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I love Sonic the Hedgehog.
Playing through Sonic Frontiers for the first time, it was hard not to have a big, dumb smile on my face when Kellin Quinn’s vocals for Undefeatable or Break Through it All accentuated some of the series’ most spectacular boss fights in recent memory. I appreciated talking to Amy, Knuckles, and Tails, and having these characters feel like characters again, for the first time in a long time. I loved the melancholic story and desolate environments. Although they felt incongruous with the last decade of Sonic’s output, it felt like another bold step forward for Sonic Team, a new horizon, uncharted territory – starting nearly from scratch and reinventing Sonic’s movement yet again was a big gamble, and one that I felt paid off.
Sonic Frontiers was not a perfect Sonic game by any stretch of the imagination. For every triumph there was comparable failure: everything from the stripped down boost gameplay in Cyberspace stages, to the lackluster combat, to the abhorrent pop-in, and obviously much more I won’t discuss here. You’ve probably heard all this before.
Sonic Frontiers was and is not a perfect Sonic game, but if not a step in the right direction - it's at least a proper reorientation, a much-needed weaning from the over-streamlined boost formula from Sonic Forces, and a manifesto that Sonic Team could still, in fact, create a game that - even at its worst - pushed the series forward.
I love Sonic the Hedgehog.
I’ve loved Sonic the Hedgehog since I was a kid. I met my best friend, Garrett, sixteen years ago on YouTube through shared interest in Sonic the Hedgehog. We used to play Xbox Live together. He visited me for my high school graduation. We played through Sonic ‘06 the Summer of 2015. We still visit each other every year or so.
I took a short break from the series when I couldn’t finish Sonic Unleashed, and then jumped back in with Sonic Generations. I remembered why I loved these games to begin with.
Sonic Mania is my favorite game of all time.
When the Sonic Symphony World Tour show was announced in Los Angeles, I asked Garrett to visit me again. We both took a week off work.
This is the same week that Sonic Frontiers’ third and last update was released: the Final Horizon. We agreed to play through it together.
For the first time since Sonic ‘06, we were able to play as Amy Rose in 3D. Exploring Ouranos Island and coming to grips with Amy’s moveset was a joy, at first. She has a triple jump again! She can glide now! We ran into a mini-boss that killed us immediately.
“Let’s just ignore that one,” I told Garrett.
We realized our speed/ring/attack/defense stats had returned to Level One. Amy Rose was a clean slate. No upgrades. We were certainly in no condition to fight an endgame mini-boss.
We hit the story beats we needed to, then the game let us control Knuckles. This was a surprisingly emotional moment. Although it hadn’t been sixteen years since we’d controlled Knuckles, it felt like meeting an old friend.
“Oh, God,” Garrett groaned suddenly as he started to glide around the map.
“What’s wrong?”
He handed me the controller, “Feel this.”
I picked up the controller and started to glide as Knuckles. I understood what he’d meant. The windup was unusual. The turn radius was abysmal. The input delay was horrific.
“What the fuck?” I said out loud. It took a few more minutes before I put the above criticisms into words.
“Yeah,” Garrett laughed, summating, “it doesn’t feel good.”
We spent the most time as Knuckles and, subsequently, experienced two Starfall events, which have a chance to occur randomly each night cycle and allow players to (essentially) farm Koco to upgrade their character’s stats.
The Final Horizon wants to have its cake and eat it, too. Multiple playable characters necessitate a highly varied moveset for each, but to balance it properly, any upgrade materials earned as Sonic do NOT carry over to other characters. Amy, Knuckles, and Tails have their own upgrade materials, their own upgrade trees, their own level progression. HOWEVER, the new Ouranos Island is built in such a way that every character must have a Cyloop ability, and each character must unlock their respective Cyloop ability using their upgrade tree, which requires exploring Ouranos Island and earning enough upgrade points to unlock the Cyloop ability for each character in the first place, so they can explore the island even more and, eventually, complete their main objectives.
It feels unusual, however, to block progression in such a way as to force players to upgrade their characters here. In the base game, Sonic learns new attacks through his skill tree, but none of these are essential to making progress (except for the Cyloop, which is the first ability that Sonic unlocks anyway).
Here, having to use the skill tree to unlock basic abilities for characters like “melee attack” and “parry” that were already regular abilities for Sonic feels arbitrary. It’s not like it takes too long to unlock these abilities anyways, players need only find two or three special Koco to obtain these abilities, but it feels unnecessary.
It’s disappointing. I play with Knuckles for a certain amount of time and learn that he can only climb on certain surfaces, so as to keep the game balance intact. It makes sense, but it doesn’t cushion the blow any. I discovered a challenge that requires Knuckles’ ability to latch onto walls and climb. A cannonball hits me and I fall to my death. I try again. A cannonball hits me. I try to recover and latch onto the wall, but Knuckles doesn’t respond. I fall to my death. I try again.
I remember playing Sonic Adventure 2 Battle on my Nintendo Wii. The year is probably 2007 or 2008. I remember playing through the Hero Story for the first time and finally being able to play as Knuckles. I remember Knuckles’ second level: Pumpkin Hill.
You know me, the fighting freak Knuckles, and we’re at pumpkin hill. You ready?
Nostalgia is a potent drug, strong enough to trick us into believing that even the most unremarkable chapters of our lives are golden, perfect snapshots. Only when we return to these chapters, we find reality is oftentimes much less kind than our memories tend to be.
I’ve replayed almost every mainline Sonic game countless times. I know that I love Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 in spite of their flaws.
I know that I love the sensation of gliding through the air as Knuckles, the pure joy of nose-diving in rapid circles, of sticking to each and every surface, of burrowing underground to find hidden treasure. Rats. I know that I love playing as Knuckles. I know that I was disappointed when I played as Knuckles in Sonic Frontiers because it wasn’t the Knuckles I remembered. It wasn’t the Knuckles I fell in love with.
“You’d think they would’ve figured this out by now,” I said to Garrett, mostly out of frustration after another cheap death, “it’s like… I’m thinking about, like, sewers.”
He didn’t know what I meant by that. I tried to explain it and probably ended up sounding like a doofus – completely unintelligible.
“I’m sure there are people who know how to make sewers, and maintain them,” I waffled around the point I was trying to make, “but, you know, I’m not sure that we know how to make them.”
“What?”
“Like, you don’t think about this? That making sewers isn't common knowledge?”
“What are you talking about?”
“How many people know how to make sewers? How many people will know how to make sewers? Imagine everyone who knows how sewers work – one day, they all die, and nobody wrote it down. Like, imagine it’s all tribal knowledge, or something.”
What I meant is that I’m worried. I have so much anxiety about the future. Sometimes I’m worried that nobody is worrying enough. There are entire lexicons, pillars of society, professions, sectors, that will be lost to time – just slowly fading out, forgotten, and by the time somebody realizes that nobody put the fundamentals down to paper, it’ll already be too late.
Another library of Alexandria is lost, every day, for the rest of time, forever.
Somehow, Sonic Team remains incapable of emulating the movement of either Sonic Adventure. It eludes them even now.
In a series where increasingly chaotic galaxy-ending terrors converge on an anthropomorphic hedgehog who has the ability to go Super Saiyan, with each entry escalating in scope, ambition, and performance – the ease of basic movement remains a foreign concept.
The sewers are overflowing with noxious waste. Vile, repugnant sludge. The streets are drowned in garbage. Your home is sinking into bedrock. It’s always been like this.
I remember Knuckles’ second level: Pumpkin Hill.
I remember gliding between the stony mountaintops, scaling the rocky pumpkin obelisks, evading ghosts, chasing oscillating signals of the shattered Emerald. It’s closer…
I remember the sunset skybox. I remember the JPEG artifacts eating the edges of the stony pumpkin mountain faces like sweet fire. I remember the background music, looping around back to its first verse.
We finally got to play as Tails. There was catharsis, exhalation. Our baby boy could fly again. Another finger of the monkey’s paw curled inward.
Our opinions of the Final Horizon diverged much more around this point. Garrett was content to play these characters again, and I couldn’t hide my disappointment.
We traded the controller often. Sometimes one puzzle or platforming section was too difficult or obtuse and either of us would tap in while the other tapped out. Some platforming challenges were puzzles in and of themselves. Every time we died or found ourselves at an impasse, we’d give each other a look, or laugh out loud.
I love Sonic the Hedgehog.
“This is… uh,” I stammered, “this is… like, the next Sonic ‘06.” I said.
Garrett laughed, “Don’t say that.”
Neither of us hated Sonic ‘06, not like a lot of people do. Then again, it was our childhood. Our biases were impossible to avoid. I couldn’t shake the thought. This was the next Sonic ‘06, I thought to myself. For better or for worse.
When we finally assumed control of Sonic and the game directed us to our first (of five) towers, we hit a wall. Although Rhea Island was notorious for its long, perilous tower ascents, it was at least kind enough to provide checkpoints; as we struggled upwards, only to come crashing down once more, we realized there would be no checkpoints.
Sonic Frontiers had become Getting Over It.
Every time we came hurtling back down to earth, I’d start singing $uicideboy$.
One last pic and I’ll be gone
Make it count
Put the flash on
Never really felt like I belonged
So I’ll be on my way
And It won’t be long
We continued, swapped the controller between each other for each attempt, each time a little closer to heaven… nearly an hour later, we’d finally conquered the summit.
We did this, again, and again, and again, until we finally reached the fifth and final tower.
To be fully transparent, there is a lot to like about the Final Horizon. Beyond the novelty of being able to play as Tails, Knuckles, and Amy in 3D again for the first time in over a decade is an achievement, and praiseworthy on its own. Once I was comfortable with Sonic’s movement again, the towers were actually very engaging and memorable platforming challenges that I felt were deserving of their endgame difficulty. Lastly, the additional Cyberspace stages were also fun, much more challenging and interesting ideas with unique gimmicks for each stage – I only wished these were part of the main quest, and not relegated to completely optional content.
That being said, the experience of the final “trial” is probably the worst Sonic Frontiers has to offer. This penultimate boss rush might be the most cynical idea of difficulty I’ve seen in any Sonic game ever. The perfect parry mechanic retroactively cheapens these encounters by demanding frame-perfect timing, and ruins the spectacle by requiring mechanical mastery to proceed.
I’ve finished every Fromsoft Souls game (except for Sekiro) and there wasn’t a single one with parrying mechanics that were this demanding. For my first two attempts, I grappled with Giganto and attempted only to learn the parry timing; if Sonic loses one ring as Super Sonic each second, and the game only gives you 400 rings total for this encounter, that means a regular attempt will average around six-and-a-half minutes. During the thirteen minutes I attempted to learn Giganto’s parry window, I only managed to successfully parry him twice.
This is straight up not finished. Nobody playtested this. Almost every user I’ve seen discussing this boss rush has mentioned that dropping the difficulty down to Easy “fixes” the perfect parry (and it does) but this is not how difficulty should be designed. If almost every player can unanimously clear 99% of the game on the hardest difficulty, but can only progress at the eleventh hour by dropping the difficulty down to Easy, that’s a huge problem.
The new final boss is also marginally better than the older one, by default. This updated final battle features a beefier Super Sonic with blue eyes(!) and a new second phase for Supreme. It also features the absolute worst camera for any Sonic boss fight I’ve played, a brand new targeting mechanic that isn’t explained anywhere, and a cutscene that outright kills you if you don’t have enough rings.
I love Sonic the Hedgehog.
Rolling the final cutscene on the Final Horizon and watching Sonic launch himself through the image of an Eldritch God should’ve been an easy victory lap, but it wasn’t.
“We’re so fucking back,” for better or for worse.
Garrett and I and our friend Jordan (another longtime Sonic fan) were strapped for time as we watched the credits roll. It was 6:15pm. The concert started at 8. We were ready to leave before the credits had finished. I wore the hoodie I bought at the Sonic Speed popup cafe in San Diego. It was 7pm when we hit serious traffic a mile away from the Dolby Theatre.
Garrett and Jordan took turns adding songs to a growing playlist of Sonic OSTs. I sat in near-gridlock, frozen bumper-to-bumper in an ocean of automobiles. Jordan played E102’s theme from Sonic Adventure.
“This makes me feel an emotion that doesn’t exist,” he said.
My eyes glazed over in silent terror. It was 7:30pm. It was only a concert. I knew it wouldn’t be a big deal if we were late. I wanted death. Old habits made playthings of my emotions, paralyzed me. Old anxieties like nightmare tendrils, looming deadlines overhead – the hands of the clock a guillotine ready to drop. I bit my lip. I still wanted death.
Cars moved inches at a time, each red light another eternity. 7:45pm. We finally hit another artery, the lifeblood of the city flowed freely again, us along with it. I found the parking I reserved ahead of time after circling the area once. It’s 7:55pm.
We reached the Dolby Theatre at 8pm on the dot. The three of us walked inside the wide auditorium together as the final countdown began. We sat down. The lights dimmed. As the orchestra started playing, a wave of relief washed over me. We'd made it.
Watching the show, I had to appreciate the accompanying background montage which appeared on a massive monitor above the orchestra, as it highlighted the many flourishes and creative liberties of the performance. The music synchronized to Sonic as he took incoming damage in Labyrinth Zone, prompting audience laughter; or the dramatic flooding sequence in Chemical Plant Zone; or the first appearance of Metal Sonic in Collision Chaos and his eventual defeat in Stardust Speedway.
