StewpendousMan
(Played on Switch with varying degrees of functionality in my left hand, due to breaking a finger in the middle of my playthrough. Cannot recommend the controller remapping functionality enough - I played a chunk of this game with one vertically-held JoyCon.)
My LoZ experience is pretty limited. Prior to this, I'd only completed the original NES and Breath of the Wild all the way through, and got 95% through a Wind Waker HD run. But boy howdy, it's not hard to see that Nintendo is already starting to figure out how exactly they will iterate on a formula, a recipe they would follow time and time again: what does our new hardware let us do? What about this entry in a tentpole series will be fundamentally different from what came before?
Shiny new graphics capabilities allowed for stronger backgrounds (including actual vistas from the tops of high places) and more sprites, leading to a separate-but-linked "Dark World" overworld that's a key plot point. Dungeons that are visually distinct from each other at a glance. Bosses and enemies that go hard and fast. A wildly expanded lineup of tools and goodies for Link, some of which are - gasp - optional. An overworld that feels both larger and smaller than the original NES outing (and somehow, both ways are improvements.)
The designers have learned a thing or two as well. Bomb supplies are increased and bombable walls in dungeons are easily visible at a glance. Rupees are easier to come by - if not flowing like water, than at least flowing like... lukewarm nacho cheese sauce? Moving diagonally makes battles sharper, and your sword, your blessed sword, now makes a satisfying arc in front of you to help you hack through baddies. Dungeons, now boasting multiple floors, are an order of magnitude better than LoZ - attention is paid to design such that exploration more frequently leads to progress. I can't remember how many times I got a key or other needed object, decided to keep exploring forwards instead of doubling back to try a separate path, and found myself precisely where I needed to be.
Most of what's new is good, but not all. One too many bosses, particularly in the game's second half, flirt with bullet hell status, though there's definitely a fumbling towards the get-gadget-beat-boss-with-gadget cadence of later games. The empty bottle mechanic, which lets you customize a loadout of various healing items and stinging insects, is a great idea that would only fully blossom in later games where refilling potions wasn't such a money-grinding pain in the ass. The magic meter doesn't feel well-tuned, and a few critical bits of progress are left in obscure places that are only slightly preferable to the bombing-random-walls gambit that LoZ sometimes fell victim to.
It's almost enough to make me want to play an N64 LoZ.
My LoZ experience is pretty limited. Prior to this, I'd only completed the original NES and Breath of the Wild all the way through, and got 95% through a Wind Waker HD run. But boy howdy, it's not hard to see that Nintendo is already starting to figure out how exactly they will iterate on a formula, a recipe they would follow time and time again: what does our new hardware let us do? What about this entry in a tentpole series will be fundamentally different from what came before?
Shiny new graphics capabilities allowed for stronger backgrounds (including actual vistas from the tops of high places) and more sprites, leading to a separate-but-linked "Dark World" overworld that's a key plot point. Dungeons that are visually distinct from each other at a glance. Bosses and enemies that go hard and fast. A wildly expanded lineup of tools and goodies for Link, some of which are - gasp - optional. An overworld that feels both larger and smaller than the original NES outing (and somehow, both ways are improvements.)
The designers have learned a thing or two as well. Bomb supplies are increased and bombable walls in dungeons are easily visible at a glance. Rupees are easier to come by - if not flowing like water, than at least flowing like... lukewarm nacho cheese sauce? Moving diagonally makes battles sharper, and your sword, your blessed sword, now makes a satisfying arc in front of you to help you hack through baddies. Dungeons, now boasting multiple floors, are an order of magnitude better than LoZ - attention is paid to design such that exploration more frequently leads to progress. I can't remember how many times I got a key or other needed object, decided to keep exploring forwards instead of doubling back to try a separate path, and found myself precisely where I needed to be.
Most of what's new is good, but not all. One too many bosses, particularly in the game's second half, flirt with bullet hell status, though there's definitely a fumbling towards the get-gadget-beat-boss-with-gadget cadence of later games. The empty bottle mechanic, which lets you customize a loadout of various healing items and stinging insects, is a great idea that would only fully blossom in later games where refilling potions wasn't such a money-grinding pain in the ass. The magic meter doesn't feel well-tuned, and a few critical bits of progress are left in obscure places that are only slightly preferable to the bombing-random-walls gambit that LoZ sometimes fell victim to.
It's almost enough to make me want to play an N64 LoZ.
2020
(Played on a laptop with an RTX 2060.)
In the spirit of a game that contains a whole bunch of systems and stuff that varies wildly in quality, here are my unorganized, wildly-varying-in-quality thoughts on Cyberpunk 2077.
• I started playing Cyberpunk 2077 on Patch 1.4, took a break, and finished it a few months after 1.5 went live. Sure, this balanced out the crit-goblin build, but only further enabled the quickhacking-goblin build, as torching some poor bastard using your mind no longer automatically reveals your position to enemies. The most salient change I noticed was that the radio in vehicles had the audio drastically rebalanced so that I could actually hear musical thumps and wubs while driving my sick-ass Akiracycle and doing sick-ass handbrake turns, which I think is the experience the entire driving physics engine was initially balanced around.
