Reports of the mid-budget game’s death have been greatly exaggerated. They’re generally now something you have to more actively be on the lookout for, but there are still plenty of them with all the same hallmarks cynics’d have you believe we don’t get anymore – navigation by way of unique geographical landmarks as opposed to UI widgets, obtuse systems you only learn the inner workings of by throwing yourself into the deep end, visual design and mechanics strange enough to ward off the easily disoriented and more. Few games in recent memory exemplify it all better than this.

While that clip works a rough vertical slice of what you can expect from Clash’s combat, its little nuances aren’t immediately obvious at a glance. The way its blocking system works feels especially distinctive from other action games with parries, temporarily slowing down the enemy you block almost like a localised version of Witch Time, but key to the balance it strikes between complexity and accessibility is how it lets you cancel any light punch at any point into one of a special attack, jump or dodge. It’s a narrow but malleable core which enables a bunch of playstyles simultaneously; you can help speed along Zenozoik’s death by manipulating these mechanics to absolutely wombo combo its denizens, be less committal and whittle them down while dodging away and luring them into each other’s attacks, focus on filling Pseudo’s attack gauge to spend as much time in his superpowered first person mode as possible or take any number of other approaches. Chuck in unlockable combat styles you can find through exploration (complementing its revamped, Bloodborne-inspired level design) alongside some light moveset customisation and you’ve got the type of game you’ll be reloading saves before boss encounters just to replay them differently, this all being before you get into modifiers brought about by the Ritual.

This is essentially an in-universe dice game that you can challenge bosses to before the fisticuffs start, during which the pair of you offer up an artifact to either somehow alter the fighting area, debuff one’s opponent or introduce some other advantage to one’s side depending on who has the most dice remaining by the end. The effects can get pretty creative, thick fog rolling in and obscuring your vision in exchange for causing enemies to swing blindly at whatever’s nearby being a suitably chaotic standout, though my favourite has to be the paired Pact and Summon artifacts. Winning the Ritual with the former active lets you store the boss you’ve beaten as an ally which you can then summon to help you by upon winning a second game with the latter equipped – if you stack up enough of both, you can essentially turn an unusual beat ‘em up into an even more unusual version of Pokemon, pitting cannibalistic mushroom men against tripedal bright blue elk with faces growing out of their chests and all manner of other weird and wonderful mercenaries I’ve no idea how these guys’ concept artists dreamt up. It does sometimes feel tedious that there’s no way to forfeit the Ritual once you’ve challenged someone to it, but it’s a worthwhile exchange for the sheer variation it enables in combat encounters. It’s everything I mentioned in the first paragraph dialled up to 11, fostered by an almost totally optional minigame. How cool is that?

I’m already predisposed to love any fictional world conceptually bizarre enough to feature something like this as its sole governing law, but it helps that it’s got the art direction to match. It’s one thing to be able to point your camera anywhere in a game and have a new wallpaper on your hands, another entirely both to craft such a genuinely alien environment and render it consistently readable without anything resembling objective markers. It’s perplexion with a purpose: it’d have been much easier to just let the player’s map or some other immersion breaking visual cue do all the thinking for them, but instead, the environmental artists and modellers gave it their all and went the extra mile to make this nutcase’s fever dream a believable place you’re expected to organically learn the lay of. Their creativity even benefits the enemy design in a way – certain opponents not having a particularly big or varied moveset is offset at least a bit by how you can never really be sure how something as uncanny as a technicolour lion with the face of an elderly man (for example) is going to attack. It easily joins hands with Bayonetta Origins and Inkulinati on the podium of some of 2023’s most unique visual design, none of which received any industry recognition in this regard because why would those with large platforms ever try to raise awareness of anything actually interesting?

How or why any given game flies under the radar varies too much to pin it on a singular cause, it’s just a particular shame that it’s happened in this case because of the extent to which Clash is stuffed with things people commonly claim to want. It might sound like a hodgepodge of disparate ideas when you’re just reading about it, but to me there are clear throughlines connecting all of its esoteric mechanics, outlandish art, intimidatingly loopy level design and litany of music I can’t do justice to with words – a willingness to be different and respect for the player’s intelligence. You can only put so much stock into how a game’s number of plays correlates to its actual popularity on a site where Gravity Rush 2 has more than Starcraft and Minecraft has only about three times as many as a Yakuza game, but only managing double digits even in a place of relative enthusiasts wouldn’t seem to bode well for its prospects (or, at least, as well as something with these traits deserves).

That’s why I challenge you, whoever’s reading this, by the One Law: please take a chance on this game you may have missed. They don’t make them like this anymore, except when they do! And when they do, you’ll be reminded of how much we could still do with more games like it.

In one of its previews, Hideaki Itsuno was deliberately evasive when asked about why Dragon’s Dogma II’s title screen initially lacks the II, saying only “nothing in this game is unintentional.” You can draw whatever conclusion you like from that, but I think I’ve a different interpretation from most – it’s less a signal that this is a reimagining or a remake or whatever else in disguise than a display of confidence in how well he and his team understand what makes it tick.

As much as I’ll never wrap my head around how they got the first Dragon’s Dogma running on 7th gen hardware (albeit just about), I would’ve said it was impossible not to feel how much more II has going on under the hood in even the briefest, most hasty of encounters if it weren’t being so undersold in this respect. While my favourite addition is that enemies’ individual body parts can now be dragged or shoved to throw them off balance, tying into both this new world’s more angular design and how they can be stunned by banging their head off of its geometry, yours might be something else entirely with how many other new toys there are to play with. One particularly big one’s that you and your pawns can retain access to your standard movesets while clinging to larger enemies if you manage to mantle onto them from the appropriate angle, but you’ve gotta watch out for the newly implemented ragdoll physics while doing so, since the damage received from getting bucked off now varies wildly depending on your position at the time and the nearby environment as a result of them. Successive strikes create new avenues of offence akin to Nioh’s grapples, pressuring you to get as much damage in as you can before letting one loose and taking your target out of its disadvantage state, while also enabling you to keep them in a loop if you’re able to manipulate their stun values well enough. Layers of interaction just keep unravelling further as you play – controlling the arc you throw enemies or objects in, tackling smaller enemies by grabbing them mid-air, corpses or unconscious bodies of bosses now being tangible things you can stand on top of instead of ethereal loot pinatas… I would’ve taken any one of these in isolation. To have them all, plus more, every one being wholly complementary and faithful to the scrambly, dynamic, improvisational core of Dragon’s Dogma’s combat? It’s i n s a n e to me that someone can undergo even a confused few minutes of exposure to any of this and reduce it to “more of the first” or what have you.

Your means of approaching enemies or general scenarios which return from the first game’re further changed by II’s more specialised vocations. Having spent most of my time with Warrior in both titles, I love what’s been done with it in particular. They’ve taken the concept of timing certain skills and applied it to almost every move, anything from your standard swings to its final unlockable skill becoming faster and faster as you time successive inputs correctly – this is only the slow, basic version of the latter and I still feel bad for whatever I batter with it – with chargeable skills now also doubling as a parry for attacks they collide with, similar to DMC5’s clashing mechanic. It’s emblematic of the devs’ approach to vocations in general; Archer’s relatively lacking melee options and litany of flippy, full-on Legolas nonsense encourages keepaway where its four predecessors were all slightly differing flavours of “does everything”, Thief trades access to assault rifle-like bows and invites stubbiness for being able to navigate this world’s much rockier terrain like it’s a platformer, Fighter no longer has to waste skill slots to hit anything slightly above your head and has more versatile means of defence in exchange for melee combat being more punishing in general, etc. It’s to the extent that choosing between any two vocations feels like I’m switching genres, man. In a landscape where people are demonstrably content with having no means of interacting with big monsters other than smacking their ankles, how is even a pretty simple interaction like this not supposed to feel like a game from the future?

On simple interactions, much of this would be lessened if it weren’t for the loss gauge in tandem with the camping system and how these accentuate the sense of adventure which the first game built. The persistent thoughts of “how do I get there?” are retained, but only being able to fully recuperate your health via downtime with the lads and/or ladesses fills every step of the way toward the answer with that much more trepidation, bolstered further by the aforementioned verticality and on the more presentational side of things by how your pawns actually talk to each other now. It leads to some very memorable, emergent experiences which are personal purely to you – one I’m especially fond of involved resting after killing a drake, having my camp ambushed in the middle of the night by knackers who were too high up for me to exercise my k-word pass and having to trek all the way back to Bakbattahl with barely a third of my maximum health as my party continually chattered about how freaky the dark is. I take back the suggestion I made regarding potential changes to the healing system in my review of the first game, because even superfans (or, maybe, especially superfans) can, and do, think too small.

