Strafe
110 Reviews liked by Strafe
Max Payne
2001
As you might expect from the way I constantly play and analyze important games, I try to do the same for albums, and this week I’ve been listening to Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). This was the first time I sat down to listen to Wu-Tang, and while the name of the group should have been a big hint, what surprised me was how the album was almost… dorky? It’s packed with references and samples from kung fu movies which were getting old even at the time of the album’s release, and you would think they would make the whole thing sound dated, but the reality is just the opposite. These movies were such a huge inspiration for producer/singer/songwriter The RZA that every track shines with the love. If you want to see just how much, check out this amazing interview where he talks about the movies he’s sampled, it’s plain that the enthusiasm hasn’t waned even 1% all these years later. That earnest appreciation has a certain magnetism to it, and it characterizes Max Payne in the same way it does Wu-Tang. You have references to oldschool noir, comic books, John Woo action, a whole slew of disparate influences, but they blend in a way that only fans who deeply understand the material could accomplish. James McCaffrey’s performance of the titular character is a big part of what brings it all to life, giving Max an edge while also establishing him as someone with a genuine sense of humor, but the extreme situation has dulled his ability to tell fantasy from reality. This blur turns the bullet-time mechanic from a simple cinematic homage into something that’s iconically Max Payne; it’s hard to tell whether the slow mo is something he’s imagining, or if his adrenaline is actually giving him the edge. The game’s ability to reuse proven narrative language while injecting it with new personality in this way is what makes the game such a timeless classic, it shines with the love of its influences while also being entirely original. I can only hope the upcoming remake knows how to do the same.
Hitman: Absolution
2012
imagine making the culmination of everything the series has been building up to at the time, just to make the most boring, linear, dumb experience ever right afterwards. not even a good stealth game on its own, it just sucks in every single aspect.
also why is every character so goofy and over the top when you're trying to tell a serious and gritty story, what was anyone thinking when making this shit.
also why is every character so goofy and over the top when you're trying to tell a serious and gritty story, what was anyone thinking when making this shit.
Hitman: Absolution
2012
Imagine that for the next game in your favorite franchise, the entire premise would be reversed, like a Resident Evil game where you played as a zombie and had to hunt down a hero and exhaust their limited supplies. While a lot of the series’ staple elements would still be there, calling it a mainline entry rather than a spinoff would be an incredibly divisive move. Some people would certainly enjoy it, and you couldn’t argue that it doesn’t belong within the series, but you couldn’t be blamed for being disappointed all the same. By using the same franchise title but not fulfilling the same expectations, the developers break the unspoken trade that comes with that decision, exchanging some creative freedom for a guaranteed audience. Hitman: Absolution may not seem like this sort of flip, since Agent 47 is still pursuing targets, swapping disguises, and sneaking around, but in all other ways, the premise is a complete reversal. It’s not 47 stalking targets on his own terms anymore, he’s the one being hunted. He can’t just slip into disguises to avoid suspicion since people are actively trying to find him, so guards see through his tricks and he’s forced to do more typical sneaking. As a result, the room for free approaches and navigating maps has been severely limited, a core element of what gave the prior games their identity. This is what separates Absolution from successful franchise pivots like Resident Evil 4, its uniqueness actually declined rather than grew with the changes. Not only that, but even when compared to the games it seeks to emulate, it doesn’t have a particularly special level of refinement or polish. The game does occasionally shine, particularly in the few missions where it fully embraces the concept of a hunter being hunted, but these moments are but rare glimpses at the potential of the concept. The theoretical version of Absolution that completely embraced this style of gameplay could have been fantastic, and Hitman/2/3 have shown how hungry people are for iterative improvements, but the version we got only proves how flipping the script without adequate development just leaves everyone unsatisfied.
Grand Theft Auto IV
2008
i came into this game with two things: a functioning knowledge of all the major plot twists in the game and very low expectations. neither prevented me from having a blast and enjoying myself. rockstar sat down and made a grounded and realistic GTA story with realistic and relatable characters that i can feel pathos for. having played previous GTA games, that is something i wasn't convinced they would ever do. i have my share of issues with the way some characters are handled (i.e. kate), but on the whole, i find the story of this game to be its best aspect.
for me, my enjoyment with this game begins and ends with Niko. Niko is by far the most interesting main character in a game that i've played in a long time, and i was invested in his character arc and narrative from beginning to end. i really adore how the game gives you so much to work with in regards to his character. rather than just being told "Niko is a traumatized man who is haunted by his past and finds it difficult to connect with people", you actually get to experience it first hand. Niko is awkward on dates and the women he dates tend to not value him as a person, more as an idea. when he opens up to them, they (typically) disregard his feelings. when talking to his friends, Niko will often say that he needs to distract himself from his intrusive thoughts or negative feelings. hell, this even extends to his combat dialogue. whereas Tommy or CJ would say snappy one liners or something stereotypically cool in combat, Niko just shouts shit like "PUSH ME, PUSH ME" and "I'LL TEAR YOUR FUCKING HEART OUT". he's clearly unstable and has an unhealthy relationship with violence. this is a character that feels like a living and breathing person with complicated feelings and emotions.
on the gameplay side of things, i enjoyed myself quite a bit too. the vehicle physics take a while to get used to, but now that i've sunk an ungodly amount of time into this game, i can say that they feel pretty natural now. i almost can't even imagine what older GTA games felt like at this point. the online multiplayer is fun too, for as active as it is in 2020. i feel genuine regret in never having the chance to play some of these modes with a more active userbase, because i had a lot of fun with the nearly dead one that i did play with.
the mission structure is fairly standard if you've played a rockstar game. there are some standout missions and some less than stellar ones as well, but overall there's nothing exceptionally shitty, which is another thing i'd never expect to be able to say about a rockstar game. i will say that i don't adore the abundance of chasing missions, because the rubberbanding on the AI always being just a little bit faster than you is apparent, but that's something i take as a necessary evil to keep a game like this exciting.
however, i do have problems with this game, two major ones. the first is that there's virtually nothing to use money on in this game, both online and offline. in San Andreas, you had so much more to do and work with in terms of buying property, clothing, hair styles, tattooing, etc. meanwhile here, you have next to no clothing shops and basically nothing to spend money on besides weapons and taxi fares. i've felt every GTA game has a major problem with "there's never anything good to spend money on" in GTA games, and this one has it arguably the worst out of all of them.
the second problem is honestly more damning for me: GTA IV hates me and people like me. if i was writing a polygon/kotaku/etc. esque article about GTA IV, i would title it something to the effect of "This Game That Includes Homophobia Is Really Good Once You Get Past The Homophobia". within the first five minutes, you hear someone say "you're a fag". the only named gay character you can do missions for is called a fag by Niko in his very first mission, and then later by another NPC. every single gay character shown in the game in meaningful capacity is either a repressed closet case or a flamer who might as well have the words "stereotypical effeminate faggot" tattooed on his head. and that's not even getting into the ways in which this game seems to adore using the t slur and referencing transphobia/misogyny like it's an auto-laugh thing. i don't have a problem with games having slurs in them if there's a point to it. none of the gay men in GTA IV are good representations of what it means to be gay, and instead are just caricatures meant to elicit laughs from those who see people like me as "others". it fucking sucks.
it's difficult for me to rationalize liking and enjoying this game when i consistently feel like my personhood is a joke to rockstar. i get that 2008 was 12 years ago, but that's simultaneously not that long ago. there were several points where i wanted to give this a shit score on principle, because it's reductive and makes me feel shitty. i guess i'm in this place where like, i simultaneously think this game fucking sucks, but also i greatly enjoy it and have fond memories of my time with it. it's this compartmentalization that you have to go through with some media. it's a little weird, but what can you do?
the vibe is the best radio station in the game btw.
for me, my enjoyment with this game begins and ends with Niko. Niko is by far the most interesting main character in a game that i've played in a long time, and i was invested in his character arc and narrative from beginning to end. i really adore how the game gives you so much to work with in regards to his character. rather than just being told "Niko is a traumatized man who is haunted by his past and finds it difficult to connect with people", you actually get to experience it first hand. Niko is awkward on dates and the women he dates tend to not value him as a person, more as an idea. when he opens up to them, they (typically) disregard his feelings. when talking to his friends, Niko will often say that he needs to distract himself from his intrusive thoughts or negative feelings. hell, this even extends to his combat dialogue. whereas Tommy or CJ would say snappy one liners or something stereotypically cool in combat, Niko just shouts shit like "PUSH ME, PUSH ME" and "I'LL TEAR YOUR FUCKING HEART OUT". he's clearly unstable and has an unhealthy relationship with violence. this is a character that feels like a living and breathing person with complicated feelings and emotions.
on the gameplay side of things, i enjoyed myself quite a bit too. the vehicle physics take a while to get used to, but now that i've sunk an ungodly amount of time into this game, i can say that they feel pretty natural now. i almost can't even imagine what older GTA games felt like at this point. the online multiplayer is fun too, for as active as it is in 2020. i feel genuine regret in never having the chance to play some of these modes with a more active userbase, because i had a lot of fun with the nearly dead one that i did play with.
the mission structure is fairly standard if you've played a rockstar game. there are some standout missions and some less than stellar ones as well, but overall there's nothing exceptionally shitty, which is another thing i'd never expect to be able to say about a rockstar game. i will say that i don't adore the abundance of chasing missions, because the rubberbanding on the AI always being just a little bit faster than you is apparent, but that's something i take as a necessary evil to keep a game like this exciting.
however, i do have problems with this game, two major ones. the first is that there's virtually nothing to use money on in this game, both online and offline. in San Andreas, you had so much more to do and work with in terms of buying property, clothing, hair styles, tattooing, etc. meanwhile here, you have next to no clothing shops and basically nothing to spend money on besides weapons and taxi fares. i've felt every GTA game has a major problem with "there's never anything good to spend money on" in GTA games, and this one has it arguably the worst out of all of them.
the second problem is honestly more damning for me: GTA IV hates me and people like me. if i was writing a polygon/kotaku/etc. esque article about GTA IV, i would title it something to the effect of "This Game That Includes Homophobia Is Really Good Once You Get Past The Homophobia". within the first five minutes, you hear someone say "you're a fag". the only named gay character you can do missions for is called a fag by Niko in his very first mission, and then later by another NPC. every single gay character shown in the game in meaningful capacity is either a repressed closet case or a flamer who might as well have the words "stereotypical effeminate faggot" tattooed on his head. and that's not even getting into the ways in which this game seems to adore using the t slur and referencing transphobia/misogyny like it's an auto-laugh thing. i don't have a problem with games having slurs in them if there's a point to it. none of the gay men in GTA IV are good representations of what it means to be gay, and instead are just caricatures meant to elicit laughs from those who see people like me as "others". it fucking sucks.
it's difficult for me to rationalize liking and enjoying this game when i consistently feel like my personhood is a joke to rockstar. i get that 2008 was 12 years ago, but that's simultaneously not that long ago. there were several points where i wanted to give this a shit score on principle, because it's reductive and makes me feel shitty. i guess i'm in this place where like, i simultaneously think this game fucking sucks, but also i greatly enjoy it and have fond memories of my time with it. it's this compartmentalization that you have to go through with some media. it's a little weird, but what can you do?
the vibe is the best radio station in the game btw.
Dishonored
2012
Dishonored’s chaos system fascinates me. On the surface it’s a basic kill-counter, where actually using the fun lethal magic is punished with increased guard counts and a pessimistic ending, and this naturally rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. When given the ability to stop time, what people want to do is take down an entire squad all at once, queue up ten projectiles for when time resumes, move someone back down the stairs, and so on, not just sneaking past one particularly stubborn guard. When given the ability to summon a devouring swarm of rats, the idea isn’t to possess one and sneak it into a drain pipe, it’s to make an explosive and terrifying entrance. Dampening that enjoyment with negative consequences seems like an unambiguously bad move, but the narrative framing that surrounds it leads into an analytical hall of mirrors. These powers are granted by the Outsider, a manifestation of the indefinable void, and their reasons aren’t very clear. They state that it’s because our protagonist is interesting, and they’re curious of what will be done with these newfound abilities. Just as the Outsider grants Corvo powers and a burden of choice, so too does the designer give them to the player, which, to a degree, lets us correlate the ideals of the two. To craft these levels with smart patrol routes, entry points, optional objectives, and bonus dialog takes a ton of effort, so the hope was that players wouldn’t choose to miss that content. While they made it possible to do so, they don’t actually want players to walk in the front door, shoot everyone in sight, and finish the game thoughtlessly in two hours, so some level of punishment was implemented. Similarly, the hope of the Outsider is that Corvo isn’t going to be boring, he won’t just give in to his base lust for revenge, and will instead give some insight on the nature of humanity. Once the uninteresting aggression has been pared off, the choice is then between taking out the high-priority targets lethally or non-lethally, and this where the situation actually becomes nuanced. All of the non-lethal, low-chaos options for eliminating targets are arguably worse than death: being branded with a hot iron and cast into a plague-infested city, being worked to death in a mine, kidnapped by an obsessive stalker, or put up for the same kind of public execution Corvo was originally destined for. The optional dialog in each mission really hammers home just how horrible things will be for those who receive your mercy, with the same overseers who mention the heretic’s brand being the same ones who reveal its horrible implications, and the prophesying heart making it clear that the spared Lady Boyle will soon die in abject poverty thanks to your beneficence. I believe this is the dilemma that the Outsider, as a being outside mortality and time, wants to see. Corvo himself was almost executed outside the law, but now he has all the power in the world and nothing to lose. What perspective on life and death does that give a person? Would he see even the most brutal rat-swarm death as justice, and maybe even merciful compared to the torturous and prolonged alternative? How much is mere existence worth?
