loot.

The real reason ‘improv’ solutions suck, though, is because normal attacks are just too good. Ranged especially. Most martial classes, even the ‘pure’ ones, come with a bow or crossbow proficiency that also confers respectable damage regardless of stats. While Thrown weapons are ostensibly meant to be used as the ranged option for physical damage dealers, they also suck compared to just… shooting the enemy from afar? Or hucking a cantrip. Unless you’re using the Strength Monk Tavern Brawler build, but that build moves so fast that I question your competency if you frequently need to use ranged with it.

As I was typing this review, I considered giving them some praise for the addition of Jump as an action, but then I really thought about it. All jumping added was some okay level design that’s immediately underscored by the buggy pathfinding, and yet another means for melee classes to ignore ranged by just doing a 20 foot leap towards the enemy.

All of this is bad on its own, yes, but the real problems begin to rear their head when it comes to the subject of leveling. In my last review I praised the game for making ‘levels feel meaningful’.

I now realise that was mostly me appreciating the crutch the game handed me as I was feeling out the systems.

Level ups in BG3 rarely feel meaningful, with the rarity being adjusted by classes.

Spellcasters enjoy a relative lack of ‘dead’ levels as they get spells and slots every single level. While levels 11 and 12 are as underwhelming for them as they are for everyone else (due to 11 and 12 being ‘buffer’ levels before level 13, which was not included in BG3), they do at least get some notable new toys to play with. They suck, sure, but it’s something.

Martial classes, however, often see long swathes where they get little more than an action which may or may not be useful, a passive trait that will 80% of the time be too situational to ever pop up, and then the monotony is broken up by a Feat. Again, again, this really hurts Paladins; they get so many Concentration spells that it would perhaps be less egregious if they only got proficiency in a skill and 16 extra HP.

Once the mechanics ‘click’, level ups soon go from being a monumental event to being countdowns for the levels where your build actually comes online. How could they not? In a game where the most boring solution will often reward you with 80 damage per character turn, getting some Always Prepared spells doesn’t mean anything. What good is Faerie Fire when Lae’zel can do at minimum 80 damage before targets can even cloak themselves?

The sole exception to all of this is Monk, a class which embodies another issue I’m going to gripe about at length later on: Content added later in development is so very detached from the rest of the game that it begins to feel like DLC in a Bethesda game which sticks out like a sore thumb.

Monk is obscene. It has numerous possible builds within itself, is one of the few (if not the only) class that can metamorph into something unique via multiclassing, and it also just gets everything. It can have useful spells that swiftly recharge on a short rest, it can get incredible martial actions that’re worth using over basic attacking (in part because they give you an extra basic attack), or they can just straight up become Rogue but better. 9 Open Hand Monk/3 Thief Rogue is one of the few builds I’ve tried that was sincerely fun.

Monk was also the last class added, and no other class has as much unique content or as much depth. The classes in general, actually, are pretty bad on both a gameplay and story front.

I also need to take a moment to gripe about Feats. In Wrath of the Righteous there’s about a hundred or so. Sure, a lot of them are boring and uncreative, but there’s always something you can take to benefit or augment a build. +2 AC when fighting defensively is boring, sure, but it’s something! That’s survivability, right there! Especially if you’re squishy!
BG3, meanwhile, has precious few feats. The vast majority of them benefit melee characters, with only a handful for ranged/magic users and some that are just plain useless. There is no real reason to take ‘Performer’ - which lets you use musical instruments, already a dubiously useful feature that embodies a problem we’ll get to soon. Sure, it gives you +1 Charisma, but you could also take.

[Drum Roll]

ABILITY IMPROVEMENT!

Ability Improvement is the ultimate embodiment of my gripes with BG3’s feats. It’s boring. It’s so boring. It’s the most boring feat in a list of like 20-30 of the most boring feats in the setting.

But it’s good. It’s really good. It’s a two +1s to any stat you want, or a single +2. Given the relatively high starting stats for classes (17 at most), the relative ease of consequence-free stat buffs, and the low level cap for stats (20 via feats, 30 from rewards/tonics), there’s no reason not to take it. Buffing your class stat buffs pretty much everything you can do, and the relatively homogenous builds available to classes means there’s not much reason to not buff the main stat unless you’re doing Strength Monk - again, the only time a class meaningfully deviates from its main draw.

The other feats, in comparison, are just utter faff and feel more like deciding which flavour of Monster Energy you want. Yeah, there’s tons and they all taste different but at the end of the day you’re functionally just choosing between four things: Proficiency in a thing, a linear stat increase, a dubiously useful situational perk, or something that’s just a total no-brainer. To be honest, most classes can get by just using Ability Improvement/Savage Attacker and either Mobile or Alert. That is, in order: +2 to your main stat, Advantage on every attack roll you’ll ever make that cannot be nullified, and either a huge buff to movement speed which is worth more than gold, or Initiative (letting you get off hefty alpha strikes).

Most feats might sound good on paper, but reality tends to crumple that paper up and throw it into a wastebin. Heavy Armor Master, for instance, promises to reduce all non-magical damage by -3 when you’re wearing heavy armor. Sounds great, right? In Act 1, it is!

For about an hour.

BG3’s core issue on the gameplay front is that it’s too rigid in its adherence to DnD 5e. This would not be a problem were it not for how fast the game scales. Much of what is ‘bad’ in BG3 is only bad because it’s in a videogame. -3 damage would be excellent in a lower stakes tabletop campaign where your two worst threats are “some guy named Greg who’s been stealing gnomes from Belfast'' and your DM’s ex-girlfriend whose untreated personality disorder means every diceroll might literally be your last.

But this is not a low stakes tabletop campaign. There are worse threats than Greg, and they frequently hit for double or triple digits. -3 is excellent against an enemy who will only do 10 damage, but in BG3 those stop appearing within about half an hour depending on your playtime.

What’s really infuriating about feats is that there is an abundance of magic items in this game, and even the shittier ones have far more interesting effects that would’ve made for a much better feat lineup. But no, death to pragmatic adaptation I suppose.

I’m gonna take a little break from kvetching about BG3 to point something out, though: This issue with classes and feats isn’t entirely Larian’s fault. It is their fault for blindly adapting 5e with no modifications besides the ones necessary for a videogame, but most of the actual issues lie with the fact that DnD 5e is just unimaginative dogshit which is - to be incredibly mean for a moment - moreso targeted to people whose perception of tabletop games is entirely shaped by Critical Role and funny DM stories on Reddit. I’d compare it to something like Hyrule Warriors, Prison Architect, Forza or Guilty Gear Strive; in theory it should be a good base for people to springboard into better and more thought-out entries within the genre, but in reality people just cling to it and never expand their horizons. And while BG3 does have many of its own issues, a fair share of them are ultimately present because 5e barely makes for a good tabletop system let alone a videogame.

Much of what I’ve said about feats applies to classes, too. You could pick Ranger if you wanted, but do you really want to? Are you really that hellbent on playing Worse Rogue? Oh, you want to pick Paladin instead? Okay, that’s cool… But do you really want to play Worse Fighter? Ah, you want to play Druid instead. Neat and all, but do you really want to play Worse Sorcerer? Bard? Is Worse Wizard really that appealing?

The answer for most people will be ‘yeah’, because this is a roleplaying game and I imagine the vast majority of people pick classes for the aesthetics and personal character flavour. Not me, though, minmaxing is part of the fun for me.

Wizards, Sorcerers and Warlocks get plenty of flavour to make them appealing and viable in their own right - even if Warlock is mostly an Eldritch Blast machine. Albeit, most of this is down to the game’s obscene fixation on magic. It very much wants you to be a caster, it wants you to use some magic even if you’re martial. The problem here is that Cleric, Druid and Bard don’t get much in the way of interesting or viable mechanics. Clerics are essentially just an awkward midpoint between Paladins and Wizards. Druid can shapeshift and Bard subclasses get spells that’re just diet versions of better class’ gimmicks, but that’s it. Their spellbooks are weak and wimpy, to the point that two entire companions (Jaheira and Halsin) kinda suck right out the gate unless reclassed.

Druid in particular sucks thanks to a problem which is multi-layered: Damage types. BG3 has a lot of ‘em; Piercing (divvied up into 3 subcategories), Fire, Lightning, Cold, Thunder, Acid, Poison, Necrotic, Radiant, Force and Psychic. Of these damage types, Fire reigns supreme. There are so many readily available sources of it than any other damage type, it’s scarcely resisted let alone nullified, and spells that deal fire damage are both incredibly convenient and incredibly strong. To a lesser extent, this also goes for lightning and cold.

Acid, Poison and Necrotic are utterly awful. A lot of enemies resist it or are outright immune to it, and their spells are either negligible in terms of damage or extremely costly. It’s the near-persistent resistances and immunities that truly make Druid a pain, though. This is, once again, a problem with the choices made in the adaptation. Larian wanted to tell a certain story with certain setpieces, no problem… At first. They also wanted to include lots of combat stuff from 5e, which meant that what they decided to adapt now had tangible consequences for some characters. Even putting aside Druid’s lackluster spellbook, 2 of its 3 subclasses are focused on dealing primarily Acid and Poison damage, which just makes them a waste.

If you have any familiarity with TTRPGs, you might still be thinking about what I said before: That some things in BG3 are fine for a tabletop session and bad for a videogame.

Anyway, let’s talk about ability checks.

In a standard tabletop session - and indeed, this game’s own multiplayer - characters will have different specialties. Your wizard may be able to bend the world’s magical weave to their whims as though it were an obedient dog, but they probably don’t have the charisma to console a grieving widow. That’s where the party member with the appropriate stats takes the stage. In BG3’s multiplayer, this is entirely intact. I rarely talk to NPCs in my main BG3 MP session because I am Smashman the Barbarian Who Smashes.. Our bard - who has 1 level in Bard and 7 in Warlock - does that for us.

In BG3 singleplayer, this becomes a problem. The Party as an entity will automatically do some things of their own volition; perception/arcana/history/whatever checks will roll concurrently and immediately with no input required. If you need something disarmed or unlocked, the game will automatically make the party member with the highest Sleight of Hand roll for it.

This is all on the overworld, however. In conversations, only the person who initiated can roll. As BG3 is a very Player-centric game, your main character will be the one doing 99% of dialogues, which in turn provides a very annoying issue with proficiency forcing.

BG3 is not a masterfully crafted RPG, or even a competently crafted one, so it lacks what I call “fail-throughs”; situations that can arise from failing a check that are unique in their own way and perhaps even better than succeeding depending on the circumstances. Here, it’s nothing but binary pass/fail checks that either skip some busywork or a fight. If you fail, you’re stuck with busywork and/or a fight. God forbid you have a charismatic character step up to the front, too, because there’s a lot of character specific exchanges in Acts 1 and 2 that you can miss out on. Especially as Shadowheart or the Dark Urge. I find this particularly jarring because it’s a problem that CRPGs solved as early as 1998… With the first Baldur’s Gate.

