My long journey to Hi-Fi Rush began when I was 7 years old, during the absolutely sweltering summer of 2003. It was one of those weekends where my family and I were "driving into town", because everything good was in Chattanooga and not where we were living. They took me to the local Circuit City (lol) and on the clearance rack they were "pennying out" (selling for a single penny to remove from the inventory system) a variety of cast-off video game and computer merchandise. One of these cast-offs was a little demo disc known as the Nintendo GameCube Preview Disc. It contained four demos, but my parents would have had a shared aneurysm if they saw me playing Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, so really, it only had three.

- Sonic Adventure DX, which was what got me to pick it up in the first place after playing the absolute shit out of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle.
- A strange game called Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, which I had a close eye on because they were talking about it in Nintendo Power and it was from the Sonic guys.
- And finally...a little game called Viewtiful Joe that absolutely blew my little 2nd grader mind.

I played that demo over, and over, and over, rewinding and fastforwarding and slow-moing with my newly-acquired VFX powers, and my parents, bless them, actually cared about and paid attention to what got me excited and passionate, because being inured to child-raising with a then-in-vogue-but-now-outdated pediatric dogma that children with autism are "stuck in their own little worlds" meant they felt an intense pressure to pay attention and reward any sign of neuron activation.
My dad thought it looked promising, because he's always had a fixation on superheroes, and he was online but not extremely online enough to differentiate "superhero" from "tokusatsu", so they preordered it for me.

Maybe I'm overstating it, but what followed on October 7th, 2003, was something of a religious experience. We picked it up from Rhino Video Games (rip, you're excused if you're too young to remember when there were tons of cool video game store chains before GameStop bought them all just for the land value), and I played that game like crazy. Back then I could never get past the absolute brutal boss rush that has you fight every boss you've already fought back to back, ending in a fight with the vicious and cruel boss of bosses Fire Leo, which, if memory serves, sends you all the way back to the beginning of the boss rush if you fail. Pretty far for a 3rd grader though it may be, I didn't quite have what it takes to reach the ending, but that game planted a seed that altered my personality for good. Henshin-a-go-go baby!

A few months later my dad handed me down his GameFAQs.com forum account so I could ask for help being stuck on the opening stage of Sonic Heroes where you play as Team Chaotix. With not a ton to occupy my time, I went on the the online to go "surfing" on this new and exciting ""web"". GameFAQs had this sidebar where they would show game industry news from their sister website, GameSpot. This meant I started paying attention to industry news, and it became apparent to me that Viewtiful Joe didn't just come out of nowhere, it came from a small outfit within Capcom called Clover Studios, that benefited enormously from institutional knowledge imported from other parts of Capcom.
I gobbled up every mention of Clover, they quickly became my favorite of all studios from the moment I even had a concept of developers.
I learned that games were not the subject of immaculate conception but rather an intense process of iteration and cultural feedback, that they existed within a canon.
I learned that Viewtiful Joe was part of a miniature canon of five games for the Gamecube known as the Capcom Five, which was really more like the Capcom Four because one of them, Dead Phoenix, got cancelled before I even heard about it. You know, for a game that never was, its title is so on-the-nose you'd be excused for thinking I just made that up.
I learned that I was supposed to be angry at an evangelical Floridian lawyer named Jack Thompson.
And, most influentially, I learned that Viewtiful Joe was the singular vision of a cooler-than-cool motorcycle-riding custom-Oakleys-wearing 80s John Hughes movie protagonist character of a man named Hideki Kamiya.

The very next year (wow, remember when amazing sequels used to only take a year? what the fuck happened?) I got Viewtiful Joe 2 on release date. I followed every bit of news about Clover Studios, heard about these wild new games they were making called Okami and God Hand, had my little pre-teen heart absolutely shattered by the news that Clover had shut down, and then subsequently kintsugi'd by the news that they had reformed into a new studio fittingly named Seeds. And then Seeds merged with another studio, and became this new studio called PlatinumGames, and that the auteurs behind Viewtiful Joe, Okami and God Hand had went with them, and they signed a contract with Sega to give them a whopping FIVE new games, all of them being next-gen, paralleling the famous Capcom Five.