I realise in retrospect that even I, on some level, was wanting certain aspects of Dragon’s Dogma to be like other games instead of taking it on its own merits, something II’s seemingly suffered from all the more with how much gaming has grown since the original’s release, the average player’s tolerance for anything deviating from the norm and, presumably, frame of reference growing ever smaller. Look no further than broad reactions to dragonsplague and its effects (which I won’t spoil) being only the second or third most embarrassing instance of misinformed kneejerk hostility disguised as principled scepticism which enveloped this game’s release to the point you’d swear Todd Howard was attached to it – we want consequences that matter, but not like that! Even if you aren’t onboard with this being the coolest, ballsiest thing an RPG has bothered and will bother to do since before I was born, how can you not at least get a kick out of starting up your own homegrown Dragonsplague Removal Service? You thought you could escape the great spring cleaning, Thomyris, you silly billy? I’m oblivious like you wouldn’t believe, had her wearing an ornate sallet by the time she’d first contracted it and still noticed her glowing red eyes every time, so I’m at a loss as to how it could blindside anybody. It vaguely reminds me of modern reactions to various aspects of the original Fallout; a game which you can reasonably beat in the span of an afternoon, designed to be played with a single hand, somehow commonly seen as unintuitive because it just is, okay? Abandon all delusions of levelheadedness: if a Fallout game with a timer were to release now, the world’s collective sharting would result in something similar to that universe’s Great War or, indeed, Dragon’s Dogma II’s own post-game.

For as many hours as I’ve poured into the Everfall and Bitterblack across two copies of the original, they’re not what I think of when I think of Dragon’s Dogma (or particularly interesting, in the former’s case), which is adventuring in its open world. In that regard, I can’t be convinced that II’s post-game isn’t far more substantial, comparatively rife with monsters either unique or which you’re very unlikely to encounter prior to it, changes to the world’s layout beyond a hole in the ground of one city, its own mechanics (one actually a bit reminiscent of Fallout’s timer), questlines and even setpieces. It’s got a kaiju fight between a Ray Harryhausen love letter and a demonic worm thing which, as of the time of writing, roughly 2% of players have discovered, and instead of being praised for the sheer restraint it must’ve taken to keep something like that so out of the way, it’s chastised for it?

I’m not sure any other game’s ever made me realise how divorced what I want out of games seems to be from the wider populace. So much of this is 1:1 aligned with my tastes that the only thing that feels potentially missing’s the relative lack of electric guitars, but even then I’d be a liar if I told you that Misshapen Eye, the dullahan’s theme, the griffin’s new track, the post-game’s somber piano keys or the true ending’s credits song among others haven’t gotten stuck in my head at some stage anyway or didn’t perfectly complement the action through dynamically changing. It manages this despite clearly not caring about what you or I or anyone else thinks or wants from it. It’s developed a will and conviction all of its own. It’s Dragon’s Dogma, too.

Unmatched in the field of causing involuntary bodily responses in the player, the difficulty of F-Zero X itself’s exceeded only by that of trying not to squirm in your chair as you (un)successfully round corners at >1500km/h, bump rival racers off the track while trying to avoid speeding headlong into the abyss yourself or snatch first place out of an increasingly tenuous situation just as a guitar solo kicks in like it’s cheering you on.

The constant multisensory tug of war comprising every race’s brought about in large part thanks to a significant emphasis on tracks’ newfound verticality, enabled by one of the N64’s relatively unsung (though no less impactful) series-first forays into 3D, but it wouldn’t be complete without the mechanics themselves getting a makeover too. What’s probably the most crucial example of this is that boosting’s gone from its own independent resource, as in the first F-Zero, to something you now have to sacrifice your vehicle’s health to use. It’s streamlining at its finest; races rarely play out the same way because there’s no longer a guarantee of either you or your competitors being able to boost upon the completion of each lap, it’s inherently riskier to use but with greater potential reward due to the momentum gained from it carrying over into slopes or airtime, and it paves the way for strategies and decision-making which weren’t really present before. Will you have a comfortable amount of health left for the next lap if you boost partway through the healing zone? Are you gonna do without healing altogether to go for gold and beeline for the boost pad between them instead? Boosting up this hill could rocket you ahead of the crowd, but is your health and the geometry ahead sufficient for a safe landing? With how little time you have to make up your mind, each race leaves your frontal lobe as sweaty as your palms.

All of this in turn has the knock-on effect of enhancing the death race concept at the heart of F-Zero, brought to the forefront by and intertwined with the addition of attacks you and your opponents’ vehicles can perform. At the cost of momentarily decelerating, you can either horizontally ram into other vehicles or spin to win, stalling whoever you hit for the most critical of split seconds and dealing damage proportional to each party’s speed and/or proximity to walls. How smartly this is incentivised becomes increasingly apparent as you ramp up the difficulty and other racers’ AI becomes accordingly aggressive – to come out on top on Expert or above, you pretty much have to kill your designated rival at least once both to broaden your own margin of error and halt their accruement of points, the health it grants you being similarly precious given how often you’ll be boosting. On a less tangible level, there are in general few outlets for gamer malice so cathartic as hearing a series of brrrrrings sound out as you position yourself for a double kill, nevermind doing so by rendering Fox McCloud an orphan in the opening seconds via the world’s least ethically sound game of pinball.

While the actual Death Race mode itself’s a bit anaemic, having only a single track (albeit one unique to it) in which other racers mind their own business instead of trying to bump you off too, it’s nonetheless a useful stomping ground for practicing these mechanics and is balanced out by more substantial post-game unlocks. My favourite racer doesn’t become playable until after the credits roll, for one thing, but the main draw in this regard’s the X Cup and its randomised tracks. Even if it seemingly can’t generate loop-de-loops, cylinders or steep vertical inclines in general, the layouts still manage to become chaotic enough and unlike any of the handcrafted ones to the point that you’ll invariably want to give it at least a few spins. “Ahead of its time” is a phrase I typically don’t like, since the way it’s often used feeds into the idea that new = inherently better and rarely references any actual points of comparison. That said, it feels appropriate in this case when you take into consideration the relative prominence of roguelike side modes and/or DLCs with similar emphasis on procedural generation that’ve crept their way into multiple major releases in the past couple of console gens – the people are crying out for what this game essentially had as a free bonus when I was still being wheeled about in a pram.

As much can be said of F-Zero X in general. Beyond its intentional minimisation of graphics exemplifying the uncanny foresight of Nintendo’s president at the time, it seems as if must have been on the minds of the team behind Mario Kart 8 (currently the second-highest selling first party title ever) to some extent given not just the appearance of both Mute City and Big Blue in it, but also the conceptual overlap between its anti-grav segments and X’s dizzying track designs. Tighten your frame of reference to just its own series and even more recent evidence of how rock solid these mechanics are presents itself in the form of F-Zero 99; while its Skyway and titular battle royale idea help carve out its own more accessible, comparably well-considered spin, it’s also simultaneously a fusion of the first game’s assets with X’s systems. In short, there’s at least a few reverberations of how much this game gets right still being felt, as well as of how timeless its appeal remains, enough so to be more digestible to today’s players than you’d initially assume. If and/or when they decide to prove as much again by taking another crack at the formula, hopefully it won’t be set upon by quite as many people who’ve never played any of them for not being the “proper” franchise revival they were definitely clamouring for.

This is all to say: don’t be intimidated by its steep learning curve and give it a whirl, because the F stands for fun and there are too few games which let you do something like this completely by accident. Like its announcer whose garbled voice gave my brother shellshock says, it’s way out in front.

Something this singularly focused and confident in what it’s setting out to achieve goes beyond a breath of fresh air and into the realm of interactive mouthwash. Nearly everything about Penny’s game encourages you to stay on the move at all times – it’s present in how the secret areas’ entryways outright throw you in or out, its main enemy type’s mode of attack being chasing you, her bouncy bunny-like outfit and the combo system rewarding you for every trick you pull, and it knows what a joy it is to do so to the point that its main collectibles reward with you with progressively zanier layouts to test your mastery of it in.

It all hinges on building and maintaining momentum, so it’s just as well that her toolkit feeds into both so intuitively. Comparisons to different platformers in this respect are easy – I got enough mileage out of her drop dash equivalent that I occasionally forgot she also has a spin dash one – but viewing this game through the lens of others is selling it short when her yo-yo swing’s the type of thing which makes returning to them initially feel weird for the lack of it. It’s so malleable it’s unreal: an on-demand boost whose strength’s proportional to her speed going into it, contextualised into her design, which can mantle up ledges or grab special items or correct jumps, all dependent on the angle at which you let go and the nearby geometry. Rarely will any two attempts at the same section of a level pan out the same way because of it alone, and that’s without delving into how fluidly almost all of her other manoeuvres interweave with it and what a complementary fit they are for stages so littered with half-pipes and slopes. By no means am I a capital P Penny gamer as of yet, but hopefully this shows what I mean to some degree.

