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lol. lmao.
I seem to be in the minority here but this actually really sucks lol. Stupidly self-indulgent and nostalgia-pandering, like Look At All This Cool Old Stuff!!! But all it really does is showcase how far Fortnite's come in the many years since Chapter 1.
The most obvious change is the approach to balancing:
1. Zero Build is given pretty much zero consideration, and items range from borderline useless in it (the Jetpack and lower level grenade launchers) to comically and insanely overpowered (the hoverboard + a shotgun + decent tracking skills is hilariously broken and allows you to third party basically any fight with almost no effort). The map is also deeply unsuited for it, with tons of sheer cliffs and environments that would be trivial with building but stupid and frustrating without it. Also it's empty as fuck, there are a stupid amount of empty fields here even with the myriad of locations from different seasons of Chapter 1.
(addendum: I am not playing build mode. People have had too many years to get good at it and I'm not interested in going up against someone who's spent thousands of hours training it. During the chapter this season's trying to imitate, people weren't quite as cracked yet and you could get by fine if you could build a quick 1x1, but that's definitely no longer the case. And I just can't really be arsed to put so much time into getting good at something so specific to just one video game)
2. You're expected to play so much more conservatively. Which is usually just boring. Who ever thought "bringing back Fortnite to when it was trying to ape PUBG the hardest" was a good idea? No one talks about PUBG anymore, and for good reason--it was overlong, boring, and fights ended way too quickly. Bringing Fortnite right back to this by limiting movement options and making healing take so much longer than it has for years, just to indulge the nostalgia-blind teenagers playing this game who played the early seasons as pre-teens is lame, and the shorter season length makes me think they knew it sucked as well.
Anyways, in all honesty I am glad this is only half the length of a normal season! Fortnite's biggest strength has been its frequent updates and constantly shifting meta, which makes a season like this, where they just Play The Hits with no understanding that the hits were in a pretty much entirely different game, feel really odd. Hope they never do this again!
I seem to be in the minority here but this actually really sucks lol. Stupidly self-indulgent and nostalgia-pandering, like Look At All This Cool Old Stuff!!! But all it really does is showcase how far Fortnite's come in the many years since Chapter 1.
The most obvious change is the approach to balancing:
1. Zero Build is given pretty much zero consideration, and items range from borderline useless in it (the Jetpack and lower level grenade launchers) to comically and insanely overpowered (the hoverboard + a shotgun + decent tracking skills is hilariously broken and allows you to third party basically any fight with almost no effort). The map is also deeply unsuited for it, with tons of sheer cliffs and environments that would be trivial with building but stupid and frustrating without it. Also it's empty as fuck, there are a stupid amount of empty fields here even with the myriad of locations from different seasons of Chapter 1.
(addendum: I am not playing build mode. People have had too many years to get good at it and I'm not interested in going up against someone who's spent thousands of hours training it. During the chapter this season's trying to imitate, people weren't quite as cracked yet and you could get by fine if you could build a quick 1x1, but that's definitely no longer the case. And I just can't really be arsed to put so much time into getting good at something so specific to just one video game)
2. You're expected to play so much more conservatively. Which is usually just boring. Who ever thought "bringing back Fortnite to when it was trying to ape PUBG the hardest" was a good idea? No one talks about PUBG anymore, and for good reason--it was overlong, boring, and fights ended way too quickly. Bringing Fortnite right back to this by limiting movement options and making healing take so much longer than it has for years, just to indulge the nostalgia-blind teenagers playing this game who played the early seasons as pre-teens is lame, and the shorter season length makes me think they knew it sucked as well.
Anyways, in all honesty I am glad this is only half the length of a normal season! Fortnite's biggest strength has been its frequent updates and constantly shifting meta, which makes a season like this, where they just Play The Hits with no understanding that the hits were in a pretty much entirely different game, feel really odd. Hope they never do this again!
Y̵a̵k̵u̵z̵a̵ Like A Dragon Mission: “ K̵i̵r̵y̵u̵ Joryu, we need you to save the cancer-riddled children of Sunflower Orphange from the Big Baby Breakdancing Gang! I’ll give you 5,000 Bronze Dragon Points if you can finish them off with this flaming dildo shaped like a copyrighted anime character and livestream it all on Snitch.tv!”
Y̵a̵k̵u̵z̵a̵ Like A Dragon Cutscene: “I’ve survived past the point of death so many times, often in the place of others who meant so much more to me than I could have known in the moment. Only now, as I face my own end, do I understand the true pain of feelings left unsaid. I tried to live without regrets, but the consequences of a life left living are inevitable.”
------------------------
Long - though comparatively short by franchise standards - periods of drama wholly contingent on the viewer's pre-existing knowledge of plot and history from Yakuza 0, Yakuza, Yakuza 2, Yakuza 3, Yakuza 4, Yakuza 5, Yakuza 6, Judgment and Yakuza: Like A Dragon exist in tandem with tutorials for complex game systems like "using the map" and "doing a kick", highlighting the epic contradictions this saga repeatedly unfolds and upholds upon itself. If you're an insane member of this subcultural phenomenon and have played through all ten games in the series, there is no spiritual need for anything beyond Kiryu's story, but ultimately all the Level-Up Daily Login Bonuses are in service of this game's overarching theme of going through the duties while you watch the exterior world move further away from you and begin to accept life in the interior world built for you by the actions of your past. Either you're new to this and woefully out of your depth (don't worry, Joryu will help you), or you've always known the man who erased his name and are now compelled by brotherly honour to remain with him until the end.
