SnowSignal
(part of my VNCup review series)
Really visceral and haunting, far more than I expected. The presentation was sublime - I loved the various ambient tracks that would swoop in and out, and without getting into spoilers, the art is the perfect mix of cute and horrifying.
The story itself is a bizarre fever dream of dysphoria, abuse, and loneliness that really got under my skin (pun intended). It takes an almost wish-fulfillment fantasy and tears it open to reveal all the oozing yuckiness lying within. In some ways it's an objection to certain essentialist ideas about bodies, and in others it's a true-to-life depiction of an abusive relationship driven by projection and miscommunication. It feels personal and icky, especially in the way the narrative is framed as a diary.
Overall, a fantastic work of horror yuri. Highly recommended.
Really visceral and haunting, far more than I expected. The presentation was sublime - I loved the various ambient tracks that would swoop in and out, and without getting into spoilers, the art is the perfect mix of cute and horrifying.
The story itself is a bizarre fever dream of dysphoria, abuse, and loneliness that really got under my skin (pun intended). It takes an almost wish-fulfillment fantasy and tears it open to reveal all the oozing yuckiness lying within. In some ways it's an objection to certain essentialist ideas about bodies, and in others it's a true-to-life depiction of an abusive relationship driven by projection and miscommunication. It feels personal and icky, especially in the way the narrative is framed as a diary.
Overall, a fantastic work of horror yuri. Highly recommended.
2023
Final Fantasy XVI is a game obsessed with itself.
Not that it lacks good reason to. From the very opening cutscene, the imagery entrances - two beasts of fire, locked in conflict. The down of the Phoenix glows with HDR-aspected radiance, a cloud of embers billowing off its wing. The demonic Ifrit leaps into the air and tackles the Phoenix in a spectacular collision, incinerating an entire forest, along with the CPU of your launch-model PS5. Never before has “graphics” been this graphical. Never has terrain looked nigh indistinguishable from photogrammetry demos. At long last, real-time cutscenes have exceeded the graphical fidelity of PS3 FMVs. What used to be the cutting edge of computer graphics, rendered on large server farms, is now being drawn thirty times a second on your walled-garden loss-leader gamer box. Truly, we live in blessed times.
Much as that last paragraph of this review was evidently obsessed with its own prose, Final Fantasy XVI sincerely believes in its own worth. Every line is given as much gusto (or anguish) as the stellar English voice cast can possibly muster. Every scene glisters with the sheen of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Pre-Rendered.” Every combat encounter hands you a choose-your-own-adventure of particle effects you can splash across the screen to decimate exquisitely rendered foes of all shapes and sizes. This game desperately wants to be taken as seriously as a prestige television fantasy show - which was itself a genre taken more seriously circa 2016, at the beginning of XVI’s production. Like a prestige television show, it reaches highs that can only come from a long-form narrative - and at these moments, Final Fantasy XVI shines with the light of a newly born star. But as the fire dies down, and your eyes begin to adjust to the light, it’s hard not to notice the unstable firmament that holds this game together.
As the story unfolds, it starts to become apparent that this self-obsession masks an identity crisis. Familiar melodies from the Final Fantasy series stop feeling like cute homages and start feeling like a lack of confidence. Every time Soken’s music tries to break the mold and stop invoking the work of Uematsu, it’s a huge success - but it’s only in the parts of the story where the creative team feels most confident about, like in the spectacular Eikon fights. The narrative that strings together these Eikon fights feels far less assured, and that gets to my biggest problem with the story - it rarely sticks on one idea long enough to be truly compelling. Even the tropes and trappings of prestige television fall by the wayside about twenty hours in, as if the game got exhausted of its own rhetorical devices. This narrative shakiness leads to many problems - a questionable approach to themes surrounding slavery and freedom from oppression, a lack of focus given to the many women in the story, a main character almost absent of internal conflict past a certain point, and more.
It’s not that I wasn’t invested in the story of the game - the opposite in fact! I cared for many of the characters deeply - I laughed and cried with them, and at moments felt joyful catharsis. But my deep investment in this game - an obsession, as it were - made the blatant missteps feel all the more damning. It was after I finished the game that I realized my obsession with this game neatly mirrored the obsession Final Fantasy XVI has with the rest of its franchise. It’s the most that a Final Fantasy game has ever been about “being a Final Fantasy game.” But rarely does it actually take the bold step of defining what a Final Fantasy game in the current year should be. Instead of becoming something truly distinctive, it actively tries to be less distinctive - less weird, less goofy, less daring - than just about any other Final Fantasy game I’ve played. Outside of the context of this franchise, XVI would be significantly less interesting. And I realized in hindsight that my interest in this game came from it being called “Final Fantasy XVI,” and being directed/produced by creative staff that I generally admire.
