justcerebro
21 Reviews liked by justcerebro
Diablo
1996
Like one balance pass away from being the best Diablo game. I love the relatively small scale (one town and one dungeon is ideal for me) and how directly roguelike-inspired the game feels. The things I don't really like are how flat character progression is (for example if you're playing a sorcerer you may as well just ignore every stat that isn't Magic) and how wonky some enemy stats can be. The penultimate floor has enemies that are completely immune to any magic damage, which on paper is a fun and roguelike-like-ish challenge to overcome for a spellcaster, but in practice overcoming that challenge is grueling when rooms frequently give you not 1-3 of them at once but 5+ to deal with.
All of that being said, the atmosphere and vibes are completely unmatched, even by its much more successful sequel.
All of that being said, the atmosphere and vibes are completely unmatched, even by its much more successful sequel.
Kingdom Hearts
2002
Ever since I was around 14 or so, I’ve made irregular pilgrimages to one of Scotland’s lesser known Lochs. As a large body of water that stretches into the horizon, it is one of the very few features of the surrounding landscape that’s remained untouched since I was born.
I used to live a short distance from it, but these days getting there is a whole journey. In college it took me a full forty minutes to simply get there, and now as a much older adult the entire return trip is around five hours. Where I was once simply passed by some buildings and later a nearby village, I now pass by three entire towns, a significant stretch of wilderness, an old forest trail, and an unmaintained stretch of road which alarmingly doesn’t appear on Google Maps.
I like to make the journey on foot, personally. Despite possessing a not-insignificant case of thalassophobia, reaching the loch after two and a half hours brings a sense of relief after what is always going to be a backbreaking trip.
Why do I make this journey, you ask?
I feel that as we get older, we stop being “bigger versions of ourselves” entirely and start being humanoid matryoshka dolls. While at first we iterate on ourselves, eventually the iterations increase so much that the self we used to be becomes an entirely different, distant person. In time, we lose that older self even if we retain some memories, ideas or feelings.
I like to journey to that loch, and a specific rocky outcrop on its north side, because it’s perhaps the only place on Earth where I have a direct link to my younger selves. The one thing all incarnations of the Mira project have in common is that they’ve sat or been sat on that outcrop, starting as early as one year old, and acknowledging this is humbling.
Let’s snap back a bit though, 2012. Sitting in Maths besides this then-infinitely annoying fuck we’ll call Jason for privacy’s sake - and also because I know he’s the kind of guy that would use Backloggd. Sorry if you see this lad, I still have your copy of Ico & Shadow of the Colossus.
Jason was… The picture most people conjure in their mind when they hear “ned” (or “chav” if you want a more familiar term); he had the “hawhawhaw” laugh, styled himself as a hardman, didn’t dress particularly well, seemed to abhor anything that seemed earnest or intellectual, primarily spoke through his nostrils, and was so dense that I had to explain what organs were to him two years later.
And in 2012, he turns to me and says: “Here, ye like games don’t ye? Git that Kingdom Hearts when it comes oot.”
He whips out his phone, the ugliest Blackberry I’d ever seen, and shows me a grainy bitcrushed trailer for the then-new Kingdom Hearts 1.5 Remix.
This dumbfounded me, because even on that tiny-ass screen I could tell that this was not a game I would ever associate with him. He goes on to tell me that he played it as a wean and loved it, prompting a further conversation about games that led to a friendship which surprised me - a then-isolated nerd who was overeducated and undermedicated for everything academia asked of her.
Per his recommendation, I picked up Kingdom Hearts 1.5 the following year and… Didn’t really get it. I enjoyed the combat, though the music was phenomenal, and the story was neat, but I felt like I was missing something. It compelled me, yes, but the source of that was lost on me. I never had the chance to discuss it with Jason, for despite our unlikely friendship we ultimately moved in different teenage social circles and, once classes started being sorted by performance, he and I never saw one another in class either.
2013 was 11 years ago, so there’s been some time to reflect.
Recently, the KH games came to Steam and, rather hilariously, Square Enix ignored the prior Epic Games Store release to pretend that this was the first time KH had ever touched PC. They even got Utada Hikaru to rerecord Simple & Clean. Hilarious!
I’ve been watching people play KH1 again - not playing it myself, for I don’t really have the energy to tackle a long game so soon after Library of Ruina - and it’s got me noticing a lot of stuff that my younger self fundamentally couldn’t get.
What strikes Adult Mira about KH1 is how it feels… Adolescent. Not in the sense that it’s childish or cringe or whatever disingenuous cynics often call it, but… Man I’m struggling to word this one.
[Insert me closing this doc for like three days and reopening it.]
I remember something that would irregularly happen in High School, and unlike many of my anecdotes I don’t think these are Scotland-specific.
Every now and then, in the very early days, someone would show up to P.E wearing a Disney shirt or whatever, or they’d have a Disney backpack/notepad/whatever. The crueller ones would laugh, while even the nicer ones would side-eye the victim and awkwardly chuckle at their friends.
You might’ve heard someone say “your body undergoes changes through puberty/as you grow up”, and in a way I find this sentiment to be a kindness. It carefully omits the actually harrowing, less obvious parts of adolescence. Namely, the death of youth.
I know the term “irony poisoning” is considered to be an internet thing, but frankly I see it manifest even in fully offline people and it seems to naturally occur in the process of going from a child to a citizen of the world. Joy and earnestness are taboo, and cynicism is expected. Nobody should ever be joyful or love “bad”/”childish” things seriously, and if they do it must be a joke - told by them or at their expense, it matters not. Stuff like that. You must laugh at the awkward undiagnosed autistic girl in your class with the Cinderella backpack. She’s a kid, and you’re not kids anymore. Laugh.
This continues into adulthood. How many people have you seen dunk on ‘cringe fanfiction’, ‘bad art’, or anything else where passion clearly outstreps base level technical talent?
You might wonder what the fuck this has to do with Kingdom Hearts, and I would tell you that I kinda see the game as an analogue for that unavoidable death of youth.
Ignore the fantastical elements for a moment, and the opening hours are of three teenagers longing to find out what exists beyond the horizon of their small corner of existence, only to find out the hard way that it’s so vast as to be deeply and spiritually underwhelming. And, unfortunately for them, they’re now a part of this world. Their forced and unwanted understanding of the world around them drives wedges between them, and through this division, one of them comes into contact with an adult who no longer views them as a child but as a tool to be cultivated and used for their own games.
SImilarly, the Disney elements feel like an attempt to broach that specific brand of teenage existentialism using iconography that’s both universal to the player (unless they somehow avoided the most enduring plague of the modern age: The Walt Disney Company) and relatable to the subject of being an adolescent. Despite the relatively peppy and almost twee trappings of each ~world~, each mini arc Kingdom Hearts doesn’t exactly feel triumphant. Riku always ends up seeming further and further away from Sora, something which only gets worse as the credits roll gets closer and closer. Likewise, the Disney elements start seeming less and less magical, ultimately ending up with the iconic Princesses being used as fuel to further someone’s goals.
I know that Kairi being one of the seven Princesses might seem like the writers trying to build a connection between the Disney stuff and the OC stuff, but c’mon. Surely you must’ve known someone that, as a kid, wanted to be a Disney Princess. It’s all too fitting that such a desire is distorted for Ansem to open his gate to hell.
In particular, my adult self has always been struck by that reference to the stars disappearing out of the sky in this game. The sky sure did seem brighter when we were younger.
As a branch of all of this, it’s easy to see the Heartless as a manifestation of the particularly caustic cynicism and joylessness that awaits children once their childhood begins to evaporate. They are no longer vessels for curiosity or play, they are now cogs, bolts and conveyors in a machine whose operation they have no say in or influence over. The Heartless are a corruptive force that sap everything from the various worlds, in this case Disney ones, which slots in so perfectly as an analogue to that nasty disdain for anything childish that so many people pick up unconsciously and utterly refuse to either interrogate or dispense with.
Jason and I didn’t talk much after High School, even after fate had us in the same college class for a single lesson of the week, but he did tell me something once while we were out on a smoke break that had a lasting impact.
When my teens arrived, I threw all of my stuffed animals in a trash bag and let them fester in the bottom of my closet. Among them was a Winnie the Pooh plush that I’d had since I was literally three years old. I was a big girl then, no time for stuffies. But yet I did yearn for them - in part because I just slept better while holding something, and pillows weren’t a good substitute.
Years later, while in college, Jason - now having reformed himself as a much less ~neddy~ soul who found his passion and the ability to dress well in wargames - offhandedly mentioned that he’d slept with his stuffed bear for years. He showed me a picture, and it was a ratty old thing, but clearly well loved. I didn’t immediately change my tone regarding stuffed animals, I even laughed it off, but the subsequent year was hellish. After that, I was all too eager to crack open that trash bag and free them.
