caebl201
198 Reviews liked by caebl201
I'm tired and didn't expect to finish this tonight so I'm going to stay terse. naughty dog is obsessed with filmic avenues for games as art. game design is entirely secondary and liberally cribbed from contemporaries. consider literally any jak game (standard collectathon for first game, same engine grafted to eyebrow-raising drab GTA world for second game) or uncharted (bog-standard cover shooter + ico-lite platforming + half-hearted turn towards horror in the back quarter). naughty dog only believes in conglomerates of design. interwoven webs of market-proven mechanics where the connective tissue is the graphical fidelity and storytelling.
this is not what I like in games. I like games that create internal logics that interact with each other in novel ways. this doesn't have to be complex. arcade-style games form tiny cores of necessary mechanics and grow their universes from exploring the facets of each element in further and further detail. surprisingly, the last of us is naughty dog's attempt at making such a game. it is meant to be a rich tapestry of survival, horror, grounded shooter, et cetera. its individual elements are evidently meant to pulsate and reprise in waves across the experience. approaches to encounters are meant to run the gamut of stealth, guns blazing, trap-oriented, and any combination of these you can conceive.
naughty dog is not a studio that has the design chops to make such a game though. instead, the end product is The third-person shooter. the third-person shooter monolith if you will. a pastiche of nearly a decade of design patterns evolving shoved into a single casserole. when in tightly constrained areas, cover is conspicuously placed for you to camp behind while you clear the room. other areas feature hidden routes to quietly crouch-walk through under the auspicious of "tense" play. others feature onslaughts of infected waves meant to be gunned down. these are discrete and easy to recognize. what makes it interconnected is that the options are bare enough to make transitioning styles required. getting caught during stealth just makes the game a cover shooter. running away from clickers far enough transitions back into stealth. remaining in cover long enough will eventually force the enemies to push and let you react aggressively. no one system ever has enough juice to invigorate the experience on its own. walking up behind someone to shiv them rarely changes outcomes over just shooting them with an arrow or walking past. shotguns sometimes barely stagger opponents so what pleasure do I attain from experimenting with the weapon when a point-blank headshot doesn't even cause them to explode into gibs. I could just use any of the multiple other weapons that have the same effect.
all you're doing at the end of the day is eliminating individual enemies with one of the options off of the a la carte weapons menu. no need to manipulate their search AI or clump them into groups or anything beyond just rotating weapons and picking off every enemy one by one. only thing that changes is if you're supposed to be playing gears-style cover tactics or far cry-style "clear the base by pressing the takedown button behind everyone" or resident evil-style horde extermination. which is potentially enough to satisfy anyone who wanted a third-person shooter buffet. none of the styles are really entertaining enough on their own to justify the whole. the universe the game design resides in is disjointed.
the rest is pushed forward by walking forward through pretty corridors pressing triangle whenever the game asks you to. none of the aforementioned mechanics lend themselves to puzzle-solving, so virtually every instance of one in the world is just moving a ladder or letting ellie float on a wood pallet. in keeping with the crash bandicoot crate methodology ie provide minute interaction between the actual tests of competancy, the game litters materials all throughout the world for you to mindlessly pick up. any semblence of creating fragments of life in these environments is shattered by this. joel and ellie's banter is mumbled as backdrop for me rumaging through lockers and piles of trash for extra bandages or ammo. representations of life pre-apocalypse decaying are bastardized as I sift through drawers looking for those telltale item symbols to pop up for me to view. this is not an insignificant portion of the game mind you. some of these segments of nothingness reach the 15-20 minute range. if they were so concerned with letting me appreciate the views, maybe they wouldn't have felt the need to breadcrumb trail me around, pointing my camera at the ground constantly in the process. which does not even begin to highlight the inauthenticity of every supposed residential area with conviently placed rubble or cars or such to create cover-based combat arenas.
with this said, its adaptability is its greatest strength as much as it is its downfall. the general workbench design and locked doors are lifted from dead space and rendered more enjoyable here thanks to a streamlined tech tree and relatively-common shivs being used as keys rather than expensive power nodes. the actual gunplay is medicore since it never matches one modality, but at the same time it is at least a better murder sim than uncharted and its sanitized pg-13 firefights. enemy AI is not exactly robust and is easy to exploit thanks to the overeemphasived distraction item mechanic (bricks and bottles are yet another endlessly available item to collect), but it is complex enough to surprise the player and force more reactive play.
there's a particular moment I really liked. in the basement of the hotel there's waterlogged storage rooms with an elevator to reach the main floors that is disabled. enabling this requires turning on a generator located on the opposite side of the area, which will attract many waves of infected along with a dangerous bloater enemy. there are many approaches to this section, including simply beelining to the exit with the keycard for the elevator, setting traps in places where the spawns become most congested, or simply fighting it out amongst the onslaught of opponents. this is identical to the style-switching I discussed earlier. however, this particular encounter is totally open-ended in a way where a particular approach isn't necessarily prescribed. in my first attempt I played cat and mouse with the bloater before I knew the keycard location because I had unwittingly turned the generator on upon seeing it. my second attempt I tried to fight back more proactively, and on my third attempt I laid down traps and planned an escape route beforehand. none of these were intended strategies to the extent that the developers felt pressed to include copious hints towards one style or another (blatant cover, passageways to crouch-walk through, etc.). the area is relatively large as well, and thus the actual tactical evaluation feels less limiting. if only more encounters in the game had attempted something higher-level like this instead of pulling from canned ideas.
all of this is in service of delivering the story. I would call it a children of men rip-off if I had ever actually watched that movie. I appreciate that joel is the anti-nathan drake. the deluge of quips is replaced by generic gruff guy behavior (not to mention ellie handles most quip duties when appropriate), but at the very least the game does a better job presenting him as a total psychopath and justifies the insane bodycount he racks up. the ending in particular I enjoyed; the "actually he did all this terrible shit because he's a terrible person!" throughline is not novel nor was it in 2013, but I rarely see a game attempt such a purposeful lack of closure. the rest is marginal. various character sketches dedicated in each chapter with predictably dour results for each. the repeated "people do terrible things under pressure" motif is wrung far too dry. makes each character's arc slight since the outcome is always known in advance. perhaps this is why I liked the ending: did not necessarily expect it given most games' predilection for riding off into a sunset.
the latter section is sort of damning because I actually played the majority of this game while dogsitting for my girlfriend months ago, and finally finished today to add another game to the halloween roster. I frankly don't remember much about the story other than the broad strokes. I at least remember more than a dozen or so particular enemy encounters, which is pretty great for a game that runs about 15 hours. what's less reassuring is how scattered my responses to said encounters were: I often remember routes I took but what guns or tactics I favored are completely absent from my memory.
a smorgasbord of opportunites for you to throw a brick somewhere and make everyone around you go "huh? what was that" and allow you to walk behind them. speaking of which: the clickers. the perfect synthesis of "scary enemy that actually is so trivial to circumvent that it's not scary" and "scary enemy that awkwardly OHKOs you and becomes more frustrating than scary". having your primary horror encounters be based around an enemy that cannot see you renders virtually every situation with them one that rewards just walking really slowly. that is when you don't have a brick, which you nearly always will because they're generously located near all clickers. finally building up the firepower to kill them more efficiently would be great if not for the OHKO, and so just walking around them still feels like the dominant strategy up through the final area. other than using the flamethrower that is, which I frankly underused outside of the final areas. also this review is more terse than my usual shit which thankfully meant I knocked it out in about an hour but still is way too long. oh well. better than my original draft from when I was more actively playing it that tried to wade into the lukewarm "games as art" discourse.
this is not what I like in games. I like games that create internal logics that interact with each other in novel ways. this doesn't have to be complex. arcade-style games form tiny cores of necessary mechanics and grow their universes from exploring the facets of each element in further and further detail. surprisingly, the last of us is naughty dog's attempt at making such a game. it is meant to be a rich tapestry of survival, horror, grounded shooter, et cetera. its individual elements are evidently meant to pulsate and reprise in waves across the experience. approaches to encounters are meant to run the gamut of stealth, guns blazing, trap-oriented, and any combination of these you can conceive.
naughty dog is not a studio that has the design chops to make such a game though. instead, the end product is The third-person shooter. the third-person shooter monolith if you will. a pastiche of nearly a decade of design patterns evolving shoved into a single casserole. when in tightly constrained areas, cover is conspicuously placed for you to camp behind while you clear the room. other areas feature hidden routes to quietly crouch-walk through under the auspicious of "tense" play. others feature onslaughts of infected waves meant to be gunned down. these are discrete and easy to recognize. what makes it interconnected is that the options are bare enough to make transitioning styles required. getting caught during stealth just makes the game a cover shooter. running away from clickers far enough transitions back into stealth. remaining in cover long enough will eventually force the enemies to push and let you react aggressively. no one system ever has enough juice to invigorate the experience on its own. walking up behind someone to shiv them rarely changes outcomes over just shooting them with an arrow or walking past. shotguns sometimes barely stagger opponents so what pleasure do I attain from experimenting with the weapon when a point-blank headshot doesn't even cause them to explode into gibs. I could just use any of the multiple other weapons that have the same effect.
all you're doing at the end of the day is eliminating individual enemies with one of the options off of the a la carte weapons menu. no need to manipulate their search AI or clump them into groups or anything beyond just rotating weapons and picking off every enemy one by one. only thing that changes is if you're supposed to be playing gears-style cover tactics or far cry-style "clear the base by pressing the takedown button behind everyone" or resident evil-style horde extermination. which is potentially enough to satisfy anyone who wanted a third-person shooter buffet. none of the styles are really entertaining enough on their own to justify the whole. the universe the game design resides in is disjointed.
the rest is pushed forward by walking forward through pretty corridors pressing triangle whenever the game asks you to. none of the aforementioned mechanics lend themselves to puzzle-solving, so virtually every instance of one in the world is just moving a ladder or letting ellie float on a wood pallet. in keeping with the crash bandicoot crate methodology ie provide minute interaction between the actual tests of competancy, the game litters materials all throughout the world for you to mindlessly pick up. any semblence of creating fragments of life in these environments is shattered by this. joel and ellie's banter is mumbled as backdrop for me rumaging through lockers and piles of trash for extra bandages or ammo. representations of life pre-apocalypse decaying are bastardized as I sift through drawers looking for those telltale item symbols to pop up for me to view. this is not an insignificant portion of the game mind you. some of these segments of nothingness reach the 15-20 minute range. if they were so concerned with letting me appreciate the views, maybe they wouldn't have felt the need to breadcrumb trail me around, pointing my camera at the ground constantly in the process. which does not even begin to highlight the inauthenticity of every supposed residential area with conviently placed rubble or cars or such to create cover-based combat arenas.