Y̵a̵k̵u̵z̵a̵ Like A Dragon Cutscene: “I’ve survived past the point of death so many times, often in the place of others who meant so much more to me than I could have known in the moment. Only now, as I face my own end, do I understand the true pain of feelings left unsaid. I tried to live without regrets, but the consequences of a life left living are inevitable.”
------------------------
Long - though comparatively short by franchise standards - periods of drama wholly contingent on the viewer's pre-existing knowledge of plot and history from Yakuza 0, Yakuza, Yakuza 2, Yakuza 3, Yakuza 4, Yakuza 5, Yakuza 6, Judgment and Yakuza: Like A Dragon exist in tandem with tutorials for complex game systems like "using the map" and "doing a kick", highlighting the epic contradictions this saga repeatedly unfolds and upholds upon itself. If you're an insane member of this subcultural phenomenon and have played through all ten games in the series, there is no spiritual need for anything beyond Kiryu's story, but ultimately all the Level-Up Daily Login Bonuses are in service of this game's overarching theme of going through the duties while you watch the exterior world move further away from you and begin to accept life in the interior world built for you by the actions of your past. Either you're new to this and woefully out of your depth (don't worry, Joryu will help you), or you've always known the man who erased his name and are now compelled by brotherly honour to remain with him until the end.
A fitting swan song for Kiryu despite (despite the fact his true swan song is coming out in January). This is what I wanted out of Yakuza 6, but didn't quite get. It's not bogged down by the mediocre writing of 6 and the need to shoehorn in characters like Akiyama, Date, and Haruka. Instead, it's fully focused on Kiryu's arc. Also I haven't enjoyed the gameplay this much since Kiwami 2. The meta commentary of the coliseum was a nice touch too.
But... Those live action cabaret missions give me an uncanny valley vibe a la SpongeBob's live action segments. Why they went in that direction with the cabaret missions, I have no idea.
But... Those live action cabaret missions give me an uncanny valley vibe a la SpongeBob's live action segments. Why they went in that direction with the cabaret missions, I have no idea.
I really was wrong about this one. I literally sobbed.
This review contains spoilers
For 13 years I have been an ardent defender of the orphanage segments of Yakuza 3, and with the final scenes of this game I am at long last vindicated.
Pretty standard pre-LAD Yakuza, but smaller. Maybe a little smaller than I expected going in, but it's fine! Everything is just fine. The combat, the minigames, the running around maps you've been playing for several games, it's all there. There's something I can't quite put my finger on though that makes the formula feel a lot more tired than, say, Lost Judgment. Not sure why - maybe something to do with it originally being planned as DLC? Regardless, there's definitely an undercurrent of Well, Here We Are Again, even if Here is a place I enjoy. Ahh, who cares, doesn't matter, the last act is great even with the extremely rushed "MEANWHILE, IN..." montage to hastily explain what part of the LAD plot we're about to land in, none of which made any sense to me having made no real headway into that game. Final scenes had me sobbing. It's cool to know that after all this time, Kiryu is still a powerful character to me!
Also I loved that the Yakuza 2 golden castle section is shouted out in this, hell yeah. Not a fan of the hostess stuff now being sleazy FMV! I can see the ring lights reflected in their eyes and I don't like it!
Pretty standard pre-LAD Yakuza, but smaller. Maybe a little smaller than I expected going in, but it's fine! Everything is just fine. The combat, the minigames, the running around maps you've been playing for several games, it's all there. There's something I can't quite put my finger on though that makes the formula feel a lot more tired than, say, Lost Judgment. Not sure why - maybe something to do with it originally being planned as DLC? Regardless, there's definitely an undercurrent of Well, Here We Are Again, even if Here is a place I enjoy. Ahh, who cares, doesn't matter, the last act is great even with the extremely rushed "MEANWHILE, IN..." montage to hastily explain what part of the LAD plot we're about to land in, none of which made any sense to me having made no real headway into that game. Final scenes had me sobbing. It's cool to know that after all this time, Kiryu is still a powerful character to me!
Also I loved that the Yakuza 2 golden castle section is shouted out in this, hell yeah. Not a fan of the hostess stuff now being sleazy FMV! I can see the ring lights reflected in their eyes and I don't like it!
it took RGG six months to make a better Spider-Man game than Infraudniac
My personal GOTY for 2023. Takes the best of the best from every Dragon Engine game thus far to create, while on the shorter side, an extremely fulfilling experience for any Yakuza/LAD fan. Kiryu's combat is at its best here by far, giving the Yakuza style the charge attacks from Tiger in Lost Judgment was an incredibly smart decision, allowing for incredibly strong and quick boss kills, while the Agent style is a fun gimmick style that has you laughing every time you do something ridiculous with it (this is the entire style). Unfortunately, I find the story hits far harder if you've played 3 and 6 (6 being my personal fav in the series), and given part of this game existing is to ease newer players from LAD7 into Kiryu for his upcoming dual protag role in LAD8, this move is very ??????. Thankfully as someone who HAS played those games, I can confidently say the story was at its best, and the way it bridges between what happened to Kiryu after 6 to his appearances in 7 are excellently executed. Most of this game is dedicated to the side content, which was fine for me, allowing me to fully indulge myself in the side content of an RGG game for the first time, as previously I had only done the sidequests in LAD7 for the summons and the karaoke in every game. My only real criticism is the file size. 24 gigs of this game is dedicated to the LAD8 demo, which is literally not even this game, and another 24 is dedicated to incredibly high quality footage of women for the cabaret club minigame, leaving almost half of the game dedicated to just those, which is frankly ridiculous.
fucking bawled by the end. the story at the start and the forced side content was a bit on the nose, but kiryu combat is at its best here, maybe even better than 0, and i had a really fun time with it despite the short length of this game. exactly what i could want from a yakuza 6 follow up and its fucking great.