However, that perspective rests upon the ever-shaky foundation of determining the developer’s intent, and it’s questionable how much of this is simply overanalysis. After all, every one of those horrible non-lethal options contribute to the low-chaos ending, with its bright skies and optimism. What could have been a dilemma worthy of the Outsider’s interest, one with no right answers, ends up as a right-and-wrong binary choice. This might be another example of the full-lethality problem, where the developers wanted players to have a choice, but had to associate some options with punishment to force players into thinking. With this, we arrive at Dishonored’s infinite mirror, of asking why players are given a choice if one option is almost objectively inferior, which can be answered with the idea that this effect is deeply woven into the narrative, which can in turn be questioned when it means interesting dilemmas are made into binary choices with inferior options, and so on, to infinity.
To be honest, I don’t know what my takeaway about Dishonored’s chaos system and its story really is. On one hand, I love that I get to question these things, but on the other, I wonder if its choices being blandly sorted into high or low chaos was just a cynical move, an anticipation that players might not pick up on the worldbuilding details and say there was no point to it all. Giving the murderous players a dark and stormy final level was considered the best way to show that the world was reacting to their choices; non-lethality had to be rewarded with smiles and sunny days, the feeling of being patronized is inescapable. That sneaky bitterness of cynicism is about the only thing that keeps me from really adoring the game, since it does everything else so beautifully, the world is so unique and interesting, the levels intricate and the powers satisfying, it’s the exact sort of originality I love to see. I just wish I could be confident that the game thought as highly of me as I do of it.
However, that perspective rests upon the ever-shaky foundation of determining the developer’s intent, and it’s questionable how much of this is simply overanalysis. After all, every one of those horrible non-lethal options contribute to the low-chaos ending, with its bright skies and optimism. What could have been a dilemma worthy of the Outsider’s interest, one with no right answers, ends up as a right-and-wrong binary choice. This might be another example of the full-lethality problem, where the developers wanted players to have a choice, but had to associate some options with punishment to force players into thinking. With this, we arrive at Dishonored’s infinite mirror, of asking why players are given a choice if one option is almost objectively inferior, which can be answered with the idea that this effect is deeply woven into the narrative, which can in turn be questioned when it means interesting dilemmas are made into binary choices with inferior options, and so on, to infinity.
To be honest, I don’t know what my takeaway about Dishonored’s chaos system and its story really is. On one hand, I love that I get to question these things, but on the other, I wonder if its choices being blandly sorted into high or low chaos was just a cynical move, an anticipation that players might not pick up on the worldbuilding details and say there was no point to it all. Giving the murderous players a dark and stormy final level was considered the best way to show that the world was reacting to their choices; non-lethality had to be rewarded with smiles and sunny days, the feeling of being patronized is inescapable. That sneaky bitterness of cynicism is about the only thing that keeps me from really adoring the game, since it does everything else so beautifully, the world is so unique and interesting, the levels intricate and the powers satisfying, it’s the exact sort of originality I love to see. I just wish I could be confident that the game thought as highly of me as I do of it.
Fuck it - I was in the middle of a Sopranos rewatch anyway and it's only 3 hours long, so why the hell not? Purports to be set in the middle of Season 5, though there isn't much to suggest that beyond a surprisingly well-rendered and well-acted Satriale gang showing up every once in a while to do a catchphrase for your amusement. A testament to the professional calibre of guys like Gandolifini and Imperioli that they actually read some of this "PRESS THE SQUARE BUTTON TO GRAB" shit at the same level as the gold David Chase and Matthew Weiner were weaving for them on the TV programme.
Unfortunately, there's no direct references to the ongoing storylines that were on television at the time, but that's maybe for the best given that Season 5 was mostly dealing with PlayStation 2-unfriendly topics like the impossibility of dissolving a marriage, the effects and ennui of Alzheimer's disease and the fundamentally immutable nature of human beings. It's very amusing to imagine Tony coming back to the Bing after one of this season's countless heart-wrenching conversations with his Uncle Jun or Carmela to dispense a [COLLECT 5 PASTRAMI SANDWICHES] fetchquest for our player-character.
Feels downright surreal at times to be playing a punch-punch-kick beat 'em up based on one of television's most legitimately prestigious works of art, and is worth playing for that reason alone; honestly, this isn't that far off, I dunno, "THE WIRE KART" or "MAD MEN: A TELLTALE SERIES". For my sins, I'm also playing Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds at the moment and even a campy little show like that feels tightly constricted by the chains of videogamedom. If nothing else, it was nice to walk around the Bing and other locations from the show and see all the sets connected together into a cohesive collection of liminal spaces I know. Just wish there was an Alabama 3 driving mission.
Unfortunately, there's no direct references to the ongoing storylines that were on television at the time, but that's maybe for the best given that Season 5 was mostly dealing with PlayStation 2-unfriendly topics like the impossibility of dissolving a marriage, the effects and ennui of Alzheimer's disease and the fundamentally immutable nature of human beings. It's very amusing to imagine Tony coming back to the Bing after one of this season's countless heart-wrenching conversations with his Uncle Jun or Carmela to dispense a [COLLECT 5 PASTRAMI SANDWICHES] fetchquest for our player-character.
Feels downright surreal at times to be playing a punch-punch-kick beat 'em up based on one of television's most legitimately prestigious works of art, and is worth playing for that reason alone; honestly, this isn't that far off, I dunno, "THE WIRE KART" or "MAD MEN: A TELLTALE SERIES". For my sins, I'm also playing Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds at the moment and even a campy little show like that feels tightly constricted by the chains of videogamedom. If nothing else, it was nice to walk around the Bing and other locations from the show and see all the sets connected together into a cohesive collection of liminal spaces I know. Just wish there was an Alabama 3 driving mission.
What makes a person who they are is an endless ocean of choices, decisions, and mistakes. It’s nearly impossible to sum up the human experience succinctly, no matter how you go about it, but the past always returns as a unifying factor. Going through life, with every fleeting moment influencing, or influenced by, an infinite amount of moments, what gives someone that unique spark among the almost eight-billion could be condensed to the minutiae of human life, the trials and tribulations of living on Earth. Each trauma, each miracle, every fear and passion, coalescing into an approximation of humanity, the individual soul.
Blue Reflection: Second Light initially seems wrapped up in this hypothesis, with memories and recollections of the past at the forefront of determining who we are. Waltzing across each character’s reified backstory, a physical representation of themselves, the keypoint in coming to terms with oneself is found in accepting what came before. Throughout the story, however, there’s this constant rhetorical question being asked, an implication that shines doubt what you are approaching as a goal. As you weave between the collective backgrounds of the game’s cast, the detours through the various Heartscapes becomes secondary until… something happens. Somewhere between spending precious hours beside these characters and learning their experiences one by one, Blue Reflection… opens up. The narrative isn’t about "the before", the uncountable and infinite universe of outcomes that fused into what becomes an individual. The "past" isn’t “you”, so much as it’s context for “you”. What makes someone who they are after that, in the moment, is just as much the bonds they share, the loves that flourish, the passions ignited and fears embraced, as it is an arbitrary “past”.
…It’s sort of inescapable that this game is focused on the meaning of “moving on”. The summer vacation framing, the constant allusion to people not wanting things to end, the oppressing fear of what comes next and the change it brings… The future as we know it is beyond the horizon, endlessly far off but within reach, all the same. What happens to the friendships we made, the stories we’ve told and moments we’ve shared, five years from now? Ten? Fifty? Facing the crossroads at the end of an era, what will you take away, and what will you leave behind? Even looking at Backloggd itself, it eventually vanishing is a sure-fire possibility. Not now, maybe not in the near future, but… what do you do with that? For most, this site, the one-liner reviews, the heartfelt tangents, the caustic arguments, will all vanish without a trace, while others will hold the memories earned here close, all gained by sharing a passion with, to be blunt, total strangers.
Inevitably, this will end, and we’ll all move to new corners, a sort of “moving on” itself. But is that necessarily a bad thing? If the site died tomorrow and the community surrounding it shriveled up, would that change the love and hate that went into the words etched into it? Just as the past gave context to who we are now, does this community become another page of backstory, a background to appreciate as we move onto the next thing?
…These are some thoroughly navel-gazey thoughts brought out by what could be surmised as a “cute-girls-doing-cute-things” game, and I won’t pretend I haven’t gone off on similar tangents for an endless slew of slice-of-life anime. But over the entirety of Second Light, with every new character thrown into the party, I saw a familiar face, a person I recognized personally. Chalk it up to great writing, or chalk it up to me seeing what I want to see. I’ve seen these stories, not in a “trite anime trope” way, but in a “I know someone like this” sense, and even on a niche video game logging site I’ve seen the people who are deftly portrayed in Blue Reflection. I won’t go as far as to say this is an essential introspective reflection on community or something pompous like that. I’d imagine for most crowds, this will come off as a very well done character-focused slow burn, and that itself is by no-means a negative reading. But I suppose I can only say this, the story, what it meant in the grand scheme of things, hit me at the right time.
Blue Reflection: Second Light initially seems wrapped up in this hypothesis, with memories and recollections of the past at the forefront of determining who we are. Waltzing across each character’s reified backstory, a physical representation of themselves, the keypoint in coming to terms with oneself is found in accepting what came before. Throughout the story, however, there’s this constant rhetorical question being asked, an implication that shines doubt what you are approaching as a goal. As you weave between the collective backgrounds of the game’s cast, the detours through the various Heartscapes becomes secondary until… something happens. Somewhere between spending precious hours beside these characters and learning their experiences one by one, Blue Reflection… opens up. The narrative isn’t about "the before", the uncountable and infinite universe of outcomes that fused into what becomes an individual. The "past" isn’t “you”, so much as it’s context for “you”. What makes someone who they are after that, in the moment, is just as much the bonds they share, the loves that flourish, the passions ignited and fears embraced, as it is an arbitrary “past”.
…It’s sort of inescapable that this game is focused on the meaning of “moving on”. The summer vacation framing, the constant allusion to people not wanting things to end, the oppressing fear of what comes next and the change it brings… The future as we know it is beyond the horizon, endlessly far off but within reach, all the same. What happens to the friendships we made, the stories we’ve told and moments we’ve shared, five years from now? Ten? Fifty? Facing the crossroads at the end of an era, what will you take away, and what will you leave behind? Even looking at Backloggd itself, it eventually vanishing is a sure-fire possibility. Not now, maybe not in the near future, but… what do you do with that? For most, this site, the one-liner reviews, the heartfelt tangents, the caustic arguments, will all vanish without a trace, while others will hold the memories earned here close, all gained by sharing a passion with, to be blunt, total strangers.
Inevitably, this will end, and we’ll all move to new corners, a sort of “moving on” itself. But is that necessarily a bad thing? If the site died tomorrow and the community surrounding it shriveled up, would that change the love and hate that went into the words etched into it? Just as the past gave context to who we are now, does this community become another page of backstory, a background to appreciate as we move onto the next thing?
…These are some thoroughly navel-gazey thoughts brought out by what could be surmised as a “cute-girls-doing-cute-things” game, and I won’t pretend I haven’t gone off on similar tangents for an endless slew of slice-of-life anime. But over the entirety of Second Light, with every new character thrown into the party, I saw a familiar face, a person I recognized personally. Chalk it up to great writing, or chalk it up to me seeing what I want to see. I’ve seen these stories, not in a “trite anime trope” way, but in a “I know someone like this” sense, and even on a niche video game logging site I’ve seen the people who are deftly portrayed in Blue Reflection. I won’t go as far as to say this is an essential introspective reflection on community or something pompous like that. I’d imagine for most crowds, this will come off as a very well done character-focused slow burn, and that itself is by no-means a negative reading. But I suppose I can only say this, the story, what it meant in the grand scheme of things, hit me at the right time.