One thing I regularly castigate BG3 for is its slavish devotion to both tabletops and other, better western RPGs. This, I feel, really makes it clear as day. CRPGs as a genre tend to have a problem wherein Charisma and its associated diplomatic functions are so powerful that taking them is a no-brainer. BG3 is no different.

Unfortunately, BG3 is not confident in doing this. It offers you an absurd amount of outs; Stat-boosting skills which can be cast from a handy menu, no-consequence rerolls that you get by the bucketload, and tons of bonuses and boons all the way to the credits. It is, in many ways, afraid to let you fail.

Early on, you’re introduced to Long Rests. These cost 40 camp supplies, advance the plot sometimes, and restore all of your spell slots/class abilities. A Short Rest can patch you up briefly for free, but you only get two. The game sort of, kinda, maybe implies that long rests should be done sparingly? This is total hogwash though, you can find about 120 camp supplies immediately after the prologue. It is, to me at least, pretty obvious that the abundance of supplies across the entire game is a safety net for people who’re taking their time to learn the combat or just aren’t that great at the game. This is fine, there’s nothing wrong with this.

…Except, on Tactician - which doubles the amount of supplies needed for a long rest - there’s still far too many. Especially for those given to exploration or completionism.

That’s not my actual issue, though.

My actual bone to pick is that the system fucks with the narrative if you’re too good at the game. A bit like Hades, but more insufferable.

Long Rests are good at restoring spell slots, sure. If your party is a monk, fighter, rogue and warlock, then you can get by with short rests. If you’re also decently good at the game, or get lucky with rolls, you can potentially go a long time without using long rests! On my latest run, I only used about three in Act 1.

A very fun fact about Baldur’s Gate 3 is that it’s held together with strings, glue, a bit of prayer and also 4-5 invigilators making sure you don’t peek behind the curtain.

Abstaining from long rests - willfully or not - is a way to peek behind the curtain.

Many narrative events, be they main story related or companion related, are directly tied to long resting. These aren’t just fun side extras, they’re vital to the story being told and the companions within. It’s similar in egregiousness to Hades’ story, wherein you’re punished outright for being better than the game expects. You can, through deliberate or accidental avoidance of long resting, skip a lot of these events.

The game breaks pretty heavily if you do. It’s still clearable, but wow. Companions can skip entire conversations (which are still recorded as happening), Astarion can potentially forget to reveal his vampirism (thus costing him his bite ability), vital scenes involving the parasite can fail to trigger (thus costing you the parasite skill tree), so on and so forth. Even when these do fire, they’re often slammed together in inappropriate ways or delayed by a few real life hours.

Hilariously, you can potentially keep Gale without needing to skill check him into submission, should you choose to kill the refugees and druids. Just don’t rest! It’s easy!

Speaking of slaughtering the refugees and druids, though, it’s possible to stumble into an outcome to the first Big Choice that is either unfinished or was meant to be cut. For context: The first Big Choice of Baldur’s Gate 3 is whether you side with a grove of druids and the refugees seeking shelter, or whether you side with goblins and butcher them. I’ve kvetched about it in my original review, but did you know there’s a third option?

Zevlor and Mol, two tiefling refugees, will allude to stealing the Druids’ sacred idol to disrupt their ritual. Mol even gives it to you as a formal quest. Should you actually do this (ideally via having someone go invisible and nab it), it will trigger a schism and cause the Druids to fight the Tieflings. The Druids will always win, backing the Tieflings into a corner and slaughtering them to the last.

Doing this locks you into a weird Schrodinger’s Murderer scenario. The game flags you as having picked both options at the same time without actually resolving the choice. You still have to trudge over to the Goblin Camp and either deal with the leaders, or “kill” the tiefling camp by… walking in the front door and having Minthara proclaim victory. Interestingly, Halsin even has unique dialogue for this scenario that sadly never gets resolved because he disappears from the game world entirely in this situation.

What’s really interesting though, are the companion reactions. Shadowheart quips that the Grove owes you a great debt for saving them - despite them being dead - while Gale groans about it despite never confronting you or alluding to it elsewhere. Astarion never acknowledges it - or maybe he does? I don’t know. On the run that let me find this outcome, I grew tired of his Stewie Griffin impression and staked him. Wyll runs through some cut content voicelines with Karlach that reveal he was intended to not leave instantly if you slaughtered the Grove.

I bring this up because it is fantastically broken, doubly so if you opt to ‘side’ with Minthara and then immediately kill her, at which point you’re locked into that Schrodinger’s Murderer state I mentioned above. And yet, this is something the game directs you to do. It’s not something I just found while faffing about, it’s a quest Mol gave me. Keep it in mind for when I talk about the story.

First, though, I want to talk about alignment. Like everything, alignment was gutted in 5e and turned into a vestigial system; there for the sake of being there, really. BG3 omits it… as a mechanic.
But it’s still beholden to the ideas of the alignment system. If you have any familiarity with the setting and its alignments, it becomes abundantly clear that they’re still there but invisible, much like engines in Mechwarrior or ammo pickup in Payday 2. Sure, there’s no good or evil meter or even associated stats, but also it’s kind of conspicuous that the only Bronze Dragon is so Lawful Good as to be destructive. Or that Astarion becoming a true vampire very noticeably shifts his alignment out of Neutral. Or that, despite waffling and shuffling around the topic, every mindflayer you encounter meets one or more definitions of Neutral Evil. Or that Shadowheart, follower of a Neutral Evil goddess, gets noticeably and abruptly more selfless after converting to Selune - a Chaotic Good goddess.

There are narrative reasons for these, yes, but they have all the sincerity and grace of a parent insisting their son’s stained school shirt, chewed bottom lip and dilated pupils are due to migraines. It’s such a strange thing to observe after 5e bent over backwards to turn alignment into the kind of atrophied husk that excites some of my puppygirl friends. Especially after having finished a replay of WOTR, a game that challenges the rigidity of alignments in basically every other major scene. Larian probably thinks Prelate Hulrun was right.

Why bring this up?

Because at the end of the day, BG3 doesn’t feel like it was actually made with love for DnD or 5e specifically. Rather, it feels like it was made by people who liked the idea of DnD or maybe their specific DnD experiences, who then went on to make a game which is just a cheap rollercoaster ride for Faerun. A narrow hodgepodge of random elements from the franchise to make people gawk at for 60 hours. In a way, I’d argue that BG3 is made more out of demented DnD fetishism as opposed to any genuine love.

It’s one of those things that only comes up on replays, really. I think the first run is good at making the world feel bigger than it is, especially given the inevitability of you missing something. On subsequent runs, it’s very obviously an A-B-C haunted house ride where you can sometimes vote to go on a detour. There are no real memorable components to the overworld, just attractions. Look, there’s the Absolutist siblings! And the owlbear den! And the goblin village! And Auntie Ethel! And the Raphael bridge! And Gnolls!

But there’s no world. I recently reviewed Factorio, yet it’s this game that feels like a conveyor belt ride. In my last review I took potshots at Act 2 for pretending to have a hazard only to immediately hand you a key to ignoring that hazard, and in hindsight Act 2 is the game just admitting what it is. ‘Here’s a wrecked Land of Fuck, go explore Fuckland and see the sights!’, with the sights primarily being undead/shadow enemies and encounters that’re either tedious boss fights or a succession of dialogue checks. They are, at the very least, better tied to the overall story than in Act 1 or 3. Really, if I say anything about Act 2 is that it’s easily the strongest arc just for making the haunted house attractions actually tie in with the rest of the house. Which honestly gives it better interior design cohesion than my parents.

Act 3 is the worst for this, though, my god. 1 and 2 have the excuse of being in a frontier forest and a blighted hellscape. 3, though rife with cuts and rewrites and bugs, takes place in the Faerun equivalent to Glasgow. And, despite the massively increased population and higher density of NPCs and framerate dives and cut content, it still feels like a haunted house ride. You dart around a tenth of the titular city going from attraction to attraction, ticking off entries in a checklist so bloated that I have to declare it as fetish art when crossing the Canadian border. Not once does the game cast off the rollercoaster shackles.

Something else that’s been bugging me as I both replay BG3 and watch others play is that, honestly, classes aren’t implemented very well in the narrative. Dialogue and actions that should break a Paladin’s oath often don’t, and the usage of generic ‘Paladin’ dialogues for each oath means that your character will almost always be OOC relative to their oath. Even Oathbreakers are OOC, as they can still act as and be treated as a Paladin by everyone not named Raphael. Warlocks can frequently chastise Wyll for how silly he was to accept a Fiend pact with little to no attention given to your hypocrisy. It’s often a coin toss whether or not characters will mention a Druid protagonist even being one when appropriate. If someone mentions a lock or trap in dialogue, take a shot every time they allude to you being a Rogue. You’ll be stone cold sober. Don’t even get me started on Warlock and its vocations.

I normally would not hold developers to such tight standards. Gamedev is tough, I’m not insane enough to think they should account for every contingency or random combination of decisions the player might make. The reason I make an exception for BG3 is because it constantly pretends it’s accounting for things. Part of the hype wave from Early Access was caused by the game having responses for all manner of combinations and the general assumption was that the full release would be the same, but More. So with that in mind, every omission is a bit of a glaring hole, especially as they’re often common-sense omissions - weirder ones get accounted for.

One last addendum (because this segment has expanded 3x its original size since I started) I feel is worth noting is that the original level cap for this game was 10. It was later buffed to 12 to allow spellcasters to get Level 6 spells, but Larian has explained several times that it’d never go any higher because they just didn’t want to deal with the ramifications of 7th level spellcasting or anything above it. “We didn’t want to deal with it” pops up a lot in interviews around this game, which is also vexing considering how much faff the game has.

[I had a segment here about how bad customization was, but honestly it’s just a repeat of my prior gripes in the last interview with an added “I hate how boring the body types are”.]

Okay. 5700 words into this review.

Let’s actually talk about the story, and the characters that inhabit it.

When I first ran through this game, I had a lot of love for the tadpole infestation as a framing device. A lot of my earlier story criticisms were centred around “squandering a good premise later on”. I liked the setup, but the payoffs to said setup were unsatisfying.