This review contains spoilers
along with 2.0, this expansion pushes cyberpunk 2077 into full imsim, and i feel at this point that i can comfortably say this is among my favorite games. also, v is among my favorite characters, particularly as voiced by cherami leigh. the new 'happy' ending crushed and now haunts me, and i just want to find v among the crowd and give her a long hug.
of course, i also went back to an earlier save to choose the arguably more righteous, more courageous path — the one truer to the game's somber exploration of mortality, culminating in imo the best ending from the original game: the 'star' ending, where v faces an uncertain future, one where she may yet die young, though it'll be among friends standing with her all the way. where perhaps saving songbird from a life as the nusa's property is the karmic push v needs to survive after the events of the game, living out there as a nomad. that's what i'd like to think, anyway...
of course, i also went back to an earlier save to choose the arguably more righteous, more courageous path — the one truer to the game's somber exploration of mortality, culminating in imo the best ending from the original game: the 'star' ending, where v faces an uncertain future, one where she may yet die young, though it'll be among friends standing with her all the way. where perhaps saving songbird from a life as the nusa's property is the karmic push v needs to survive after the events of the game, living out there as a nomad. that's what i'd like to think, anyway...
This review contains spoilers
So, what the hell is Act 3?
Dragon Quest XI is full of endlessly endearing characters, constantly pleasurable combat, and a sense of warmth and wonder that few experiences can rival. I'd call it one of my favorite games. But, the thing my thoughts kept returning to for days after finishing it was Act 3. What the hell is it??
After DQXI's antagonist is defeated and the ending credits roll, a lengthy additional scenario for the player begins, generally referred to as the Post-Game or "Act 3." Taking place after the end credits, it's framed as an extra optional adventure, though some story elements from the main game only see their ultimate resolution in Act 3. I decided to play through Act 3 in order to see everything that DQXI had to offer. I loved the main game, after all!
I'd characterize my initial experience with Act 3 with two words: Whiplash and bafflement. Why why why is this game un-sticking its own landing to have me undermine its most emotionally impactful moments?
The scenario of Act 3 is built around using time travel to undo the death of the character and party member Veronica. Her death happens suddenly and silently in the main story; the player won't learn that she is dead until many hours after she sacrificed herself. There are no tearful last words, no encouragement to finish the quest from the dying, the player just gets separated from her at one point, and instead of a reunion, there's her body.
In a game principally concerned with the undiluted joys of love and friendship and the appeal of just spending time with people you care about, Veronica's death is titanic. DQXI semi-frequently punctuates its usually lighthearted fairy tale tone with moments of sadness, loss, and despair to contrast with and underscore the importance of its joyful themes, but Veronica's death is a step beyond. It constitutes a massive, tangible loss for both the principal characters and the player. Veronica stops being a playable character, she can no longer be a piece of any party composition in the dozens of battles to come, she won't be hanging out in camp, she won't have any optional dialogue, she won't feature in any story scenes going forward. These things may seem obvious but in the tens of hours I had been playing up til then, Veronica had become a staple of my experience in the game. She was an integral member of my band of friends and I had expected to return her to the party when I found her after all the characters were scattered at the end of "Act 1." After spending so many great hours with DQXI, her death cast a shadow of sadness over the rest of my experience.
She's survived by her sister Serena, who resolves to continue adventuring with the player and to live for the both of them. She cuts her hair and inherits a piece of Veronica's spirit, and from then on in gameplay Serena possesses the powers and abilities of both herself and her sister. She quietly carries Veronica's memory with her for the rest of the game, and every time the player uses her to cast one of Veronica's spells during combat they are reminded that no one is ever truly gone forever. It's a simple, beautiful way to imbue the basic fabric of a game with emotional resonance. Act 3 is about taking all that away.
That is maybe a bit uncharitable to say, but it is fundamentally true. Act 3 sees the hero traveling back in time to keep Veronica from dying and then saving the day all over again with her in tow. In this reality, Serena never suffers that loss and never resolves to remain strong in the face of grief. The bonds of the party are never strained and strengthened by the loss of their loved one. Similarly, other hard lessons are unlearned as well. Another party member, Erik, has his confrontation and reconciliation with his sister erased and replaced with an altogether more abridged and tidy reunion. Michelle the mermaid never sees her tragic story concluded, Sylvando never finds purpose forming a traveling troupe to bring joy to a despairing world. People all over Dragon Quest XI's world never experience the dark era of strife brought on by the game's antagonist. In the main story the hero fails to stop him at the end of Act 1, and the player is made to live with the cataclysmic consequences while experiencing both struggle and hope in the process of rebuilding. In Act 3's revised history, all this darkness is made squeaky clean by comparison. In a game that previously seemed to be putting forth the importance of hope and perseverance in the face of life's tragedies, Act 3 seems to be saying that hardship is fundamentally inappropriate to a happy life, and that it would be better for those hard lessons to never be learned at all, fantasizing that all the bad in the world can be magically painted over, completely exiting any emotional reality that a player could experience themselves in their own life.
