Mythemim
4 reviews liked by Mythemim
Super Princess Peach
2005
Played this game in the waiting room at the abortion clinic.
EarthBound
1994
"Ness thought he heard his mother from far away."
Earthbound has been a presence in my life since I was a child, though initially it was from quite a distance. I would see the game referenced in magazine articles, or ScrewAttack Top 10s. I would see it mentioned in forum posts as an underrated classic, ballooning in importance as the years went on until it was eventually championed as one of the all time great video games. When Earthbound was released for the Wii U in 2013, I finally had a chance to play it. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but somehow got stuck in Twoson and dropped the game there. Many years later it was again rereleased, this time for the Switch. "Finally, I can redeem myself and finish Earthbound." I thought. Once again, my playthrough ended in Twoson. Years have passed, and I'm happy to report that over a decade after my first attempt to play Earthbound, I've finally rolled credits. It is an odd feeling.
Earthbound has plenty of faults. Its battle system is pretty good, but can be overbearing at times when there exist some fights that simply will not let you win. Endgame enemies deflection your damage and causing a guaranteed HP loss for multiple party members upon death is a good idea to force cautious resource management on the player, but by the time you've reached that final dungeon you're probably too busy wanting the game to be over to be welcoming of that added stress. Earthbound's narrative progression is gated by a lot of little fetch quests and point A to B navigation, none of which are particularly obtuse but some of which definitely grate. Completing a dungeon only to be told you have to spend 10 minutes returning to a prior area, talking to an NPC, and then going back to the dungeon location to continue to the story happens on several occasions and it never feels like anything other than padding. The game ultimately feels quite a bit longer than it should.
The core of the game's content is quite strong, however. Bosses are fun and interesting, a lot of the enemies are charming and likeable, and every area you enter has great appeal. The art and music are unique as hell, and lends the game an irresistible charm. No other game has ever quite managed to have the 'flavor' of an Earthbound, even a game like Undertale that you can tell is trying its hardest. I think that's because, for all its irreverence, Earthbound is hiding within itself one of video gaming's most melancholy hearts. The nostalgia people have for Earthbound today is due to the game itself being a total pincer attack - on one hand, you have its inimitable style, and on the other, it's a game very much about nostalgia itself.
I remember the first time I played Earthbound, back in 2013. I was still in high school, though not for long. I would finish school and come home most days to walk my dog and handle errands around the house. Often I'd snack on a few strawberries - my favorite fruit. Eventually my mom would come home. She'd cook dinner, we'd all eat, and after dishes were done I'd head to my room to do homework or watch TV or play a game. Usually the latter. Playing Earthbound now, I can't help but reflect on those days. Things are a lot harder now - that's how it goes everyone, right? Things get tougher the older you get and the less connected you get from the way things used to be. One thing people do to help cope is to remember. Remember sitting down with their family and eating their favorite meal. Remember their childhood friends playing a game at the park. Remember their mother's laugh when they would tell a silly joke. As we get old, we all go through a terribly difficult journey, each our own. We battle forces from outside as well as within. Often, we overcome them. We forge our paths with determination, vision, and love. And that courage and love doesn't come from nothing, it gets instilled in us when we are young. By our mothers, our fathers, our teachers, our friends. It is through them that we are made to become the versions of ourselves that can overcome trials and succeed at tasks once unimaginable. And it is through our memories of them that we can keep ourselves level.
Yesterday was Mother's Day. I couldn't afford to buy my mother a gift. She smiled at me and we ate quiche and strawberries.
Earthbound has been a presence in my life since I was a child, though initially it was from quite a distance. I would see the game referenced in magazine articles, or ScrewAttack Top 10s. I would see it mentioned in forum posts as an underrated classic, ballooning in importance as the years went on until it was eventually championed as one of the all time great video games. When Earthbound was released for the Wii U in 2013, I finally had a chance to play it. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but somehow got stuck in Twoson and dropped the game there. Many years later it was again rereleased, this time for the Switch. "Finally, I can redeem myself and finish Earthbound." I thought. Once again, my playthrough ended in Twoson. Years have passed, and I'm happy to report that over a decade after my first attempt to play Earthbound, I've finally rolled credits. It is an odd feeling.