The disc for Final Fantasy XVI has now been returned to its pristine steelbook case, with the save data for a completed game now resting dormant on my solid state drive (along with over two hundred screenshots because yes, this game is beautiful). I think one day I’ll come back to this game, mostly because the outer case still wears the proud logo of Final Fantasy, complete with a gorgeous illustration by Yoshitaka Amano, my favorite artist to this day. If the case had a sticker over the logo, with the name “Clive’s Eikonic Adventures” proudly emblazoned, I might leave it on my shelf for a while longer.
Actually, “Clive’s Eikonic Adventures” has a nice ring to it.
Edit: The more distance and hindsight I have from this, the more my impression has degraded. I don't think I'm coming back to this.
Not that it lacks good reason to. From the very opening cutscene, the imagery entrances - two beasts of fire, locked in conflict. The down of the Phoenix glows with HDR-aspected radiance, a cloud of embers billowing off its wing. The demonic Ifrit leaps into the air and tackles the Phoenix in a spectacular collision, incinerating an entire forest, along with the CPU of your launch-model PS5. Never before has “graphics” been this graphical. Never has terrain looked nigh indistinguishable from photogrammetry demos. At long last, real-time cutscenes have exceeded the graphical fidelity of PS3 FMVs. What used to be the cutting edge of computer graphics, rendered on large server farms, is now being drawn thirty times a second on your walled-garden loss-leader gamer box. Truly, we live in blessed times.
Much as that last paragraph of this review was evidently obsessed with its own prose, Final Fantasy XVI sincerely believes in its own worth. Every line is given as much gusto (or anguish) as the stellar English voice cast can possibly muster. Every scene glisters with the sheen of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Pre-Rendered.” Every combat encounter hands you a choose-your-own-adventure of particle effects you can splash across the screen to decimate exquisitely rendered foes of all shapes and sizes. This game desperately wants to be taken as seriously as a prestige television fantasy show - which was itself a genre taken more seriously circa 2016, at the beginning of XVI’s production. Like a prestige television show, it reaches highs that can only come from a long-form narrative - and at these moments, Final Fantasy XVI shines with the light of a newly born star. But as the fire dies down, and your eyes begin to adjust to the light, it’s hard not to notice the unstable firmament that holds this game together.
As the story unfolds, it starts to become apparent that this self-obsession masks an identity crisis. Familiar melodies from the Final Fantasy series stop feeling like cute homages and start feeling like a lack of confidence. Every time Soken’s music tries to break the mold and stop invoking the work of Uematsu, it’s a huge success - but it’s only in the parts of the story where the creative team feels most confident about, like in the spectacular Eikon fights. The narrative that strings together these Eikon fights feels far less assured, and that gets to my biggest problem with the story - it rarely sticks on one idea long enough to be truly compelling. Even the tropes and trappings of prestige television fall by the wayside about twenty hours in, as if the game got exhausted of its own rhetorical devices. This narrative shakiness leads to many problems - a questionable approach to themes surrounding slavery and freedom from oppression, a lack of focus given to the many women in the story, a main character almost absent of internal conflict past a certain point, and more.
It’s not that I wasn’t invested in the story of the game - the opposite in fact! I cared for many of the characters deeply - I laughed and cried with them, and at moments felt joyful catharsis. But my deep investment in this game - an obsession, as it were - made the blatant missteps feel all the more damning. It was after I finished the game that I realized my obsession with this game neatly mirrored the obsession Final Fantasy XVI has with the rest of its franchise. It’s the most that a Final Fantasy game has ever been about “being a Final Fantasy game.” But rarely does it actually take the bold step of defining what a Final Fantasy game in the current year should be. Instead of becoming something truly distinctive, it actively tries to be less distinctive - less weird, less goofy, less daring - than just about any other Final Fantasy game I’ve played. Outside of the context of this franchise, XVI would be significantly less interesting. And I realized in hindsight that my interest in this game came from it being called “Final Fantasy XVI,” and being directed/produced by creative staff that I generally admire.
The disc for Final Fantasy XVI has now been returned to its pristine steelbook case, with the save data for a completed game now resting dormant on my solid state drive (along with over two hundred screenshots because yes, this game is beautiful). I think one day I’ll come back to this game, mostly because the outer case still wears the proud logo of Final Fantasy, complete with a gorgeous illustration by Yoshitaka Amano, my favorite artist to this day. If the case had a sticker over the logo, with the name “Clive’s Eikonic Adventures” proudly emblazoned, I might leave it on my shelf for a while longer.