This is roughly the message I got from Act 3 at first blush. However, I want to challenge my own premise here, because after some time and a lot of thought, I've come to view Act 3 in a different way that, while not fully making me love its direction, helps me to appreciate and reconcile it with the overall shape of DQXI as a piece of art.
For me to make peace with Act 3, I first had to accept that it's primarily an exercise in wish-fulfillment. At the end of the main game I had so much affection for those characters that a chance to spend dozens more hours with them was everything I could ask for! Act 3 is wish-fulfillment on a deeper thematic layer too. The main story spends a lot of its focus on imparting its ostensibly light-hearted storybook narrative with a sense of emotional tangibility. It reaches out to the player with moments of irrevocable sadness followed by moments of joy, friendship, and solidarity despite it all, and asks the player to see the value in these things. In reality you can't take back regrets or bring back the people you lose. The purpose of Act 3 is to willfully engage in a fantasy contrary to the rest of the game, though just because it's contrary doesn't mean it doesn't have value.
By doing the impossible and rewriting history in Act 3, the player and the hero perform a service out of love for the people they care about. Their friends will never know the strife that might have been. Given the opportunity, What lengths would you not go to, to protect the ones you love from pain? Given that very opportunity, the hero of Dragon Quest XI changes the entire fabric of the world, because reality is a small price to pay to see a friend smile again. The world is already full to bursting with hurt and sadness, it won't miss the little that you take away.
Act 3 taps into the impulse to wish you could truly save the day and make everything okay for the people that matter to you. In real life, this can be an impossible and even unhelpful idea when pushed too far, and I'm personally more drawn to the world of real emotional consequence presented by the main story, so the real Dragon Quest XI will always sort of end for me at the conclusion of Act 2. But Act 3 lets the player spend time in the fantasy, spend more time with their friends, be the hero they cannot be in real life. It's a videogame, why not take this chance to live inside it as you cannot outside it? As a purely additional coda to a game all about the connections we make, it strikes me as somewhat beautiful that in Act 3, you never have to say goodbye.
Dragon Quest XI is full of endlessly endearing characters, constantly pleasurable combat, and a sense of warmth and wonder that few experiences can rival. I'd call it one of my favorite games. But, the thing my thoughts kept returning to for days after finishing it was Act 3. What the hell is it??
After DQXI's antagonist is defeated and the ending credits roll, a lengthy additional scenario for the player begins, generally referred to as the Post-Game or "Act 3." Taking place after the end credits, it's framed as an extra optional adventure, though some story elements from the main game only see their ultimate resolution in Act 3. I decided to play through Act 3 in order to see everything that DQXI had to offer. I loved the main game, after all!
I'd characterize my initial experience with Act 3 with two words: Whiplash and bafflement. Why why why is this game un-sticking its own landing to have me undermine its most emotionally impactful moments?
The scenario of Act 3 is built around using time travel to undo the death of the character and party member Veronica. Her death happens suddenly and silently in the main story; the player won't learn that she is dead until many hours after she sacrificed herself. There are no tearful last words, no encouragement to finish the quest from the dying, the player just gets separated from her at one point, and instead of a reunion, there's her body.
In a game principally concerned with the undiluted joys of love and friendship and the appeal of just spending time with people you care about, Veronica's death is titanic. DQXI semi-frequently punctuates its usually lighthearted fairy tale tone with moments of sadness, loss, and despair to contrast with and underscore the importance of its joyful themes, but Veronica's death is a step beyond. It constitutes a massive, tangible loss for both the principal characters and the player. Veronica stops being a playable character, she can no longer be a piece of any party composition in the dozens of battles to come, she won't be hanging out in camp, she won't have any optional dialogue, she won't feature in any story scenes going forward. These things may seem obvious but in the tens of hours I had been playing up til then, Veronica had become a staple of my experience in the game. She was an integral member of my band of friends and I had expected to return her to the party when I found her after all the characters were scattered at the end of "Act 1." After spending so many great hours with DQXI, her death cast a shadow of sadness over the rest of my experience.
She's survived by her sister Serena, who resolves to continue adventuring with the player and to live for the both of them. She cuts her hair and inherits a piece of Veronica's spirit, and from then on in gameplay Serena possesses the powers and abilities of both herself and her sister. She quietly carries Veronica's memory with her for the rest of the game, and every time the player uses her to cast one of Veronica's spells during combat they are reminded that no one is ever truly gone forever. It's a simple, beautiful way to imbue the basic fabric of a game with emotional resonance. Act 3 is about taking all that away.