• I encountered a moderate amount of glitches of varying sizes. I still can’t tell if the cargo van I saw implanted nose-down in one of Night City’s riverside plazas was a bug or some environmental storytelling thing.
• The main theme of the game seems to be choice. Ever notice how V can choose whether or not to drink/do drugs when the opportunity presents itself, but Johnny can’t? That is a very good and very tiny thing. The quality of so many of Cyberpunk 2077’s individual elements seems to be independent of their size and significance in the game as a whole, which is absolutely wild.
• The RPG systems are huge in scope and extremely uneven in execution. It’s pretty good that some skill trees are entirely self-contained builds (Be a ninja who gets completely unique combat options! Use Cold Blood and make yourself temporarily stronger by chaining kills!), but so many other options are flaccid and have negligible impact on the experience, of the “5% boost to assault rifle accuracy” flavor. I get that some choices matter more than others, but… man.
• This probably connects to why the gunplay feels like oatmeal. Possible fix for the sequel: each variety of gun has a distinct and unique mechanic. Assault rifles can fire around corners somehow, shotguns can blast open doors, sniper rifles stay sniper rifles? I don’t know, CDPR, y’all got Keanu Reeves to star in a video game, figure something out.
• You know what this game feels like? Mass Effect.
• From beginning to end, I was impressed by the unrelenting dedication to first-person stuff. You notice very quickly that not only does every big story event happen in first person, but tiny things do too – and with mostly lovingly-crafted animations. Huffing a health inhaler during combat, munching on takoyaki during a conversation, coughing up blood in the shower, taking a pill to get Keanu Reeves to quiet down for a bit. And you always, always, are prompted to press a button to take a seat before a sit-down sort of conversation. There are things that are abstracted, but there is a conscious effort to give so many actions at least a little bit of weight via animation. In a game where so many concrete things feel floaty and loose, it is a more-than-token effort towards something grounded.
• My personal favorite moment in the game happened when I was on a boat ride with a sort-of friend whom I would later sort-of have sex with. This boat ride happens late in the game, long after it is established that Keanu Reeves’ digital ghost of a character will regularly pop out of the ether in cinematic ways to comment on the action in a way that only your character can see. My sort-of friend was playing his guitar and I was idly looking off into the sunset off the port side when I realized that Keanu’s character had materialized right in the center of my vision, reclining on the rail of the boat. I stared into the face of God, blinked, and realized: this game had subconsciously trained me to know exactly when and where the freak who lived in my head would show up.
• The writing and characters are all over the place. There’s fascinating structure here, especially among the four romantic leads – like clockwork, you get the chance to see their strengths and weaknesses as you navigate their questlines. And the endings do form a moving portrait of the choices we make in the face of impossible situations. And it also feels like a lot is missing: The first and second acts are puzzle boxes of interacting b-plots and sidequests, while the third unceremoniously dumps you at the doorstep of the finale as soon as it starts. As the star of the show, Keanu Reeves’ Johnny Silverhand is menacing, tragic, and compelling, but not all of the other characters (even ones who get as much screentime) are as consistently well-written.
• By my count, the game contains nearly 40 critical-path story quests, over 90 non-critical side quests, and over 80 tertiary “gigs” that mostly offer cash and loot for completion. Of these, I estimate that two-thirds of the story quests, over half of the side quests, and roughly two-thirds of the gigs contain combat. Of these combat-containing gigs, I estimate that 80% of them take place in fully-realized, Deus Ex-style maps. That’s somewhere around one hundred fully-designed combat encounters of varying scales, that must account for a variety of approaches that even System Shock 2, in its wildest dreams, could not even begin to imagine. And none of them noticeably suck.
• The music kinda bangs. And even on my 2060-ass laptop at suboptimal settings for that sweet 60 FPS, the graphics are absolutely nutso.
• The combat isn’t Halo. The RPG elements aren’t Dragon Quest. The driving ain’t Gran Turismo, and even the writing isn’t Metal Gear Solid. So: how do you feel about abundance in video games? What do you want the games you buy to be? This may be a neon-soaked Vegas buffet of a game that doesn't do much exceptionally well, but it was cheap at $20, and there are nuggets of goodness mixed in with the empty calories. As humanity barrels along an ending path that’s gonna make Night City look like the Big Rock Candy Mountains, it’s hard for me to fault the impulse behind this game or anyone who plays it for an ass-blasting AAA Video Game experience.
• I think the sequel to this is gonna kick ass if CD Projekt Red actually hires enough people.
In the spirit of a game that contains a whole bunch of systems and stuff that varies wildly in quality, here are my unorganized, wildly-varying-in-quality thoughts on Cyberpunk 2077.