Now, coming back to Act 1 several times, I’ve actually come to resent the story for immediately going out of its way to remove all sense of urgency without even pretending there’s anything at stake. Very early on, you are told outright that the tadpole in your brain won’t immediately turn you and thus there’s no real rush whatsoever. Despite vestigial dialogue from Early Access implying that engaging with the tadpole at all will doom you, this is a lie. There are no consequences for using it, and it is indeed just a cool skill tree you can gorge on with no issue or complaints. Lae’zel doesn’t even need to be persuaded to turn a blind eye; you can stand in front of her and ram parasites into your skull while she stares at you glaikit and uncaring.

This isn’t an issue exclusive to the tadpoles. Even in Act 1, you will be told an annoying amount of times that the Druids are this close to shutting off the grove and that you REALLY need to hurry before they succeed in their ritual. Naturally, you can take all the time you like. Even as you learn of a pending Goblin invasion, so long as you don’t speak to Minthara you can just meander around at your own pace. Characters are constantly urging you to focus on things; Raphael warns you not to meander, your companions beg you to hurry up and do their specific thing, NPCs give you quests and go “oh it is SO urgent people are DYING it’s almost OVER you are our LAST HOPE” only to exit dialogue and stiffly walk away while you pinch their healing potions with Astarion.

Now, I need to lay my cards out here: I like time limits, and I think completionism is a venereal disease. I think the real strength of videogames is that they offer experiences that other artforms literally cannot replicate, and a huge part of this is due to some games simply not letting you ‘see everything’ on a first run.

I don’t think BG3 would actually benefit from hard or soft time limits, though. Rather, I take hefty umbrage with the game constantly pretending to have any sort of urgency or time limit only to clap its hands and lead you down a trail of Side Shit. It’s telling that you can acquire a ring from a sidequest that’s meant to assuage symptoms of tadpole infection only to find out that it confers a small buff instead.

WHICH IS A PERFECT TIME TO TALK ABOUT EARLY ACCESS AGAIN!

I really need you, the viewer, to understand how much of a different game BG3 was before they bowed to complaints and made a worse version of DA:O, and I’ll start with that bloody ring.

As I’ve mentioned before, the Early Access version of BG3 was a much different, darker beast. Using the tadpole was an in-game taboo, would royally piss off your companions, and subtly accelerated your descent into becoming a squid. But there was a way to make it fuck off: A ring. The same ring you get that now confers a small buff. It required a short and at-the-time annoying sidequest, but it made that tadpole shut up and made the dream visitor fuck right off until you removed it.
That it was diluted so heavily in the full release (to the point where pursuing the sidequest actually enhances your tadpole powers) is indicative of this game’s massive tone shift, but it’s not quite as indicative as *Wyll.

Wyll in BG3’s release version is the noble son of Duke Ravengard. He is a kind and morally upstanding man who took a Warlock pact that massively fucked him over, but he’s still good in spite of it. He is the goodest of good companions. Mizora, his patron, is just a terrible creature all around with all the redeeming traits of the average Serbian war criminal given that she groomed a teenager into accepting a Warlock pact.

Wyll in BG3’s EA version wasn’t even a Ravengard. He was hinted to be an Eltan, and his dad was a rogue. While he was still the ‘Blade of Frontiers’, conversing with him and exposing him to Goblins made it clear that he harboured an intense darkness in his soul and was a bit too proud of himself. When faced with noncompliant Goblins he immediately resorted to torture, and had no qualms about hurting an innocent man for information. He saw himself as Robin Hood, but veered into The Punisher territory… But there was also an undercurrent of longing to his desire to find Mizora. Despite being his abuser (more intensely, since EA implied she’d sexually assaulted him) and openly scorning her, it was never clear if he actually did hate her.

Unfortunately Larian made the mistake of asking CRPG fans to empathise with a morally complex black man and thus they whined for years that he was “boring” (despite being, imo, the most interesting EA companion besides Gale), so they rewrote him entirely and gave him a new VA and didn’t even have the fucking care to give him as much dialogue as the other companions, so now he feels worse than even the non-Origin characters or Karlach - who only existed late in the game’s lifespan. I bring this up specifically because EA Wyll and EA Astarion were essentially the same character concept; men who affected a front that crumpled under duress and revealed a murky, complex interior. Wyll’s story just progressed in EA while Astarion’s didn’t.

In the middle of writing this segment, which was going to touch on how launch BG3 is painfully split between trying to be a dark fantasy story and trying to be ‘Dragon Age With Cocks’, Larian dumped out Patch 5, which among other things adds an actual epilogue and a way to recruit Minthara without carrying out a small-scale ethnic cleansing. The content present in both of these confirmed to me that Larian have opted to embrace Bioware’s legacy wholeheartedly, by treating their own work as a terminally unserious dating sim for 20-30 somethings who laugh at Virtual Youtuber fans but treat Astarion as though he were an actual person they know.

It’s an excellent jumping off point for my criticisms about tone, though. Marketing itself as a Dark Fantasy Epic gives me certain expectations and while I’ll praise them for avoiding the addiction to sexual assault which is omnipresent in American/West European Dark Fantasy, I have to dock them points for not actually making a Dark Fantasy story. Yes, the game is very gorey and a lot of sidequest characters get royally dicked over, but this is ultimately a story about a party of mostly heroic individuals out to slay an inarguable bad guy who is out to control all reality. Along the way, you can hit a button every now and then to do a dickish thing for no justifiable reason than “the option was there”.

If you’ve played BG3, think of your least favourite party member. Maybe it’s Shadowheart, with her initial snootiness and wishy washy morals? Maybe it’s Lae’zel, with her refusal to lick your character’s boots and penchant for dickheadedness? Maybe it’s Gale, with his emotional manipulation and habit of lovebombing people?

Whoever they are: They were better in EA simply by way of having worse character traits. The release version comes with a distinct sanding-down of everyone to make them more palatable to the Dragon Age crowd. Which, given how DA fans continue to talk about Morrigan to this day, isn’t entirely unreasonable. The end result though is that the party are, as a collective, insufferably good. Besides Minthara - who is very obviously your Lawful Evil rep - every single party member is ‘good at heart’, or just outright good.

The option is there to make some of them worse, of course, but as I alluded to in my last review and up above there often isn’t any justifiable reason for it. It’s debatably a worse case of protagonist-centric morality than the titles this game is blatantly ripping off. At least Dragon Age 2 bothered to provide reasons why you might turn Anders into a crazed zealot or Isabela into an amoral, selfish thief. Here, the choice is always “follow the logical conclusion of the character’s arc” or “hit the bad guy button”.

None of this would be an issue if each NPC’s worst traits were still present. Barring some leftover EA dialogue and early Act 1, everyone just softens up unless you hit the bad guy button.

I also need to take a moment to natter about how boring the companions are, having seen their arcs to completion around 5-6 times at this point. Call me reductive if you wish, but every Origin character is someone whose life growing up was defined by abuse (sexual, emotional, institutional, whatever) and whose personalities at game start are defined by grooming (for romance, for sex, for control, as part of a militaristic caste society, by a literal demon, etc). The resolution to these characters is always either them getting over it - with only your help, naturally - or becoming a dickhead.

The only material difference, besides (imo) cosmetic differences in dialogue is that Astarion gets significantly more Everything than everyone, which is best exemplified by the Dark Urge

I was hoping to put the Astarion favouritism off until nearer the end, but again the recent update put him at the forefront of dev time, quality and quantity so I am bloodsworn to kvetch. Most of what I’m going to say applies to Shadowheart too, but to a much lesser degree because she’s a woman and you know how fantasy fans are.

Astarion gets an unusual amount of shilling by the devs, to the point where it gets exhausting. He has the most indepth romance, he has the most interactions with the Dark Urge, he has the most dialogue, the most interjections, the most indepth companion questline - with the most outcomes - and is generally just given so much more than everyone else. In updates, he is always the focus. “You can kiss Astarion on demand” got more attention from Larian themselves than “Minthara, an entire companion, now works properly”. Hell, the old BG3 poster used to have every companion dispersed evenly and now it’s got him at the forefront. He’s also the only dex-specced party member in the game, so you’re stuck with him unless you want a Hireling.

I wouldn’t normally take umbrage with character shilling because, let’s be honest for a second, posterboys are exceptionally useful marketing tools and most big releases have one for sanity’s sake. My actual issue comes from the sheer neglect everyone else gets. Wyll, a companion who’s been around since very early access, has less dialogue than Karlach - a character who didn’t at all exist until earlier this year. Everyone else just has less than Astarion, which is impressive given that it’s Shadowheart who the narrative drops on you. I’ve noticed that a lot of this game’s most vehement defenders tend to point to Astarion’s story (which is just “sexual assault is bad… when it happens to men c:”) as proof that the narrative is high art while conspicuously ignoring the rest of the game’s narrative contents.

In a way, it amazes me that Larian managed to speedrun the Star Wars Pitfall - wherein a series starts off with a vivid and interesting cast of characters only to cross the event horizon and end up revolving around 2-3 (Skywalker/Kenobi) in the end. In EA, BG3 was a game about a party of fucked up people with a deep ugliness in their soul sat opposite all the beauty, and in the full release BG3 is a game with Astarion and some other people in it.

Also… This may strike some viewers as cold, but I don’t particularly care about the way sexual assault and trauma are depicted in Astarion’s questline. Both because all of the abuse is thrown up in one big box named “abuse”, and because the writers clearly think the players are fucking morons which results in several scenes where either Astarion or the Narrator tells you outright the exact ways in which his trauma affects him.
This in itself is not unrealistic; as heartbreaking as it is, the most damaged people I know don’t want for self-awareness and could probably deliver much the same exposition.
In writing, though, it often comes off as what I said before: The writers assuming players are morons. Which is doubly strange given Gale (my favourite companion) is a whole other beast, and the results of his grooming by a literal goddess are often present yet not explicitly commented upon. He’ll even deny it in the rare moments you do bring it up.

It’s all very… “Young adult novel tackling abuse”. Every time I see the ‘good’ climax to Astarion’s story where he declares that he’s “so much more than [Cazador] made him” and then stabs his abuser to death before sobbing, I wince a little at how juvenile it is. In the past it was ambiguous as to whether murdering Cazador actually helped, but sure enough the new epilogues confirm it ‘fixes’ him. Nauseating, I tell you.

I mentioned that Gale was my favourite companion and that’s primarily because he hits on the same notes, they’re just handled with grace. Gale is a deeply traumatized man who was groomed and taken as a consort by a literal goddess. A goddess who enabled his worst tendencies until they bore actual consequences, and then cut ties with him for both of their sakes.
He presents a jovial and jolly front, but said front comes with a habit for compliments-as-manipulation and guilt tripping because it turns out being well-read does not make up for serious arrested development.
Peer beneath the veil and you find a man who has a genuine, sincere belief that his death will be a net positive for the world, yet despite this emptiness and resignment to his fate he still nurses a nuclear anger towards his abuser and anyone like her that can be set off if pushed properly. His apparent ‘ego’ is also a front, because in truth he believes his only notable trait is his intellect and magical prowess; they’re the core of his entire self. Without them, what is he?

