between 1999 and 2005 george lucas followed up his extremely successful original star wars trilogy with three new films charting the events leading up to the original movies, dubbed the prequel trilogy. upon release these films were wildly successful but lambasted by critics for their stilted performances, over reliance on massive effects driven setpieces, confusing narratives, simple emotions, and a perceived focus on technological improvements over solid narrative and character cohesion. in subsequent years, the films have rode waves of critical reappraisals and certain fans of the franchise and certain cinephiles in general who now praise the visual acumen on display, the political intrigue at the heart of the films, the grand operatic scale, and the oneness of vision the films have, while also finding beauty in the strange performances or charm in the bizarre attempts at comedy.

i feel as though much of the same can be said of final fantasy x, releasing smack in the middle of the prequel trilogy (and perhaps most likely at least somewhat influenced by the phantom menace), the game feels somewhat strange and awkward. i was playing the ps4 re-release which i know has it's own problems with visual fidelity in comparison to the original ps2 version, but the game's massive vision is obviously somewhat hampered by the technical constraints of the time, leading to dialogue that feels stilted, there's a reason why the only thing i really knew about this game before playing it was the famous laughing sequence that was omnipresent on the mid-00s internet. the game is also very convoluted when trying to explicitly follow each beat of the narrative, introducing you to so many things at once it can at times be difficult to keep all of the different facets of spira's religion and politics straight in your mind and the game just constantly builds on top of all of these ideas. and then there's just so many strange asides that feel like so much time went into them but also feel somewhat half-baked, like the sport of blitzball that functions as religon and game for the people of spira, given so much mechanic depth and with stats to improve and items to collect to build your team more and more, but ultimately is completely superfluous to the game as a whole and feels horrible to play (to the point where i just avoided it after having to play it for the first time).

but what can i say other than that i was enamored with the whole experience of playing this game. there is a deep feeling of honesty and the heart of this game, earnest expression bursting from every seem. it's a game fundamentally about faith and duty, trying to find reconciliation between commitment and community, sacrifice and friendship, all told through a simple, bittersweet, and earnest love story at the film's center. i found myself deeply drawn to these characters as the game wore on, a certain beauty found in their strangeness. wakka's evangelical jock, rikku's ditzy anime girl, lulu and auron's stoic resolve, tidus and yuna's hopeful naivety. each journey ultimately feels raw and real, and the copious amounts of worldbuilding is deeply connected to each of the character's personal struggles, making each moment of story feel important to the overall feeling of the game.

and the vibes here are just impeccable, that early 2000s seaside gaming similar to kingdom hearts or super mario sunshine, obsessed with water and tropical locales, captured through beautifully rendered cinematic frames. the choice to use pre-rendered backdrops and a lot of static camera set-ups makes the game feel a lot more intentional with what it's trying to show you, and can create some deeply arresting images in both cutscenes and gameplay. this is all scored by one of nobuo uematsu many musical masterpieces, constantly augmenting different themes to complement different emotions or narrative beats, creating something that is truly a thing of beauty. this is all not even to mention the strange myspace-nu-metal-fantasy-steampunk-anime art direction that the game is going for, with strange costumes and intricate machinery that i just really vibed with heavy.

this is the first time i've completed a final fantasy game, and from what i understand this is much more traditional in terms of its gameplay. ffvii (which i've played about 10 hours of) has its active time battle system and more modern final fantasy draws from the arpg styling of kingdom hearts, but the one just uses a traditional turn based approach and augments it with tons of different approaches to battle. you'll find the party makeup and approach that makes the most sense to you (i found i likes using lulu, auron, and yuna quite a bit especially as i got closer to the endgame) but there just so many different options with how to build your characters, which items to use, and what strategies to employ, that i feel my way of playing the game will only be one of many successful approaches. there's also just so much side-content i haven't even approached yet, dozens of hours of endgame stuff that i just didn't yet find the time for, and hell i haven't even played blitzball in months so maybe it's time to finally become champion.

i am glad that we've since evolved from the "putting the final save fifteen minutes of gameplay and ten minutes of cutscenes away from the final boss"-era though because my god it probably took me four hours of grinding and attempts to finally beat him alone.

a million different things can be said about death stranding, it's probably one of the most thematically complex pieces of work done in this medium so far and reminds me of so many different films while also managing to be completely idiosyncratically kojima. it took me about a year and a half to fully complete this, one restart and over 80 total hours of gameplay. in the time it took me through various starts and stops, i managed to complete kojima's metal gear solid series and get more acquainted with him as a "auteur" before jumping back in to finish this. much like sons of liberty it's a game constantly playing with your notion of who kojima is as a creative, what games even really are as a medium, and what we should expect as players. it's also a game about the gig economy, covid (even though it came out in 2019), growing american (and world) division, fascism, terrorism, the military industrial complex, and the question of whether governments or communities keep us truly safe. it's also a game about love, fear, memory, faith, connection, separation, loss, grief, and hope. all this to say it's a game that's really impossible to actually pin down but constantly has me thinking about it and comparing things to it. through all it's messy gravitas and earnest guts spilling it becomes a unique and beautiful experience that while feeling indebted to cinema can only truly be captured in the interactive medium.

not to say that it's all a narrative or thematic project, the actual gameplay is simply invigorating in it's overall simplicity. as a courier, you are given starting points and destinations, but the route you take is entirely up to you. by utilizing equipment you slowly start to build your world outward, constantly changing the environments you inhabit to make paths and routes for sam to take. as more of the game opens up, you also get access to building roads and collaborating with online structures to access even more locations in less and less time. it's devilishly simple, climbing mechanics controlled by shoulders buttons, combat at it's best when you're simply avoiding it, but it iterates on the core design philosophhy of metal gear solid v (objectives given with no course of action specified) while de-emphasizing combat to create a game that just has an addictive gameplay loop that makes all the side objectives fun to complete. if this had been released simply as a courier simulator with none of the narrative interest, i'd probably still give it a very high rating based on that alone.

feels like possibly the current pinnacle of kojima's career, given so much freedom to create whatever he wants kojima decides to put out this messy sprawling epic that raises more questions and has even less answers than the best in the metal gear franchise. possibly a case for more "auteur" driven video games but more than that it's a case for giving actual budgets to teams that want to create things as audacious as this is, the only AAA game worth a damn.

as an ending aside, some of the films it reminded me of were: southland tales, the end of evangelion, the rebuild of evangelion series, david fincher's the killer, shyamalan's old, tenet, first cow, universal soldier: day of reckoning, cronenberg's crash, the resident evil films, the matrix films, cloud atlas, inland empire, twin peaks: the return, spielberg's AI, and so many others that i can't remember to just list here.