• I started playing Cyberpunk 2077 on Patch 1.4, took a break, and finished it a few months after 1.5 went live. Sure, this balanced out the crit-goblin build, but only further enabled the quickhacking-goblin build, as torching some poor bastard using your mind no longer automatically reveals your position to enemies. The most salient change I noticed was that the radio in vehicles had the audio drastically rebalanced so that I could actually hear musical thumps and wubs while driving my sick-ass Akiracycle and doing sick-ass handbrake turns, which I think is the experience the entire driving physics engine was initially balanced around.
• I encountered a moderate amount of glitches of varying sizes. I still can’t tell if the cargo van I saw implanted nose-down in one of Night City’s riverside plazas was a bug or some environmental storytelling thing.
• The main theme of the game seems to be choice. Ever notice how V can choose whether or not to drink/do drugs when the opportunity presents itself, but Johnny can’t? That is a very good and very tiny thing. The quality of so many of Cyberpunk 2077’s individual elements seems to be independent of their size and significance in the game as a whole, which is absolutely wild.
• The RPG systems are huge in scope and extremely uneven in execution. It’s pretty good that some skill trees are entirely self-contained builds (Be a ninja who gets completely unique combat options! Use Cold Blood and make yourself temporarily stronger by chaining kills!), but so many other options are flaccid and have negligible impact on the experience, of the “5% boost to assault rifle accuracy” flavor. I get that some choices matter more than others, but… man.
• This probably connects to why the gunplay feels like oatmeal. Possible fix for the sequel: each variety of gun has a distinct and unique mechanic. Assault rifles can fire around corners somehow, shotguns can blast open doors, sniper rifles stay sniper rifles? I don’t know, CDPR, y’all got Keanu Reeves to star in a video game, figure something out.
• You know what this game feels like? Mass Effect.
• From beginning to end, I was impressed by the unrelenting dedication to first-person stuff. You notice very quickly that not only does every big story event happen in first person, but tiny things do too – and with mostly lovingly-crafted animations. Huffing a health inhaler during combat, munching on takoyaki during a conversation, coughing up blood in the shower, taking a pill to get Keanu Reeves to quiet down for a bit. And you always, always, are prompted to press a button to take a seat before a sit-down sort of conversation. There are things that are abstracted, but there is a conscious effort to give so many actions at least a little bit of weight via animation. In a game where so many concrete things feel floaty and loose, it is a more-than-token effort towards something grounded.
• My personal favorite moment in the game happened when I was on a boat ride with a sort-of friend whom I would later sort-of have sex with. This boat ride happens late in the game, long after it is established that Keanu Reeves’ digital ghost of a character will regularly pop out of the ether in cinematic ways to comment on the action in a way that only your character can see. My sort-of friend was playing his guitar and I was idly looking off into the sunset off the port side when I realized that Keanu’s character had materialized right in the center of my vision, reclining on the rail of the boat. I stared into the face of God, blinked, and realized: this game had subconsciously trained me to know exactly when and where the freak who lived in my head would show up.
• The writing and characters are all over the place. There’s fascinating structure here, especially among the four romantic leads – like clockwork, you get the chance to see their strengths and weaknesses as you navigate their questlines. And the endings do form a moving portrait of the choices we make in the face of impossible situations. And it also feels like a lot is missing: The first and second acts are puzzle boxes of interacting b-plots and sidequests, while the third unceremoniously dumps you at the doorstep of the finale as soon as it starts. As the star of the show, Keanu Reeves’ Johnny Silverhand is menacing, tragic, and compelling, but not all of the other characters (even ones who get as much screentime) are as consistently well-written.
• By my count, the game contains nearly 40 critical-path story quests, over 90 non-critical side quests, and over 80 tertiary “gigs” that mostly offer cash and loot for completion. Of these, I estimate that two-thirds of the story quests, over half of the side quests, and roughly two-thirds of the gigs contain combat. Of these combat-containing gigs, I estimate that 80% of them take place in fully-realized, Deus Ex-style maps. That’s somewhere around one hundred fully-designed combat encounters of varying scales, that must account for a variety of approaches that even System Shock 2, in its wildest dreams, could not even begin to imagine. And none of them noticeably suck.
• The music kinda bangs. And even on my 2060-ass laptop at suboptimal settings for that sweet 60 FPS, the graphics are absolutely nutso.
• The combat isn’t Halo. The RPG elements aren’t Dragon Quest. The driving ain’t Gran Turismo, and even the writing isn’t Metal Gear Solid. So: how do you feel about abundance in video games? What do you want the games you buy to be? This may be a neon-soaked Vegas buffet of a game that doesn't do much exceptionally well, but it was cheap at $20, and there are nuggets of goodness mixed in with the empty calories. As humanity barrels along an ending path that’s gonna make Night City look like the Big Rock Candy Mountains, it’s hard for me to fault the impulse behind this game or anyone who plays it for an ass-blasting AAA Video Game experience.
• I think the sequel to this is gonna kick ass if CD Projekt Red actually hires enough people.
1995
[Played on the RetroArch emulator.]
Fuck me running, what a joy this is to play.