Earthbound has plenty of faults. Its battle system is pretty good, but can be overbearing at times when there exist some fights that simply will not let you win. Endgame enemies deflection your damage and causing a guaranteed HP loss for multiple party members upon death is a good idea to force cautious resource management on the player, but by the time you've reached that final dungeon you're probably too busy wanting the game to be over to be welcoming of that added stress. Earthbound's narrative progression is gated by a lot of little fetch quests and point A to B navigation, none of which are particularly obtuse but some of which definitely grate. Completing a dungeon only to be told you have to spend 10 minutes returning to a prior area, talking to an NPC, and then going back to the dungeon location to continue to the story happens on several occasions and it never feels like anything other than padding. The game ultimately feels quite a bit longer than it should.
The core of the game's content is quite strong, however. Bosses are fun and interesting, a lot of the enemies are charming and likeable, and every area you enter has great appeal. The art and music are unique as hell, and lends the game an irresistible charm. No other game has ever quite managed to have the 'flavor' of an Earthbound, even a game like Undertale that you can tell is trying its hardest. I think that's because, for all its irreverence, Earthbound is hiding within itself one of video gaming's most melancholy hearts. The nostalgia people have for Earthbound today is due to the game itself being a total pincer attack - on one hand, you have its inimitable style, and on the other, it's a game very much about nostalgia itself.
I remember the first time I played Earthbound, back in 2013. I was still in high school, though not for long. I would finish school and come home most days to walk my dog and handle errands around the house. Often I'd snack on a few strawberries - my favorite fruit. Eventually my mom would come home. She'd cook dinner, we'd all eat, and after dishes were done I'd head to my room to do homework or watch TV or play a game. Usually the latter. Playing Earthbound now, I can't help but reflect on those days. Things are a lot harder now - that's how it goes everyone, right? Things get tougher the older you get and the less connected you get from the way things used to be. One thing people do to help cope is to remember. Remember sitting down with their family and eating their favorite meal. Remember their childhood friends playing a game at the park. Remember their mother's laugh when they would tell a silly joke. As we get old, we all go through a terribly difficult journey, each our own. We battle forces from outside as well as within. Often, we overcome them. We forge our paths with determination, vision, and love. And that courage and love doesn't come from nothing, it gets instilled in us when we are young. By our mothers, our fathers, our teachers, our friends. It is through them that we are made to become the versions of ourselves that can overcome trials and succeed at tasks once unimaginable. And it is through our memories of them that we can keep ourselves level.
Yesterday was Mother's Day. I couldn't afford to buy my mother a gift. She smiled at me and we ate quiche and strawberries.
There's a lot to be excited about with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Sands of Time and POP2008 were very important games to me growing up, but outside of a mostly warm replay of the former a couple years ago I haven't seen or really even thought much about the franchise since. Ubisoft has been on nothing short of a legendary downward spiral for the past decade or so, with the truly good and interesting games coming out of that giant being so few and far between that you'd be forgiven for thinking they were mirages. The Lost Crown is one of those, and most importantly it succeeds not just at being a great Metroidvania in its own right, but for bringing me back to the things I loved about these games as a kid.
It's not the story or the setting, which are both on the weaker side here. Mount Qaf is large and the actual level design is mostly strong - we'll get to that later - but it lacks a sense of place. It feels like a series of disconnected video game rooms stuck together mostly at random. They look nice and are fun to move through, but the game goes to great lengths to impress upon the player the history and legacy of Mount Qaf and the people who once inhabited it, and none of it worked for me. I tried, I read a lot of the early lore pickups and was intrigued by the friendship between Sargon and his cohorts and their grander relationship with Persia and its folklore. But nothing stuck, and by the midpoint I was more than happy to skip through text boxes barely skimming their contents.
It's fortunate, then, that these areas are a lot of fun to explore. Even fairly early in the game you come to grips with controlling Sargon and it feels good. Platforming in this game at its most basic is fluid, fast, and fun. As your moveset expands and you get abilities both familiar and unfamiliar to the genre, the game successfully settles into the late-game "fly through every room while backtracking" flow that all the greats do. Special shoutout to the sound effect while walljumping, which is very reminiscent to the hand-clapping sound effect from Sands of Time and made me smile almost every time I heard it. But good-feeling platforming isn't much fun if there's not much jumping to be done. Thankfully, The Lost Crown has plenty of platforming challenges, both in main progression and in optional gauntlets. Every 30 minutes in this game you're running into a mini Path of Pain, and I loved it. Some of these things had my hands sweating like the final level of Mario Wonder, the only bummer for me being that the game's final challenges are entirely combat focused. The game has some very good hidden platforming challenges but when it comes time to wrap up and really test your knowledge, they hold back - presumably so that players less versed in platforming are able to see the game through. It's a bummer.