You see the same sort of attitude with Kingdom Hearts itself, really. I’ve noticed that so-called ex-fans of it often point to it as a cringe teenage hyperfixation, while also talking about it with the same fondness most people reserve for significant others or childhood friends they hold some affection for. You ever see a straight dude who’s clearly a hyper-repressed gay man talk about his ‘best friend’? Kinda like that.
KH is, to lots of people, ‘cringe’. It is naked in its sincerity and Nomura makes no attempt to hide that it’s his pinboard passion project where 90% of additions are justified with “I wanted to” and the other 10% are “Square Enix asked me to”. As with everything so unabashedly sincere, those who wear cynicism like a second skin or overly irony-poisoned nerds who still make Sonichu jokes in 2024 often dismiss it. Indeed, much like stuffed animals, so many people seem to think themselves above a game where a twink can stunlock Sephiroth with moves that’d make Vergil look amateurish.
Look, I’ll be honest, even I take potshots at KH sometimes. Not the first game, as you’ve noticed, but subsequent entries do leave a lot to be desired. Where I - and I suspect many other KH fans - differ is that most of my potshots stem from KH losing a lot of the ironclad consistency, relatively self-contained writing and airtight pacing of the first game.
I think it’s really telling that Ansem’s insistence he can “unlock people’s hearts” only leads to them becoming absolute monsters. I wonder if there’s anything to examine there. Riku, tragically, loses this fight to Ansem and becomes yet another pawn for him, while Sora’s unwillingness to entirely sever the ties that bind him to what came before is what allows him to stay free. I hesitate to even jokingly call it ‘corny’, it’s just a very upfront admission that you’ll lose your soul if you can’t keep a hold of any whimsy or an ability to engage in play.
“Mira, where does the Final Fantasy stuff slot in?”
It’s cool as fuck, next question.
Despite seeming simple and clean on the surface, Kingdom Hearts is a series I don’t think one can truly critique, praise or even react to without inadvertently revealing something about themselves that - presumably - they’d want to keep hidden. It’s one of those games where I can often tell how cynical someone is by how willing they are to dismiss everything about it off the cuff. It’s why I just opened with the personal anecdote - I hate subtext, it’s for cowards and subs.
That all said, I do find it somewhat sad that despite this game being aimed at children and teens, neither of them are particularly well equipped to explain why it might be resonant or even resonate with it in the first place. Indeed, I myself didn’t get it all the way back in 2013. They’ll find it fun, sure, but some things you only understand with time I guess.
I feel like, more than anything, the part of Kingdom Hearts that embodies all of this is the very first song you hear on the menu: Dearly Beloved. It’s hardly heroic, not even cool or foreboding. No, it’s a piece that feels sad? It somehow manages to capture that really specific feeling of seeing a normally-populated city at night for the first time and realizing that, without people occupying that space, it’s just concrete, power lines, glass and in Glasgow’s case also a sizable amount of potholes.
To end off… I silently weep for people who think they’re too old for Kingdom Hearts, or indeed for anything like it. Not because I look down on them, but because I feel losing the part of you that can enjoy things like this, stuffed animals, and goofy (hyuk) apparel must be miserable. That first death, right there in the soul, is always a harbinger of worse things to come.
But hey, it’s never too late to claw it back. You, too, can play Kingdom Hearts or spend £1000~ on stuffed rabbits.
I used to live a short distance from it, but these days getting there is a whole journey. In college it took me a full forty minutes to simply get there, and now as a much older adult the entire return trip is around five hours. Where I was once simply passed by some buildings and later a nearby village, I now pass by three entire towns, a significant stretch of wilderness, an old forest trail, and an unmaintained stretch of road which alarmingly doesn’t appear on Google Maps.
I like to make the journey on foot, personally. Despite possessing a not-insignificant case of thalassophobia, reaching the loch after two and a half hours brings a sense of relief after what is always going to be a backbreaking trip.
Why do I make this journey, you ask?
I feel that as we get older, we stop being “bigger versions of ourselves” entirely and start being humanoid matryoshka dolls. While at first we iterate on ourselves, eventually the iterations increase so much that the self we used to be becomes an entirely different, distant person. In time, we lose that older self even if we retain some memories, ideas or feelings.
I like to journey to that loch, and a specific rocky outcrop on its north side, because it’s perhaps the only place on Earth where I have a direct link to my younger selves. The one thing all incarnations of the Mira project have in common is that they’ve sat or been sat on that outcrop, starting as early as one year old, and acknowledging this is humbling.
Let’s snap back a bit though, 2012. Sitting in Maths besides this then-infinitely annoying fuck we’ll call Jason for privacy’s sake - and also because I know he’s the kind of guy that would use Backloggd. Sorry if you see this lad, I still have your copy of Ico & Shadow of the Colossus.
Jason was… The picture most people conjure in their mind when they hear “ned” (or “chav” if you want a more familiar term); he had the “hawhawhaw” laugh, styled himself as a hardman, didn’t dress particularly well, seemed to abhor anything that seemed earnest or intellectual, primarily spoke through his nostrils, and was so dense that I had to explain what organs were to him two years later.
And in 2012, he turns to me and says: “Here, ye like games don’t ye? Git that Kingdom Hearts when it comes oot.”
He whips out his phone, the ugliest Blackberry I’d ever seen, and shows me a grainy bitcrushed trailer for the then-new Kingdom Hearts 1.5 Remix.
This dumbfounded me, because even on that tiny-ass screen I could tell that this was not a game I would ever associate with him. He goes on to tell me that he played it as a wean and loved it, prompting a further conversation about games that led to a friendship which surprised me - a then-isolated nerd who was overeducated and undermedicated for everything academia asked of her.
Per his recommendation, I picked up Kingdom Hearts 1.5 the following year and… Didn’t really get it. I enjoyed the combat, though the music was phenomenal, and the story was neat, but I felt like I was missing something. It compelled me, yes, but the source of that was lost on me. I never had the chance to discuss it with Jason, for despite our unlikely friendship we ultimately moved in different teenage social circles and, once classes started being sorted by performance, he and I never saw one another in class either.
2013 was 11 years ago, so there’s been some time to reflect.
Recently, the KH games came to Steam and, rather hilariously, Square Enix ignored the prior Epic Games Store release to pretend that this was the first time KH had ever touched PC. They even got Utada Hikaru to rerecord Simple & Clean. Hilarious!
I’ve been watching people play KH1 again - not playing it myself, for I don’t really have the energy to tackle a long game so soon after Library of Ruina - and it’s got me noticing a lot of stuff that my younger self fundamentally couldn’t get.
What strikes Adult Mira about KH1 is how it feels… Adolescent. Not in the sense that it’s childish or cringe or whatever disingenuous cynics often call it, but… Man I’m struggling to word this one.
[Insert me closing this doc for like three days and reopening it.]
I remember something that would irregularly happen in High School, and unlike many of my anecdotes I don’t think these are Scotland-specific.
Every now and then, in the very early days, someone would show up to P.E wearing a Disney shirt or whatever, or they’d have a Disney backpack/notepad/whatever. The crueller ones would laugh, while even the nicer ones would side-eye the victim and awkwardly chuckle at their friends.
You might’ve heard someone say “your body undergoes changes through puberty/as you grow up”, and in a way I find this sentiment to be a kindness. It carefully omits the actually harrowing, less obvious parts of adolescence. Namely, the death of youth.
I know the term “irony poisoning” is considered to be an internet thing, but frankly I see it manifest even in fully offline people and it seems to naturally occur in the process of going from a child to a citizen of the world. Joy and earnestness are taboo, and cynicism is expected. Nobody should ever be joyful or love “bad”/”childish” things seriously, and if they do it must be a joke - told by them or at their expense, it matters not. Stuff like that. You must laugh at the awkward undiagnosed autistic girl in your class with the Cinderella backpack. She’s a kid, and you’re not kids anymore. Laugh.
This continues into adulthood. How many people have you seen dunk on ‘cringe fanfiction’, ‘bad art’, or anything else where passion clearly outstreps base level technical talent?
You might wonder what the fuck this has to do with Kingdom Hearts, and I would tell you that I kinda see the game as an analogue for that unavoidable death of youth.
Ignore the fantastical elements for a moment, and the opening hours are of three teenagers longing to find out what exists beyond the horizon of their small corner of existence, only to find out the hard way that it’s so vast as to be deeply and spiritually underwhelming. And, unfortunately for them, they’re now a part of this world. Their forced and unwanted understanding of the world around them drives wedges between them, and through this division, one of them comes into contact with an adult who no longer views them as a child but as a tool to be cultivated and used for their own games.