It was then I realized that Sonic’s greatest strength, as a series, was its many iconic moments. Not only the dramatic story beats, as in cutscenes, but its many instances of semi-interactive storytelling; as in the flooding sequence in Chemical Plant Zone, or running away from an Orca, or an oversized truck, or traversing an upside down castle.
After the intermission, however, was our main event. Not only what we’d been craving all night, but our entire lives.
I've been in love with this series for well over half my life now. When I was a kid, I always used to listen to Sonic the Hedgehog soundtracks. I thought Zebrahead’s His World was the rawest thing I’d ever listened to when I was thirteen. I listened to Crush 40 religiously, each vocal track another unforgettable experience – a story’s climactic end heralded by Johnny Gioeli’s radical vocals.
As the second act began and the first chords of Shadow the Hedgehog’s (I am) All of Me filled the Dolby Theatre, setting the crowd alight, I remembered why I fell in love with the series again.
I don’t even like Shadow the Hedgehog anymore, man. That game sucked!
However, what I’ve always loved was Shadow’s soundtrack –its dark, industrial sounds and heavy metal ethos seeped into every crack and crevice of its experience. When I was a kid, I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
So imagine the experience of seeing Crush 40 live, playing a song you’ve unconsciously memorized the lyrics to forever ago, backed by a full orchestra, in a room filled with Sonic fans screaming the lyrics alongside you.
I never thought I’d be here.
As a kid, I never thought I’d get to see Crush 40 live, and yet here they were. I’d fulfilled one of my oldest wishes. I was able to see Crush 40 live with my best friend.
Kellin Quinn made an appearance for the encore, and performed Break Through It All and Undefeatable. Better memories of Sonic Frontiers resurfaced.
For the final song, Johnny Gioeli joined Kellin Quinn for Live & Learn. Quinn provided backup vocals. Hearing him scream, “Hold on to what if?” cut deep into my soul.
The performance ended.
“Los Angeles,” Johnny addressed us, “we’ve made a beautiful memory here tonight.”
We made our exit shortly after. Garrett told me his only regret was not being able to attend the 3:30 showing as well. Rarely do we get to experience these moments twice.
I love Sonic the Hedgehog, and yet it was hard to not be disappointed by the Final Horizon.
What should’ve been a resounding triumph was neither an encore nor a reprise, but yet another new direction – an unwelcome challenge, a pale imitation of old glories. I was disappointed. But seeing Crush 40 live reminded me why I loved Sonic in the first place.
I’ll cherish these memories. They won’t always be perfect, but sometimes they are.
I know I’ll return to Sonic Frontiers again one day, but for now, yet another chapter of the blue blur’s legacy comes to a close.
In hindsight, I know that even if Sonic Frontiers ended up being poorly received, it wouldn’t kill Sonic. If Sonic ‘06 couldn’t kill Sonic, nothing can kill Sonic. Regardless of whichever new journey the hedgehog embarks on next, I know I’ll be there day one, eager to see what’s in store. After all, the adventure is never solely the end; the adventure ends up being the memories we take with us.
Playing through Sonic Frontiers for the first time, it was hard not to have a big, dumb smile on my face when Kellin Quinn’s vocals for Undefeatable or Break Through it All accentuated some of the series’ most spectacular boss fights in recent memory. I appreciated talking to Amy, Knuckles, and Tails, and having these characters feel like characters again, for the first time in a long time. I loved the melancholic story and desolate environments. Although they felt incongruous with the last decade of Sonic’s output, it felt like another bold step forward for Sonic Team, a new horizon, uncharted territory – starting nearly from scratch and reinventing Sonic’s movement yet again was a big gamble, and one that I felt paid off.
Sonic Frontiers was not a perfect Sonic game by any stretch of the imagination. For every triumph there was comparable failure: everything from the stripped down boost gameplay in Cyberspace stages, to the lackluster combat, to the abhorrent pop-in, and obviously much more I won’t discuss here. You’ve probably heard all this before.
Sonic Frontiers was and is not a perfect Sonic game, but if not a step in the right direction - it's at least a proper reorientation, a much-needed weaning from the over-streamlined boost formula from Sonic Forces, and a manifesto that Sonic Team could still, in fact, create a game that - even at its worst - pushed the series forward.
I love Sonic the Hedgehog.
I’ve loved Sonic the Hedgehog since I was a kid. I met my best friend, Garrett, sixteen years ago on YouTube through shared interest in Sonic the Hedgehog. We used to play Xbox Live together. He visited me for my high school graduation. We played through Sonic ‘06 the Summer of 2015. We still visit each other every year or so.
I took a short break from the series when I couldn’t finish Sonic Unleashed, and then jumped back in with Sonic Generations. I remembered why I loved these games to begin with.
Sonic Mania is my favorite game of all time.
When the Sonic Symphony World Tour show was announced in Los Angeles, I asked Garrett to visit me again. We both took a week off work.
This is the same week that Sonic Frontiers’ third and last update was released: the Final Horizon. We agreed to play through it together.
For the first time since Sonic ‘06, we were able to play as Amy Rose in 3D. Exploring Ouranos Island and coming to grips with Amy’s moveset was a joy, at first. She has a triple jump again! She can glide now! We ran into a mini-boss that killed us immediately.
“Let’s just ignore that one,” I told Garrett.
We realized our speed/ring/attack/defense stats had returned to Level One. Amy Rose was a clean slate. No upgrades. We were certainly in no condition to fight an endgame mini-boss.
We hit the story beats we needed to, then the game let us control Knuckles. This was a surprisingly emotional moment. Although it hadn’t been sixteen years since we’d controlled Knuckles, it felt like meeting an old friend.
“Oh, God,” Garrett groaned suddenly as he started to glide around the map.
“What’s wrong?”
He handed me the controller, “Feel this.”
I picked up the controller and started to glide as Knuckles. I understood what he’d meant. The windup was unusual. The turn radius was abysmal. The input delay was horrific.
“What the fuck?” I said out loud. It took a few more minutes before I put the above criticisms into words.
“Yeah,” Garrett laughed, summating, “it doesn’t feel good.”
We spent the most time as Knuckles and, subsequently, experienced two Starfall events, which have a chance to occur randomly each night cycle and allow players to (essentially) farm Koco to upgrade their character’s stats.
The Final Horizon wants to have its cake and eat it, too. Multiple playable characters necessitate a highly varied moveset for each, but to balance it properly, any upgrade materials earned as Sonic do NOT carry over to other characters. Amy, Knuckles, and Tails have their own upgrade materials, their own upgrade trees, their own level progression. HOWEVER, the new Ouranos Island is built in such a way that every character must have a Cyloop ability, and each character must unlock their respective Cyloop ability using their upgrade tree, which requires exploring Ouranos Island and earning enough upgrade points to unlock the Cyloop ability for each character in the first place, so they can explore the island even more and, eventually, complete their main objectives.
It feels unusual, however, to block progression in such a way as to force players to upgrade their characters here. In the base game, Sonic learns new attacks through his skill tree, but none of these are essential to making progress (except for the Cyloop, which is the first ability that Sonic unlocks anyway).
Here, having to use the skill tree to unlock basic abilities for characters like “melee attack” and “parry” that were already regular abilities for Sonic feels arbitrary. It’s not like it takes too long to unlock these abilities anyways, players need only find two or three special Koco to obtain these abilities, but it feels unnecessary.
It’s disappointing. I play with Knuckles for a certain amount of time and learn that he can only climb on certain surfaces, so as to keep the game balance intact. It makes sense, but it doesn’t cushion the blow any. I discovered a challenge that requires Knuckles’ ability to latch onto walls and climb. A cannonball hits me and I fall to my death. I try again. A cannonball hits me. I try to recover and latch onto the wall, but Knuckles doesn’t respond. I fall to my death. I try again.
I remember playing Sonic Adventure 2 Battle on my Nintendo Wii. The year is probably 2007 or 2008. I remember playing through the Hero Story for the first time and finally being able to play as Knuckles. I remember Knuckles’ second level: Pumpkin Hill.
You know me, the fighting freak Knuckles, and we’re at pumpkin hill. You ready?
Nostalgia is a potent drug, strong enough to trick us into believing that even the most unremarkable chapters of our lives are golden, perfect snapshots. Only when we return to these chapters, we find reality is oftentimes much less kind than our memories tend to be.
I’ve replayed almost every mainline Sonic game countless times. I know that I love Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 in spite of their flaws.
I know that I love the sensation of gliding through the air as Knuckles, the pure joy of nose-diving in rapid circles, of sticking to each and every surface, of burrowing underground to find hidden treasure. Rats. I know that I love playing as Knuckles. I know that I was disappointed when I played as Knuckles in Sonic Frontiers because it wasn’t the Knuckles I remembered. It wasn’t the Knuckles I fell in love with.
“You’d think they would’ve figured this out by now,” I said to Garrett, mostly out of frustration after another cheap death, “it’s like… I’m thinking about, like, sewers.”
He didn’t know what I meant by that. I tried to explain it and probably ended up sounding like a doofus – completely unintelligible.
“I’m sure there are people who know how to make sewers, and maintain them,” I waffled around the point I was trying to make, “but, you know, I’m not sure that we know how to make them.”
“What?”
“Like, you don’t think about this? That making sewers isn't common knowledge?”
“What are you talking about?”
“How many people know how to make sewers? How many people will know how to make sewers? Imagine everyone who knows how sewers work – one day, they all die, and nobody wrote it down. Like, imagine it’s all tribal knowledge, or something.”
What I meant is that I’m worried. I have so much anxiety about the future. Sometimes I’m worried that nobody is worrying enough. There are entire lexicons, pillars of society, professions, sectors, that will be lost to time – just slowly fading out, forgotten, and by the time somebody realizes that nobody put the fundamentals down to paper, it’ll already be too late.
Another library of Alexandria is lost, every day, for the rest of time, forever.
Somehow, Sonic Team remains incapable of emulating the movement of either Sonic Adventure. It eludes them even now.
In a series where increasingly chaotic galaxy-ending terrors converge on an anthropomorphic hedgehog who has the ability to go Super Saiyan, with each entry escalating in scope, ambition, and performance – the ease of basic movement remains a foreign concept.
The sewers are overflowing with noxious waste. Vile, repugnant sludge. The streets are drowned in garbage. Your home is sinking into bedrock. It’s always been like this.
I remember Knuckles’ second level: Pumpkin Hill.
I remember gliding between the stony mountaintops, scaling the rocky pumpkin obelisks, evading ghosts, chasing oscillating signals of the shattered Emerald. It’s closer…
I remember the sunset skybox. I remember the JPEG artifacts eating the edges of the stony pumpkin mountain faces like sweet fire. I remember the background music, looping around back to its first verse.
We finally got to play as Tails. There was catharsis, exhalation. Our baby boy could fly again. Another finger of the monkey’s paw curled inward.
Our opinions of the Final Horizon diverged much more around this point. Garrett was content to play these characters again, and I couldn’t hide my disappointment.
We traded the controller often. Sometimes one puzzle or platforming section was too difficult or obtuse and either of us would tap in while the other tapped out. Some platforming challenges were puzzles in and of themselves. Every time we died or found ourselves at an impasse, we’d give each other a look, or laugh out loud.
I love Sonic the Hedgehog.
“This is… uh,” I stammered, “this is… like, the next Sonic ‘06.” I said.
Garrett laughed, “Don’t say that.”
Neither of us hated Sonic ‘06, not like a lot of people do. Then again, it was our childhood. Our biases were impossible to avoid. I couldn’t shake the thought. This was the next Sonic ‘06, I thought to myself. For better or for worse.
When we finally assumed control of Sonic and the game directed us to our first (of five) towers, we hit a wall. Although Rhea Island was notorious for its long, perilous tower ascents, it was at least kind enough to provide checkpoints; as we struggled upwards, only to come crashing down once more, we realized there would be no checkpoints.
Sonic Frontiers had become Getting Over It.
Every time we came hurtling back down to earth, I’d start singing $uicideboy$.
One last pic and I’ll be gone
Make it count
Put the flash on
Never really felt like I belonged
So I’ll be on my way
And It won’t be long
We continued, swapped the controller between each other for each attempt, each time a little closer to heaven… nearly an hour later, we’d finally conquered the summit.
We did this, again, and again, and again, until we finally reached the fifth and final tower.
To be fully transparent, there is a lot to like about the Final Horizon. Beyond the novelty of being able to play as Tails, Knuckles, and Amy in 3D again for the first time in over a decade is an achievement, and praiseworthy on its own. Once I was comfortable with Sonic’s movement again, the towers were actually very engaging and memorable platforming challenges that I felt were deserving of their endgame difficulty. Lastly, the additional Cyberspace stages were also fun, much more challenging and interesting ideas with unique gimmicks for each stage – I only wished these were part of the main quest, and not relegated to completely optional content.
That being said, the experience of the final “trial” is probably the worst Sonic Frontiers has to offer. This penultimate boss rush might be the most cynical idea of difficulty I’ve seen in any Sonic game ever. The perfect parry mechanic retroactively cheapens these encounters by demanding frame-perfect timing, and ruins the spectacle by requiring mechanical mastery to proceed.