Combat is good though, much better than in Hollow Knight, the game's closest contemporary. Silksong has its work cut out for it to match this. The Lost Crown frequently feels like they took some of Devil May Cry's stylish launcher-focused combat and put it into 2D and it works extremely well. Closest comparison I can think of is Dishwasher Dead Samurai, if you know you know.
The game looks nice and runs mostly well. I played on Switch, because I hate myself, and I'd say the portability was well worth the trade off. I had a few hitches when things got super crazy, but they were very few and far between in a game I spent 20 hours in. Not a dealbreaker at all. A bigger issue for me were the bugs, which by the end of the game were popping up very frequently. Multiple hardcrashes, loading zones breaking, even old cutscenes playing when crossing a trigger that should've been deleted. It's hard to say whether or not any of that is Switch specific or if the game just launched hot, and none of it was a serious issue, but it definitely gave me the feeling that the game was falling apart the further in I was getting.
Pacing is probably the game's biggest single issue. The game's actual structure is pretty good, smartly laying out mandatory questlines that take you all over its enormous map and dotting it with fun sidequests. A lot of these sidequests take the form of finding specific collectables on the world map, and it always feels awesome to be exploring an area and stumble across one of these items and check them off the list. I finished the game with 97% completion, only missing 3 items. The memory shard feature that lets you take in-game screenshots on the map of areas to come back to is fantastic and I can't imagine a future game in this genre without it, but it's a shame the game doesn't mark uncollected (or even collected) items on your map by the end of the game. Some of these areas are so huge and their traversal such a chore that the prospect of combing them all again for the final few trinkets was too daunting to bear. A lot of individual rooms in the game are fun to go through, but they're all made to be a challenge in a certain way. This means going through the same challenge tens of times while backtracking and looking for secrets, which gets old fast. Fast travel points are few and the distance between them can vary from two rooms apart to sometimes 20 rooms apart. The size and layout of The Lost Crown makes cleanup a much bigger chore than recent standouts like Metroid Dread, and that's ultimately the game's biggest fault.
Still, for all its issues, this is still a very good Metroidvania. Memory Shards are one of the greatest advances in Metroidvania game design in ages, and many of the individual boss fights, puzzles, and platforming challenges are very fun to go through. But when you're running through the same platform challenge for the 15th time on the off-chance that there might be a boring lore item that you missed, the sheen wears off. Here's hoping the team gets another crack at a game like this, because at its brightest The Lost Crown is full of sequences so good that I'll be remembering them when it comes time to put together my year-end list.
Oh, I forgot to mention the music. That should tell you all you need to know. And I really liked Dread's OST!
It's not the story or the setting, which are both on the weaker side here. Mount Qaf is large and the actual level design is mostly strong - we'll get to that later - but it lacks a sense of place. It feels like a series of disconnected video game rooms stuck together mostly at random. They look nice and are fun to move through, but the game goes to great lengths to impress upon the player the history and legacy of Mount Qaf and the people who once inhabited it, and none of it worked for me. I tried, I read a lot of the early lore pickups and was intrigued by the friendship between Sargon and his cohorts and their grander relationship with Persia and its folklore. But nothing stuck, and by the midpoint I was more than happy to skip through text boxes barely skimming their contents.
It's fortunate, then, that these areas are a lot of fun to explore. Even fairly early in the game you come to grips with controlling Sargon and it feels good. Platforming in this game at its most basic is fluid, fast, and fun. As your moveset expands and you get abilities both familiar and unfamiliar to the genre, the game successfully settles into the late-game "fly through every room while backtracking" flow that all the greats do. Special shoutout to the sound effect while walljumping, which is very reminiscent to the hand-clapping sound effect from Sands of Time and made me smile almost every time I heard it. But good-feeling platforming isn't much fun if there's not much jumping to be done. Thankfully, The Lost Crown has plenty of platforming challenges, both in main progression and in optional gauntlets. Every 30 minutes in this game you're running into a mini Path of Pain, and I loved it. Some of these things had my hands sweating like the final level of Mario Wonder, the only bummer for me being that the game's final challenges are entirely combat focused. The game has some very good hidden platforming challenges but when it comes time to wrap up and really test your knowledge, they hold back - presumably so that players less versed in platforming are able to see the game through. It's a bummer.