I say “almost” for the same reason as the “nearly” at the start, because although it’s a resounding success at funnelling you into a flow state the vast majority of the time, one or two common interactions stand out as uncharacteristically finicky. The window for maintaining a combo when transitioning from a yo-yo swing into spinning on top of screws feels excessively strict, slightly marring how much I’m predisposed to love any control scheme which even vaguely reminds me of Ape Escape, while obstacles which require Penny to come to a stop (like tree catapults or giant drawers) seem incongruent with how you otherwise pretty much always want to be moving. I’m hesitant to criticise these aspects too much because all manner of unconventional games, not just skill-intensive ones like Penny’s, suffer too often from players’ tendencies to blame them for their own lack of willingness to meet them on their own terms, and knowing that levels can be beat in a single combo makes me think the relative discomfort of these moments is my own fault. Occasional collision issues and/or clipping through terrain are more unambiguously annoying, but in any case, stuff like this is only so conspicuous because everything else about how it plays is so bang on.

That’s similarly true of its levels themselves. While it’s a bit of a pity that the amount of levels per area vary so steeply – Industria and Tideswell, my two favourites in part for the Dynamite-Headdy-if-he-real visuals and being yet further evidence for why Tee Lopes should be made to compose every game ever, only have two levels each – any pacing issues this could’ve potentially resulted in are offset by what a smooth difficulty curve they result in when taken wholistically. The progression from early hazards like water, which can be manipulated to the player’s advantage via the point bonuses it offers by riding on top of it with enough speed, to the absolutely no-touchy electrical discharges powered by breakable lightbulbs in later areas creates this lovely feeling of the game taking its gloves off just as you’ve become acclimatised enough with its systems to no longer need the help. I initially found it frustrating that hazards like the latter hurt Penny if her yo-yo collides with them, but after sitting on it, I can now see that it’s just another example of what a unique platformer this is – substantially extending her hurtbox whenever you perform a trick causes you to really consider when and where to do so in a way that many others don’t really demand of you.

It's evocative of a larger point, which is that Penny’s Big Breakaway is the type of game we could all do with more of. It’s one that’s not afraid to be so out-there in both mechanics and visual design to the point of potentially being offputting for some. It’s one which tangibly takes enough inspiration from the like of Sonic or Mario Odyssey to feel immediately familiar on some level, yet also puts equally as much of its own spin on areas in which it shares common ground with bigger names to the extent that you can’t treat it like them. It’s one that’s in general so unabashedly itself that you can’t not respect it regardless of whether or not it’s to your personal taste, but if you’re at all into the kind of game which gives out as much as you put in and only becomes better as you yourself do, there’s too much on offer here executed to too high of a standard for it not to be.

To extend to it the highest praise in a more succinct way: in art direction, ethos and gameplay philosophy, this is essentially a fully 3D Mega Drive game. Breakaway indeed.

Translator’s note: “wealth” means “padding.”

It can’t be stressed enough how much Infinite Wealth’s core gameplay tweaks salvage it. This marks an all-time high for the Dragon Engine games’ responsiveness in terms of just fundamentally moving around, both Ichiban and Kiryu turning and 180ing with an unprecedented level of fluidity, but the real star’s the combat’s new emphasis on positioning. The movement circle’s so impactful for such a seemingly minor addition; lining up back attacks, proximity bonuses and the directions enemies get knocked in is an endlessly engaging triptych with suitably punchy feedback, as well as the best justification of the engine’s ragdoll physics outside of Lost Judgment’s big enemies, and only improves as you fiddle with party members’ equipment, jobs or builds. Kiryu’s fighting styles are arguably better differentiated here than in the game they’re from, which is emblematic of the extent to which all these pre-existing assets and gameplay concepts get freshened up by the genre switch. Despite retaining some of 7’s issues which’re less understandable in a game that already has a foundation to work off of, like a poor battle camera regularly obscuring enemies’ attacks and allies sometimes just not performing chain attacks when they trigger, it’s overall legitimately at the point where I can picture this being someone’s favourite turn-based RPG based on its mechanics rather than solely for how conceptually unique it is.

Playing so well’s an absolute lifeline given its relentlessly sluggish pacing. There’s an early segment in which Ichiban needs $30 to pay an information broker, and if you already have at least $30 he actually comments on how it’s already sorted, but instead of letting you just pay the broker at that point (as you weirdly can when this exact scenario resurfaces much later), you instead have to get roped into a substory which isn’t even really a substory since it’s bloating the main story to play a minigame to make the money you already have first, then travel back and only then pay him. The fatigue a situation like this brings on’s initially lessened by said minigame being great, but its introduction would’ve been a more unambiguous highlight if you’d been permitted to find it on your own and is quickly exacerbated by how often this happens; sizeable portions of the next three or four chapters are comprised of mandatory, agonisingly slow tutorials for shallow knock-offs of games Yokoyama was pretending this series is too cool for fewer than a couple of years prior. He talked big pre-release about how much longer Infinite Wealth is than the others, and although he wasn’t lying, it would’ve been good to mention that this is only because the typewriter monkeys under his dominion are masters of stretching out what could be single button presses into entire hours.

Some kind of stride’s finally hit with Kiryu’s segments – the core theme of recognising his mortality and appreciating the time he has left’s particularly resonant, as someone whose family’s seen one stage 4 cancer diagnosis and other health scares in recent years – but it’s also got the side effect of making the rest of the narrative that much thinner comparatively. In the same game partially revolving around the terminal illness of a character whom a decent amount of players will have essentially grown up alongside, I just can’t get invested in nuclear waste disposal, the unintentional humour brought about by a Vtuber interviewing yakuza figureheads or Ichiban’s efforts to assure child-gassing Dick Dastardly that they’re still nakamas to the extent that the amount of time dedicated to these seemingly expects you to, especially not with the lifeless substory-esque presentation the cutscenes for these plot threads often have or villains so tepid and hard to believe. Never mind that the Geomijul can hack government satellites but can’t doxx a famous streamer, whose decision was it to make the most American-as-interpreted-by-the-Japanese looking centenarian you’ve ever seen speak English like he’s fresh off the boat from the Tokugawa shogunate? I don’t know if it’s more or less dire than how Ichiban’s either unable to speak English or fluent in it depending on what the given scene demands. The camerawork’s presenting Bryce like he’s on the brink of attaining godhood or something and I’m giggling every time he speaks. The mismatch between voice and character’s sillier than all the plot twists people meme about combined.

His home turf’s enjoyable to explore at first thanks to an impressive amount of detail relative to its size, but the scale ultimately detracts more than it adds. Bigger in-game worlds wouldn’t feel so misguided for these games if Lost Judgment hadn’t already solved the issue of boring traversal; compared to its skateboard, the segway’s much slower to whip out, put away or move around on, more expensive, vulnerable to enemy encounters, prevents you from picking up valuable materials, doesn’t even require player input and has no tricks to perform or any means of interacting with the environment at all. Taken together with still being able to immediately fast travel to any taxi from the map, plus the fact that doing so’s cheap as chips, it becomes redundant not long after it’s introduced and with it goes most reasons to actually engage with this huge, meticulously crafted city. The likes of Kamurocho and Sotenbori stand out from the worlds of most vaguely comparable games for being small enough that you’ll naturally come to know them street by street and getting from A to B’s never arduous. Conversely, Hawaii and (this and 7’s version of) Yokohama are pretty much the definition of what Hideaki Itsuno was talking about here.

Regressions like these are only so frustrating because the occasional flashes of greatness shine so bright, though even those are weighed down by a disproportionate amount of them being relegated to a protagonist who’s supposed to have passed the torch roughly four times as of Infinite Wealth, which seems especially egregious when you consider how often its core cast reflect on the importance of moving on. The route 7 decided to go down was a much needed one that I’m still on board with in theory, and Ichiban remains a pot of potential narrative gold (which I don't think either 7 or IW fully capitalise on outside of Aoki's final scenes in the former), but it’s increasingly difficult to be confident in his ability to carry a franchise on his back when his own creators don’t seem to be themselves. His last scene ending on a punchline at his expense is so uncharacteristically insincere for these games, like an exclamation mark punctuating my confusion at this being their biggest break commercially and critically. If I wasn’t a big proponent of trusting people to know what they like instead of rationalising silly reasons why they might feel differently from you, I’d assume that the Daidoji are both real and responsible for the inherent RGG bonus that factors into Backloggd’s average score calculations.

The net gameplay improvements here are too substantial to suggest that Infinite Wealth isn’t worth playing, but at the same time, I reckon it’d be made largely redundant by its own predecessor if you could somehow surgically remove them and retrofit them into it. Eagerly anticipating this series’ sense of direction appearing as a bartender in the next one.

Initially felt inclined to rate The Lost Crown slightly lower due to some minor annoyances brought about by glitches, but by the end, I realised it represents too much of what I want out of this industry to lowball it. This game’s not just a welcome franchise revival or a showcase of a big publisher’s willingness to get experimental, it’s equally a reminder that not enough people are aware of what consistently great developers Ubisoft Montpellier are, an exercise in hardcore Indo-Persian frisbeeing, a vindication of Warrior Within enjoyers and – if you ask me – the single best search-‘em-up outside of actual Metroid games.