There’s a moment in Act 2 that’s incredibly easy to miss due to that act’s general pacing issues where he’s just outright depressed. When you poke him for a conversation, the first thing he apologises for? Not being the erudite and verbose speaker he usually is. It’s heartbreaking.

Most of that is just inferred, by the way. Unlike Astarion, Gale has precious few scenes that really expand on his character and I had to really dig to get some of them. That many of them were bugged and didn’t appear until patches 3 and 4 didn't help. Minthara is great too, but the developers are hellbent on leaving her unfinished so I can’t even go into an expository rant about her.

I’m going to take a brief break from dunking on the game to talk about a good part - though it is in service to dunking all the same.

Act 2 is fucking phenomenal. I’d say it’s the only solid part of the game’s story. There’s a solid villain with defined motives and an actual personality, a strong supporting cast, minibosses who act as narrative mirrors to the big bad, and several companion quests (Except Wyll, sorry) reveal their full stakes here. The studio’s art designers worked overtime for each of its various environments, deftly alternating between oppressive deathcult fortresses and regal yet foreboding enclaves with plenty of rotted quasi-medieval structures in between before eventually capping off in a horrific dungeon made of meat. While I’m still not too fond of the Shadow-Cursed Lands as an area to navigate, I think the entire thing is of infinitely superior construction to the acts it’s sandwiched between.
Special shoutout to Act 2 if you’re playing as Shadowheart, which is perhaps the only time in the game where the potential of Origin Characters as a game mechanic is ever realized. Dialogue changes constantly and your interactions with the major NPCs are often radically shifted to account for your character’s role and heritage. Shame it doesn’t last.

Act 2’s biggest flaw, sadly, is that its mere existence makes two already bad acts look even worse. With the primary exception of Act 3’s intro and final two hours, most of BG3’s plot in Acts 1 and 3 only occurs sporadically. It is a series of diversions, fetch quests and camp rests until Plot, and Act 2 really pulls back the curtain on this because the plot is progressing constantly. It’s difficult to wander around Act 2 and not advance the story.
The foundation of this criticism stems from BG3’s obsession with absolute faff. Taking a leaf out of DA: Inquisition’s book, a lot of sidequests and side areas are either contextless fights or an intro to painfully unfunny writing. XP in this game stands for both Experience and Excruciating Pain from yet another Whedonesque gag sequence. Normally I’d excuse this because the game gives you gear for suffering, but so much gear is caster-specific that my martial addicted self usually bins it.

There’s a conspiracy theory that Dark Urge - who starts as a Sorcerer by default - was the main character and ‘Tav’ did not exist, which is probably not true but is believable with how much gear is caster specific. If you are a punchman or a Barbarian, eat shit.

And the Dark Urge itself… Truthfully, I like it so much that I do wish it was the only option and that Origins were unplayable. The DU story is a tale of someone wracked with a violent compulsion that haunts them no matter what. If they fight it, it is a story of fighting tooth and nail to stop said compulsion as it grows in power, eventually threatening to make the DU lash out and kill their loved ones. If they succumb, it’s a story of a demented madman building a throne of murder from the bones of reality, for they are a Bhaalspawn and that is their birthright.
DU is, to my surprise, a surprisingly captivating tale because of this. There’s a lot more weight given to some moments, and parts of the game which are usually dead air are instead filled with advancements of the DU’s personal plot. Successfully fighting it and making it to the end feels earned, in part because it’s the only good-aligned path in BG3 which is infinitely harder than the evil path.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand nobody really responds to it. DU, much like the other companions, just doesn’t get as much unique dialogue as it should. As expected, Astarion is the only character to really get into conversations about the DU, with everyone else only really giving brief interjections or casual camp chats. In the good route you are literally murdered stone dead and brought back, and nobody reacts to it. It feels grotesquely incomplete, which is a disservice to BG3’s most interesting aspect.

Throughout this review I’ve alluded to “the plot” or “the story” and I’m sad to announce that there just isn’t that much to discuss on that front. The party get infected with mind flayer tadpoles, are manipulated by a rogue mind flayer, get told to wrest control of an Elderbain from the Dead Three’s Chosen, and then decide what to do with said brain once it breaks free. I am of course being reductive, but only slightly; the meat of this game’s ‘story’ is the companion quests and side stuff. Attempt to do the plot with Hirelings and it peels back just how empty the game is.
And, really, I think having the final villain be the Elderbrain is a bit too straightforward for a game that pretends to have depth with its various ‘twists’. Doubly so considering the Chosen are miles ahead of the brain in terms of writing, managing to deftly straddle the line between “big bad you absolutely must kill” and “sympathetic failure who has reasons for being like this”. Which gives the game more depth than Final Fantasy XIV, I guess.

The story can be made somewhat more palatable by picking an Origin, because it at least hoists some unique scenes on you as a means to let you play out a character's arc however you wish. This is, sadly, the only way to give Wyll or Karlach any depth, and I'm not about to award points for the game encouraging you to make up the good writing in your head - though it certainly worked on a lot of people.

I am nearly ten thousand words into this review, and the entire time I've been waiting for a moment to posit the "What is Baldur's Gate 3 about?" question to myself. Staring down at the last few paragraphs, I realize I don't even know. So deep are the narrative changes and so sloppy is the EA/Launch welding that I can't even speculate with certainty.

As we near the end, I do want to say that the voice acting is the game’s best aspect. Besides Neil Newbon (I’m sorry. He sounds like Stewie Griffin. I will not budge.) everyone else sounds fantastic. It says a lot that the main cast have relatively few works under their belt yet are managing to go toe-to-toe with legendary voice actors JK Simmons and Jason Isaacs, with the gap in quality being about a hair’s width. Sure, it’s really fucking annoying that the game has a cutscene for EVERY dialogue even if it’s incidental NPC one-offs, but at least it’s nice to listen to everyone. Shout out to Maggie Robertson for managing to make every line out of Orin’s voice sound hornier than even I could imagine. You rock.

Ultimately, this game’s ambitions hurt it the most. There is a vast mountain of cut content for this game, much of which was being shown off and played by the developers as late as three weeks pre-release. Endless rewrites, mechanical changes and changing staff are obvious in the patchwork, ramshackle product that released in August of this year. There is a clear attempt to make a modern epic on display here. To call this game a rough gem would be acknowledging that it is still a gem, and that’s not praise I’m willing to offer even faintly.
Towards the back of my 200~ hours in this game, I began thinking of something I read years ago while talking about Three Kingdoms China. I think it’s from Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’?

There’s a limit to how far something can travel before it needs more maintenance, food and water than it can transport. This goes for animals, humans, and software too.

Baldur’s Gate 3 needed either more money, staff and resources than Larian had, or more realistic ambitions. The foundation required to support their ambitions just wasn’t there.

This game has already won a ton of awards, and will likely win even more in the coming year. For many people, it’ll be their first experience with Dark Fantasy and their views on the genre will be coloured by it. It’ll take five or so years for critical retrospectives to exist without getting shouted down by manic Astarion fans. Even now, all over social media, excitable gamers hold it aloft as an example of what games “should be”, and executives will nod their head and agree. It is, after all, the AAA way to launch unfinished and fix it later.

I have no satisfactory ending for this review. Which, given what game I'm reviewing, is apt.

[POST-SCRIPT STUFF STARTS HERE]

After posting this review, I lay down to rest my ancient back and primordial eyes, and I had a thought.

This game has problems with sex, Asian people and trans people.

Just to rattle them off without a script or proofreading:

1) Sex is treated weirdly, like Bioware's attitude but worse. It is a reward, something you get from engaging in the uncomfortably transactional romances or from doing sidequests. Alternatively, it's treated as a kink in and of itself, and that people who have it are freaky, which is very obvious with both Minthara and the fucking incest twins. Lastly, it tends to pop up as a punchline but in a very annoying way where it's the only punchline. There is genuinely an encounter early on where the '''joke''' is "haha look! Ugly people fucking!"

2) There just aren't any important Asian characters in this game, with the most prominent being a one dimensional baddy who is ultimately irrelevant outside of Astarion's questline and the rest being NPCs with one or two lines of dialogue. It really sticks out, especially given the undeserved praise this game is getting for representation. Hell, the Black characters aren't treated any better; Wyll is a non-factor thanks to Larian gutting him to appease whiners, and his dad is another man's plot token. Neither of them have any agency within the story, with Wyll always putting the fate of his dad in your hands. The playable cast is so fucking white too, my god.

3) Much of what I said up above applies to trans people, essentially confirming what I said last time. There are only a handful of trans NPCs, and there are no body options so if you decide to be a trans woman you're stuck with bolted on tits, and trans male characters are stuck looking buff as fuck because everyone in this game shares one of 4 body types. Sure, you could use one of the other body types, but faces are sex-based and there's an aggravating lack of sliders there's no real option besides femininity or masculinity. Fun! There's one major trans NPC who appears in Shadowheart's quest, but that's really it for trans people in Faerun.

[This one is cobbled together from my review notes and also the 500~ Discord messages I exchanged about the game with some friends, so it’s a bit scatterbrained compared to my usual fare.]

When talking about games in a longrunning franchise, certain phrases tend to pop up around controversial entries.

“This game was one step forward, two steps back” and its variants.

Judgment confounded and still very much confounds me because it’s a step in every direction at once, with its directions seemingly mapped to someone’s rhythm game dance mat.

The premise of this game is simple: Dispense with the Yakuza franchise’s typical crime plots, machismo drama and half-naked rooftop brawls and replace it with a detective story that gradually branches out into a conspiracy tale. In the same vein, Kiryu takes a vacation from the series and is replaced by Takayuki Yagami, a guy who frequently calls to mind Geoff Keighley in that Yagami too is a relatively uncharismatic and drab man surrounded by the most interesting people on Earth. Rather than fighting with epic, powerful brawling moves, Yagami is a more agile and crafty fighter which is ludonarratively in touch with what I assume must be a frequent need to evade the authorities for chatting up high schoolers.

Right off the gate, the most immediately tangible difference between this game and its parent series is that Judgment has opted for a return to the quasi-noir style of Yakuza 2 - albeit if you play the current gen version you’ll have to fucking squint to notice it. It’s most obvious with Yagami’s constant internal narrations and an overarching feeling that you are but a cog in a machine you can’t really comprehend. Furthering this is that the Yakuza are no longer cool, noble modern heroes. They’re petty, lying criminals with no regard for civilians and a nasty habit of letting ambitions cloud judgement - pun not intended.