In multidisciplinary arts such as theatre, film, and video games, directors face two distinct challenges: making each individual element good, and making sure they fit together. At the first task, helmsman Hironobu Sakaguchi succeeds through overwhelming firepower. The creator of Dragon Quest? Call him up. The artist behind Dragon Ball Z? Make it so. The writer who invented the video game cutscene? He ain’t busy. Our composer’s a bit green, but he cornered our VP and demanded to be put on a real game – let’s get the Final Fantasy composer to back him up.
They were called the “Dream Team,” and they live up to the billing. The combat system is as good as any ATB-based RPG has ever had, with the Tech system ensuring that every possible group of three feels as distinct as, I don’t know, 90 percent of Final Fantasy parties? The pixel art and art direction is lovely from top to bottom, from the compact overworld map that gets different washes for each time period (Link to the Past, baby!) to the obscene amount of sprites and animations that so many characters are lavished with – Crono’s hyena cackle alone has more character than an awful lot of 3D animation you’d see on the Playstation. And the music: the breathless chord change you hear in this game’s first 30 seconds of audio (a figure you hear again and again) primes your subconscious for a story that’s both always shifting beneath your feet and supremely confident in its own sense of direction.
Here is the point: Nothing here, not a goddamned thing, has to “make up for” anything else.
So we’ve brought an arsenal of nukes to a gun fight. Do they play well together? Interestingly enough, the glue here is the story – the battles, the dungeons (Jesus, it doesn’t feel right to call them “dungeons,”) the menus, everything here moves quickly because the story does. So many reviews of this game contain the phrase “highly polished,” which feels only partially correct; it’s even more accurate to say that it is tightly woven. Chrono Trigger is a 25-hour theme park ride, and to play it is to be reminded that RPGs should feel like adventures, goddammit. In one memorable sequence, you stumble out of a time portal in 12,000 BC and visit a highly-advanced magical civilization. From a blasted tundra, you enter via a magical portal housed in an Art Deco-y sub-building, which immediately sets you on edge: you haven’t yet seen architecture so consciously beautiful in the story. As the portal deposits you in an alien place, a track unlike anything you’ve yet heard starts playing – unfamiliar instruments playing a bastardized version of the main theme utterly lacking in dynamism, as motionless as death. You step onto a new overworld map: a kingdom of dreams in the sky, housed on floating islands. It’s Disney, but it sure doesn’t feel like the happiest place on Earth. And in less than 60 minutes, a lot of hanging plot details have been tied up, the stakes have been raised for the umpteenth time, and you get swooshed to another location.
You have to wonder why, given the source material, this game hasn’t been higher up on Square-Enix’s list for the remake treatment. (Live A Live? That’s what you’re going with?) I hope that the answer is fear. At the same time, I know that somewhere at his desk behind the mountains of cocaine, Tetsuya Nomura has occasionally entertained thoughts of remaking this game. So here’s my compromise: Chrono Trigger’s remake should:
• Clean up a few translation inaccuracies (though Woolsey did a great job,)
• Add a single sequence where our intrepid heroes visit Square Enix HQ in 202X and express bafflement at the very concept of video games,
• Not touch anything else.
Because Chrono Trigger lost the war to Final Fantasy 7, we will probably never see another RPG like this, and that’s a shame. (Though when it’s finished, Deltarune might come close.) In a few weeks, I will most likely eagerly devour Xenoblade Chronicles 3 upon its release. I will probably like it a lot, and it may well even resonate with me on an emotional level moreso than Chrono Trigger.
And compared to Chrono Trigger, I bet it will feel like it was designed by someone who hates fun.
Fuck me running, what a joy this is to play.
In multidisciplinary arts such as theatre, film, and video games, directors face two distinct challenges: making each individual element good, and making sure they fit together. At the first task, helmsman Hironobu Sakaguchi succeeds through overwhelming firepower. The creator of Dragon Quest? Call him up. The artist behind Dragon Ball Z? Make it so. The writer who invented the video game cutscene? He ain’t busy. Our composer’s a bit green, but he cornered our VP and demanded to be put on a real game – let’s get the Final Fantasy composer to back him up.
They were called the “Dream Team,” and they live up to the billing. The combat system is as good as any ATB-based RPG has ever had, with the Tech system ensuring that every possible group of three feels as distinct as, I don’t know, 90 percent of Final Fantasy parties? The pixel art and art direction is lovely from top to bottom, from the compact overworld map that gets different washes for each time period (Link to the Past, baby!) to the obscene amount of sprites and animations that so many characters are lavished with – Crono’s hyena cackle alone has more character than an awful lot of 3D animation you’d see on the Playstation. And the music: the breathless chord change you hear in this game’s first 30 seconds of audio (a figure you hear again and again) primes your subconscious for a story that’s both always shifting beneath your feet and supremely confident in its own sense of direction.
Here is the point: Nothing here, not a goddamned thing, has to “make up for” anything else.