with this said, its adaptability is its greatest strength as much as it is its downfall. the general workbench design and locked doors are lifted from dead space and rendered more enjoyable here thanks to a streamlined tech tree and relatively-common shivs being used as keys rather than expensive power nodes. the actual gunplay is medicore since it never matches one modality, but at the same time it is at least a better murder sim than uncharted and its sanitized pg-13 firefights. enemy AI is not exactly robust and is easy to exploit thanks to the overeemphasived distraction item mechanic (bricks and bottles are yet another endlessly available item to collect), but it is complex enough to surprise the player and force more reactive play.
there's a particular moment I really liked. in the basement of the hotel there's waterlogged storage rooms with an elevator to reach the main floors that is disabled. enabling this requires turning on a generator located on the opposite side of the area, which will attract many waves of infected along with a dangerous bloater enemy. there are many approaches to this section, including simply beelining to the exit with the keycard for the elevator, setting traps in places where the spawns become most congested, or simply fighting it out amongst the onslaught of opponents. this is identical to the style-switching I discussed earlier. however, this particular encounter is totally open-ended in a way where a particular approach isn't necessarily prescribed. in my first attempt I played cat and mouse with the bloater before I knew the keycard location because I had unwittingly turned the generator on upon seeing it. my second attempt I tried to fight back more proactively, and on my third attempt I laid down traps and planned an escape route beforehand. none of these were intended strategies to the extent that the developers felt pressed to include copious hints towards one style or another (blatant cover, passageways to crouch-walk through, etc.). the area is relatively large as well, and thus the actual tactical evaluation feels less limiting. if only more encounters in the game had attempted something higher-level like this instead of pulling from canned ideas.
all of this is in service of delivering the story. I would call it a children of men rip-off if I had ever actually watched that movie. I appreciate that joel is the anti-nathan drake. the deluge of quips is replaced by generic gruff guy behavior (not to mention ellie handles most quip duties when appropriate), but at the very least the game does a better job presenting him as a total psychopath and justifies the insane bodycount he racks up. the ending in particular I enjoyed; the "actually he did all this terrible shit because he's a terrible person!" throughline is not novel nor was it in 2013, but I rarely see a game attempt such a purposeful lack of closure. the rest is marginal. various character sketches dedicated in each chapter with predictably dour results for each. the repeated "people do terrible things under pressure" motif is wrung far too dry. makes each character's arc slight since the outcome is always known in advance. perhaps this is why I liked the ending: did not necessarily expect it given most games' predilection for riding off into a sunset.
the latter section is sort of damning because I actually played the majority of this game while dogsitting for my girlfriend months ago, and finally finished today to add another game to the halloween roster. I frankly don't remember much about the story other than the broad strokes. I at least remember more than a dozen or so particular enemy encounters, which is pretty great for a game that runs about 15 hours. what's less reassuring is how scattered my responses to said encounters were: I often remember routes I took but what guns or tactics I favored are completely absent from my memory.
a smorgasbord of opportunites for you to throw a brick somewhere and make everyone around you go "huh? what was that" and allow you to walk behind them. speaking of which: the clickers. the perfect synthesis of "scary enemy that actually is so trivial to circumvent that it's not scary" and "scary enemy that awkwardly OHKOs you and becomes more frustrating than scary". having your primary horror encounters be based around an enemy that cannot see you renders virtually every situation with them one that rewards just walking really slowly. that is when you don't have a brick, which you nearly always will because they're generously located near all clickers. finally building up the firepower to kill them more efficiently would be great if not for the OHKO, and so just walking around them still feels like the dominant strategy up through the final area. other than using the flamethrower that is, which I frankly underused outside of the final areas. also this review is more terse than my usual shit which thankfully meant I knocked it out in about an hour but still is way too long. oh well. better than my original draft from when I was more actively playing it that tried to wade into the lukewarm "games as art" discourse.
Lynchian dialogue.
El prologo al capitulo perdido de esa saga que medita sobre la dualidad.
Inesperado plot twist. Ground Zeroes es un reflejo del primer episodio de MGS2, pura pornografia de accion y espionaje que deriva hacia un final turbio y extraño que parece enganchar la fantasia con la realidad. Tambien es, como MGS2, un reflejo sobre la imposibilidad de desligarnos de las nociones de lo que es "un buen videojuego"
Jugar con la linea que separa la explotacion, la parodia y la autocritica parece estar prohibido en los videojuegos, la necesidad de brindar un punto de acceso asequible para el jugador por medio de un centro moral facil donde se acepta antes la accion cartoon que la posibilidad de manejar la pornografia estetica y la abstraccion. Casi todos los acercamientos formales parecen basarse en la calidad del apartado, el tejido en si, por encima de la expresion y el retrato, confundiendo forma con materia y calidad con profundidad que, partiendo de ahi, ese razonamiento se arrastra hasta lo narrativo, lo literal y lo moral. la sustraccion selectiva a la que juegos como MGSV se ven sometidos es prueba de lo poco que en ocasiones entendemos realmente (me incluyo, por supuesto), ya no de videojuegos, si no de posibilidades. Con Sustraccion selectiva me refiero a la focalizacion de aspectos concretos que nos hacen salvar o condenar un videojuego concreto, en MGSVgz:
-La bomba en la vagina como condena.
-La jugabilidad como redencion.
Para mi ninguno tiene sentido.
La cuestion de la misoginia interiorizada de Kojima es evidente y una absoluta lastima, tan evidente que el mismo la reconoce de forma casi abierta. ha intentado varias veces de manera honesta tratar la sexualidad como parte de sus mundos, siempre una mix entre la nocion japonesa y Norte-americana del sexo y los cuerpos, el exhibicionismo y el empoderamiento, tanto para hombre como para mujeres, aunque claramente al ser MGS una saga que maneja la masculinidad y el mito del heroe, la peor parte se la lleva el genero femenino.
Dicho esto, el asunto de la bomba me parece mas una super-dramatizacion de un acto atroz que sadismo sexual en si. Quiza me equivoque, pero no veo mas atencion en ello que la incomodidad y el retrato de una tragedia de guerra, crafteada dentro de un momento intencionalmente incomodo, Y Quiet me hace sentir demasiado incomodo, entiendo que forme parte del punto de TPP, me gusta la teoria, pero no comparto las formas.
La cuestion de la jugabilidad es el punto de sustraccion selectiva mas grande y en la que mas "Criticos" caen: Apuntan a una ausencia de autocritica mientras alaban las posibilidades del gameplay cuando ven un video de Dunkey, sin pensar en disociar o hilar lo que sucede con nada que no este dentro del videojuego, siempre desde la relacion avatar-jugador. lo que vemos es lo que hay y los videojuegos son literales.
Es un modo de ver las cosas con el que cada vez concuerdo menos.
Aparte,hay algo mas anti- americano que ofrecerte guantanamo como un campo de juego para despues desatar un 9/11 sobre el hogar del avatar/protagonista??
Bastante genio.
La posibilidad de crear mundos digitales donde el autor pueda integrar personificaciones de sus predilecciones, preocupaciones y, por que no? Fallos y problemas personales como un mashup se ve lapidada por las cuestiones de tono, necesidad de un ancla moral y la necesidad de satisfacer al jugador, claro, un juego se supone que debe ser divertido.
Pues No.
No necesariamente.
En que punto perdimos la capacidad de entender que el contenido ideologico cuestionable que un autor incluya en su obra no tiene que ser una personificacion 1 a 1 del mismo? Ni idea, pero en videojuegos es algo extendido. Quiza porque gozan de menor reconocimiento cultural? Por sus cualidades inmediatas? Porque son divertidos?
En ocasiones uno debe separar para ver con perspectiva, encontrar ese algo especial, pero habria que empezar a pensar como separar mejor para reencajar mejor todo.
Inesperado plot twist. Ground Zeroes es un reflejo del primer episodio de MGS2, pura pornografia de accion y espionaje que deriva hacia un final turbio y extraño que parece enganchar la fantasia con la realidad. Tambien es, como MGS2, un reflejo sobre la imposibilidad de desligarnos de las nociones de lo que es "un buen videojuego"
Jugar con la linea que separa la explotacion, la parodia y la autocritica parece estar prohibido en los videojuegos, la necesidad de brindar un punto de acceso asequible para el jugador por medio de un centro moral facil donde se acepta antes la accion cartoon que la posibilidad de manejar la pornografia estetica y la abstraccion. Casi todos los acercamientos formales parecen basarse en la calidad del apartado, el tejido en si, por encima de la expresion y el retrato, confundiendo forma con materia y calidad con profundidad que, partiendo de ahi, ese razonamiento se arrastra hasta lo narrativo, lo literal y lo moral. la sustraccion selectiva a la que juegos como MGSV se ven sometidos es prueba de lo poco que en ocasiones entendemos realmente (me incluyo, por supuesto), ya no de videojuegos, si no de posibilidades. Con Sustraccion selectiva me refiero a la focalizacion de aspectos concretos que nos hacen salvar o condenar un videojuego concreto, en MGSVgz:
-La bomba en la vagina como condena.
-La jugabilidad como redencion.
Para mi ninguno tiene sentido.
La cuestion de la misoginia interiorizada de Kojima es evidente y una absoluta lastima, tan evidente que el mismo la reconoce de forma casi abierta. ha intentado varias veces de manera honesta tratar la sexualidad como parte de sus mundos, siempre una mix entre la nocion japonesa y Norte-americana del sexo y los cuerpos, el exhibicionismo y el empoderamiento, tanto para hombre como para mujeres, aunque claramente al ser MGS una saga que maneja la masculinidad y el mito del heroe, la peor parte se la lleva el genero femenino.
Dicho esto, el asunto de la bomba me parece mas una super-dramatizacion de un acto atroz que sadismo sexual en si. Quiza me equivoque, pero no veo mas atencion en ello que la incomodidad y el retrato de una tragedia de guerra, crafteada dentro de un momento intencionalmente incomodo, Y Quiet me hace sentir demasiado incomodo, entiendo que forme parte del punto de TPP, me gusta la teoria, pero no comparto las formas.
