Most people will agree Heavy Rain is bad. The writing and performances are just dreadful, and the clunky interactive button-prompt cutscenes are incredibly awkward, prone to sinking any suspension of disbelief the game happens to build up on the way. Lots of people enjoy HR ironically, as a videogame equivalent to B-movies, something to be pushed to it's breaking point, and gawked at with friends. I know because that's what I did!

But, at the same time, I can't forget the experiences of my many friends who played the game on release and took it at face value, not really questioning the experience until years later when the game became a sort of meme. Were they too young to know a bad story when they saw it? Were the standards of AAA gaming so low in 2010 that a dud like Heavy Rain could be taken seriously? I mean, yes to both, but in playing it ironically I can't lie. There is value in the games pacing, its weird branching unpredictability, the finality of the choices. In 2010 it really was rare to find a tentpole game with so little padding content crunch, and such a grounded, personal story, even if the execution kind of flops.

Any playthrough of Heavy Rain will result in a LOT of laughter and confusion, but I think it deserves to be remembered as more than just a meme.

What if Metal Gear was more like Monster Hunter, by which we mean just the parts of Monster Hunter that have to do with drop rates and equipment development? What if every idea about homosexuality from American and Japanese popular culture was assimilated into one woman who burns with an unrequited love which she'd never consider voicing, who was a personal friend of Alan Turning, who awakens a latent bisexuality in women she molests in comedy ecchi scenes, and who ultimately and with no clear motivation decides to give men a go? What if there were dozens of identical tank-abducting missions rendered impossible to complete at a high rating until one arduously develops the technology to allow Snake to carry a large enough number of balloons? What if Snake electrocuted an anime schoolgirl in her underwear?

I spent about a hundred hours doing everything there is to do in this game. What more can one ask of a work of art than to lay bare the deficiencies in one's soul?

been feverishly trying to finish up my last few games for 2AGO recently and I figured it'd be a good idea to do a quickie runthrough mgs3 for some easy points. run it on a low difficulty, skip all the cutscenes, and end up earning a ton of points in return. not a bad idea by the looks of it... until one of the mods suggested that I should run it on the original "snake eater" release on normal difficulty for some extra points. that didn't sound too bad! I legit went and bought a copy of the game to play on a real ps2 with a real sorta tiny CRT on our coffee table. playing mgs3 as it was originally "meant" to be played intrigued me, as it has since I was a high school student playing it for the first time.

I must have been a junior when I first played it. it was fall (I believe I played the whole game in november), and it felt like one of those gaming coming-of-age moments where I had really enveloped myself in something fantastical and totally unique. I had conquered this worldly adventure, defeated each member of the cobra unit, sabotaged the shagohod, and watched the white blossoms fade to crimson at a time in my life when I was still delving into the kinds of classic games that would really define my tastes for years to come. at the time I was actually playing on a crt as well - a much bigger one that my parents had bought two decades prior, with the 16:9 ps3 port awkwardly squashed into a 4:3 composite signal. it was challenging and often stressful, but it infused me with a sense of courage and awe at the same time. it was more complex than anything I had played, broader in scope than virtually any of the (admittedly older) worlds I had ever seen, and crafted more expertly than even most books I had read up to then.

I first knew this was going to be a rough replay when I began a hard run of the hd port after doing multiple marathon dogtag runs of mgs2 back in the early months of the pandemic. the latter I had affirmed was still my favorite (as I've spent much time privately and publically digesting), and I was expecting mgs3 to be a little rougher around the edges... but let's just say I didn't make it far past the ocelot fight. now less focused on the presentation and more on the mechanics, the game just didn't sing to me like those repeat runs of mgs2 had, and I quickly instead moved on to trying mgs4 and peace walker for the first time.

now back to this playthrough: how troubling is the infamous top-down camera that defines the original release, hastily "corrected" in the subsistence release a year later? I'm divided a bit on this. if I had a mind to, I could easily tug some contrarian thread extoling the cinematic framing that the fixed camera provides versus its clunkier free-cam counterpart a la yakuza 2, and admittedly at points I did feel this way. kojima explained the initial camera perspective was to unite the game as part of a trilogy with mgs1 and 2, and while it feels more likely to me that the the 3D camera was deemed too taxing performance-wise (the game as a whole really strains the ps2), I sort of understand the throughline he was trying to create there. playing mgs3 in its original form visually conditions the player to remember their experiences in shadow moses and the big shell, and in the process affixes its areas as extensions of the older environments rather than a full reinvention.