Actually, “Clive’s Eikonic Adventures” has a nice ring to it.
Edit: The more distance and hindsight I have from this, the more my impression has degraded. I don't think I'm coming back to this.
2020
More fun than Mario Odyssey.
2023
Will re-review once I actually finish the main story, but so far this is an absolutely stellar game. The character storylines are subversive and varied, and the battle system is one of the best I've ever experienced in a JRPG. The huge enemy variety and overwhelming breadth of abilities means that even simple random encounters take planning and coordination, and the leveling mechanics eliminate the need to grind.
2003
Space Station 13's codebases all share a simple premise: there's a massive environment you share with a bunch of other people with really complex systems that anyone can fuck up in at least twelve different ways. However, unlike real life, Space Station 13 is built around cyclical resets, where everything is temporary and therefore so are your mistakes. There are some obstensible 'progression mechanics' like unlocking a new job after X hours of playtime, but that is more of a moderation mechanic meant to keep inexperienced players out of roles that can be very unfun for others to interact with if you don't know how to use them properly. Space Station 13 is the greatest video game of all time - not any specific codebase, the concept of Space Station 13, the manifestation of it through the community, drama, discourse, and of course, the actual gameplay.
Video games have always been cursed with the problem of ephemerality. Retro game preservation requires active effort and some games take thousands of hours to be restored to a playable state due to releasing on hardware that no longer exists or is impractical for the vast majority of players to obtain. Multiplayer games have double this problem, since the experience of playing the game is also directly tied to the other people playing it, and the community that surrounds said game - every multiplayer game has a hidden death clock ticking down to its irrelevance, at which point the player count to make the game 'worth playing' will have dropped below critical mass.
Space Station 13 is an extreme example of ephermality, in which every round can have millions of possible outcomes at any given moment due to emergent mechanics, and if you miss that round you can never recreate them. Sure, you can listen to other people talking about the stories from particularly notable rounds - but you can never viraciously experience it, being in the space where you realize that your decisions will actively feed into the outcomes of what happens next. I can not name a single other game that immerses you in such an active, unpredictable world that still feels unique during every new cycle. The most magical moments are when you become an antagonist, and the tension of every action you take skyrockets. Nothing is more viscerally fun then getting to plan out and then enact diabolical plans to mess with the crew, and getting a 'greentext' (in this context - a message saying that your antagonist objectives were successful) is a massive rush of relief and accomplishment. The stories that you can create with this game are simply unmatched.
You can find these stories everywhere - the subreddit even has a weekly thread to post them - but I might as well share one that happened to me early in my experience with this game:
In my first round as a changeling (a very transparent take on John Carpenter's The Thing), I was promoted to being the head of the station, which gave me far more resources to work with, such as a firearm readily available. My goals were to assasinate two specific people and absorb another changeling. I started by giving the other changelings all-access IDs - we had a hivemind chat, so coordinating was easy. I then turned into a monkey and crawled through the vents, in search of my first target. No luck, but I did see the clown. I told him that he could come to the HOP line to get all-access. Once he got there, I him by injecting him with a substance that made him grow an armblade - a usually tell-tale sign of being a 'ling. I then shot him to death before he could say anything, with the justification of 'he was about to kill me'. I also get away with cremating his body, since lings can self-revive if their body is intact.
At that point, security was starting to get suspicious of my actions. Two other lings had already been busted, and my justification for murder was dubious at best. I'm unexpectedly tased by the detective and taken into the interrogation room where I try to calmly defend myself for my actions. At some point, I get fed up with the conversation and purchase a power that supposedly dissolves restraints - in this case my handcuffs. I activated it and then immediately activated my own armblade. Now, the armblade is one of the deadliest melee weapons in the game - three hits can put someone in critical condition, five can outright kill them. However, I was still buckled to the chair! The detective responded by opening fire with his revolver, but the chamber was empty. He hastily starts reloaded, while I unbuckle myself from the chair. With the element of surprise lost, I can't win against a high-powered revolver. But I can still escape through the du-
It was just then that my game decided to crash. By the time I reconnected, I got to see my dead body in the incinerator, joining the clown in what might be called the circle of life. I then spent the rest of the round as a research scientist on a far-removed station, drinking (in-game) alcohol in solitude and pondering my own mistakes. Fun times!