In 2003 I played Viewtiful Joe. In 2004 I played Viewtiful Joe 2. In 2005 I played Viewtiful Joe Double Trouble for the Nintendo DS (and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney! but aside from Shu Takumi's bromance (and possible unrequited love?) for Hideki Kamiya that's not particularly relevant).
In 2008 we were really really poor that year (huh I wonder why) so that Christmas my parents bought me a used PS2 Slim to replace the PS2 that had broke to where it keeps showing that scary red screen, and with it came a newly-released Greatest Hits reprint of Okami, which had me jumping up and down with joy that I had finally found a copy, because it had become low-print-run eBay scalper bait from pretty much the moment it came out. I subsequently do every sidequest and acquire every Stray Bead, leaving absolutely no stone unturned to adequately pay tribute to my idol Hideki Kamiya.

In 2010 I finally find a sunfaded-to-the-point-of-disintegrating copy of God Hand at the local outdoor drive-in theater/swap meet, for the low low price of 5 dollars. I remember it got bad reviews which is why I never played it, that on top of the aforementioned parental-aneurysm-inducing M-rating, but hey, I'm a teenager now, my parents just said they think I'm mature enough for the M-rating, and I end up playing the fuck out of that too. My online Venezuelan pen-pal who ended up introducing me to so, so many games I adored due to South America's vibrant culture of piracy, I mean, he said God Hand was fantastic, and I trust his word, so why not? (we haven't talked in probably a decade but we're friends on Backloggd so a shout-out to you if you're reading this, thank you for everything! thank you for Deadly Premonition! I hope we get to talk again one day, so much has happened!)
God Hand was directed by a man named Shinji Mikami, and word of mouth got around that he was really, really good at designing action games. 4chan-adjacent contrarians exalted it and used the famous IGN 3/10 review as fuel for their paranoid distrust of and superiority complex to game journalists. It became the subject of a meme comic template based on how the game's hidden excellence took everybody who played it by surprise. Tim Rogers then writes a review wherein, among many other extremely colorful metaphors, he compares moments in God Hand to "the feeling of catching a bully's punch, effortlessly uncurling his fist, and snatching out a fifty-dollar-bill". My bullied 15-year-old self nods, agreeing with his assessment.

In 2012, I played Devil May Cry 1 and 3 out of the HD Collection after the sage advice of the net told me to skip 2, and I played Ninja Gaiden Sigma Male, and I played the return of the Mikami and God Hand design ethos, a game called *dramatic title-screen-announcer voice* VANQUISH. I adored Vanquish, and I spent the next 11 years rawdogging estradiol and waiting for, finally, another action game bearing the stamp of Shinji Mikami. Thank you for reading so far into something this personal, you probably get where this is going, yeah? Keep going though.

In 2013, I buy the last game of Platinum's Sega deal, Anarchy Reigns, and I have an excellent, very fun month with this hypermasculine game while its online was still alive, getting my mind off the crippling anxiety of having just came out to my parents. In 2015 I finally, finally get to play Bayonetta, because I always heard the PS3 version was bad, so I avoided it until I got a Wii U, and I am reminded of my intense fondness for Hideki Kamiya's trademark embracement of stylish action, camp, and cringe.

In 2016 I play Furi, a particularly inspired indie game specially crafted for "genetic freaks!" who are "not normal!" such as myself, while living out of a motel, on a Wii U Pro Controller while my dad sleeps in the same room. I finish the game at like 5 AM. The credits give a very special thanks to Shinji Mikami, Hideki Kamiya, Keiji Inafune (lol, I'd put Akira Kitamura if only for Cocoron), Hideo Kojima, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Genyo Takeda (director of Punch-Out), Platinum Games, Grasshopper Manufactures (sic), and Treasure Co, in that exact order, probably close to the order I'd put them in too. Thank you for all the great games and memories! so they wrote.

In 2017, under conditions of more stable housing, I play Nier:Automata from Platinum, and it's great! But this review isn't about how I've been Facebook friends with Yoko Taro since before Drakengard 3 came out. Where are you, Yoko Taro? I miss you.
Also in 2017, Hideki Kamiya's next big effort, Scalebound, is cancelled by Microsoft, making me shake my fist in anger at the Xbox brand and how anything good it produces seems to be in spite of themselves. I make a post online about how they should retrofit it into Drakengard 4.

In 2019 I back The Wonderful 101 Remastered Kickstarter, because somehow I hadn't got around to playing it yet. Surprise surprise, as expected from a Hideki Kamiya joint, it was incredible. In 2020 I buy Vanquish AGAIN, the moment it got released on PS4, and in the midst of intense anxiety over an incoming plague and Bernie Sanders primary results, I finally accomplish the infamous "Tactical Challenge 6", iykyk. Sega has posted a survey for people who bought the Bayonetta/Vanquish collection, I spam every field with "VANQUISH 2 VANQUISH 2 VANQUISH 2". My longing for the return of Shinji Mikami intensifies like a kid on their birthday remembering their dad who stepped out for a pack of smokes and never came back.