but mgs3 is a reinvention; it may as well be the start of a brand-new series. mgs2 perfected the old metal gear formula - military locales with slight sci-fi elements, smaller indoor areas, no natural cover, truly ghost-like stealth - in such a way that there wasn't a point to continuing on with those design parameters. mgs3 is the rough draft for a new kind of stealth game. old metal gear had its run, but it was time to catch up with titles that really took advantage of the 3D space and the locales it could create. the new metal gear made you a natural predator, slithering through foliage, feeding off the land, disposing of guards, and patiently taking stock of potential openings. and really? it's a concept that kojima didn't really nail until mgsv. in that game you have so much at your disposal that you do truly become the big boss of legend, the punished demon wrecking havoc on soviet troops through countless outposts and bases. you're actually superhuman, and unknowable to those that you prey upon. even through that it never ceases to feel dynamic and punishing if you don't plan your moves, perform reconnaissance, and stay on your belly.

mgs3 never gets quite that far. in an effort to boost believability, the ever-useful soliton radar has been stripped from snake's arsenal. a sad choice but necessary to reach the next level of truly self-reliant stealth action. on its own this wouldn't be a problem, but at the same time the guard's have been granted some sort of hivemind ability to immediately spring into action at the slightest glimpse of your person. mgs2 distinguished itself on having its AI naturally react to your presence with tension and fear, needing to radio HQ to inform the others that you were sighted, but mgs3 cuts down this reaction time to a split second instead. briefly spotted by a guard 100 feet away? now everyone in the location will descend on your location instantly. no chance to get a quick headshot because someone accidentally walked up on you alone or even use CQC. if you happen to miscalculate a single guard's location or miss their existence entirely, you will certainly be punished.

this punishment is more of a light slap on the wrist though. mgs3 leans on far more "get from point A to point B" objectives and in the process kneecaps its ability to punish you for not remaining stealthy. given the amount of lethal heavy weaponry you receive, it's obvious that stealth was never the sole intended option. snake can eat dozens of bullets and outrun guards easily, making simply running to your destination often much quicker and more viable than actually attempting a redo of a given area once your cover is blown. you can't reset to a checkpoint anyway, so might as well just skedaddle and try to get a couple screens ahead before forcing a death and getting to respawn in a later area with the alert wiped.

even when you're forced to actually remain in an area to complete a specific objective, it feels mandatory to tranq virtually everyone. the tranq gun feels somewhat divisive on whether it simplifies the gameplay loop too much, and mgs3 feels like it leans on it heavily for less experienced players to get by. the alternative is CQC - which the game is absolutely effusive about - but in a game where guards can easily hear your footsteps, actually getting close to get the grab and not just awkwardly punch them feels night impossible in many cases. it's worth mention that CQC has a clunky, over-involved set of states that left me with the manual firmly in hand for my entire first run. instead, most rooms initally led me to finding a good vantage spot, getting solid tranq shots on everyone I could see, and crawling about through hoping to death that I hadn't missed an obscured opponent.

and the CQC reminds me: oh god, the controls. mgs2 already had a bit of a stuffed control scheme, but servicable to those who would learn it. mgs3 leans too heavily on the pressure-sensitive buttons of the dualshock 2, and in the process makes certain things like firing a weapon (specifically the AK-47) feel woefully unresponsive. having to look up why I was failing counter-CQC against the boss only to find that I was not hitting the button hard enough felt like a slap to the face. the crawling is also abysmal given how vital it is to progression. it is difficult to turn and you will occasionally get stuck on objects if you go prone too close to something else, making apparent how little they felt the need to update said controls over predecessors that used it far more sparingly. weapons still lack a reticle, and certain weapons require holding L1 on top of already holding R1 just to aim down sights, which makes the motorcycle chase section more uncomfortable than it had to be. it's a system that should have been overhauled following mgs2, and it's unfortunate that this game released before over-the-shoulder aiming became the norm.

