There’s a part of this where you can only see the boss you’re fighting through a rearview mirror and have to damage him by judging which of the three trains you’re running along the top of to decouple behind you, which is immediately followed up by having to raise a series of platforms said boss’ baby is standing on to prevent him from dipping your co-protagonist into rising lava via crane, both while dodging hails of projectiles. These just about make the top fifteen or so wildest scenarios in the game, maybe.

If Successor of the Skies (PAL supremacy) sounds crazy, that’s because it is, though it’s crazy with a purpose. Its mechanics seem straightforward enough initially: either flying or grounded, the player’s tools are exclusively shooting, charging up a more powerful shot, melee attacks or a dodge, and these are never added to from start to finish beyond minor alterations during certain setpieces. Only when you’re thrust into a genuinely overwhelming slarry of obstacles littering the screen from every angle is it that you’re driven to discover these moves’ less obvious nuances. The level I’ve referenced in the first paragraph has a great example of this, with a sequence in which enemies who are resistant to gunfire but get OHKO’d by melee attacks charge at you in such a rhythm that doing the full melee combo’s liable to get you hit (thereby teaching you that doing just its first one or two hits is sometimes preferable), but this kind of thing’s present in other areas too. A favourite of mine is how it handles parrying bosses – instead of telegraphing which attacks can be countered with a lens flare or something, as you might expect from other action games, you’re trusted to put two and two together when a boss enters the foreground and the intrusive thought of “What if I try kicking this gigantic claw swipe out of the way?” takes hold. Be it these, gauging just how much charge a shot needs to stun a given enemy or reflecting explosive projectiles back via melee, every interaction’s connected by the philosophy of nudging the player in the right direction without explicitly telling them.

How consistently intuitive it manages to be’s pretty staggering when you consider not just this hands-off approach, but also the creativity bursting out of it at every turn. As impossible as it is not to involuntarily grin at sights like a gruff military general splitting into three giant dolphins made of ink or a supersized lion wrapping a vulture around itself to become a griffon, it runs deeper than just presentational or conceptual levels. When a nominal rail shooter switches dimensions to chuck you into scenarios like a swordfight against a flying samurai lady or a fistfight in which you’re tethered to a particular spot on the floor, it’s tempting to think of these as borderline genre switches until the initial wow factor wears off and you realise that the moveset you’re utilising hasn’t really changed throughout the whole ride. As aforementioned, it’s never added to, though it is occasionally diminished to spice things up; apart from those examples, the segment following my favourite line in the game is an especially strong instance of design by subtraction, forcing you to approach familiar enemies differently both via said alien donkey/bike’s inability to fly and restricting your ability to fire if you hit the railings at each side of the screen. What gets me isn't just the fact the few tools at your disposal are versatile enough to be twisted into situations like this while never once feeling disparate from standard gameplay, it’s also that this isn’t even the only time that the borders of your screen are weaponised against you.

When the fact that you can legitimately never guess what’s up next on a minute-per-minute basis combines with the sheer amount of nonsense you have to navigate through at any given time, it’d be reasonable to worry about visual clarity becoming an issue, but it remarkably never does. There are enough actors, other interactable assets and particle effects jumping around that I frequently find myself wondering how Treasure got it running so smoothly on the Wii, although the hardware’s probably due thanks in this regard. Character models and environments being only so detailed hits a sweet spot in the same way that the visuals of the previous console generation did, teasing at realism enough to be immediately understandable while still being abstract and stylised enough to stoke the player’s imagination as to what else is out there in this bizarre vision of the future. It’d be myopic to attribute it all to working around technical limitations, though; the relatively muted palettes of levels’ backgrounds are clearly an intentional decision given just how much they help all the vital information pop out, from the seas of mooks you can’t take your eyes off of to the brightly coloured timer/score multiplier lining your peripheral vision. It’s a wonderful translation of art to game, which I think this wallpaper I can’t find the source of exemplifies pretty well (you’re welcome).

Although I like to waffle on about how much I value a game feeling focused, I’m pretty used to reading the parts of games I enjoy the most and which I couldn’t imagine them without written off by others as “bloat” or something similar to a point that my brain sometimes autotranslates it to “the fun parts.” Successor of the Skies is different to many of my favourites in that I genuinely can’t think of anything extraneous in it. So much as the file select music you hear when booting up the game is pitch perfect in terms of how well it sets the tone for what you can expect over the course of the next few hours, with all its boisterousness and excitement and undercurrents of melancholy. Don’t let how over the top it is fool you – not many games understand themselves as well as this one.