Pupperazzi
2022
A bone-chilling indie horror game that preys on every software developer’s greatest fear - releasing an unfinished debug build to production. Pupperazzi’s release number is permanently branded on the screen, the developer flashes the same studio logo twice during startup, PlayStation button prompts sneak their way into the Xbox version, dogs can walk on water, poster textures are wrapped around rocks, and crouching arbitrarily changes between two different buttons. It’s already a nightmare, and then you find out everyone in the game talks like they’re posting your least favourite Reddit thread. Good God, man.
Dead Rising 3
2013
right off the bat, there's a binary choice to make here. either you opt for a traditional story mode, or you experience the los perdidos outbreak through the lens of 'nightmare mode' - a feature designed to bring the game more in line with previous dead rising entries. as a fan of the hectic hustle and bustle core to the franchise's dna, in which significant organizational sense and stringent time management were required to succeed, the choice hardly posed a dilemma for me. but nightmare mode more or less revealed an incogruous title on all fronts - appending a time limit to dead rising 3's broader framework shines a spotlight on the pervasive rot at its core. where previous titles succeeded in designing interconnected networks to immersive oneself in, with main arteries clogged by zombies, psychopaths and hapless survivors, dead rising 3 has almost zero semblance of focus. the game's insistence on depicting a city is part of the problem here. willamette was nothing more than a mall, content to function as quaint romero pastiche, and fortune city gets a pass as a somewhat believable gambling district, but DR3 devotes its attention towards depicting a citywide outbreak somewhere in socal, with the titles marketing boasting about los perdidos' size utterly eclipsing both willamette and fortune city. you can chalk it up to the typical western AAA developmental decision, largely in service of traditionally rigid AAA expansion (bigger! better!). im also gonna speculate that it was primarily to shine a spotlight on just how many zombies can exist on the screen at once with this new #tech, and, credit where credits due, there's a lot of em. scores and scores of them can be on the screen at any time, even, with no loss to frame rate on my decrepit laptop. however, thanks to the ease of play this time around, you're rarely put in a position where this is an actively stressful thing, nor is there ever enough incentive to utilize the games sparse strokes of verticality to traverse the environment too much. getting around rapidly in nightmare mode also means using a car a lot of the time, which chokes any interesting decision-making and essentially turns this into a game of going to marked waypoints in a vehicle that's half as slow because it keeps running into cattle. inventory management's barely a consideration since there's food everywhere and you can craft weapons on the fly. nightmare mode doesnt tell you where any save points are because the game was built with autosave in mind despite the mode adhering to traditional tenets of the series regarding save management ie if you die fuck you, reload your last save. the clock is way faster now which makes Doing Everything in One Shot, another series staple, virtually impossible, meaning to complete nightmare mode you have to jettison almost everything that isnt the main story. 'escortable survivors' have been reconfigured into 'stranded survivors' where the goal is to just kinda kill the zombies around them and let them escape on their own. the list goes on and on, beyond what im willing to critically focus on - it's not really dead rising, it's in an incredibly frictional state where it has to bow down to western design convention while simultaneously juggling series expectation which mostly results in some incredibly annoying, gimmicky bosses and incredibly strange design decisions. the end result is total gratuitousness, essentially dead rising as musou, and it's not even an interesting musou. dull as dishwater for the most part.
at most i suppose i should thank nightmare mode for being such a babymode breeze that i wasnt compelled to stick around this world for any longer like i otherwise might have in a normal playthrough. not touching the narrative with a ten-foot pole, a total bastardization of dead rising's playful sense of tone and humor to such an inexplicable extent that i remain unsure how capcom vancouver was responsible for dead rising 2 as well. weirdly misanthropic and tasteless game overall, there's a kind of collectible you can get called a 'tragic ending' where you just stare at a dead body while a piano plays and they make a pun about their death and it's all...lacking in harmony. nick kind of sucks a lot too. part of the appeal for this series for me has been embodying atypical protagonists - dour and often selfish schlubby everymen who overcome insurmountable obstacles with a servbot smile, and nick is just too naive, one-note, and inconsistently characterized for me to be invested in his plight. also jesus christ, this games ugly. something about this game's aesthetic and colour palette was revolting to me, made me have a headache trying to focus on everything, and the UI which bleakly resembles this infamous riff on modern AAA design does it no favours. this 'XBone Launch Title Art Direction', as i've come to call it, really produced some of the most nauseating games on the planet. lococycle, ryse: son of rome, panzer dragoon de puta, powerstar golf, and fighter within...the idea that this game has a sequel that people hold in even less regard scares the shit out of me. if i ever get around to it, dead rising 4 might just be the worst game i'll ever play. impressive!
they made the psychopaths in this game represent the seven deadly sins. fucking grow up
at most i suppose i should thank nightmare mode for being such a babymode breeze that i wasnt compelled to stick around this world for any longer like i otherwise might have in a normal playthrough. not touching the narrative with a ten-foot pole, a total bastardization of dead rising's playful sense of tone and humor to such an inexplicable extent that i remain unsure how capcom vancouver was responsible for dead rising 2 as well. weirdly misanthropic and tasteless game overall, there's a kind of collectible you can get called a 'tragic ending' where you just stare at a dead body while a piano plays and they make a pun about their death and it's all...lacking in harmony. nick kind of sucks a lot too. part of the appeal for this series for me has been embodying atypical protagonists - dour and often selfish schlubby everymen who overcome insurmountable obstacles with a servbot smile, and nick is just too naive, one-note, and inconsistently characterized for me to be invested in his plight. also jesus christ, this games ugly. something about this game's aesthetic and colour palette was revolting to me, made me have a headache trying to focus on everything, and the UI which bleakly resembles this infamous riff on modern AAA design does it no favours. this 'XBone Launch Title Art Direction', as i've come to call it, really produced some of the most nauseating games on the planet. lococycle, ryse: son of rome, panzer dragoon de puta, powerstar golf, and fighter within...the idea that this game has a sequel that people hold in even less regard scares the shit out of me. if i ever get around to it, dead rising 4 might just be the worst game i'll ever play. impressive!
they made the psychopaths in this game represent the seven deadly sins. fucking grow up
what does it mean to "feel like Spider-Man"? after all, that's the refrain we heard time and time again upon the release of Spider-Man for the PS4, and it's the question that I couldn't get out of my head every time I thought about this game.
looking at the mechanics of the game doesn't really answer that question for me, mostly because a shocking amount of the experience of this game is simply lifted wholesale from the Batman Arkham games with precious little alteration. the combat, the surprisingly present stealth sections that involve isolating a group of enemies with a chronic neck injury that prevents them from looking even slightly Up, "detective" segments that entirely involve looking for a yellow line to follow, even an omnipresent voice in your ear feeding you constant info, it's all as it was all the way back in 2009's Arkham Asylum, mostly unaltered. indeed, these games themselves were lauded at the time for "making you feel like Batman" but not nearly to the same hyperbolic memetic extent as marvel's sony's kevin feige's ike perlmutter's spider-man does for the ultimate arachnid-boy. generally speaking I would not consider Spider-Man and Batman to be characters that share an enormous deal in common outside of the very basic concept of fighting criminals in an urban environment, and in many ways there is an argument to be made that spider-man is batman's antithesis. and yet, somehow, essentially the same mechanics that created an experience that made you Feel Like Batman has made a great many people Feel Like Spider-Man.
the one meaningful mechanic which differentiates this from Arkham (though, maybe not as much as it perhaps should given the zip-to-point mechanic is again lifted completely wholesale from Arkham City) is the web-swinging, and it's a useful point in elucidating what the mechanical experience of this game does. web-swinging in this game is pleasing, stunningly well-animated, highly responsive, and also completely effortless. it's a struggle to even call it a mechanic: it is almost completely on auto-pilot, with nothing more involved than successive presses of R2 seeing Miles swing, leap, run on walls, the navigational experience of Spider-Man swinging through a painfully detailed recreation of Manhattan reduced to a single button. much like Assassin's Creed's automated free-running that clearly inspired the rhythms of play here, web swinging in this game looks fantastic - especially on a twitter clip captured with the patented SonyTM PlayStationTM ShareTM ButtonTM - but mechanically vacuous to the point of non-existence.
comparisons to Spider-Man 2's (the 2004 game, not this, the second instalment of the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise, nor the upcoming Marvel's Spider-Man 2, the third game in the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise) much lauded web swinging are passé, I know, but indulge me for just a moment: web-swinging in that game was beloved because it was a system. It had depth, it had a skill ceiling, it had moves that were difficult to pull off and a learning curve that required familiarity with the mechanic. it was enough to make a game in and of itself, and indeed it largely did because the rest of Spider-Man 2 ranges from unremarkable to poor. i don't know if i would go as far to say that this system "made me feel like spider-man" but it was, at the very least, a systemisation of this aspect of the character in such a way that it made for a compelling gameplay experience.
spider-man PS4 has none of this. it's mechanics are intentionally stripped down to the point that essentially the entire game is about pressing buttons at the right time in response to on-screen stimuli, and I know all video games can be boiled down to that, but Marvel's Spider-Man comes pre-boiled: the illusion it creates is so wafer thin that even a minute of thought reveals the 4K smoke and mirrors for what they really are. contrary to the appeals to the fraught concept of immersion the phrase "makes you feel like spider-man" evokes, I've scarcely felt more painfully aware that I am a person sitting on a sofa, holding a controller, than when playing this. when your entire game is frictionless, there's nothing to hang onto, either.
there is one sense in which the gameplay experience of Marvel's Miles Morales succeeds in capturing the spirit of the character, and that's in how his new powers frequently dissolve tension in the gameplay, with his invisibility offering you a fast charging get-out-of-jail-free card if you mess up the stealth (if being the operative word here) and the way almost every fight will end with an overpowered Venom Blast.
indeed, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales often does feel like a Spider-Man comic, but rarely in ways I enjoy. After tremendous backlash from vocal fans at the time to "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" issue of Spider-Man, Stan Lee (who at this point was increasingly disconnected from the actual goings-on of the universe he helped create to the point that he only knew Gwen was dead when someone at a con asked if she would come back to life) decreed that Marvel Comics should avoid meaningful change, change that might alienate longtime fans or, more importantly, those who wished to turn marvel characters into lunchboxes and action figures and cartoons and movies, and instead only offer the illusion of change. while the obvious response to this is that Peter Parker could only be replaced by his clone, Ben Reily, for a short period of time before the gravity of the status quo would pull Peter Parker back into the starring role, it also had something of a side-effect, which is that as a universe where meaningful change is resisted and avoided, Marvel Comics as a whole has a reactionary and conservative worldview that gravitates towards it's baked-in assumptions and the presumed goodness of those assumptions.
in 2004's Civil War, Marvel Comics sided with the PATRIOT act. In 2008's Secret Invasion, Marvel Comics used evil religious extremist shapeshifting Skrulls who hide among us and could be friends, co-workers, countrymen plotting the destruction of earth as an analogy for islamic terrorism. In 2012's Avengers VS X-Men, five heroes empowered by a cosmic force change the world for the better, curing diseases, ending world hunger, only to have those changes be rejected as unnatural, and eventually are consumed by said cosmic power. In 2019's House of X/Powers of X, the X-Men founded a nationalistic ethnostate for mutants that is an explicit parallel for the apartheid state of Israel and sees this as a good thing.
Whatever form it may take, whatever illusions of change may, however briefly, be affected, Marvel Comics are bound to a reflection of our status quo that is essentially desirable, and a huge amount of Superhero comics are about reinforcing their own status quos as well as our own, with high-profile stories such as DC's Doomsday Clock ultimately being nothing more than desperate appeals to the supposed self-evident relevance and importance of the unchanging status of these characters. All of this does not even mention the aggressive copaganda of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, to the point where Captain Marvel was reproduced unaltered as propaganda for the US Air Force. Mainstream superheroes are always enforcers of the status quo, for good or for ill, but it's when the enforcement of that status quo comes up against depictions and discussions of the injustices of the real world that this becomes most uncomfortable.
There's a bit in this game, once you finish a side quest, where the camera pans up to a Black Lives Matter mural painted on the side of a building, and lingers there for just long enough to feel awkward. I don't object to the presence of this mural at all, but the direction decision here smacks as performative. It's not enough that the building is placed very prominently to ensure you can't miss it, but the game cranes itself to show you the image again, and the feeling of this can only really be described as the cinematography equivalent of "You know, I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could." It's desperate to demonstrate that it knows, it supports Black Lives Matter, but the functional reality of the rest of the game is aggressively at odds with what that movement is materially about.