SImilarly, the Disney elements feel like an attempt to broach that specific brand of teenage existentialism using iconography that’s both universal to the player (unless they somehow avoided the most enduring plague of the modern age: The Walt Disney Company) and relatable to the subject of being an adolescent. Despite the relatively peppy and almost twee trappings of each ~world~, each mini arc Kingdom Hearts doesn’t exactly feel triumphant. Riku always ends up seeming further and further away from Sora, something which only gets worse as the credits roll gets closer and closer. Likewise, the Disney elements start seeming less and less magical, ultimately ending up with the iconic Princesses being used as fuel to further someone’s goals.
I know that Kairi being one of the seven Princesses might seem like the writers trying to build a connection between the Disney stuff and the OC stuff, but c’mon. Surely you must’ve known someone that, as a kid, wanted to be a Disney Princess. It’s all too fitting that such a desire is distorted for Ansem to open his gate to hell.
In particular, my adult self has always been struck by that reference to the stars disappearing out of the sky in this game. The sky sure did seem brighter when we were younger.
As a branch of all of this, it’s easy to see the Heartless as a manifestation of the particularly caustic cynicism and joylessness that awaits children once their childhood begins to evaporate. They are no longer vessels for curiosity or play, they are now cogs, bolts and conveyors in a machine whose operation they have no say in or influence over. The Heartless are a corruptive force that sap everything from the various worlds, in this case Disney ones, which slots in so perfectly as an analogue to that nasty disdain for anything childish that so many people pick up unconsciously and utterly refuse to either interrogate or dispense with.
Jason and I didn’t talk much after High School, even after fate had us in the same college class for a single lesson of the week, but he did tell me something once while we were out on a smoke break that had a lasting impact.
When my teens arrived, I threw all of my stuffed animals in a trash bag and let them fester in the bottom of my closet. Among them was a Winnie the Pooh plush that I’d had since I was literally three years old. I was a big girl then, no time for stuffies. But yet I did yearn for them - in part because I just slept better while holding something, and pillows weren’t a good substitute.
Years later, while in college, Jason - now having reformed himself as a much less ~neddy~ soul who found his passion and the ability to dress well in wargames - offhandedly mentioned that he’d slept with his stuffed bear for years. He showed me a picture, and it was a ratty old thing, but clearly well loved. I didn’t immediately change my tone regarding stuffed animals, I even laughed it off, but the subsequent year was hellish. After that, I was all too eager to crack open that trash bag and free them.
You see the same sort of attitude with Kingdom Hearts itself, really. I’ve noticed that so-called ex-fans of it often point to it as a cringe teenage hyperfixation, while also talking about it with the same fondness most people reserve for significant others or childhood friends they hold some affection for. You ever see a straight dude who’s clearly a hyper-repressed gay man talk about his ‘best friend’? Kinda like that.
KH is, to lots of people, ‘cringe’. It is naked in its sincerity and Nomura makes no attempt to hide that it’s his pinboard passion project where 90% of additions are justified with “I wanted to” and the other 10% are “Square Enix asked me to”. As with everything so unabashedly sincere, those who wear cynicism like a second skin or overly irony-poisoned nerds who still make Sonichu jokes in 2024 often dismiss it. Indeed, much like stuffed animals, so many people seem to think themselves above a game where a twink can stunlock Sephiroth with moves that’d make Vergil look amateurish.
Look, I’ll be honest, even I take potshots at KH sometimes. Not the first game, as you’ve noticed, but subsequent entries do leave a lot to be desired. Where I - and I suspect many other KH fans - differ is that most of my potshots stem from KH losing a lot of the ironclad consistency, relatively self-contained writing and airtight pacing of the first game.
I think it’s really telling that Ansem’s insistence he can “unlock people’s hearts” only leads to them becoming absolute monsters. I wonder if there’s anything to examine there. Riku, tragically, loses this fight to Ansem and becomes yet another pawn for him, while Sora’s unwillingness to entirely sever the ties that bind him to what came before is what allows him to stay free. I hesitate to even jokingly call it ‘corny’, it’s just a very upfront admission that you’ll lose your soul if you can’t keep a hold of any whimsy or an ability to engage in play.
“Mira, where does the Final Fantasy stuff slot in?”
It’s cool as fuck, next question.
Despite seeming simple and clean on the surface, Kingdom Hearts is a series I don’t think one can truly critique, praise or even react to without inadvertently revealing something about themselves that - presumably - they’d want to keep hidden. It’s one of those games where I can often tell how cynical someone is by how willing they are to dismiss everything about it off the cuff. It’s why I just opened with the personal anecdote - I hate subtext, it’s for cowards and subs.
That all said, I do find it somewhat sad that despite this game being aimed at children and teens, neither of them are particularly well equipped to explain why it might be resonant or even resonate with it in the first place. Indeed, I myself didn’t get it all the way back in 2013. They’ll find it fun, sure, but some things you only understand with time I guess.
I feel like, more than anything, the part of Kingdom Hearts that embodies all of this is the very first song you hear on the menu: Dearly Beloved. It’s hardly heroic, not even cool or foreboding. No, it’s a piece that feels sad? It somehow manages to capture that really specific feeling of seeing a normally-populated city at night for the first time and realizing that, without people occupying that space, it’s just concrete, power lines, glass and in Glasgow’s case also a sizable amount of potholes.
To end off… I silently weep for people who think they’re too old for Kingdom Hearts, or indeed for anything like it. Not because I look down on them, but because I feel losing the part of you that can enjoy things like this, stuffed animals, and goofy (hyuk) apparel must be miserable. That first death, right there in the soul, is always a harbinger of worse things to come.
But hey, it’s never too late to claw it back. You, too, can play Kingdom Hearts or spend £1000~ on stuffed rabbits.
This review contains spoilers
[Disclaimer: I’m going to spoil Lonesome Road from head to toe, but I’m also likely to spoil everything else in NV. I also need to discuss the Fallout TV Show. This is your only warning.]
I have a very nebulous relationship with the concept of ‘Death Of The Author’, but to dig into why we really need to back up a little.
You’ve probably heard the phrase “all art is political” before, and you likely have feelings on it. In having feelings on it, you’ve inadvertently validated it. When that phrase is uttered, I imagine most people’s minds dart over to the most obvious indicators of politics: Democrats, Republicans, Conservatives, Greens, etc etc.
This isn’t wrong per se, but the real meaning of “all art is political” is simple: Human beings are deeply opinionated creatures, and many of these opinions concern matters that’ve become, if not explicitly political, then at least ideological. Critics of that sentiment, lacking in self-awareness, would often point to paintings of forests or something “neutral” as a counterargument - unaware that the portrayal of nature as a calming or beautiful place is an idea that’s implicitly in support of nature and in implicit opposition to industrial expansion or deforestation. Like, c’mon dude, the idea that nothing can be something is so substantial to the human condition that we have a word specifically for it.
Now, to go back to my opening statement: As both an author myself (and one who’s had people read parts of my text in wildly different ways) and as someone who puts way too much thought into everything, I don’t necessarily believe one truly can invoke death of the author. Everything, from how one depicts the poor to what is considered ‘evil’ to how a work treats the concept of ‘order’, betrays something about the author. To me, the act of engaging with art has always been a three way split between the viewer, the art or subject, and the creator. Even the dumbest of humans, raised in isolation, would be a political creature whether they knew it or not.
With that all said, I consider Lonesome Road to be Chris Avellone’s finest work. Not out of any love for the man or even the DLC, no, but because it’s one of the few stories I can think of where I struggle to have an opinion of it.
A good chunk of that struggle comes from what I said a few sentences ago: Lonesome Road’s meaning, ideals, and politics vastly change depending on whether you prioritize Chris Avellone’s personal beliefs and intent, or whether you read the text as-is. People who’ve played Bioshock 1 may be getting serious Deja Vu right about now.
I don’t necessarily consider this a good thing, mind you. But, enough of the exposition for now. Let’s take it from the top, and talk about the text.
Lonesome Road is the culmination of a story arc alluded to in New Vegas proper (as early as the player reaches Primm, if they’re inquisitive!) and which properly began in Dead Money. This story arc revolves around the preemptively mythologized confrontation between the player (Courier Six) and a man named Ulysses - the former Courier Six.
And… I think what sticks out to me nowadays is that Lonesome Road’s meaningful content is mostly relegated to the chats with Ulysses. It’s a bit denser than the other three DLCs for sure, but much of that content is gunning down Marked Men (Ghouls but red) and Tunnelers (Trogs but brown) ad infinitum in relatively bland, linear shooting corridors. This will be important later.