That is maybe a bit uncharitable to say, but it is fundamentally true. Act 3 sees the hero traveling back in time to keep Veronica from dying and then saving the day all over again with her in tow. In this reality, Serena never suffers that loss and never resolves to remain strong in the face of grief. The bonds of the party are never strained and strengthened by the loss of their loved one. Similarly, other hard lessons are unlearned as well. Another party member, Erik, has his confrontation and reconciliation with his sister erased and replaced with an altogether more abridged and tidy reunion. Michelle the mermaid never sees her tragic story concluded, Sylvando never finds purpose forming a traveling troupe to bring joy to a despairing world. People all over Dragon Quest XI's world never experience the dark era of strife brought on by the game's antagonist. In the main story the hero fails to stop him at the end of Act 1, and the player is made to live with the cataclysmic consequences while experiencing both struggle and hope in the process of rebuilding. In Act 3's revised history, all this darkness is made squeaky clean by comparison. In a game that previously seemed to be putting forth the importance of hope and perseverance in the face of life's tragedies, Act 3 seems to be saying that hardship is fundamentally inappropriate to a happy life, and that it would be better for those hard lessons to never be learned at all, fantasizing that all the bad in the world can be magically painted over, completely exiting any emotional reality that a player could experience themselves in their own life.
This is roughly the message I got from Act 3 at first blush. However, I want to challenge my own premise here, because after some time and a lot of thought, I've come to view Act 3 in a different way that, while not fully making me love its direction, helps me to appreciate and reconcile it with the overall shape of DQXI as a piece of art.
For me to make peace with Act 3, I first had to accept that it's primarily an exercise in wish-fulfillment. At the end of the main game I had so much affection for those characters that a chance to spend dozens more hours with them was everything I could ask for! Act 3 is wish-fulfillment on a deeper thematic layer too. The main story spends a lot of its focus on imparting its ostensibly light-hearted storybook narrative with a sense of emotional tangibility. It reaches out to the player with moments of irrevocable sadness followed by moments of joy, friendship, and solidarity despite it all, and asks the player to see the value in these things. In reality you can't take back regrets or bring back the people you lose. The purpose of Act 3 is to willfully engage in a fantasy contrary to the rest of the game, though just because it's contrary doesn't mean it doesn't have value.
By doing the impossible and rewriting history in Act 3, the player and the hero perform a service out of love for the people they care about. Their friends will never know the strife that might have been. Given the opportunity, What lengths would you not go to, to protect the ones you love from pain? Given that very opportunity, the hero of Dragon Quest XI changes the entire fabric of the world, because reality is a small price to pay to see a friend smile again. The world is already full to bursting with hurt and sadness, it won't miss the little that you take away.
Act 3 taps into the impulse to wish you could truly save the day and make everything okay for the people that matter to you. In real life, this can be an impossible and even unhelpful idea when pushed too far, and I'm personally more drawn to the world of real emotional consequence presented by the main story, so the real Dragon Quest XI will always sort of end for me at the conclusion of Act 2. But Act 3 lets the player spend time in the fantasy, spend more time with their friends, be the hero they cannot be in real life. It's a videogame, why not take this chance to live inside it as you cannot outside it? As a purely additional coda to a game all about the connections we make, it strikes me as somewhat beautiful that in Act 3, you never have to say goodbye.
This review contains spoilers
If you are at all interested in this game and you clicked "show spoilers" because you've played FFVII and you know about Aeris and viewed the optional cutscenes and know about Zack... I would implore you to go play the main game and only play optional missions if you're underleveled, which is a memorable and relatively compact (for an RPG) experience sitting at around 12 hours, and skip the next few paragraphs.
(SPOILERS!!!)
You see, I can't talk about this game without talking about how perfect its ending is. You know how some movies seem to have been written entirely around one scene? Not just that the scene is iconic, but it feels like the writers started with that scene and then used it as a scaffolding for everything else? (Children of Men is one such movie) Crisis Core's ending is like that. It was so well written and directed that even though I knew what was going to happen, it managed to subvert my expectations multiple times and hit me right in the feels.
I saw Zack draw his sword to charge at a literal army and prepared myself to watch a cutscene of the death of this guy who'd spent the last 20 or so hours endearing himself to m-"ACTIVATING COMBAT MODE"
dafuq?
The game forced me to play through his hopeless last stand, and even though I knew it would end in his death I fought as hard as I could (and being slightly overleveled I held out really long) in the vain hope that I would be able to cheat fate. And as the bullets rained down, the DMW slots metamorphosed from a needlessly-clunky RNG mechanic into the representation of Zack's life flashing before his eyes. And when, near death, the DMW rolled Aeris like it had so many times before, I thought I would at least be able to trigger the Healing Wave limit break and keep fighting for just a while more... but it was only Zack's nearly-gone consciousness focusing on who he most wanted to see in that moment, before finally shutting down.
I can't remember the last time a video game affected me so much.
(SPOILERS END HERE)
-----------------------------------------
Does Crisis Core have issues? Plenty! The action elements feel half-assed, in that everything takes place in real-time but the hit detection and physics feel slightly "off", never fully consistent or intuitive - if they wanted to do an action style, they missed an opportunity to make it handle like a musou game which would have been perfect for this! The side content is bloated beyond belief, and consists entirely of generic cutpaste missions with little variety to them. Genesis sits proudly at the top of the pile of my least favorite RPG villains thanks to his incessant and obnoxious quotations from a pompous and irrelevant text.
Those are all relevant criticisms of the game and can be dealbreaking for some, but they are not enough to eclipse how good an experience it was for me. Crisis Core adds nice worldbuilding and history to the FFVII timeline, introduces some (mostly) great side characters - Cissnei being a particular hit - and if you have any nostalgia for the original FFVII at all, it'll kick your feels in the balls.