There was like a three day period where I was naive enough to think that this game maybe could have made some headway into the empathy problem shared by gamers across generations. Then I saw people being abusive about playing it and realized that they understood literally nothing about the plot and I've since stopped believing you can reach people without empathy through entertainment. In fact, it has this paradoxical effect where a lot of the games that make the biggest deal about empathy as a concept (this, Undertale, Disco Elysium for a few examples) bring out this intense toxicity and defensiveness that flies so far in the face of what those stories are trying to talk about that it's discouraging. I'm lucky none of the artforms I practice involve storytelling, cuz I would hate to be responsible for people misinterpreting my story and doing harm over it.

I also played this game at the end of the worst year of my life and it helped me deal with a lot of what I went through, so I'll always treasure my time with it because of that aspect. I just wish it went a different way with the general populace.

O momento mais simbólico de toda a filosofia de design de Morrowind se apresenta logo no começo; após encontrar Caius Cosades, o mesmo te oferece alguns recursos e diz: "Vá dar uma olhada por aí e achar alguma coisa legal pra fazer; quando quiser avançar a história, me avise". Mesmo que, como Nerevarine, sejamos parte de uma grande profecia e tenhamos um papel enorme na história do jogo, esse simples momento representa como o jogo quer ser jogado do início ao fim. Não há pressa, não há nada te empurrando. Jogue no seu tempo, faça o que quiser, vá ler livros, conhecer NPCs ou fazer missões de clã, mas lembre-se que tem sempre uma ótima história te aguardando.

The Witness Analysis
Spoilers

Concept
The Idea / The Epiphany
In a 2014 GDC talk, Yoko Taro discusses a scriptwriting technique he uses called backwards scriptwriting, which is the process of starting with the conclusion of the story and then creating a cause or reason. He also discusses starting with an emotion he wants to evoke from the player and writing the story and characters around that. This is similar to how the idea of The Witness came about, where Jonathan Blow started with the reaction of an epiphany and created the gameplay around that.

Jonathan Blow, following the release of his widely influential and catalytic indie game Braid, started development on a new game with an idea he had even before the development of Braid. Blow co-founded the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC, and in a Noclip documentary, he discusses a project he made for this workshop. Inspired by games like Black & White and Arx Fatalis, which used gestural input to draw shapes and cast spells, he created a game where certain elements of the shape would control spell parameters, such as damage, range, hold time, tracking, and speed. He planned to have the player engage in combat by drawing these shapes which were more interesting to draw versus other games at the time, since the shape and spell could be different and altered every time. The player would learn new spells through normal game mechanics, such as books and NPCs; however, after the player climbs a mountain, they may or may not see that the path they just walked on is a spellcasting symbol. The player’s whole view of the world would change, as they realize that these symbols are all around them in the environment. This missable “eureka moment” is the foundation on which the game was created, and it was optimized to create “miniature epiphanies over and over again." Development began on this spellcasting game, but the team did not feel like the spellcasting was going to be executed well. Blow realized that he just needed any reason for the player to draw symbols and decided to create another puzzle game, The Witness.

The Inspiration
The Witness is a first-person, puzzle, non-linear, exploration game where you are tasked with the goal of solving puzzles on panels throughout an island. It was heavily inspired by Cyan Worlds’ games, specifically the Myst series. Although very different, similarities to this franchise can be seen throughout the entire game. The Witness was developed over the course of seven years by indie studio Thekla Inc., with a team made up of ten full time developers and eight others: Jonathan Blow as the lead designer/programmer, three programmers (Salvador Bel, Ignacio Castano, and Andrew Smith), three artists (Eric Anderson, Luis Antonio, and Orsolya Spanyol), and three architects/landscape architects (Deanna VanBuren, Digo Lima, and Nicolaus Wright). After investing $4 million of Blow’s own money made from Braid, he went into debt seeking additional funding, with total costs estimated at just under $6 million.

Introduction
The Vertical Slice / The Tutorial
The game begins in a dark tunnel, where the player can only move forward. A left analog stick or WASD icon will flash on the screen, showing the player how to move, although still non-verbally. After moving forward, they will encounter a panel puzzle of the simplest complexity with only one option of completion. The button to interact with the panel will also flash on the screen. These will be the only instructions given to the player for the entire game.This tunnel’s purpose is to give the player no freedom while teaching the player the controls, as well as give the player an idea of how the panels work.