I knew that the original 2018 Marvel's Spider-Man was in love with The Police but I can't describe how unprepared I still was for how aggressively conservative this game is. The story revolves around Miles Morales, while Peter Parker is on holiday to Generic Eastern Europeaistan, fighting against The Tinkerer and their evil plot to...destroy a product of an Evil Corporation that is giving people cancer. While at the eleventh hour they do contrive a reason why The Tinkerer's plan is #GoingTooFar, for most of the game there's actually no material reason for her to be in the wrong, and Miles Morales - and by extension, the game - is completely incapable of coming up with a single argument against her plan, simply resorting to "it's wrong! blowing things up is against the law!" or the classic "it's too risky! if even one person gets hurt that is too much!" said while Miles gives a Goon a severe concussion.
When I think of what Spider-Man means to me, what it is About, I think I'd describe it as the struggle to live up to an ideal of being our best selves, of always doing the right thing, in a world that makes that incredibly difficult to actually achieve, with our own personal failings and our endless conflicting responsibilities. In that sense, the Tinkerer, instrumentalized into meaningful action against an evil corporation by the death of a loved one, and struggling with how that affects her personal life and the relationships she has, is far more of a Spider-Man than Miles Morales in this game could ever be, given that his job is one of endless praise and assumed goodness facilitated by a hilarious uncritical depiction of the gig economy that sees the responsibility of Spider-Man morphed into a Deliveroo hustle grindset that always makes sure to respect Our Boys In Blue. How can something that loves the Police and hates direct action this much possibly claim to believe that Black Lives Matter?
In attempting to provide an "All-New, All-Different" up-to-date Spider-Man without making any effort to change the underlying assumptions it has about the world in which it lives, all this game does is expose how out of touch and outdated this whole concept is when the illusion of change fades away. Everything about this game is completely surface-level, all a well-presented illusion of Being Spider-Man that breaks the instant you think about it in any way, and you find yourself sitting your sofa, with your expensive toy for privileged people, pressing buttons to make the copaganda continue to play out in front of you.
I finished Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I had a perfectly ok time. I was rarely frustrated and occasionally found it charming and visually enthralling. I liked stuff with Miles' uncle. It also made me feel like everything about this style of game and this type of story had hit an evolutionary dead-end and had nowhere to go but running on the same treadmill, forever.
So, yes. It made me feel like Spider-ManTM.
looking at the mechanics of the game doesn't really answer that question for me, mostly because a shocking amount of the experience of this game is simply lifted wholesale from the Batman Arkham games with precious little alteration. the combat, the surprisingly present stealth sections that involve isolating a group of enemies with a chronic neck injury that prevents them from looking even slightly Up, "detective" segments that entirely involve looking for a yellow line to follow, even an omnipresent voice in your ear feeding you constant info, it's all as it was all the way back in 2009's Arkham Asylum, mostly unaltered. indeed, these games themselves were lauded at the time for "making you feel like Batman" but not nearly to the same hyperbolic memetic extent as marvel's sony's kevin feige's ike perlmutter's spider-man does for the ultimate arachnid-boy. generally speaking I would not consider Spider-Man and Batman to be characters that share an enormous deal in common outside of the very basic concept of fighting criminals in an urban environment, and in many ways there is an argument to be made that spider-man is batman's antithesis. and yet, somehow, essentially the same mechanics that created an experience that made you Feel Like Batman has made a great many people Feel Like Spider-Man.
the one meaningful mechanic which differentiates this from Arkham (though, maybe not as much as it perhaps should given the zip-to-point mechanic is again lifted completely wholesale from Arkham City) is the web-swinging, and it's a useful point in elucidating what the mechanical experience of this game does. web-swinging in this game is pleasing, stunningly well-animated, highly responsive, and also completely effortless. it's a struggle to even call it a mechanic: it is almost completely on auto-pilot, with nothing more involved than successive presses of R2 seeing Miles swing, leap, run on walls, the navigational experience of Spider-Man swinging through a painfully detailed recreation of Manhattan reduced to a single button. much like Assassin's Creed's automated free-running that clearly inspired the rhythms of play here, web swinging in this game looks fantastic - especially on a twitter clip captured with the patented SonyTM PlayStationTM ShareTM ButtonTM - but mechanically vacuous to the point of non-existence.
comparisons to Spider-Man 2's (the 2004 game, not this, the second instalment of the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise, nor the upcoming Marvel's Spider-Man 2, the third game in the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise) much lauded web swinging are passé, I know, but indulge me for just a moment: web-swinging in that game was beloved because it was a system. It had depth, it had a skill ceiling, it had moves that were difficult to pull off and a learning curve that required familiarity with the mechanic. it was enough to make a game in and of itself, and indeed it largely did because the rest of Spider-Man 2 ranges from unremarkable to poor. i don't know if i would go as far to say that this system "made me feel like spider-man" but it was, at the very least, a systemisation of this aspect of the character in such a way that it made for a compelling gameplay experience.
spider-man PS4 has none of this. it's mechanics are intentionally stripped down to the point that essentially the entire game is about pressing buttons at the right time in response to on-screen stimuli, and I know all video games can be boiled down to that, but Marvel's Spider-Man comes pre-boiled: the illusion it creates is so wafer thin that even a minute of thought reveals the 4K smoke and mirrors for what they really are. contrary to the appeals to the fraught concept of immersion the phrase "makes you feel like spider-man" evokes, I've scarcely felt more painfully aware that I am a person sitting on a sofa, holding a controller, than when playing this. when your entire game is frictionless, there's nothing to hang onto, either.
there is one sense in which the gameplay experience of Marvel's Miles Morales succeeds in capturing the spirit of the character, and that's in how his new powers frequently dissolve tension in the gameplay, with his invisibility offering you a fast charging get-out-of-jail-free card if you mess up the stealth (if being the operative word here) and the way almost every fight will end with an overpowered Venom Blast.
indeed, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales often does feel like a Spider-Man comic, but rarely in ways I enjoy. After tremendous backlash from vocal fans at the time to "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" issue of Spider-Man, Stan Lee (who at this point was increasingly disconnected from the actual goings-on of the universe he helped create to the point that he only knew Gwen was dead when someone at a con asked if she would come back to life) decreed that Marvel Comics should avoid meaningful change, change that might alienate longtime fans or, more importantly, those who wished to turn marvel characters into lunchboxes and action figures and cartoons and movies, and instead only offer the illusion of change. while the obvious response to this is that Peter Parker could only be replaced by his clone, Ben Reily, for a short period of time before the gravity of the status quo would pull Peter Parker back into the starring role, it also had something of a side-effect, which is that as a universe where meaningful change is resisted and avoided, Marvel Comics as a whole has a reactionary and conservative worldview that gravitates towards it's baked-in assumptions and the presumed goodness of those assumptions.
in 2004's Civil War, Marvel Comics sided with the PATRIOT act. In 2008's Secret Invasion, Marvel Comics used evil religious extremist shapeshifting Skrulls who hide among us and could be friends, co-workers, countrymen plotting the destruction of earth as an analogy for islamic terrorism. In 2012's Avengers VS X-Men, five heroes empowered by a cosmic force change the world for the better, curing diseases, ending world hunger, only to have those changes be rejected as unnatural, and eventually are consumed by said cosmic power. In 2019's House of X/Powers of X, the X-Men founded a nationalistic ethnostate for mutants that is an explicit parallel for the apartheid state of Israel and sees this as a good thing.
Whatever form it may take, whatever illusions of change may, however briefly, be affected, Marvel Comics are bound to a reflection of our status quo that is essentially desirable, and a huge amount of Superhero comics are about reinforcing their own status quos as well as our own, with high-profile stories such as DC's Doomsday Clock ultimately being nothing more than desperate appeals to the supposed self-evident relevance and importance of the unchanging status of these characters. All of this does not even mention the aggressive copaganda of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, to the point where Captain Marvel was reproduced unaltered as propaganda for the US Air Force. Mainstream superheroes are always enforcers of the status quo, for good or for ill, but it's when the enforcement of that status quo comes up against depictions and discussions of the injustices of the real world that this becomes most uncomfortable.
There's a bit in this game, once you finish a side quest, where the camera pans up to a Black Lives Matter mural painted on the side of a building, and lingers there for just long enough to feel awkward. I don't object to the presence of this mural at all, but the direction decision here smacks as performative. It's not enough that the building is placed very prominently to ensure you can't miss it, but the game cranes itself to show you the image again, and the feeling of this can only really be described as the cinematography equivalent of "You know, I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could." It's desperate to demonstrate that it knows, it supports Black Lives Matter, but the functional reality of the rest of the game is aggressively at odds with what that movement is materially about.
I knew that the original 2018 Marvel's Spider-Man was in love with The Police but I can't describe how unprepared I still was for how aggressively conservative this game is. The story revolves around Miles Morales, while Peter Parker is on holiday to Generic Eastern Europeaistan, fighting against The Tinkerer and their evil plot to...destroy a product of an Evil Corporation that is giving people cancer. While at the eleventh hour they do contrive a reason why The Tinkerer's plan is #GoingTooFar, for most of the game there's actually no material reason for her to be in the wrong, and Miles Morales - and by extension, the game - is completely incapable of coming up with a single argument against her plan, simply resorting to "it's wrong! blowing things up is against the law!" or the classic "it's too risky! if even one person gets hurt that is too much!" said while Miles gives a Goon a severe concussion.
When I think of what Spider-Man means to me, what it is About, I think I'd describe it as the struggle to live up to an ideal of being our best selves, of always doing the right thing, in a world that makes that incredibly difficult to actually achieve, with our own personal failings and our endless conflicting responsibilities. In that sense, the Tinkerer, instrumentalized into meaningful action against an evil corporation by the death of a loved one, and struggling with how that affects her personal life and the relationships she has, is far more of a Spider-Man than Miles Morales in this game could ever be, given that his job is one of endless praise and assumed goodness facilitated by a hilarious uncritical depiction of the gig economy that sees the responsibility of Spider-Man morphed into a Deliveroo hustle grindset that always makes sure to respect Our Boys In Blue. How can something that loves the Police and hates direct action this much possibly claim to believe that Black Lives Matter?
In attempting to provide an "All-New, All-Different" up-to-date Spider-Man without making any effort to change the underlying assumptions it has about the world in which it lives, all this game does is expose how out of touch and outdated this whole concept is when the illusion of change fades away. Everything about this game is completely surface-level, all a well-presented illusion of Being Spider-Man that breaks the instant you think about it in any way, and you find yourself sitting your sofa, with your expensive toy for privileged people, pressing buttons to make the copaganda continue to play out in front of you.
I finished Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I had a perfectly ok time. I was rarely frustrated and occasionally found it charming and visually enthralling. I liked stuff with Miles' uncle. It also made me feel like everything about this style of game and this type of story had hit an evolutionary dead-end and had nowhere to go but running on the same treadmill, forever.
So, yes. It made me feel like Spider-ManTM.