There’s a few indicators that Warrior Within was a point of study here – Sargon dual wields swords, it’s bloodier and more combat-oriented than most other entries, creatures from Persian folklore play a bigger role compared to original monsters and the Prince’s outfit from it was a preorder bonus – but the main one is that Warrior Within was Prince of Persia’s precedent for experimenting with a Metroid-y overworld. That more exploratory angle was always why I liked it best, so it’s just as well that The Last Crown expands on this like a duck to water. Mount Qaf’s dishing out surprises so regularly that the game never once feels stale despite how much longer it is than most of this genre, which is thanks not just to the conceptual creativity and sheer number of its biomes but also how those concepts inform their mechanics. To mention just one, my favourite’s the labyrinthine library whose master’s hunger for knowledge ended up turning him into Mr. X, in which you have to juggle that looming threat with puzzles where realising the solution is only part of the equation; showing you how I did this particular one isn’t even really a spoiler, because the onus is still as much on your dexterity and forward-planning as on figuring out what to do. Comparatively straightforward, linear areas aren’t without some kind of distinctive pull or spectacle either, one major highlight being pressing the resume button on a naval battle which had been frozen in time centuries ago.

That sort of moment-to-moment variety goes a big way towards helping avoid the staleness or tedium that could’ve been invited by its length, but the biggest asset in that regard is what a joy it is to gradually unravel Mount Qaf. I love the powers in this to the point that I’m hoping future metroidbraniacs rip them off wholesale. Nearly every individual one of them opens up several means of approach in both platforming and combat by itself; teleporting to an afterimage with Shadow of the Simurgh to slip through obstacles or set up multiple charged attacks quicker than you normally could, phasing between realities like in Soul Reaver to control when certain enemies or platforms become tangible, stuffing an explosive in your pocket to unveil a hidden respite in a precision platforming segment or even an entire enemy to even the odds in a particularly tough encounter… Every time I unlocked a new one, my mind was racing at the possibilities. Combine just a few with a little out-of-the-box thinking and it feels like you can reach just about anywhere – I’ve no idea how you’re “supposed” to get past the bit in that clip normally, and that’s beautiful.

Its combat designers similarly outdo themselves. Experimentation’s the name of the game, in part thanks to the impressive amount of hit reactions on its enemies’ part. They and bosses can be varyingly be tripped, launched, juggled, wallsplatted and more, but these differ heavily according to their weight class, which contributes to them being as varied functionally as visually in addition to making target prioritisation pretty frantic whenever big bois are mixed in with little ones. Coupled with the aforementioned powers, your means of approach are spruced up by the extent to which you can alter Sargon’s attributes through an equivalent to Hollow Knight’s charm system. I personally set him up with a ranged shockwave on melee attacks and another letting you turn the chakram into a lingering hazard, with an additional one that heals you on successful parries in case I ran out of potions during the increasingly tough later levels and their gleefully Shonen boss fights, but the customisation on offer’s such that your combat comfort zone’ll likely be pretty different. The feedback on attacks also deserves credit, seemingly taking pointers from Dreadtroid in that respect (love the slight screenshake on each hit in particular). As I said to a friend of mine, himself a French weeb, I’d loosely compare The Lost Crown to Streets of Rage 4 in that it represents what happens when a bunch of French weebs get together and stuff as much of whatever they think is coolest into a game as possible: an exhibition of action gameplay so well-studied and thoroughly understood you’d swear it was made by the Japanese genre figureheads they so clearly admire.

Same goes for its visual artists and the carvers of ancient rock reliefs they palpably draw inspiration from. It’s a delight to see this series dig deeper into the historical iconography of its namesake, ornate Faravahars and esoteric cuneiform and all, tempered by the hand of Rayman Legends’ art director to drape it all in this lovely cartoony, stylised edge. I imagine part of why it runs so well both handheld and docked’s due in part to some clever tricks the artists use with the backgrounds and certain characters too, rendering them with painted 2D images as opposed to fully textured 3D models; really lends figures like the Simurgh and places like the Crossroads of Time an otherworldly feel.

I’ve always been iffy on how “Ubisoft” is used as a descriptor, partially because it often crops up regardless of how similar the game it’s used in reference to actually is to any of their games, but also because there are so many Ubisofts that you can’t really talk about them like they’re a singular entity. I mentioned in my Chaos Theory review that I find it hard not to retain some goodwill towards them so long as at least some of their oldheads remain, and while that holds true, The Lost Crown’s also a compelling case for their newcomers. It’s clear evidence that there’s a swathe of latent talent amongst the group’s bloated headcount primed and ready for the chance to be let off the mobile game hamster wheel and deliver some genre-best efforts, with such avalanches of great ideas that I haven’t even mentioned Memory Shards or that this has a Persian Vergil who uses the 3D games’ time powers against you. Severely hoping Ahriman decides to lay off for a bit so that this game and the people behind it can see the success they deserve, and so we can get more of those in turn.

What if Yoko Taro made Dustforce after he’d just finished playing The Sands of Time, was on a Crypt of the NecroDancer kick and liked rats? That’s a really reductive description, but it’s also probably the closest thing to a box into which you can pigeonhole Mad Rat Dead. Rhythm games mixed with other genres are like crack to me, so even with the high standard I hold them to, it’s probably a sign that it’s done something very right whenever I start replaying levels for S ranks before I’ve even finished it.

The game's differentiated from most similar rhythm-plus-something-else hybrids in that, instead of maintaining a consistent beat, its songs’ BPM actually change throughout each stage and you’re expected to adjust the timings of your actions on the fly (which, without spoiling anything, goes into maximum overdrive on hard mode). There’s great foresight shown in some of the design decisions implemented to prevent this from becoming too overwhelming, namely how there’s a three second countdown after you close the pause menu to give you some prep time, Mad Rat’s basic movement isn’t tied to the beat and the game briefly goes into slow motion whenever the beat switches tempo. Considering how taxing it can be to mentally juggle the sheer amount of obstacles it’s often chucking at you with the need to time all his dashes and jumps correctly, these do a pretty remarkable job at avoiding frustrations which would have easily been prevalent in the hands of a lesser team.

Iffy situations can still arise sometimes despite how thoroughly thought out it is overall, though. Dying in Mad Rat Dead works like the 3D Prince of Persias’ time rewinding mechanic except it subtracts from the time limit instead of a collectible resource and any source of damage kills you in one hit; there were consequently a few instances where I’d found myself in enough of a cyclical death trap that it was more beneficial to just restart the whole level instead of trying to work my way out of a situation where (for example) I’d eventually ran out of disappearing platforms to rest my weary rat legs on. On the initial playthrough there doesn’t seem to be any way to skip cutscenes either, which can become grating in some of the especially difficult levels. That said, I’m hesitant to pour too much haterade on this partially because most of your time’s likely going to be spent playing through the level select menu (which wisely makes cutscenes optional), as well as the old adage: never attribute to flawed design that which is adequately explained by skill issues.

The third part is because it’s ultimately outweighed by what a joy this is to control. Without hyperbole, Mad Rat himself’s got to be one of the most fun characters to fundamentally just move around as in any platformer. He doesn’t get any new moves or abilities over the course of the game, but that’s because he doesn’t need any – familiarising yourself with all his quirks, like being able to jump mid-air if you’ve dashed off of a ledge, breakdancing while airborne to maximise airtime or shortening his dashes to a custom length by tapping the opposite direction you’re dashing in, intrinsically progresses you from feeling hapless at the start to like a champ by the end. There are lots of segments I initially couldn’t stop dying during which’ve eventually become ones I now occasionally boot up the game specifically to replay, just to dance around the proverbial litterbox of hazards that once gave me so much trouble or party with bosses that feel like you’re at a particularly malicious concert, complete with moves that resemble strobe lights.

Something you might notice in the first of those clips is how much the soundtrack’s reverbs sound like the mewling of an angry cat, which reflects another one of the game’s specialties: conveying character through music. Take a second and picture in your head a morally dubious cartoon rat breaking out of his cage with the intent to kill his owner, then imagine what a soundtrack to that scene would sound like: chances are it’s exactly like this. Now do the same for this scenario: that rat’s feeling like a hero with a newfound sense of purpose after developing a moral compass and saving the life of a young girl – same situation. The fruit of looking at a rhythm game and going “the music’s good” hangs so low it’s effectively underground, so it’s just as well that Mad Rat Dead’s soundtrack goes the extra mile and evokes all the right emotions so effectively (which is especially impressive considering how many different composers it has and how tonally scattershot it could’ve been as a result; clearly some strong direction going on here).