So we’ve brought an arsenal of nukes to a gun fight. Do they play well together? Interestingly enough, the glue here is the story – the battles, the dungeons (Jesus, it doesn’t feel right to call them “dungeons,”) the menus, everything here moves quickly because the story does. So many reviews of this game contain the phrase “highly polished,” which feels only partially correct; it’s even more accurate to say that it is tightly woven. Chrono Trigger is a 25-hour theme park ride, and to play it is to be reminded that RPGs should feel like adventures, goddammit. In one memorable sequence, you stumble out of a time portal in 12,000 BC and visit a highly-advanced magical civilization. From a blasted tundra, you enter via a magical portal housed in an Art Deco-y sub-building, which immediately sets you on edge: you haven’t yet seen architecture so consciously beautiful in the story. As the portal deposits you in an alien place, a track unlike anything you’ve yet heard starts playing – unfamiliar instruments playing a bastardized version of the main theme utterly lacking in dynamism, as motionless as death. You step onto a new overworld map: a kingdom of dreams in the sky, housed on floating islands. It’s Disney, but it sure doesn’t feel like the happiest place on Earth. And in less than 60 minutes, a lot of hanging plot details have been tied up, the stakes have been raised for the umpteenth time, and you get swooshed to another location.
You have to wonder why, given the source material, this game hasn’t been higher up on Square-Enix’s list for the remake treatment. (Live A Live? That’s what you’re going with?) I hope that the answer is fear. At the same time, I know that somewhere at his desk behind the mountains of cocaine, Tetsuya Nomura has occasionally entertained thoughts of remaking this game. So here’s my compromise: Chrono Trigger’s remake should:
• Clean up a few translation inaccuracies (though Woolsey did a great job,)
• Add a single sequence where our intrepid heroes visit Square Enix HQ in 202X and express bafflement at the very concept of video games,
• Not touch anything else.
Because Chrono Trigger lost the war to Final Fantasy 7, we will probably never see another RPG like this, and that’s a shame. (Though when it’s finished, Deltarune might come close.) In a few weeks, I will most likely eagerly devour Xenoblade Chronicles 3 upon its release. I will probably like it a lot, and it may well even resonate with me on an emotional level moreso than Chrono Trigger.
And compared to Chrono Trigger, I bet it will feel like it was designed by someone who hates fun.
2017
I think Sonic’s struggles have always been tied to the core gameplay: it is very, very difficult to meaningfully control a fast-moving object and design levels around that movement. (To say nothing of the franchise's spirit: the most notorious game in the franchise ends by erasing its entire plot from existence.)
Thankfully, Sonic Mania is good enough to make you forget that you should feel sorry for the poor blue bastard.
After 26 years, Sega has found someone in Christian Whitehead (from outside the company, of course) with the good sense to know that Sonic games should lead with their historical strength: aesthetics. Graphically, this is the best Sonic has ever looked, 3D be damned: Sonic CD’s pastel-palette maximalism is tempered by Sonic 2 and 3’s clean lines, sprites and animations have been souped up with something approaching love, and menus and title cards are ‘90s enough to film an episode of Double Dare on. Tee Lopes’ soundtrack demands headphones – both the new themes and the rearrangements of old material feature throbbing new jack swing bass lines, transcendentally trashy house keyboards, and R&B-flavored countermelodies. Sonic has rarely been as red-hot as he is gunning through Stardust Speedway’s second act, cityscapes and fireworks rushing past as punchy bass and crystalline synths pound your eardrums.
Speaking of, Sonic Mania’s gameplay is not bad at all, which I think is the highest possible compliment you could give to the gameplay of a Sonic game. The theme here is cramming in a ton of clever bits and gimmicks to mask serviceable platforming, and it mostly works. Sonic’s usual floaty controls and slippery physics are given just enough body by a truckload of single-level gimmicks, including a shrink ray that turns your character into an adorable chibi version of themselves and an entire level dealing with the fallout of an environmental catastrophe you caused in a previous segment. Boss battles, over 20 (!) of them, are mostly clever references and enjoyable setpieces, which is as good as any Sonic boss has ever aspired to be. (Sonic does carry on his proud tradition of owning the cops, thank goodness.) Only in the final few levels do you get anything remotely approaching hateful design, and while those bits stick out, they are over quickly enough.
The Sonic series has finally found an identity. Now Sega just has to stick with the formula for future games, not screw things up catastrophically or harm their relationship with this talented team, and ahahahahahahahahaha
Thankfully, Sonic Mania is good enough to make you forget that you should feel sorry for the poor blue bastard.
After 26 years, Sega has found someone in Christian Whitehead (from outside the company, of course) with the good sense to know that Sonic games should lead with their historical strength: aesthetics. Graphically, this is the best Sonic has ever looked, 3D be damned: Sonic CD’s pastel-palette maximalism is tempered by Sonic 2 and 3’s clean lines, sprites and animations have been souped up with something approaching love, and menus and title cards are ‘90s enough to film an episode of Double Dare on. Tee Lopes’ soundtrack demands headphones – both the new themes and the rearrangements of old material feature throbbing new jack swing bass lines, transcendentally trashy house keyboards, and R&B-flavored countermelodies. Sonic has rarely been as red-hot as he is gunning through Stardust Speedway’s second act, cityscapes and fireworks rushing past as punchy bass and crystalline synths pound your eardrums.