Remember Space Invaders? Me neither. These days, it’s a game that mostly exists to pad out ‘Top 100 Video Games of All Time’ lists and sell novelty heat-change mugs. So when Space Invaders: Infinity Gene declares ”THE KING OF GAMES IS BACK!” in its opening moments, it kinda feels like that time your drunken dad shouted ”THE KING OF GAMES IS BACK!” while weaving towards the karaoke machine for a frenetic cover of a 60s hit you’ve never heard of. The game goes to great lengths to show you how much it’s evolved, but ultimately it’s an exercise in stripping away everything that uniquely identifies Space Invaders in favour of a standard shmup that seems hell-bent on inducing epilepsy in anyone who’s able to make it beyond the first world. Taito have swapped their king’s crown for a Yankee snapback and squeezed him into some skinny jeans - it would be impolite of us not to give him an encouraging smile and a respectful nod, but maybe keep your distance. The old man is dying.
with winter having arrived and snow on the ground, i've been stricken with an urge to play a bunch of skyrim... largely to try some mods i've long been curious about, like the fully voiced and uniquely smart and funny khajiit companion, inigo. my character is one with a background in thievery and a curiosity for the arcane, now become a full-on wizard complimented by magic of stealth: silencing illusion spells and conjured bows... having long thought of skyrim as the most restrictive of the elder scrolls especially with regard to magical creativity, i'm discovering there's more to it than i'd known. naturally, this brings about a need to talk about one of my favorite games:
morrowind.
actually, i really want to talk about both. i want to talk about the nature of roleplay in these games, and what it means to inhabit these characters of our own making and imagining. see, there's been plenty of debate as to whether bethesda care any longer about making 'true' rpgs, having in many ways simplified the experience on a granular level, depriving the player more and more of their options and ownership over the experience of playing their games. i do think there's a lot of truth to this, though i feel there's more to be said.
getting to the point... before considering all the differences in the systems—how you build your character and develop their skills, defining their nature through mechanics and so forth—we have to consider the very concept of these characters, the intentions at work before we get involved. i'm setting oblivion aside here because it's a bit of an outlier in that you fill the shoes of an interloper, while the "real hero" of the story (the one who'll be remembered in the history books) is martin. in skyrim, you're meant to be the dragonborn, undeniably enjoying the favor of the gods unless you deliberately avoid the main quest (perhaps even going as far as installing an alternate start mod so you can just be a bandit in the wilderness or a fisherman or whatever). in my current run through the game (more like run around, given how these work) i've decided to embrace this blessing and use it to better the situation in skyrim as much as i can. my traveling companions are a vampire princess (my gay wife) and a recovering skooma fiend. (the latter is entirely a mod creation, while the former is augmented by several mods and they interact with voiced dialogue and radiant ai conversations and everything!) so, getting to morrowind: things are considerably more ambiguous and complicated, here. i'm going to keep it somewhat short because i'd prefer not to ruin the experience for anyone interested in giving the game a try—suffice to say the whole matter of whether you're any kind of chosen one is up for debate, and the range and options you have in the course of defining who your character is are considerably... more. or, well. at least it seems to be that way. it largely is... but it's also just different.
your choices in skyrim are essentially reduced to yes or no: yes, i will explore this destiny as dragonborn. no, i will not. yes, i will go to the college of winterhold and become arch-mage, or no, i'd rather not do that and perhaps instead become a nightingale, master of thieves. of course, you can choose to do all of these things—or to do none of them. and it sometimes does go further than that, such as when faced with the matter of joining the dark brotherhood. (i'm going to spoil some things here, so skip to the next paragraph if you'd rather avoid that.) having taken it upon yourself to murder the terrible, abusive matron of the orphanage in riften at the request of a young boy calling upon the infamous death cult, their leader eventually abducts you and locks you in a cabin with three blindfolded strangers, tells you that one of them has a contract on their head, and forces you into deciding which one to kill. a cruel initiation. (an interesting note is that the clairvoyance spell points toward one of them, though there's no other indication of which would be the correct choice, if any.) you have one alternative: kill your captor, free the others, and set about laying waste to the entire dark brotherhood. this is an actual questline, its availability as a path of action not readily apparent given the gravity of the situation—a bit of thinking on your feet is required to discover this. it's not always easy to stumble into these sort of options given the nature of questing in skyrim, where you're typically pulled along by quest markers... but they are there, and it's always refreshing.
morrowind is another beast entirely. beyond acceptance or denial, the matter of how you proceed is dramatically more self-driven. there are no quest markers. rarely will an npc tell you exactly where to go, and even when they do it's up to you to find your way. and then there's the question of how you'll go about accomplishing whatever task, left entirely up to you. you're not just an adventurer or a mercenary—you're an investigator. you keep a journal describing most of your interactions and observations in the game itself, and it's never a bad idea to keep notes of your own outside of the game. i've seen plenty of others describe dialogue as a bunch of wiki pages or whatever, entirely boring and so forth, but holy shit do i feel the exact opposite. i don't think there's any other game that fills me with such a desire to delve into its world and learn everything i can to understand its nature, its history, its people, and my role among them. reincarnation of a legend or not—and it's up to you to decide, not just via yes or no, but in the text, in your imagination, your headcanon, in the details. my favorite nerevarine is an iconoclastic wanderer who feels empowered by her otherwise bewildering involvement with the blades and, as an outlander to native dunmer 'culture', places the eradication of the enslavement of the khajiit and argonian races high on her list of motivations. becoming a demigod through her own efforts (albeit guided by prophecy) is just the icing on the cake. you could play through (in, around) morrowind a dozen times and find a new path, deepen the path(s) you've previously found interesting or exciting... it's just a game that makes me dream like no other.
also, you can (if you so choose) eventually craft spells that let you jump across the entire island of vvardenfell. or simply fly. you can't levitate at all in these other games! (well... without mods.)
i'm really enjoying my time with skyrim right now, and i think i've found a way to play a role i find fulfilling and comfortable with my own personality... but these games always lead back to morrowind, for me. it won't be long before i feel the pull back to vvardenfell once more.
morrowind.
actually, i really want to talk about both. i want to talk about the nature of roleplay in these games, and what it means to inhabit these characters of our own making and imagining. see, there's been plenty of debate as to whether bethesda care any longer about making 'true' rpgs, having in many ways simplified the experience on a granular level, depriving the player more and more of their options and ownership over the experience of playing their games. i do think there's a lot of truth to this, though i feel there's more to be said.
getting to the point... before considering all the differences in the systems—how you build your character and develop their skills, defining their nature through mechanics and so forth—we have to consider the very concept of these characters, the intentions at work before we get involved. i'm setting oblivion aside here because it's a bit of an outlier in that you fill the shoes of an interloper, while the "real hero" of the story (the one who'll be remembered in the history books) is martin. in skyrim, you're meant to be the dragonborn, undeniably enjoying the favor of the gods unless you deliberately avoid the main quest (perhaps even going as far as installing an alternate start mod so you can just be a bandit in the wilderness or a fisherman or whatever). in my current run through the game (more like run around, given how these work) i've decided to embrace this blessing and use it to better the situation in skyrim as much as i can. my traveling companions are a vampire princess (my gay wife) and a recovering skooma fiend. (the latter is entirely a mod creation, while the former is augmented by several mods and they interact with voiced dialogue and radiant ai conversations and everything!) so, getting to morrowind: things are considerably more ambiguous and complicated, here. i'm going to keep it somewhat short because i'd prefer not to ruin the experience for anyone interested in giving the game a try—suffice to say the whole matter of whether you're any kind of chosen one is up for debate, and the range and options you have in the course of defining who your character is are considerably... more. or, well. at least it seems to be that way. it largely is... but it's also just different.
your choices in skyrim are essentially reduced to yes or no: yes, i will explore this destiny as dragonborn. no, i will not. yes, i will go to the college of winterhold and become arch-mage, or no, i'd rather not do that and perhaps instead become a nightingale, master of thieves. of course, you can choose to do all of these things—or to do none of them. and it sometimes does go further than that, such as when faced with the matter of joining the dark brotherhood. (i'm going to spoil some things here, so skip to the next paragraph if you'd rather avoid that.) having taken it upon yourself to murder the terrible, abusive matron of the orphanage in riften at the request of a young boy calling upon the infamous death cult, their leader eventually abducts you and locks you in a cabin with three blindfolded strangers, tells you that one of them has a contract on their head, and forces you into deciding which one to kill. a cruel initiation. (an interesting note is that the clairvoyance spell points toward one of them, though there's no other indication of which would be the correct choice, if any.) you have one alternative: kill your captor, free the others, and set about laying waste to the entire dark brotherhood. this is an actual questline, its availability as a path of action not readily apparent given the gravity of the situation—a bit of thinking on your feet is required to discover this. it's not always easy to stumble into these sort of options given the nature of questing in skyrim, where you're typically pulled along by quest markers... but they are there, and it's always refreshing.
morrowind is another beast entirely. beyond acceptance or denial, the matter of how you proceed is dramatically more self-driven. there are no quest markers. rarely will an npc tell you exactly where to go, and even when they do it's up to you to find your way. and then there's the question of how you'll go about accomplishing whatever task, left entirely up to you. you're not just an adventurer or a mercenary—you're an investigator. you keep a journal describing most of your interactions and observations in the game itself, and it's never a bad idea to keep notes of your own outside of the game. i've seen plenty of others describe dialogue as a bunch of wiki pages or whatever, entirely boring and so forth, but holy shit do i feel the exact opposite. i don't think there's any other game that fills me with such a desire to delve into its world and learn everything i can to understand its nature, its history, its people, and my role among them. reincarnation of a legend or not—and it's up to you to decide, not just via yes or no, but in the text, in your imagination, your headcanon, in the details. my favorite nerevarine is an iconoclastic wanderer who feels empowered by her otherwise bewildering involvement with the blades and, as an outlander to native dunmer 'culture', places the eradication of the enslavement of the khajiit and argonian races high on her list of motivations. becoming a demigod through her own efforts (albeit guided by prophecy) is just the icing on the cake. you could play through (in, around) morrowind a dozen times and find a new path, deepen the path(s) you've previously found interesting or exciting... it's just a game that makes me dream like no other.
also, you can (if you so choose) eventually craft spells that let you jump across the entire island of vvardenfell. or simply fly. you can't levitate at all in these other games! (well... without mods.)
i'm really enjoying my time with skyrim right now, and i think i've found a way to play a role i find fulfilling and comfortable with my own personality... but these games always lead back to morrowind, for me. it won't be long before i feel the pull back to vvardenfell once more.
This review contains spoilers
Tell Us Why
Given Life
Are we meant to die
Helpless in our cries
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It’s early 2014, I’m pretty sure. Maybe around March, or April? It’s been a bad year. It’s going to get worse. I’m falling back into bad habits. Not leaving the house as much. Not going to classes. I’m trawling through Steam one day when I see a marginal discount on Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn. Wasn’t this good now, I heard? I hadn’t thought much of this game since I laughed at footage of the 1.0 version at launch. It’s cheap and comes with a month free trial. I like Final Fantasy. Why not?
I make my first character, a male miqo’te gladiator, a classic new player mistake to accidentally opt in to Tanking because Gladiators are the only class that starts with a sword. I name them Woodaba Vacaum, a surname that is borrowed from a character in a game I will never finish making. “Vacaum” doesn’t mean what I think it means and apparently isn’t even a latin word like I thought it was. I play for a few hours, and have a pretty good time, but, y’know…exams are coming up, there are other games to play, and this “Ifrit” boss seems pretty scary. I log out, let the free month lapse, and let the game languish in my steam library for years.
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It would be an incredible understatement to say that Endwalker had a lot on it’s shoulders. Not only was it following up on the near-universally beloved Shadowbringers, not only was it the first piece of content released after the game unexpectedly skyrocketed in popularity in 2021 and became the nigh-mythical “WoW Killer” almost out of nowhere, but it also had the unenviable task of wrapping up a story that has been in the making, in some shape or form, since 2010, a story that had some whispering in hushed tones about being “the best Final Fantasy, now”, whilst not resolving it too conclusively to encourage people to stop playing Square Enix’s most profitable venture. Given all that, it’s maybe a little churlish of me to point out that, under the weight of all this, Endwalker stumbles, falls, and ultimately chooses to lighten that load to ensure it can reach the finish line intact.
I’ll just be upfront with this: I don’t think this as good as Shadowbringers. I’m not even sure it’s as good as Heavensward. Even Stormblood, increasingly the punching bag of the XIV community, for all it’s messiness, feels like it’s aiming for more ambitious and thematically interesting things than Endwalker. I think as the afterglow fades, we’re going to see less and less people somewhat embarrassingly referring to this as “peak fiction”. There was genuinely a point in the main quest where I felt crushingly disappointed that this was the direction they had decided to take things for the grand finale, that the game had, in some ways, become the least interesting version of itself, went for a storyline that I would sooner expect from, say, Star Ocean, than Final Fantasy. But at the same time, there were moments that had my heart soaring for how much they affected me, left me feeling awed at just how tight a hold this story had on my heart. For everything that irks me, there are things I dearly love.
Thinking about Endwalker is difficult, and I think that might be why we’ve yet to see many substantive pieces of criticism on it that isn’t just effervescent praise. It’s taken me a long time to write this piece. I’m still unsure how I feel about many things in it. I don’t know if I’m ready to write this review.
Let's try anyway.
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It’s summer 2016. I’m at the end of my final year of university. I’m leaving with a decent grade in a subject that is kind of worthless, especially since the uncertainty following the Brexit vote is about to obliterate the few job opportunities there are in this field. If I’m honest with myself, I never quite thought about what I would do after university. I was so fixated on the dream of the rose coloured campus life that I never thought about what I’d do after that. So instead of answering that question, I’m playing MMOs again. I’ve been revisiting my childhood fascination of Azeroth, but it’s slowly losing its luster. But then, I remember. Didn’t I have Final Fantasy XIV on steam? I keep hearing that it’s really good now. Maybe I should try it again…
Suddenly, I’m Woodaba Vacaum once more, picking up just where I’d left off over two years ago. The necessity of having to do group content to continue the story gets me over a hurdle that I’ve never quite managed to get over for an MMO, and suddenly, I’m hooked. Over the coming months, I play through the entirety of the A Realm Reborn storyline as well as the Crystal Tower raid series, the very first raids I’ve done for any MMORPG “properly”, and finally reach Ishgard and the Heavensward expansion, forgoing the Paladin job in favour of Dark Knight because events of the main quest suddenly make me feel uncomfortable playing Paladin and in that moment, realise that I’m invested in this world quite unlike any other before. The incredible Dark Knight quests only solidify that for me. In late November, having started somewhere around June, I’m officially, for the very first time “caught up” with the main story of an MMORPG, finishing the 3.3 Dragonsong War quests with a final confrontation with Nidhogg.