I’ve finished every Fromsoft Souls game (except for Sekiro) and there wasn’t a single one with parrying mechanics that were this demanding. For my first two attempts, I grappled with Giganto and attempted only to learn the parry timing; if Sonic loses one ring as Super Sonic each second, and the game only gives you 400 rings total for this encounter, that means a regular attempt will average around six-and-a-half minutes. During the thirteen minutes I attempted to learn Giganto’s parry window, I only managed to successfully parry him twice.
This is straight up not finished. Nobody playtested this. Almost every user I’ve seen discussing this boss rush has mentioned that dropping the difficulty down to Easy “fixes” the perfect parry (and it does) but this is not how difficulty should be designed. If almost every player can unanimously clear 99% of the game on the hardest difficulty, but can only progress at the eleventh hour by dropping the difficulty down to Easy, that’s a huge problem.
The new final boss is also marginally better than the older one, by default. This updated final battle features a beefier Super Sonic with blue eyes(!) and a new second phase for Supreme. It also features the absolute worst camera for any Sonic boss fight I’ve played, a brand new targeting mechanic that isn’t explained anywhere, and a cutscene that outright kills you if you don’t have enough rings.
I love Sonic the Hedgehog.
Rolling the final cutscene on the Final Horizon and watching Sonic launch himself through the image of an Eldritch God should’ve been an easy victory lap, but it wasn’t.
“We’re so fucking back,” for better or for worse.
Garrett and I and our friend Jordan (another longtime Sonic fan) were strapped for time as we watched the credits roll. It was 6:15pm. The concert started at 8. We were ready to leave before the credits had finished. I wore the hoodie I bought at the Sonic Speed popup cafe in San Diego. It was 7pm when we hit serious traffic a mile away from the Dolby Theatre.
Garrett and Jordan took turns adding songs to a growing playlist of Sonic OSTs. I sat in near-gridlock, frozen bumper-to-bumper in an ocean of automobiles. Jordan played E102’s theme from Sonic Adventure.
“This makes me feel an emotion that doesn’t exist,” he said.
My eyes glazed over in silent terror. It was 7:30pm. It was only a concert. I knew it wouldn’t be a big deal if we were late. I wanted death. Old habits made playthings of my emotions, paralyzed me. Old anxieties like nightmare tendrils, looming deadlines overhead – the hands of the clock a guillotine ready to drop. I bit my lip. I still wanted death.
Cars moved inches at a time, each red light another eternity. 7:45pm. We finally hit another artery, the lifeblood of the city flowed freely again, us along with it. I found the parking I reserved ahead of time after circling the area once. It’s 7:55pm.
We reached the Dolby Theatre at 8pm on the dot. The three of us walked inside the wide auditorium together as the final countdown began. We sat down. The lights dimmed. As the orchestra started playing, a wave of relief washed over me. We'd made it.
Watching the show, I had to appreciate the accompanying background montage which appeared on a massive monitor above the orchestra, as it highlighted the many flourishes and creative liberties of the performance. The music synchronized to Sonic as he took incoming damage in Labyrinth Zone, prompting audience laughter; or the dramatic flooding sequence in Chemical Plant Zone; or the first appearance of Metal Sonic in Collision Chaos and his eventual defeat in Stardust Speedway.
It was then I realized that Sonic’s greatest strength, as a series, was its many iconic moments. Not only the dramatic story beats, as in cutscenes, but its many instances of semi-interactive storytelling; as in the flooding sequence in Chemical Plant Zone, or running away from an Orca, or an oversized truck, or traversing an upside down castle.
After the intermission, however, was our main event. Not only what we’d been craving all night, but our entire lives.
I've been in love with this series for well over half my life now. When I was a kid, I always used to listen to Sonic the Hedgehog soundtracks. I thought Zebrahead’s His World was the rawest thing I’d ever listened to when I was thirteen. I listened to Crush 40 religiously, each vocal track another unforgettable experience – a story’s climactic end heralded by Johnny Gioeli’s radical vocals.
As the second act began and the first chords of Shadow the Hedgehog’s (I am) All of Me filled the Dolby Theatre, setting the crowd alight, I remembered why I fell in love with the series again.
I don’t even like Shadow the Hedgehog anymore, man. That game sucked!
However, what I’ve always loved was Shadow’s soundtrack –its dark, industrial sounds and heavy metal ethos seeped into every crack and crevice of its experience. When I was a kid, I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
So imagine the experience of seeing Crush 40 live, playing a song you’ve unconsciously memorized the lyrics to forever ago, backed by a full orchestra, in a room filled with Sonic fans screaming the lyrics alongside you.
I never thought I’d be here.
As a kid, I never thought I’d get to see Crush 40 live, and yet here they were. I’d fulfilled one of my oldest wishes. I was able to see Crush 40 live with my best friend.
Kellin Quinn made an appearance for the encore, and performed Break Through It All and Undefeatable. Better memories of Sonic Frontiers resurfaced.
For the final song, Johnny Gioeli joined Kellin Quinn for Live & Learn. Quinn provided backup vocals. Hearing him scream, “Hold on to what if?” cut deep into my soul.
The performance ended.
“Los Angeles,” Johnny addressed us, “we’ve made a beautiful memory here tonight.”
We made our exit shortly after. Garrett told me his only regret was not being able to attend the 3:30 showing as well. Rarely do we get to experience these moments twice.
I love Sonic the Hedgehog, and yet it was hard to not be disappointed by the Final Horizon.
What should’ve been a resounding triumph was neither an encore nor a reprise, but yet another new direction – an unwelcome challenge, a pale imitation of old glories. I was disappointed. But seeing Crush 40 live reminded me why I loved Sonic in the first place.
I’ll cherish these memories. They won’t always be perfect, but sometimes they are.
I know I’ll return to Sonic Frontiers again one day, but for now, yet another chapter of the blue blur’s legacy comes to a close.
In hindsight, I know that even if Sonic Frontiers ended up being poorly received, it wouldn’t kill Sonic. If Sonic ‘06 couldn’t kill Sonic, nothing can kill Sonic. Regardless of whichever new journey the hedgehog embarks on next, I know I’ll be there day one, eager to see what’s in store. After all, the adventure is never solely the end; the adventure ends up being the memories we take with us.
I don’t like pointing out quote-unquote ‘plot holes.’ It’s a pedantic, lazy way of judging a work and often feels like it’s missing the forest for the trees — not questioning, say, broader issues with the structure or writing or something to instead point and go “but why didn’t they do [thing I, a rational mind, would instead do in this situation]. this is a problem with the work. ding!” What it ignores, in particular, is that literally everything has these inconsistencies or little mistakes if you squint hard enough — and that it’s up to the work as a whole to… work as a whole, in a way that patches these small issues over and makes any inconsistencies not seem as glaring. Some of my favourite books, films, games, etc. usually do have problems… but they’re either minor, or I enjoy the work to such an extent that I don’t feel guilty ignoring whatever those issues might be. To me, it’s always ‘does this thing I’ve noticed actually impact the work, or my enjoyment of it in a meaningful way?’ If it doesn’t, and there aren’t any major issues, then hey, look, nobody’s perfect, and you did a good enough job otherwise, so thumbs up. If there are issues, and they’re a bit more meaningful, then… the work has some problems on its hands.
The Dark Pictures: The Devil In Me is a game I feel has some major issues preventing me from enjoying it. And while I’ve seen comments online, and heard comments made while I was streaming the game that say it’s objectively bad because what the characters did was not what the person commenting would do… I feel comments like those are only surface level, and if I’m really going to try and get into why I felt the game fell flat I think it’s more important to look at the bigger picture, and what these small issues represent on a larger scale.
The game follows the crew of Lonnit Entertainment, a true crime investigative team who specialize in digging up the history of famous old serial killers, as they receive an invitation to a replica of a hotel owned by H.H Holmes, with whom the game seems convinced was “The First American Serial Killer” (the only accurate word in that declaration is “American”). Upon arrival, however, their host disappears on them, and they start to clue in that none of this is quite what it seems. Soon, they find out that the replica hotel (supposedly) possesses just as many deathtraps as the real thing, and that somebody’s hunting them down, one by one. It’s up to the player to explore the hotel, solve puzzles, and make tough decisions, that’ll either mean escape for all five group members, or make sure they don’t make it out of the hotel alive…
Gameplay-wise, I’ll give it credit: it functions well. That might sound rather backhanded, but what I mean by that statement is that regardless of the elements around it, the skeleton of the game itself works. To its core: The Devil in Me is a game where you influence a story in motion and choose what the characters do, with the intent of determining whether they live or die. To this extent, it succeeds fairly well: for its rather small scale, the game does a good job of letting your choices influence the narrative, and the sections where you can potentially get characters killed… mostly feel fair — if you’re observant, and can key into the game’s logic, you can get everybody out okay. If you don’t, you can at least understand what went wrong, and how exactly your choice got that character killed. There are also some really effective individual setpieces, ones where you have to think your way out of a situation, that really work to amp up the stress and make you worry about whether you’re making the correct choice, and these sections… honestly do make it work as a horror game — keeping the stress level up for the rest of the runtime and… never really stopping once it gets started.
Unfortunately, it takes a long while to start. You might think, by my writeup above, that the main plot gets going rather quickly. It doesn't. The first four hours of what’s only a 7-8~ hour game are dedicated to having… basically nothing happen. Instead you’re subjected to endless gameplay segments of exploring the island and the mansion which take up so much time and establish nothing in the meantime. Other games by Supermassive had these sections too, but they were much shorter — and mostly served either to bridge two parts of the story together or represent something, such as you, as the player, trying to dig up info in a specific place. Here they felt so bloated, especially since there seem to be a lot more puzzles gating progress than I feel these games ever had: each character has their own unique talent they can use to interact with things around them (and none of them ever feel like they’re particularly potent or meaningful) there’s a whole system around object physics and using them as a stepping stone to continue your way into the next room you can’t find the exit to because the game is so poorly lit that after nightfall hits it’s almost impossible to see what’s around you. There’s one I particularly liked — one where the feeling like you’re getting lost seems intentional, in a way that diegetically leads you into a later plot point, but as a whole all the puzzles, all the parts where you had to traverse from point A to point B felt like padding. Like, maybe the intention of the first was to start the story slow and build up the characters, but…
…aside from one, maybe two of them I really didn’t feel the cast of five was all that well defined. A good majority of them feel like blank slates of people. While some people get traits or character beats attached to them, they seem rather superficially applied: one character has a whole scene stop to establish that they’re deathly afraid of heights, and then later on when he and another character have to walk across a plank over a sheer drop into the ocean… he just crosses it immediately, without the player’s input, without even so much as a reaction, and it’s the other dude who you have to navigate to the other side. Then, later, when the same guy is up in a lighthouse… suddenly he’s afraid of heights again? Literally the only distinct trait we’re given for him and it’s not even handled consistently. And also… it doesn’t really feel like anybody changes as people during the course of the story, or has some sort of arc. There are token gestures (oh, I’m a hardcore smoker because it helps with my Anxiety that definitely comes up through the game, totally, absolutely, but now that I’ve survived death island….... nah, I think I’m gonna quit…......) but it really feels like, for a game that at points seems as if it’s trying to personalize the death traps to the people going in them, you could have put switched them around and put them in other people’s situations and they all would’ve turned out the exact same. Which would be fine, maybe, if that wasn’t really meant to be a focus… but then at the end of the game, when it recaps who lived and who dies, it specifically states that the survivors lived because they learned and improved as people which, like… no they didn’t. That didn’t happen. Nothing about what you said impacted whether they lived or died or not. Don’t try to pretend you did more with the characters than you actually did.
And, like, going back to my preamble for a second, there are complaints I’ve read and heard about the game’s stories which maybe address the surface level of a problem, but also I feel like these things speak to deeper flaws in the overall construction. Yes, the killer teleporting everywhere and being able to keep up with the main characters is kind of mind-boggling and tiring (like, maybe it’s a reference to how Jason does this in some of the later F13 movies? but also why would you do a throwback to one of the most decried elements of those movies?) but it also speaks to how poorly defined the island is — where is anything on this island in relation to each other? How can the killer go back to chasing one group of characters, then head over to a different building that seems to be nowhere near where he was before and menace a different group of characters there, then just as easily go back to chasing the original group again? What’s the point in that whole segment where we put in the work to get away from him when he can instantly just catch up again? In addition… look, “the plot requires people to act stupid!” is more universal of a critique than the people who use it seem to realize: if whoever writes it can sell it well, then I’m totally willing to buy that maybe a character can be a dumbass and get himself into trouble. It’s much harder of a sell when I, as the player, am being forced to do… things that seem kinda blatantly suicidal in the name of progressing the plot forward. There’s a part of the game where you’re exploring a basement where I came into a room, explored, and found no way forward other than some locked doors a conveyor belt which the game made quite an effort to establish would be insanely dangerous for a human to enter. So I went “okay, so I won’t” and then looked up a walkthrough to see how to get through the locked door… only to find out that the only way out was to go on the conveyor belt. If the game maybe had a cutscene where, say, the character jumps on it because the killer was threatening them at that very moment and the conveyor belt was the only way out, I’d buy it (IIRC there’s a similar thing in Until Dawn during a chase scene) but when I, as the person trying to explore and escape the room, are repeatedly denied other options beside something I wouldn’t want to do… it gets grating. Real quick.