After completion, a door is opened. Through this door is a stairwell with an exit to the outside. The first thing visible to the player is a mountain, which is the end goal of the game. Upon reaching the top of the stairwell, the first puzzle and the end goal are framed together. This outside area is small and closed off, giving the player more freedom, albeit limited. The exit of this starting area is blocked by an electric field. The panel to open this field is covered with bars that the player cannot draw through, teaching the player that physical objects in the game can obstruct panels.

The panels in the starting area slowly increase in complexity, with some panels giving the player options to start and end at multiple points. Completing these panels will open the bars, allowing the player to open the field and leave. After leaving the area, the path diverges to the left. If the player goes down this path, they are introduced to a large puzzle with two new symbols on it, which should be impossible for the player to solve. The player is forced to leave and return to the main path. There is an opening at a fallen wall, where the player can get their first real view of the island. In plain sight is an environmental puzzle; however, it is much too early for the player to form a connection with the panel puzzles and the shapes in the environment. After continuing on the path, they will encounter two types of puzzles, each with a symbol from the earlier puzzle. After completing these puzzles, the player will have the knowledge of how to complete the earlier puzzle. This design is able to teach the player about nonlinearity, and that it may be necessary to explore different areas before attempting the current area. This vertical slice shows the player the game mechanics and gives them a taste of most of the experiences the player will encounter for the rest of the game.

Gameplay
The Puzzles
Gameplay is made up of two types of puzzles: panel puzzles and the optional environmental puzzles. Panels are made up of a grid with a starting point (a circle) and an ending point (a rounded line). The player must draw a line along the grid lines, starting and ending at the designated points. For many of the puzzles, there are symbols in between the grid lines, each with their own rules. For puzzles without symbols, the environment must be used, such as light, shadow, sound, and objects in the world. For certain puzzles that have a set amount of solutions, there is also a system to disincentivize guessing; when the player enters an incorrect solution, the current panel becomes inactive and they must re-solve the last panel to reactivate it.

The puzzles are typically designed to appear to have an obvious solution, but that solution is not possible. In my opinion, this design makes for the best puzzles; the player understands everything in the puzzle and has an idea to solve it, but it doesn’t work, forcing the player to understand why it didn’t work and rethink the solution. This way, the player is always stumped, learning new concepts, and having epiphanies. Blow also states that “The clearer and simpler the puzzle is, the more beautiful and strong that feeling of epiphany can be.”

No Circles
Environmental puzzles are found in the world and follow the same rules as panel puzzles (the puzzle starts at a circle and ends at a rounded line). This concept poses a very unique and difficult challenge for the game design; there can be no unintentional circles. Their solution was to make all unintended circles and rounded edges into polygons.

The Game Design / The Gameplay Loop
There are 11 main areas in the game, each with their own theme and puzzle symbol or concept for the player to learn. Since the whole world is open to the player, excluding 2 endgame areas, progression is non-linear. The player can visit any area in the game at any time; however, certain areas will require that you’ve learned the concepts of other areas beforehand to complete them. This open world design also gives the player the freedom to leave a puzzle they’re stuck on and move to another area. This also means that the player will always have several puzzle options available to them, making it more likely for the player to make consistent progress.

When beginning an area, only one puzzle will be active for the player to interact with, and it will introduce a new symbol or idea for the player to learn. Because the game is nonverbal, it is up to the player to discern the rules of these symbols. There are two ways the game achieves this. The first is by making the starting puzzle of the simplest possible complexity with minimal options and slowly increasing the complexity. The player will be able to solve the first few puzzles unintentionally through trial and error. After having a set of solutions to examine, they will be able to formulate their own conclusions as to the rules of the symbols, similar to pattern understanding. The second is by making symbols which are violated by an incorrect solution flash red. Because of this, the player knows what specifically was wrong with their solution. Panels are connected by power cables, and completing a panel will cause the cable to light up and guide the player to the next panel. Completing all puzzles in an area will allow the player to activate a laser which points up towards a mountain, the final endgame area. This laser works similarly to the cables, both guiding the player to where they need to go. 8 lasers are needed to enter the mountain, while all 11 lasers are needed to enter a secret challenge area.