La cuestion de la jugabilidad es el punto de sustraccion selectiva mas grande y en la que mas "Criticos" caen: Apuntan a una ausencia de autocritica mientras alaban las posibilidades del gameplay cuando ven un video de Dunkey, sin pensar en disociar o hilar lo que sucede con nada que no este dentro del videojuego, siempre desde la relacion avatar-jugador. lo que vemos es lo que hay y los videojuegos son literales.
Es un modo de ver las cosas con el que cada vez concuerdo menos.
Aparte,hay algo mas anti- americano que ofrecerte guantanamo como un campo de juego para despues desatar un 9/11 sobre el hogar del avatar/protagonista??
Bastante genio.
La posibilidad de crear mundos digitales donde el autor pueda integrar personificaciones de sus predilecciones, preocupaciones y, por que no? Fallos y problemas personales como un mashup se ve lapidada por las cuestiones de tono, necesidad de un ancla moral y la necesidad de satisfacer al jugador, claro, un juego se supone que debe ser divertido.
Pues No.
No necesariamente.
En que punto perdimos la capacidad de entender que el contenido ideologico cuestionable que un autor incluya en su obra no tiene que ser una personificacion 1 a 1 del mismo? Ni idea, pero en videojuegos es algo extendido. Quiza porque gozan de menor reconocimiento cultural? Por sus cualidades inmediatas? Porque son divertidos?
En ocasiones uno debe separar para ver con perspectiva, encontrar ese algo especial, pero habria que empezar a pensar como separar mejor para reencajar mejor todo.
Extreme Make Over: Metal Gear Solid Edition
A remake? No, this is a parody and a love letter to action films.
How do you make a parody of Metal Gear Solid? The original game is already self-aware and self-indulgent to an extreme - always making you laugh with things like the writing, the way Meryl walks, Otacon pissing himself and perhaps more plot-twists than in a Yakuza game.
I read this was originally going to be more faithful to the original but Kojima didn't like the idea and did everything in his power in order to make it different, going so far as to handpicking the cutscene director - Ryuhei Kitamura.
The beautiful and melancholic soundtrack of the original was replaced for more of a generic action movie soundtrack but it fits the tone of what this project was going for so I don't have any problems with that.
The only problem I have with this is how they didn't remake the level design to account for the gameplay changes they exported from MGS2 - it makes the gameplay asinine. But perhaps this is what they were going for? For you to disconnect your brain and just have a laugh? Still, I would have liked to be more surprised with level design changes like in REmake.
In an era where we are plagued by inoffensive remakes and the only thing they do is be the same game but with more polygons and different lighting - The Twin Snakes justifies its existence by presenting itself as a parody and something different.
When I'm in the mood for something pretty and challenging I will play Metal Gear Solid 1; when I only feel like disconnecting my brain and having a laugh I will play The Twin Snakes.
A remake? No, this is a parody and a love letter to action films.
How do you make a parody of Metal Gear Solid? The original game is already self-aware and self-indulgent to an extreme - always making you laugh with things like the writing, the way Meryl walks, Otacon pissing himself and perhaps more plot-twists than in a Yakuza game.
I read this was originally going to be more faithful to the original but Kojima didn't like the idea and did everything in his power in order to make it different, going so far as to handpicking the cutscene director - Ryuhei Kitamura.
The beautiful and melancholic soundtrack of the original was replaced for more of a generic action movie soundtrack but it fits the tone of what this project was going for so I don't have any problems with that.
The only problem I have with this is how they didn't remake the level design to account for the gameplay changes they exported from MGS2 - it makes the gameplay asinine. But perhaps this is what they were going for? For you to disconnect your brain and just have a laugh? Still, I would have liked to be more surprised with level design changes like in REmake.
In an era where we are plagued by inoffensive remakes and the only thing they do is be the same game but with more polygons and different lighting - The Twin Snakes justifies its existence by presenting itself as a parody and something different.
When I'm in the mood for something pretty and challenging I will play Metal Gear Solid 1; when I only feel like disconnecting my brain and having a laugh I will play The Twin Snakes.
Silent Hill 2
2024
This review was written before the game released
Over the Shoulder Camera
Fuck you Resident Evil 4
Fuck you Resident Evil 4
Super Mario Bros.
1985
One of the only good NES games.
Elden Ring
2022
This review contains spoilers
"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CW: Brief discussion on the game's use of rape
In Elden Ring, you can never discover anything once. That was the thought that entered my head early in the experience and never quite left it. One of the most evocative parts of the game's genuinely stunning art direction is the walking cathedral, a strange and arresting colossus that stumbles across the Weeping Peninsula, each step ringing the bell that hangs beneath its torso. It was a sight of strange, beautiful magic, the kind of which these games have been good at in the past.
Except, to describe this creature in the singular would be inaccurate. Because Walking Cathedrals appear all over the world of Elden Ring, each one identical in appearance, each one performing an identical, express mechanical function for the player. This cannot be left alone as a strange, unique beast, it has to be reduced to a Type of Content a player can engage with over and over again for a characterless transaction of pure mechanics. It is the excitement of coming across something esoteric that the Souls games have made a core part of their identity, utterly commodified and made into the exact same arc that applied to Assassin's Creed the moment climbing a tower to survey the environment and taking a leap of faith into a haystack below shifted from an exciting and evocative moment into a rote and tiresome mechanical interaction.
Because, that's right everyone, Dark Souls Is Now Open World. Not an open world in the same way that Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, or Dark Souls II were, where you could freely venture down different paths to different bosses and take things in an order outside of the game's expected leveling curve. No, this is an Open World as we understand it today: an enormous ocean of discrete repeated Activities dotted with islands of meaningful bespoke design. There's plenty of stuff to do in this world, but it's all of a specific type - in a catacomb you will navigate stone gargoyles and chalice dungeon designs to a lever that will open a door near the entrance that will contain a boss that you've likely found elsewhere in the world, and will be filled with stone gargoyles. Mines will be filled with mining rock-people and upgrade materials. Towers will have you find three spectral creatures around them in order to open them up and obtain a new Memory Slot. Camps will contain a patrolling enemy type and some loot. Even genuinely enchanting vistas and environments get their space to be repeated in slight variations. Boss battles too will be repeated endlessly, time and time again, with delightful designs like the Watchdog tragically becoming something I sighed and was annoyed to see crop up half-a-dozen times over the course of the adventure, and I was truly, deeply annoyed at fighting no less than about ten or twelve Erdtree Avatars and Dragons, with whom the moves never change and the fight plays out the exact same way every single time.
The first time I discovered these things, I was surprised, delighted even, but by even the second time, the truth that these are copied-and-pasted across the entirety of the Lands Between in order to pad it out became readily apparent, and eventually worn away even the enthusiasm of that first encounter. When I look back on my genuine enjoyment of the first battle with the Erdtree Avatar, I can only feel like an idiot for not realizing that this fight would be repeated verbatim over and over and become less fun every single time. When you've seen one, you've really seen all of them, and this means that by the time you leave Limgrave, you've already seen everything the Open World has to offer.
This is, of course, to be expected. Open world games simply have to do this. They are an enormous effort to bring into life, and the realities of game production mean that unless you're willing to spend decades on one game, you're going to have to be thrifty with how you produce content. I expect this, I understand this. Fallout: New Vegas is probably my favorite Open World game, but its world is also filled with this template design. But what's to be gained from this in a Dark Souls game? Unlike contemporaries like Breath of the Wild, your verbs of interaction in these games are frighteningly limited, with almost all of the experience boiling down to fighting enemies, and without a variety of interactions, the lack of variety in the huge amounts of content stands out all the more. Does fighting the same boss over and over and traversing the same cave over and over make Souls better? Even if you choose to just ignore all of these parts of the Open World (which is far easier said than done, as due to a very harsh leveling curve and the scarcity of crucial weapon upgrade materials outside of The Mines, the game's design absolutely pushes towards you engaging in these repetitious activities), the Legacy Dungeons that comprise the game's bespoke content are functionally completely separate from the Open World, with not even your Horse permitted to enter. This is no Burnout: Paradise or Xenoblade Chronicles X, which retooled the core gameplay loop to one where the open world was absolutely core to the design: this is a series of middling Dark Souls levels scattered among an open world no different from games like Far Cry or Horizon: Zero Dawn that many Souls fans have historically looked down on, and the game is only worse for it.
NPC storylines in particular suffer massively, as the chances of you stumbling upon these characters, already often quite annoying in past games, are so low as to practically require a wiki if you want to see the end of multiple questlines. However, that assumes that you will want to see the end of these stories and that you are invested in this world, and I decidedly Was Not. Souls games have always had suspect things in them that have gone largely uninterrogated but Elden Ring really brings that ugliness to the surface, with rape being an annoyingly present aspect of the backstories of many characters, and even having multiple characters threaten to rape you, none of which is deployed in a way that is meaningful and is just insufferable edgelord fantasy writing, and the same could be said of the grimdark incest-laden backstory, the deeply suspect trans panic writing surrounding one of the characters, and the enthusiastic use of Fantasy Racism tropes in the form of the Demi-Humans. I remain convinced that George RR Martin's involvement in this game was little more than a cynical publicity stunt, but certainly the game's writing indulges in many of that man's worst excesses, whilst having almost none of his strengths.
None of this is to say that Elden Ring is devoid of enjoyment. While the fact that it did hit just in time for a manic-depressive mood that made me perfectly suited to play a game I could just mindlessly play for a couple of weeks, I did see it through to the end in that time, even if I did rush to the end after a certain point. From Software's artists remain some of the best in the industry, with some incredible environments and boss designs that deserve Olympic gold medals for how much heavy-lifting they're doing to keep the experience afloat. I loved being kidnapped by chests into other parts of the world, and I wish it happened more than a couple of front-loaded times. But the enjoyment I had in it never felt like stemmed from the open world, and even its highest points don't hang with the best bits of the prior installments. Stormveil is probably the level design highlight of the game but it already fades from my mind in comparison to the likes of Central Yharnam or the Undead Burg or the Dragon Shrine. Indeed, the fact that they exist as islands in an ocean of vacuous space between them precludes the so-called "Legacy Dungeons" of this game from having the satisfying loops and interconnections that are often the design highlights of prior entries. The bosses are a seriously uneven mixed bag as well; even setting aside the repetition, as the nasty trend of overturned bosses that started in Dark Souls III rears its unfortunate head again. The superboss Melania is an interesting design utterly ruined by her obscene damage output, and my personal highlight of the game, Starscourge Radagon, who is the only boss fight that felt like it played to the things that Elden Ring brought to the table, and is a moment among the series that the game can truly claim as it's very own...but the tuning of the fight prevented it from being the triumphant coming-together moment that it is clearly attempting for many of my friends, who left the fight feeling that it was just annoying and tedious. Modern From Software could never make a fight like Maiden Astrea again because they'd insist on making her really hard in a way that actively detracts from the emotional experience in the fight. Boss fights can be about more than just providing a challenge, and I think From has forgotten that.