And honestly… the game as a whole felt fairly grating, given how much stuff there was obviously padding and how some of the stuff that isn’t is in service to… ‘develop’ characters who never really felt all that defined in the first place. There’s neat stuff — cool setpieces, and it does mostly work well as far as choice and consequence are concerned, but… I didn’t have a particularly fun time with this game. And when you look past the surface level stuff you see people point out and try and look at the bigger (dark) picture, these issues are painted by deeper problems overall, and given how these rot the frame in which this story is built on… I think this one needed to go back to the drawing board. 4/10.
The Dark Pictures: The Devil In Me is a game I feel has some major issues preventing me from enjoying it. And while I’ve seen comments online, and heard comments made while I was streaming the game that say it’s objectively bad because what the characters did was not what the person commenting would do… I feel comments like those are only surface level, and if I’m really going to try and get into why I felt the game fell flat I think it’s more important to look at the bigger picture, and what these small issues represent on a larger scale.
The game follows the crew of Lonnit Entertainment, a true crime investigative team who specialize in digging up the history of famous old serial killers, as they receive an invitation to a replica of a hotel owned by H.H Holmes, with whom the game seems convinced was “The First American Serial Killer” (the only accurate word in that declaration is “American”). Upon arrival, however, their host disappears on them, and they start to clue in that none of this is quite what it seems. Soon, they find out that the replica hotel (supposedly) possesses just as many deathtraps as the real thing, and that somebody’s hunting them down, one by one. It’s up to the player to explore the hotel, solve puzzles, and make tough decisions, that’ll either mean escape for all five group members, or make sure they don’t make it out of the hotel alive…
Gameplay-wise, I’ll give it credit: it functions well. That might sound rather backhanded, but what I mean by that statement is that regardless of the elements around it, the skeleton of the game itself works. To its core: The Devil in Me is a game where you influence a story in motion and choose what the characters do, with the intent of determining whether they live or die. To this extent, it succeeds fairly well: for its rather small scale, the game does a good job of letting your choices influence the narrative, and the sections where you can potentially get characters killed… mostly feel fair — if you’re observant, and can key into the game’s logic, you can get everybody out okay. If you don’t, you can at least understand what went wrong, and how exactly your choice got that character killed. There are also some really effective individual setpieces, ones where you have to think your way out of a situation, that really work to amp up the stress and make you worry about whether you’re making the correct choice, and these sections… honestly do make it work as a horror game — keeping the stress level up for the rest of the runtime and… never really stopping once it gets started.
Unfortunately, it takes a long while to start. You might think, by my writeup above, that the main plot gets going rather quickly. It doesn't. The first four hours of what’s only a 7-8~ hour game are dedicated to having… basically nothing happen. Instead you’re subjected to endless gameplay segments of exploring the island and the mansion which take up so much time and establish nothing in the meantime. Other games by Supermassive had these sections too, but they were much shorter — and mostly served either to bridge two parts of the story together or represent something, such as you, as the player, trying to dig up info in a specific place. Here they felt so bloated, especially since there seem to be a lot more puzzles gating progress than I feel these games ever had: each character has their own unique talent they can use to interact with things around them (and none of them ever feel like they’re particularly potent or meaningful) there’s a whole system around object physics and using them as a stepping stone to continue your way into the next room you can’t find the exit to because the game is so poorly lit that after nightfall hits it’s almost impossible to see what’s around you. There’s one I particularly liked — one where the feeling like you’re getting lost seems intentional, in a way that diegetically leads you into a later plot point, but as a whole all the puzzles, all the parts where you had to traverse from point A to point B felt like padding. Like, maybe the intention of the first was to start the story slow and build up the characters, but…
…aside from one, maybe two of them I really didn’t feel the cast of five was all that well defined. A good majority of them feel like blank slates of people. While some people get traits or character beats attached to them, they seem rather superficially applied: one character has a whole scene stop to establish that they’re deathly afraid of heights, and then later on when he and another character have to walk across a plank over a sheer drop into the ocean… he just crosses it immediately, without the player’s input, without even so much as a reaction, and it’s the other dude who you have to navigate to the other side. Then, later, when the same guy is up in a lighthouse… suddenly he’s afraid of heights again? Literally the only distinct trait we’re given for him and it’s not even handled consistently. And also… it doesn’t really feel like anybody changes as people during the course of the story, or has some sort of arc. There are token gestures (oh, I’m a hardcore smoker because it helps with my Anxiety that definitely comes up through the game, totally, absolutely, but now that I’ve survived death island….... nah, I think I’m gonna quit…......) but it really feels like, for a game that at points seems as if it’s trying to personalize the death traps to the people going in them, you could have put switched them around and put them in other people’s situations and they all would’ve turned out the exact same. Which would be fine, maybe, if that wasn’t really meant to be a focus… but then at the end of the game, when it recaps who lived and who dies, it specifically states that the survivors lived because they learned and improved as people which, like… no they didn’t. That didn’t happen. Nothing about what you said impacted whether they lived or died or not. Don’t try to pretend you did more with the characters than you actually did.
And, like, going back to my preamble for a second, there are complaints I’ve read and heard about the game’s stories which maybe address the surface level of a problem, but also I feel like these things speak to deeper flaws in the overall construction. Yes, the killer teleporting everywhere and being able to keep up with the main characters is kind of mind-boggling and tiring (like, maybe it’s a reference to how Jason does this in some of the later F13 movies? but also why would you do a throwback to one of the most decried elements of those movies?) but it also speaks to how poorly defined the island is — where is anything on this island in relation to each other? How can the killer go back to chasing one group of characters, then head over to a different building that seems to be nowhere near where he was before and menace a different group of characters there, then just as easily go back to chasing the original group again? What’s the point in that whole segment where we put in the work to get away from him when he can instantly just catch up again? In addition… look, “the plot requires people to act stupid!” is more universal of a critique than the people who use it seem to realize: if whoever writes it can sell it well, then I’m totally willing to buy that maybe a character can be a dumbass and get himself into trouble. It’s much harder of a sell when I, as the player, am being forced to do… things that seem kinda blatantly suicidal in the name of progressing the plot forward. There’s a part of the game where you’re exploring a basement where I came into a room, explored, and found no way forward other than some locked doors a conveyor belt which the game made quite an effort to establish would be insanely dangerous for a human to enter. So I went “okay, so I won’t” and then looked up a walkthrough to see how to get through the locked door… only to find out that the only way out was to go on the conveyor belt. If the game maybe had a cutscene where, say, the character jumps on it because the killer was threatening them at that very moment and the conveyor belt was the only way out, I’d buy it (IIRC there’s a similar thing in Until Dawn during a chase scene) but when I, as the person trying to explore and escape the room, are repeatedly denied other options beside something I wouldn’t want to do… it gets grating. Real quick.
And honestly… the game as a whole felt fairly grating, given how much stuff there was obviously padding and how some of the stuff that isn’t is in service to… ‘develop’ characters who never really felt all that defined in the first place. There’s neat stuff — cool setpieces, and it does mostly work well as far as choice and consequence are concerned, but… I didn’t have a particularly fun time with this game. And when you look past the surface level stuff you see people point out and try and look at the bigger (dark) picture, these issues are painted by deeper problems overall, and given how these rot the frame in which this story is built on… I think this one needed to go back to the drawing board. 4/10.
Stray
2022
From the outside looking in, art school seems like a weird experience. My partner dedicated several years to developing their degree and I’d get to hear first-hand details of just the bizarre petty problems it would entail. High school level cattiness, teachers who would see students as competition instead of talented individuals, cliques between different departments, so on and so forth. But out of all of it, there was one observation from my partner that really stuck with me.
“A lot of great artists don’t know how to write and a lot of great writers don’t know how to use art.”
Stray’s art direction might have, genuinely, one of the highest bars to clear I’ve ever seen. This is the new peak for me. Every single aspect of this game is firing on all cylinders. The world is vibrantly sharp in its beauty and structure. Each street corner, every nook, every room, every chair, everything feels personal and designed for that specific space. It's a game about the subtle beauty of an urban environment, about lived-in spaces and how people build their homes around themselves. You can easily beat this game in under two hours if you’re racing through, but that would be a disservice to the utter care and craft that went into building this world. Most playtimes last five hours and mine lasted longer just for soaking in all the visuals. I’ve never been someone who stopped to take pictures of impressive game visuals, but took numerous opportunities to take screenshots while playing this game. Every AAA game after this is gonna have to do a LOT of legwork to make me half as impressed with its visuals as I am with this one cat game.
The famous cat itself is of course the star of the show. The animation work done to nail the gamefeel of this cat is beyond compare. The Stray feels exactly as it should, fluid and seamless. The gameplay is perfectly designed around being a cat. I found myself genuinely surprised at a few points in the game because my expectations as a long-time gaming person clashed with the rules of being a cat. A single fence in your way? Games have trained me to think of that as an impenetrable barrier. I return to a quest giver to find the police blockade set-up? I’m not supposed to go in there anymore, the cops will see me. But that’s silly. A cat just finds a hole or climbs up a fence. The police won’t notice a cat passing them by. The real obstacles now are just doors or shelves that are a little too high off the ground. I had to retrain my brain over what was and wasn’t possible to accomplish in the gameworld.
People have sort of turned on accounts like Can I Pet the Dog for being a little too twee, and I do understand why. But I think people misinterpret the purpose of accounts like that. While there’s certainly a marketable wholesomeness to wanting to pet a digital line of code in a video game, the real core of Can I Pet the Dog is about encouraging more methods of interaction. Allowing players to personally interact in the game world in ways that make that world seem more real. It's the Who Framed Roger Rabbit animators making their job harder by making Roger bump into real world items constantly. It's Shovel Knight adding a useless crouch button that can’t dodge anything, just for the sake of giving players that option. The useless button or the useless interaction is one of the most subtle but beautiful ways to add a special polish to your game.
Stray is a master of this thesis. The game provides hundreds and hundreds of ways for the player to interact like this. Nuzzling random robots. Little cat nap locations that just pan over to the gorgeous cityscape. Knocking over boxes and paint cans. Places to claw at carpets. The dedicated meow button. The way the Stray lies on the ground or walks around in annoyance when someone puts an outfit on it. Standing in the middle of the road can lead to a robot completely tripping over you and collapsing into the pavement. All these details and nuances add so much life and personality to the world. Stuff like Catlateral Damage falls apart because it features one stiff movement as the main centerpiece of the entire game. It only offers one level of interaction across three hours of gametime. Stray offers so much variability in ways that speaks to something about the world and its protagonist.
It's in the writing itself that the game sort of wobbles. Don’t get me wrong, putting a cat in a cyberpunk landscape is truly ingenious. If it was just a cat game wandering through city streets, I think it’d be too lacking in personality to really shine. If it was just a game about a robot society living underground, I think it’d vanish into the forgotten sea of other simply alright sci-fi games. Combining them together allows unique gameplay elements and makes these ideas feel fresh.
But the reason it needs to be combined together is that the robot society element would likely be very dull when left on its own. The set-up of the robot culture is initially interesting. The robots have built their own language, their own history, their own religion. They’re certainly aware of humans, but only in a mythical sense. They’ve mimicked their creators to an extent, before passing down that mimicry through the ages and getting naturally distorted through the times.
Yet it's hard not to feel a little disappointed after a while that mimicry is sort of all that society is. The robots have just recreated the same social structure, same concepts of gender, the same jobs and hierarchies. Old robots complain about “kids today and their music,” while I’m trying to understand how kid robots even exist. When you have tiny robots repeating phrases like “That’s what I want to be when I grow up!” without detailing how growth and age works for robots, it's hard not to get a little confused. Robots get drunk like humans, have developed digestive systems within their systems… I’m not trying to Cinema Sins whine about something being illogical. I was just hoping that a game this creative could demonstrate a culture more distinct than just being Metal Humans.
The character work itself also runs into this problem. There’s occasional aspects of sincere depth. The cat’s companion can visit different locations and the game and speak emotionally about their surroundings. Reminisce about forgotten drinks and lonely nights and how those moments stayed with them hundreds of years later. But several character arcs can pass by so quickly it's a little jarring. Grumpy drinker Seamus acts as a disgruntled, bitter character for his early appearances. Yet it only takes giving him one journal from his father to make him completely 180 into someone with hope and optimism. It was a sweet storyline, but given the subsequent fetch quest you get sent on, it would also be easy to give Seamus some more time. Have your companion say “we should fix Seamus’ thing while he copes with this extremely personal item we gave him” and then have him express his change in demeanor after he’s had some off-screen time to process. Breathing room, you know? Another character decides to swerve to betrayal in the late game. But that character has had so little presence so far, I barely recognized who he was. He just didn’t stick out.
Even beyond that, the way the robots react to the Stray is hard to quite pin down. They all view the cat as an intelligent being and assume it’s just a particularly tiny, fuzzy robot. They try to have intelligent conversations with it, with your companion B-12 translating for the audience’s benefit. But they also don’t mind what they think is a robot stranger nuzzling up to them or lying on their chest. It's cute and I love those moments! But it gives you pause sometimes.
It's particularly weird with the character of B-12. B-12 knows what a cat is and shares a lot of emotional dialogue with the Stray. But I kind of wish B-12 talked to the Stray like a cat owner. Call the cat your stinky baby. Giving speeches about friendship and things like “I can’t believe you came to rescue me!” just feels… I’m not sure what I’m asking for. The game wants to convey its story but I think it created a weird necessary suspension of disbelief where the cat has to be both a cat and an intelligent silent protagonist that takes in character monologues. Its just a weird needle to thread and I think it makes the character work harder to pull off.