But it’s something I did alone. The duty finder is a godsend and encountering genuinely unpleasant people almost never happens, but I’m too shy to join a free company, or join in on any PF content for high-difficulty content. Bereft of MSQ, I log out for a while. Final Fantasy XV is coming out soon, after all. The book on the Dragonsong War closes in silence.
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Endwalker starts pretty slow, with Labyrinthos probably ranking as one of the lamer zones in the game and Thavnair taking a bit too long to go anywhere cool, but once you arrive in Garlemald, things pick up significantly, and the game dives headfirst into some of its most fascinating and thorny content in its history, and then, after a hugely surprising bodyswap sequence, the game slams down hard on the accelerator and leaves whatever expectations you might have for where the story is going to go far, far behind it. To leave me completely in suspense at where the story is going to go after this many expansions is a genuine feat that I appreciate, but it also means that sheer adrenaline and excitement does a lot to carry you through stuff that is maybe, in hindsight, more than a little thematically suspect. Still, my eyebrows went through the roof when I killed Zodiark in the first trial, and I spent the next couple dozen hours absolutely dumbfounded as to where the story could possibly go next, and completely enjoying that feeling of this game still being able to surprise me after all this time.
What’s also surprising is the quality of the battle content in the game thus far. The first two trials, in particular, are tuned to a notably higher difficulty than prior story trials, finally recognizing that if someone has three expansions under their belt they might be able to tackle some heftier mechanics than a stack or two. The dungeon bosses too are notably more demanding mechanically than even Shadowbringers’ bosses, continuing the style of that expansion of very simple layouts twinned with boss mechanics that would give a Heavensward boss a heart attack. The game in general seems more keen to prepare players for the jump in difficulty that comes with EX-level content, which is something I really appreciate, as someone who spent over a year of playing this game too terrified to even consider checking out some of the most mechanically engaging and satisfying multiplayer gameplay one can find. While I think The Seat of Sacrifice remains my favorite fight in the entire game, the fact that The Mothercrystal in particular is able to put in a decent fight for the top spot is incredibly high praise.
The new jobs are also two real winners, particularly Sage, which is positively electrifying to play, even in old content, thanks partially to the stat squish that has given a lot of old raids back some bite that they lost after Shadowbringers beefed up numbers so considerably. Getting O11 in Raid Roulette and finding it to be once again a tense white-knuckle drag race of a fight put an enormous smile on my face. Even stuff that seems rough at first glance, like Dark Knight and New Summoner, will continually evolve in both perception and tweaks as time passes, and already we’re seeing a re-evaulation of the initial backlash against Dark Knight after it unexpectedly found itself sitting atop the tanking DPS charts. Although I’m reviewing Endwalker now, as a period in the game’s life it is only just beginning, over the next couple years it will continue to evolve and change, and will succeed and fail in different respects, just like how Shadowbringers ended up as a mediocre expansion in the eyes of many who are strictly interested in high-level raid content despite being so beloved among those like myself who place a high value on narrative.
Ultimately, it’s that value that has my feelings on Endwalker so mixed. There’s so much to enjoy in this expansion, so much to appreciate, that the areas where it fumbles and falters are drawn into sharp relief, and ultimately it’s the areas of this story and this world that I value the most that Endwalker fumbles the hardest.
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It’s 2017. It’s a bad year. It will continue to be a bad year. Aside from a miserable fast food job I hold down for a couple months at the start of the year until one of the other workers there threatens to kill me, I am unemployed for the entirety of the year. I try a lot of things, and I fail at all of them. I am increasingly ill at ease with the person I am pretending to be. The details aren’t relevant. I am unhappy. But I still play Final Fantasy XIV, and, in fact, I find myself incredibly excited to take part in my first “live” expansion launch for an MMO, in the form of Stormblood. It’s certainly a rough one, and leads into something of a rough MSQ, but it’s one that I still treasure dearly as a light in a time where I had few.
I’m keeping up to date more regularly, I start doing content without guides, I level other jobs, and I find myself becoming a part of the community of the game in a way I simply haven’t before. As 2017 changes to 2018, FFXIV becomes more and more a part of my life, as starting a masters in a last ditch attempt to give my life a form of direction leaves me with far less time to play games than ever before, and FFXIV’s structure allows me to dive into content and experience the myriad stories within piecemeal in between work and classes. Whether it’s the Omega raids, the slowly unfolding MSQ, or getting into fishing while listening to revision notes, I have quite unexpectedly gone from someone who Plays XIV to a XIV Person. It gets me excited, helps me destress, helps me socialize, and is helping me in ways that I only begin to understand.
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When Shadowbringers discussed the Final Days as experienced by the Ancients, I thought what was happening was fairly conclusive: they encountered something that did not fit within their framework of understanding, and that lack of understanding led to a horrified revelation at their own limits and mortality, a fear of death that manifested via their creation magicks into demonic entities shaped like their own death. It was, I thought, quite clear and extremely resonant with the wider themes of the expansion vis a vis allowing old things to die and fade away and be replaced with better things, both the sadness and necessity of that. I genuinely wasn’t expecting further elaboration on The Final Days in Endwalker, but further elaboration is what we get, and the explanation only serves to narrow the scope of interpretation and resonance to such an extent that it arguably harms Shadowbringers in hindsight, which is maybe the most damning thing I can say about a story beat.
To put it simply, Meteion sucks. I know some people really like the birb but for me, she just blows, I’m sorry. This jokerfied Junko Enoshima wannabe is one of the lamer villains in the entire final fantasy pantheon, like if Seymour Guado was actually the villain of FFX instead of a distraction from the real problem. An evil bird-girl in space who is radiating Bad Vibes because she thinks life is meaningless and therefore everyone should die is something I would expect from an AI-generated parody of Bad JRPG plots, and yet, here it is, sitting as the culmination of this decade-long narrative. After the thoughtful theming of Shadowbringers I could not have imagined that its sequel would boil everything down to generalized Hopepunk but that is kind of what happened. No longer is the demise of the Ancients a result of the flaws of their own societal perspective that is resonant with real things, instead it is because a big ball of evil at the end of the universe turns you into a monster when you feel despair.
And yeah, I get that big loud themes of Hope facing Despair at the end of the universe is kind of a JRPG staple, but boiling things down to such primal themes causes a lot of friction with the kind of game Final Fantasy XIV, and, indeed, the series as a whole, has been up to this point. In Shadowbringers, you were fighting a near godlike entity at the end of their universe, but that godlike entity represented material things. They were an aging boomer who refused to accept or acknowledge the validity of the world that was coming in favor of their uncritical adoration of their idealized prelapsarian idea of the world as it was. In contrast to many lesser Hopepunk stories, Final Fantasy XIV has previously acknowledged that people feel despair for real, material reasons. The people of Ishgard and Dravania in Heavensward felt despair because they were trapped in a war built on lies and deception, a Foundation constructed to justify the unjustifiable. The people of Doma and Ala Mhigo in Stormblood felt despair because they were trapped under the boot of imperial tyranny and violence, of their cultures being taken from them and twisted beyond recognizability, of their lives being treated as sport by a spoiled brat born into immense power, an expansion who’s materialist concerns hit me particularly hard as someone living in a land occupied by a colonial power. And, of course, the people of The First in Shadowbringers despair because the ideology they were taught from birth was good and right and just turned against them and choked them to the edge of their life, and they overcame the despair by uniting to overthrow the (admittedly fatphobic caricature) eikon of greed and complacency at the top of it all. In Endwalker, people feel despair, ultimately, because an evil space bird with primary-school nihilist motivations makes them feel despair.
In the real world, people feel “despair” for many reasons, and more often than not, those reasons are directly related to the material circumstances that affect their daily lives. Not being able to pay rent, being unemployed, suffering heartbreak and depression, witnessing the callousness and greed of the people who hold positions of power in our world. Reducing Despair to an ontological narrative force completely divorced from the lived experiences of our everyday lives also divorces it from resonance with said lived experiences, and is what ultimately leaves Endwalker feeling intellectually hollow. Shadowbringers electrified my mind for months after I finished it and I am fairly confident the same will not happen here. When this reveal happened, Endwalker transformed from a story that had me literally trembling with excitement the more I played to something that, even if for just a moment, made me question whether investing in this world and these characters for as long as I have had been worth it after all.
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It’s 2019. I’m coming to the end of my masters, working on a dissertation project that is, hilariously, a “letterboxd for games” called…Backloggr. The release of Shadowbringers is imminent, and I am excited. Not like I was excited for Stormblood, no. Now I’m in and Shadowbringers is my most anticipated game of the year, and I’m planning how I can voraciously consume it whilst not letting my dissertation project suffer. What’s more, 2019 is the year I am finally honest with myself and others that I am trans, and my relationship with my FFXIV character finally makes sense. They are the medium in which I experiment with gender and gender presentation in a way that does not have the pressure and anxieties of experimentation in the real world, a way to experiment with an audience that won’t judge me in the way that I fear the most. This subject - and Final Fantasy XIV in general - becomes the subject of my first paid piece of games writing, and although I have mixed feelings on that article, the fact that I managed it at all is something that I hold dearly to heart. The article even goes up during my first clear of The Seat of Sacrifice [Extreme], my favorite fight in the entire game and one of my favorite moments in all of video games. It is the culmination of a story that has evolved from “pretty good, for an MMO” to a genuine contender for Best Final Fantasy Story, which I can only really express as the highest praise possible given that FF is probably my favorite series of games that contains multiple all-time contenders.
Final Fantasy XIV is a part of my life. I’m not going to credit it for the way I’ve grown as a person or a writer or say that it saved me or anything like that, I find the way people often give the media they enjoy the credit for accomplishing things like that disappointing because it deprives them of enormous credit. But during Shadowbringers especially, it helped me. It helped me work things out about myself, it helped me get work, it helped me develop my critical and creative writing faculties, it helped me make friends and it helped me get closer to old ones. And it helped make me happy when I wasn’t.
How do you even begin to review something like that?
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As a story, Endwalker is frequently and fairly consistently delightful and enjoyable moment to moment, but attempting to think more deeply about what it is trying to say causes a lot of friction, particularly when attempting to reconcile it with past expansions, and the Meteion stuff is maybe No.1 with a bullet as to why this is. I keep thinking about the scene where Jullus, one of the expansion’s most compelling new characters, rages with righteous anger against Zenos viator Galvus for destroying his home and people in his quest to fightfuck the player character, only for Alphinaud to tell him that he has to remain calm or else he’ll turn into a big evil monster the heroes will have no choice but to take down. Or how the fandom’s overly sympathetic lens of Emet-Selch and the Ancients in general has been absorbed wholeheartedly, leading to a shockingly uncritical depiction of a society that has a fundamental callous disregard for the sanctity of life, and particularly falls a little too much in love with Venat/Hydaelyn, sanding down many of the most interesting wrinkles of her character to make her a fairly unambiguous good guy at the end (which is not to say that her character is without depth - far from it - but the game does almost repel from the idea of really digging into that depth in favor of idolizing her), especially given things like the bodyswap and the conscious uselessness of the characters on the moon highlighting the fallibility of Hydaelyn and her plans, and casting a critical eye on the Scions’ uncritical adoration of her (you can even say “hey what was with Hydaelyn straight up lying to me in Heavensward ” to which an NPC says “huh dunno, probably nothing to worry about” which I thought for sure was Going Somewhere but no I was simply Not Supposed To Worry About it). And, frankly, only doom lays down the path of trying to parse any kind of statement out of the Final Days itself, what with it turning people feeling depression, righteous anger against injustice, and other true, human emotions unhelpfully grouped together and labeled “despair” into evil creatures who cannot be saved and must be put down lest they harm others.