As a brief recap in case you’ve not played LR for years or are just tourist-browsing: Ulysses is an ex-Caesar’s Legion Frumentarii whose tribe - the Twisted Hairs - was eventually forcibly assimilated by the Legion. He left in disgust after the White Legs tribe (from Honest Hearts) ‘honored’ him by carrying out cultural appropriation and styling their hair after Ulysses’ tribes’ signature dreadlocks. After the Legion were beaten back at the first battle of Hoover Dam, Ulysses stumbled upon a community named (and based in) The Divide.
The Divide as a community was established by people too stubborn to move, and Courier Six (again, that’s you) was their lifeline due to, well, delivering packages. Much like the rest of the territory surrounding Nevada though, it soon became a target for annexation by the NCR due to being a (functional) second highway into the Mojave. This, naturally, drew the attention of the Legion, who began enacting plots to convert or destroy it.
But it wasn’t any of the major factions that destroyed the Divide. On a routine job, Courier Six (that’s you) delivers a package to the Divide and walks away. This package, a transmitter keyed to nuclear warheads, ignites bombs underneath the Divide and destroys everything in it - NCR, civilian, Legion, you name it.
This recap is very important, I wouldn’t have included it otherwise and if you’re familiar with my writing you’re likely already aware that I fucking hate narrating the text to you.
Ulysses’ specific bone to pick with Courier Six (that’s you) is… Alright, before I begin, I need to do something out of character here: I don’t like to address other people’s criticisms directly, because these are my reviews and they should concern my opinions exclusively, right?
However, over the last ten or so years I’ve seen an alarming amount of people hate on LR for “forcing a backstory on the player”, and this criticism bothers me because it’s both wrong and hyperreactive. The only thing LR adds to Courier Six’s (that’s you) backstory is that they delivered packages to a place, and one of those deliveries went awry. This not only isn’t much of a backstory, it’s also literally the opening of the game. It’s already set in stone that Courier Six (that’s you) has walked all over the place, LR is completely inoffensive on that front. Hell, it’s entirely debatable as to whether the Courier he remembers is the same one you control: Noticeably, the player has a lot of options to recall things from their past across the game, but none to acknowledge the Divide or Ulysses.
But speaking of unworkable criticisms, let’s talk about Ulysses.
I’ve seen a lot of analytical pieces about LR and Ulysses written over the last decade, and many of them are wonderfully well-written, but… I think taking Ulysses at face value about everything is a mistake, and any approach to LR which posits him as a 100% reliable source of information that you’re meant to agree with is a non-starter.
From where I stand, it’s pretty obvious he’s both a hypocrite, and an angry man lashing out because he can’t accept that events happening by association does not mean those events have correlation. In other words, he can’t handle that “shit happens” sometimes is the only explanation.
Ulysses holds a grudge against Courier Six (that’s you) because, in simple terms, his experiences with the Divide and the Legion have convinced him that history is exclusively written by special individuals. He feels that Courier Six (that’s you) should ‘take responsibility’ for the atrocity you ‘caused’ in the Divide. This in itself is madness, for all that was done was a simple delivery - from the Enclave to the Divide. Ulysses does not hold the Enclave responsible - betraying how fake his world-weariness is - nor does he hold the NCR or the Legion responsible for what they were doing to the Divide.
Similarly, Ulysses betrays his own biases upfront in his logs and conversations. Despite his allegedly balanced approach to the world, he’s delusional enough to think the Legion is good at empire management and that the NCR are secretly the evil ones. This is despite being so high up in the Legion’s command chain that he reported to Caesar directly, and was trusted enough to attempt an assassination of Joshua Graham, so he really should know how bad things really are.
There’s also the matter to consider of his own actions. Ulysses believes he alone has a divine right to punish the Courier, the NCR and the Legion for what happened before his eyes, yet he pays no mind to anything he’s done. Ulysses is, to wit, directly responsible for the last three DLCs even occurring, set the plot of New Vegas in motion by rejecting the delivery of the Platinum Chip, and started the NCR-Legion war in its entirety by reporting the discovery of Hoover Dam to Caesar. In short, everything is his goddamn fault.
Lastly, despite the fact Ulysses will castigate the player for refusing to pick a side in the Mojave war, Ulysses himself doesn’t support any particular side and will admit upon interrogation (should he survive) that he thinks all four options are uniquely terrible. His attempts to punish the Legion and the NCR are just petty.
That said, I don’t think any of this is bad writing, no. On the contrary, I like that Ulysses is a deeply hypocritical and miserable piece of shit that’s built his entire worldview on a house of cards. People have debated the meaning of throwing “Who are you, who do not know your history?” back at him, but I’ve always taken it to be a reminder that shit does, indeed, happen. That Ulysses oftentimes was the shit that happened, and he’s no better than the Courier. Really, Ulysses being such a shitheel is in character for a game where Caesar misrepresenting Hegelian Dialectics is the first bullet point on the “Caesar is secretly a moron” list.
In a way, I’d compare Ulysses to an IRL conspiracy theorist. He’s fundamentally unable to accept that the nuking of the Divide was at worst an unfortunate, terrible terrible accident that nobody could’ve seen coming.
If anything, a lot of the guilt he seemingly wants Courier Six (that’s you) to feel reads like guilt he feels, given the overwhelming implication that he considers himself to have failed the Divide’s citizens. New Vegas’ dialogue files contain script notes, and a surprising amount of Ulysses are flagged with a note indicating that he’s trying to convince himself more than he is the player.
But this is just the text, divorced from everything I know about the real-world writing, authorial intent, and intended outcome.
Just to open on a loud note: Chris Avellone has admitted several times that Ulysses is his mouthpiece. Knowing this, I feel, drastically changes how a lot of Lonesome Road reads.
The Fallout TV show came out recently and, spoiler alert, it involves the NCR being nuked out of existence shortly after New Vegas ends (though the show’s writers got their dates wrong and had to clarify), essentially resetting the entire West Coast back to the Fallout 1 days. This sparked a lot of discussion online, surprisingly well-intentioned discussion too, about what “post-post-apocalypse” means.
As early as Fallout 2, the Fallout series had already begun to move into the post-post-apocalypse. No less than 7 major settlements occupy its map, with what’s considered to be “wilderness” vastly shrinking. Cities have already moved towards having printed/minted currency, and fledgling governments are beginning to strike out. New Vegas leans heavier into this, with the Mojave being relatively civilised and endless allusions to civilization existing beyond the playable borders. The NCR in particular have grown so large that they are, for all intents and purposes, beyond the post-apocalypse entirely.
Much of the discussion around this is derived from Bethesda’s ostensible hatred for the concept of a post-post-apocalypse. That, from where we’re standing, it seems like they want to tell stories about wastelands and misery and bad iconography forever. To me personally it was a tacit admission that Bethesda just want to make theme parks with the Fallout IP rather than games or stories. Fallout isn’t games anymore, it’s merch.
It’s worth noting that Chris Avellone is on the “keep the apocalypse forever” side of this debate, and doesn’t seem to hold much love for New Vegas’ central conceit.
Somewhat ironically for a DLC about roads, I find myself at a crossroads knowing all of this.
With Chris Avellone’s opinions and intent in mind, a lot of the praise I levelled at Lonesome Road starts to feel uncomfortable. Thorny even. Ulysses being a raving hypocrite seems like good writing at first, but knowing that Chris Avellone is just doing videogame blackface and using his self-insert to vent about how much he doesn’t like New Vegas kinda rubs me the wrong way.
And I think the reason it rubs me the wrong way is because it basically turns the DLC into Fallout 3.
Like Fallout 3, Ulyssesvellone is obsessed with both moral dichotomies and a very straightforward, incurious depiction of a ~post-apocalypse~. There’s a lot of decay in New Vegas, but it tends to shy away from outright ruination. Lonesome Road, naturally, sets the counter back to Fallout 3’s corner - the asset reuse from 3’s Raven Rock just adds to it.
Like Fallout 3, Lonesome Road is a hallway shooter with little in the way of exploration and a somewhat gratuitous obsession with gore, dark tunnels and subways.
And, like Fallout 3, the fail state isn’t actually any choices you do or don’t make. It’s speech checks. NV loves its dialogue checks, sure, but it both varies the skills you need to use (rather than JUST speech) and offers alternatives either in the forms or hidden objectives or in reactivity to things you’ve already done. Ulysses only demanding a speech or reputation check calls back to Colonel Autumn in ways that might not’ve been intended.
But where the Fallout 3 comparisons really start getting bothersome, they really get bothersome. In my Fallout 3 review I talked at length about how that game is obsessed with great men and how they’re the only ones allowed to lead civilization.
New Vegas steps back from this significantly: The Legion isn’t held aloft by one great man 0 it just thinks it is - but tons of subjugated and indoctrinated tribals using guerrilla warfare, tribal assimilation and salted earth tactics.