The End / The Challenge
Upon entering the mountain, everything you’ve learned is turned on its head; the environment shifts from nature to a completely artificial and clinical space, and the puzzles are now “broken” and introduce new concepts. There are TV screens piled up showing all areas in the world. Perhaps there is something deeper going on?

The player will make their way down three layers of the mountain and will reach a room with a door. This door has two panels with puzzles that are procedurally generated. The player must solve both of these panels in a set amount of time, or else the puzzle will reset with a new random puzzle, foreshadowing what is to come in the challenge area, which is hidden in this room. After opening these doors, a new type of edgeless panel is introduced – a cylinder. Upon completion, the player will reach an elevator. The elevator will fly them through the island as their work is reset, and a quote from the Diamond Sutra is spoken. The Diamond Sutra is a Mahayana Buddhist text that contains the discussion between the Buddha to his disciple Subhuti about the nature of reality, non-self, and emptiness. It’s the world oldest dated printed book, whose full Sanskrit title translates to “The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion” or “The Perfection of Wisdom Text that Cuts Like a Thunderbolt.”

Bill Porter’s, whose pen name is Red Pine, complete Diamond Sutra quote translation is the following:
So you should view this fleeting world –
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

The first verse is not spoken in the game, perhaps to leave the ending more open to interpretation to players not familiar with the sutra. As “A bubble in a stream” is spoken, the player flies over the river. As “A flash of lightning in a summer cloud” is spoken, the player is looking at a gray storm cloud in the sky. As “A flickering lamp” is spoken, the player flies over a flickering lantern on the lake. As “A phantom” is spoken, the white electric field is reactivated. As “A dream” is spoken, the player is returned back to the starting tunnel as the screen darkens. Was it all a dream? Is it all a dream? The only thing not shown was a star…

This is a hint for the true ending. Additionally, the panel controlling the electric field is in a unique shape – a shape made up of diamonds. The player can also find a drawing of this diamond shaped panel later in the game that contains a solution to reactivate the bright field. This is another hint that the field has a purpose while active. As the player is sent back to the beginning, the player may be armed with the knowledge of environmental puzzles. If so, they may also understand that any circle in the world must be part of a puzzle. The player may notice that the force field keeping them in the starting area looks like an environmental puzzle. The field is currently only the line portion of the environmental puzzle, but where is the circle? The sun… the sun upon the player’s awakening… a star at dawn. Solving this environmental puzzle will lead to the true ending – a first-person FMV, where a person (who is actually Blow, but represents the player) wakes up after playtesting The Witness, and tries to use the knowledge gained from the game in the real world.

To enter the challenge area, the player must first activate all lasers in the game. Similar to the force field in the starting area, activating a laser will remove a bolt obstructing a panel at the top of the mountain. Removing all of the bolts opens a new solution for the panel, which will activate a panel in the room at the bottom of the mountain. Solving this panel will open a hidden door to the challenge area. The symbols on this panel are triangles (sets of one, two, or three). These symbols are scattered all about the island, which is different and more challenging than how the game presents all of the other types of puzzles.

Eventually the player will reach a record player. Activating it will start the challenge – a timed gauntlet of procedurally generated panels which the player must also solve under the pressure of the song “In The Hall of the Mountain King.” Pausing or tabbing out of the game will reset the challenge, and inputting an incorrect solution will deactivate the current panel and generate a new puzzle. I have heard some players call this the greatest boss fight of all time.

Visuals
The Art Style / The Graphics
Art styles and graphics are typically dictated by hardware limitations, development limitations, or the tone of the game, all of which are created with the goal of looking as appealing as possible while constrained by these limitations. While this was developed by a small indie team of at most 15 members, the low poly art style and minimalist color palette plays a vital role to the gameplay. Both of these characteristics facilitate the player in easily absorbing information and distinguishing the environmental and perspective puzzles. One of the artists, Luis Antonio (who is also the developer of Twelve Minutes), gave a GDC talk about the art of The Witness and has written and been interviewed about this topic several times. He states that Jonathan Blow had clear art goals early in the development to minimize the amount of visual noise, support gameplay, and be grounded in reality, but before the team decided on an art style, everything was incoherent and highly detailed. In a Game Developer article (formerly Gamasutra) he states, "What’s the minimum amount of information we can use to tell you what you need to know about an object? Use that, and no more. That's what I learned on The Witness." Another artist, Eric Anderson, stated that their goal was “to build a game world without unnecessary visual clutter. ‘Noise’ was [their] enemy.” It’s also interesting to note that the development team was composed of three architects/landscape architects.