Taken as a series of its legacy dungeons, of its finest moments, I think Elden Ring would only be a middling one of these games. The additions to the formula feel anemic and unbalanced, the multiplayer implementation is honestly a quite considerable step back from prior games (the decision to have the majority of invasions only occur during co-operation feels like an attempt to weed out trolls picking on weaker players but in reality what it does is make equal fights are next-to-impossible and put Seal-Clubbers in a place where they are the only players who can effectively invade, a completely baffling decision), but it's really the open world I keep coming back to as the reason this game doesn't work. Not only does it add nothing that wasn't already present in better ways in prior games, but it actively detracts from the experience. The promise of the Open World is one of discovery, of setting off in uncharted directions and finding something new, but do Open Worlds actually facilitate this any better than more linear games? I don't know if they do. I felt a sense of discovery and finding something in so many of these games, even the most linear ones, and felt it stronger because the game was able to use careful, meticulous level design to bring out those emotions. Walking out of a cave and seeing Irithyll of the Boreal Valley, or Dead Man's Wharf stretch out before me, were moments of genuine discovery, and they would not be improved if I found six more Dead Man's Wharfs throughout the game. Contrary to their promise, in my experience, the open world, rather than create a sense of discovery, undermine it due to the compromises necessary to create these worlds. All the openness does for your discoveries is let you approach them from a slightly different angle as everyone else.
That is, if you can even claim to have discovered anything in the first place. To call Elden Ring derivative of prior games in this milieu would be a gross understatement. I am far from the first person to note that the game's much-hyped worldbuilding is largely content to regurgitate Souls Tropes with the Proper Nouns replaced with much worse ones, but it goes beyond that - entire questlines, plot beats, character arcs, dungeon designs, enemies, and bosses are lifted wholesale from prior games practically verbatim. More often than not Elden Ring feels closer to a Greatest Hits album than a coherent piece in and of itself, a soulless and cynical repackaging of prior Souls Classics, irrevocably damaged by being torn from the original context from which they belonged. I'm not a fan of Dark Souls III, in part because it too is also a game that leans on repetition of prior games, but at the very least the game was about those repetitions, where yes, old areas and characters would be repeated, but at least it was thematically resonant with what the game was doing. Elden Ring can't even claim that. Whatever this shallow mess of a narrative, easily the worst of the franchise thus far by my reckoning, is going for, it is done no favors by being this stitched-together Frankenstein of Souls.
I was particularly shocked by the sheer ferocity with which the game steals from the fan-favorite Bloodborne. Quick, tell me if you've heard this one before: you encounter a hunched, bestial foe, who fights you with their fists, but once you get their health halfway down, the battle stops, a cutscene plays, where they speak coherently, summon a blade from their past, and stand with their former dignity restored, the music changes, and their name is revealed to be "X the Y Blade". Or what about a hub area, separated in its own liminal space from the rest of the map, that can be discovered in its True Form in the material world? What about when that hub area is wreathed in spectral flame and begins to burn as the final hours of the game is nigh? These are far from the only examples, as there are multiple enemies and ideas throughout the game that are shamelessly lifted from my personal favorite From Software effort, but these stand out as the most noxious of all, as they simply repeat beats that were effective in the game they originated from because the game was able to build to them and have them resonate with the rest of the experience. You cannot just graft things whole cloth from prior work onto a new one and expect it to work as a coherent piece, the very prospect is ridiculous.
When Elden Ring did all this, my jaw about hit the floor from the sheer unmitigated gall. When it chose to conclude itself with a straight-faced Moon Presence reference, complete with an arena that directly evokes the Hunter's Dream, I just had to laugh. The final statement the game made on itself, the bullet point it chose to put on the experience, was "Remember Bloodborne? That was good, wasn't it?" Because in many ways, that really was a perfect conclusion to this game.
While it would be a mistake to claim, as people seem increasingly eager to, that Souls emerged entirely out of the magical ocean that is Hidetaka Miyazaki's unparalleled genius or whatever, as these games have always drawn heavy inspiration from properties like Berserk, Book of the New Sun, and The Legend of Zelda, and were built on top of a framework clearly established by past Fromsoft series King's Field, the reason I think that myself and many others were initially enthralled by the promise of Demon's Souls or Dark Souls was because they were decidedly different. Their esoterica, willingness to buck modern design conventions and hugely evocative online elements were why these games set imaginations alight so strongly, and proved enormously influential for the past decade of game design.
Demon's Souls felt like something new. And while successive games in this series have felt far less fresh, none of them have felt as utterly exhausted as Elden Ring: a final statement from the designers and writers at From Software that they have officially Ran Out of Ideas, that the well has long gone dry, that all they can do is to hastily staple on the modern design trends they once rejected onto a formula that does not gel with them, and that they are wandering without life through a never-ending cycle of their own creation, branded by the Darksign. Perhaps it's no surprise that their least inventive, least consistent, and least creative game since Demon's Souls is also by far their most successful. Once From Software defied conventions and trends, and now, they are consumed by them.
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"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
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CW: Brief discussion on the game's use of rape
In Elden Ring, you can never discover anything once. That was the thought that entered my head early in the experience and never quite left it. One of the most evocative parts of the game's genuinely stunning art direction is the walking cathedral, a strange and arresting colossus that stumbles across the Weeping Peninsula, each step ringing the bell that hangs beneath its torso. It was a sight of strange, beautiful magic, the kind of which these games have been good at in the past.
Except, to describe this creature in the singular would be inaccurate. Because Walking Cathedrals appear all over the world of Elden Ring, each one identical in appearance, each one performing an identical, express mechanical function for the player. This cannot be left alone as a strange, unique beast, it has to be reduced to a Type of Content a player can engage with over and over again for a characterless transaction of pure mechanics. It is the excitement of coming across something esoteric that the Souls games have made a core part of their identity, utterly commodified and made into the exact same arc that applied to Assassin's Creed the moment climbing a tower to survey the environment and taking a leap of faith into a haystack below shifted from an exciting and evocative moment into a rote and tiresome mechanical interaction.
Because, that's right everyone, Dark Souls Is Now Open World. Not an open world in the same way that Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, or Dark Souls II were, where you could freely venture down different paths to different bosses and take things in an order outside of the game's expected leveling curve. No, this is an Open World as we understand it today: an enormous ocean of discrete repeated Activities dotted with islands of meaningful bespoke design. There's plenty of stuff to do in this world, but it's all of a specific type - in a catacomb you will navigate stone gargoyles and chalice dungeon designs to a lever that will open a door near the entrance that will contain a boss that you've likely found elsewhere in the world, and will be filled with stone gargoyles. Mines will be filled with mining rock-people and upgrade materials. Towers will have you find three spectral creatures around them in order to open them up and obtain a new Memory Slot. Camps will contain a patrolling enemy type and some loot. Even genuinely enchanting vistas and environments get their space to be repeated in slight variations. Boss battles too will be repeated endlessly, time and time again, with delightful designs like the Watchdog tragically becoming something I sighed and was annoyed to see crop up half-a-dozen times over the course of the adventure, and I was truly, deeply annoyed at fighting no less than about ten or twelve Erdtree Avatars and Dragons, with whom the moves never change and the fight plays out the exact same way every single time.
The first time I discovered these things, I was surprised, delighted even, but by even the second time, the truth that these are copied-and-pasted across the entirety of the Lands Between in order to pad it out became readily apparent, and eventually worn away even the enthusiasm of that first encounter. When I look back on my genuine enjoyment of the first battle with the Erdtree Avatar, I can only feel like an idiot for not realizing that this fight would be repeated verbatim over and over and become less fun every single time. When you've seen one, you've really seen all of them, and this means that by the time you leave Limgrave, you've already seen everything the Open World has to offer.
This is, of course, to be expected. Open world games simply have to do this. They are an enormous effort to bring into life, and the realities of game production mean that unless you're willing to spend decades on one game, you're going to have to be thrifty with how you produce content. I expect this, I understand this. Fallout: New Vegas is probably my favorite Open World game, but its world is also filled with this template design. But what's to be gained from this in a Dark Souls game? Unlike contemporaries like Breath of the Wild, your verbs of interaction in these games are frighteningly limited, with almost all of the experience boiling down to fighting enemies, and without a variety of interactions, the lack of variety in the huge amounts of content stands out all the more. Does fighting the same boss over and over and traversing the same cave over and over make Souls better? Even if you choose to just ignore all of these parts of the Open World (which is far easier said than done, as due to a very harsh leveling curve and the scarcity of crucial weapon upgrade materials outside of The Mines, the game's design absolutely pushes towards you engaging in these repetitious activities), the Legacy Dungeons that comprise the game's bespoke content are functionally completely separate from the Open World, with not even your Horse permitted to enter. This is no Burnout: Paradise or Xenoblade Chronicles X, which retooled the core gameplay loop to one where the open world was absolutely core to the design: this is a series of middling Dark Souls levels scattered among an open world no different from games like Far Cry or Horizon: Zero Dawn that many Souls fans have historically looked down on, and the game is only worse for it.
NPC storylines in particular suffer massively, as the chances of you stumbling upon these characters, already often quite annoying in past games, are so low as to practically require a wiki if you want to see the end of multiple questlines. However, that assumes that you will want to see the end of these stories and that you are invested in this world, and I decidedly Was Not. Souls games have always had suspect things in them that have gone largely uninterrogated but Elden Ring really brings that ugliness to the surface, with rape being an annoyingly present aspect of the backstories of many characters, and even having multiple characters threaten to rape you, none of which is deployed in a way that is meaningful and is just insufferable edgelord fantasy writing, and the same could be said of the grimdark incest-laden backstory, the deeply suspect trans panic writing surrounding one of the characters, and the enthusiastic use of Fantasy Racism tropes in the form of the Demi-Humans. I remain convinced that George RR Martin's involvement in this game was little more than a cynical publicity stunt, but certainly the game's writing indulges in many of that man's worst excesses, whilst having almost none of his strengths.