Yakuza games north of 2 have an awful tendency to drop about 50 NPCs on you in the first few chapters and only 10 will matter, and with Judgment they’ve bucked this trend in favour of sticking to a very small pool of characters. If you start with the franchise here you won’t get inundated with keywords, but it does expect you to remember who everyone is.

This, unfortunately, works against it. The worst sin a detective/murder mystery story can carry is being predictable. And Judgment is very predictable. Having a smaller cast means the suspect can only logically be someone within that cast, and the game makes no attempt to throw the player off or surprise them, as characters frequently interject to shoot down any suspects that aren’t the suspect. As a result, I’d figured out the killer’s identity by the middle of the game and their motive just shortly after. It’s not great, and the insistence on padding out a relatively unengaging conspiracy plot means the back half of this game drags.
I will admit, though, that there’s a good chance it was only obvious to me because I’m very attuned to the unspoken languages used in detective media, Yakuza games and games as a whole. In an RGG Studios game, the big bad is going to be someone who was face-scanned from a real actor. That’s just a fact, and it narrows the list down to four people.

As a detective story, the game also fails because there’s not a lot of actual detecting going on. Most plot beats are sussed out via pure instinct, and the trailing/investigation stuff often doesn’t actually matter due to the story progressing once Yagami makes a wild connection that Kaito calls ridiculous but ultimately ends up being right. Chapter 9 is AWFUL for this! Yagami essentially solves the entire plot barring two loose ends, and though everyone rightfully calls it out as absurd, Yagami is right.

Fortunately! There is a silver lining to this: The cast is exceptional, and despite the actual story being banal drudgery it is hard carried by excellent character dynamics, fantastic development for the main players, and a wonderful ability to pace out interpersonal reveals. I don’t like Yagami himself, but the supporting cast are phenomenal and the dynamic between the ever-growing members of his detective agency is worth the price of admission. Kaito might be RGG Studios’ best supporting man.

This is also the start of RGG Studios respecting the player’s time, so there are now optional
intermissions between long exposition dumps. While the story already drags, these excel in keeping things from feeling too suffocating - though the last couple hours are egregious even by franchise standards. On the ‘two steps forward’ front, the story manages to avoid the sins of past Yakuza games (4 and 5 especially) by knowing when to slam the brakes… Except in Chapter 7, which might be the most unwieldy exposition dump in the series. Other scenes go on longer, yes, but Chapter 7’s is so hamfisted it might as well be a pig.

There’s just one problem. A really really big problem. A problem so big that I can’t forgive it, even when I can forgive the obvious killer and the plodding middle third and the frankly weird left-turns the story makes near the end.

This was Toshihiro Nagoshi’s last big hurrah as a writer for RGG Studios and it unfortunately shows. With 0, 6, and 7 he took a backseat role which saw the writing quality rise dramatically, but the games he was a proper lead on tend to have some problems with the writing of women and Japan’s various minorities - Korean and Chinese primarily. It’s rather telling that the first mainline Yakuza after his stepping back from the role contains women in prominent roles and a direct addressing of the franchise’s prior treatment of Korean and Chinese migrants.

Judgment unfortunately maintains the spirit of his earlier work, and the game is suffocatingly misogynistic. Every female character in this story is either a plot device, revolves around the affections of men, or is someone for Yagami to prey on. It pains me to say it after the series managed to pull itself out of the misogyny pit, but Judgment is worse about women than Yakuza 1 was. Special mention goes to Mafuyu, whose entire character can be summed up as “Yagami’s ex” and she never evolves beyond this.
It is both hilarious and depressing, then, that this is the only RGG title to make an overt commentary on misogyny. Halfway through the game, you play as Saori - An assistant at Yagami’s old law office - and go through the hostess minigame from Yakuza 0/Kiwami 2… Which the game uses to comment on the misogyny faced by hostesses and indeed any woman faced on the streets of Japan.

This is tone-deaf in a million ways, yeah, but it stands out especially for being an uncomfortable commentary in a game that itself is incredibly misogynistic. Furthermore, for as much as I love the post-Nagoshi RGG games, they still include the skeevy and relatively unpleasant hostess minigames with absolutely zero sense of self-awareness. In another game series this would’ve been fine, but in a franchise with a still-growing black mark it has all the grace of a pigeon trying to do taijutsu.

Ah, speaking of clumsy martial arts, now is a fantastic time to discuss the gameplay.

I like the gameplay, but it’s not good, really. It’s a significant shakeup for the series, focusing less on brawling and more on acrobatics. Almost none of Yagami’s moves are reused, and for the first time in years we have a protagonist with a 110% unique fighting style - two of them, even!

And… One of them sucks. Badly. Really badly. Yagami has access to Crane (wide kicking attacks for crowds) and Tiger (Open-palm karate attacks for single target fights), and Crane is an utter waste of space. It gets no upgrades and its supposed use case is also perfectly doable by the versatile, powerful, hard hitting and exceptionally fast Tiger style - which also gets infinitely stronger as the game goes on. There’s some occasional uses for Crane as a combo extender, but normal melee attacks in this game do so little damage that this isn’t a meaningful use.

Instead, Judgment is focused on powerful single hits. Yagami can jump over enemies and bounce off of walls as preludes to exceptionally strong heavy hits, and Tiger style gets both the Tiger Drop from Kiryu’s games and Bruce Lee’s one-inch punch. The primary focus of combat in Judgment is scrabbling around to get an enemy on the backfoot before you hit them really hard. Truthfully? I like it. Kenzan and Ishin both added ‘new things’ but were ostensibly just skins for the standard brawling Yakuza combat. Playing as Yagami feels much more tense, as though he’s outmatched and has to basically cheat to survive. It’s telling that his hardest fight is against a guy who fights mostly the same.

But it is ultimately a messy and undercooked system that’s enjoyable in spite of its mechanics rather than because of them. People have mercifully reassured me that Lost Judgment is better about this, opting to become “Yakuza DMC” rather than a half-finished mod for Kiwami 2. As a small aside, I need to harp on the game for just how bad the hyperarmor problem is. Even mooks on the street are able to resist several blows which makes the early game feel like wading through mud.

There is one aspect I’ll praise without caveats though:

THE DUB.

I’m blessed/cursed with enough passive Japanese knowledge to know what constitutes a ‘bad’ performance in that language, even if the specifics are harder to articulate because I’m hardly conversational let alone fluent. The JP track in this game is very… Stilted. Yagami’s VA isn’t putting his heart into it and is fulfilling every bad stereotype about getting TV actors to do VA roles without much prep, and the side characters are a massive mixed bag. Again, I’m assured that Lost Judgment fixes this.

The dub, though? Goddamn. Everyone is putting in work. Greg Chun and Crispin Freeman act their hearts out during the various Yagami/Kaito dynamic scenes. Steve Blum returns to larger videogames as Higashi and kills it, reminding everyone why he was so prolific once upon a time. The venerable Fred Tatasciore appears as Kyohei Hamura and utterly owns the role, providing an infinitely better antagonistic presence than the actual antagonist, and Cherami Leigh manages to salvage Mafuyu’s drab character with an excellent performance. I was really fond of Keith Silverstein’s role as Satoshi Shioya, too, and was sad he was such an underused character.

I’m a big fan of Yakuza 7’s dub and likewise think it’s superior to the JP track, but with Judgment I am infinitely more confident in making that declaration. It’s frankly a shame that the series’ dubbing legacy is tarnished thanks to Gaiden’s utterly lackluster efforts. Here’s hoping Infinite Wealth is better.

In the end… God, I really did want to like this one. It’s so cool and the cast is so wonderful that it actually makes me kind of sad to have my review be so glum, but there’s just too much shit I can’t excuse even for a franchise that demands you put up with some shit in the process of experiencing it.

Kaito is my best friend.

The question posed during Dishonored 2’s development which best summarises the end product’s probably “could we do both?” Its levels are ambitious conceptually, but stifle their potential in practice by having to accommodate two characters’ different sets of powers, plus players who forego powers altogether. Its premise tries to expand Dishonored’s world by taking us to a new locale, but ultimately makes it feel smaller by having it revolve around the same five or six people as before. It stresses player agency, but hamstrings it via more rigidly characterised protagonists coupled with a more intrusive focus on clumsier storytelling. Even the box art evokes the root of most of its issues: pulling itself in two directions.

Playing it back-to-back with its predecessor makes this especially apparent in terms of movement. Dishonored 2 adds uncancellable animations to lots of mundane actions which were instantaneous before – e.g. keyhole peeping, vaulting over or on top of obstacles, sliding – and/or makes them more restrictive, significantly limiting the directions in which you can sprint as well as adding roughly a full second of input delay to crouching and standing back up. Assuming immersion was the goal, because it’s hard to imagine what else could be the rationale behind making it so stoppy-starty, these changes only serve to produce the opposite effect; I’m less drawn into the game by a few minor features arguably feeling slightly more tangible than before and much more taken out of it by wondering why superhuman acrobats Emily and Corvo forgot how to jog anywhere but directly forwards, come to a screeching halt whenever they lightly brush against a railing or are only sporadically able see their own legs. Raphaël Colantonio, who conspicuously didn’t direct this game, once discussed how Arkane intentionally avoids putting ladders in their games because they don’t want players to feel like they’re stuck in “modes,” i.e. states in which their options are arbitrarily restricted. That approximate situation’s happening every few steps in Dishonored 2, however briefly, and cumulatively makes for an experience that controls like a boat compared to the first Dishonored’s butter.

To some extent, Dishonored 2’s addition of several new nonlethal tools assuages the constrictiveness brought about by this, but it also unfortunately makes lethal and nonlethal playstyles much more samey. You can now use melee to knock enemies out through several conditions after they’ve spotted or even engaged combat with you, as well as KO them from above with a nonlethal counterpart to drop assassinations – as a result, what little resource management there was is diminished (since this eats into the niche of sleep darts), the degree to which players have to navigate levels differently depending on their lethality’s reduced (counterproductive to how it adds or subtracts the amount of bloodflies and guards) and a nonlethal player generally doesn’t have to worry about any scenarios which a lethal player also doesn’t. Low Chaos runs are no longer about being the bigger man and abstaining from the temptation of inflicting avoidable harm onto those who’ve dishonoured™ you, because Dishonored 2 covers you with a safety net in the name of convenience and lets you do so without worrying about its potential consequences.