this of course is ignoring the "survival" aspects, interrupting the above gameplay with constant detours into the menu. changing camo to get a high index is mandatory if you literally don't want to be seen crawling from extremely long distances away, which forces menuing on many room transitions to adapt to the environment. god forbid you miss an important camo from not exploring, because some of them feel near mandatory (I was often screwed indoors for this reason). the food menu is an easier one, simply letting you refil your stamina with various foodstuffs you've obtained or carved. the cure menu is obnoxious and tedious, but veterans will know that using said menu is virtually pointless on normal difficulty anyway since letting wounds heal on their own is mandatory to expanding the HP bar, so I basically never bothered with it until near the end.

and I could keep going on, just blabbing about how annoying I find playing this game now, analyzing the mechanical interactions that fail, and just generally whining about what may be one of the beloved games ever made. there is no satisfaction in this for me! this particular replay, with a stuttering framerate and no freecam and skipping all the cutscenes and codec calls and just running at the instant I got an alert felt like a sledgehammer utterly crushing my perception of the game. it's so hard for me to discern what I actually think about this game. the gameplay really didn't change at the end of the day: the way I played it just did. with my original playthrough I let myself actually try to embody naked snake, and in the process experiencing his finest hour was cathartic. on this playthrough I rushed through and neutered the game's impact.

one of the ways to rectify this is to lean into the kojima-isms present in the game, which are possibly more present here than any of his other games. you can blow up the enemy's ammo/food supply to hurt their morale and make their weapons useless! blow up the helicopter at the base in the early game to prevent it from patrolling the mountains! throw rotten food at the fear to get him to eat it when he gets low on stamina! but do these really enhance the overall gameplay? or are they just trivia to spout and share? they don't legitimize the game's structure unless your criteria for a game's quality is how many weird things you can know about it. I don't want to let my opinion of the game rest entirely on such a flimsy structure. obviously those little touches are still cool, but my big praises for mgs2 don't revolve around the fact that you can use the directional mic during the emma sniper section to hear her talk to the diarrhea guy. it's still great for discussing the game with friends though; one of my friends is playing it for the first time and when he told me he decided he was just going to kill every guard in his path I had a good laugh at his expense knowing that he'd be complaining endlessly once he got to the sorrow.

so this is the real reason I've been reluctant to attempt to retrospectively review this game. having not played it since 2015, I couldn't really write a review in post without replaying the game, but something meant to be a breezy playthrough like I just finished ended up unveiling ugly aspects of the game I wish I didn't have to consider. however you as the reader conceive of my reviewing style, I certainly self-consciously see it somewhere in the more formalist space, less concerned with conveying experiential nuance in favor of revealing mechanical interactions and the strengths of the underlying rules and objectives of the game. thus it was impossible for me to work through my conception of the game without me in the process undermining my own thesis on how amazing this game actually is and how much it blew my mind back in high school.

so the replay was a bit of a blessing in disguise; it let me split my psychic image of this game a bit, and shunt all of those negative feelings into this playthrough while still maintaining the idealized vision of that First Time. I think the two can coexist, and maybe sometime I'll finally finish that hard playthrough while actually watching the cutscenes and doing everything the "right way". then through gritted teeth I can do my masterpiece review, dissecting its cold war setting and observations on the expendability of even those deemed "special" in order to further the goals of the state. maybe I can do a volgin and solidus comparison, or explain the parallels between bosses like vulcan raven and the fury, or the evolution from sniper wolf to the end. I can share my praises for the gorgeous environments, the sublime pacing, and the top-notch level design. the setpieces, that gorgeous theme, and the heartbreaking credits song. but that review isn't this review, and it may just live in my brain perpetually. mgs3 as I originally played it will continue to live as its own log, potentially review-less. the only context being that date, and the memories swirling around growing ever fainter as I grow older and less connected to my high school self. perhaps laughing at my friend for his killing spree was bit hypocritical; I did coup de grace every enemy my first playthrough, only to face the sorrow in a grueling 20-minute encounter that rattled me quite a bit. the younger me would be proud to learn I killed only one guard on the road to the sorrow fight this time.