It is 2021. I finally play another Capcom Five game from way back when, Mikami and Suda51's Killer7, in 4K widescreen. They never collaborated again, anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. It is everything I was told it was. The m4m craigslist guy was right. I continue to miss Shinji Mikami so fuckin bad

It is late 2022. God Hand is selling on eBay for the high high price of 160 dollars, and people are buying, because it's worth it. I am reading the r/gamingleaksandrumors subreddit, as I am wont to do, even though I don't have a Reddit account. Some guy is posting about Microsoft registering a trademark for a new game called...HI-FI RUSH. They think, via process of elimination, that it could be an unannounced project from Tango Gameworks, Shinji Mikami's studio. They think it might be an action game! I excitedly message my one friend who watches my streams, similarly obsessed with this canon as I am, in the hopes that it could be that fabled second coming of God Hand. Could it be? Do I dare to hope?

It is January 25th, 2023. Microsoft just straight-up drops the game I've been waiting for for most of my life during a presentation I'm not watching, with zero fanfare. I immediately buy it based solely off reflex from my sympathetic nervous system, before my conscious mind can even comprehend what just happened. Despite having been ravenous for this for most of the time I've been a conscious human being, I save it for a rainy day.

It is late 2023. I am on mushrooms. I remember there is a new Shinji Mikami produced game I still haven't played, and so I boot up Hi-Fi Rush. I quickly realize that by my personal barometer, it is one of the greatest games ever made, and that I would still be feeling this way even if I wasn't on drugs. It means the world to me that this game was allowed to exist, it feels like coming home.
The character action genre is my favorite genre of game, and I’ve always considered it the most pure, joyous, evocative genre of video game, they represent everything uniquely special about the medium while radiating a tangible aura of inspired fun, mechanical depth, flashy setpieces and an effortless sense of “cool” that shaped my personality more than I could ever untangle from myself.

I guess what I'm trying to get at by autobiographizing like this, is that I am glad this game exists at all, and from a young age, younger than I should have been to learn such a life lesson, the shutdown of Clover Studios taught me something really important. Don't be sad because it's over, be happy because it happened. Because it could've been so easy for it not to, you know? Everything about your life and mine only happened because everything landed in the right place, this game only existed because everything landed in the right place, it's so incredibly easy for something to never come together, or get cancelled before we ever even heard about it. With how many minds are warring for supremacy, it's an absolute miracle anything ever gets made at all, let alone a game this good and coherent and visionary. And just like I saw growing up alongside them, watching them rise from the ashes like a (dead?) phoenix with how Clover became Seeds became Platinum became Tango, you can kill a studio but you can't kill their spirit, the influence they have on the family tree of design. Tango will return.

It is February 29th, 2024. Leap Day, a liminal space that only comes around once a presidential term. I am on mushrooms again. I decide now is the time to finish Hi-Fi Rush. I beat the game a couple minutes after midnight, which disappointed me slightly because I wanted the achievement date to say the 29th. My first playthrough was on Very Hard difficulty of course, because this personal history has made me into quite the tryhard. I sit through the credits as a gesture of respect, of course. How could I not? I waited most of my life for this game, it's the least I could do. The director himself starts serenading me. I look around nervously, wondering if I am hallucinating this or something. I am not. Everything I wrote about in this review comes flooding back. It becomes apparent to me that the world is filled with overwhelming beauty, that it is truly beautiful that people can collaborate and make something with so many moving parts, and that it is beautiful that everything I've experienced and the ways those people like Mikami, Kamiya, and now Johanas contributed to a shared lineage made me who I am, and I feel loved and personally spoken to in a way I've never felt before. Of course, of course I cry my goddamn eyes out.

We somehow made it through

All of this.

Making things is hard,

Things never go as planned.

Too many features, not enough time.

We want the best

But can only do so much

With what we have.

So this is what we made.

We've never been more proud.

A game, a song, a million different pieces working together

Brought to you by all of us.

It may not be what you expected,

Everything

(Everything that you want)

But we did our best

And here it is:

A piece of our heart,

The hard work from all of us.

So please don't complain

And just enjoy.

Because at the end of the day, it's all just a game.