I won't forget.
(SPOILERS!!!)
You see, I can't talk about this game without talking about how perfect its ending is. You know how some movies seem to have been written entirely around one scene? Not just that the scene is iconic, but it feels like the writers started with that scene and then used it as a scaffolding for everything else? (Children of Men is one such movie) Crisis Core's ending is like that. It was so well written and directed that even though I knew what was going to happen, it managed to subvert my expectations multiple times and hit me right in the feels.
I saw Zack draw his sword to charge at a literal army and prepared myself to watch a cutscene of the death of this guy who'd spent the last 20 or so hours endearing himself to m-"ACTIVATING COMBAT MODE"
dafuq?
The game forced me to play through his hopeless last stand, and even though I knew it would end in his death I fought as hard as I could (and being slightly overleveled I held out really long) in the vain hope that I would be able to cheat fate. And as the bullets rained down, the DMW slots metamorphosed from a needlessly-clunky RNG mechanic into the representation of Zack's life flashing before his eyes. And when, near death, the DMW rolled Aeris like it had so many times before, I thought I would at least be able to trigger the Healing Wave limit break and keep fighting for just a while more... but it was only Zack's nearly-gone consciousness focusing on who he most wanted to see in that moment, before finally shutting down.
I can't remember the last time a video game affected me so much.
(SPOILERS END HERE)
-----------------------------------------
Does Crisis Core have issues? Plenty! The action elements feel half-assed, in that everything takes place in real-time but the hit detection and physics feel slightly "off", never fully consistent or intuitive - if they wanted to do an action style, they missed an opportunity to make it handle like a musou game which would have been perfect for this! The side content is bloated beyond belief, and consists entirely of generic cutpaste missions with little variety to them. Genesis sits proudly at the top of the pile of my least favorite RPG villains thanks to his incessant and obnoxious quotations from a pompous and irrelevant text.
Those are all relevant criticisms of the game and can be dealbreaking for some, but they are not enough to eclipse how good an experience it was for me. Crisis Core adds nice worldbuilding and history to the FFVII timeline, introduces some (mostly) great side characters - Cissnei being a particular hit - and if you have any nostalgia for the original FFVII at all, it'll kick your feels in the balls.
I won't forget.
COMPLETE LOCAL SATURATION.
That's it. I'm fusing myself with this copy of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective for the Nintendo DS in order to prove I'm the biggest fan of this underrated classic the west mistakenly overlooked
We Love Katamari
2005
The Sequel That Is About Being A Sequel is something I'm familiar with, but I didn't expect We Love Katamari to be one of these. The title itself is a statement that is certainly true for the fanbase, for many of the people who made it, and for anyone who made money off of it, but for creator Keita Takahashi, the title was more of a question that needed an answer. Do we love Katamari? Why? Do we want more Katamari? Do I want more Katamari?
The game opens by summarizing the events of the first game, declaring that Katamari Damacy was beloved by all, so of course there had to be a follow-up. But The King of All Cosmos, the flippant and prideful figure who caused the catalyst for the first game, doesn't really get it. He enjoys being beloved, and he'll gladly take any opportunity to boss the Prince and his cousins around, but when it comes down to it, he seems to want to do anything else besides play Katamari. He only does it for the sake of the humans who loved Katamari Damacy, or are curious about why people love it.
These humans, while at first expressing their love of Katamari, also are very demanding and petty. The player is used to being insulted by The King on their first try in any level, but sometimes the "fan" is even harsher, and even when you do pretty good, they still never fail to throw in something like "Yeah, you could do better, but I guess I'll settle for this." While I'm sure exceeding at every stage will get you more unqualified compliments, the average player will often disappoint these fans, or see would-be fans says something like "Is this was Katamari is? Doesn't seem that good to me." The game is constantly referencing the first game, as The Prince is working entirely in service of people who are only thinking of the first game. The cosmos are just fine, exactly as you left them at the end of the first game, The Prince and The King are only doing all this because they've been asked to, because they feel the need to prove themselves to any naysayers in the world.
The unbridled joy and fascination with the world that was present in Damacy is still here in the art, gameplay, design, and music, but We Love Katamari also has a surprising cynical streak that it never really relents from. In the end it kind of suggests that no sequel is entirely uncynical, that revisiting the well will never truly result in something just as good, but it also ends up being an extremely fucking solid sequel to Damacy that rivals it in quality. I love the gimmick levels in this game, like the one where you're moving super fast on a race track, or where you're trying to search for every paper crane in a level, there's so much creativity in the variety of level types. I don't think it ever surpasses the original like some people believe, but it's a strong as hell follow-up.
It ends up making We Love Katamari bittersweet, it's incredibly fun to play, but it's a game that believes being "as fun as the first" isn't enough, and therefore no sequel to Katamari Damacy will ever be worthwhile, even the one you're playing. It especially becomes a bummer when you check the Wikipedia page for the "Katamari Series" and see that there's been around 4 different mobile games since We Love Katamari, along with countless other entires with no involvement from Takahashi. We Love Katamari was his way of expressing gratitude to anyone who enjoyed Damacy, while also being his way of letting them know that it's OK to let Katamari go, and that he'll be the first to do so.