Combat is good though, much better than in Hollow Knight, the game's closest contemporary. Silksong has its work cut out for it to match this. The Lost Crown frequently feels like they took some of Devil May Cry's stylish launcher-focused combat and put it into 2D and it works extremely well. Closest comparison I can think of is Dishwasher Dead Samurai, if you know you know.
The game looks nice and runs mostly well. I played on Switch, because I hate myself, and I'd say the portability was well worth the trade off. I had a few hitches when things got super crazy, but they were very few and far between in a game I spent 20 hours in. Not a dealbreaker at all. A bigger issue for me were the bugs, which by the end of the game were popping up very frequently. Multiple hardcrashes, loading zones breaking, even old cutscenes playing when crossing a trigger that should've been deleted. It's hard to say whether or not any of that is Switch specific or if the game just launched hot, and none of it was a serious issue, but it definitely gave me the feeling that the game was falling apart the further in I was getting.
Pacing is probably the game's biggest single issue. The game's actual structure is pretty good, smartly laying out mandatory questlines that take you all over its enormous map and dotting it with fun sidequests. A lot of these sidequests take the form of finding specific collectables on the world map, and it always feels awesome to be exploring an area and stumble across one of these items and check them off the list. I finished the game with 97% completion, only missing 3 items. The memory shard feature that lets you take in-game screenshots on the map of areas to come back to is fantastic and I can't imagine a future game in this genre without it, but it's a shame the game doesn't mark uncollected (or even collected) items on your map by the end of the game. Some of these areas are so huge and their traversal such a chore that the prospect of combing them all again for the final few trinkets was too daunting to bear. A lot of individual rooms in the game are fun to go through, but they're all made to be a challenge in a certain way. This means going through the same challenge tens of times while backtracking and looking for secrets, which gets old fast. Fast travel points are few and the distance between them can vary from two rooms apart to sometimes 20 rooms apart. The size and layout of The Lost Crown makes cleanup a much bigger chore than recent standouts like Metroid Dread, and that's ultimately the game's biggest fault.
Still, for all its issues, this is still a very good Metroidvania. Memory Shards are one of the greatest advances in Metroidvania game design in ages, and many of the individual boss fights, puzzles, and platforming challenges are very fun to go through. But when you're running through the same platform challenge for the 15th time on the off-chance that there might be a boring lore item that you missed, the sheen wears off. Here's hoping the team gets another crack at a game like this, because at its brightest The Lost Crown is full of sequences so good that I'll be remembering them when it comes time to put together my year-end list.
Oh, I forgot to mention the music. That should tell you all you need to know. And I really liked Dread's OST!
Omori
2020
Jessica and I danced under the lights at the Lombard Graduation Recital, June 21st 2014. Our senior years had finally ended three weeks prior, and the graduation ceremony had at last come to a close. I don't remember why we danced together, but we did. She was leaving for Iowa in August. A terrible Coldplay song was playing. Somehow our hands fell together, and there was a harmony. We melted like two squares of butter on the flat of a pan, and when my eyes next opened our lips were pressed together. It didn't last long. We returned to ourselves and separated. She blushed deeply. "I don't think my boyfriend is going to like that." She said with a smile. We parted ways.
Three days later I was sitting at a Steak & Shake fauxdiner with my friends Marco and Brandon. We were in the midst of some ugly spat, but we were hungry, so we ate. At some point during the meal all in the restaurant grew quiet, and just as I sensed a presence coming up from behind me my head was being slammed into the table, directly onto the small pool of ketchup I was using to finish up my fries. "What the fuck is wrong with you, man!?" It was Jared. "I should kill you for putting moves on my girl." I strained my eyes to the other side of the table where Marco and Brandon had been sitting. It was empty now. I was on my own.
"Sorry, I'm sorry." I squeezed out, the pressure in my head turning to pain. For a moment I felt his grip release, and I lifted my head only for it to be roughly smashed back down, this time into the corner of my meal tray. I yelled in pain, and fell onto my back on the booth. I heard some people gasp and a few goons laughs, but Jared didn't seem to think it was funny. He leaned over me and grabbed my shirt collar, pulling me up towards him, my life in his hands.
"Don't fucking tell me it was her. Why did you mack on my girl?" This was red hate. His spit flecked onto my face.