The NCR wins fights with well-equipped and well trained soldiers, but those soldiers are just people. Even Courier Six (that’s you) is just some schmuck.
House and the Legion crumple easily because they put all of their eggs in one human-sized basket, and if that basket is killed then it’s all over. Really, House and Caesar feel like scathing commentary on the whole concept.
Lonesome Road sort of veers back into that territory though. As a mouthpiece, Ulysses designates himself as a divine prophet that can pick who is the right great man to restore civilization, and explicitly calls out all factions as unworthy. In his eyes, it’s only you that can dictate the path of civilization.
Now, NV isn’t perfect about avoiding great man stuff, few RPGs are, but it’s very upfront with the idea that you’re just Some Guy who accidentally stumbled into a position of importance. Indeed, I can’t help but wonder if the relative unimportance you actually have initially is what makes it so compelling. So to suddenly have Courier Six (that’s you) be so important, and placed on such a pedestal, is alarming.
There’s also this strange dissonance between LR’s attempts to show you the horrors of nuclear bombs firsthand in the Divide, and the almost fetishistic veneration it actually has for nukes. I loathed the Fat Man in 3, resent its inclusion in New Vegas, hate that cars are nuclear bombs waiting to go off, and am frankly kind of annoyed that small-scale nuclear warheads are so commonplace in Lonesome Road. There’s a very strange love for the nuke underscoring Lonesome Road that is, to be entirely honest, a lot more alarming here than it was in Fallout 3 or 4.
I don’t think Chris Avellone is a total hack, he did write Planescape almost entirely by himself after all, but he’s more often than not one of the lesser RPG writers than he is one of the greats. Lonesome Road, to me, is a very curtains-pulled moment. It’s layered in a left-handed, overly serious derision for its source material and seems to care more about itself than anything around it, both of which are the same reasons why KOTOR 2 can be so suffocating - though LR thankfully has no women to be misogynistic about.
It’s a window into what a lot of his contributions to games end up as. I have an endless distaste for Divinity Original Sin 2’s Fane because he just reeks of that white nerd writing Avellone unfortunately built a career on. LR isn’t trying to be funny, at least, but there’s a sort of… Condescension, I’d say, baked into the foundation.
It’s funny, if you think about it. Remember when people thought the finale to LR was stupid? How the hell was one man gonna nuke the NCR? That’s an insane thing to put in a DLC.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand then the Fallout TV show did it anyway. One has to wonder how Bethesda feels about Courier Six (that’s us) despite their claims of love.
I realize this might come across as me hating Chris Avellone, and I don't - even if he is a weird ghoul who struggles to say much of anything. I just deeply dislike his work, because even decades later it still has that weird grease to it that makes playing Fallout 2 so suffocating. Said dislike comes to a head here, in a DLC where his OC goes on stage and proclaims that everything in NV sucks and everyone involved is stupid. If anything, this review is more about the Fallout TV show than anything, as LR lays the groundwork for what came next.
I want to end off with a funny joke, but nothing comes to mind. Uh... Isn't it funny that the single part of NV's overall narrative that tries to say "all sides are wrong" ends up being more wrong than anyone involve in the Mojave, yet Ulysses will try to call you a centrist if you don't have particularly high faction rep?
I dunno man. The more I think about this DLC the more it feels like self-parody, and I regret knowing that it's meant to be taken seriously.
I have a very nebulous relationship with the concept of ‘Death Of The Author’, but to dig into why we really need to back up a little.
You’ve probably heard the phrase “all art is political” before, and you likely have feelings on it. In having feelings on it, you’ve inadvertently validated it. When that phrase is uttered, I imagine most people’s minds dart over to the most obvious indicators of politics: Democrats, Republicans, Conservatives, Greens, etc etc.
This isn’t wrong per se, but the real meaning of “all art is political” is simple: Human beings are deeply opinionated creatures, and many of these opinions concern matters that’ve become, if not explicitly political, then at least ideological. Critics of that sentiment, lacking in self-awareness, would often point to paintings of forests or something “neutral” as a counterargument - unaware that the portrayal of nature as a calming or beautiful place is an idea that’s implicitly in support of nature and in implicit opposition to industrial expansion or deforestation. Like, c’mon dude, the idea that nothing can be something is so substantial to the human condition that we have a word specifically for it.
Now, to go back to my opening statement: As both an author myself (and one who’s had people read parts of my text in wildly different ways) and as someone who puts way too much thought into everything, I don’t necessarily believe one truly can invoke death of the author. Everything, from how one depicts the poor to what is considered ‘evil’ to how a work treats the concept of ‘order’, betrays something about the author. To me, the act of engaging with art has always been a three way split between the viewer, the art or subject, and the creator. Even the dumbest of humans, raised in isolation, would be a political creature whether they knew it or not.
With that all said, I consider Lonesome Road to be Chris Avellone’s finest work. Not out of any love for the man or even the DLC, no, but because it’s one of the few stories I can think of where I struggle to have an opinion of it.
A good chunk of that struggle comes from what I said a few sentences ago: Lonesome Road’s meaning, ideals, and politics vastly change depending on whether you prioritize Chris Avellone’s personal beliefs and intent, or whether you read the text as-is. People who’ve played Bioshock 1 may be getting serious Deja Vu right about now.
I don’t necessarily consider this a good thing, mind you. But, enough of the exposition for now. Let’s take it from the top, and talk about the text.
Lonesome Road is the culmination of a story arc alluded to in New Vegas proper (as early as the player reaches Primm, if they’re inquisitive!) and which properly began in Dead Money. This story arc revolves around the preemptively mythologized confrontation between the player (Courier Six) and a man named Ulysses - the former Courier Six.
And… I think what sticks out to me nowadays is that Lonesome Road’s meaningful content is mostly relegated to the chats with Ulysses. It’s a bit denser than the other three DLCs for sure, but much of that content is gunning down Marked Men (Ghouls but red) and Tunnelers (Trogs but brown) ad infinitum in relatively bland, linear shooting corridors. This will be important later.
As a brief recap in case you’ve not played LR for years or are just tourist-browsing: Ulysses is an ex-Caesar’s Legion Frumentarii whose tribe - the Twisted Hairs - was eventually forcibly assimilated by the Legion. He left in disgust after the White Legs tribe (from Honest Hearts) ‘honored’ him by carrying out cultural appropriation and styling their hair after Ulysses’ tribes’ signature dreadlocks. After the Legion were beaten back at the first battle of Hoover Dam, Ulysses stumbled upon a community named (and based in) The Divide.
The Divide as a community was established by people too stubborn to move, and Courier Six (again, that’s you) was their lifeline due to, well, delivering packages. Much like the rest of the territory surrounding Nevada though, it soon became a target for annexation by the NCR due to being a (functional) second highway into the Mojave. This, naturally, drew the attention of the Legion, who began enacting plots to convert or destroy it.
But it wasn’t any of the major factions that destroyed the Divide. On a routine job, Courier Six (that’s you) delivers a package to the Divide and walks away. This package, a transmitter keyed to nuclear warheads, ignites bombs underneath the Divide and destroys everything in it - NCR, civilian, Legion, you name it.
This recap is very important, I wouldn’t have included it otherwise and if you’re familiar with my writing you’re likely already aware that I fucking hate narrating the text to you.
Ulysses’ specific bone to pick with Courier Six (that’s you) is… Alright, before I begin, I need to do something out of character here: I don’t like to address other people’s criticisms directly, because these are my reviews and they should concern my opinions exclusively, right?
However, over the last ten or so years I’ve seen an alarming amount of people hate on LR for “forcing a backstory on the player”, and this criticism bothers me because it’s both wrong and hyperreactive. The only thing LR adds to Courier Six’s (that’s you) backstory is that they delivered packages to a place, and one of those deliveries went awry. This not only isn’t much of a backstory, it’s also literally the opening of the game. It’s already set in stone that Courier Six (that’s you) has walked all over the place, LR is completely inoffensive on that front. Hell, it’s entirely debatable as to whether the Courier he remembers is the same one you control: Noticeably, the player has a lot of options to recall things from their past across the game, but none to acknowledge the Divide or Ulysses.
But speaking of unworkable criticisms, let’s talk about Ulysses.
I’ve seen a lot of analytical pieces about LR and Ulysses written over the last decade, and many of them are wonderfully well-written, but… I think taking Ulysses at face value about everything is a mistake, and any approach to LR which posits him as a 100% reliable source of information that you’re meant to agree with is a non-starter.
From where I stand, it’s pretty obvious he’s both a hypocrite, and an angry man lashing out because he can’t accept that events happening by association does not mean those events have correlation. In other words, he can’t handle that “shit happens” sometimes is the only explanation.