I think maybe the game could have experimented with no dialogue at all. Some of the game’s best segments are when there’s no translator and the story needs to be conveyed through visuals alone. And the visuals are so striking that the team is absolutely capable of doing so. Player goals are perfectly directed through excellent lighting choices and level design. Visuals alone can carry this game. Drop the players fully into the life of a cat. No words, no dialogue, just pure cat living.
Its hard to be disappointed with this one though. I might take another run at this game to get the last few achievements, just because I adored the world so much. Its a real marvel and easily high in the running for GOTY 2022.
“A lot of great artists don’t know how to write and a lot of great writers don’t know how to use art.”
Stray’s art direction might have, genuinely, one of the highest bars to clear I’ve ever seen. This is the new peak for me. Every single aspect of this game is firing on all cylinders. The world is vibrantly sharp in its beauty and structure. Each street corner, every nook, every room, every chair, everything feels personal and designed for that specific space. It's a game about the subtle beauty of an urban environment, about lived-in spaces and how people build their homes around themselves. You can easily beat this game in under two hours if you’re racing through, but that would be a disservice to the utter care and craft that went into building this world. Most playtimes last five hours and mine lasted longer just for soaking in all the visuals. I’ve never been someone who stopped to take pictures of impressive game visuals, but took numerous opportunities to take screenshots while playing this game. Every AAA game after this is gonna have to do a LOT of legwork to make me half as impressed with its visuals as I am with this one cat game.
The famous cat itself is of course the star of the show. The animation work done to nail the gamefeel of this cat is beyond compare. The Stray feels exactly as it should, fluid and seamless. The gameplay is perfectly designed around being a cat. I found myself genuinely surprised at a few points in the game because my expectations as a long-time gaming person clashed with the rules of being a cat. A single fence in your way? Games have trained me to think of that as an impenetrable barrier. I return to a quest giver to find the police blockade set-up? I’m not supposed to go in there anymore, the cops will see me. But that’s silly. A cat just finds a hole or climbs up a fence. The police won’t notice a cat passing them by. The real obstacles now are just doors or shelves that are a little too high off the ground. I had to retrain my brain over what was and wasn’t possible to accomplish in the gameworld.
People have sort of turned on accounts like Can I Pet the Dog for being a little too twee, and I do understand why. But I think people misinterpret the purpose of accounts like that. While there’s certainly a marketable wholesomeness to wanting to pet a digital line of code in a video game, the real core of Can I Pet the Dog is about encouraging more methods of interaction. Allowing players to personally interact in the game world in ways that make that world seem more real. It's the Who Framed Roger Rabbit animators making their job harder by making Roger bump into real world items constantly. It's Shovel Knight adding a useless crouch button that can’t dodge anything, just for the sake of giving players that option. The useless button or the useless interaction is one of the most subtle but beautiful ways to add a special polish to your game.
Stray is a master of this thesis. The game provides hundreds and hundreds of ways for the player to interact like this. Nuzzling random robots. Little cat nap locations that just pan over to the gorgeous cityscape. Knocking over boxes and paint cans. Places to claw at carpets. The dedicated meow button. The way the Stray lies on the ground or walks around in annoyance when someone puts an outfit on it. Standing in the middle of the road can lead to a robot completely tripping over you and collapsing into the pavement. All these details and nuances add so much life and personality to the world. Stuff like Catlateral Damage falls apart because it features one stiff movement as the main centerpiece of the entire game. It only offers one level of interaction across three hours of gametime. Stray offers so much variability in ways that speaks to something about the world and its protagonist.
It's in the writing itself that the game sort of wobbles. Don’t get me wrong, putting a cat in a cyberpunk landscape is truly ingenious. If it was just a cat game wandering through city streets, I think it’d be too lacking in personality to really shine. If it was just a game about a robot society living underground, I think it’d vanish into the forgotten sea of other simply alright sci-fi games. Combining them together allows unique gameplay elements and makes these ideas feel fresh.
But the reason it needs to be combined together is that the robot society element would likely be very dull when left on its own. The set-up of the robot culture is initially interesting. The robots have built their own language, their own history, their own religion. They’re certainly aware of humans, but only in a mythical sense. They’ve mimicked their creators to an extent, before passing down that mimicry through the ages and getting naturally distorted through the times.
Yet it's hard not to feel a little disappointed after a while that mimicry is sort of all that society is. The robots have just recreated the same social structure, same concepts of gender, the same jobs and hierarchies. Old robots complain about “kids today and their music,” while I’m trying to understand how kid robots even exist. When you have tiny robots repeating phrases like “That’s what I want to be when I grow up!” without detailing how growth and age works for robots, it's hard not to get a little confused. Robots get drunk like humans, have developed digestive systems within their systems… I’m not trying to Cinema Sins whine about something being illogical. I was just hoping that a game this creative could demonstrate a culture more distinct than just being Metal Humans.
The character work itself also runs into this problem. There’s occasional aspects of sincere depth. The cat’s companion can visit different locations and the game and speak emotionally about their surroundings. Reminisce about forgotten drinks and lonely nights and how those moments stayed with them hundreds of years later. But several character arcs can pass by so quickly it's a little jarring. Grumpy drinker Seamus acts as a disgruntled, bitter character for his early appearances. Yet it only takes giving him one journal from his father to make him completely 180 into someone with hope and optimism. It was a sweet storyline, but given the subsequent fetch quest you get sent on, it would also be easy to give Seamus some more time. Have your companion say “we should fix Seamus’ thing while he copes with this extremely personal item we gave him” and then have him express his change in demeanor after he’s had some off-screen time to process. Breathing room, you know? Another character decides to swerve to betrayal in the late game. But that character has had so little presence so far, I barely recognized who he was. He just didn’t stick out.
Even beyond that, the way the robots react to the Stray is hard to quite pin down. They all view the cat as an intelligent being and assume it’s just a particularly tiny, fuzzy robot. They try to have intelligent conversations with it, with your companion B-12 translating for the audience’s benefit. But they also don’t mind what they think is a robot stranger nuzzling up to them or lying on their chest. It's cute and I love those moments! But it gives you pause sometimes.
It's particularly weird with the character of B-12. B-12 knows what a cat is and shares a lot of emotional dialogue with the Stray. But I kind of wish B-12 talked to the Stray like a cat owner. Call the cat your stinky baby. Giving speeches about friendship and things like “I can’t believe you came to rescue me!” just feels… I’m not sure what I’m asking for. The game wants to convey its story but I think it created a weird necessary suspension of disbelief where the cat has to be both a cat and an intelligent silent protagonist that takes in character monologues. Its just a weird needle to thread and I think it makes the character work harder to pull off.
I think maybe the game could have experimented with no dialogue at all. Some of the game’s best segments are when there’s no translator and the story needs to be conveyed through visuals alone. And the visuals are so striking that the team is absolutely capable of doing so. Player goals are perfectly directed through excellent lighting choices and level design. Visuals alone can carry this game. Drop the players fully into the life of a cat. No words, no dialogue, just pure cat living.
Its hard to be disappointed with this one though. I might take another run at this game to get the last few achievements, just because I adored the world so much. Its a real marvel and easily high in the running for GOTY 2022.
To say that I am a Castlevania fan would be a clamorous understatement worthy of a loud, Count Von Count-esque vampire guffaw. I love Castlevania dearly, and I have for many years now. As I reflect upon my anecdotes of playing through this series, I reminisce fondly of my time whipping candlesticks and eating questionable meat from brick walls. The memory of playing Castlevania Curse of Darkness, Rondo of Blood, the original NES game, and Symphony of the Night twice in the span of one lazy weekend is something I will never forget. Needless to say, I may not share the bloodline but I feel I have earned status as an official Belmont myself. I have not played every Castlevania title (yet) but I have many, many hours under my belt that made me very excited to hear about the upcoming Bloodstained Ritual of the Night way back in 2019. At that point in time, I bought and played the game, filling my map to 100% completion as always, and put it down. I loved the game, but for a harrowing handful of years now I have not returned to it. If you have been keeping up with my previous reviews, you may know I am and have been battling some long standing health issues, and in this time I have been unable to sleep properly. Instead of laying in bed wide awake, I have resorted to playing a little bit of a video game every night to at the very least stimulate my mind. The past few nights of this, I decided to revisit this game- and I sure did just that!
In the wide pantheon of Koji Igarashi’s 2D Igavania Castlevania titles, I have played and enjoyed all of them to varying extents. Castlevania Symphony of the Night- if you check my Backloggd home page, you would see this game comfortably and highly sits in my all time favorites list. I have made it to the credits of that video game nearly 5 dozen times, and on platforms ranging from my original Playstation 1 disc to bizarre illegal online rom website during a day of my High School Microsoft certification class on a public school budget, dusty, 4:3 screen, school computer. Castlevania Aria of Sorrow is not far behind, and also has earned a congenial quantity of full, 100% map completion replays. The rest of his titles have generally been positive, though are more mixed in my mind. Dawn of Sorrow is a picture child for middle of the road, “solid time” video games. Portrait of Ruin I remember being quite good, though I have not longed to replay it nearly as vehemently as the Symphony or Aria. Order of Ecclesia is a game I feel I respect for its undeniable qualities more than I actually enjoy it myself. I like all these games, some of them even quite a bit. I do, however, not like the dizzying dual castle and ear-bleeding musical beeps of Harmony of Dissonance. And while only igavania in style rather than director, Circle of the Moon is a game I would fight in a boxing ring if it was a human and I was given the opportunity. This style of Castlevania experience is something I either unapologetically love, like, or unapologetically hate- three very extreme standpoints admittedly. This was my biggest concern for Bloodstained ROTN, as there was a lot of pressure to live up to my nuance-lacking scale- a breaking point between an all time classic, a thumbs up and mental moving-on, or many years of hyperbolized insults spewed at it any time I get the chance to discuss video games with my friends.
Luckily for myself and my (parasocial) buddy Iga, I loved Bloodstained ROTN! I loved it a lot. In 2019 I vividly remember thinking back on my choice for 2019’s game of the year, and while I am a shilling indentured servant to the Resident Evil 2 Remake, I mentally awarded Bloodstained ROTN a solid second place- (sorry Fire Emblem Three Houses!). Upon revisiting the game again, this time in 2023 as a slightly older and iller individual, I still loved it- and I loved it hard.
Describing my feelings or personal appeal of this specific type of experience is difficult, as my paragraphs can ultimately be condensed down to “game is fun”, but I will try to describe anyways. To put it bluntly, Castlevania deliberately gives you brief jaunts of narcissism. Gaining an ability in game is satisfying and provides a very visceral feeling of growth and power, however the true magic comes from you combing your limbic system for tiny little cracks on the walls, doors you couldn’t open, or peculiar obstacles that now you can now scurry to and bypass once and for all. This feeling never gets old. It will never get old. Nor will the feeling of getting shredded into paste by a boss, only to learn its patterns and optimize yourself to finally watch the twinkling “level up” appear as your sword (or other weapon or ability) cleaves its last clove. You feel smart. You feel powerful. And you get rewarded for it.
It does not matter if a room is full of new items to play with, or has nothing at all. Every single room in this style of game is enthralling to explore, perhaps particularly because of that gamble. If you are anything like me, you will explore every single room as to ensure you don’t flare your FOMO, and that process of charting your map slowly but surely to 100%- or 200.6, in some cases- is just as enthralling as the sword slashing. The cherry on top of this vampiric sundae is the way in which this experience is presented. The gothic architecture weaving together creative level themes to be memorable in an aesthetic and gameplay sense, compendium of creatures to slay and loot, the incredible artwork, and standing-ovation worthy music. All of it comes together to be an unflinchingly fun experience.
Now, I just spent the last paragraphs detailing why I enjoy Koji Igarashi’s Castlevania titles on a very fundamental and structural level. You may be wondering why I am talking so much about Castlevania in this review of a game that is, notably, not Castlevania. Well, dear reader, the thing about Bloodstained ROTN is that the only barrier that separates Bloodstained from a Konami-sent lawsuit is the title of the game, name of the characters, and some enemy and/or location designs. Some might see this as a fault, but as someone who loves and yearned for more of this gameplay experience specific to director and series, this “spiritual successor” being more akin to a “long lost brother/sister” is welcome with arms open.
Bloodstained ROTN does not do much at all to evolve this formula of game. Miriam swings her sword identically to Alucard. You collect enemy shards that function just like Soma Cruz’s soul system. You talk to merchants and can buy potions to heal with in the menu. The map is a checkerboard of blue squares dotted with red save rooms. You get the true ending and final areas of the game by a bizarre and specific set of tasks. That is not even accounting for the laundry list of references to the classic series (my favorite of which are the optional boss against someone remarkably Simon Belmont adjacent, and the names of those you avenge on the monster killing sidequests). This game is Castlevania, there is no denying it- and I love it. Sure, there are evolutions and new ideas here and there. The new guns and general weapon/playstyle variety is wonderful, the previously mentioned enemy shards provide incredible customization unlike anything ever before. Being a 2.5D experience may look a little choppy in cutscenes on occasion, but generally gives an aesthetic and malleability unlike anything the sprite-based titles could offer. There is a lot new here, and it is wonderful stuff, but I applaud this game so much for being so unflinchingly itself. Aside from its visuals and a handful of its mechanics, it feels like a long lost PS1 or 2 sequel to Symphony brought to life in the modern era. Typically describing a game as lacking evolution or change would have a negative connotation, but I see the opposite here. This is a game that emanates and oozes as much passion as it does clear direction. It feels like a game Iga was dying to make, and now got the chance to make exactly that. I can’t help but appreciate someone who is making a passion project and putting their all into it- especially when the efforts provide a legitimately captivating experience for me, the player.