This toothlessness extends to its writing and the whiplash-inducing contrast between how little it respects the player’s intelligence versus how much playing it still ultimately does. You’re frequently beaten over the head with definitive, unprompted, often incredibly lame answers to most of what had even the slightest room for interpretation in the first game, a big part of why I found Dishonored’s world so captivating. The Outsider, now recasted to an ill-fitting voice actor who sounds much less characteristically indifferent and aloof, quashes all mystery surrounding his esoteric origins by explaining to you that he’s just some goober who got murdered by a cult some years ago. Jessamine’s spirit now appears to either protagonist of your choosing to confirm that the Heart is hers, because you aren’t trusted to have sussed that out from it sharing her voice or how heavily it alludes to being familiar with them both. The now-voiced protagonists comment on and spoonfeed you everything, delivering such insights as “Corvo must’ve lived here” seconds after CORVO ATTANO’S ABANDONED HOME flashes up on the screen or moping about who manufactured their door locks for some reason, usually within earshot of guards whose selective deafness sticks out like a sore thumb due to how otherwise impressively perceptive they are (exacerbated by the first game’s Daud DLCs not having this problem). It’s distractingly discordant with the hands-off, let-the-player-fill-in-the-gaps style of game design stemming from its Looking Glass lineage and doesn’t make up for it with any layers that even the first game’s fairly straightforward plot still managed to have – for example, how Daud’s guilt-stricken actions indirectly lead to the rat plague being cured.

It'd be fair to say you don’t play Dishonored for its narrative if 2 didn’t emphasise it so much more than its predecessor that it bottlenecks its own mission structure. Being whisked away into unskippable cutscenes for Delilah to deliver spontaneous monologues retconning her own motivations is one thing, but outright preventing the player from progressing through a level’s objectives until they’re forced into an unavoidable encounter with its target (as first occurs in The Good Doctor) is just poisonous for this genre. This is the sequel to a game which has an achievement for pickpocketing a major antagonist unnoticed and without harming him, just to taunt him about how much better of an assassin you are – to picture what it’d be like if that level were in Dishonored 2, either completely remove or lock about a third of its optional areas behind unbreakable doors whose keys are on the opposite end of the map, make obtaining Corvo’s stolen equipment mandatory, forbid the player from completing any other objective until they do, have Corvo moan about how wet it is after looking at a visibly flooded vista and create an unskippable sequence where Daud scuffles with him before subsequently forgetting he was ever there.

Even more than how palpably confused it is, Dishonored 2’s most deflating in its fundamental lack of imagination. Some eejit with a gamerboxd account has no business suggesting what a game with this much talent and money behind it should’ve been about instead, or whether Arkane even had the creative freedom to choose its premise, but this world and a character like the Outsider beg for an anthological approach. All of these issues could well’ve been more tolerable if they were present in a game more interested in its own setting; say, one about an Overseer missionary to Pandyssia who has to balance his faith in addition to the region’s Chaos level or a disgraced captain of Tyvia’s secret police. Of all the avenues they could've explored, how they landed on essentially rehashing the first game’s DLCs is anyone’s guess.

I’m fortunate that revisiting a game’s never once made me think less of it, but this is also the first time where it’s not helped me find anything further to appreciate. I don’t regret playing Dishonored 2 and continue to recommend it to the curious, but these are mostly because (respectively) it’s disappointing on so many levels that it caused me both to reevaluate what I want out of games in the first place as well as be wary of any sequels commonly referred to as better than the original in every way(!!!), and there are so few similar games that you might as well try it anyhow. As a baseline, the industry would be a better place if more games were like it, but it’s only that – both flavours of Arkane proved several times before, and particularly just the year after, that they’re capable of far more than this.

text by tim rogers

★★★★

“THE BEST VIDEOGAME OF ALL-TIME.”

Another World (released as “Out of This World” in the US and “Outer World” in Japan) is, perhaps by default, the best game of all-time by our criteria: it was designed and programmed by virtually one man, it is not long, it features no heads-up display to clutter the screen, it features precisely one weapon which can be used for three purposes (regular attack, charge attack, shield) using only one button (we love games that let us hold down a button and then let go), it possesses unshakable confidence in the sharpness of its mechanic (conveyed in level design that prompts the player to use his multi-faceted gun in many creative ways), it features puzzles whose solutions require no more than common sense, it has amazing music, it is gorgeous to look at, and it tells a story while it moves, relentlessly, never stopping, never preaching, never speaking, from the frightening beginning right up to the heartbreaking conclusion.

Out of This World was ahead of its time in 1991, and it is still ahead of not-its time in 2008. One might call it an art film of a videogame. This wouldn’t be a wrong description so much as a lazy one. It’s more of a silent film of a videogame. Or, better than that, it is a videogame of a videogame.

Out of This World shows (not tells) us the story of Lester Knight Chaykin, a red-haired physicist working in some kind of laboratory. The introduction scene impresses us immediately with visions of the familiar: a car (headlights), a building, a thunderstorm. Lester — whose name we will only know if we’ve read it out of the instruction manual — descends into his laboratory and boots up a large computer. He leans back in his chair. He sips a can of what might be beer. It’ll be the last can of what might be beer that he’ll ever have. A lightning bolt strikes the building outside. We see Lester’s car again, for a split second. Something explodes and implodes simultaneously deep inside the lab. A spherical hole replaces Lester’s chair. The screen hangs there for a moment, perfect, weighty cinematography befitting . . . cinema. Then there’s a crash, and a splash. Lester materializes in a pool of water. Vine-like tentacles begin to reach toward the sunlight on the surface of the pool.

The game begins.

Out of This World, from this moment until its fascinating conclusion, represents an Actual Genius’s osmosed omniscience regarding game design: we can say that it is Super Mario Bros. turned on its ear. In Super Mario Bros., the player knows he has to go to the right because his recognizable-as-human avatar is facing to the right, and standing just left of the center of the screen. The reason for going to the right is explained only in the instruction manual: a dragon has kidnapped a princess, and Mario must get her back (our imaginations fill in the perhaps-promise of getting laid). Out of This World doesn’t need an instruction manual: here we have a hero who was in one place, and is now in another. Sinking in a pool of water is objectively worse (humans can’t breathe underwater) a situation than sitting in a desk chair drinking beer (what’s a few dead brain cells?). We must get out of here. To further impress the situation upon us, we have those growing, evil tentacles.

It is possible to die a grisly, uniquely animated death not one second into Out of This World. It’s likely that the designer, one Eric Chahi, intended for the player to die the first time the game began. This is how you die in the beginning of the game: you don’t press any buttons. You just stare at the beautiful and serene pool of water. This is, in fact, what most people would do, if they found themselves suddenly transported from a desk chair in a laboratory to a pool of water beneath a vaguely alien sun. That one second is long enough for Lester to sink just far enough for the evil tentacles to grab him. Now you’re being dragged underwater. The next thing you know, you’re dead.

All great art tends to originate from a somewhat shy little need. Most of the time, the “need” is only a placebo. The artist eventually realizes he didn’t need anything. Like The Stone Roses said, “You don’t have to wait to die / the kingdom’s all inside”. Or something. Eric Chahi’s production of Another World began when he saw the game Dragon’s Lair, found the animation fascinating, and dreamt up — probably in a split second, while standing dead still in the middle of an intersection with a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand — a method to make similarly fluid animation using much less data storage space. He set to work immediately, having no clue what he was going to make — only a basic idea of how he was going to do it. It’s said he planned at first only to make a game like Karateka and Prince of Persia, only in a science-fiction setting. He spent half a year developing his excessively complicated though ultimately amazingly efficient animation technique. He developed it the only sane way: while using it to make a cinematic introduction for his game.

Now it was time to make a game. Eric Chahi presumably did not bother to jot his game design idea onto a bar napkin. The “game design” pre-production phase of Another World did not exist. Chahi had presumably had a simple idea brewing. When it came time to make a game, he figuratively snapped his fingers, and a genie exploded out of his ears.

Every third man who owns an electric guitar will claim to have met and hung out with the person who only they consider “the best unknown singer / songwriter alive today”. These singer / songwriter-warriors often impart the same advice regarding songwriting to every friend cool enough to drink a beer with them: if you want to write a song, man, just heckin’ write a song. Anything can be a song. A song can be anything. And If you have a song, sing it. This is not just the method for writing songs — you can replace these verbs and adjectives at random, and you’ll end up with a pretty fool-proof philosophy.

Another World is a song of a videogame. The dumbfounding simplicity of its core mechanics are such that they must have been set in stone from the very moment Chahi began level design. Chahi says, nowadays, that the level design was done completely at random, in a spur-of-the-moment sort of way, and this sticks: only when the game design is so thoroughly complete is the level design allowed to be spur-of-the-moment.

The basic gist of Another World is that you must not die. You play the part of a man in a world completely different from the home of cars and laboratories glimpsed in the introduction, and then never again. You escape from the tentacles in the pool to find yourself on a barren, rocky planet. You may walk either to the right or to the left. To the left is a cliff, and a vine. To the right are some slugs. If a slug bites your leg, you will see a pan-flash close-up animation of a silver stinger cutting through khaki. Then it’s back to the main screen. Lester falls over, dead. Your next attempt, you might try pressing a button. Press the Action Button, and Lester kicks. Kick the slugs to kill them. Press the Jump Button to hop over the slugs. Keep moving right, and you will come face-to-face with a beast. The beast is huge, and black. It is, in fact, the first thing you see upon exiting the pool at the beginning of the game: the beast is standing on a cliff in the distance. When you emerge from the water, he turns and gallops off-screen. You cannot kill the beast, and you will immediately know this because you know how Lester is hardly a match for a slug. Whether you walked left at the beginning of the game or not, whether you saw that vine and that cliff or not, you will be compelled to run back the way you came by virtue of the fact that the beast literally takes up most of the right side of the screen. You will run left, jumping over the slugs. The beast chases you. You run all the way off the edge of the cliff, grab the vine, and swing around as the beast rears up to avoid falling. Now you have to run again to the right, jumping over the slugs again. Make your way all the way back to the screen where you met the beast; when you run off the right side of the screen, the game suddenly betrays your just-founded expectations (that running off the edge of one screen takes you to a new screen) by having your character fall backward onto the rocky ground. Robe-shrouded, large humanoid forms walk into the frame. The beast comes gallopping into the screen. One of the robed men immediately shoots the beast with a concealed weapon. The beast crumples into a pile. Lester stands up, thanking his saviors. He is punched in the gut with a laserbeam, and the screen fades to black.