Speaking of strong direction, there’s a reason I mentioned Yoko Taro at the start. How many funny rat games kick off by interviewing you about whether or not you hate other people, if it’s always right to do what benefits the most people and whether or not you’ve the will to realise your dreams, complete with booting you back to the main menu as a joke if you pick the particularly suspect options? I don’t know either, but this one does. It’s not eccentric for the sake of itself, either, because these concepts tie in with the events that unfold throughout the story far more neatly than you’d expect; such a mechanics-driven game could easily get away with not putting this much effort into its narrative, but they did anyway.

It's what it says on the tin: platforming madness with an extra helping of heart. Don’t be a scaredy rat and give it a go – or else.

Whenever Maximo swings his sword, it can either rebound off of hard surfaces or get stuck in wooden ones as he has to take a second to wiggle it out again. It begs the question: why’s this niche 3D platformer from when the PS2 was still new, about a cartoon Roman fighting the skeletons from Army of Darkness, making me think more about when and where I swing a sword than most games wholly predicated on smacking things with a sword released in the decades since?

This emphasis on positioning’s essential to what makes Maximo such a great translation of Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins into 3D. As early on as its second set of levels, which introduces barriers of thorny vines you can only safely cut down from a certain range, it becomes apparent that the difference between life and death’s often something as seemingly negligible as knowing that Maximo remains stationary if you slash once but takes a step forward if you slash twice. Even small interactions like that distinguish themselves from equivalent moments in other platformers because you can’t rely on your depth perception as much, given that Maximo’s camera is at a Dutch angle, sprinkling in perpetual spatial discomfort just in case the trademark difficulty inherited from its sister series wasn’t already giving you the business. It sounds dissimilar to how slight inclines or dips in the road often spell doom for Arthur, as does stuff like luring enemies out into open areas to minimise the risk of Maximo’s sword getting caught on something, but these things are really just a different execution of the same key principles – making virtually every second of getting from point A to B an exercise in problem-solving and demanding an intimate level of familiarity with your character.

To go along with its extra dimension, Maximo adds an extra layer of decision-making to the above in the form of its randomised ability system. It’s drowning in bonus moves you can obtain as random drops from defeated enemies or chests, which range from making your ground pound’s shockwaves do damage or unveil hidden treasure to turning your shield throw into a lingering hazard by holding down the button and transforming into an invincible skeleton who dishes out OHKO contact damage, among enough others that I was still finding new ones in the final levels. There are two catches to this, though, the first of which being that you can only have up to 12 abilities at a time. It seems more likely that this limitation was created intentionally rather than a result of technological restrictions, given that it might detract from the difficulty if you’d access to them all at once and forcing the player to adapt through RNG elements is G‘n’G 101. Even if the latter’s the case, though, the game still deserves credit for how they’re designed in such a way that none are unambiguously superior to the rest and all are heavily subject to the player’s circumstances. I regularly decided to forego abilities (or locked treasure chests which might’ve contained some) in certain stages where I might’ve coveted them in others, which speaks both to that quality and the wealth of variety present in its level design too.

The second thing to consider is that all abilities you haven’t selected as permanent are lost upon dying (which happens, a lot). Losing them, a life and your maximum health limit definitely makes you feel about as helpless as I felt in the car accident I had the morning prior to writing this, the frosty field I stood in for an hour afterwards incidentally giving me a greater appreciation for Red Dead Redemption 2’s shrinking horse bollock technology, the random nature of these drops counterweights frustration in that there’s inherently always a chance you’ll end up with abilities more appropriate for the situation at hand than those you had initially. As much was my experience with the final set of levels, in which an abundance of enemies whom you have to repeatedly stun with ground pounds were made significantly easier to deal with after I’d died and subsequently got one that increased my shockwave’s radius. Dynamic or what? If that sounds exploitable then worry not, because losing all your lives results in having to pay the medium’s most charismatic interpretation of Death an increasingly high amount of special coins each time it occurs (and which each take collecting 50 other items to obtain). They were one step ahead of us, gamers.

Charismatic’s a good summation of the whole package, and not just thanks to the cartoony art direction which is realised fully enough to be used as a selling point on the back of its PAL box. As indicated by the tagline at the top, the love of all things old school was one of the core sentiments behind Maximo, such that its director David Siller (whose role in the creation of Crash is keenly felt) went as far as illustrating the design of each of its levels on pen and paper like some kind of scribe. Enough time’s passed since its release that Maximo itself, and contemporary reception of it, now feels representative of that on some level; as standardisation's entrenched over time, you have to wonder if current audiences would be as open to a game so boldly off-kilter that its camera isn’t even screwed on straight.

It all makes for some short, sweet, replayable arcadey goodness wrapped up in the same wonderfully slapstick spookiness that makes Medievil such a visual delight. Start your year off right: the next time you come across some old game on here with a (bizarrely, as per) subpar average rating and a number of plays fun-sized enough to suggest it wasn’t a big deal in its day, please take a chance on it regardless, because you just might walk away with a new favourite.

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.

The fruits of the first Strand-type Mario are simple, but juicy.

Despite the comparison, Wonder’s multiplayer reminds me more than anything of LittleBigPlanet’s. The 7th console generation came well after my first exposure to online multiplayer, which I think was either Runescape or Age of Mythology, but LBP integrating that sense of shared experience into a 2D platformer of all things stuck out to me as feeling like the future at the time. Trying your hardest to show other players secrets, puzzle solutions and how to reach certain items without any way to communicate beyond changing Sackboy’s facial expression, or vice versa, was just as much fun as getting from point A to B and Wonder hits all those same notes, minus the ability to take out your frustrations on one another with a punch that was equal parts friendly and passive-aggressive.

Other players being intangible ghosts in Wonder’s a net advantage, though, due to how much more condensed and focused it allows the levels to be than if it weren’t the case. 3D World had always been my favourite Mario in part for its passive online elements; for the longest time, I’d put off giving its Switch port a proper go because the absence of other players in the world select (which Wonder thankfully reintroduces) and the uncomfortable laughs that came with their posts felt offputtingly empty, like joining a now dead server in an online game you used to love years back. That said, revisiting it solo in the run up to Wonder’s release drew my attention to just how spaced out many of its levels are, no doubt to accommodate the chaos that came with four players being able to physically bump into and sabotage each other. There’s something to be said for that kind of experience too – some of my favourite memories of Team Fortress 2 involve intentionally making enemy spies invulnerable – but Wonder’s overall more cooperative spin on multiplayer Mario enables more engaging content density while also better fitting the game’s cheerful tone.

The latter point could be extended to the removal of both the timer and scoring, but there was likely more to axing these than that. Considering the emphasis Wonder places on collectibles and exploration, there’s a sense that some cues have been taken from the 3D games, which seems to have also included the willingness to let players go at their own pace. How well considered this decision is becomes apparent through online play and the revival system in particular, since players need to physically touch each other or a standee to be saved; it’s tough to imagine this mechanic not being undermined to the point of redundancy if everyone was incentivised to rush through levels as quickly as possible instead. You don’t have to engage with it purely out of the goodness of your gamer’s heart either, because heart points both provide an extrinsic motivator to tickle your monke brain for assisting others too and are arguably more practical than scores ever were, given that they inform others of how helpful you are (vaguely akin to the original Demon’s Souls’ co-op ranking system).

Granted, there were definitely a few instances where being revived allowed me to get past some parts it felt like I shouldn’t have. While some tougher levels (especially those in the special world like Climb to the Beat) are designed with such a staggering amount of foresight that they prevent dying and then floating around obstacles to be revived at the other end from being a consistently reliable strategy, usually by way of autoscrolling and/or stuffing the screen with a precision platformer’s worth of hazards, it’s easy to see why someone might reductively refer to Wonder’s multiplayer as a glorified checkpoint system whenever those factors aren’t present. Although you can’t knock it too much for this since it’s a self-inflicted problem in at least two different ways, seeing as you need to go out of your way not only to touch another player but also to flick the multiplayer on in the first place, it did lead to rare moments of dissatisfaction in a game otherwise so good at avoiding them that it should probably be studied in some kind of school.

The different effects brought about by the Wonder Flowers go a big way towards achieving that, essentially multiplying the frequency with which other platformers like Rayman Legends and Tropical Freeze dole out new ideas every couple of minutes by a factor of two while also giving nearly every level at least double the amount of completion methods. The abundance of brand new enemy designs, powerups, and locales combined with characterful jams like this and claymation-like art direction would’ve been more than enough for this to feel like a breath of fresh air, but not knowing whether you’re about to be turned into a jelly monster or take a ride on a Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins dragon and simultaneously sharing the bewilderment of others around the world takes it to another level.

Hopefully this review’s focus on multiplayer hasn’t been too one-note and gives a bit of different perspective on how valuable an experience it can be. It’s not a coincidence that I’ve referenced three other, older games here whose online features (i.e. my favourite part of all of them) can’t be conventionally accessed anymore – unless it’s faithfully rereleased 1:1 from now until the end of time, Wonder’ll likely someday join them as a game I’ll still always be able to happily recommend, but partially on the basis of inimitable memories. I think the tendency of remasters to remove online functionalities has played a part in conditioning us to see multiplayer as this ancillary thing that can ultimately be done without, even if it’s where the game’s at its strongest; ideally, Wonder’s will be preserved for as long as possible, because it really does accentuate its many strengths.