None of this is to say that Elden Ring is devoid of enjoyment. While the fact that it did hit just in time for a manic-depressive mood that made me perfectly suited to play a game I could just mindlessly play for a couple of weeks, I did see it through to the end in that time, even if I did rush to the end after a certain point. From Software's artists remain some of the best in the industry, with some incredible environments and boss designs that deserve Olympic gold medals for how much heavy-lifting they're doing to keep the experience afloat. I loved being kidnapped by chests into other parts of the world, and I wish it happened more than a couple of front-loaded times. But the enjoyment I had in it never felt like stemmed from the open world, and even its highest points don't hang with the best bits of the prior installments. Stormveil is probably the level design highlight of the game but it already fades from my mind in comparison to the likes of Central Yharnam or the Undead Burg or the Dragon Shrine. Indeed, the fact that they exist as islands in an ocean of vacuous space between them precludes the so-called "Legacy Dungeons" of this game from having the satisfying loops and interconnections that are often the design highlights of prior entries. The bosses are a seriously uneven mixed bag as well; even setting aside the repetition, as the nasty trend of overturned bosses that started in Dark Souls III rears its unfortunate head again. The superboss Melania is an interesting design utterly ruined by her obscene damage output, and my personal highlight of the game, Starscourge Radagon, who is the only boss fight that felt like it played to the things that Elden Ring brought to the table, and is a moment among the series that the game can truly claim as it's very own...but the tuning of the fight prevented it from being the triumphant coming-together moment that it is clearly attempting for many of my friends, who left the fight feeling that it was just annoying and tedious. Modern From Software could never make a fight like Maiden Astrea again because they'd insist on making her really hard in a way that actively detracts from the emotional experience in the fight. Boss fights can be about more than just providing a challenge, and I think From has forgotten that.
Taken as a series of its legacy dungeons, of its finest moments, I think Elden Ring would only be a middling one of these games. The additions to the formula feel anemic and unbalanced, the multiplayer implementation is honestly a quite considerable step back from prior games (the decision to have the majority of invasions only occur during co-operation feels like an attempt to weed out trolls picking on weaker players but in reality what it does is make equal fights are next-to-impossible and put Seal-Clubbers in a place where they are the only players who can effectively invade, a completely baffling decision), but it's really the open world I keep coming back to as the reason this game doesn't work. Not only does it add nothing that wasn't already present in better ways in prior games, but it actively detracts from the experience. The promise of the Open World is one of discovery, of setting off in uncharted directions and finding something new, but do Open Worlds actually facilitate this any better than more linear games? I don't know if they do. I felt a sense of discovery and finding something in so many of these games, even the most linear ones, and felt it stronger because the game was able to use careful, meticulous level design to bring out those emotions. Walking out of a cave and seeing Irithyll of the Boreal Valley, or Dead Man's Wharf stretch out before me, were moments of genuine discovery, and they would not be improved if I found six more Dead Man's Wharfs throughout the game. Contrary to their promise, in my experience, the open world, rather than create a sense of discovery, undermine it due to the compromises necessary to create these worlds. All the openness does for your discoveries is let you approach them from a slightly different angle as everyone else.
That is, if you can even claim to have discovered anything in the first place. To call Elden Ring derivative of prior games in this milieu would be a gross understatement. I am far from the first person to note that the game's much-hyped worldbuilding is largely content to regurgitate Souls Tropes with the Proper Nouns replaced with much worse ones, but it goes beyond that - entire questlines, plot beats, character arcs, dungeon designs, enemies, and bosses are lifted wholesale from prior games practically verbatim. More often than not Elden Ring feels closer to a Greatest Hits album than a coherent piece in and of itself, a soulless and cynical repackaging of prior Souls Classics, irrevocably damaged by being torn from the original context from which they belonged. I'm not a fan of Dark Souls III, in part because it too is also a game that leans on repetition of prior games, but at the very least the game was about those repetitions, where yes, old areas and characters would be repeated, but at least it was thematically resonant with what the game was doing. Elden Ring can't even claim that. Whatever this shallow mess of a narrative, easily the worst of the franchise thus far by my reckoning, is going for, it is done no favors by being this stitched-together Frankenstein of Souls.
I was particularly shocked by the sheer ferocity with which the game steals from the fan-favorite Bloodborne. Quick, tell me if you've heard this one before: you encounter a hunched, bestial foe, who fights you with their fists, but once you get their health halfway down, the battle stops, a cutscene plays, where they speak coherently, summon a blade from their past, and stand with their former dignity restored, the music changes, and their name is revealed to be "X the Y Blade". Or what about a hub area, separated in its own liminal space from the rest of the map, that can be discovered in its True Form in the material world? What about when that hub area is wreathed in spectral flame and begins to burn as the final hours of the game is nigh? These are far from the only examples, as there are multiple enemies and ideas throughout the game that are shamelessly lifted from my personal favorite From Software effort, but these stand out as the most noxious of all, as they simply repeat beats that were effective in the game they originated from because the game was able to build to them and have them resonate with the rest of the experience. You cannot just graft things whole cloth from prior work onto a new one and expect it to work as a coherent piece, the very prospect is ridiculous.
When Elden Ring did all this, my jaw about hit the floor from the sheer unmitigated gall. When it chose to conclude itself with a straight-faced Moon Presence reference, complete with an arena that directly evokes the Hunter's Dream, I just had to laugh. The final statement the game made on itself, the bullet point it chose to put on the experience, was "Remember Bloodborne? That was good, wasn't it?" Because in many ways, that really was a perfect conclusion to this game.
While it would be a mistake to claim, as people seem increasingly eager to, that Souls emerged entirely out of the magical ocean that is Hidetaka Miyazaki's unparalleled genius or whatever, as these games have always drawn heavy inspiration from properties like Berserk, Book of the New Sun, and The Legend of Zelda, and were built on top of a framework clearly established by past Fromsoft series King's Field, the reason I think that myself and many others were initially enthralled by the promise of Demon's Souls or Dark Souls was because they were decidedly different. Their esoterica, willingness to buck modern design conventions and hugely evocative online elements were why these games set imaginations alight so strongly, and proved enormously influential for the past decade of game design.
Demon's Souls felt like something new. And while successive games in this series have felt far less fresh, none of them have felt as utterly exhausted as Elden Ring: a final statement from the designers and writers at From Software that they have officially Ran Out of Ideas, that the well has long gone dry, that all they can do is to hastily staple on the modern design trends they once rejected onto a formula that does not gel with them, and that they are wandering without life through a never-ending cycle of their own creation, branded by the Darksign. Perhaps it's no surprise that their least inventive, least consistent, and least creative game since Demon's Souls is also by far their most successful. Once From Software defied conventions and trends, and now, they are consumed by them.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
This review contains spoilers
Finally, after all these years, all this waiting...a sequel to Metal Gear Solid 4.
Less of an elegant melding of the design philosophies of Xenoblade 1 and 2 and more a Burnout-Esque car crash of systems, careening discordant mechanics at each other again and again, piling mechanic upon mechanic upon mechanic, leaving each one shattered by impact, until finally, just when it would be funniest to...another system comes screaming in and collides with the pile-up. On paper, Xenoblade 3 seems like it might really be the best of both worlds, but paper is famously two-dimensional. Practice reveals that Xenoblade 3's complete incoherence, its inability to make any single element of its design work fully with any other results in a game that was, for me, actively unpleasant and frustrating to play through.
So many things about Xenoblade 3 reward you with experience points, be they sidequests, chain attacks, or exploration, and certainly the most fun I had in Xenoblade 3 was the initial thrill of abusing the chain attack to get 1000% extra EXP and go up like 4 levels at once. But because the ability to level down to keep apace with the level curve of the main quest is bafflingly locked behind New Game+, and because fighting enemies below your level substantially slows down the unlocking of your Jobs, which the game encourages you to switch near constantly but also encourages you to remain on a single job so that others can use it too, what gaining that EXP practically means is a short burst of endorphins at seeing Number Go Up in exchange for an hour or two of staid misery as your progression grinds to a halt and you languish in a party composition you aren't enjoying so that you can unlock one you do like later. A game where you are punished for progression, and punished for not progressing by potentially missing out on the first game in the trilogy where there is more than a handful of sidequests with actual stories and meaningful gameplay unlocks in them. Xenoblade 3 represents the point where the memetic maximalism of the series, something I have always enjoyed about it, finally buckles and collapses under it's own weight, the cumulative effect of all this is being that you are left with a game built on systems of rewards that actively work against things the rest of it is doing, that make the game frustrating and unpleasant to play, the RPG design equivalent of being pulled in 4 separate directions by each of your limbs.
The story produces a similar effect. While the pretty great core cast provides a solid foundation for the game, thematically or stylistically there's not a single theme or idea that Xenoblade 3 brings up that it will not at some point contradict or muddy, not a single thing it ever fully commits to. Sometimes this is borderline parody, like the scene where the party rages with righteous fury at members of Mobius for having the temerity to treat killing people as a game, only to then in the very next screen meet a hero character who treats killing people as a game that every single character is completely on board with except for Eunie, who is chided for the crime of consistency and is asked to undergo a sidequest character arc in order to stop committing it. It often has the feel of a first draft, especially in how characters significant to the histories of our crew are introduced in flashback seconds before they reappear in the present to have a dramatic and tearful finale. Down to the very basics, the broad theme that comprises so much of the story and the gameplay, of two disparate peoples doing good by coming together, is shattered by an ending that sees their separation as a tragic necessity. By any conventional standards of narrative or mechanical coherence, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is an unmitigated disaster.