You wake up in a cage. It’s a brief cut-scene. You see an alien sitting across from you. This is very important: at the lower-right corner of the screen is one of the robed aliens. He immediately removes his robe. Underneath is a large, albino-gorilla-like muscular being wearing a skin-tight black shirt and briefs. This alien being is precisely identical to the alien beings mining in the background — and the alien sitting next to us in our cage. Why are we in the cage? As with most of the questions presented in Another World, this is a question we don’t need to ask. We can ask it — and then answer it — anyway: these aliens all look precisely the same. Lester doesn’t look anything like them. Lester is in the cage, perhaps, because he is an obviously intelligent being who looks nothing like the resident intelligent beings of this world. The narrative plays our brain on subconscious levels: if Lester is arrested for looking different, then these people might have some kind of racism in their hearts. That would make them inherently bad. We don’t hesitate to assume that the reason they locked up one of their own kind is because he is not bad. If the game’s first puzzle is getting out of the pool, and the second puzzle is escaping from the beast, the third is wondering why these terrible things keep happening to us. The solution to the puzzle involves a leap of conscience: escape from the cage. Escaping from the cage requires as much common sense as swimming out of the water. In the water, you pressed up. In the cage, you press right and left to make it swing. Make it swing once, and the guard in the lower-right shouts some unintelligible alien words at you. He fires his gun into the air. Guards appear in the background. Now you know you’re on the right track. Swing harder. The cage falls off its chain and crushes the guard dead. A quick cut-scene shows Lester’s hand approaching the floor, picking up a gun. The guards in the background panic.

The rest of the game begins.

The immediate, short-term, and long-term goals will, for the duration of the experience, be “move”, and “survive”. Moving will involve running and jumping; surviving will involve shooting and dodging.

Another World is a game centered on death. As we’ve established, Eric Chahi’s inspiration for creating it came from looking at Dragon’s Lair and wondering if he could create a similar graphical effect using much less storage space. There had to be a little more to the Dragon’s Lair inspiration than Eric Chahi has perhaps let on. Dragon’s Lair‘s initial appeal was its full-motion-video graphics. It was better than something that looked “like” a cartoon — it was a cartoon. That was enough, in Dragon’s Lair‘s day and age. People wouldn’t care about the control or depth of a game if it looked like absolutely nothing they’d ever seen before within the same medium. You play Dragon’s Lair by pressing the correct button as dictated by a glint on the screen. Press that button, and the hero will move, initiating a “successful” video segment. Don’t press that button, and the current segment of video will flow directly into the “failure” animation. Dragon’s Lair‘s conscience is a weird one to peg, however, because nearly as much attention is paid to “failure” as to “success”. Some would even argue that watching your hero die is more interesting than watching him succeed. If you have only successfully completed Dragon’s Lair without making any mistakes, then you haven’t seen the whole game. Another World is the same way, only — thanks to the beautiful animations taking up much less data storage space than full-motion video — there’s an actual game shoehorned into it.

Dragon’s Lair had been joyfully free of then-modern videogame genre restrictions: the action was shown from many bizarre, quasi-cinematic angles. Another World was intended from the outset to be an experiment in streamlining an artistic game experience. So it ended up as a side-scroller in the vein of Super Mario Bros. Chahi probably never had a doubt in his mind that many of the set-pieces in the game would rely on use of a context-sensitive Action Button. It’s the button you will immediately think to press when an alien grabs you buy the shoulders; press it in time and you kick him in the groin, and he drops you. No game has done Action Buttoning as well as Another World, try as games might. The simplicity of the situations — always one man, expressively and silently facing a faceless opponent in a unique struggle — and the honest, terse dread of every moment-to-moment conflict lend themselves well to a just-barely-subconscious instinct that knows to Press That One Button. The variety of set pieces exploits the Action Button’s function and timing in enough entertaining ways to qualify this game as a masterpiece, as the undisputed king of the “adventure” genre, far better than all those point-and-clickers with their byzantine puzzles with arcane solutions and tacked-on tacky humor. Then the game goes and takes one step closer to the edge of the Grand Canyon, when Lester picks up a gun; minutes later, we are playing The Greatest Videogame Ever.

Pick up the gun and proceed one screen to the right. You will see guards in the halls. The gun is the king in Another World: no living thing survives more than one shot. Landing that one shot is the trick. In your second fight, you will see a guard hold his gun out, and a ball of energy grow at the tip. Eventually, the ball of energy will become a shield roughlythe height of his body. He will then poke his arm out of the shield and fire at you. You can duck his shots. The game is telling you to hold your own Action Button down. Hold it down long enough, and you produce your own shield. Poke your arm out and shoot at his shield. Shoot his shield enough to break it. Or you can hold your trigger until the glowing ball appears, and then let go to fire a massive, shield-destroying shot. With the shield destroyed, fire another quick zap to disintegrate your enemy.

If Another World were made today, or one day later, or one day earlier, you maybe would have just had a gun that fired when you pressed the fire button. Maybe you would have gotten another gun, later, which fired really fast, and a third gun, which fired really big bullets. Another World‘s game design, however, was gracefully decided in what we’ve determined was the length of a snap of the creator’s fingers. A gorgeous one-off informed by all that was ever fun in videogames, and all that would ever come to be.

To recap, your gun can:

1. Fire enemy-killing lasers
2. Create a force shield capable of absorbing several shots
3. Fire a charged shot capable of destroying an enemy force shield in one burst

The level design escalates smoothly, then sharply. We learn how to shoot. We learn how to shield. We learn how to break shields. Then the game pushes us down an elevator shaft, the sink-or-swim approach. Soon, we’re making shields on staircases, or making two shields, or three. Soon, we have enemies attacking from two fronts. Eventually, we’re attacking enemies with craft. Each screen, each skirmish, becomes a little puzzle. Another World owes its elegance in no small part to its screen-by-screen nature. Like Pac-Man, like Donkey Kong, all action in the game takes place within one screen. What we can see right now is what matters. Maybe some literary theme is hiding behind the scenes of this, or maybe not. Either way, it works, because the creator only needed to think of every gunfight in the context of one screen.

Some will say that Another World‘s controls are hokey, or ropey. We say that they are exactly as they’re supposed to be. We’re not even going to cop-out and say that life is hokey and ropey, nor are we going to say that the characters in Gears of War move really slowly. We’re just going to say that everything bows to the game design. We believe that the highest compliment one can pay a single-player adventure game is that a two-player deathmatch mode, with each player controlling a clone of the main character, would be amazing. This is certainly the case in Another World: we can imagine a single-screen arena where players are free to set up shields, blast shields down, and take shots at one another. In that context, the controls would feel just right. It’d be at least as engaging as Pac-Man Vs., or as entertaining as four-player “Don’t Touch The Floor” in Bionic Commando: Rearmed.

The game flows along, through Action Button scenes, platform segments, environmental puzzles, split-second-long yet mesmerizing cut-scenes, and increasingly elaborate gunfights. Lester will eventually have to swim, solve a dastardly puzzle requiring him to flood a large cave, and pilot a tank in a death arena. All the while, you keep running, terrified. The story shows itself deliberately, with elaborate foreground and background animations. Eventually, there’s a “main bad guy”, who looks exactly like every other alien — including your buddy. The “final battle”, which you fight on your stomach, crawling at one-sixteenth your previous walking speed, involves a hysterically brilliant play on the physical appearance of the aliens, eliminating all doubt: no, Eric Chahi most definitely did not make all the aliens look the same because he was lazy. (Then again, to say he intended this conclusion all along would negate what he’d said about doing the level design randomly. In other words, Eric Chahi is even more of a genius for deciding to stage the final battle the way he did. Wow.)

The ending is beautiful, and you’ll never forget it.

Certain questions regarding Another World‘s continuity will only ever be asked by fourteen-year-old kids: at the beginning of the game, we see these aliens shooting a beast with a gun. If the only purpose of having a gun is to hunt for safety or for food, why is there a shield function? The answer to the question is, of course, another question: why are the aliens imprisoning one of their own, who happens to look exactly like they look? Eventually, if you want it, Another World becomes about more than survival. Eventually, a quite frankly spooky theme settles down gently over the experience: we are a man sprinting for freedom in an absolutely, mind-crushingly foreign universe. There it is: no matter how sharply the rules of life might suddenly change, any man will know from instinct alone what freedom is.

Right after the first gunfight, Lester and his Alien Buddy get on an elevator. You can go down — the right way — or you can go up. If you go up, you will find yourself in a small, dome-shaped room with a window. Walk over and look out the window. We see through Lester’s eyes. The first time you see it, you don’t know what to think.

It’s a view of the expanse of this terrifyingly foreign world. Immediately, you look at that, and you know you’re going to die. You know Lester is going to die, some day, even if — especially if — he survives this. All at once, the Looney Tunes nature of grisly death and oblivious rebirth subconsciously becomes an essential artistic element of Another World‘s design.

Playing Another World before age sixteen can, probably, make one a better human being in the end. It’s certainly more qualifiable as “art” than any Disney animation.

Aw, we shouldn’t have said that. That was kind of rude.

Another World is a lean game, designed through a series of what must have been excruciatingly difficult choices. Chahi chose not to incorporate every possible gun/shield-dynamic permutation into the game, because this isn’t a game “about” shooting. Overstaying his welcome was never Chahi’s intent. Chahi’s intent, presumably, was to make a game that begins, middles, and ends. He composed event sequences on the fly, maybe fiddled with the arrangement, and then set about removing what didn’t work perfectly well. This is something modern game designers don’t do, more often than not. Just ask the crew behind the Final Fantasy games: past a certain point in the development, if an idea is still sitting on the table, it will be in the game. It’s a terrifying staring contest. Luckily, one man can’t have a staring contest with himself, so Another World, with regard to flow, is absolutely perfect.

Modern game designers also toil over the question of how to balance story and action segments: if the game is too hard, the player won’t be able to witness the full extent of the story, which means we might as well not have a story. Attention, game developers: if you’re thinking this, maybe your game is, at its core, too long, too complicated, or just plain boring. Another World keeps the context front and center, and the most complicated it gets is offering us the opportunity to easily kill a near-invincible guard by climbing into the tunnel above his chamber and shooting a hanging green orb the instant we see his reflection pass under it. We’ve previously said that Lost Vikings and Portal are amazing games because the level designers stop at nothing to exploit every facet of their brilliant mechanics; now, we’re going to say that Another World is more brilliant because it possesses sparkling self-confidence, and uses its mechanics as a tool. It stays cool-headed, elegant, and noble until the end. It isn’t a “game” with an “engine”; it’s an experience, one big, elaborate “puzzle”. It’s a story. It just happens to contain the bones and sinews of an excellent game. As a “piece of art” where the focal theme is the utter dread of being a stranger in a strange land, both the very concept of dying and being reborn (offered the chance to try again) in a videogame and the Looney-Tunes-like snap-to presentation of the post-death rebirth lends itself perfectly to the theme. From the moment this man’s life is upset (again: transported from a laboratory to a bizarre alien world), we know deep down, instinctually, that he will die some day, and so will we. His multiple deaths in our effort to learn the ins and outs of the experience perfectly — and, (crucially,) accidentally — present us with a plausible “ending” at any and every deadly turn. No one can ever pronounce Another World‘s thoughtfulness “pretentious”, because it’s not. It’s unassuming, nonchalant, confident, and cool. In short: yes, it’s French.