One we spent thousands and thousands of hours

Arguing, building, and polishing.

But hey,

No sweat. 😅

In 1904, game designer, writer, reporter, Georgist and feminist Elizabeth Magie patented The Landlord's Game: a scathing review of the contemporary trends of rent and land ownership (in the form of a board game). The idea was that players could understand the complicated web of "The Rich Get Richer" from a more simplified point of view. Fairness could be instilled in children when they play this game and realize how cruel the world could be if we let it. Unfortunately for Elizabeth, this did not work out. The world is still cruel because we have let it. Even more unfortunate for her, Parker Brothers made Monopoly in 1935, a game very much like The Landlord's Game, that quickly took the world by storm and became commonplace in American homes. Monopoly probably came to be due to some perfectly legal patent loopholes, but it's clear that a piece made to criticize greed eventually became a vehicle for it.

Perhaps Monopoly took off the way it did because The Landlord's Game is from the point of view of the owners of money and land. But what if it was from the point of view of someone who has no money?

Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland is a scathing indictment of greed and the acquisition of money, more ferocious and toothed than anything The Landlord's Game could conjure up. It is made to inspire the soul crushing feelings of a minimum wage 9-5 and it does it very well. Most games demand you grind to work your way up. Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland demands you grind to lift your pathetic leg up on the first rung of the ladder.
Everything, down to talking with npcs, costs money. And you, as the titular 35-year-old virgin Tingle, (who has very, very little to do with the series he originated in) have none of it. Want to look at things in a store? Want to ask someone a question? Better clock in and beat up some animals to do an imaginary coin flip to get an item so that you can sell it for a paltry sum of rupees.

Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland works so much better as a piece of critical art than The Landlord's Game because it is terrible. It is boring, it is bland, it is repetitive, it is exactly what having a job is like. And brother? i quit this job after two days.

I hate this game. I recommend it to not only Zelda fans, but anyone who enjoys art.

My (18F) SO (47M) won't stop shouting BRAVO NINTENDO every time he is able to climb something, AITA for accidentally calling his videogame "Tears of the Child"?

I feel like I'm going insane seeing people everywhere go "WOW ITS ACTUALLY SO GOOD ITS ACTUALLY BETTER" while never pointing out why, as if you're just supposed to accept that "you can do many things = good videogame"

This was never gonna hit very hard for me unless they changed the format from BotW significantly, and lord knows they didn't have the balls to nudge even a single system from that game. For the record I don't have even a single problem with the bricklayers, the carpenters or the painters of this house, I'd just like a word with the architect. What has been crafted within the format and beyond the systems is pretty nuts - plenty of great quests and open world storytelling, great environmental puzzles (outside of shrines - which are a mixed bag), and a much better presentation than before.

There's still very little point in interacting with much of the world, combat - being mostly centered on physics cheese - still feels like a round of TABS, Link still has to run around grinding for food like he's in an early access survival sim, clothes and temperature are still non-systems that basically just make you menu a whole lot more and your path still consists of 80% completely forgettable, mind numbing gliding/climbing from point A to point B.

This time however, you're much less interrupted by discovery and exploration, as you already know what's beyond the horizon, seeing as a large majority of the game takes places on more or less the same map. This was a dumb decision taken by an idiot. There are very little soyface moments to be had if you already played the previous game, and you're also supposed to believe that the new stuff they did add (both world and story) was just uh.. it was just hiding last time okay!! Stop thinking about it!!!

I actually really like the final act or so of the story, at least presentation wise, but the substance of the whole thing is extremely lacking and you can pretty much figure out the entire plot in broad strokes from seeing maybe 10% of it.

Temples are much better looking now and a little bit better gameplay wise - but shrines? Flip a coin man. Sometimes they're way better than anything in BotW and sometimes it's like "hurr duur here is a big stick and a lever with no big stick on it, wonder what to do man haha". Thanks Dora, I'll bring out the notebook see if we can't crack this conumdrum. A lot of the shrine puzzles are solved upon a single glance and then take significant time and fiddling to actually execute, which just feels like you're jerking off with the HL2 gravity gun for several minutes trying to make a plate balance on a stick, and fast solve + long execute = YAWN. In BotW some shrines had "alternative" solutions where you could solve the shrine in other ways than intended - I thought this was neat. In TotK, most shrines can be skipped entirely if you strap a single rocket to any of your backup shields. For a while I tested the limits of this by simply strapping every rocket I found to a shield and skipping around 4-6 shrines in a row by simply flying over the content after doing the solve in my head in 5 seconds and not wanting to bother with the execute. I don't think this is neat.