Of course, since we can't have nice things, it's time for me to talk about the 'bad'. The truth is, I don't know if someone reading this review would get a similar experience to what I did. This comes back to the inherent ephermality of the experience - I can make absolutely no guarentees as to how the game will play out for you. Though my brain tends to look at this game through a rose-tinted lenses, I can still remember the many boring rounds where nothing of particular interest happened. Many times, there will be something interesting happening, but you just won't be in the right place or the right time. At that point, it's often more fun to just observe the round as a ghost and monitor what shenanigans people get up to. Even then, a lot of players, especially in low-RP servers, play the game exclusively as amoral powergamers who focus exclusively on 'winning' the game over creating interesting scenarios with other players.
But if you can find that one, magical round - you will never stop playing this game unless you force yourself to quit. That's what I had to do several years ago because, as much as I hate to admit it, this game consumed my life. The ephemeral nature of this game can also be an addictive quality - feeding into the worry of 'missing out' and chasing the 'hit' of another interesting round. If you are incredibly autistic about massive lists of information or just endless wiki rabbit-holes in general, this game was specifically engineered to continually nerd-snipe you for hundreds, even thousands of hours. If you have anything remotely productive that needs finishing in the near future, do not play any version of this game.
I haven't even touched on the community, a messy subject to say the least. The drama can be fascinating at times - like when a popular server admin created 14 alternative reddit accounts to promote himself and disappeared from the face of the earth when called out. It's all the worst human tendencies made manifest, especially in the ranks of administrators and server owners. The playerbase can sometimes be even worse, thanks to the community being occasionally overwhelmed by capital-G Gamers reviewing le hidden gem, thus sparking a very predictable influx of chuds who think the epitome of human thought lies in /pol/ screenshots and usually only play the game to fulfill some twisted power fantasy. The good news is that these idiots get filtered pretty quickly through the esoteric gameplay systems and violating multiple server rules against bigotry, powergaming, and just generally being an asshole. But since the origins of this game do come from edgy message boards, some of that is going to be inherent, even baked in. For a community that actively pushes away those awful people, I highly recommend Goonstation or Baystation12 - not that they can be free from drama themselves.
At the same time, I can't deny that Space Station 13 shaped me as a person, when I look back on my experiences with it. It played a role in helping me to figure out my gender, unironically taught me some useful collaborative skills and internet etiquette, brought me back into developing games, and gave me countless laughs along the way. Most importantly, some of my greatest friendships have been made through this game. I will always be grateful for that.
One more word of advice for those who choose to walk down this path: don't play as assistant for your first game. Everyone will think you're actually a veteran player trying to avoid the consequences of their own actions. Play as a cargo technican instead. You get to lug packages around, deliver mail, and bond with your department coworkers. Start a union, do some day trading, or just go talk to people in the bar for 30 minutes. Space is the limit!
Video games have always been cursed with the problem of ephemerality. Retro game preservation requires active effort and some games take thousands of hours to be restored to a playable state due to releasing on hardware that no longer exists or is impractical for the vast majority of players to obtain. Multiplayer games have double this problem, since the experience of playing the game is also directly tied to the other people playing it, and the community that surrounds said game - every multiplayer game has a hidden death clock ticking down to its irrelevance, at which point the player count to make the game 'worth playing' will have dropped below critical mass.
Space Station 13 is an extreme example of ephermality, in which every round can have millions of possible outcomes at any given moment due to emergent mechanics, and if you miss that round you can never recreate them. Sure, you can listen to other people talking about the stories from particularly notable rounds - but you can never viraciously experience it, being in the space where you realize that your decisions will actively feed into the outcomes of what happens next. I can not name a single other game that immerses you in such an active, unpredictable world that still feels unique during every new cycle. The most magical moments are when you become an antagonist, and the tension of every action you take skyrockets. Nothing is more viscerally fun then getting to plan out and then enact diabolical plans to mess with the crew, and getting a 'greentext' (in this context - a message saying that your antagonist objectives were successful) is a massive rush of relief and accomplishment. The stories that you can create with this game are simply unmatched.
You can find these stories everywhere - the subreddit even has a weekly thread to post them - but I might as well share one that happened to me early in my experience with this game:
In my first round as a changeling (a very transparent take on John Carpenter's The Thing), I was promoted to being the head of the station, which gave me far more resources to work with, such as a firearm readily available. My goals were to assasinate two specific people and absorb another changeling. I started by giving the other changelings all-access IDs - we had a hivemind chat, so coordinating was easy. I then turned into a monkey and crawled through the vents, in search of my first target. No luck, but I did see the clown. I told him that he could come to the HOP line to get all-access. Once he got there, I him by injecting him with a substance that made him grow an armblade - a usually tell-tale sign of being a 'ling. I then shot him to death before he could say anything, with the justification of 'he was about to kill me'. I also get away with cremating his body, since lings can self-revive if their body is intact.