Sound
The Sound Design / The Music
There is next to no music or sound effects in The Witness. Because sound effects and music are used sparingly, when they are heard, the player knows they have special meaning. The most prominent example being the audio-based puzzles found in the jungle area. Here the player must determine the pitch of birds chirping to solve the puzzles. Other examples can include using the player’s footsteps or dripping water as part of the puzzle. Dialogue is only found through optional audio and video logs, as well as the ending of the game. The information heard here all helps to contribute to the game’s theme.

Theme
The Meaning
The theme of the game is attempting to understand the world. To do this, one may also have to change their perspective and view the world differently. In this quest to understand the world and the universe, their understanding of reality may be completely altered. This theme is enforced through gameplay, audio and video logs, and the metanarrative. It is enforced through gameplay from both the panel and environmental puzzles.

The player tries to understand the logic of the panel puzzle symbols, and once they come to the realization that the puzzles they’ve been solving the whole game are all around them in the environment, their whole view of the world is changed. Hidden audio logs and FMV videos express differing ideologies of science, religion, and philosophy. One of the most impactful audio logs can be found on top of the mountain. The mountain is also the point at which it is most likely for the player to discover the environmental puzzles; Blow’s “mountain path” from his original idea is showcased here in the form of the river. There is also a canvas placed directly above the river with a line in the river’s shape for additional support.

After gaining a new point-of-view of the world from this vantage point and possibly from the environmental puzzles, a quote from astronaut Russell Schweickart can be heard that expresses his new view of the world from space.

Development / Conclusion
The Engine
Thekla created their own game engine in C++, which allowed them complete control over the development. Work on this engine was very demanding and made up a large portion of the total development time of the game. The team used Subversion for version control (specifically Tortoise SVN); however, they developed their own system to prevent conflicts which were constantly happening. “Originally, the game saved all entities into one file in a binary format. This is most efficient, CPU-performance-wise, and the natural thing that most performance-minded programmers would do first. Unfortunately, though, SVN can't make sense of such a file, so if two people make edits, even to disjoint parts of the world, SVN is likely to produce a conflict; once that happens, it's basically impossible to resolve the situation without throwing away someone's changes or taking drastic data recovery steps.” Their solution was to convert all entities into files. Files include the name of the entity, a unique ID, position, orientation, entity flags, entity name, group ID, mount parent ID, mount position, and mount orientation. To preserve the exact values of floating-point numbers, they stored the variables as hexadecimals. The engine would parse and load the tens of thousands of text files every time the game started up, which didn’t have a huge effect on performance for a game of this smaller scale. This change drastically improved workflow, prevented conflicts, and allowed for conflicts to be easily resolved. Blow states that “It would be difficult to overemphasize the robustness gained. I feel that these sentences do not quite convey the subtle magic; it feels a little like the state change when a material transitions from a liquid to a solid.” Dozens more articles about the engine written by Blow, Ignacio Castaño, and Casey Muratori can be found at http://the-witness.net/news/category/engine-tech/.

The Future
While programming The Witness’ engine, Blow grew to dislike C++ and felt that it had “reached critical complexity.” He has since been creating a new language meant as a C++ replacement with game programming as its focus. Blow has given many talks on this new language, with the first on September 17, 2014. Some of the core principles of this language (codenamed JAI) are high performance, joy of programming, simplicity, low friction, designed for good programmers, and full compile-time execution. In 2017, Blow demonstrated a non-optimized compiler doing a full rebuild with an estimated 104,000 lines per second. In 2018, Blow demonstrated his next game with 80,000 lines of code (equivalent to approximately 110,000 lines of C++) compiling in 1-1.5 seconds. With this new language, the team is writing a new compiler, game engine, and game. By working on all of these projects concurrently, they are able to test and improve the language. Apart from Blow’s next Sokoban-style game, he is also working on a 20 year long project which he began in 2012 or 2013. He is rewriting it in Jai, and it will be released in installments, with each new iteration being an elaboration “on the same game over the course of 20 years, making it bigger and bigger and more complex.”

arriving late to the party is always so weird. i'm sure the FFXI many people used to love isn't there anymore. we now have Trusts for everyone so they can solo content, crystal and book teleports so you don't have to rely on airship and boat schedules, many many rewards just for playing, including gearsets at every level. its difficulty and commitment was definitely watered down over the years and i can see how that would frustrate older players, the ones that got here first.