Endwalker is a mess, both when it comes to reconciling what it’s trying to say with itself, and when it comes to how it interacts with prior expansions. But if it must be a mess? If it has to have this difficult and frictional relationship with the parts of the story I value the most? If it must end this way? Then let it be a beautiful mess. Let it be dumb and questionable with impeccable style, let it burn it’s bridges with impeccably dancing flames. Endwalker is many things at many times, but it is almost always doing what it is doing amazingly, with a confidence fully owned by a creative team burning with a confidence and passion found almost nowhere else in the big-budget space. Any time Endwalker goes somewhere, it does so in the most brash, confident manner possible, with some truly incredible visuals and direction that is genuinely staggering coming from a game that’s still kinda running on 13 year old FF13 tech. The music team once again does incredible work here, and if this soundtrack isn’t spoken of in the same hushed tones as all the expansion soundtracks before it, it’s only because Square Enix has become ever more draconian about allowing people to share this wonderful music. I said in a kind of cutting way earlier that Endwalker is consistently delightful and enjoyable moment to moment, but I want to stress that being continually entertaining throughout is something that many games utterly fail to manage, and the day I turn my nose up at a story that delights in its movements as much as Endwalker does is the day you can officially write me off as a lost cause.
And, hell, it’s not like the story isn’t worthwhile. I’ve been highly critical of the decisions made thematically, and I stand by those criticisms, but not only are the decisions not as disastrous as they could have been (in the incredible Answers scene the status of the Ascians as pining for a prelapsarian utopia that did not exist is upheld despite much of Elpis’ attempts to undermine that, which I felt was very important) but also there is still a great deal of resonance here to be found here. I truly think Garlemald, in particular, is a strong contender for best arc in the entire MSQ, and the character writing as a whole remains excellent. Thavnair is a cultural appropriation playground to be certain, but it’s also got one of the sickest characters in the whole game making his nest there, and I hope to see it developed further in future patches. The fact that I’m not as condemnatory of the Elpis arc as I think perhaps part of me wants to be is a testament to just how well rounded Hythlodaeus, Emet-Selch, Venat and Hermes manage to be. The Zenos duel at the end is obviously hysterical as a big dumb shonen finale but it also I think acknowledges a truth about this game and the people that play it that a lot of games (including this one, in the past) try to dance around. I may fundamentally disgree and find facile the game's argument that suffering is what gives life meaning, but it's in how that idea interacts with characters like the Ancients and Zenos, that this theme finds some purchase in my heart, an exploration of how people who have lived blessed, privileged lives of plenty are deaf and cold-hearted to the suffering of those less fortunate around them, and how that eventually twists into genuine malice as they become ever more desperate to maintain their comfortable status quo. Even if I find the root of why she has to do it fairly vacuous, Venat choosing to destroy her world for the sake of a potential better one is incredibly powerful. And above all, this story of people at the end of days finding something to hold onto, something worth living for, is something that I did find affecting and meaningful, even if I kind of have to avoid thinking about the details in order for it to have the biggest impact. Every day, I feel the crushing weight of the end of the world all around me, and I struggle greatly with just trying to live in a world where all around me are reminders trying to convince me that there is no hope to save our planet in the face of the people and systems killing it. And while I would caution against becoming addicted to Hope as a placebo against genuine change, there is still something to be said for making me feel like there is hope.
The answer that Endwalker ultimately arrives at, is that in the darkest of times, we find the strength to go on in each other, and in standing/working together, we can overcome anything. It’s a cliche, perhaps boring answer, but in many ways it is also the right one. The Warrior of Light has never walked alone, after all, they’ve always had a party of 3/7/23 others to journey alongside, to help carry them through their trials. Whether they saved others from death, took the fire for their friends, or slain the beasts that threatened them, we’ve always done this together. I know I have. I wouldn’t be here without those who have walked beside me, who healed me when I was at the end of my rope, who stood alongside me against my problems and granted me the strength to see them through. Whatever else I may think about what Endwalker has to say about living at the end of the world, I think it is right about that, at least.
Do I wish Endwalker handled things differently? Yeah, kinda. Do I think there are things about it that suck? For sure. Is this a fitting conclusion to a story over a decade in the making? Honestly, I still don’t know.
But did I have fun? Was it meaningful? Am I happy I made these friends, fought these battles? Am I glad I heard what I heard, felt what I felt, and thought what I thought?
Has my journey been good? Has it been worthwhile?
...That, I can’t deny.
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Whispers
Falling silently drifts on the wind
But I hear you
Our Journey
Now a memory fading from sight
But I see you
You're not alone.
Given Life
Are we meant to die
Helpless in our cries
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It’s early 2014, I’m pretty sure. Maybe around March, or April? It’s been a bad year. It’s going to get worse. I’m falling back into bad habits. Not leaving the house as much. Not going to classes. I’m trawling through Steam one day when I see a marginal discount on Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn. Wasn’t this good now, I heard? I hadn’t thought much of this game since I laughed at footage of the 1.0 version at launch. It’s cheap and comes with a month free trial. I like Final Fantasy. Why not?
I make my first character, a male miqo’te gladiator, a classic new player mistake to accidentally opt in to Tanking because Gladiators are the only class that starts with a sword. I name them Woodaba Vacaum, a surname that is borrowed from a character in a game I will never finish making. “Vacaum” doesn’t mean what I think it means and apparently isn’t even a latin word like I thought it was. I play for a few hours, and have a pretty good time, but, y’know…exams are coming up, there are other games to play, and this “Ifrit” boss seems pretty scary. I log out, let the free month lapse, and let the game languish in my steam library for years.
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It would be an incredible understatement to say that Endwalker had a lot on it’s shoulders. Not only was it following up on the near-universally beloved Shadowbringers, not only was it the first piece of content released after the game unexpectedly skyrocketed in popularity in 2021 and became the nigh-mythical “WoW Killer” almost out of nowhere, but it also had the unenviable task of wrapping up a story that has been in the making, in some shape or form, since 2010, a story that had some whispering in hushed tones about being “the best Final Fantasy, now”, whilst not resolving it too conclusively to encourage people to stop playing Square Enix’s most profitable venture. Given all that, it’s maybe a little churlish of me to point out that, under the weight of all this, Endwalker stumbles, falls, and ultimately chooses to lighten that load to ensure it can reach the finish line intact.
I’ll just be upfront with this: I don’t think this as good as Shadowbringers. I’m not even sure it’s as good as Heavensward. Even Stormblood, increasingly the punching bag of the XIV community, for all it’s messiness, feels like it’s aiming for more ambitious and thematically interesting things than Endwalker. I think as the afterglow fades, we’re going to see less and less people somewhat embarrassingly referring to this as “peak fiction”. There was genuinely a point in the main quest where I felt crushingly disappointed that this was the direction they had decided to take things for the grand finale, that the game had, in some ways, become the least interesting version of itself, went for a storyline that I would sooner expect from, say, Star Ocean, than Final Fantasy. But at the same time, there were moments that had my heart soaring for how much they affected me, left me feeling awed at just how tight a hold this story had on my heart. For everything that irks me, there are things I dearly love.
Thinking about Endwalker is difficult, and I think that might be why we’ve yet to see many substantive pieces of criticism on it that isn’t just effervescent praise. It’s taken me a long time to write this piece. I’m still unsure how I feel about many things in it. I don’t know if I’m ready to write this review.
Let's try anyway.
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It’s summer 2016. I’m at the end of my final year of university. I’m leaving with a decent grade in a subject that is kind of worthless, especially since the uncertainty following the Brexit vote is about to obliterate the few job opportunities there are in this field. If I’m honest with myself, I never quite thought about what I would do after university. I was so fixated on the dream of the rose coloured campus life that I never thought about what I’d do after that. So instead of answering that question, I’m playing MMOs again. I’ve been revisiting my childhood fascination of Azeroth, but it’s slowly losing its luster. But then, I remember. Didn’t I have Final Fantasy XIV on steam? I keep hearing that it’s really good now. Maybe I should try it again…
Suddenly, I’m Woodaba Vacaum once more, picking up just where I’d left off over two years ago. The necessity of having to do group content to continue the story gets me over a hurdle that I’ve never quite managed to get over for an MMO, and suddenly, I’m hooked. Over the coming months, I play through the entirety of the A Realm Reborn storyline as well as the Crystal Tower raid series, the very first raids I’ve done for any MMORPG “properly”, and finally reach Ishgard and the Heavensward expansion, forgoing the Paladin job in favour of Dark Knight because events of the main quest suddenly make me feel uncomfortable playing Paladin and in that moment, realise that I’m invested in this world quite unlike any other before. The incredible Dark Knight quests only solidify that for me. In late November, having started somewhere around June, I’m officially, for the very first time “caught up” with the main story of an MMORPG, finishing the 3.3 Dragonsong War quests with a final confrontation with Nidhogg.
But it’s something I did alone. The duty finder is a godsend and encountering genuinely unpleasant people almost never happens, but I’m too shy to join a free company, or join in on any PF content for high-difficulty content. Bereft of MSQ, I log out for a while. Final Fantasy XV is coming out soon, after all. The book on the Dragonsong War closes in silence.
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Endwalker starts pretty slow, with Labyrinthos probably ranking as one of the lamer zones in the game and Thavnair taking a bit too long to go anywhere cool, but once you arrive in Garlemald, things pick up significantly, and the game dives headfirst into some of its most fascinating and thorny content in its history, and then, after a hugely surprising bodyswap sequence, the game slams down hard on the accelerator and leaves whatever expectations you might have for where the story is going to go far, far behind it. To leave me completely in suspense at where the story is going to go after this many expansions is a genuine feat that I appreciate, but it also means that sheer adrenaline and excitement does a lot to carry you through stuff that is maybe, in hindsight, more than a little thematically suspect. Still, my eyebrows went through the roof when I killed Zodiark in the first trial, and I spent the next couple dozen hours absolutely dumbfounded as to where the story could possibly go next, and completely enjoying that feeling of this game still being able to surprise me after all this time.
What’s also surprising is the quality of the battle content in the game thus far. The first two trials, in particular, are tuned to a notably higher difficulty than prior story trials, finally recognizing that if someone has three expansions under their belt they might be able to tackle some heftier mechanics than a stack or two. The dungeon bosses too are notably more demanding mechanically than even Shadowbringers’ bosses, continuing the style of that expansion of very simple layouts twinned with boss mechanics that would give a Heavensward boss a heart attack. The game in general seems more keen to prepare players for the jump in difficulty that comes with EX-level content, which is something I really appreciate, as someone who spent over a year of playing this game too terrified to even consider checking out some of the most mechanically engaging and satisfying multiplayer gameplay one can find. While I think The Seat of Sacrifice remains my favorite fight in the entire game, the fact that The Mothercrystal in particular is able to put in a decent fight for the top spot is incredibly high praise.
The new jobs are also two real winners, particularly Sage, which is positively electrifying to play, even in old content, thanks partially to the stat squish that has given a lot of old raids back some bite that they lost after Shadowbringers beefed up numbers so considerably. Getting O11 in Raid Roulette and finding it to be once again a tense white-knuckle drag race of a fight put an enormous smile on my face. Even stuff that seems rough at first glance, like Dark Knight and New Summoner, will continually evolve in both perception and tweaks as time passes, and already we’re seeing a re-evaulation of the initial backlash against Dark Knight after it unexpectedly found itself sitting atop the tanking DPS charts. Although I’m reviewing Endwalker now, as a period in the game’s life it is only just beginning, over the next couple years it will continue to evolve and change, and will succeed and fail in different respects, just like how Shadowbringers ended up as a mediocre expansion in the eyes of many who are strictly interested in high-level raid content despite being so beloved among those like myself who place a high value on narrative.
Ultimately, it’s that value that has my feelings on Endwalker so mixed. There’s so much to enjoy in this expansion, so much to appreciate, that the areas where it fumbles and falters are drawn into sharp relief, and ultimately it’s the areas of this story and this world that I value the most that Endwalker fumbles the hardest.
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It’s 2017. It’s a bad year. It will continue to be a bad year. Aside from a miserable fast food job I hold down for a couple months at the start of the year until one of the other workers there threatens to kill me, I am unemployed for the entirety of the year. I try a lot of things, and I fail at all of them. I am increasingly ill at ease with the person I am pretending to be. The details aren’t relevant. I am unhappy. But I still play Final Fantasy XIV, and, in fact, I find myself incredibly excited to take part in my first “live” expansion launch for an MMO, in the form of Stormblood. It’s certainly a rough one, and leads into something of a rough MSQ, but it’s one that I still treasure dearly as a light in a time where I had few.
I’m keeping up to date more regularly, I start doing content without guides, I level other jobs, and I find myself becoming a part of the community of the game in a way I simply haven’t before. As 2017 changes to 2018, FFXIV becomes more and more a part of my life, as starting a masters in a last ditch attempt to give my life a form of direction leaves me with far less time to play games than ever before, and FFXIV’s structure allows me to dive into content and experience the myriad stories within piecemeal in between work and classes. Whether it’s the Omega raids, the slowly unfolding MSQ, or getting into fishing while listening to revision notes, I have quite unexpectedly gone from someone who Plays XIV to a XIV Person. It gets me excited, helps me destress, helps me socialize, and is helping me in ways that I only begin to understand.