This isn't a unique failing of this game, however. Some of this is not unique to Xenoblade 3, but rather represents a degree of exhaustion I have with elements of Xenoblade that have remained unchanging. Xenoblade has always taken influence from MMORPGs, but it's influences have never really extended beyond the experience of the player character. Playing through raid or even dungeon bosses in an MMO, with their own discrete mechanics and designs that throw wrenches into your rotations you must react to, alongside Xenoblade 3 thoroughly demonstrates that if Xenoblade is a single-player MMO, it is a single-player MMO where every single enemy is a mob, where every single fight plays out almost the exact same way. Whether you are fighting a lowly bunnit or the God of Genesis, you're going to be just trying to execute your rotation all the same. And the rotations themselves are incredibly simple, the actual challenge is navigating around the uniformly terrible AI of your squadmates. The chain attack has always felt like a concession to this, and never more so than here, where at almost any time the + button lets you opt into a mode of play that tosses out basically the entire rest of the battle system to play a minigame that also happens to be a completely dominant strategy that is more powerful than anything else in the game, at the cost of being incredibly drawn-out and boring. Similarly, the world design, which is basically the same as the prior games but much wider, exposes just how uninteresting these spaces are to explore when the visuals and atmosphere aren't doing the heavy lifting. But Aionios is a particularly bland and staid world, with precious little interesting visual scenery and barely buoyed by a soundtrack that, Mobius themes aside, I found almost totally unmemorable. Both in the things it takes away from prior games that may have distracted from it, and the things it does itself, Xenoblade 3 does an admirable job at demonstrating the rot at the core of this entire series, the flaws and failings that have always been there, brought into the light more completely for the first time.
And it almost works. It genuinely, sincerely, almost works.
The world of Xenoblade 3 is a literal mash-up of the worlds of Xenoblade 1 and 2, a staid, in-between world maintained in eternal stasis and backward-looking by a group of (awfully-dressed) manchildren who treat all of this as consequence-less entertainment for themselves, who hang out in a theater watching clips from the world outside as if they are little more than episodes of a weekly seasonal anime. This lack of coherence, the way the writing never takes more than a step without stumbling, the way the ungodly chimera of systems and mechanics makes simply existing in Aionios feel genuinely stressful for me, against all odds does manage to feel resonant with the parts of the story that are about how existing in this singular moment is awful, how we need to forcefully draw a line under all this and move on. When characters talk about how much they hate this world, I sincerely agree with them. I hate it because the time I have spent here, because I have hiked across its vast empty wastes, seeing off dead bodies in a spiritual ritual reduced to a Crackdown Orb, because I have fought the battles of this endless war between Keves and Agnus and found them to be unpleasant and unsatisfying, because I have found the carrots of progression it offers to be hollow and tasteless. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 earnestly and sincerely represents a formal boldness that I genuinely did not think Monolith Soft was capable of, a willingness to produce a game where the act of playing feels terrible in order to underscore its point about how the world it presents must be ended. Even if it's lack of materialism and eagerness to abstract it's themes means it's never going to hit me like games that name their enemy (I've seen people talk about XB3 as an anti-capitalist game and while I can see how it's talk about destroying the Endless Now would be resonant with feelings like that, I'd like to direct your attention towards the early scene where a nopon explains the Free Market to the party and they all go "that's so poggers" and also the unbridled Shinzo Abe-ness of certain scenes, you know the ones) it nonetheless represents Xenoblade going further and reaching higher than, frankly, I ever thought it capable of. When a late-game boss starting randomly spouting contextless lines from Xenogears' theme song, I knew that some part of this game knew what was up.
I wish the rest of it did.
Perhaps Xenoblade 3 would be dishonest with itself if it did not also muddy and fumble the one part of it tying all the disparate strands together, but by indulging in earnest and straightforward nostalgia to an almost comical extent. One of the earliest things that intrigued me about Xenoblade 3 was how each of the two nations is ruled by a figurehead representation of a prominent waifu character from a prior game, where the uncritical worship of these characters is manufactured and exploited in order to maintain the endless war machine. It was cutting, it was incisive, and seemed self-aware, however briefly, of just how wretched the fandoms of these games are. Of course, it couldn't last. By the end, these figureheads are replaced with the Real Versions of these characters, who actually are uncritically good and brilliant and worthy of worship, whose immense power is absolutely necessary to destroy "The Endless Now", and also my willingness to find something that means anything in this mess. The one thing you absolutely cannot do when making a story about clinging to the past being wrong and bad is to parade around that same past as if it's the second coming, to indulge so completely in uncritical fanservice that buries anything interesting beneath tuneless self-indulgence that sounds like a thousand teenage boys yelling "BRO PEAK FICTION". If Xenoblade 3 isn't willing to commit to what it's doing, why should I? Why did I spend 100 hours of my life that I will never get back on a game that's just going to throw away everything interesting it's doing a the final hurdle? What was the point of any of this?
The angry tone of the prior passage is not how I feel now, given time to relax and reflect on the parts of the game that do genuinely work for me, like the main party (Eunie and Taion prove that Monolith Soft is in fact capable of writing a good romance, they have thus far simply chosen not to) and, of course, the parts that Really Don't Work, which are the things that worked most of all. But I'm not really able to get over that the one thing I found was truly interesting and exceptional about this game was something it just couldn't resist the allure of Servicing Fans enough to bring home. With Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Monolith Soft set out to prove that Xenoblade cannot continue the way it is, and the worst part is that they succeeded...just in a way that convinced me that the problem might lie deeper within Monolith Soft, not simply with Xenoblade itself.
Ultimately, I just think these games aren't for me anymore. I really gave it the best try I could, but I'm content to let the people who do still love them enjoy it themselves, whilst I let time turn it into a faded memory. The best Xenoblade, on paper? Definitely. But then, cardboard cut-outs don't make for great company, do they?
Less of an elegant melding of the design philosophies of Xenoblade 1 and 2 and more a Burnout-Esque car crash of systems, careening discordant mechanics at each other again and again, piling mechanic upon mechanic upon mechanic, leaving each one shattered by impact, until finally, just when it would be funniest to...another system comes screaming in and collides with the pile-up. On paper, Xenoblade 3 seems like it might really be the best of both worlds, but paper is famously two-dimensional. Practice reveals that Xenoblade 3's complete incoherence, its inability to make any single element of its design work fully with any other results in a game that was, for me, actively unpleasant and frustrating to play through.
So many things about Xenoblade 3 reward you with experience points, be they sidequests, chain attacks, or exploration, and certainly the most fun I had in Xenoblade 3 was the initial thrill of abusing the chain attack to get 1000% extra EXP and go up like 4 levels at once. But because the ability to level down to keep apace with the level curve of the main quest is bafflingly locked behind New Game+, and because fighting enemies below your level substantially slows down the unlocking of your Jobs, which the game encourages you to switch near constantly but also encourages you to remain on a single job so that others can use it too, what gaining that EXP practically means is a short burst of endorphins at seeing Number Go Up in exchange for an hour or two of staid misery as your progression grinds to a halt and you languish in a party composition you aren't enjoying so that you can unlock one you do like later. A game where you are punished for progression, and punished for not progressing by potentially missing out on the first game in the trilogy where there is more than a handful of sidequests with actual stories and meaningful gameplay unlocks in them. Xenoblade 3 represents the point where the memetic maximalism of the series, something I have always enjoyed about it, finally buckles and collapses under it's own weight, the cumulative effect of all this is being that you are left with a game built on systems of rewards that actively work against things the rest of it is doing, that make the game frustrating and unpleasant to play, the RPG design equivalent of being pulled in 4 separate directions by each of your limbs.
The story produces a similar effect. While the pretty great core cast provides a solid foundation for the game, thematically or stylistically there's not a single theme or idea that Xenoblade 3 brings up that it will not at some point contradict or muddy, not a single thing it ever fully commits to. Sometimes this is borderline parody, like the scene where the party rages with righteous fury at members of Mobius for having the temerity to treat killing people as a game, only to then in the very next screen meet a hero character who treats killing people as a game that every single character is completely on board with except for Eunie, who is chided for the crime of consistency and is asked to undergo a sidequest character arc in order to stop committing it. It often has the feel of a first draft, especially in how characters significant to the histories of our crew are introduced in flashback seconds before they reappear in the present to have a dramatic and tearful finale. Down to the very basics, the broad theme that comprises so much of the story and the gameplay, of two disparate peoples doing good by coming together, is shattered by an ending that sees their separation as a tragic necessity. By any conventional standards of narrative or mechanical coherence, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is an unmitigated disaster.
This isn't a unique failing of this game, however. Some of this is not unique to Xenoblade 3, but rather represents a degree of exhaustion I have with elements of Xenoblade that have remained unchanging. Xenoblade has always taken influence from MMORPGs, but it's influences have never really extended beyond the experience of the player character. Playing through raid or even dungeon bosses in an MMO, with their own discrete mechanics and designs that throw wrenches into your rotations you must react to, alongside Xenoblade 3 thoroughly demonstrates that if Xenoblade is a single-player MMO, it is a single-player MMO where every single enemy is a mob, where every single fight plays out almost the exact same way. Whether you are fighting a lowly bunnit or the God of Genesis, you're going to be just trying to execute your rotation all the same. And the rotations themselves are incredibly simple, the actual challenge is navigating around the uniformly terrible AI of your squadmates. The chain attack has always felt like a concession to this, and never more so than here, where at almost any time the + button lets you opt into a mode of play that tosses out basically the entire rest of the battle system to play a minigame that also happens to be a completely dominant strategy that is more powerful than anything else in the game, at the cost of being incredibly drawn-out and boring. Similarly, the world design, which is basically the same as the prior games but much wider, exposes just how uninteresting these spaces are to explore when the visuals and atmosphere aren't doing the heavy lifting. But Aionios is a particularly bland and staid world, with precious little interesting visual scenery and barely buoyed by a soundtrack that, Mobius themes aside, I found almost totally unmemorable. Both in the things it takes away from prior games that may have distracted from it, and the things it does itself, Xenoblade 3 does an admirable job at demonstrating the rot at the core of this entire series, the flaws and failings that have always been there, brought into the light more completely for the first time.
And it almost works. It genuinely, sincerely, almost works.