The Ascend ability in particular legitimately has like one puzzle you can make with it - you go up through roof. Is there a roof? If yes, use ability menu. It sometimes feels like it was made entirely so designers could spend less time making sure every cave had an exit. Rewind is not much better - it's impressive technologically but as an actual level design tool it's insanely one dimensional and when they try to make it not one dimensional by making shit that flips and turns so you can't "just" rewind it in the same angle, it becomes extremely finicky and feels like physics cheese again.

Closing rant:
Little Big Planet cars have zero place in Zelda and I'll never be convinced otherwise. I have been completely unimmersed since the second I saw rockets lying around for no reason. Oh and while I'm at it fuck your Purah pad bullshit ass in-universe Switch too. It's not cute Nintendo!!! It just looks fucking weird!!! No one else has one! Those fantasy creatures would freak the fuck out if they saw a handheld tablet!!! Fuck you!!!!!

Final score: Why is it so empty in the basement

WIKTOBER LOG #0025 - LUIGI'S MANSION

Luigi is funny. When he screams M-M-MARIO I laugh. He is suffering, but to me it is funny. This game is good in part due to this dichotomy - how much it sucks for Luigi, and how funny I find that.

I enjoyed playing this videogame. I even got all the spooks. But they still gave me a crappy house womp womp - that's okay though, Luigi just called for help in a voice that sounds like he's just been lined up to take part in a blindfolded shooting execution, and he doesn't know on which end. That's comedy. I laugh. I'm not scared of ghosts, but Luigi is. He's a funny guy.

Small town. A few brahmin herds, and a single watering hole. I step into the musty saloon. A local girl slithers up to me, complaining about her quiet farm life. She tells me about a local Vault - Vault 15. She mentions it by name. I press the "ask about" button and ask her about Vault 15. "Never heard of it" she says. I try to ask her about anything else whatsoever. She's never heard of anything. Alright. Keep your secrets honey... I tell the local gay man, Ian, he will get paid if he follows me forever until his eventual inevitable death. He agrees immediately and eagerly, because I am very "good at speaking".

We wander to the Vault that doesn't exist. We wander back, because we forgot to bring 50 ropes. We try again - the dungeon takes 10 minutes and nothing happens. A weapon is hidden in the bathroom smeared by 10 layers of poop, piss, pixels and blood. We find what we came here for (it's nothing), and go back to town. "Noo you gotta save my girl she's gonna get boiled in shit". I find the raider camp - I tell them I will fuck their mom. They let the girl go for some reason.

8 hours later my dog and all 3 of my friends I tricked in the same way as Ian the Twunk die in a single dungeon because they won't wear any clothes thicker than a dress shirt. It's a Mad Max reference or something. The travel time on the overworld gives me time to think. I think about the giant, barren wasteland. I think about how far and dangerous there is between settlements. I think about how no one has grabbed a broom in 100 years. I think about telling murder mutants where my family lives. I don't know what my meds do and I'm not sure how to find out. I found a backpack in this videogame that I simply couldn't figure out how to use - What? I think about why I have 4 CHA instead of 1. I think about the 2 hours I spent getting this game to run on a modern PC and a 4K monitor. I think about so far only having found one character that allows me to sex and cum in the entirety of California. It's lonely out here. Many games would throw sex and cum at me. Fallout? In Fallout it's about the lack thereof.

Eventually my player character completes their quests and drowns in an ocean of jank - jank that would later continue on through an entire genre shift, a new company, several new engines and somehow be recognizable still as the same old jank. After being stuck for half an hour I had to google an alternate solution for one of the final dungeons because it bugged out on me. Luckily there was one, because many quests don't have that kind of privilege. Some bugs in this game somehow persist in Todd Howards' Starfield. No one knows how. It's beautiful in a sense. A red string of jank.

This game is unfinished - like half the quests have cut content and an entire act of the game got left on the floor. It's a good basis. I hope the sequel will use it well. I hope someone mods it for Steam Deck controls.

reasons this is the best zelda game:
- stamp collecting side-quest where you get to do the stamping yourself
- absolutely KILLER soundtrack
- when you go on your little train the soundtrack syncs to the rhythm of your engine
- rabbits :)
- zelda is one of the best companion characters the series has ever had. i love having her by my side
- you can make your train go choo-choo, an experience no other zelda game offers
- the final battle slaps
- i first played it when i was 9