Sufficient for the day is its own trouble, though. For now, just enjoy divvying out those wowie zowie balloons.

For what a high point of storytelling in games the franchise it spawned has come to be seen as, it feels underdiscussed how effortlessly God of War married its narrative with its mechanics on its very first try. What I’d wager is the peak of this entire series in that regard’s present here, specifically during the final boss, at which point there’s a masochistically difficult segment where Kratos has to defend his family from an army of himself and can quite literally sacrifice his life (bar) to restore theirs.

While a sequence near the end of Chains of Olympus comes close in terms of catharsis, I find this section especially interesting not just for its music being a top 5 track in any action game or the 1:1 emotions it induces in both the player and Kratos, but also because of how neatly it wraps him up at the very start of what went on to be arguably Sony’s premier franchise, to the point of being its guinea pig for expanding outside of its own consoles. It’s become unfortunately common to mischaracterise the Greek games’ Kratos as an avatar of mindless anger, this being just one example of any number of counterpoints to that notion which existed as early on as his debut (you’d hope the introductory cutscene alone would’ve been enough). Were he not a compelling leading man with just enough depth to maintain interest over the course of a game relatively lengthy for its genre, it’s doubtful that he would’ve become probably the closest thing PlayStation’s ever had to its own Mario or Master Chief, if not in terms of sheer recognisability or an on-brand colour scheme then certainly in being a distilment of his parent company’s core draw – in this case, complex scenarios made accessible to as wide an audience as possible by way of presentational, cinematic flair.

God of War achieves this partially through its fixed camera, which is a huge boon to its sense of adventure. Even something as mundane as trotting down what’s functionally a featureless corridor feels momentous whenever it’s paired with a rampaging Ares in the background occupying two thirds of the screen, or when it pans out to the point of Kratos being barely visible to drive home the gargantuan scale of places like Pandora’s Temple and the Desert of Lost Souls. The in-game levels encompassing these areas are only so big, but the bespoke camera angles do a stellar job of selling the impression that there’s something more out there on the horizon (accentuated by how they enable the level designers to hide important collectibles out of view) and stoking the player’s imagination, the latter of which increasingly seems to be a lost art in games of production value comparable to this as they hone in further and further on photorealism. This isn’t to suggest that God of War isn’t likely trying to look as realistic as the PS2’s hardware allowed for – the amount of real-time reflections, volumetric water effects and NPCs running around during crowded scenes are pretty insane considering how smoothly it runs – but I do think this is a case where technical limitations helped bring about the best of both worlds, where it’s simultaneously cool how lifelike it can often look while still leaving room for mental abstraction on the player’s part.

The other half of the equation’s the combat system. The lack of any pesky directional inputs coupled with the Blades of Chaos’ gigantic range help reduce the skill barrier a decent margin by de-emphasising positioning (though not nearly to as egregious an extent as the Norse games’ slip ‘n’ slide attack magnetism) and technicality, but it’s still got layers which this surface-level simplicity belies. The hardest difficulty particularly necessitates a balancing act, where you’ll be pretty much constantly weighing up whether to get in as many weak hits as possible and milk the combo counter for all the red orbs it’s worth or to risk chucking out slower, stronger attacks to quickly dispatch the most annoying enemies. It has a few of those for sure; if you can believe it, Sony Santa Monica actually put my reaction to a gorgon appearing onscreen into one of these games. The enemy roster’s largely good and makes creative use of Greek myth, but other, more minor irritations do occasionally rear their heads in soldiers’ unreactable wakeup attacks and how there doesn’t seem to be any reliable way to predict when sirens or minotaurs decide to respectively dodge or block.

Despite these blemishes and the Blade of Artemis feeling slightly undertuned for being the only other weapon in the game, God of War’s combat system has enough other strong points to outweigh them. The grab system in particular deserves more attention than it tends to get and could stand to be cribbed from more often by other action games. At the press of a button and depending on the context in which they’re used, grabs are a tool for combo extension, crowd control, orb maximisation, invincible instakills (at the cost of receiving no orbs) and non-mandatory QTEs which net you specific resources from certain enemies should you need them; complemented by the wealth of magic abilities Kratos obtains over the course of the game, it enables more room for experimentation than one’d expect. It also can’t be stressed enough how great it is at fulfilling a power fantasy; the chunkiest hitstop in all of Athens and a striking amount of enemy hit reactions makes feedback on attacks feel fantastic whether you’re ripping into entire hordes or a single measly harpy.

As sobering as this being my 50th review was the fact that, according to my memory card, the last time I’d played God of War on original hardware seems to have been 2008. Gamer carbon dating places that roughly in our own equivalent of ancient Greece, but as with the real deal, we shouldn’t arrogantly look down on that era. There’s a tendency in gaming and other media to purport that standards only ever increase as time passes, but even in the face of the leaps and bounds action games have come on in the time since God of War’s release, I reckon there’s still not many that outdo it in all of its key selling points, one of which includes the ability to put Kratos in a cow costume. It remains not just the game I might not’ve gotten into my favourite genre without, but also a solid exemplification of why you probably shouldn’t trust anybody who uses “like a PS2 game” as a pejorative. Or, in my experience, the first sentence of this old promo video. The second one’s true enough, though.

This game lets me walk around looking out the windows of and meticulously hand-placing ornaments throughout a homemade, supersized approximation of an interceptor from Homeworld that I built for myself and my posh, English, spatially challenged Judge Anderson cosplayer wife to go dungeon diving in, and you’re telling me there are people who don’t enjoy it?

What’s as striking as this realisation is how much better Starfield feels to fundamentally move around in than Bethesda’s prior titles, especially in third person. Your character shifts their weight and takes a balancing step when moving from one direction to the opposite, the addition of mantling up ledges means where you can or can’t go’s significantly less ambiguous and a hefty degree of animation blending makes their transitioning between states more natural-looking. Beyond making it so that your character now actually feels like part of the world they’re in instead of indifferently gliding over it as in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, this has some positive knock-on effects in terms of environmental design.

Oblivion had its acrobatics and Fallout 4 its jetpack, but these largely weren’t able to factor into how you traversed dungeons since there had to be concessions for the inevitability that not every player would have them. In contrast, Starfield’s boost packs being practically universal alongside planetary modifiers means it can afford to get more creative in this respect. This was apparent even early on when I dropped into a cave on a low-gravity planet and had to get through it by jumping between a series of distant platforms, varying my boost timing to reach some of the taller ones like I was playing Jak & Daxter or something. Another particularly cool one let me float out of the roof of an initially closed hangar after a pirate ship arrived to give its inhabitants some backup, which I could later land my own ship inside after befriending those same pirates. Others still let me circumvent enemy encounters by way of boosting up to an overhead vent, something I might’ve missed if I were playing Starfield like one of Bethesda’s less vertical titles and never looked above me, or more colourfully via shifting between dimensions akin to that one level from Titanfall 2. The setting’s also a great help in terms of making shortcuts through these areas less conspicuous – emergency vents you have to break the seals of or imposing, computerised gates are a more natural fit for this kind of thing than what felt like every other ancient Nordic tomb having a not-so-secret collapsible door.

The semi-procedurally generated nature of Starfield’s planets means there’s always a risk of some of these places losing their lustre through repetition, but are two factors mitigating this. One, there are also no instances of Daggerfall’s ambitious but malevolently complicated RNG hellscapes and two, planets’ environmental conditions go at least some way towards keeping things varied; you’re probably not going to approach a multistorey Ecliptic tower on a nigh-zero G planet the same way you will on one where your feet barely leave the ground, for example. I’m inclined to chalk this up as a net positive partially for that reason and also because it creates a sense of not knowing how you’ll deal with what’s on the horizon even if you can eventually predict it, which is notably beneficial whenever everything’s reshuffled in a new game plus that’s conceptually reminiscent of and similarly sick as Dragon’s Dogma’s. Especially impressive was the fact that, as far as I can recall, I didn’t encounter the same alien wildlife on any two planets except when there was an in-universe explanation for it.

Some may find it dry that Starfield relegates aliens to fauna, but I find it refreshing if anything. A utilitarian focus purely on humanity, our place in the universe and what we ought to do with all that spess out there seem strangely underexplored ideas for how many sci-fi games there are, especially considering how naturally these lend themselves to RPGs specifically. Antagonists bicker over egoism versus altruism, quests commonly pose questions about how far venturing into the unknown is too far, balances of power can be tipped in situations as petty as a dispute between two local shop owners or as grand as instigating conflicts between galaxy-spanning factions, there’s always some trepidation in not knowing whether another spaceship is about to shake you down or treat you to a folk song, etc. Within the limitations of a game, it does quite a sound job of encapsulating what an eclectic bunch we are without being needlessly pessimistic about it.