personally, regarding games that have existed for a long time like this one, i think a healthy dose of detachment is good. i'm not one to pine for FFXIV's HW days even though i did start the game there, but i also remember how wildly different that game was and how some things do get lost when you try to make your game accessible to everyone. like, i say this as someone who hates to socialize even in MMOs because i'm hella shy, but i can understand someone who feels like the game has lost its socialization aspect. it was its big thing (tbh it was THE thing for MMOs in general) and i'm sure it started many great and terrible friendships just because the game forced you to communicate with others.

but the thing is, for me, right here and right now, what I found was an incredibly charming game, a game that still asks a lot of commitment from its players. while teleports do facilitate moving around, you still have to make many first trips on foot, by boat, going into dangerous territory. like, i leveled WHM so i had invisible and sneak for me and my bf in dangerous dungeons, but what about those who don't? people still ask for help in cities from time to time, because trust characters won't be casting these spells on you.

i really really want to talk more about what this game does, like how some NPCs only sell items to players if other players have sold that item to said NPC, having to select weird invisible menu options to be able to proceed with a main story quest that involves an underground organization, how racism is actually ever present in the interaction between every wildly different race in this game and how this affects the whole world (something XIV would never dare), how the beastman dehumanization issue is there right out of bat instead of 2 expansions in, how every job isn't put into a nice little box of role and instead just do plenty of different and interesting things, how all the different maps are actually populated by people because that's how you level up in this game, or how the stakes are always high because you can actually level down when you die.

this game definitely went through many many changes, but i feel like it's still itself at the end of the day: a PS2 MMO that asks a lot of who's playing, and i'm glad i took my time to meet its demands.

also love that the story puts a lot of importance in events that happened 20 years ago, i feel like we played this at the exact right time

[LEARN THE DIFFERENCE]

Has politics (BAD)
Don't has politics (GOOD)

Thank goodness they will never put politics in my beloved Kiseki games.

much like life, being trans is awful. having to live your life as a compromised version of yourself, not quite belonging anywhere, even among the people who love you most, and constantly struggling with the feeling that you can't do what you want to do because people won’t let you or won't understand. there is a sense of loneliness, of isolation, a sense that you're not ever going to be understood and that you'll always be just a little off, a little too clockable, a little too different. there is an incredible sadness to the whole experience.

as for the positive aspect? i'm still working that out. i'm not lucky enough to have a family that supports me. i live in a state of constant fear and apathy, knowing that no matter what i do, i'll never be the girl i've always had in my head.

the problem is, i'm a pretty miserable person, and i take it out on everyone around me. i hate my life, and i can't be happy being a man and i don't know what to do about it. but i do know that i hate this situation i'm in, and the idea that i can't escape it. it's like i have an anchor dragging me down, and i can't get out of the water.

i know there's a lot of trans people who are really happy, and i'm happy for them. for me, it's not been a good experience, and i'm not at all sure it's going to get better. but it has given me some perspective on life.

my perspective on gender has led me to have unfortunate habits of psychoanalyzing everyone i see, recognizing patterns and trying to understand why they do what they do. it has given me a sense of being misunderstood and that it's everyone else's fault. because of this, i'm very judgmental. it's like i've dissociated from all of society, there's no human connection or emotions behind the faces and words. it's almost like i'm a vampire. it's not exactly easy being this way, and i wish i had been born different, but at least i know that, at the end of the day, no one is ever going to be able to understand me completely.

my feelings are a complicated mess, and trying to explain them to people who don't understand gender dysphoria is difficult, so it's easier to go without trying, especially if it was easier for everyone to assume i'm cis than have me talk about my feelings. it's just easier to keep people at arms length, let them make their own assumptions and let them feel comfortable in their own bubble. but if i tried to interact with people, i'd just be putting them in an awkward position, trying to understand what i'm saying. it's easier for everyone to just assume.

i don't really enjoy cars, i don't think i understand them. i don't get the excitement, i don't get the aesthetics, i can find beauty in a car design, but i don't get a rush out of it. simply put, i'm not a part of its culture

i am, however, gonna dig any car that has "DRUAGA" written in big bold letters on top of it's paint an immense amount. i'm sure this game is better for people who actually do like these machines, but i was genuinely content playing it. listen, Namco was king once. way before Atlus could start to even concede it's proven true red and black combo. this here is elegant, provocative and powerful, masterclass in design, really, in every way. nothing else was doing it like videogames were and much less like Namco was.

