I feel like this often gets kinda sidelined as a mere stopgap on the way to Kingdom Hearts 3, which is a real shame because I feel like this is the best the series has done at integrating the Disney worlds with the wider series themes of growing up and the horror of the childhood's end since the original game.

The spaces here are wonderful, easily some of the most evocative in the entire series, and Aqua's depressive trudge through the shattered ephemera of broken Disney Worlds is a phenomenal reflection of what it is often like to revisit one's childhood as an adult. This is the kind of stuff I love Kingdom Hearts the most for, the way it explores the liminal space between childhood and adulthood with sophistication belied by the series' reputation. I could take or leave the wider series plot and continuity, and accordingly, it's when the game goes about tying up a bunch of loose ends that no one really needed tying up that it ceases to enthrall me in quite the same way.

It's still fun, don't get me wrong: extremely fun, actually. Mickey's shirtless explanation is surely one of the funniest things in the entire franchise and I'm enough of a fan of KH3's sandbox that even the restrictive, underdeveloped version here is a riot. But it's a reminder that the things that I value most in this series are patently not the same things it - or, indeed the wider series fandom - is interested in. And while I've made my peace with that from the day the beautiful Roxas prologue of KH2 first ended, the moments when the series brushes up against those feelings just make me want them all the more.

KINGDOM HEARTS SEXISM WATCH: well this is a game about the second most prominent woman in the series having an absolutely miserable fucking time for a decade, but on the other hand it does portray her with agency and nuance...when she isn't playing second fiddle to a cartoon mouse that is the icon of the late capitalist nightmare world we all live in. the fact that they did not carry over the fashion into KH3 is demonstrative of Square Enix's enormous cowardice. let sora be a catboy!!!!!

i enjoy how openly this game is about nothing. how all its various narrative branches lead to wildly contradicting endings. in that way it reflects very well the philosophy that life is meaningless and empty but how we all strive to put our own unique stamp on all the random choices we make anyway.

i also enjoy the beautifully mundane liminal spaces and how video games have the power to really create some amazing interactive space if they choose to.

it's a game ultimately where you wander around and different shit happens and i think that's cool.

Played through it last spring and was continually dazzled by how well it pulled off the change to an open world. The scope of the game just keeps getting wider and wider, it's an incredible feeling.
Replaying it full co-op mode with my partner and having someone with you as you push through each dungeon is a very different, much more dynamic experience. I do miss the tightness of the interlocking level design in the Souls games and Bloodborne, but still the series jumps to an open world in a shockingly assured, smooth and fun way.

what if we made counter-strike but it had the lightning pace & matchup knowledge required of fighting games. you have to put up with ubisofts abysmal pc client, occasional server issues, an extremely steep learning curve, and years of iterative liveservice grievances, but the reward for your patience, composure, and penchant for masochism is one of the most dynamic & fierce multiplayer shooters you could sink your teeth into. skirmishes are claustrophobic, intensely layered, and verge into eerie; when communications are in disarray and the information economy siege is founded on fails to tick properly every environment tends to feel like it's haunted, almost voyeuristic. you never know what hole operators are peeking at you through, or if they're inverse rappelling from above a window with laser sights trained on you. just as the cruelty of hunt: showdown ate up a lot of my time in 2022, i expect 2023 to be the year of siege standing in for my personal go-to multiplayer vehicle

Refreshingly unsentimental where it counts, mostly made up of post-humanist dystopia vibes and not much else. What more do you need in a game than neon lights and a cute kitty though? And this takes full advantage of those on that front. It is confident in its simplicity and knows where to draw the line before becoming needlessly complicated in further building mechanics. The focus remains on the beautifully textured atmosphere and the cat's interactions with the communities and the worlds they inhabit. It's not particularly rich in those explorations and I don't know how this will fare retrospectively but its briskness and accessibility (not to mention gorgeously moody soundtrack) made for a weekend well spent. A rainy day matinee blockbuster wrapped around an indie core. Admirable.

Overwhelmed and lost me when I started playing months ago. Came back to it recently, became absolutely immersed, finding it hard to put down until the credits rolled. Unmatched freedom in choice and just how detailed each skill tree, piece of dialogue, narrative thread and character, no matter how minor is. Continued to overwhelm me but in a way where I wanted to delve deeper and deeper, discover more about Martinaise, Revachol as a whole, my character’s history, and mostly not disappoint Kim. I love Kim. Gonna have to sit and unpack this fascinating, strangely emotional, esoteric journey for a long time.

Although I loved Death Stranding when I played it through on release, I didn't really consider it a contender for my game of the year in The Year of Endless Bangers. I let three years slip by, not even booting it back up on the release of the Director's Cut, before ultimately using my new PS5 as an excuse to transfer the save and bang out a few more deliveries.

So much has changed for me in the intervening three years. Others have written at length about the pandemic and its thematic parallels with the game, so suffice it to say that for me (still largely housebound and isolated, increasingly alienated by the fever-pitch denial of the world at large) being able to enact a world where real people work together to build infrastructure and thereby heal the world has been personally healing in a way I couldn't have imagined in 2019.

My tastes as someone who thinks critically about games have changed as well. Death Stranding's preoccupation with the texture of play—from asking you to viscerally feel the geometry of the ground you walk on to showing painstakingly mocapped cutscenes of every little action in your private room—hits much harder now that I've played through the FromSoft canon which is itself texture-obsessed in a different direction. Coming directly off playing some AAA shlock, I also found myself with a renewed appreciation of this game's dialectic approach to a cinematic aesthetic, with carefully choreographed moments that nevertheless always emphasize play as the distinguishing factor that makes this decidedly not a movie.

I'm setting this down again not because I'm finished with it for good, but because I'm inducting it into the tier of games I intend to return to over and over again. I could happily finish out the DC plots and call it "finished", but what I really want is to create a kind of personal infrastructure I can use to bring myself back to this world, this textural landscape, whenever I need to feel that connection with people that this game so masterfully evokes.

not as replayable as Bloodborne or Sekiro, but the first playthrough of this cannot be put into words.

beating Melania is one of my best gaming achievements.

I hope the next game in this franchise builds upon what this one did, since they struck gold once again