Ulysses holds a grudge against Courier Six (that’s you) because, in simple terms, his experiences with the Divide and the Legion have convinced him that history is exclusively written by special individuals. He feels that Courier Six (that’s you) should ‘take responsibility’ for the atrocity you ‘caused’ in the Divide. This in itself is madness, for all that was done was a simple delivery - from the Enclave to the Divide. Ulysses does not hold the Enclave responsible - betraying how fake his world-weariness is - nor does he hold the NCR or the Legion responsible for what they were doing to the Divide.
Similarly, Ulysses betrays his own biases upfront in his logs and conversations. Despite his allegedly balanced approach to the world, he’s delusional enough to think the Legion is good at empire management and that the NCR are secretly the evil ones. This is despite being so high up in the Legion’s command chain that he reported to Caesar directly, and was trusted enough to attempt an assassination of Joshua Graham, so he really should know how bad things really are.
There’s also the matter to consider of his own actions. Ulysses believes he alone has a divine right to punish the Courier, the NCR and the Legion for what happened before his eyes, yet he pays no mind to anything he’s done. Ulysses is, to wit, directly responsible for the last three DLCs even occurring, set the plot of New Vegas in motion by rejecting the delivery of the Platinum Chip, and started the NCR-Legion war in its entirety by reporting the discovery of Hoover Dam to Caesar. In short, everything is his goddamn fault.
Lastly, despite the fact Ulysses will castigate the player for refusing to pick a side in the Mojave war, Ulysses himself doesn’t support any particular side and will admit upon interrogation (should he survive) that he thinks all four options are uniquely terrible. His attempts to punish the Legion and the NCR are just petty.
That said, I don’t think any of this is bad writing, no. On the contrary, I like that Ulysses is a deeply hypocritical and miserable piece of shit that’s built his entire worldview on a house of cards. People have debated the meaning of throwing “Who are you, who do not know your history?” back at him, but I’ve always taken it to be a reminder that shit does, indeed, happen. That Ulysses oftentimes was the shit that happened, and he’s no better than the Courier. Really, Ulysses being such a shitheel is in character for a game where Caesar misrepresenting Hegelian Dialectics is the first bullet point on the “Caesar is secretly a moron” list.
In a way, I’d compare Ulysses to an IRL conspiracy theorist. He’s fundamentally unable to accept that the nuking of the Divide was at worst an unfortunate, terrible terrible accident that nobody could’ve seen coming.
If anything, a lot of the guilt he seemingly wants Courier Six (that’s you) to feel reads like guilt he feels, given the overwhelming implication that he considers himself to have failed the Divide’s citizens. New Vegas’ dialogue files contain script notes, and a surprising amount of Ulysses are flagged with a note indicating that he’s trying to convince himself more than he is the player.
But this is just the text, divorced from everything I know about the real-world writing, authorial intent, and intended outcome.
Just to open on a loud note: Chris Avellone has admitted several times that Ulysses is his mouthpiece. Knowing this, I feel, drastically changes how a lot of Lonesome Road reads.
The Fallout TV show came out recently and, spoiler alert, it involves the NCR being nuked out of existence shortly after New Vegas ends (though the show’s writers got their dates wrong and had to clarify), essentially resetting the entire West Coast back to the Fallout 1 days. This sparked a lot of discussion online, surprisingly well-intentioned discussion too, about what “post-post-apocalypse” means.
As early as Fallout 2, the Fallout series had already begun to move into the post-post-apocalypse. No less than 7 major settlements occupy its map, with what’s considered to be “wilderness” vastly shrinking. Cities have already moved towards having printed/minted currency, and fledgling governments are beginning to strike out. New Vegas leans heavier into this, with the Mojave being relatively civilised and endless allusions to civilization existing beyond the playable borders. The NCR in particular have grown so large that they are, for all intents and purposes, beyond the post-apocalypse entirely.
Much of the discussion around this is derived from Bethesda’s ostensible hatred for the concept of a post-post-apocalypse. That, from where we’re standing, it seems like they want to tell stories about wastelands and misery and bad iconography forever. To me personally it was a tacit admission that Bethesda just want to make theme parks with the Fallout IP rather than games or stories. Fallout isn’t games anymore, it’s merch.
It’s worth noting that Chris Avellone is on the “keep the apocalypse forever” side of this debate, and doesn’t seem to hold much love for New Vegas’ central conceit.
Somewhat ironically for a DLC about roads, I find myself at a crossroads knowing all of this.
With Chris Avellone’s opinions and intent in mind, a lot of the praise I levelled at Lonesome Road starts to feel uncomfortable. Thorny even. Ulysses being a raving hypocrite seems like good writing at first, but knowing that Chris Avellone is just doing videogame blackface and using his self-insert to vent about how much he doesn’t like New Vegas kinda rubs me the wrong way.
And I think the reason it rubs me the wrong way is because it basically turns the DLC into Fallout 3.
Like Fallout 3, Ulyssesvellone is obsessed with both moral dichotomies and a very straightforward, incurious depiction of a ~post-apocalypse~. There’s a lot of decay in New Vegas, but it tends to shy away from outright ruination. Lonesome Road, naturally, sets the counter back to Fallout 3’s corner - the asset reuse from 3’s Raven Rock just adds to it.
Like Fallout 3, Lonesome Road is a hallway shooter with little in the way of exploration and a somewhat gratuitous obsession with gore, dark tunnels and subways.
And, like Fallout 3, the fail state isn’t actually any choices you do or don’t make. It’s speech checks. NV loves its dialogue checks, sure, but it both varies the skills you need to use (rather than JUST speech) and offers alternatives either in the forms or hidden objectives or in reactivity to things you’ve already done. Ulysses only demanding a speech or reputation check calls back to Colonel Autumn in ways that might not’ve been intended.
But where the Fallout 3 comparisons really start getting bothersome, they really get bothersome. In my Fallout 3 review I talked at length about how that game is obsessed with great men and how they’re the only ones allowed to lead civilization.
New Vegas steps back from this significantly: The Legion isn’t held aloft by one great man 0 it just thinks it is - but tons of subjugated and indoctrinated tribals using guerrilla warfare, tribal assimilation and salted earth tactics.
The NCR wins fights with well-equipped and well trained soldiers, but those soldiers are just people. Even Courier Six (that’s you) is just some schmuck.
House and the Legion crumple easily because they put all of their eggs in one human-sized basket, and if that basket is killed then it’s all over. Really, House and Caesar feel like scathing commentary on the whole concept.
Lonesome Road sort of veers back into that territory though. As a mouthpiece, Ulysses designates himself as a divine prophet that can pick who is the right great man to restore civilization, and explicitly calls out all factions as unworthy. In his eyes, it’s only you that can dictate the path of civilization.
Now, NV isn’t perfect about avoiding great man stuff, few RPGs are, but it’s very upfront with the idea that you’re just Some Guy who accidentally stumbled into a position of importance. Indeed, I can’t help but wonder if the relative unimportance you actually have initially is what makes it so compelling. So to suddenly have Courier Six (that’s you) be so important, and placed on such a pedestal, is alarming.
There’s also this strange dissonance between LR’s attempts to show you the horrors of nuclear bombs firsthand in the Divide, and the almost fetishistic veneration it actually has for nukes. I loathed the Fat Man in 3, resent its inclusion in New Vegas, hate that cars are nuclear bombs waiting to go off, and am frankly kind of annoyed that small-scale nuclear warheads are so commonplace in Lonesome Road. There’s a very strange love for the nuke underscoring Lonesome Road that is, to be entirely honest, a lot more alarming here than it was in Fallout 3 or 4.
I don’t think Chris Avellone is a total hack, he did write Planescape almost entirely by himself after all, but he’s more often than not one of the lesser RPG writers than he is one of the greats. Lonesome Road, to me, is a very curtains-pulled moment. It’s layered in a left-handed, overly serious derision for its source material and seems to care more about itself than anything around it, both of which are the same reasons why KOTOR 2 can be so suffocating - though LR thankfully has no women to be misogynistic about.
It’s a window into what a lot of his contributions to games end up as. I have an endless distaste for Divinity Original Sin 2’s Fane because he just reeks of that white nerd writing Avellone unfortunately built a career on. LR isn’t trying to be funny, at least, but there’s a sort of… Condescension, I’d say, baked into the foundation.
It’s funny, if you think about it. Remember when people thought the finale to LR was stupid? How the hell was one man gonna nuke the NCR? That’s an insane thing to put in a DLC.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand then the Fallout TV show did it anyway. One has to wonder how Bethesda feels about Courier Six (that’s us) despite their claims of love.