there is something definitive I'll pull from this experience though, and it's probably a big reason why I didn't just leave this at "this game hasn't aged well for me." most of the bosses in this game are not really that impressive on a second-go-round, which is fine for metal gear; they're much more about witnessing their monologues for the first time and getting to see the big gimmick of each fight (for the record, I ran my system clock forward to kill the end quickly; I'm doing this for a competition after all!). however, I somehow forgot to pick up the snow camo - I think I grabbed it and then died and forgot to grab it again on the replay - and thus was forced to face the boss naked. the fight was protracted and unexpected, and in that way it suddenly became what my younger me remembered from all those years ago. blindly stumbling around turned to methodically picking new sniping positions where I felt momentarily safe, and desperately flailing against her CQC became praying for chances for free damage. when I finally witnessed the flowers turn in all of its single-digit framerate glory that catharsis of surmounting the challenge returned. it was elation. I did sit and watch those final scenes, and man does it still make me tear up. that graveside view of big boss honoring the true patriot will never not affect me. so that's how I know that somewhere I still think metal gear solid 3 is a unalienable masterpiece, a peak of the medium that no one should miss, and one of the unquestionable most profound games for me at the sunset of my adolescence.

but god if they had just remade this on the fox engine or something I would much rather play that instead. maybe I'll give in and try that 3ds port...

It's amazing how much you can get done with just a little bit of unconventionality, isn't it? Killer7 dares to take the mere act of walking from one place to another and render it unrecognizable. What's usually a two-stick process is now mapped almost entirely to the "A" button, denying the player control over both the camera and the path your character takes. This game's tutorial mission scrambled my brain- not because walking is at all complicated, but because it's such a radically different approach from everything else I've played that I couldn't comprehend it at first. Hardly ever being responsible for the direction that your Smith goes in makes it that much more difficult to create a mental map of the area, even when frequently consulting the actual in-game map. Trying to decipher spacial layouts in Killer7 is as tricky as trying to decipher the game's overarching plot, and I often found myself stopping to take aim when there weren't any enemies around just for a more orthodox camera perspective. And, clearly, this was a deliberate trap. In the collective mind of the Smith syndicate, the world only makes sense when viewed through the scope of a rifle, a detail that's communicated entirely through gameplay and embellished through audiovisuals. The simple geometry and basic color gradients of every environment seem to mock you, claiming that they're not as complicated as you think they are, and the haunting laugh of every Heaven's Smile adds that extra bit of disorientation. Given how effective this one facet of the game is, then, it's such a shame that the rest of it is just so conventional. I shoot enemies in their glowing weak spots. I solve puzzles that I'm given the answers to. I'm never tasked with managing the mutual vitality of the Killer7, nor do I even choose my Smith based on the situation that I find myself in. Conforming to the standard structure of ending most levels with a boss battle is the most poorly considered of these decisions, as the lack of any mobility whatsoever means they're all simultaneously painful yet far too easy. The one exception is Andrei Ulmeyda, who represents an exciting chase through an arena that was actually built to take advantage of how moving around works. Ulmeyda Intercity, in general, seems to have been lifted from a much more cleverly designed game, mainly due to how it reevaluates how horror should operate in the context of Killer7. It's pretty unconventional for a game's scariest level to be its least confined, isn't it? Unfortunately, this game isn't all that weird, despite how desperately it wants to convince you otherwise. Samantha, for instance, abstractly transitions between various erotic fantasies and/or stages of adolescence whenever you see her, and only allows you to save your game when she's an adult-slash-French-maid. Leaving such a vital part of the game to an unreliable character is a stroke of genius, especially when you consider how much of a relief finally reaching a safe zone in a stressful game can end up being, but it's all rendered pointless by the fact that the map tells you where you can and can't save, allowing you to ignore Samantha's whims entirely while planning your path. But, I suspect, fans of this game will consider any non-thematic analysis of Killer7 to be equally pointless. I won't pretend to be smart enough to fully get what Suda is ultimately grasping at, though I will say that fate and control are far and away some of the least interesting themes for video games to cover, even back in 2005. Nor will I pretend to care all that much- thematically rich or not, the game's still boring, and in my eyes, anything that demands a deeper look is obligated to contain more replay value, not less. I've almost certainly only been made dumber by the amount of times I've heard Leon S. Kennedy's corny one-liners, but I'm not sure if I'll ever return to this (according to Suda acolytes) incredibly intellectually rewarding work. For better or worse, I no longer get that DS feeling...

Sat on this for a while, but despite its charms and fantastic ideas, I think I'd much rather just pick up and reread the many books I've read or was taught about from the period rather than force myself to find something more in Pentiment.