i honestly love how this game controls, i love how there's only two (three technically) different locations with tons of variations on how they're raced, i love the soundtrack, i love picking colors for my car, love the duel system, love the obnoxious DJ, i especially love driving at night it feels like everything to me. winning feels good, this game will make you tense and it will also make you relaxed because believe it or not there is enough time to appreciate the scenery.

i don't like cars but maybe if i had ridge racer v during my formative years i would have played racing games other than mario kart. or at the very least more ridge racer

Another entry from my List of the Thirty-Five Best Games I Played in 2023, now available à la carte:

On Chrono Cross (Or — "How I Developed a Palate for Poison")

My grandmother doesn’t live in Vermont anymore. A couple years ago, she and I went back there together and rented a place to relive those days. Naturally, the rental had some similarities to her old place. We drove around, taking in familiar sights, waiting for the rest of the family to join us. I fired up Chrono Cross for the first time one evening, and promptly came down with a case of water poisoning.

If I believed in omens, I’d take that as a bad one. I touched a game about a character who finds himself in an eerie facsimile of home, itself the strange and twisted sequel of a beloved favorite, and it left me hurling into a toilet. The water supply we’d been drawing from was unfit for human consumption. I spent the recovery period with Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest V on DS, beneath the more familiar ceiling of a family friend’s house. I’d later start writing a non-review about how I didn’t have to play Chrono Cross, eschewing the pretense of being some aspiring member of the Backloggd “videogame intelligentsia.” I don’t need “cred,” right??

Well.

I played Chrono Trigger again in 2023 at least twice, depending on how you define a “playthrough”. The first was because I’d just finished Final Fantasy X and wanted to make some unfair comparisons. The second was because I was three-fourths of the way through Chrono Cross and…wanted to make some unfair comparisons. Even in the thick of it, I was avoiding the inevitable.

So…About the Game

Cross makes every effort possible to be anything but a clean, obedient sequel to its father. And you know what? Good. Trigger’s development was predicated on originality, and should likewise be followed up with another adventurous convention-breaker. The “Chrono Trigger 2” advocated by the likes of Johnny Millennium doesn’t appeal to me; lightning doesn’t strike twice. Still, Cross is Trigger’s opposite even in ways it really shouldn’t be.

With the exception of its original PSX audiovisual presentation, some of the most colorful and lush I’ve ever experienced, just about every one of its ideas is noncommittal and indecisive. Monsters appear on the overworld again, but you won’t find anything as deliberately paced as Trigger’s level design to elevate this from the status of "mild convenience." The conceit of its combat system is worth exploring – characters deal physical damage to build spell charges — but the deluge of party members and fully customizable spell slots amounts to a game that would’ve been impossible to balance. Level-ups are only granted during boss fights, and the gains acquired in normal battles aren’t worth the effort, so the whole thing snaps in half not 50% of the way through. It isn’t measured to account for the fact that you can take down just about everything with an onslaught of physical attacks by the midgame.

Then again, if the combat had been as challenging as the story is bizarre, I don’t know that I would’ve stuck around all the way to the end. Maybe I wouldn’t have been as gung-ho about swapping party members around and collecting them like Pokémon. Amid its spectacle and ambition, the wonder of sailing the seas and crossing dimensions, I left most events unsure of what to think, positive or negative. It wasn’t ambivalence, exactly.

SPOILERS AHEAD

It’s like this: Fairly early on, you’re given an infamous decision. One of the major protagonists, Kid, is dying of a magically-inflicted illness, and the only antidote is Hydra Humour. If you agree to go after it, you’ll find that it can only be extracted from the Guardian of the Marshes, and its death would mean the deterioration of the ecosystem which relies upon it. The dwarves and all other life in this biome would be put at risk. I weighed my options. I decided to reload a save and refuse the quest. Kid wouldn’t want her life to come at the cost of hundreds, if not thousands of others. So I start down the opposite path…

…Only to find that, in this route, a squad of human soldiers kills the hydra anyway, leaving the dwarves to flee their uninhabitable home to lead a genocidal attack on the fairies’ island to claim it for themselves. Jesus. The dwarves’ manic strangeness did little to downplay how chilling the result of my little coin flip was.