As the above suggests, I don’t think Starfield’s writing particularly needs defending, in part because it’d do everyone some credit to recognise that writing in RPGs isn’t constrained to just dialogue boxes or cutscenes reflecting the outcomes of your pre-programmed “choices.” Coming across scenes like this tucked away in the collapsed shaft of an abandoned NASA facility, or spacer bases having credstiks strewn about where office appliances ought to be, gets the gears turning in my head as much as or more than any flowery bouts of exposition. In Todd Howard’s interview with Lex Fridman, he mentioned that Bethesda’s got a team specifically for arranging miscellaneous objects throughout their worlds in a way that makes them feel lived-in; although big-brained, standards-having gamers like you and me might scoff in disbelief when we trek outside our bubble and remember that Fallout 3’s not only generally very well liked but also won awards for its storytelling, it becomes easier to wrap your head around when you realise they’ve always been and continue to be ace at this.

An understated but crucial strength of all of these games which accentuates that’s also been expanded upon: Starfield lets you rotate and throw such objects with varying force in addition to being able to pick up and carry them as before. It’s got practical applications (e.g. chucking then shooting hazardous canisters), but to me its real importance is building upon an avenue of the kind of roleplaying that’s essentially unique to this developer, as well as a reason why I don’t understand what I’m supposed to be comparing it to, beyond the vaguest possible descriptors, when I read that it’s allegedly “dated.” Flipping a bucket and sticking it over Vasco’s head, orienting an object into a shopkeeper’s line of sight to prevent them from witnessing theft or otherwise messing about with physics are the kinds of things that I myself might actually do for kicks if I were really in my character’s shoes – I’m not actually a bug-themed, tanto-wielding sentai hero with a suspiciously large and well-organised stockpile of stolen food in his ship’s storage room, but the agency this one mechanic affords goes such a long way toward breaking down the barrier between character and player regardless that you could’ve fooled me.

Player agency falters a bit in other aspects like the abundance of essential NPCs, but this and occasionally finicky menus notwithstanding, I’m unsure which metrics I’m supposed to be gauging to determine that Starfield isn’t probably the best iteration of this formula in more ways than not. There’s not much to disparage here that couldn’t also be said of all its siblings ⁿᵒ ⁿᵉʷ ᵛᵉᵍᵃˢ ⁱˢ ʳᵉᵃˡˡʸ ⁿᵒᵗ ᵗʰᵃᵗ ᵈⁱᶠᶠᵉʳᵉⁿᵗ, except they weren’t counterweighted by the benefits of combat I don’t actively want to avoid whenever possible, the novelty of being able to divert power to different systems in a spaceship or a main quest climax which made me genuinely think about what I’d do in that scenario among other things. Catch me revving up the engines of the Hiigaran Beryl for another several dozen hours hereafter.

As rickety and often barely functional yet ultimately powerful as its titular protagonists. Less than an hour into this replay, I got stuck inside a door and had to reload a save to get out, had a guard I’d intimidated into passivity turn hostile again when he rounded a corner and witnessed an unconscious, bedridden patient aggressively A-pose when I fed on his doctor, but as ever, I stick with it regardless because virtually everything else about the game is so enthralling. The ladies call it “oh God!,” but you can call it Vampire the Masquerade – Bloodlines.

Paradoxically, VTMB’s main strength is probably its immersion. No amount of glitchiness could be enough to prevent anyone from feeling smothered in the atmosphere of dark urban decay it depicts, even after several playthroughs; this was my fourth since I was little and I still find myself wary of areas which I should know by now have no enemies or other dangers, because (appropriately, considering the game’s premise) there’s always a pervasive sense that there could be. Something less obvious that contributes to this is the fact that it’s one of few RPGs with a contemporary setting – it’s easier to feel on edge when familiar locales like a beachside hotel, a hospital or an arcade are supernaturally twisted into something uncomfortable. These aspects join hands with a soundtrack which sounds like what you’d see if you peered into the mind of any of this portrayal of LA’s aimless drifters, grungy ambient sound effects, imposing neo-Gothic architecture and some lovely, imagination-sparking skyboxes to make each of its four small but dense hub worlds that much more of a joy to explore, even when the later portions take their infamous downturn in terms of options for resolving quests and general rushed-ness.

It's a pity that the endgame’s so combat-orientated given that the combat system, despite being somewhat flexible and satisfying in small doses thanks to some of the more out-there vampiric powers, generally isn’t engaging enough to maintain long-term interest. One area in which VTMB never falters, though, is in terms of character interactions. Stellar voice acting and facial animations unique in their sheer expressiveness, true even of NPCs which most players might never even encounter, don’t just bring its cast to (un)life but also make the dialogue system feel more natural, too. As in the first two Fallout games with which Troika shared several staff, NPCs’ demeanour towards you is telegraphed diegetically via their facial expressions and, although speech checks are highlighted by a bunch of fancy fonts, there’s no indication of whether you’ll succeed at them or whether doing so’ll even result in a beneficial outcome. Only on my third playthrough did I learn that you can lock yourself out of getting the Downtown haven if you’re too cheeky to LaCroix, with no warnings next to any of the dialogue options that result in this. It’s all too rare and all too cool that an RPG pulls the rug out from under you like this and lets you get whisked away on a domino effect of your poor decisions, however minor they seem at the time.

What accentuates this even further is the diversity between the clans you can pick at the start. Playing a Malkavian or Nosferatu in particular’s so differentiated from those with their heads and/or skin screwed on that it’s almost like playing the game for the first time again; as above, it wasn’t until this replay that I learned you could skip the tutorial and miss out on a free lockpick until I realised the hard way that I don’t have as good a grasp on the voices in my Malk’s head as I’d thought. It occasionally feels like every character needing to be voiced restricted the lengths Troika could go to in integrating unique interactions for these oddball clans, but the fact that there’s one entirely optional clan which alters every single line of player dialogue in the game and at least one other which fundamentally changes how you have to navigate the hubs is really impressive, no less for the restraint this must’ve taken than for its impact on gameplay and replay value – again, reminiscent of low-INT builds in Fallout 1 and 2.

You’ll probably have noticed that this review’s got a consistent thread running through it of getting slapped in the face with things I didn’t know were in the game before, and that’s because a core draw of VTMB is discovery. It’s why I’ve not dug into how juicy much of its dialogue is, the surprising amount of other World of Darkness tabletops it draws from beyond just Vampire or the frequency with which it reminds you what a vivid imagination its character designers/artists have, because it all deserves to learnt firsthand. That said, I did make a tiny collage to drive home the latter point: these four characters all live on roughly the same street. The amount of effort it must’ve taken to conceptualise a cast so varied’s almost as mad to think about as the fact that VTMB is old enough now to arguably function as period piece.

This being as true of the time in which it released as of its contents is what led to this revisit in the first place. Having played and enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077 and Starfield in quick succession, both of which feature only about as many bugs across an entire playthrough as any individual hour of this (if even), I find it hard to imagine a world where the public wouldn’t sentence VTMB to the same death-by-hyperbole if it were to come out now, without the reputational fortune of being long solidified as a cult classic for epic gamers only. It turns out that releasing in the same week as Half Life 2, MGS3 and Halo 2 was a blessing in disguise, if only because this was well before the Camarilla saw fit to punish us with social media monetisation and how it's helped foster vague, directionless outrage about games most of those perpetuating it have no intention of playing anyway as its own micro-industry.

Forever glad that people were able to see the forest for the trees in this particular case, for whatever reason, and recognise that not even bugs on the level of crashing the game when you press the screenshot button or a penultimate boss in three out of four story routes constituting what may genuinely be the worst boss fight in any video game are enough to sink the one-of-a-kind RPG that VTMB is. Take the plunge into its supernatural underworld, look forward to making mistakes along the way and remember: don’t open it.

The faithfulness of System Shock 2023 to the original’s design principles is probably best illustrated with this anecdote: I was still able to beat it after forgetting where I’d put a (theoretically) mandatory quest item.

Axing the original’s unorthodox HUD and control scheme debatably helps this remake carve out its own niche – if anything, it’s more novel to be able to play what’s essentially Ultima Underworld in space with a fairly conventional interface than if it’d just regurgitated something that already exists – but it also makes it appear more different than it really is. As much as I love it when a game demands you meet it on its own terms when it comes to aspects as fundamental as those, I’ve never seen them as the core of System Shock, not least because they didn’t survive into what’d eventually become its own sequel or any spiritual successors Looking Glass’ alumni would go on to contribute to. Progressing through whichever means would make sense if you were really in the Hacker’s shoes, with no arbitrary limitations to tell you that you can’t? Scenarios which would be restrictive, barely interactive setpieces in any other type of game arising organically through the player’s manipulation of overlapping, interconnected mechanics? Lobbing a grenade at something, ducking into a corner and peeking out again to see its giblets gently floating in a gravlift like a cybernetic pinata? These are some of the pillars which much more warmly remind me of what game I’m playing and they’re all here, rendered with visuals and sound which’re likely a series best.