At that point, security was starting to get suspicious of my actions. Two other lings had already been busted, and my justification for murder was dubious at best. I'm unexpectedly tased by the detective and taken into the interrogation room where I try to calmly defend myself for my actions. At some point, I get fed up with the conversation and purchase a power that supposedly dissolves restraints - in this case my handcuffs. I activated it and then immediately activated my own armblade. Now, the armblade is one of the deadliest melee weapons in the game - three hits can put someone in critical condition, five can outright kill them. However, I was still buckled to the chair! The detective responded by opening fire with his revolver, but the chamber was empty. He hastily starts reloaded, while I unbuckle myself from the chair. With the element of surprise lost, I can't win against a high-powered revolver. But I can still escape through the du-
It was just then that my game decided to crash. By the time I reconnected, I got to see my dead body in the incinerator, joining the clown in what might be called the circle of life. I then spent the rest of the round as a research scientist on a far-removed station, drinking (in-game) alcohol in solitude and pondering my own mistakes. Fun times!
Of course, since we can't have nice things, it's time for me to talk about the 'bad'. The truth is, I don't know if someone reading this review would get a similar experience to what I did. This comes back to the inherent ephermality of the experience - I can make absolutely no guarentees as to how the game will play out for you. Though my brain tends to look at this game through a rose-tinted lenses, I can still remember the many boring rounds where nothing of particular interest happened. Many times, there will be something interesting happening, but you just won't be in the right place or the right time. At that point, it's often more fun to just observe the round as a ghost and monitor what shenanigans people get up to. Even then, a lot of players, especially in low-RP servers, play the game exclusively as amoral powergamers who focus exclusively on 'winning' the game over creating interesting scenarios with other players.
But if you can find that one, magical round - you will never stop playing this game unless you force yourself to quit. That's what I had to do several years ago because, as much as I hate to admit it, this game consumed my life. The ephemeral nature of this game can also be an addictive quality - feeding into the worry of 'missing out' and chasing the 'hit' of another interesting round. If you are incredibly autistic about massive lists of information or just endless wiki rabbit-holes in general, this game was specifically engineered to continually nerd-snipe you for hundreds, even thousands of hours. If you have anything remotely productive that needs finishing in the near future, do not play any version of this game.
I haven't even touched on the community, a messy subject to say the least. The drama can be fascinating at times - like when a popular server admin created 14 alternative reddit accounts to promote himself and disappeared from the face of the earth when called out. It's all the worst human tendencies made manifest, especially in the ranks of administrators and server owners. The playerbase can sometimes be even worse, thanks to the community being occasionally overwhelmed by capital-G Gamers reviewing le hidden gem, thus sparking a very predictable influx of chuds who think the epitome of human thought lies in /pol/ screenshots and usually only play the game to fulfill some twisted power fantasy. The good news is that these idiots get filtered pretty quickly through the esoteric gameplay systems and violating multiple server rules against bigotry, powergaming, and just generally being an asshole. But since the origins of this game do come from edgy message boards, some of that is going to be inherent, even baked in. For a community that actively pushes away those awful people, I highly recommend Goonstation or Baystation12 - not that they can be free from drama themselves.
At the same time, I can't deny that Space Station 13 shaped me as a person, when I look back on my experiences with it. It played a role in helping me to figure out my gender, unironically taught me some useful collaborative skills and internet etiquette, brought me back into developing games, and gave me countless laughs along the way. Most importantly, some of my greatest friendships have been made through this game. I will always be grateful for that.
One more word of advice for those who choose to walk down this path: don't play as assistant for your first game. Everyone will think you're actually a veteran player trying to avoid the consequences of their own actions. Play as a cargo technican instead. You get to lug packages around, deliver mail, and bond with your department coworkers. Start a union, do some day trading, or just go talk to people in the bar for 30 minutes. Space is the limit!
2022
Well it's definitely better than Vampire Survivors! Unfortunately this game makes some baffling design decisions - some characters have functionally useless abilities, while other characters have abilities that can break the entire game in minutes. Also the game's color palette is appealing but for some ungodly reason the colors for enemy bullets and health pickups is identical, and the summons use the same colors as the enemies so at a certain point it becomes difficult to tell where your summons end and the waves of enemies begin. Overall a decently fun game that you can probably 'beat' in the first 2-3 hours.