The world of Xenoblade 3 is a literal mash-up of the worlds of Xenoblade 1 and 2, a staid, in-between world maintained in eternal stasis and backward-looking by a group of (awfully-dressed) manchildren who treat all of this as consequence-less entertainment for themselves, who hang out in a theater watching clips from the world outside as if they are little more than episodes of a weekly seasonal anime. This lack of coherence, the way the writing never takes more than a step without stumbling, the way the ungodly chimera of systems and mechanics makes simply existing in Aionios feel genuinely stressful for me, against all odds does manage to feel resonant with the parts of the story that are about how existing in this singular moment is awful, how we need to forcefully draw a line under all this and move on. When characters talk about how much they hate this world, I sincerely agree with them. I hate it because the time I have spent here, because I have hiked across its vast empty wastes, seeing off dead bodies in a spiritual ritual reduced to a Crackdown Orb, because I have fought the battles of this endless war between Keves and Agnus and found them to be unpleasant and unsatisfying, because I have found the carrots of progression it offers to be hollow and tasteless. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 earnestly and sincerely represents a formal boldness that I genuinely did not think Monolith Soft was capable of, a willingness to produce a game where the act of playing feels terrible in order to underscore its point about how the world it presents must be ended. Even if it's lack of materialism and eagerness to abstract it's themes means it's never going to hit me like games that name their enemy (I've seen people talk about XB3 as an anti-capitalist game and while I can see how it's talk about destroying the Endless Now would be resonant with feelings like that, I'd like to direct your attention towards the early scene where a nopon explains the Free Market to the party and they all go "that's so poggers" and also the unbridled Shinzo Abe-ness of certain scenes, you know the ones) it nonetheless represents Xenoblade going further and reaching higher than, frankly, I ever thought it capable of. When a late-game boss starting randomly spouting contextless lines from Xenogears' theme song, I knew that some part of this game knew what was up.
I wish the rest of it did.
Perhaps Xenoblade 3 would be dishonest with itself if it did not also muddy and fumble the one part of it tying all the disparate strands together, but by indulging in earnest and straightforward nostalgia to an almost comical extent. One of the earliest things that intrigued me about Xenoblade 3 was how each of the two nations is ruled by a figurehead representation of a prominent waifu character from a prior game, where the uncritical worship of these characters is manufactured and exploited in order to maintain the endless war machine. It was cutting, it was incisive, and seemed self-aware, however briefly, of just how wretched the fandoms of these games are. Of course, it couldn't last. By the end, these figureheads are replaced with the Real Versions of these characters, who actually are uncritically good and brilliant and worthy of worship, whose immense power is absolutely necessary to destroy "The Endless Now", and also my willingness to find something that means anything in this mess. The one thing you absolutely cannot do when making a story about clinging to the past being wrong and bad is to parade around that same past as if it's the second coming, to indulge so completely in uncritical fanservice that buries anything interesting beneath tuneless self-indulgence that sounds like a thousand teenage boys yelling "BRO PEAK FICTION". If Xenoblade 3 isn't willing to commit to what it's doing, why should I? Why did I spend 100 hours of my life that I will never get back on a game that's just going to throw away everything interesting it's doing a the final hurdle? What was the point of any of this?
The angry tone of the prior passage is not how I feel now, given time to relax and reflect on the parts of the game that do genuinely work for me, like the main party (Eunie and Taion prove that Monolith Soft is in fact capable of writing a good romance, they have thus far simply chosen not to) and, of course, the parts that Really Don't Work, which are the things that worked most of all. But I'm not really able to get over that the one thing I found was truly interesting and exceptional about this game was something it just couldn't resist the allure of Servicing Fans enough to bring home. With Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Monolith Soft set out to prove that Xenoblade cannot continue the way it is, and the worst part is that they succeeded...just in a way that convinced me that the problem might lie deeper within Monolith Soft, not simply with Xenoblade itself.
Ultimately, I just think these games aren't for me anymore. I really gave it the best try I could, but I'm content to let the people who do still love them enjoy it themselves, whilst I let time turn it into a faded memory. The best Xenoblade, on paper? Definitely. But then, cardboard cut-outs don't make for great company, do they?
Soma
2015
I don't get it. By which I mean, I don't get what the appeal is supposed to be. Was this supposed to be scary? Was this supposed to be deep? I jokingly called the premise and the ending two steps into the first proper level. Full spoilers because I don't respect this game.
I don't respect this game because it made me kill people multiple times for the sake of simple lock-and-key "puzzle" advancement. For reasons that are abstract enough I do not care to learn more about, multiple NPCs in this game are hooked up to power generators as a form of life support. The first time I encountered one of them, a robot named Carl, there was a puzzle elsewhere in the room that let me keep him alive while I diverted power to a door through alternate means.
"Ah ha!" I thought. The puzzle of the game will be: take the obvious route, and someone dies. Explore and find the more obscure route, and you save their life.
Except for the next one, a woman named Amy, you pull out her life support lines right in front of her. She screams. The player character says "you ok bro?" and then pulls out the second. She dies. "Oh no!" says the player character. And then goes about his puzzle solving.
I had to look up in a guide that I had to do this. Saving Carl had conditioned me to think that of course I would save Amy. It did not cross my mind that the main character would be so stupid, cruel, and selfish as to very obviously kill a woman just to open a door.
So, to spoil the premise: the player character is a digital brain scan of a Canadian man, Simon, who has been loaded into a computer chip. This chip has then been wedged into the brain of a dead woman. So using her dead body, Simon explores a science facility with another dead digitized woman, Catherine, (who lives in his PDA) in the hopes that both of them can escape into the Matrix.
I hate Simon. As a player character, I hate that he’s always breathing so hard. (He’s a zombie robot! He should not be respiring!) As a character, his writing is so myopic it drives me up a wall. He never mentions Amy to Catherine. But later, Simon needs to get into a pressurized suit. And instead of … putting on a new suit, Simon and Catherine make a copy of his mind and hijack the corpse of another dead woman who’s already in a suit.
Doing this creates two Simons, after which Catherine asks new Simon to kill old Simon now, or otherwise leave him to die when his battery runs out. This causes Simon to have a near mental break-down. “This is so fucked up! How could you do this to me???” And I’m sitting in the back asking, “What the fuck, you murdered Amy to open a fucking door????”
At the end of the game, when Catherine and Simon make it into the Matrix, they are copied, not transferred. And Simon is surprised by this again and throws another hissy fit.
I feel like this game, like many pieces of media dealing with mortality and robot bodies, focuses on the wrong end of the question. “What is death?” is not a very interesting question. “Who are we? What makes us, us?” The answer to all of those is settled. You are your continuation of memory. Death is that continuation being irreversibly terminated. The more interesting end of the question is, “What are the ethics for creating new life in hostile environments? Should new life be created when you know exactly what kind of person they will be, (a copy of yourself), and what kind of existence they will lead from the moment you create them?”
But SOMA breezes past that kind of discussion with easy “here, press this computer button to kill that inconvenient double” answers at multiple turns. It seems to think it has found depth by shoving the player’s face into the sentiment, “woah, did you just kill a dude? Isn’t that fucked up??”
Yes. That was murder. It was bad. What do you want from me?
Oh yeah, this game has monsters. They’re lame. Feel no shame in using Safe Mode.
God I hate it when games are secretly woman murder simulators.
What an eye-rolling affair. D+ / C- rank, 1.5 stars.
I don't respect this game because it made me kill people multiple times for the sake of simple lock-and-key "puzzle" advancement. For reasons that are abstract enough I do not care to learn more about, multiple NPCs in this game are hooked up to power generators as a form of life support. The first time I encountered one of them, a robot named Carl, there was a puzzle elsewhere in the room that let me keep him alive while I diverted power to a door through alternate means.
"Ah ha!" I thought. The puzzle of the game will be: take the obvious route, and someone dies. Explore and find the more obscure route, and you save their life.
Except for the next one, a woman named Amy, you pull out her life support lines right in front of her. She screams. The player character says "you ok bro?" and then pulls out the second. She dies. "Oh no!" says the player character. And then goes about his puzzle solving.
I had to look up in a guide that I had to do this. Saving Carl had conditioned me to think that of course I would save Amy. It did not cross my mind that the main character would be so stupid, cruel, and selfish as to very obviously kill a woman just to open a door.
So, to spoil the premise: the player character is a digital brain scan of a Canadian man, Simon, who has been loaded into a computer chip. This chip has then been wedged into the brain of a dead woman. So using her dead body, Simon explores a science facility with another dead digitized woman, Catherine, (who lives in his PDA) in the hopes that both of them can escape into the Matrix.
I hate Simon. As a player character, I hate that he’s always breathing so hard. (He’s a zombie robot! He should not be respiring!) As a character, his writing is so myopic it drives me up a wall. He never mentions Amy to Catherine. But later, Simon needs to get into a pressurized suit. And instead of … putting on a new suit, Simon and Catherine make a copy of his mind and hijack the corpse of another dead woman who’s already in a suit.
Doing this creates two Simons, after which Catherine asks new Simon to kill old Simon now, or otherwise leave him to die when his battery runs out. This causes Simon to have a near mental break-down. “This is so fucked up! How could you do this to me???” And I’m sitting in the back asking, “What the fuck, you murdered Amy to open a fucking door????”
At the end of the game, when Catherine and Simon make it into the Matrix, they are copied, not transferred. And Simon is surprised by this again and throws another hissy fit.
I feel like this game, like many pieces of media dealing with mortality and robot bodies, focuses on the wrong end of the question. “What is death?” is not a very interesting question. “Who are we? What makes us, us?” The answer to all of those is settled. You are your continuation of memory. Death is that continuation being irreversibly terminated. The more interesting end of the question is, “What are the ethics for creating new life in hostile environments? Should new life be created when you know exactly what kind of person they will be, (a copy of yourself), and what kind of existence they will lead from the moment you create them?”
But SOMA breezes past that kind of discussion with easy “here, press this computer button to kill that inconvenient double” answers at multiple turns. It seems to think it has found depth by shoving the player’s face into the sentiment, “woah, did you just kill a dude? Isn’t that fucked up??”
Yes. That was murder. It was bad. What do you want from me?
Oh yeah, this game has monsters. They’re lame. Feel no shame in using Safe Mode.
God I hate it when games are secretly woman murder simulators.
What an eye-rolling affair. D+ / C- rank, 1.5 stars.
Gungriffon II
1998
Fundamentally, there are two basic varieties of true videonaut: those for whom the game controls are a matrix which brings the digital to life; a cybernetic prostheses via which the corporeal form of a person should be able to interface with digifiction as seamlessly as is reasonable. The second group of virtual-cowpoke considers the controls to be a means to itself, a medium of expression in it's own right which can, and often should, create a friction between the corporeal and digital.