I love Bloodstained. In my recent replay I took upon the task to get the platinum trophy on my PlayStation, and even with the herculeic grind for item completion- I had a wonderful time. I could not stop. The trophy for reaching level 50 was easily overthrown by my nearly level 70 save file by the end. I even paid 4.99 USD for the Iga’s backpack DLC, which ultimately was just a little tip to the developers for the lovely game- but the added fight against Iga himself was fun even if I tore his fancy cowboy hat clean off with my overpowered stats and swords. I have yet to delve into them myself but the amount of added extra content is incredibly commendable, and the fact that they still are adding new stuff to this bursting chest of treasure is wonderful, too.
If you like Castlevania and do not play Bloodstained, you are a silly person who makes silly decisions. I would equate avoiding this title to a clamoring Metroid fan skipping Metroid Dread when it released (which, side note, is another wonderful game). If you have not played Castlevania, it is still worth playing- though I spring the consideration of dipping your toes into Dracula’s domain too with Castlevania as a whole first. If you don’t like Castlevania, this will not change your perspective. Bloodstained is a wonderful video game. Bloodstained is everything I wanted. Bloodstained, even several years later holds up. Play this game. Check out the Curse of the Moon spinoffs too. Support this team and this series because it deserves your attention and investment. Plus, I want a Ritual of the Night 2. I will be revisiting this game for years to come, just as I have been doing with its predecessors. It may be a horrible night to have a curse, but it is never a horrible night for Bloodstained
In the wide pantheon of Koji Igarashi’s 2D Igavania Castlevania titles, I have played and enjoyed all of them to varying extents. Castlevania Symphony of the Night- if you check my Backloggd home page, you would see this game comfortably and highly sits in my all time favorites list. I have made it to the credits of that video game nearly 5 dozen times, and on platforms ranging from my original Playstation 1 disc to bizarre illegal online rom website during a day of my High School Microsoft certification class on a public school budget, dusty, 4:3 screen, school computer. Castlevania Aria of Sorrow is not far behind, and also has earned a congenial quantity of full, 100% map completion replays. The rest of his titles have generally been positive, though are more mixed in my mind. Dawn of Sorrow is a picture child for middle of the road, “solid time” video games. Portrait of Ruin I remember being quite good, though I have not longed to replay it nearly as vehemently as the Symphony or Aria. Order of Ecclesia is a game I feel I respect for its undeniable qualities more than I actually enjoy it myself. I like all these games, some of them even quite a bit. I do, however, not like the dizzying dual castle and ear-bleeding musical beeps of Harmony of Dissonance. And while only igavania in style rather than director, Circle of the Moon is a game I would fight in a boxing ring if it was a human and I was given the opportunity. This style of Castlevania experience is something I either unapologetically love, like, or unapologetically hate- three very extreme standpoints admittedly. This was my biggest concern for Bloodstained ROTN, as there was a lot of pressure to live up to my nuance-lacking scale- a breaking point between an all time classic, a thumbs up and mental moving-on, or many years of hyperbolized insults spewed at it any time I get the chance to discuss video games with my friends.
Luckily for myself and my (parasocial) buddy Iga, I loved Bloodstained ROTN! I loved it a lot. In 2019 I vividly remember thinking back on my choice for 2019’s game of the year, and while I am a shilling indentured servant to the Resident Evil 2 Remake, I mentally awarded Bloodstained ROTN a solid second place- (sorry Fire Emblem Three Houses!). Upon revisiting the game again, this time in 2023 as a slightly older and iller individual, I still loved it- and I loved it hard.
Describing my feelings or personal appeal of this specific type of experience is difficult, as my paragraphs can ultimately be condensed down to “game is fun”, but I will try to describe anyways. To put it bluntly, Castlevania deliberately gives you brief jaunts of narcissism. Gaining an ability in game is satisfying and provides a very visceral feeling of growth and power, however the true magic comes from you combing your limbic system for tiny little cracks on the walls, doors you couldn’t open, or peculiar obstacles that now you can now scurry to and bypass once and for all. This feeling never gets old. It will never get old. Nor will the feeling of getting shredded into paste by a boss, only to learn its patterns and optimize yourself to finally watch the twinkling “level up” appear as your sword (or other weapon or ability) cleaves its last clove. You feel smart. You feel powerful. And you get rewarded for it.
It does not matter if a room is full of new items to play with, or has nothing at all. Every single room in this style of game is enthralling to explore, perhaps particularly because of that gamble. If you are anything like me, you will explore every single room as to ensure you don’t flare your FOMO, and that process of charting your map slowly but surely to 100%- or 200.6, in some cases- is just as enthralling as the sword slashing. The cherry on top of this vampiric sundae is the way in which this experience is presented. The gothic architecture weaving together creative level themes to be memorable in an aesthetic and gameplay sense, compendium of creatures to slay and loot, the incredible artwork, and standing-ovation worthy music. All of it comes together to be an unflinchingly fun experience.
Now, I just spent the last paragraphs detailing why I enjoy Koji Igarashi’s Castlevania titles on a very fundamental and structural level. You may be wondering why I am talking so much about Castlevania in this review of a game that is, notably, not Castlevania. Well, dear reader, the thing about Bloodstained ROTN is that the only barrier that separates Bloodstained from a Konami-sent lawsuit is the title of the game, name of the characters, and some enemy and/or location designs. Some might see this as a fault, but as someone who loves and yearned for more of this gameplay experience specific to director and series, this “spiritual successor” being more akin to a “long lost brother/sister” is welcome with arms open.
Bloodstained ROTN does not do much at all to evolve this formula of game. Miriam swings her sword identically to Alucard. You collect enemy shards that function just like Soma Cruz’s soul system. You talk to merchants and can buy potions to heal with in the menu. The map is a checkerboard of blue squares dotted with red save rooms. You get the true ending and final areas of the game by a bizarre and specific set of tasks. That is not even accounting for the laundry list of references to the classic series (my favorite of which are the optional boss against someone remarkably Simon Belmont adjacent, and the names of those you avenge on the monster killing sidequests). This game is Castlevania, there is no denying it- and I love it. Sure, there are evolutions and new ideas here and there. The new guns and general weapon/playstyle variety is wonderful, the previously mentioned enemy shards provide incredible customization unlike anything ever before. Being a 2.5D experience may look a little choppy in cutscenes on occasion, but generally gives an aesthetic and malleability unlike anything the sprite-based titles could offer. There is a lot new here, and it is wonderful stuff, but I applaud this game so much for being so unflinchingly itself. Aside from its visuals and a handful of its mechanics, it feels like a long lost PS1 or 2 sequel to Symphony brought to life in the modern era. Typically describing a game as lacking evolution or change would have a negative connotation, but I see the opposite here. This is a game that emanates and oozes as much passion as it does clear direction. It feels like a game Iga was dying to make, and now got the chance to make exactly that. I can’t help but appreciate someone who is making a passion project and putting their all into it- especially when the efforts provide a legitimately captivating experience for me, the player.
I love Bloodstained. In my recent replay I took upon the task to get the platinum trophy on my PlayStation, and even with the herculeic grind for item completion- I had a wonderful time. I could not stop. The trophy for reaching level 50 was easily overthrown by my nearly level 70 save file by the end. I even paid 4.99 USD for the Iga’s backpack DLC, which ultimately was just a little tip to the developers for the lovely game- but the added fight against Iga himself was fun even if I tore his fancy cowboy hat clean off with my overpowered stats and swords. I have yet to delve into them myself but the amount of added extra content is incredibly commendable, and the fact that they still are adding new stuff to this bursting chest of treasure is wonderful, too.
If you like Castlevania and do not play Bloodstained, you are a silly person who makes silly decisions. I would equate avoiding this title to a clamoring Metroid fan skipping Metroid Dread when it released (which, side note, is another wonderful game). If you have not played Castlevania, it is still worth playing- though I spring the consideration of dipping your toes into Dracula’s domain too with Castlevania as a whole first. If you don’t like Castlevania, this will not change your perspective. Bloodstained is a wonderful video game. Bloodstained is everything I wanted. Bloodstained, even several years later holds up. Play this game. Check out the Curse of the Moon spinoffs too. Support this team and this series because it deserves your attention and investment. Plus, I want a Ritual of the Night 2. I will be revisiting this game for years to come, just as I have been doing with its predecessors. It may be a horrible night to have a curse, but it is never a horrible night for Bloodstained
Deltarune: Chapter 2
2021
This review contains spoilers
It's been so long since Chapter 1 that I forgot that Toby Fox is like, the funniest person making games right now. Like this might be the most consistently hilarious game I've played ever, maybe even more than previous Toby Fox games. In general this was absolutely worth the wait, so much good stuff all around, doesn't at all feel like just a retread of chapter 1. Also, some incredibly emotional punches dotted across this game, and yet it never clashes with the humor, as there's always appropriate space given for both. Shit is ready to start fucking HURTING though, the way several of this game's threads are going, and I'm ready for it, I'm ready to be hurt by this series. I guess my biggest concern is that with everything this and the previous chapter have set up, as well as the time between each chapter, there's a possibility the final chapter won't be able to wrap it all up in a satisfying way, but I think if anyone could pull it off it would be the small team behind this series.
...shit I missed the hidden boss again didn't I FUCK
...shit I missed the hidden boss again didn't I FUCK
Silent Hill 2
2001
Content Warning for Attempted Suicide, Terminal Illness, Death, and Chronic Illness
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It’s September 2011 and I’m seventeen years old when I try to kill myself. There are two ponds near my parent’s house. It’s like 4 AM. I like to be out this early. Nobody else is awake, and they won’t be for a while. It’s like the whole world belongs to me. I wander around between the neighborhoods, along the roads, and in the fields. In ten years these will be fresh real estate properties but today they’re still farmland. This hour and a half is the only time the anxiety quells. The real world never knows peace. There’s a dread that accompanies every action and every moment; living in that house, going to school, hanging out with my friends (are they my friends? They are but I won’t be able to understand that until I’m healthier). I’ll always have to go back home. I’ll never be able to articulate what’s happening to me. The pressure is too intense. I don’t plan it, but, the pond is right there, and it’s deep enough, and early enough that no one will hear me. Not having a plan is what saves my life. Turns out impromptu self-drownings are difficult to pull off when the water is still and not THAT deep. So, it doesn’t work, and I’m soaked, and grateful to get home and hide the evidence before my parents wake up, but I don’t feel BETTER. I feel despair, still. There’s no way out. I wish I could just climb up the stairwell, out of this. I wish I had the clarity to understand what was wrong with me.
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What do you even say about Silent Hill 2? To say that it’s one of the best video games ever made feels simultaneously obvious and like I’m underselling it, right? Fuckin, uhhhh, Resident Evil 2 is one of the best video games ever made. Ace Attorney 3 is one of the best games ever made. Come on! When we see people talk about old games that they like they’ll so often say stuff like “it holds up really well for its age” or some similar comment that implies that progress is the same as quality. This is, of course, nonsense. I wouldn’t say video games are better as a medium in 2021 than they were in 2001; on the whole and in the mainstream I would say they’re demonstrably worse in almost every way – how they look, how they sound, how they feel. Silent Hill 2 was a AAA game. What do we get now instead? Far Cry 6? The fuckin, THE MEDIUM? We’ve lost everything in pursuit of bad lighting and looking like a mediocre episode of whatever was popular on HBO three years ago. Silent Hill 2 looks great and sounds great and fuck you it plays great too it feels good and even the puzzles are MOSTLY FINE. MOSTLY. Listen I’m saying this is the all time best video game I’m not saying it fuckin ended world hunger.
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It’s October 2012, I’m nineteen and I’m sitting in a business communications class when I get the text confirmation that Sam’s brain tumor is back, again. It’s not the first time, and I know that there’s nothing left to do, he’s going to die. It’s fast, untreated. He’s one of my best friends, and the only person I know from home who went to the same college as me, but we live really far apart on a big urban campus and I haven’t seen him as much as I’d have liked to. Now he’s gonna spend the rest of his time with his family back home. When I see him next it’s at a hometown charity event for his family in December. He’s unrecognizable physically, and he can’t speak. The event is at our old catholic elementary school, in the gym, where in the years since we graduated they’ve painted a giant tiger on the wall. It’s the school mascot. I feel incredibly awkward around him and spend most of the time away with our other friends. I only speak to him briefly, and when I do it’s a stupid joke about the tiger mural. These will be my last words to him. I do know this will be the case, I think. Later that month I’ll be one of his pallbearers. I spend a lot of time angry and ashamed of myself for not being better to him, not knowing how to act or what to say. I’m about to drop out of school for reasons financial and related to my mental health.