"I really don't know, I don't remember kissing her. Maybe it was her!" I stammered out the words, growing desperate for relief. He looked at me for a long time, his dark eyes seething. Eventually, he let me go.
"Stay the fuck away from her." He and his bros left the restaurant, while I gagged and bled over what was left of my meal. The waitress told me that I didn't have to pay.
In October of the following year my friends shared with me a news story that Jessica was dead. Beaten by Jared, her body found on some forgotten roadway in Iowa somewhere. For his defense, Jared said she was cheating on him, using his money to go to bars in town and meet boys and have one night stands with them while he was out with his friends. He said he couldn't take it anymore. I couldn't help but feel the smallest wince of blame.
Omori was released on Chirstmas Day, 2020. I bought it that day, and played through it to completion over the following two weeks. My playthrough took me around 33 hours. I have not booted up Omori since, nor have I purchased the later ports of the game that feature additional content.
In the coming-on two years since Omori's release, I have thought about it every single day.
Ignoring any and all gameplay or aesthetic discussion, where Omori leaves its mark is the heart. This game has a heart that beats and bleeds and pumps its feeling from itself into you, and you see yourself in the mirror and you see the things Omori put into you creeping across your face. You see smiles forgotten. You see tears wiped away. You see a hand on your shoulder. Everything will be okay. It's a game that may well have the most potent and excellently constructed narrative of any game ever made. Every single decision made during this game's development was one done to amplify the potency of the way this game makes you feel. It never goes away. If I'm fortunate enough to grow old, I wil still think about Omori every day. It will always be relevant. The things it says don't rust over with age. It will no longer just be my face in the mirror. I will always see her, and countless others.
Three days later I was sitting at a Steak & Shake fauxdiner with my friends Marco and Brandon. We were in the midst of some ugly spat, but we were hungry, so we ate. At some point during the meal all in the restaurant grew quiet, and just as I sensed a presence coming up from behind me my head was being slammed into the table, directly onto the small pool of ketchup I was using to finish up my fries. "What the fuck is wrong with you, man!?" It was Jared. "I should kill you for putting moves on my girl." I strained my eyes to the other side of the table where Marco and Brandon had been sitting. It was empty now. I was on my own.
"Sorry, I'm sorry." I squeezed out, the pressure in my head turning to pain. For a moment I felt his grip release, and I lifted my head only for it to be roughly smashed back down, this time into the corner of my meal tray. I yelled in pain, and fell onto my back on the booth. I heard some people gasp and a few goons laughs, but Jared didn't seem to think it was funny. He leaned over me and grabbed my shirt collar, pulling me up towards him, my life in his hands.
"Don't fucking tell me it was her. Why did you mack on my girl?" This was red hate. His spit flecked onto my face.
"I really don't know, I don't remember kissing her. Maybe it was her!" I stammered out the words, growing desperate for relief. He looked at me for a long time, his dark eyes seething. Eventually, he let me go.
"Stay the fuck away from her." He and his bros left the restaurant, while I gagged and bled over what was left of my meal. The waitress told me that I didn't have to pay.
In October of the following year my friends shared with me a news story that Jessica was dead. Beaten by Jared, her body found on some forgotten roadway in Iowa somewhere. For his defense, Jared said she was cheating on him, using his money to go to bars in town and meet boys and have one night stands with them while he was out with his friends. He said he couldn't take it anymore. I couldn't help but feel the smallest wince of blame.
Omori was released on Chirstmas Day, 2020. I bought it that day, and played through it to completion over the following two weeks. My playthrough took me around 33 hours. I have not booted up Omori since, nor have I purchased the later ports of the game that feature additional content.
In the coming-on two years since Omori's release, I have thought about it every single day.
Ignoring any and all gameplay or aesthetic discussion, where Omori leaves its mark is the heart. This game has a heart that beats and bleeds and pumps its feeling from itself into you, and you see yourself in the mirror and you see the things Omori put into you creeping across your face. You see smiles forgotten. You see tears wiped away. You see a hand on your shoulder. Everything will be okay. It's a game that may well have the most potent and excellently constructed narrative of any game ever made. Every single decision made during this game's development was one done to amplify the potency of the way this game makes you feel. It never goes away. If I'm fortunate enough to grow old, I wil still think about Omori every day. It will always be relevant. The things it says don't rust over with age. It will no longer just be my face in the mirror. I will always see her, and countless others.