I have the benefit of being somewhat familiar with the setting, so much of that time period was taught to us at school. It is a big part of my country's history, it was our golden age after all. Name of the Rose comes up a lot when discussing Pentiment, one of the many books we had to read surrounding that period of time, and it is definitely very inspired by it, but there's also clearly a great deal of research that went into creating believable and exciting scenarios for the game to remain interesting throughout its entire runtime. I love the way this game looks and that strive for an enjoyable mystery within the framework it set for itself. For most I assume it would be the feeling of something unique and exciting, but for me it was the old, comforting familiar feeling that drew me into Pentiment.

The way you explore the gameworld is through a set of predetermined interactions that are available to you at a given time, you are supposed to select which one you want to spend your limited time on. Some interactions do not pass time, and it is usually indicated by a character specifically asking whether you want to spend it on this particular action. The game sets up these rules to make passage of time a very important narrative and gameplay element, making the most of the time and chances given, dealing with the consequences of the choices made under its constraints, etc.

So when any cracks start to show within the logic of the gameplay or the narrative, or when one begins to clash with another, the believability and investment begin to dwindle. Unfortunately, my playthrough led me to a few too many. The game taught me that walking and exchanging simple words with certain people isn't a time-consuming action, but when I needed one character to be outside in a certain time of day, not an unreasonable one like the middle of the night or anything, I was simply unable to. Said character knew we were supposed to meet and was supposed to pass me a cure for a person that was dying, who was unable to come and get it themselves. But I couldn't do that, the game blocked me from following up on that, even though I was promised earlier that I could come pick it up the same day. I couldn't save the life of a character I really enjoyed interacting with due to an artificial reason, not a narrative one or one that was necessarily the consequence of my actions. This situation arose because it was ultimately a game and didn't set up a proper trigger for me to interact with. What's worse, a completely unrelated trigger with a different character in the same area caused the character I needed to appear to join in this activity, but afterwards they were gone once more and I could not interact with them!

Plenty of other, similar moments began popping up. I uncover a lead that I could undoubtedly confront a person with, but the game didn't set up a trigger for me to do that. I walk up to a person, their family and loved ones and they cheerfully go "Hello!" and that's that, even though I have in my posession a damning piece of evidence that would undoubtedly end up with a death sentence. Pentiment too often clashes with any idea that might pop up in a player's head because its systems are so rigid. This ultimately ties to the story it tries to tell in a way, but it is done so artificially that I simply could not find enough investment or emotion in it.

Nothing but disappointment really sticks with me from my own playthrough, yet when I take a look at it I find it difficult to not feel generally positive towards Pentiment. A clear labor of love only made possible thanks to the GamePass, beautiful art, so many stories of other people going through it and having these fantastic realizations. I know that somewhere where I haven't gone myself there is a potential for an enthralling story, and that it is entirely possible to avoid the trappings I fell into. There are some profound moments that, should enough investment be built, I think will stick with others for a long time. I would lie if the praise it gets didn't bug me somewhat, I experienced a far different game than most, but even I find it to be very charming, so I understand what an amazing feeling a perfect run of this game must feel like. I, too, loved the early moments, when I was fully invested in the history of Tassing.

absolute hall of fame endgame idec how rushed it was. mechanisms and items stripped of any intuitive meanings outside of feeling around in the dark w your verbs, harnessing adventure game puzzle indecipherableness to have you completely in tune w the total dissolution of curtis's semiotic world. and no one cared or even thought it was worth evaluating outside of "bad fmv game puzzle" so that proves i deserve video games more than most of you. MY denpa eroge, MY documentary of my life where curtis is literally me and all of this actually happened

“Years ago, I was Chinese”

It’s universally true that every American has dreamt of being an autistic Japanese dock worker. Now, you can make that dream come true!

On a serious note, Majora’s Mask was the perfect primer for me to get into Shenmue. This famously immersive Dreamcast epic/Virtua Fighter RPG is beyond ambitious, and it’s proof that game design going deep can be way better than going wide.

It’s the wonderfully aimless predecessor to games like LA Noire and Yakuza. It’s part mystery, part fighting game, part life-sim, but honestly with none of the headache that comes with any of them. You don’t have to bathe or comb your hair like in Red Dead Redemption 2, and there’s no real hurry to finish the campaign, so you can play darts and Space Harrier to your heart’s content.