After an effort to defend the few remaining fairies and keep the dwarves at bay — leaving the survivors to process the turmoil of their new reality — after all that…it turns out that Kid is fine. She got over the illness by herself, offscreen.

For as many words as it goes on to spew, no moment of my Chrono Cross playthrough spoke louder than this one. Chrono Trigger’s party was faced with a choice — allow Lavos to erupt from the planet and drive everything to the brink of extinction, or risk everything to prevent the apocalypse. It’s a thousand years away, these three characters can live out the rest of their days comfortably and never have to concern themselves with it. They’re shown an End of Time, proof that the universe won’t last regardless of what they do, and still decide to fight on behalf of the world. It’s worth trying, if only to preserve a few more precious seconds of life for their descendants and their home.

Chrono Cross (eventually) reveals that their meddling allowed Lavos to become an even more devastating monster. We can defeat it, but who can say that won’t result in an even more cataclysmic fate? Because he lives and breathes, Serge’s timeline is worse off. It’s hard to tell whether that’s lore nonsense, self-flagellation on the game’s part, or genuine philosophizing. It wouldn’t be alone in that. As a chronic “downer,” I can’t help wondering if there’s no way to survive in the modern world without directly or indirectly participating in human suffering.

Maybe Writer/Director Masato Kato couldn’t either. He seems bent on reminding the player that they are but a speck in a cosmic puzzle, and there’s no defiant “so what?” answer to that problem. Even the thing we’ve been led to accomplish isn’t revealed until seconds before the finale of this forty hour game (and that's NOT a joke). You can’t see the credits without recognizing that it’s an unfortunate victim of mismanagement and a little too much Evangelion, but that doesn’t mean it fails to resonate. I don't think there’s another game that so thoroughly captures the existential confusion of being alive.

Quando o jogo diz, logo de cara, que é uma história de amor, essa deve ser a única coisa sincera que ele diz: um único pingo de cor caindo de um conta-gotas. A partir daí -- do momento em que o Narrador diz que seu objetivo é matar a princesa, e o momento em que a Princesa resiste -- tudo é um espelho, e faz questão de nunca te deixar esquecer disso.

A cada passo, Slay The Princess vai te lembrar que está acontecendo como está acontecendo por causa das suas escolhas, e nada existe substancialmente fora delas. O mundo é sem forma, fractal, e existe para ser salvo ou destruído. Não existe uma diegese propriamente dita, ou não por muito tempo: a Princesa é o que você faz dela, as vozes que te acompanham são o que a princesa faz de você em resposta. Existe uma análise psicanalítica para ser feita por alguém, mas eu não tenho muito interesse nisso: afinal, o jogo se faz tanto um espelho que se torna plenamente arbitrário, como se você estivesse diante de uma folha de papel. O que você desenhar te reflete de alguma forma, mesmo se você escolher conscientemente a reflexão que você quer ver. Então não se pode dizer que o jogo examina suas escolhas, porque não é isso que ele faz -- ao contrário do que vão te dizer.

Tudo que você escolher vai voltar para o mesmo ponto: o reflexo de você. A entidade que coleta as princesas que você cria sabe que ela é você, mas não exatamente. Ela tem uma existência contingente, definida pelas suas escolhas -- que, por sua vez, existem porque um Criador as colocou ali, mas que também sabe que não tem controle da situação. Sua violência ou sua compaixão são refletidas de volta para você para que você as examine, não o jogo. Suas escolhas importam, mas não porque elas têm consequência -- importam porque você está vendo quem você é, ou quem escolheu ser de propósito.

Isso tudo poderia ser muito bobo porque, afinal de contas, é uma folha em branco. O jogo te fornece um espelho e, como um espelho funcional, só te mostra aquilo que você mostra, mesmo que ofuscado pelo humor, pela poesia, pelas interações com as várias facetas que a Princesa, o Narrador e Você podem assumir. O jogo não se completa nesses conflitos porque eles se anulam.

O jogo se completa porque aquele pingo de cor se irradia na folha em que você desenha: o amor tinge você. Você escolhe e vê reflexos mais ou menos amorosos de suas próprias escolhas e, por isso, consegue ver você mesmo, quem você escolhe ser ou quem as pessoas podem ser com mais ternura do que antes. É assim que Slay the Princess completa sua mágica: ao te fazer amar nada em particular, ele materializa os reflexos vazios que te mostrou com a doçura que você souber trazer. Todos são você, e você é a Princesa.