Another World is just simply not a game in which to stand still. This is crucial: casual players the world over can aesthetically break any game in three to four seconds by standing still. During its conflict phases, Another World will not let you stand still. It works a miraculous magic on the player, compelling him to always be acting out his role.

The second fight we find ourselves in involves several guards coming from the left side of the screen. Our New Alien Friend pounds away at a computer panel. We immediately recognize our role, without some FPS-like commanding officer barking orders at us: keep the enemies back while our man opens the door. This is as fist-sized and logistical as the fights will get, or will ever need to get, for Another World to prove its point.

Other games saw fit to expand on Another World‘s spear-like, joyfully geometric mechanics in rudimentary, fundamental, or elaborate ways. Interplay’s Blackthorne is perhaps best described as Another World: The Videogame: the level designers picked up the slack and put Another World‘s crisp conflict model into a non-stop, overwhelmingly thorough puzzle-solving blast-a-thon. Years later, Oddworld Inhabitants, perhaps thinking they were being clever, unleashed Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, which they paraded as a brilliant, brand-new thing. Going by the way the developer hyped it to the media, they seriously believed it would be the Next Huge Thing, the next Super Mario. The game was essentially Another World, turned into a “videogame”, expanded, multiplied by eleven, and starring hideous character designs that not even a mother’s mother could love. (Thus we actually happen to like the game a lot.)

Modern games have inherited Another World‘s showmanship and close to none of its subtlety. BioShock pays fetishistic, loving attention to its own world, which it realizes with an awe-inspiring level of beauty: despite being very obviously a videogame, a “simulation”, its visual and sonic confidence exudes subconscious-like understanding of the greatness of Another World. Too bad the “game” part is convoluted and bogged down by a design document that no doubt contained an entire ream-long section labeled “Bullstuff”.

Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami has gone on record as considering Another World the absolute best game of all-time, and the primary influence on Resident Evil. Using Another World as a yardstick, we can say that Resident Evil is hilariously unsuccessful — it is laden with red keys, red doors, blue keys, blue doors, and an inventory management system that smacks of the developers being scared that the game wouldn’t have “enough stuff” in it. It goes without saying that Resident Evil possessed the opportunity to be as sophisticated and perfect as Another World; however, through the process of think-tanking and regularly scheduled Monday-morning hung-over brainstorms, through the absolute lack of “common sense” as a job requirement for the level designers (or: the absolute lack of the “level designer” in post-Famicom-era Japanese game development), the game became unnecessarily dirty. When it came time to “improve” the game in sequels, we ended up with only more bullstuff. Resident Evil 4, an amazing and beautiful game in its own right, saw Mikami getting conscientious, and leaning closer to the dream of Another World. The “horror movie” genre of videogame had perhaps been too ambitious, Mikami must have noticed. So they went about making an “action movie”. It worked tremendously well, and had it featured only one truly awesome gun and no speaking cut-scenes (seriously: heck that radio stuff), we’d probably love it a whole lot more than we already do.

Goichi Suda, CEO of Grasshopper Manufacture and director of games such as Killer 7, Flower, Sun, and Rain, The Silver Case, and No More Heroes, all titles so close to being masterpieces that they suck royally, is also a repeat professor of his love of Another World. Suda’s love of Another World stems from its absolute unwavering execution of atmospheric mood. You can see plenty of influence in Suda’s titles, if you squint hard enough. The confidence evident in the sound design and visual sense alone earn his games hall-of-fame status. However, the issue of game design has a problem — namely, that there isn’t any. We can certainly see what Suda is driving at with games like No More Heroes: he is imagining a concept and a world, and is keeping the game elements to a minimum so as to allow each boss encounter to be a game in and of itself. The problem is that he hasn’t hit on the right minimum yet.

Fumito Ueda would have to be the only Japanese game designer who “truly” “gets” the Another World aesthetic. He, too, praises Another World above all games. When we interviewed him on the subject of Shadow of the Colossus in 2004, we asked him some questions about Another World, and he replied by very frankly saying that it depresses him when he reads gushing reviews of ICO, which fail to note the copious Another World homages. Ueda is a game designer’s game designer, and he may or may not surpass Another World in the future. For now, however, his parents allow him the keys to the Ferrari, though not the Lamborghini: Ueda had apparently wanted Shadow of the Colossus to not feature any kind of HUD display at all, like Another World, only his higher-ups literally told him that having no HUD would result in the game being “looked-down upon” as “unsophisticated” by critics and players. What kind of hecked-up world do we live in, where (#1) people who have worked at a company for 30 years, being promoted only because they’re not doing anything worthy of being promoted (and laws of societal niceness dictate that we not tell a man implicitly that he’s “not making anything better”) are trusted over people with genuine creativity (#2) someone with a university degree can possibly think that a little icon showing a sword is absolutely necessary in a videogame where the main character stands in the center of the screen and one can clearly see, at all times, that he is holding a sword? It’s like face portraits by dialogue boxes in RPGs: these days, when the characters are so big and expressive, having a face portrait by the dialogue box is freaky and depressing. Either way, Shadow of the Colossus can’t be a perfect game, because there’s no explanation for why the bow has unlimited arrows. What a pity! We will gladly, turgidly anticipate his next works, however, because it’s clear he both loves Another World‘s vibe and appreciates Zelda‘s aims. A bullstuff-free, flowing game possessing Zelda‘s attention to detail could be amazing.

Of all the Japanese game designers claiming to love Another World more than any other game, ever, Hideo Kojima would have to be the most hilarious and ironic. He makes the longest, ugliest, most logically convoluted orchestrated fatuosities yet produced by modern man in the name of attempted entertainment; if he actually loves Another World, we have to say that his love has not inspired him, or, rather, his love has inspired him to run like the wind in the opposite direction. Furthermore, we would like to express our condolences to his wife.

Okay, maybe we’re being mean. Maybe, just maybe, we can see some Another World in the original Metal Gear Solid; some cinematics can be described as “virtuoso” (these tend to be the silent ones), and the setups for small-scale grunt conflicts express an eerie tightness which insinuates that Kojima, like Chahi, had allowed “play situations” to come along naturally. Likewise, we recall Fumito Ueda describing the production of Ico as “design by subtraction” — they designed puzzle-challenges one at a time, and then arranged them in the best logical order, eliminating the ones that were too easy, too hard, or redundant. Many confrontations in the Metal Gear Solid series feel the same way; it’s just that Kojima seems to adore the raw concept of the videogame on far too many levels. The fans have grown up alongside him, and they find the idea of Shakespeare in Japanese: Starring US Army Special Forces, Giant Robots, and Cyborg Ninjas to be as captivating as he must find it hilarious.

If anything, we arrive at the core of this analysis believing in the cold center of our hearts that the “design by subtraction” that Fumito Ueda speaks of is the only way to make an excellent videogame. We arrive at the conclusion of our list of the Best Games Ever awakened to the fact that Level Design is the most important part of any game, be it an epic cluster of entertainment purposely fashioned to be impenetrable to non-gamers or a sleek and simple rope-like experience. Game designers: think of a single, sharp, spear-like mechanic, stick with it, set it in stone, and then make awesome levels. If there’s a mood you want to go for, keep it in mind. In short: be cool, and you too can make a masterpiece. Even if your single mechanic is amazing, it doesn’t mean anything without great levels. However, even a bare-bones mechanic (like, say, “running and jumping”) can make for spectacular entertainment if the levels are great (Super Mario Bros. 3).

No one loves on Another World enough, these days. Five furious minutes of internet research have yielded us the information that no major gaming news / review site has ever put Another World on its list of the best games ever — not even at #100. These are lists that have hecking Hogan’s Alley or Kingdom Hearts on them, for God’s sake.

It’s safe to say that some of the right people like this game, however. We can’t exactly prove it, though when we played Call of Duty 4, there were times where we felt like everyone involved in that game must have instinctively gotten the point of Another World: for every moment of commanding officers shouting orders, there is a balancing poetic moment of fine level design; when the game twists the “conventions” of its “genre”, it does so matter-of-factly, without pretention, a post-Kojima kind of anti-bravado.

Gears of War‘s cover mechanic still feels to us more like something out of a 2D platform-action game — and a specific one, at that — than an FPS, which is probably why it works so well in 3D.

Half-Life 2‘s gravity gun is a whole game in and of itself, and the greater part of the game simply radiates with confidence and direction.

And then there’s the issue of Portal: like Another World, it begins disorientingly, and it ends apocalyptically. It tells a story with feet; it lets the player absorb the atmosphere and make of it what he or she will. It’s talky, though never annoying, because it’s also funny (at least to us). No one (even us) can accuse it of being “too linear”, because, like Another World — and unlike Half-Life 2 — your character literally is a prisoner in a restricted world.

Like Another World, Portal has often been criticized as being “too short”.

A game cannot be too short if it’s memorable. Portal‘s sterile atmosphere implants itself in our brains precisely because there exist moments of visual clash; the dialogue implants itself in our brains because it rides a change in theme. And the main reason the game works is because it has a brilliant mechanic: the Portal Gun. Another World is a better game than Portal, mostly, because we say so. Because it’s not glib, and offers no reason for no one not to like it. It is honest, humble, noble, and at the same time hugely artistic and expressive. It tells a story, it presents awesome, unforgettable gunfights, and it lingers in the back of the mind for an eternity. It is the closest videogames have yet come to a great film, and we probably shouldn’t ignore it anymore. Every element that causes critics to jump up and down with joy in modern games existed in a perfect, pure form in Another World. Everyone making games — or writing about them, or playing them — should either play it, play it again, or at least think about it. Because, seriously, though we can’t say with a straight face that we “need” more games like this, once we have a whole bunch more of them, we’ll definitely start wondering what we did without them.

–tim rogers

* Footnote: no, there is no particular reason we didn’t mention Flashback in this review. We thought about going back and adding it to the part re: Abe’s Oddysee, though we hesitated and now can’t remember the exact intended wording. Anyway, Flashback is a very nice game as well. It just tries a tiny bit too hard. We also almost mentioned Beyond Good and Evil because it too was envisioned by a French man, though we figured maybe we shouldn’t bother. That’d be like telling a Japanese person that you like Haruki Murakami and having them reply immediately with “I don’t know, man, I prefer Ryu Murakami.” Seriously, a man’s peers aren’t decided by his last name.