Some call it boring, but I found Shenmue to be a soothing, fulfilling experience. It makes me sad that we don’t see tons of games like it nowadays. Companies have gone for these expansive/empty open worlds for so long that aside from a few (including aforementioned games) we’ve missed out on a level of granular detail that they were able to achieve on the Sega Dreamcast. Plus you can carry over your save file Mass Effect-style to the next game! Insane!

We need more games like Shenmue.

Intermittently torturous, always detached, and Shenmue only improves in this regard two decades on. It is often cited as the open world urtext, but where Shenmue works in alienation the games it influenced put the player-character at the centre of the universe. In the Grand Theft Auto series the player moves in a reckless, fluid way, in stark contrast to the rigid and wandering NPCs — every frame explodes into being through our freedom, of movement, of decision, of infinite variety and eternal recurrence, and yet we are never allowed access to the patterns or behaviours of those around us. The very absence of an 'talk' button along with the sheer number of people spawned across the game environment has us intuitively accept that the world is that which we do — we are its God, its conductor. With Shenmue however, Ryo's body moves in this blocky, unwieldy way, and must fit into the whims and schedules of those around him. The game's day-night cycle seems to actively close rather than open opportunities, such as in cases where we are tasked with waiting tens of hours to meet certain people at certain times of day, and all Ryo's options for time-killing actively feel like time-killing (in the sense of time we know we will never get back) — throwing darts, visiting noodle houses, patting cats, watching the trees. There is no way to accelerate time's passing, and the only way to endure it is to actively make the time to enjoy the small things, which is to say reframing the story as the distraction and not the other way around. Still, as Zen as this all sounds, however beautiful the sunsets and poignant the broken swing by the stairs, Shenmue makes it so the player never feels as though they belong in it.

Every day begins and ends at the Hazuki Residence, in a curious disciplinary move that has us clumsily navigate a house that never becomes a home, waiting as Ryo puts on or takes off his shoes, before venturing into a world that similarly never opens up to him. The anonymous faces in Grand Theft Auto are props until they're activated by player action, reflecting the scale of cause and effect, but in Shenmue we are always trying to act according to the dominating logic of the world, making the people in it both obstacles that are necessary to progress the game, and ever-present reminders of our not belonging. If we see an 'interact' prompt appear near a stranger, Ryo is just as likely to receive some valuable information as he is to be, in the most polite way possible, called a creep and asked to leave. He can't jump or skip or even run through a door. He checks over his shoulder to make sure he's alone before exercising in the park. When Ryo sees someone else is using the stairs, he will wait until they get to the top before he even begins is ascent, one gets the sense out of discomfort rather than politeness. They have their routines and we don't have ours. This doesn't make us free, it makes us perpetually alone. An old woman asks Ryo for directions and says she'll wait at the park to hear from him. If the player forgets, the old woman can never be found again. How long did she wait? Did she find the place on her own? Is she okay? It's always like this, he's impossible, nobody knows who he is and neither does he. Even those who know Ryo's name expect something of him that he's failing to embody, and this sense of quiet failure permeates Shenmue in both the way the world is painted and the way it plays.

Interactions with friends and family remain at the level of surface courtesies, veiling a great sadness and isolation that hints at impossible rifts between each and every person. Nobody knows Ryo — he's always falling just short of being what others think they know of him, and on an entirely different course from what's expected in the long run. And looking to him for answers leads to an even more penetrating sense of absence, a passive neglect of others and a dead eyed embrace of tangible actions and information pathways where the insignificant is given significance, and significant actions are always underpinned by the mundane. He confronts gang members like a kid buying a toy, and he buys toys like he's finally found meaning in this world. The central ambiguity in Shenmue, and what makes it so affecting, is whether this suffocating sense of loneliness is inherent to the world or just Ryo, who as the game's protagonist paints the way it appears to us. Is there a difference? When he is showed great generosity by Fuku-San, Ryo's unreadable face casts a cold negation of the gesture, making the other person seem comically, embarrassingly over-expressive. But it's Ryo who is embarrassing — his straightforward detective questioning, gullibility, and tonedeaf approach to human interaction make his journey less a myopic descent into obsession than a sort of hobby or project, a convenient opportunity for something to do. At one stage Nozomi asks Ryu about school, and we realise all this free time he has is the result of shirking a role that could give him some structure; some direction. In every sense he is out of sync: like Kyle MacLachlan's character in Blue Velvet no matter how successfully he works through the underbelly of his town he's only ever met with bemusement and confusion by the people he finds there. He can't be here, but he can't go back either. Once again the mechanic of Ryo's return to the Hazuki Residence reinforces every morning and every evening that there is no home for him. Shenmue is affecting because it forces us to play through, to physically enact this discomfort, while reading around Ryo that it is he who is the stranger.