The game opens by summarizing the events of the first game, declaring that Katamari Damacy was beloved by all, so of course there had to be a follow-up. But The King of All Cosmos, the flippant and prideful figure who caused the catalyst for the first game, doesn't really get it. He enjoys being beloved, and he'll gladly take any opportunity to boss the Prince and his cousins around, but when it comes down to it, he seems to want to do anything else besides play Katamari. He only does it for the sake of the humans who loved Katamari Damacy, or are curious about why people love it.
These humans, while at first expressing their love of Katamari, also are very demanding and petty. The player is used to being insulted by The King on their first try in any level, but sometimes the "fan" is even harsher, and even when you do pretty good, they still never fail to throw in something like "Yeah, you could do better, but I guess I'll settle for this." While I'm sure exceeding at every stage will get you more unqualified compliments, the average player will often disappoint these fans, or see would-be fans says something like "Is this was Katamari is? Doesn't seem that good to me." The game is constantly referencing the first game, as The Prince is working entirely in service of people who are only thinking of the first game. The cosmos are just fine, exactly as you left them at the end of the first game, The Prince and The King are only doing all this because they've been asked to, because they feel the need to prove themselves to any naysayers in the world.
The unbridled joy and fascination with the world that was present in Damacy is still here in the art, gameplay, design, and music, but We Love Katamari also has a surprising cynical streak that it never really relents from. In the end it kind of suggests that no sequel is entirely uncynical, that revisiting the well will never truly result in something just as good, but it also ends up being an extremely fucking solid sequel to Damacy that rivals it in quality. I love the gimmick levels in this game, like the one where you're moving super fast on a race track, or where you're trying to search for every paper crane in a level, there's so much creativity in the variety of level types. I don't think it ever surpasses the original like some people believe, but it's a strong as hell follow-up.
It ends up making We Love Katamari bittersweet, it's incredibly fun to play, but it's a game that believes being "as fun as the first" isn't enough, and therefore no sequel to Katamari Damacy will ever be worthwhile, even the one you're playing. It especially becomes a bummer when you check the Wikipedia page for the "Katamari Series" and see that there's been around 4 different mobile games since We Love Katamari, along with countless other entires with no involvement from Takahashi. We Love Katamari was his way of expressing gratitude to anyone who enjoyed Damacy, while also being his way of letting them know that it's OK to let Katamari go, and that he'll be the first to do so.
How do you follow up the likes of that which has never been seen before? Could you even hope to surpass the video game equivalent of lightning in a bottle? Keita Takahashi didn’t think so, but Namco saw the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and wanted more. So, he compromised. He agreed to direct the sequel after learning that Namco was willing to forge ahead, with or without him, and in exchange, the sequel became a metaphor for his mixed feelings regarding sequelitis and his eventual alienation from videogames as a whole. The result is We Love Katamari, a successor that tackled the subject of pandering to those around you while attempting to maintain the spirit of the original. The original Katamari Damacy was interpreted by many as an object of childlike wonder, railing against any form of cynicism while explaining absolutely nothing to preserve that joy. We Love Katamari on the other hand, turns the irreverence up to 11… and honestly, I’m all for it. As the Prince and the King of the Cosmos attempt to fulfill every fan’s request while repopulating the sky, they’re confronted with increasingly absurd situations. There’s a baby that outright tells you that he’s glad he was born to see the Prince of the Cosmos fulfill his lifelong dreams. Animals send requests a few times too, with some white dog telling you to roll around a zoo so he can attend a concert with more friends. To top this all off, the astronaut from the first game begs you to save the Earth from impending doom by rolling up countries of the world to stop an asteroid. The requests are all over the place and just as wild, if not wilder, than Katamari Damacy, and it’s fascinating how simultaneously off-the-rails the plot and worldbuilding have become even as the game remains one of Takahashi’s most intimate works, conveying his complicated feelings in this microcosm of cathartic destruction.
In terms of gameplay, We Love Katamari takes many of the logical steps in terms of progressing its simple yet realized formula. While the original game was content setting up its structure and letting players romp about in an expanding playground, We Love Katamari actively tests its limits of experimentation, challenging perceptions of what could be achieved with its level design while making players sweat with more complex goals and stricter time limits. Now granted, I concede that not everything in the sequel impresses me. The firefly level has a solid concept (roll up fireflies in a camping ground so a student has more light to study with) but doesn’t achieve much in terms of sense of scale or underlying complexity besides “roll up things quickly to get bright,” I could have done without three different variations of the Saturn levels where you just have to decide when you’re of the proper size, and I personally am not a huge fan of the underwater level where you have to handle floatier physics while dodging fishing hooks that put you out of commission for a bit. That said, the expansions that I did enjoy, I ended up really enjoying. There’s another campgrounds level where you control a burning Katamari and must carefully consider pathing on the fly to make sure that you never run out of fuel while avoiding any water sources that would snuff you out. Conversely, there’s another zoo level that sets a limit not on time, but on the things you’re allowed to roll up; as a result, it becomes an interesting exercise of restraint and sight-recognition, figuring out exactly the biggest things you can roll up at any time while outright avoiding anything else. Other favorite levels here include a racetrack where you “race” against a flurry of karts on a looping island road while barreling through anything in your way, and a sumo wrestling level where instead of rolling a Katamari, you roll the awkwardly-shaped sumo wrestler himself, and must prioritize foods as part of training him up to eventually KO his awaiting opponent. While some of the sequel's levels are content just playing with the established formula of “roll up things to get bigger to roll up more things,” the best levels here emphasize Katamari’s arcade and puzzle-like qualities by enforcing familiarization with the intricate object placement while accentuating the need for careful routing to avoid larger obstacles only to consume them whole later.