That might seem faint praise, given that this remake’s 24 years removed from its predecessor, but it’s not. System Shock 2 derives its effectiveness in no small part due to its enemies’ (and, later on, environments’) genuinely repulsive visual design, coupled with the Dark Engine’s sound propagation system ensuring that any and all instances of malicious squishing or clanking remain paranoia-inducing no matter the distance between you and their source. It’s a high watermark for the medium in both respects, one which Nightdive’s efforts have adequately followed up on. Seeing a red lens flare in the distance paired with a monotone, faint but increasingly loud “searching” or suddenly seeing the shadow of an invisible mutant under a dynamic light source as you lose your way in a literal maze elicits all the right emotions, as well as some new ones when taken in tandem with a generally higher extent of environmental interactivity than either of the prior two games and TriOptimum’s raddest electric guitars. As much of an earworm as the original game’s MIDIs are, they’ve never instilled in me quite the same feelings as scrambling past inadvertently overturned tables and bonsai trees as a gorilla-tiger barrels down the corridor to the tune of this.

I say generally because there are some odd omissions in that regard, namely the inability to mantle up ledges. Any issues this poses’re circumvented whenever you eventually obtain the V3 hover boots, which allow for an unreal degree of schmovement up down and all around, but (to my knowledge) the earliest point at which you can get those is quite late into the game and long after you’ll have become acquainted with the fact that Shodan’s strongest soldiers are knee-high steps. What exacerbates this somewhat is that you can’t pick up and manipulate objects to more practically stand on top of them – it feels a bit unfair to criticise it for this considering that you can’t in System Shock 1 or 2 either, but given that ostensible influence from one other relatively recent immersive sim rears its head elsewhere, I don’t think its otherwise robust and faithfully labyrinthine level design would’ve been lessened by taking a leaf out of Prey or Deus Ex Mankind Divided’s book in this area.

Prey specifically’s the apparent source of said influence, namely its recycling system, this iteration of which I’d wager is a net improvement. Despite adding to the multifaceted purposes of every item in Prey, there were often cases where recycling was a little too much of a no-brainer; I’m not aware of any incentives to hold on to Typhon organs instead of recycling them into exotic material ASAP, for example. In System Shock 2023, recycling any item always results in the same one resource (i.e. money), but many items take up a hefty amount of inventory slots which are quite precious compared to most similar games, the catch being that you’ll gain noticeably more money if you recycle the item itself instead of first vaporising it into junk (which only takes up a single slot). These two key changes help this system enhance the resource management and decision-making inherent to this series while sprinkling in a bit of similarly characteristic difficulty. Altogether ace.

Difficulty’s one area in which System Shock 2023’s refreshing on multiple levels. Where people seem to equate “gameplay” with “combat” increasingly often, even with reference to games or genres where the latter isn’t the focus and might benefit from there being less of, it’s cool to have a new release which (as the original did) not only recognises that combat comprises just a single part of the experience but also lets you tailor the intensity of it, puzzles and primary objectives independently of one another. So much as figuring out where to go next or even just opening a door’s often as much or more of an endurance test as surviving against Citadel Station’s denizens – with no objective markers, means of tracking your current mission outside of hints in audio logs or even the ability to write notes on your map, this is a game which absolutely doesn’t care if you get lost. Between that, the reveal that Citadel’s intentionally, maliciously designed to be confusing and Shodan’s lovingly re-recorded chastisements accompanying you all the while, there’s surely some ludosomething synchronicity or whatever it’s called to be found as a result of this.

You don’t have to reinvent the proverbial gamer wheel for injecting that sort of experience into the modern zeitgeist to be arguably equally as valuable as the original. Aforementioned omissions like mantling or being able to annotate the map make for occasional frustrations – with respect to the latter especially, you can probably tell without context why this part of the game was my least favourite – but in the grand scheme of things they’re slight relative to what an accomplishment I feel this remake is. It’s an almost totally undiluted translation of Looking Glass’ philosophy which makes smart use of technological advancements since the original’s release in ways which enable it to differentiate itself from the first two games while still feeling intimately familiar, to the level that I can’t really think of anyone I’d prefer the merry go round of who's making System Shock 3 to land on than Nightdive.

Check it out if that’s what you want, because what you want is what you get.

Before there was Oblivion with guns, there was Resident Evil 4 without guns. More so than with respect to even its emphasis on crowd control, dynamic difficulty scaling or abundance of contextual carpal tunnel generators, God Hand’s arguably most reminiscent of its spiritual cousin in terms of how forward-thinking it is.

An action game likes convenience. To be able to jump in and fight what you want, when you want with as little fluff as possible’s part of why DMC’s Bloody Palace (or equivalents) became a genre mainstay, why Bayonetta 3’s revamped chapter select system is probably the single most underappreciated feature of 2022 and why the not-infrequent complaint about Nioh having a level select menu is so mystifying. Play enough games from when this family tree was still in its relative infancy and you’ll likely realise how easy it is to take such features for granted, which is why it's so cool that God Hand had something like the Fighting Ring so early on in the genre’s history.

A practice area coupled with all sorts of bespoke combat encounters you can tackle and/or fail any number of times, totally free of consequence, would be a natural fit for any action game, but it’s especially great for God Hand because of how its equipment system works. There’s not just a litany of attacks at your disposal, each with their own distinct properties and niches, but you can also equip any of them in any order and assign them to any button. It’s an unprecedented degree of customisation that might’ve otherwise been overwhelming without an area like this, and which I’m not sure’s been matched before or since. The likes of The Wonderful 101, God of War 3 and DMC5 might let me switch from one weapon to any other in any order, but not even they let me build a moveset out of pimp slaps if I feel like it, purely because I can.

The draw of experimentation that comes with this is hampered a bit by certain rough patches – for example, multi-hit attacks occasionally feel disincentivised in a way that doesn’t seem intentional because of how frequently enemies block and counterattack as the difficulty level increases (especially on Hard where you’re permanently at the highest), while low profile moves which dodge enemies’ high attacks for some reason don’t avoid jumping grabs – but what helps keep the combat malleable despite these is the counterhit system. Interrupt an enemy or boss’ attack with one of your own and they’ll varyingly flinch, be stunned, get juggled or launched, even if none of those properties work on them normally. It creates an engaging sense of back-and-forth and ensures you’re never completely strapped for options no matter how suffocating the situation you find yourself in or which moves you've equipped, especially when taken in tandem with being able to cancel any of Gene’s attacks at any point with one of three different dodges (which, provided your thumbs can remain intact, is also particularly helpful for circumventing the aforementioned issues with multihit attacks).

On that point, God Hand’s handling of defence is something more games could probably stand to learn from. The Great Sensei is a sink or swim moment in this respect and, in my view, the embodiment of what makes it shine, stringing together high attacks, vertical attacks and crowd control in blistering succession that demands you have an iron grip on each of Gene’s dodges and what they’re for like no boss before or after him. He would still be infamously difficult because of all this in a vacuum, but I think part of why he’s such a challenge also stems from how many other games with real-time combat systems treat their (often singular) dodge as a one-size-fits-all invincibility bubble and how tough it can be to break the conditioning that that sort of standardisation instils. Lost Judgment is another 3D beat-‘em-up which plays excellently, but despite being 15 years God Hand’s junior on platforms multitudes more powerful, it can’t help but feel comparatively primitive whenever Yagami “evades” a sweep kick by ducking his head. In contrast, God Hand’s more nuanced combination of side/backward dodges and bobbing & weaving reminded me loosely of Soulcalibur, which on top of its counterhit system makes one wonder how much other action games might benefit from leaning into their common ground with fighting games.

Not all of God Hand’s boss fights or enemies utilise its mechanics equally well, the final boss in particular running the risk of jettisoning the player’s goodwill into the bin, but some scattershot ups and downs are to be expected when your game is so bonkers at every turn. It speaks to how entertaining its stages manage to be, both conceptually and in design, that you end the game with no further mechanics than what you start with and it never once feels stale. There’s an inherent excitement that comes with cramming so many clowns, demons, cowboys, Venetian canals, floating pyramids and other seemingly disparate ideas that you don’t know what to expect next; while some might be surprised at the fact that he considers Resident Evil 4 to be the opposite, it’ll likely shock nobody that Shinji Mikami feels that God Hand is the game with the most amount of himself in it. What results is no doubt chaotic, but more than worth looking past the imperfections of for experiencing what’s essentially his and a bunch of other loveable goofballs’ collective personality transcribed onto a disc, which also happens to be perhaps the only game that feels like an interactive version of an action film’s fight choreography.

If you happen to still have a PS2 lying around, I can attest that the ~80 gamerbux that used copies of this bad boy go for are worth it. You may not be you know who, but you’ll feel like it by the end.