The strangest and most subtly moving decision made is that the game's final act begins with Ryo taking on a job at the dock, driving forklifts. Where Ryo's physically cumbersome body spent weeks running around Dobuita, mangling interactions and finding ways to kill time, Ryo's dock work finally gives him purpose, a routine, and targets to meet. Throughout the rest of the game it is impossible to know whether one is making progress or floundering, but the dock work gives instant feedback in the form of quotas and bonus cheques reflecting efforts made. The forklifts also control with a fluidity uncommon in the rest of the game and reach speeds he can't on foot. Lunch breaks begin at the same time every day with a shot of Ryo sitting with his colleagues and eating; he could almost belong here. And because we're not waiting for time to pass but rather trying to do things in time, the way the skies change during the afternoon shift can at the docks be appreciated for how beautiful they are. Time becomes valuable, and as it passes it fills the scene with warmth before it leaves. Despite the routinised action or perhaps because of it, it is clear there will never be another day exactly like this one. One afternoon Ryo sees Nozomi at the docks taking photos and there is this confronting atmosphere because Ryo for the first time sees himself in the face of someone who recognises what he's doing — not for what his family represents or what anyone thinks he should be doing, but for what he is doing as he works at the dock. This is followed by a strange and beautiful sequence where Ryo's and Nozomi's photograph is taken twice, and Ryo must pick one to take away. One makes it appear as though they are lovers, the other, total strangers, and clearly the truth is somewhere in between. This moment of self-presentation to someone who matters is immediately turned into a fiction, or perhaps memorialised as a future that can never be between two people, one who doesn't know who she is but knows what she wants, the other a blank surface reflecting back everything indeterminate, everything unsure, everything anxious about the one unfortunate enough to look. He is in short a negation.

As the year wraps up, the uncaring faces increase in volume, and many of the familiar ones say they're going away. Ryo's neighbourhood, already a quietly lonely place, comes to feel like a ghost town of dead end interactions and suspended time — a place simultaneously too big and too small to sustain life. Ryo's dispassionate movement through Yokosuka is curious, because he is not the one feeling these things. Everything to him is information, and if that information leads abroad, so be it. He doesn't care one way or another, but we do. That Yokosuka is framed as a place that is already dead and in the process of being remembered must then belong to somebody else, someone who is remembering the story as Ryo tells it. Indeed as others try to reach out for him it becomes clear that it is not the town that is the ghost, but Ryo, that figure once present and well liked but who died one day and now glides through with blank eyes, forever out of time and place.

Without the language of Chinese cinema the story is simplistic and weird, but its grandiose animated dreams and talks of fate cut an effective threshold between the exhaustingly quotidian world of Shenmue and its mythic aspirations. Its textures are uniformly dingy and wet looking but this adds to Ryo's sense of claustrophobia, and the alienating temporality of the game that insists we shouldn't be here. Indeed the construction of the New Yokosuka Movie Theatre that will never be finished, and dig site and Sakuragaoka suggest the world will keep moving once we leave but can't start until that happens. The ability to talk to people who will only offer 'Sorry I don't feel like talking' leads to disappointment before its themes of isolation become clear. The animations haven't aged well but the offbeat rhythms of the game work its visuals into an uncanny space both otherworldly and uncomfortably familiar. It's also occasionally gorgeous by any standards: in one scene on a motorbike Yu Suzuki manages an extended reference to Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels and, short a bloom effect to mimic that director's blurry expressionism, simply layers brake light colours across the screen. I'll admit I lost my breath for a full minute: the absence of a bleeding light for a strange, rigid, suspended rendering of abstract human emotion might be the game in a single wonderful image.

not morally egregious per se but rather a depressing culmination of a decade's worth of design trickery and (d)evolving cultural/social tastes and otherwise exists as insipid twitchcore autoplaying bullshit that should come with a contractual agreement binding its devotees to never speak prejudicially about mobile games or musou ever again lest they face legally enforced financial restitution. just play nex machina man. or watch NFL. been a fun season for that. fuck the review man let's talk sports in the comments