I must admit that despite my appreciation for what the sequel brings to the table, there’s a part of me that still prefers the original. There’s a sort of cohesion present in the original from repeating the same three levels but in slightly different ways and exploring them with different sizes that I think is missing in the sequel; rather, the sequel feels a bit more disconnected, with all the different fan-requests pulling from all different sides and a lot of the environments showing up for just a couple of stages or so. As a result, despite having more fleshed out execution of its base formula, I still feel as if the sequel could have more thoroughly explored certain levels in order to realize their full potential. In addition, I do find the sequel slightly more grindy than the original: not necessarily just because it’s harder (though I can’t rule out the possibility that this might be a factor), but because one of the final levels can’t be unlocked until you collect all the cousins (more or less just a cosmetic in the original), and multiple cousins are often present in the same level even though you’re only allowed to roll up and unlock one cousin per run. Finally, I must agree with everyone else in that I don’t think the extra Reverie levels from the remaster add much to the core experience, or at the very least didn’t wow me in the same way that many of the more experimental base game levels did. Rolling up clutter in a room as fast as possible and creating a variation of the racetrack level (just with the goal of snagging tires instead of overall size) doesn’t quite hit the same I suppose. Nevertheless, don’t let my personal gripes distract you from the fact that I absolutely recommend this. It's everything that a sequel could hope to be and more, providing a satisfying evolution to the series that stresses its understated design principles while serving as both a love-letter to the franchise and a send-off to Keita Takahashi’s most famous contributions to the medium. At the end of the day, we love Katamari, and while it may not be enough for Takahashi, it’s enough to matter for me.
In terms of gameplay, We Love Katamari takes many of the logical steps in terms of progressing its simple yet realized formula. While the original game was content setting up its structure and letting players romp about in an expanding playground, We Love Katamari actively tests its limits of experimentation, challenging perceptions of what could be achieved with its level design while making players sweat with more complex goals and stricter time limits. Now granted, I concede that not everything in the sequel impresses me. The firefly level has a solid concept (roll up fireflies in a camping ground so a student has more light to study with) but doesn’t achieve much in terms of sense of scale or underlying complexity besides “roll up things quickly to get bright,” I could have done without three different variations of the Saturn levels where you just have to decide when you’re of the proper size, and I personally am not a huge fan of the underwater level where you have to handle floatier physics while dodging fishing hooks that put you out of commission for a bit. That said, the expansions that I did enjoy, I ended up really enjoying. There’s another campgrounds level where you control a burning Katamari and must carefully consider pathing on the fly to make sure that you never run out of fuel while avoiding any water sources that would snuff you out. Conversely, there’s another zoo level that sets a limit not on time, but on the things you’re allowed to roll up; as a result, it becomes an interesting exercise of restraint and sight-recognition, figuring out exactly the biggest things you can roll up at any time while outright avoiding anything else. Other favorite levels here include a racetrack where you “race” against a flurry of karts on a looping island road while barreling through anything in your way, and a sumo wrestling level where instead of rolling a Katamari, you roll the awkwardly-shaped sumo wrestler himself, and must prioritize foods as part of training him up to eventually KO his awaiting opponent. While some of the sequel's levels are content just playing with the established formula of “roll up things to get bigger to roll up more things,” the best levels here emphasize Katamari’s arcade and puzzle-like qualities by enforcing familiarization with the intricate object placement while accentuating the need for careful routing to avoid larger obstacles only to consume them whole later.
I must admit that despite my appreciation for what the sequel brings to the table, there’s a part of me that still prefers the original. There’s a sort of cohesion present in the original from repeating the same three levels but in slightly different ways and exploring them with different sizes that I think is missing in the sequel; rather, the sequel feels a bit more disconnected, with all the different fan-requests pulling from all different sides and a lot of the environments showing up for just a couple of stages or so. As a result, despite having more fleshed out execution of its base formula, I still feel as if the sequel could have more thoroughly explored certain levels in order to realize their full potential. In addition, I do find the sequel slightly more grindy than the original: not necessarily just because it’s harder (though I can’t rule out the possibility that this might be a factor), but because one of the final levels can’t be unlocked until you collect all the cousins (more or less just a cosmetic in the original), and multiple cousins are often present in the same level even though you’re only allowed to roll up and unlock one cousin per run. Finally, I must agree with everyone else in that I don’t think the extra Reverie levels from the remaster add much to the core experience, or at the very least didn’t wow me in the same way that many of the more experimental base game levels did. Rolling up clutter in a room as fast as possible and creating a variation of the racetrack level (just with the goal of snagging tires instead of overall size) doesn’t quite hit the same I suppose. Nevertheless, don’t let my personal gripes distract you from the fact that I absolutely recommend this. It's everything that a sequel could hope to be and more, providing a satisfying evolution to the series that stresses its understated design principles while serving as both a love-letter to the franchise and a send-off to Keita Takahashi’s most famous contributions to the medium. At the end of the day, we love Katamari, and while it may not be enough for Takahashi, it’s enough to matter for me.