Speaking of, Sonic Mania’s gameplay is not bad at all, which I think is the highest possible compliment you could give to the gameplay of a Sonic game. The theme here is cramming in a ton of clever bits and gimmicks to mask serviceable platforming, and it mostly works. Sonic’s usual floaty controls and slippery physics are given just enough body by a truckload of single-level gimmicks, including a shrink ray that turns your character into an adorable chibi version of themselves and an entire level dealing with the fallout of an environmental catastrophe you caused in a previous segment. Boss battles, over 20 (!) of them, are mostly clever references and enjoyable setpieces, which is as good as any Sonic boss has ever aspired to be. (Sonic does carry on his proud tradition of owning the cops, thank goodness.) Only in the final few levels do you get anything remotely approaching hateful design, and while those bits stick out, they are over quickly enough.
The Sonic series has finally found an identity. Now Sega just has to stick with the formula for future games, not screw things up catastrophically or harm their relationship with this talented team, and ahahahahahahahahaha
(Played on a RetroArch emulator.)
Stunning pixel art, a bangin' soundtrack, and solid Metroid-style progression in the first half can't outlift truly awful enemy and level design. Which is a shame, because literally any design better than "long hallway filled with 4 of the same enemy" would make this an all-time great.
Stunning pixel art, a bangin' soundtrack, and solid Metroid-style progression in the first half can't outlift truly awful enemy and level design. Which is a shame, because literally any design better than "long hallway filled with 4 of the same enemy" would make this an all-time great.
The first MGS game I ever played. Even without the background of the first game, I smoked it in a single sitting and beat the final boss at 4 AM on a Saturday. Joker's Tricks aside, I'm not sure video games have ever gotten closer to telling a story that can only be told via a video game.
you know, we are LIVING in a SOCIETY raiden
you know, we are LIVING in a SOCIETY raiden
[Played on a RetroArch emulator.]
Sure, the music is just decent and the art is only good-to-great by GBA standards. On the other hand, there's some evidence of enemy design, level design, and something that looks like a difficulty curve if you squint, so suck on that, Symphony of the Night.
Sure, the music is just decent and the art is only good-to-great by GBA standards. On the other hand, there's some evidence of enemy design, level design, and something that looks like a difficulty curve if you squint, so suck on that, Symphony of the Night.
This review contains spoilers
For its seventh mainline game, Final Fantasy produced Final Fantasy 7 – an actual, honest-to-goodness Landmark of spectacle and storytelling techniques for both RPGs and AAA video games.
For its seventh mainline game, the Xeno series produced, uh, this.
That’s not a roast, I swear. The two series are, at their core, interested in doing different things. Final Fantasy is here to reinvent itself with every new installment, even if these constant reinventions seem to be asymptotically approaching a AAA character action game. The Xeno series is here to Talk About Big Stuff and repackage weepy-ass German anti-philosophers for terminally isolated suburban teenage males.
(That last bit was a roast.)
Easy jokes and/or personal politics aside, you might see the problem here. For all their flaws, Final Fantasy games are at least primarily interested in being video games. That’s good, because they’re video games. Xeno games are not primarily interested in being video games. That’s a problem, because they’re video games.
That said, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is pretty enjoyable and successful when it wants to be a video game. Hell, it’s probably better than a YouTube video essay about Xenoblade Chronicles 3.
At long last, here’s a Xeno game with a simple back-of-the-envelope concept: A world comprised almost entirely of two nations locked in an eternal war. The only thing the teenage tank-bred citizen soldiers of these nations can look forward to is a personal visit from their queen and a peaceful public execution if they can survive for 10 years. (I can’t imagine a more metal death than a dozen flautists playing so hard at a person that they dissolve into orbs of light. Monolith is, if nothing else, far ahead of Danganronpa.)
The concept is expanded upon with enough skill to pleasantly surprise after the storytelling of Xenoblade 1 and 2. We meet our six heroes and breathe a sigh of relief as we learn that at least four of them have more than one dimension to their personalities. As they fight to liberate the world from the forever war, they learn about things they never encountered in the Logan’s Run war machine: aging, families, and – gasp – human reproduction. They visit other military outposts and learn precisely how hundreds of years of war have robbed people of meaningful choice and reduced them into a spectrum of coping mechanisms. Prominent side content is self-aware enough to dodge easy answers: even as the party visits a city where people start families and live full-length human lives outside of the 10-year time limit, they quickly learn that a self-interested ruling class and the war outside can still combine to eliminate choice and create real, meaningful suffering. Whether or not you are interested in the war, the war is interested in you.