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So what DO you say about Silent Hill 2? That it’s a masterpiece? That it’s the most well-conceived and executed video game ever made? That every detail of it dovetails into every other in a legitimately perfect cocktail story, presentation, and play? That the performances, cinematography, soundscape, all of it are untouchably top of their class? That when Mary reads the letter at the end I WEEP because it’s one of the best pieces of acting I’ve ever heard? That if I ever meet Troy Baker it’s ON SIGHT? These things are all true. We all know it. Everybody knows this. It’s Silent Hill 2.
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It’s August 2019, I’m twenty-five and I’ve just managed to graduate college in time to move to a new city with my partner as she enters her third year of medical school. That’s the year they kick you out of the classroom and you start going to the hospitals to do your real hands-on training month to month. I’m job hunting unsuccessfully and we’re living exclusively off her loans, when what seems at first like a pulled lower back muscle becomes a fruitless early morning ER trip (five hours, no results, not seen by a doctor) becomes an inability to get out of bed becomes a forced leave of absence. Without a diagnosis she can’t get disability accommodations. While on a leave of absence we can’t have her loans, and in fact we have to pay them back. We’re getting desperate, thousands of dollars in debt, and I take the first soul sucking job I can find. It takes almost a full year of visits to increasingly specialized physicians but eventually my partner is diagnosed with non radiographic axial spondyloarthritis, an extremely rare condition that culminates in the fusion of the spinal column. We can treat the pain, sort of, but it’s only a matter of time until it’s likely to evolve into a more serious condition, she’ll never have the strength or stamina she had before, and the treatment options are expensive and difficult. Her diagnosis doesn’t even officially exist as a recognized condition that people can have until September 2020.
Suddenly I am a caretaker and everything is different now. Obviously our mood is stressed from the financial dangers, but she’s in pain, terrible pain, constantly for months. She can’t sleep, she can’t eat. There’s nothing I can do. It’s exhausting to live like that. She’s depressed. On good days we try to walk outside but good days are few and far between, and grow fewer over time, and her body makes her pay for the walks. She’s on drugs, a lot of them. Do they help? It’s unclear. They don’t make her feel BETTER. Nobody knows what’s wrong with her. Her school thinks she’s faking, they’re trying to concoct ways to get her kicked out. She wants to die. It breaks my heart. She’s everything to me, all that there is. She has literally saved my life. And I can’t help her. But it’s exhausting for me too. I don’t want to admit this, not even privately, to myself. It is hard to be the person who is leaned on, especially when the person you love can’t give anything back. I’m tired. I’m not angry, and I don’t think I’m resentful. But I’m tired. I feel shame for thinking about it, for acknowledging it. I know it’s silly to feel the shame but it’s there. I do find a job eventually, thankfully, but it’s still a long time before we get a diagnosis, much less an effective treatment. Even after things settle somewhat, it’s a hard year. And there are hard times to come.
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Ever since I first played it as a teen, Silent Hill 2 is a game that has haunted me through life, like a memory. It struck a deep chord with me when I was too young for that to be fair, too young to identify why I could relate to these people and their ghosts. I used to think this was a special relationship that I had with the game, the way you kind of want to think you have these when you’re younger, but the older I get the more I recognize this as part of growing up. Silent Hill 2 doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve encountered situations in life that closely mirror that of the protagonist. I mean, Angela’s story resonates deeply with me despite little overlap in the specifics of our family traumas. Silent Hill 2 touches me – and most of us – so deeply, because it has such a keen understanding of what it feels like to be Going Through It. It is a game that knows what it is to grieve, to despair, to soak in the fog, and also, maybe, to feel a catharsis, if you’re lucky, and you do the work.
I’ve been Angela, parts of her. I’ve been Laura too. I’ve had more James in me than I would prefer. I suspect all of us have these people, these feelings in us, to some degree or another. We collect them as we get older. That’s just part of it. Silent Hill 2 isn’t a happy game, but it’s one that Gets It, and lets us explore those spaces in a safe and cathartic way. It does this about as well as any piece of media I’ve encountered, on top of being so excellent at all the cinematic and video game stuff. But that’s really what makes it what it is. The empathy, and the honesty. I think it’s beautiful.
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It’s September 2011 and I’m seventeen years old when I try to kill myself. There are two ponds near my parent’s house. It’s like 4 AM. I like to be out this early. Nobody else is awake, and they won’t be for a while. It’s like the whole world belongs to me. I wander around between the neighborhoods, along the roads, and in the fields. In ten years these will be fresh real estate properties but today they’re still farmland. This hour and a half is the only time the anxiety quells. The real world never knows peace. There’s a dread that accompanies every action and every moment; living in that house, going to school, hanging out with my friends (are they my friends? They are but I won’t be able to understand that until I’m healthier). I’ll always have to go back home. I’ll never be able to articulate what’s happening to me. The pressure is too intense. I don’t plan it, but, the pond is right there, and it’s deep enough, and early enough that no one will hear me. Not having a plan is what saves my life. Turns out impromptu self-drownings are difficult to pull off when the water is still and not THAT deep. So, it doesn’t work, and I’m soaked, and grateful to get home and hide the evidence before my parents wake up, but I don’t feel BETTER. I feel despair, still. There’s no way out. I wish I could just climb up the stairwell, out of this. I wish I had the clarity to understand what was wrong with me.
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What do you even say about Silent Hill 2? To say that it’s one of the best video games ever made feels simultaneously obvious and like I’m underselling it, right? Fuckin, uhhhh, Resident Evil 2 is one of the best video games ever made. Ace Attorney 3 is one of the best games ever made. Come on! When we see people talk about old games that they like they’ll so often say stuff like “it holds up really well for its age” or some similar comment that implies that progress is the same as quality. This is, of course, nonsense. I wouldn’t say video games are better as a medium in 2021 than they were in 2001; on the whole and in the mainstream I would say they’re demonstrably worse in almost every way – how they look, how they sound, how they feel. Silent Hill 2 was a AAA game. What do we get now instead? Far Cry 6? The fuckin, THE MEDIUM? We’ve lost everything in pursuit of bad lighting and looking like a mediocre episode of whatever was popular on HBO three years ago. Silent Hill 2 looks great and sounds great and fuck you it plays great too it feels good and even the puzzles are MOSTLY FINE. MOSTLY. Listen I’m saying this is the all time best video game I’m not saying it fuckin ended world hunger.
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It’s October 2012, I’m nineteen and I’m sitting in a business communications class when I get the text confirmation that Sam’s brain tumor is back, again. It’s not the first time, and I know that there’s nothing left to do, he’s going to die. It’s fast, untreated. He’s one of my best friends, and the only person I know from home who went to the same college as me, but we live really far apart on a big urban campus and I haven’t seen him as much as I’d have liked to. Now he’s gonna spend the rest of his time with his family back home. When I see him next it’s at a hometown charity event for his family in December. He’s unrecognizable physically, and he can’t speak. The event is at our old catholic elementary school, in the gym, where in the years since we graduated they’ve painted a giant tiger on the wall. It’s the school mascot. I feel incredibly awkward around him and spend most of the time away with our other friends. I only speak to him briefly, and when I do it’s a stupid joke about the tiger mural. These will be my last words to him. I do know this will be the case, I think. Later that month I’ll be one of his pallbearers. I spend a lot of time angry and ashamed of myself for not being better to him, not knowing how to act or what to say. I’m about to drop out of school for reasons financial and related to my mental health.
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So what DO you say about Silent Hill 2? That it’s a masterpiece? That it’s the most well-conceived and executed video game ever made? That every detail of it dovetails into every other in a legitimately perfect cocktail story, presentation, and play? That the performances, cinematography, soundscape, all of it are untouchably top of their class? That when Mary reads the letter at the end I WEEP because it’s one of the best pieces of acting I’ve ever heard? That if I ever meet Troy Baker it’s ON SIGHT? These things are all true. We all know it. Everybody knows this. It’s Silent Hill 2.
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It’s August 2019, I’m twenty-five and I’ve just managed to graduate college in time to move to a new city with my partner as she enters her third year of medical school. That’s the year they kick you out of the classroom and you start going to the hospitals to do your real hands-on training month to month. I’m job hunting unsuccessfully and we’re living exclusively off her loans, when what seems at first like a pulled lower back muscle becomes a fruitless early morning ER trip (five hours, no results, not seen by a doctor) becomes an inability to get out of bed becomes a forced leave of absence. Without a diagnosis she can’t get disability accommodations. While on a leave of absence we can’t have her loans, and in fact we have to pay them back. We’re getting desperate, thousands of dollars in debt, and I take the first soul sucking job I can find. It takes almost a full year of visits to increasingly specialized physicians but eventually my partner is diagnosed with non radiographic axial spondyloarthritis, an extremely rare condition that culminates in the fusion of the spinal column. We can treat the pain, sort of, but it’s only a matter of time until it’s likely to evolve into a more serious condition, she’ll never have the strength or stamina she had before, and the treatment options are expensive and difficult. Her diagnosis doesn’t even officially exist as a recognized condition that people can have until September 2020.
Suddenly I am a caretaker and everything is different now. Obviously our mood is stressed from the financial dangers, but she’s in pain, terrible pain, constantly for months. She can’t sleep, she can’t eat. There’s nothing I can do. It’s exhausting to live like that. She’s depressed. On good days we try to walk outside but good days are few and far between, and grow fewer over time, and her body makes her pay for the walks. She’s on drugs, a lot of them. Do they help? It’s unclear. They don’t make her feel BETTER. Nobody knows what’s wrong with her. Her school thinks she’s faking, they’re trying to concoct ways to get her kicked out. She wants to die. It breaks my heart. She’s everything to me, all that there is. She has literally saved my life. And I can’t help her. But it’s exhausting for me too. I don’t want to admit this, not even privately, to myself. It is hard to be the person who is leaned on, especially when the person you love can’t give anything back. I’m tired. I’m not angry, and I don’t think I’m resentful. But I’m tired. I feel shame for thinking about it, for acknowledging it. I know it’s silly to feel the shame but it’s there. I do find a job eventually, thankfully, but it’s still a long time before we get a diagnosis, much less an effective treatment. Even after things settle somewhat, it’s a hard year. And there are hard times to come.
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Ever since I first played it as a teen, Silent Hill 2 is a game that has haunted me through life, like a memory. It struck a deep chord with me when I was too young for that to be fair, too young to identify why I could relate to these people and their ghosts. I used to think this was a special relationship that I had with the game, the way you kind of want to think you have these when you’re younger, but the older I get the more I recognize this as part of growing up. Silent Hill 2 doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve encountered situations in life that closely mirror that of the protagonist. I mean, Angela’s story resonates deeply with me despite little overlap in the specifics of our family traumas. Silent Hill 2 touches me – and most of us – so deeply, because it has such a keen understanding of what it feels like to be Going Through It. It is a game that knows what it is to grieve, to despair, to soak in the fog, and also, maybe, to feel a catharsis, if you’re lucky, and you do the work.
I’ve been Angela, parts of her. I’ve been Laura too. I’ve had more James in me than I would prefer. I suspect all of us have these people, these feelings in us, to some degree or another. We collect them as we get older. That’s just part of it. Silent Hill 2 isn’t a happy game, but it’s one that Gets It, and lets us explore those spaces in a safe and cathartic way. It does this about as well as any piece of media I’ve encountered, on top of being so excellent at all the cinematic and video game stuff. But that’s really what makes it what it is. The empathy, and the honesty. I think it’s beautiful.
Google Snake
2017
Google claims to be "against misinformation" yet it has a game featuring a carnivorous animal eating apples. SAD!
Super Mario Galaxy
2007
My personal favorite game of all time. I don't think I will ever stop being pulled in for another 100% playthrough! This is Mario at his best with creative levels, fun mechanics, and lots of challenge for players to encounter. One of the reasons I adore this game is the optional backstory for Rosalina, and how it isn't afraid to be a tear-jerking empathetic tale in the middle of a happy-go-lucky Mario game. It's always a joy to revisit this title since it is very easy to jump in and play 10 minutes at a time before moving on. It's a must play platformer and one of the Wii's crowning gems!
the time of its release couldn't have been better. it was so perfect, in fact, that i'm starting to suspect nintendo's involvement in the spread of COVID-19 might be a hot lead.
no, i'm kidding. but the saddest, and very real, part was the months and years following the release. it was a tough fall from grace for the title, and its inferiority when compared to older instalments, like wild world and new leaf, became apparent.
obviously, my hour count is in the 400s. i would be lying if i said "i didn't like the game!". i do recommend playing some of the older titles, rather than this one, if you get the chance. but eh, if you're a fan of ac, might as well play new horizons. it will, guaranteed, give you a cosy dopamine spike every now and then.
no, i'm kidding. but the saddest, and very real, part was the months and years following the release. it was a tough fall from grace for the title, and its inferiority when compared to older instalments, like wild world and new leaf, became apparent.
obviously, my hour count is in the 400s. i would be lying if i said "i didn't like the game!". i do recommend playing some of the older titles, rather than this one, if you get the chance. but eh, if you're a fan of ac, might as well play new horizons. it will, guaranteed, give you a cosy dopamine spike every now and then.
Stray
2022
Cyberkitty Oedo 808.