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When Shadowbringers discussed the Final Days as experienced by the Ancients, I thought what was happening was fairly conclusive: they encountered something that did not fit within their framework of understanding, and that lack of understanding led to a horrified revelation at their own limits and mortality, a fear of death that manifested via their creation magicks into demonic entities shaped like their own death. It was, I thought, quite clear and extremely resonant with the wider themes of the expansion vis a vis allowing old things to die and fade away and be replaced with better things, both the sadness and necessity of that. I genuinely wasn’t expecting further elaboration on The Final Days in Endwalker, but further elaboration is what we get, and the explanation only serves to narrow the scope of interpretation and resonance to such an extent that it arguably harms Shadowbringers in hindsight, which is maybe the most damning thing I can say about a story beat.
To put it simply, Meteion sucks. I know some people really like the birb but for me, she just blows, I’m sorry. This jokerfied Junko Enoshima wannabe is one of the lamer villains in the entire final fantasy pantheon, like if Seymour Guado was actually the villain of FFX instead of a distraction from the real problem. An evil bird-girl in space who is radiating Bad Vibes because she thinks life is meaningless and therefore everyone should die is something I would expect from an AI-generated parody of Bad JRPG plots, and yet, here it is, sitting as the culmination of this decade-long narrative. After the thoughtful theming of Shadowbringers I could not have imagined that its sequel would boil everything down to generalized Hopepunk but that is kind of what happened. No longer is the demise of the Ancients a result of the flaws of their own societal perspective that is resonant with real things, instead it is because a big ball of evil at the end of the universe turns you into a monster when you feel despair.
And yeah, I get that big loud themes of Hope facing Despair at the end of the universe is kind of a JRPG staple, but boiling things down to such primal themes causes a lot of friction with the kind of game Final Fantasy XIV, and, indeed, the series as a whole, has been up to this point. In Shadowbringers, you were fighting a near godlike entity at the end of their universe, but that godlike entity represented material things. They were an aging boomer who refused to accept or acknowledge the validity of the world that was coming in favor of their uncritical adoration of their idealized prelapsarian idea of the world as it was. In contrast to many lesser Hopepunk stories, Final Fantasy XIV has previously acknowledged that people feel despair for real, material reasons. The people of Ishgard and Dravania in Heavensward felt despair because they were trapped in a war built on lies and deception, a Foundation constructed to justify the unjustifiable. The people of Doma and Ala Mhigo in Stormblood felt despair because they were trapped under the boot of imperial tyranny and violence, of their cultures being taken from them and twisted beyond recognizability, of their lives being treated as sport by a spoiled brat born into immense power, an expansion who’s materialist concerns hit me particularly hard as someone living in a land occupied by a colonial power. And, of course, the people of The First in Shadowbringers despair because the ideology they were taught from birth was good and right and just turned against them and choked them to the edge of their life, and they overcame the despair by uniting to overthrow the (admittedly fatphobic caricature) eikon of greed and complacency at the top of it all. In Endwalker, people feel despair, ultimately, because an evil space bird with primary-school nihilist motivations makes them feel despair.
In the real world, people feel “despair” for many reasons, and more often than not, those reasons are directly related to the material circumstances that affect their daily lives. Not being able to pay rent, being unemployed, suffering heartbreak and depression, witnessing the callousness and greed of the people who hold positions of power in our world. Reducing Despair to an ontological narrative force completely divorced from the lived experiences of our everyday lives also divorces it from resonance with said lived experiences, and is what ultimately leaves Endwalker feeling intellectually hollow. Shadowbringers electrified my mind for months after I finished it and I am fairly confident the same will not happen here. When this reveal happened, Endwalker transformed from a story that had me literally trembling with excitement the more I played to something that, even if for just a moment, made me question whether investing in this world and these characters for as long as I have had been worth it after all.
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It’s 2019. I’m coming to the end of my masters, working on a dissertation project that is, hilariously, a “letterboxd for games” called…Backloggr. The release of Shadowbringers is imminent, and I am excited. Not like I was excited for Stormblood, no. Now I’m in and Shadowbringers is my most anticipated game of the year, and I’m planning how I can voraciously consume it whilst not letting my dissertation project suffer. What’s more, 2019 is the year I am finally honest with myself and others that I am trans, and my relationship with my FFXIV character finally makes sense. They are the medium in which I experiment with gender and gender presentation in a way that does not have the pressure and anxieties of experimentation in the real world, a way to experiment with an audience that won’t judge me in the way that I fear the most. This subject - and Final Fantasy XIV in general - becomes the subject of my first paid piece of games writing, and although I have mixed feelings on that article, the fact that I managed it at all is something that I hold dearly to heart. The article even goes up during my first clear of The Seat of Sacrifice [Extreme], my favorite fight in the entire game and one of my favorite moments in all of video games. It is the culmination of a story that has evolved from “pretty good, for an MMO” to a genuine contender for Best Final Fantasy Story, which I can only really express as the highest praise possible given that FF is probably my favorite series of games that contains multiple all-time contenders.
Final Fantasy XIV is a part of my life. I’m not going to credit it for the way I’ve grown as a person or a writer or say that it saved me or anything like that, I find the way people often give the media they enjoy the credit for accomplishing things like that disappointing because it deprives them of enormous credit. But during Shadowbringers especially, it helped me. It helped me work things out about myself, it helped me get work, it helped me develop my critical and creative writing faculties, it helped me make friends and it helped me get closer to old ones. And it helped make me happy when I wasn’t.
How do you even begin to review something like that?
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As a story, Endwalker is frequently and fairly consistently delightful and enjoyable moment to moment, but attempting to think more deeply about what it is trying to say causes a lot of friction, particularly when attempting to reconcile it with past expansions, and the Meteion stuff is maybe No.1 with a bullet as to why this is. I keep thinking about the scene where Jullus, one of the expansion’s most compelling new characters, rages with righteous anger against Zenos viator Galvus for destroying his home and people in his quest to fightfuck the player character, only for Alphinaud to tell him that he has to remain calm or else he’ll turn into a big evil monster the heroes will have no choice but to take down. Or how the fandom’s overly sympathetic lens of Emet-Selch and the Ancients in general has been absorbed wholeheartedly, leading to a shockingly uncritical depiction of a society that has a fundamental callous disregard for the sanctity of life, and particularly falls a little too much in love with Venat/Hydaelyn, sanding down many of the most interesting wrinkles of her character to make her a fairly unambiguous good guy at the end (which is not to say that her character is without depth - far from it - but the game does almost repel from the idea of really digging into that depth in favor of idolizing her), especially given things like the bodyswap and the conscious uselessness of the characters on the moon highlighting the fallibility of Hydaelyn and her plans, and casting a critical eye on the Scions’ uncritical adoration of her (you can even say “hey what was with Hydaelyn straight up lying to me in Heavensward ” to which an NPC says “huh dunno, probably nothing to worry about” which I thought for sure was Going Somewhere but no I was simply Not Supposed To Worry About it). And, frankly, only doom lays down the path of trying to parse any kind of statement out of the Final Days itself, what with it turning people feeling depression, righteous anger against injustice, and other true, human emotions unhelpfully grouped together and labeled “despair” into evil creatures who cannot be saved and must be put down lest they harm others.
Endwalker is a mess, both when it comes to reconciling what it’s trying to say with itself, and when it comes to how it interacts with prior expansions. But if it must be a mess? If it has to have this difficult and frictional relationship with the parts of the story I value the most? If it must end this way? Then let it be a beautiful mess. Let it be dumb and questionable with impeccable style, let it burn it’s bridges with impeccably dancing flames. Endwalker is many things at many times, but it is almost always doing what it is doing amazingly, with a confidence fully owned by a creative team burning with a confidence and passion found almost nowhere else in the big-budget space. Any time Endwalker goes somewhere, it does so in the most brash, confident manner possible, with some truly incredible visuals and direction that is genuinely staggering coming from a game that’s still kinda running on 13 year old FF13 tech. The music team once again does incredible work here, and if this soundtrack isn’t spoken of in the same hushed tones as all the expansion soundtracks before it, it’s only because Square Enix has become ever more draconian about allowing people to share this wonderful music. I said in a kind of cutting way earlier that Endwalker is consistently delightful and enjoyable moment to moment, but I want to stress that being continually entertaining throughout is something that many games utterly fail to manage, and the day I turn my nose up at a story that delights in its movements as much as Endwalker does is the day you can officially write me off as a lost cause.
And, hell, it’s not like the story isn’t worthwhile. I’ve been highly critical of the decisions made thematically, and I stand by those criticisms, but not only are the decisions not as disastrous as they could have been (in the incredible Answers scene the status of the Ascians as pining for a prelapsarian utopia that did not exist is upheld despite much of Elpis’ attempts to undermine that, which I felt was very important) but also there is still a great deal of resonance here to be found here. I truly think Garlemald, in particular, is a strong contender for best arc in the entire MSQ, and the character writing as a whole remains excellent. Thavnair is a cultural appropriation playground to be certain, but it’s also got one of the sickest characters in the whole game making his nest there, and I hope to see it developed further in future patches. The fact that I’m not as condemnatory of the Elpis arc as I think perhaps part of me wants to be is a testament to just how well rounded Hythlodaeus, Emet-Selch, Venat and Hermes manage to be. The Zenos duel at the end is obviously hysterical as a big dumb shonen finale but it also I think acknowledges a truth about this game and the people that play it that a lot of games (including this one, in the past) try to dance around. I may fundamentally disgree and find facile the game's argument that suffering is what gives life meaning, but it's in how that idea interacts with characters like the Ancients and Zenos, that this theme finds some purchase in my heart, an exploration of how people who have lived blessed, privileged lives of plenty are deaf and cold-hearted to the suffering of those less fortunate around them, and how that eventually twists into genuine malice as they become ever more desperate to maintain their comfortable status quo. Even if I find the root of why she has to do it fairly vacuous, Venat choosing to destroy her world for the sake of a potential better one is incredibly powerful. And above all, this story of people at the end of days finding something to hold onto, something worth living for, is something that I did find affecting and meaningful, even if I kind of have to avoid thinking about the details in order for it to have the biggest impact. Every day, I feel the crushing weight of the end of the world all around me, and I struggle greatly with just trying to live in a world where all around me are reminders trying to convince me that there is no hope to save our planet in the face of the people and systems killing it. And while I would caution against becoming addicted to Hope as a placebo against genuine change, there is still something to be said for making me feel like there is hope.
The answer that Endwalker ultimately arrives at, is that in the darkest of times, we find the strength to go on in each other, and in standing/working together, we can overcome anything. It’s a cliche, perhaps boring answer, but in many ways it is also the right one. The Warrior of Light has never walked alone, after all, they’ve always had a party of 3/7/23 others to journey alongside, to help carry them through their trials. Whether they saved others from death, took the fire for their friends, or slain the beasts that threatened them, we’ve always done this together. I know I have. I wouldn’t be here without those who have walked beside me, who healed me when I was at the end of my rope, who stood alongside me against my problems and granted me the strength to see them through. Whatever else I may think about what Endwalker has to say about living at the end of the world, I think it is right about that, at least.
Do I wish Endwalker handled things differently? Yeah, kinda. Do I think there are things about it that suck? For sure. Is this a fitting conclusion to a story over a decade in the making? Honestly, I still don’t know.
But did I have fun? Was it meaningful? Am I happy I made these friends, fought these battles? Am I glad I heard what I heard, felt what I felt, and thought what I thought?
Has my journey been good? Has it been worthwhile?
...That, I can’t deny.
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Whispers
Falling silently drifts on the wind
But I hear you
Our Journey
Now a memory fading from sight
But I see you
You're not alone.
Persona 3 FES
2007
I played this at 13 and it was a sea change for my perspective - no other game I would readily recommend to a high schooler than this one because it so expertly talks to them at their level, unafraid to sugarcoat the real drama, frustrations, sexual paralysis, and depth of angst a teen can feel, the entire spectrum of coming into an existential self, toiling with agnosticism, and becoming aware of yourself and your limited time in such a dreadful way. it’s a post-structural treatise on a teen’s burgeoning time management skills, their ability to juggle relationships while toiling with inner conflict and secret traumas, and while it’s flaws are immediately apparent to me on replay in adulthood, it’s hard to fight the gloomy catharsis this game achieves, one I have never found anywhere else in quite the same way.
Knack
2013
i was at my cousin's house looking at their games and went "haha is that fucking Knack" and then they just gave me it and now i'm the person who gets to hear people look at my collection and say "haha is that fucking Knack", shit got passed down like in It Follows