So here you are, wandering around a world so massive and explorable that the Nintendo Switch audibly (and visually) groans under the strain of it all. You realize that you don’t miss the worst excesses of the previous games – the interface streamlining here is welcome, even if the accessories menu is somehow worse than Xenoblade 2’s. You’re kinda baffled but entertained by the Chain Attack system, which allows you to stop playing Xenoblade Chronicles 3 for the Switch and start playing the indie RPG version of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 that you bought for 20 bucks on Steam. Maybe you’re noticing that, in a snazzy thematic parallel, your own arsenal of choices in combat and world traversal are expanding as the party grants the choice of a life outside of the forever war to more and more people. The game is Talking About Big Stuff without Talking About Big Stuff, and it’s a pretty good time.
And then, about two-thirds of the way in, in an hour-long cutscene complex, the back-of-the-envelope concept that was meticulously built out into the interesting world that your party had a hand in creating is shoved aside. In a blob of villainous mustache-twirling, anime fighting, and a time-passing montage set to a J-pop song, the video game is over. The Talking About Big Stuff has begun.
To be fair, maybe you’re into that sort of thing. Maybe the things that a lot of people don’t like about JRPG stories are the things you love. If so, you’re in heaven. And even if you’re not into that sort of thing, there are one or two well-executed bits to be found in the home stretch. But if people standing stock still in the middle of an intense fight to plan their strategy and talk shop isn’t your bag, you sprint right back into what’s been working: a moderately functional job system, pachinko-machine optimization combat, and character-focused side quest chains whose narratives feel feather-light compared to the main story.
The plot kind of wobbles to its conclusion. There’s a fetch quest and a movie theater. The final sequence does The JRPG Things and even earns a real emotional response to one or two of them. But once you’ve finished Killing A Concept, you realize you just played a game that either lacks confidence in itself or doesn’t value its strengths. It’s good at a lot of things, but for whatever reason, it’s here to do something very different. (More than one character in this game struggles with this very issue, by the way.) That doesn’t erase or cancel out the good stuff by any means. But since the game stops caring, you have to work hard not to follow suit.
Look, I get that it’s hard to make a really good work of art about philosophy. (That’s probably because people can just read philosophy if they really want to.) But you could make an entire RPG out of the Small Stuff. Maybe you could even use the Small Stuff to meticulously outline Big Stuff with a minimum of self-conscious explanations and lectures. It wouldn’t be as good as Chrono Trigger because Chrono Trigger is about People Doing Things, but it would be a good time. If not a utopia, then maybe a shining land of small things that make up something bigger. A golden country, you might even call it. Someone should make an RPG like that.
For its seventh mainline game, the Xeno series produced, uh, this.
That’s not a roast, I swear. The two series are, at their core, interested in doing different things. Final Fantasy is here to reinvent itself with every new installment, even if these constant reinventions seem to be asymptotically approaching a AAA character action game. The Xeno series is here to Talk About Big Stuff and repackage weepy-ass German anti-philosophers for terminally isolated suburban teenage males.
(That last bit was a roast.)
Easy jokes and/or personal politics aside, you might see the problem here. For all their flaws, Final Fantasy games are at least primarily interested in being video games. That’s good, because they’re video games. Xeno games are not primarily interested in being video games. That’s a problem, because they’re video games.
That said, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is pretty enjoyable and successful when it wants to be a video game. Hell, it’s probably better than a YouTube video essay about Xenoblade Chronicles 3.
At long last, here’s a Xeno game with a simple back-of-the-envelope concept: A world comprised almost entirely of two nations locked in an eternal war. The only thing the teenage tank-bred citizen soldiers of these nations can look forward to is a personal visit from their queen and a peaceful public execution if they can survive for 10 years. (I can’t imagine a more metal death than a dozen flautists playing so hard at a person that they dissolve into orbs of light. Monolith is, if nothing else, far ahead of Danganronpa.)
The concept is expanded upon with enough skill to pleasantly surprise after the storytelling of Xenoblade 1 and 2. We meet our six heroes and breathe a sigh of relief as we learn that at least four of them have more than one dimension to their personalities. As they fight to liberate the world from the forever war, they learn about things they never encountered in the Logan’s Run war machine: aging, families, and – gasp – human reproduction. They visit other military outposts and learn precisely how hundreds of years of war have robbed people of meaningful choice and reduced them into a spectrum of coping mechanisms. Prominent side content is self-aware enough to dodge easy answers: even as the party visits a city where people start families and live full-length human lives outside of the 10-year time limit, they quickly learn that a self-interested ruling class and the war outside can still combine to eliminate choice and create real, meaningful suffering. Whether or not you are interested in the war, the war is interested in you.
So here you are, wandering around a world so massive and explorable that the Nintendo Switch audibly (and visually) groans under the strain of it all. You realize that you don’t miss the worst excesses of the previous games – the interface streamlining here is welcome, even if the accessories menu is somehow worse than Xenoblade 2’s. You’re kinda baffled but entertained by the Chain Attack system, which allows you to stop playing Xenoblade Chronicles 3 for the Switch and start playing the indie RPG version of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 that you bought for 20 bucks on Steam. Maybe you’re noticing that, in a snazzy thematic parallel, your own arsenal of choices in combat and world traversal are expanding as the party grants the choice of a life outside of the forever war to more and more people. The game is Talking About Big Stuff without Talking About Big Stuff, and it’s a pretty good time.