Gungriffon will literally kill anyone from the first group.
Gungriffon will literally kill anyone from the first group.
Metal Gear Solid
1998
The purchase of the Japanese Metal Gear Solid Premium Package inspired a lot of thoughts regarding how much I love the game, so I thought I'd write some of it down while I'm feeling like this.
Metal Gear Solid One is the main thing I like. A great deal of things that I like, I like because they're a bit like MGS1. It's the most sincere reflection on genetic inherentance, the disparity between nature and technology, and the state of global conflict in the 21st century, all wrapped up in a deeply earnest videogame with big muscley baddies who shoot you with a tank and laugh. It's the pinacle of early 3D action game design, fully reflective of the decades of fun, lovable game design that came before it. It's 90s anime and late 80s action films. At any point in the game you can call one contact to tell you about the flora and fauna of Alaska and another to tell you about international attitudes towards the use of nuclear weapons. It's the perfect thing for me to like.
I love how rigidly and logically it plays too. Literal cones of vision that you have to slip between, button inputs that always serve one function, and great big surfaces that all sit on 45 degree alignments. It's Solid. That's satisfaction. That's what I like.
I love the romance and coldness of MGS1. Dirty metal walls, corroded by gunpowder, sitting within pure thick white mist. It's people who have only known to fight learning that the value of living is found in love. It's so achingly earnest about that. You either have to be cool and dismiss it or just spend the rest of your life bathing in the beauty of METAL GEAR SOLID for the SONY PLAYSTATION.
I could mention any tiny piece of minutia regarding MGS1 and wax lyrical about why I love that stupid wee thing, but it's just every part of it. I love Level 5 PAN cards and the sound effect when you scroll through your inventory and Alaskan field mice and the Colt Single Action Army - the greatest handgun ever made - and the Super Baby Method and the big industrial freight elevators that descend diagonally. Metal Gear Solid is why I'm like this.
Metal Gear Solid One is the main thing I like. A great deal of things that I like, I like because they're a bit like MGS1. It's the most sincere reflection on genetic inherentance, the disparity between nature and technology, and the state of global conflict in the 21st century, all wrapped up in a deeply earnest videogame with big muscley baddies who shoot you with a tank and laugh. It's the pinacle of early 3D action game design, fully reflective of the decades of fun, lovable game design that came before it. It's 90s anime and late 80s action films. At any point in the game you can call one contact to tell you about the flora and fauna of Alaska and another to tell you about international attitudes towards the use of nuclear weapons. It's the perfect thing for me to like.
I love how rigidly and logically it plays too. Literal cones of vision that you have to slip between, button inputs that always serve one function, and great big surfaces that all sit on 45 degree alignments. It's Solid. That's satisfaction. That's what I like.
I love the romance and coldness of MGS1. Dirty metal walls, corroded by gunpowder, sitting within pure thick white mist. It's people who have only known to fight learning that the value of living is found in love. It's so achingly earnest about that. You either have to be cool and dismiss it or just spend the rest of your life bathing in the beauty of METAL GEAR SOLID for the SONY PLAYSTATION.
I could mention any tiny piece of minutia regarding MGS1 and wax lyrical about why I love that stupid wee thing, but it's just every part of it. I love Level 5 PAN cards and the sound effect when you scroll through your inventory and Alaskan field mice and the Colt Single Action Army - the greatest handgun ever made - and the Super Baby Method and the big industrial freight elevators that descend diagonally. Metal Gear Solid is why I'm like this.
Metal Gear Solid
1998
lost in the bloody shadows of war are the cries of those who seek the light.
the golden standard for equally balanced gameplay and story. blended together in such a way where one cannot exist without the other. each and every guard we come across, unknowingly trapped as pawns in a much deeper game whose players show blatant disregard for their own pieces on the board. everyone has selfish reasons for fighting, despite war never ending in favor of its soldiers turned victims. victory is reliant on how mercilessly you can move forward while forgetting the scent of past’s bloody aroma.
i’m a huge fan of every character here but the one i felt most connected to was surprisingly meryl. she’s almost like this self insert for some of the audience with her portrayal of the battlefield as this larger-than-life action flick displaying heroes and villains. as the game goes on, both us and meryl slowly discover the truth of it. there are no heroes, no villains. on the surface there appears to be two different sides, but on the battlefield there are just people, people who simply do what they’re told. mgs1 doesn’t sugarcoat anything, conveying the cold truths beneath what we know as “war.” the mysteries run deeper than we initially thought.
the game’s content wouldn’t have worked as well as it did if not for the unconventional yet effective writing combined with the surprising amount of production value. at times it can be a bit infodumpy but the subject matter is relevant and intriguing enough to keep me interested. the cutscene presentation was initially what blew me away like many others. each scene has some really good shot composition and directing. it’s definitely reminiscent of the terminators and the predators of the time while still managing to be distinct in its own right. there’s a noticeable amount of attention to detail paid to both the cinematics and gameplay. when roaming the foreboding mechanical hallways of shadow moses you have all the tools at your disposal, it’s up to you to figure out how to use those tools realistically and efficiently. there’s no one set way to do basically anything in the game. experimentation is encouraged and even today i find it to be pretty ingenious.
the past can be used as an excuse to justify our present actions. in our strive for personal benefit sometimes we lose sight of who we really are. the past is important, no doubt, but what we make of ourselves now is what counts (if you can excuse my bit of cliche regurgitation). live on snake, otacon, meryl.
metal gear solid’s legacy speaks for itself. there’s not much more i can add to the discussion that hasn’t already been said. it’s considered one of the greatest games ever made for a reason, setting a new standard for the medium that still echoes throughout the modern gaming world. one of the most revolutionary titles i’ve played in recent memory.
the golden standard for equally balanced gameplay and story. blended together in such a way where one cannot exist without the other. each and every guard we come across, unknowingly trapped as pawns in a much deeper game whose players show blatant disregard for their own pieces on the board. everyone has selfish reasons for fighting, despite war never ending in favor of its soldiers turned victims. victory is reliant on how mercilessly you can move forward while forgetting the scent of past’s bloody aroma.
i’m a huge fan of every character here but the one i felt most connected to was surprisingly meryl. she’s almost like this self insert for some of the audience with her portrayal of the battlefield as this larger-than-life action flick displaying heroes and villains. as the game goes on, both us and meryl slowly discover the truth of it. there are no heroes, no villains. on the surface there appears to be two different sides, but on the battlefield there are just people, people who simply do what they’re told. mgs1 doesn’t sugarcoat anything, conveying the cold truths beneath what we know as “war.” the mysteries run deeper than we initially thought.
the game’s content wouldn’t have worked as well as it did if not for the unconventional yet effective writing combined with the surprising amount of production value. at times it can be a bit infodumpy but the subject matter is relevant and intriguing enough to keep me interested. the cutscene presentation was initially what blew me away like many others. each scene has some really good shot composition and directing. it’s definitely reminiscent of the terminators and the predators of the time while still managing to be distinct in its own right. there’s a noticeable amount of attention to detail paid to both the cinematics and gameplay. when roaming the foreboding mechanical hallways of shadow moses you have all the tools at your disposal, it’s up to you to figure out how to use those tools realistically and efficiently. there’s no one set way to do basically anything in the game. experimentation is encouraged and even today i find it to be pretty ingenious.
the past can be used as an excuse to justify our present actions. in our strive for personal benefit sometimes we lose sight of who we really are. the past is important, no doubt, but what we make of ourselves now is what counts (if you can excuse my bit of cliche regurgitation). live on snake, otacon, meryl.
metal gear solid’s legacy speaks for itself. there’s not much more i can add to the discussion that hasn’t already been said. it’s considered one of the greatest games ever made for a reason, setting a new standard for the medium that still echoes throughout the modern gaming world. one of the most revolutionary titles i’ve played in recent memory.
Red Dead Redemption
2010
It's kind of the "Free Bird" of video games. It's thematically thin, but just fatalitic enough to feel poetic. It's a cornerstone of modern American AAA games the way Free Bird is a cornerstone of 70s rock. Both a very much for Your Dad. And its legacy is ultimately tied to its vastness.
Just as Free Bird goes on and on and crescendos with a long guitar solo, so does Red Dead Redemption go on and on and then crescendos spectacularly... although crescendo is the wrong word. This isn't a game that leads to a big, violent set piece, but rather leads a series of quiet domestic chores as you reacclimate to life around the family farm. But in contrast to how loud much of the preceding game is, it feels a bit like a crescendo, like an inverted guitar solo.
I do wish this game wasn't so cartoonish. It feels like a game that could easily bare more of its soul. Red Dead Redemption 2 certainly comes closer to doing that. But here, just about every mission from after you leave Bonnie's ranch until you get back to Blackwater is filled with nonsense comic characters, with a few exceptions (Marshal, Landon, Luisa). Nothing wrong with having a sense of humour but in a game that's attempting to be as sombre and "authentic" as this is, the stereotypes just feel lazy and insecure.
Anyway. Good ending. I liked riding around the old west. And when I first played this I wasn't a very big gamer and it spurred 16 year old me on. I still have a poster of Bonnie on the wall of my old room. I don't know that I'll ever be able to NOT see through all of this game's warts.
Just as Free Bird goes on and on and crescendos with a long guitar solo, so does Red Dead Redemption go on and on and then crescendos spectacularly... although crescendo is the wrong word. This isn't a game that leads to a big, violent set piece, but rather leads a series of quiet domestic chores as you reacclimate to life around the family farm. But in contrast to how loud much of the preceding game is, it feels a bit like a crescendo, like an inverted guitar solo.
I do wish this game wasn't so cartoonish. It feels like a game that could easily bare more of its soul. Red Dead Redemption 2 certainly comes closer to doing that. But here, just about every mission from after you leave Bonnie's ranch until you get back to Blackwater is filled with nonsense comic characters, with a few exceptions (Marshal, Landon, Luisa). Nothing wrong with having a sense of humour but in a game that's attempting to be as sombre and "authentic" as this is, the stereotypes just feel lazy and insecure.
Anyway. Good ending. I liked riding around the old west. And when I first played this I wasn't a very big gamer and it spurred 16 year old me on. I still have a poster of Bonnie on the wall of my old room. I don't know that I'll ever be able to NOT see through all of this game's warts.
awful
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