I realize this might come across as me hating Chris Avellone, and I don't - even if he is a weird ghoul who struggles to say much of anything. I just deeply dislike his work, because even decades later it still has that weird grease to it that makes playing Fallout 2 so suffocating. Said dislike comes to a head here, in a DLC where his OC goes on stage and proclaims that everything in NV sucks and everyone involved is stupid. If anything, this review is more about the Fallout TV show than anything, as LR lays the groundwork for what came next.
I want to end off with a funny joke, but nothing comes to mind. Uh... Isn't it funny that the single part of NV's overall narrative that tries to say "all sides are wrong" ends up being more wrong than anyone involve in the Mojave, yet Ulysses will try to call you a centrist if you don't have particularly high faction rep?
I dunno man. The more I think about this DLC the more it feels like self-parody, and I regret knowing that it's meant to be taken seriously.
Kingdom Hearts
2002
kingdom hearts goes so hard when you are no longer beholden to old expectations of lacking any semblance of childishness that the men and your peers in your life instilled in you growing up
One of my favorite units in any RTS are the AoE2 Teutonic Knights, which like many things in this have been historically modified for the sake of gameplay.
The real Teutonic Knights were a bunch of catholic dudes on horseback, while in this game they fight on foot and walk very slowly towards their opponents with their swords at their sides and beat the shit out of cavalry, trebuchets, and entire castles with nothing but that same sword. They're little tin can armor fellas in capes with stats equivalent to Mammoth Tanks from Command & Conquer, except they'd probably solo Kirov Airships too if you gave them jetpacks. Hell, could you imagine what would happen if you gave them a skateboard or a set of rollerblades? It's nightmarish imagining such a scenario, every archer would piss their pants at the sight of these guys sliding at them downhill with their swords pointed towards them.
Simplicity is sometimes the most endearing thing.
This had to have been my dad's favorite game ever at least on the ol' piece of shit Gateway PC. He was always a sucker for medieval warfare, and honestly I ain't exactly straying from the same path of interests he had, at least in this instance. It was an all too common occurrence to constantly hear the "under attack" alert ring out through the apartment. It was only slightly less funnier than the Empire Earth alert that was some pompous bastard bellowing "WE'RE UNDER ATTACK" even when an unthreatening bronze age slinger was bouncing stones off a space age chicken walker.
Between playing this, Balatro, and Picross I can't help but feel like I'm slowly turning into a hodgepodge of both my dad and my grandma. ;-;
The real Teutonic Knights were a bunch of catholic dudes on horseback, while in this game they fight on foot and walk very slowly towards their opponents with their swords at their sides and beat the shit out of cavalry, trebuchets, and entire castles with nothing but that same sword. They're little tin can armor fellas in capes with stats equivalent to Mammoth Tanks from Command & Conquer, except they'd probably solo Kirov Airships too if you gave them jetpacks. Hell, could you imagine what would happen if you gave them a skateboard or a set of rollerblades? It's nightmarish imagining such a scenario, every archer would piss their pants at the sight of these guys sliding at them downhill with their swords pointed towards them.
Simplicity is sometimes the most endearing thing.
This had to have been my dad's favorite game ever at least on the ol' piece of shit Gateway PC. He was always a sucker for medieval warfare, and honestly I ain't exactly straying from the same path of interests he had, at least in this instance. It was an all too common occurrence to constantly hear the "under attack" alert ring out through the apartment. It was only slightly less funnier than the Empire Earth alert that was some pompous bastard bellowing "WE'RE UNDER ATTACK" even when an unthreatening bronze age slinger was bouncing stones off a space age chicken walker.
Between playing this, Balatro, and Picross I can't help but feel like I'm slowly turning into a hodgepodge of both my dad and my grandma. ;-;
For followers of the Ace Attorney franchise, Dai Gyakuten Saiban appeared to be an unattainable mirage. Released in 2015 and never localised, the title was a distant beacon that players were desperately trying to experience. The situation had already happened in the past with Gyakuten Kenji 2 (2011). The game was a follow-up to the first spin-off which already featured Miles Edgeworth. In that case, the combination of the disappointing sales of the first opus and the impossibility of splitting the localisation team on both Gyakuten Kenji 2 and the upcoming Dual Destinies (2013) prevented the game from being released outside Japan. The Ace Attorney community being tenacious, they set about an unofficial translation, the quality of which must be underlined for amateur work. Thus, it was the Scarlet Study team that took on the unofficial translation of Dai Gyakuten Saiban, shortly after a playthrough with English subtitles was released online.
A titanic task if ever there was one. This fan localisation also shines through in its tendency towards professionalism and was well on its way to completing the entirety of the two games released, before leaks took the public by surprise, announcing the official localisation in a single collection, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. The following months would confirm these rumours and the localisation was carried out by Janet Hsu, whose challenge here is particular. Unlike the main series, for which the localisation embraced an Americanisation of all Japanese place names and cultural markers, The Great Ace Attorney only makes sense by respecting the spirit and letter of the terms used.
Indeed, the title places us in the shoes of Ryunosuke Naruhodo, ancestor of Phoenix Wright, and young Japanese student. His adventures will lead him to become a defence lawyer and to cross the globe to settle in the Victorian United Kingdom, with Herlock Sholmes. He is accompanied by Susato Mikotoba, a legal assistant caught in the conservative fire of legal institutions. This historical context is the cornerstone of the title's social and political discourse, as well as the narrative economy, so that it is impossible to transpose Meiji era Japan to a fantasy creation that copies the United States. This historical stability thus brings an element of complexity, since it is a question of translating dialogues, but also a continuum of reactions – drawn from reality – that underlie behaviours at the turn of the 20th century.
It would be difficult for me to set out here all the issues related to translation, as they are so rich and plural. Nevertheless, I would like to insist briefly on the ability to transcribe strangeness in the official localisation, something that is lacking in the fan localisation. Indeed, for a Western audience – especially if they are familiar with the mysteries of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction – the Victorian spirit should not be too disorienting. For our protagonists, the situation is quite different, and conveying this impression of surprise and novelty is a difficult operation, when all the text is in English. Susato and Ryunosuke use idioms and comparisons with Japanese elements to express their perplexity and it is the translation of such elements that is the great challenge of the localisation. For more on this, I can only recommend the extremely interesting blog posts by Janet Hsu.
But what about the game itself? I'm not ashamed to say that the title has quickly become one of my favourite games, crowning an exceptional franchise in my opinion. The Ace Attorney formula is generally well known: a succession of four or five cases, in which our protagonist alternates between investigation and trial sequences. In the former, the gameplay is close to traditional point&clicks, in a tradition that may remind us of The Portopia Serial Murder Case (1983) and all the games that follow. The trial phases are visual novels with cross-examination sequences where the aim is essentially to dismantle the testimonies by pointing out the contradictions they have with the case file. If the formula has always worked well, it must be said that certain recurrent criticisms point to the length of the investigation phases and a certain artificiality in the rhythm of the cases. I agree with them overall and was very surprised to see that The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles sweeps away these problems with exceptional ease.
For the first five cases, the pace is impeccably supported by a single investigative sequence, followed by the trial court portion. Even when the traditional formula returns for the last four cases, the pace is judiciously thought out, thanks to an elegant tangle of narrative threads. Indeed, in the vein of Gyakuten Kenji, The Great Ace Attorney has several overarching mysteries, within which are nestled smaller mysteries, solved with each case. This matriochka structure keeps the dramatic tension high and highlights the corruption that permeates the British Empire and its Japanese counterpart.
The Great Ace Attorney is a far cry from Apollo Justice and does not omit the political aspect in its criticism of the judicial system. This was very bland in the main series with a dark age of the law that had no formal consequences, so it was more of a background that awkwardly justified Phoenix Wright's suspension. Here, the corruption is felt in the gameplay from the third case onwards, and it persists throughout the rest of the game, through subtly revolting elements that challenge Ryunosuke and Susato's certainties.
In general, all the elements, beyond their comic and narrative strengths, aim to highlight structural problems in British and Japanese society, indirectly shedding light on very contemporary concerns. The plunge into Victorian London for Japanese students is highlighted by the main cast, but also the figure of Natsume Souseki, whose restlessness helps to convey the difficulty of adapting to a decidedly foreign society. The insistence on taxes points to the horror of the British social classes, in contrast to the aristocratic image that some characters give off – van Zieks, but more generally the entire judicial institution. Whether in the third, fifth, seventh or eighth case, The Great Ace Attorney is careful to highlight the problem of science at a time when a methodical revolution is taking place. The birth of forensic science and forensics allows the title to discuss what science is and what it can do.