Stray was one of the initial PS5 games Sony revealed before the system launch and I've been looking forward to it ever since. I love both cats, owning one, and cyberpunk as a genre so it's a perfect mix right? Surprisingly so. You play the role of a stray cat that on a perilous jump is separated from their family and finds themselves in a forgotten dystopian cyberpunk city and needs to find their way out meeting a host of odd characters and unraveling the story of its existence as you go.
Far greater writers than I will talk about this game I'm sure, but what I really want to highlight is how great the animations are. You really feel like a cat. The way you scratch objects, jump, crouch, slink is perfect. In one scene the cat stares at something that catches their attention before padding over to it, it's something I've seen my cat do and it's that attention to detail in the game that really brings it to life. That same level of detail is brought to the environments, characters and rest of the world too. Make no mistake this is a very good looking title. Brilliant use of colour, lighting crisp image quality and art design make it a gorgeous world to explore, especially impressive as an indie game on a lower budget.
The actual game plays like an adventure game where you explore, talk, collect items. Being a cat you have in certain places more vertical exploration being able to jump up buildings, shelves, air con units etc especially in the hubs. The jumping itself is more contextual when you are near an object you can jump up the X prompt will come up. While it does make the jumping animations look far smoother and makes all your jumps perfect, with the agility of lets say...a cat, it also can be a little finicky at times.
Overall I had a great time with this little game. I got the platinum in 11 hours in two play throughs but most importantly I can press circle to meow!
+ Fantastic animations.
+ Gorgeous visual design.
+ Interesting world to explore.
+ Meow!
- jumping isn't always the best.
Stray was one of the initial PS5 games Sony revealed before the system launch and I've been looking forward to it ever since. I love both cats, owning one, and cyberpunk as a genre so it's a perfect mix right? Surprisingly so. You play the role of a stray cat that on a perilous jump is separated from their family and finds themselves in a forgotten dystopian cyberpunk city and needs to find their way out meeting a host of odd characters and unraveling the story of its existence as you go.
Far greater writers than I will talk about this game I'm sure, but what I really want to highlight is how great the animations are. You really feel like a cat. The way you scratch objects, jump, crouch, slink is perfect. In one scene the cat stares at something that catches their attention before padding over to it, it's something I've seen my cat do and it's that attention to detail in the game that really brings it to life. That same level of detail is brought to the environments, characters and rest of the world too. Make no mistake this is a very good looking title. Brilliant use of colour, lighting crisp image quality and art design make it a gorgeous world to explore, especially impressive as an indie game on a lower budget.
The actual game plays like an adventure game where you explore, talk, collect items. Being a cat you have in certain places more vertical exploration being able to jump up buildings, shelves, air con units etc especially in the hubs. The jumping itself is more contextual when you are near an object you can jump up the X prompt will come up. While it does make the jumping animations look far smoother and makes all your jumps perfect, with the agility of lets say...a cat, it also can be a little finicky at times.
Overall I had a great time with this little game. I got the platinum in 11 hours in two play throughs but most importantly I can press circle to meow!
+ Fantastic animations.
+ Gorgeous visual design.
+ Interesting world to explore.
+ Meow!
- jumping isn't always the best.
Corridor Simulator VII is terribly inconsistent.
Where to start with this game? it's a hard one to review because while I don't completely hate it, I don't remotely like it either. It's a mix of things that don't really work together leaving a bit of a flat experience for me if you look past the Final Fantasy VII aesthetic and nostalgia involved in it's creation.
For those unaware Final Fantasy VII remake is, obviously a remake of Final Fantasy VII, originally a Playstation 1 game released in 1997. I say Remake, it only actually covers the part of the original game set in Midgar which was only a few hours but has been dragged out into a 30-40 hour experience. It is being sold episodic and while I don't have a problem with this as a principal. I do have a problem with it in execution because so much of the game is inconsistent.
The game is incredibly linear, I'm not talking about story, I have no problem with that, i'm talking about level design. It is awful. Awful! Past the first chapter which was the game highlight for me it's just incredibly narrow corridors leading from one place to the next with very little to explore or do. These corridors are also filled with slow forced walking sections or narrow gaps Cloud has to slowly shimmy through like he's in Uncharted or Tomb raider destroying the pacing completely. The few branching paths you meet you are often railroaded past "this way Cloud!" without being allowed to explore. These few side paths are often just corridors to arena rooms anyway for obvious later side quests.
Speaking of which, Side quests! Cool right? A chance to see more of Midgar and meet cool characters? wrong. These are terrible. There are 20 plus in the game and every. Single. One. is. boring. Meet a forgettable character, have mundane dialogue, backtrack through a narrow corridor to above mentioned obvious side quest area, kill monster variant, come back. Repeat. there is no soul to them at all, they feel thrown in to extend the game length, no more, no less. while I understand a lot of RPGs use this kind of formula they might at least be funny or have memorable characters, these all just feel bland like created by committee or for an mmo.
Fighting the above mentioned monsters is also a let down for me. I love action RPGS, I love turn based RPGs, I dislike whatever this is. It's a jack of both and master of none. You have three party members to swap between on the fly, each can attack, block, dodge, use a variety of skills and magic and you can pause the game to select abilities and order characters to use moves. Sounds great? wrong.
The dodge is useless. It has no invincibility frames so doing a last minute well timed dodge like most action games is a waste of time, you'll get hit anyway and can only use it for slow obvious attacks. Block lessens damage but you take a huge amount anyway and you can't cancel out of attacks to block so if you're committed you're taking huge damage. the game seems designed to make sure you're taking damage.
The AI is just intentionally bad. Your team mates can't do anything on their own but some basic attacking occasionally and sit like lemmings most of the time. Square Enix solved this themselves years ago with the gambit system on Playstation 2 yet have weirdly regressed. Enemy AI just swarms your controlled character forcing you to constantly swap characters for breathing room. All I want to do is play as Tifa but I can't do that to use the combat effectively. She is also the only fun character to use in combat (Barrett especially is so boring) Don't even get me started on the stagger system where enemies take almost no damage unless you assess them and use the right magic on them. Not got those equipped? a boss fight can take like 40 minutes unless you reload your game. It gives you options on what you want to use, then often forces you another way anyway. Throw in how useless and limited summons are, (they may as well not be in the game) and how terrible the camera often is keeping track, especially in narrow confines and flying enemies and the combat is just disappointing :(
I really dislike it and yet I can see where it could have been fantastically fun but it feels like they hamstrung themselves and the whole game feels like that. Expanded story could have been wonderful but it's often cringey or bland. Bigger Midgar would be great, but it's a linear corridor simulator. Action combat could be exciting but it's instead got shoe horned in mechanics that slow it all down and leave it in a genre limbo.
This brings me to the visuals. This game is gorgeous, the character models look amazing, better than the Advent Children CG movie and Chapter 1 is also stunning for detailed areas, brickwork and textures. So why do some other parts look so awful? there seems to be a texture issue especially in Chapters 3 and 8 but can happen any time where the walls, junk or posters are so blurry sections of it look like a Playstation 2 background. For a game that's so linear and small in level scope that shouldn't be happening. See what I mean? Inconsistent.
Lastly the ending is absolute garbage. A lot of the added content is appalling or cringe worthy but the ending just felt like they wanted to make Advent Children 2 rather than a FFVII remake and Barrett is just an awful stereotype the whole way through.
Overall I'm aware i'm probably in the minority but I just don't like it that much. By chapter 14 I dropped the difficulty down to easy, not because it was hard, it's not, it's just tedious. Easy at least allowed me to combo in as Tifa and made that more fun to see it through to the end. I'm glad I played it and saw it through to the end but it just wasn't the game I wanted I guess, it felt like Final Fantasy XIII crossed with Kingdom Hearts and that is not a sentence I ever want to write again. I have no interest in playing this again or the next part.
+ Expanded character development about Avalanche is a (mostly) welcome addition.
+ Tifa is at least semi fun in combat when you can use her.
+ The nostalgia of playing a new FFVII game is great, especially when some of the iconic music fires up.
+ The game is gorgeous...
- .....except when it isn't texture wise.
- Narrow corridor, forced walking, crevice crawling moments are horrendous.
- Side quests are laughably dull.
- Combat is no fun. Intentionally road blocks any fun you could have, camera is terrible, summons are useless, stagger is a chore.
- New content is just padding. Ending to the game is terrible.
- Roche.
Where to start with this game? it's a hard one to review because while I don't completely hate it, I don't remotely like it either. It's a mix of things that don't really work together leaving a bit of a flat experience for me if you look past the Final Fantasy VII aesthetic and nostalgia involved in it's creation.
For those unaware Final Fantasy VII remake is, obviously a remake of Final Fantasy VII, originally a Playstation 1 game released in 1997. I say Remake, it only actually covers the part of the original game set in Midgar which was only a few hours but has been dragged out into a 30-40 hour experience. It is being sold episodic and while I don't have a problem with this as a principal. I do have a problem with it in execution because so much of the game is inconsistent.
The game is incredibly linear, I'm not talking about story, I have no problem with that, i'm talking about level design. It is awful. Awful! Past the first chapter which was the game highlight for me it's just incredibly narrow corridors leading from one place to the next with very little to explore or do. These corridors are also filled with slow forced walking sections or narrow gaps Cloud has to slowly shimmy through like he's in Uncharted or Tomb raider destroying the pacing completely. The few branching paths you meet you are often railroaded past "this way Cloud!" without being allowed to explore. These few side paths are often just corridors to arena rooms anyway for obvious later side quests.
Speaking of which, Side quests! Cool right? A chance to see more of Midgar and meet cool characters? wrong. These are terrible. There are 20 plus in the game and every. Single. One. is. boring. Meet a forgettable character, have mundane dialogue, backtrack through a narrow corridor to above mentioned obvious side quest area, kill monster variant, come back. Repeat. there is no soul to them at all, they feel thrown in to extend the game length, no more, no less. while I understand a lot of RPGs use this kind of formula they might at least be funny or have memorable characters, these all just feel bland like created by committee or for an mmo.
Fighting the above mentioned monsters is also a let down for me. I love action RPGS, I love turn based RPGs, I dislike whatever this is. It's a jack of both and master of none. You have three party members to swap between on the fly, each can attack, block, dodge, use a variety of skills and magic and you can pause the game to select abilities and order characters to use moves. Sounds great? wrong.
The dodge is useless. It has no invincibility frames so doing a last minute well timed dodge like most action games is a waste of time, you'll get hit anyway and can only use it for slow obvious attacks. Block lessens damage but you take a huge amount anyway and you can't cancel out of attacks to block so if you're committed you're taking huge damage. the game seems designed to make sure you're taking damage.
The AI is just intentionally bad. Your team mates can't do anything on their own but some basic attacking occasionally and sit like lemmings most of the time. Square Enix solved this themselves years ago with the gambit system on Playstation 2 yet have weirdly regressed. Enemy AI just swarms your controlled character forcing you to constantly swap characters for breathing room. All I want to do is play as Tifa but I can't do that to use the combat effectively. She is also the only fun character to use in combat (Barrett especially is so boring) Don't even get me started on the stagger system where enemies take almost no damage unless you assess them and use the right magic on them. Not got those equipped? a boss fight can take like 40 minutes unless you reload your game. It gives you options on what you want to use, then often forces you another way anyway. Throw in how useless and limited summons are, (they may as well not be in the game) and how terrible the camera often is keeping track, especially in narrow confines and flying enemies and the combat is just disappointing :(
I really dislike it and yet I can see where it could have been fantastically fun but it feels like they hamstrung themselves and the whole game feels like that. Expanded story could have been wonderful but it's often cringey or bland. Bigger Midgar would be great, but it's a linear corridor simulator. Action combat could be exciting but it's instead got shoe horned in mechanics that slow it all down and leave it in a genre limbo.
This brings me to the visuals. This game is gorgeous, the character models look amazing, better than the Advent Children CG movie and Chapter 1 is also stunning for detailed areas, brickwork and textures. So why do some other parts look so awful? there seems to be a texture issue especially in Chapters 3 and 8 but can happen any time where the walls, junk or posters are so blurry sections of it look like a Playstation 2 background. For a game that's so linear and small in level scope that shouldn't be happening. See what I mean? Inconsistent.
Lastly the ending is absolute garbage. A lot of the added content is appalling or cringe worthy but the ending just felt like they wanted to make Advent Children 2 rather than a FFVII remake and Barrett is just an awful stereotype the whole way through.
Overall I'm aware i'm probably in the minority but I just don't like it that much. By chapter 14 I dropped the difficulty down to easy, not because it was hard, it's not, it's just tedious. Easy at least allowed me to combo in as Tifa and made that more fun to see it through to the end. I'm glad I played it and saw it through to the end but it just wasn't the game I wanted I guess, it felt like Final Fantasy XIII crossed with Kingdom Hearts and that is not a sentence I ever want to write again. I have no interest in playing this again or the next part.
+ Expanded character development about Avalanche is a (mostly) welcome addition.
+ Tifa is at least semi fun in combat when you can use her.
+ The nostalgia of playing a new FFVII game is great, especially when some of the iconic music fires up.
+ The game is gorgeous...
- .....except when it isn't texture wise.
- Narrow corridor, forced walking, crevice crawling moments are horrendous.
- Side quests are laughably dull.
- Combat is no fun. Intentionally road blocks any fun you could have, camera is terrible, summons are useless, stagger is a chore.
- New content is just padding. Ending to the game is terrible.
- Roche.