And then, about two-thirds of the way in, in an hour-long cutscene complex, the back-of-the-envelope concept that was meticulously built out into the interesting world that your party had a hand in creating is shoved aside. In a blob of villainous mustache-twirling, anime fighting, and a time-passing montage set to a J-pop song, the video game is over. The Talking About Big Stuff has begun.
To be fair, maybe you’re into that sort of thing. Maybe the things that a lot of people don’t like about JRPG stories are the things you love. If so, you’re in heaven. And even if you’re not into that sort of thing, there are one or two well-executed bits to be found in the home stretch. But if people standing stock still in the middle of an intense fight to plan their strategy and talk shop isn’t your bag, you sprint right back into what’s been working: a moderately functional job system, pachinko-machine optimization combat, and character-focused side quest chains whose narratives feel feather-light compared to the main story.
The plot kind of wobbles to its conclusion. There’s a fetch quest and a movie theater. The final sequence does The JRPG Things and even earns a real emotional response to one or two of them. But once you’ve finished Killing A Concept, you realize you just played a game that either lacks confidence in itself or doesn’t value its strengths. It’s good at a lot of things, but for whatever reason, it’s here to do something very different. (More than one character in this game struggles with this very issue, by the way.) That doesn’t erase or cancel out the good stuff by any means. But since the game stops caring, you have to work hard not to follow suit.
Look, I get that it’s hard to make a really good work of art about philosophy. (That’s probably because people can just read philosophy if they really want to.) But you could make an entire RPG out of the Small Stuff. Maybe you could even use the Small Stuff to meticulously outline Big Stuff with a minimum of self-conscious explanations and lectures. It wouldn’t be as good as Chrono Trigger because Chrono Trigger is about People Doing Things, but it would be a good time. If not a utopia, then maybe a shining land of small things that make up something bigger. A golden country, you might even call it. Someone should make an RPG like that.
Slippery controls, Konami’s Sunday best looks, and an OST filled with bangers, which puts it right up there with Sonic Mania in the pantheon of small-mammal platformers. How did that Bubsy jamoke get a full animated TV pilot while this little guy only got a sequel and (shudder) an HD remake?
2021
The darkness is closer to home this time, more familiar. An SNES-length JRPG about the quiet desperation of suburban kids is a hell of a concept, and if you grew up within 30 minutes of a strip mall, you’ll immediately recognize the types. Maybe you were one of them.
If anyone can create an anti-escapism work of art using an inherently escapist medium, it’s probably Toby Fox, and while I’m not sure he’ll manage to perfectly square that circle, this still looks an awful lot like it’s going to take Undertale's place as the most well-executed JRPG since Chrono Trigger. Sign me up.
If anyone can create an anti-escapism work of art using an inherently escapist medium, it’s probably Toby Fox, and while I’m not sure he’ll manage to perfectly square that circle, this still looks an awful lot like it’s going to take Undertale's place as the most well-executed JRPG since Chrono Trigger. Sign me up.
A lot of the writing can be precisely carbon-dated to the most cringeworthy period of Millennial posting, but the music, art, and concept stick the landing. After all, most visual novel NPCs aren’t much more than talking heads in the first place – why not go all in and put them on the other side of a bar?
2000
Don’t play this without the Mega Man X5 Improvement Project mod, which lets you cut the insufferable in-level "hints" and fixes the smaller, jankier gameplay systems.
The movement here, especially Zero's, is enough to carry a lot of other dead weight. The graphics are a few car lengths behind X4 because Capcom was making six other Mega Man games simultaneously, but no matter. Take a few minutes to patch a ROM of this and enjoy X and Zero’s best-feeling post-SNES outing. (And be sure to pump up the volume for the best-in-franchise boss fight theme.)
The movement here, especially Zero's, is enough to carry a lot of other dead weight. The graphics are a few car lengths behind X4 because Capcom was making six other Mega Man games simultaneously, but no matter. Take a few minutes to patch a ROM of this and enjoy X and Zero’s best-feeling post-SNES outing. (And be sure to pump up the volume for the best-in-franchise boss fight theme.)
2009
imagining myself trying to explain this game's plot to a zoomer and smiling serenely
2020
I'd let Lisa kill me and I still got terminally bored after 20 hours.
2019
As close as video games have come to controllable slapstick comedy. Each of the four action buttons does something delightful: a doofy little jump that sends your guy tumbling head over heels, a perfectly wacky kick (that desperately needs a "yoing" sound effect to accompany it,) rolling up into a stupid little ball, or simply bouncing your head up and down. Sure, the controls are slightly too drifty to be perfectly reliable, but who cares? I can make my little guy bounce up and down to the music. And like the best Jackass sketches, it knows enough to not outstay its welcome. What a blast.