For the game takes up the character of Sherlock Holmes – here localised as Herlock Sholmes, as Maurice Leblanc did in his time – but all the themes that are addressed in the Doylian stories. Shu Takumi shows a remarkable love for the Holmesian canon, reinterpreting and blending iconic investigations into his own universe, as well as classic detective fiction, as references abound and there are more or less sustained tributes to Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr, Edogawa Rampo and Gilbert Keith Chesterton. I would have loved to go into more detail about these references, but that would require a full explanation of the cases, and I prefer to leave the pleasure of discovery to the reader. In any case, lovers of classic detective stories can only be seduced by Shu Takumi's approach, which offers an exceptional recital on well-known themes and tropes.
Finally, a word on the technical achievement. If Ace Attorney has always been known for its exceptional sprite work and impeccable staging – thanks to a remarkable sound effects job – The Great Ace Attorney raises the discipline to the best of the franchise. The animations are exceptionally beautiful and the sense of timing is always perfect. While the first five cases use some animated scenes in its cinematics, the last five are content to use the game's engine, but there is no room for reproach, as the composition is so well mastered.
In this respect, the musical work is undoubtedly the best in the series, with a subtle play in the instrumentation, which marries Western orchestras with Japanese influences and instruments – in a way that also recalls the work of Yu-Peng Chen on Genshin Impact. On a personal note, The Great Ace Attorney has my favourite soundtrack of the entire franchise, for the enveloping nature of the tracks and its solemnity, which I particularly enjoy. The dubbing is not to be outdone, as it suits the characters perfectly; in particular, the fact that the actors for the Japanese students are British dubbers of Japanese descent – thus Mark Ota, Rina Takasaki and Ben Deery – contributes to the overall atmosphere.
I could go on and on about the characters being some of the funniest in the franchise and the sincerity that emanates from the game, but what can I say except that they contribute to one of my most cherished video game experiences? I've always had a foreign fascination with the late 19th century and pre-war era. To see characters evolve in this setting, in their fortunes and misfortunes, has been a source of exceptional joy.
No doubt the fact that I shared this experience with my parents – in that respect, how perfect is the Ace Attorney franchise for introducing newcomers to video games! – makes it special. But few games, in any case, are able to take me from tears to laughter in a matter of moments. It's a title that makes no concessions on its themes, on its political discourse, and that remains exceptionally sweet, with a high level of humanity. John Watson, in the Holmesian canon, observed of Mary Marson: "A wondrous subtle thing is love, for here were we two, who had never seen each other before that day, between whom no word or even look of affection had ever passed, and yet now in an hour of trouble our hands instinctively sought for each other... So we stood hand in hand like two children, and there was peace in our hearts for all the dark things that surrounded us." The atmosphere in this quote is the feeling that The Great Ace Attorney evokes in my heart, when I think of it again. A masterwork, without any doubt.
A titanic task if ever there was one. This fan localisation also shines through in its tendency towards professionalism and was well on its way to completing the entirety of the two games released, before leaks took the public by surprise, announcing the official localisation in a single collection, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. The following months would confirm these rumours and the localisation was carried out by Janet Hsu, whose challenge here is particular. Unlike the main series, for which the localisation embraced an Americanisation of all Japanese place names and cultural markers, The Great Ace Attorney only makes sense by respecting the spirit and letter of the terms used.
Indeed, the title places us in the shoes of Ryunosuke Naruhodo, ancestor of Phoenix Wright, and young Japanese student. His adventures will lead him to become a defence lawyer and to cross the globe to settle in the Victorian United Kingdom, with Herlock Sholmes. He is accompanied by Susato Mikotoba, a legal assistant caught in the conservative fire of legal institutions. This historical context is the cornerstone of the title's social and political discourse, as well as the narrative economy, so that it is impossible to transpose Meiji era Japan to a fantasy creation that copies the United States. This historical stability thus brings an element of complexity, since it is a question of translating dialogues, but also a continuum of reactions – drawn from reality – that underlie behaviours at the turn of the 20th century.
It would be difficult for me to set out here all the issues related to translation, as they are so rich and plural. Nevertheless, I would like to insist briefly on the ability to transcribe strangeness in the official localisation, something that is lacking in the fan localisation. Indeed, for a Western audience – especially if they are familiar with the mysteries of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction – the Victorian spirit should not be too disorienting. For our protagonists, the situation is quite different, and conveying this impression of surprise and novelty is a difficult operation, when all the text is in English. Susato and Ryunosuke use idioms and comparisons with Japanese elements to express their perplexity and it is the translation of such elements that is the great challenge of the localisation. For more on this, I can only recommend the extremely interesting blog posts by Janet Hsu.
But what about the game itself? I'm not ashamed to say that the title has quickly become one of my favourite games, crowning an exceptional franchise in my opinion. The Ace Attorney formula is generally well known: a succession of four or five cases, in which our protagonist alternates between investigation and trial sequences. In the former, the gameplay is close to traditional point&clicks, in a tradition that may remind us of The Portopia Serial Murder Case (1983) and all the games that follow. The trial phases are visual novels with cross-examination sequences where the aim is essentially to dismantle the testimonies by pointing out the contradictions they have with the case file. If the formula has always worked well, it must be said that certain recurrent criticisms point to the length of the investigation phases and a certain artificiality in the rhythm of the cases. I agree with them overall and was very surprised to see that The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles sweeps away these problems with exceptional ease.
For the first five cases, the pace is impeccably supported by a single investigative sequence, followed by the trial court portion. Even when the traditional formula returns for the last four cases, the pace is judiciously thought out, thanks to an elegant tangle of narrative threads. Indeed, in the vein of Gyakuten Kenji, The Great Ace Attorney has several overarching mysteries, within which are nestled smaller mysteries, solved with each case. This matriochka structure keeps the dramatic tension high and highlights the corruption that permeates the British Empire and its Japanese counterpart.
The Great Ace Attorney is a far cry from Apollo Justice and does not omit the political aspect in its criticism of the judicial system. This was very bland in the main series with a dark age of the law that had no formal consequences, so it was more of a background that awkwardly justified Phoenix Wright's suspension. Here, the corruption is felt in the gameplay from the third case onwards, and it persists throughout the rest of the game, through subtly revolting elements that challenge Ryunosuke and Susato's certainties.
In general, all the elements, beyond their comic and narrative strengths, aim to highlight structural problems in British and Japanese society, indirectly shedding light on very contemporary concerns. The plunge into Victorian London for Japanese students is highlighted by the main cast, but also the figure of Natsume Souseki, whose restlessness helps to convey the difficulty of adapting to a decidedly foreign society. The insistence on taxes points to the horror of the British social classes, in contrast to the aristocratic image that some characters give off – van Zieks, but more generally the entire judicial institution. Whether in the third, fifth, seventh or eighth case, The Great Ace Attorney is careful to highlight the problem of science at a time when a methodical revolution is taking place. The birth of forensic science and forensics allows the title to discuss what science is and what it can do.
For the game takes up the character of Sherlock Holmes – here localised as Herlock Sholmes, as Maurice Leblanc did in his time – but all the themes that are addressed in the Doylian stories. Shu Takumi shows a remarkable love for the Holmesian canon, reinterpreting and blending iconic investigations into his own universe, as well as classic detective fiction, as references abound and there are more or less sustained tributes to Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr, Edogawa Rampo and Gilbert Keith Chesterton. I would have loved to go into more detail about these references, but that would require a full explanation of the cases, and I prefer to leave the pleasure of discovery to the reader. In any case, lovers of classic detective stories can only be seduced by Shu Takumi's approach, which offers an exceptional recital on well-known themes and tropes.
Finally, a word on the technical achievement. If Ace Attorney has always been known for its exceptional sprite work and impeccable staging – thanks to a remarkable sound effects job – The Great Ace Attorney raises the discipline to the best of the franchise. The animations are exceptionally beautiful and the sense of timing is always perfect. While the first five cases use some animated scenes in its cinematics, the last five are content to use the game's engine, but there is no room for reproach, as the composition is so well mastered.
In this respect, the musical work is undoubtedly the best in the series, with a subtle play in the instrumentation, which marries Western orchestras with Japanese influences and instruments – in a way that also recalls the work of Yu-Peng Chen on Genshin Impact. On a personal note, The Great Ace Attorney has my favourite soundtrack of the entire franchise, for the enveloping nature of the tracks and its solemnity, which I particularly enjoy. The dubbing is not to be outdone, as it suits the characters perfectly; in particular, the fact that the actors for the Japanese students are British dubbers of Japanese descent – thus Mark Ota, Rina Takasaki and Ben Deery – contributes to the overall atmosphere.
I could go on and on about the characters being some of the funniest in the franchise and the sincerity that emanates from the game, but what can I say except that they contribute to one of my most cherished video game experiences? I've always had a foreign fascination with the late 19th century and pre-war era. To see characters evolve in this setting, in their fortunes and misfortunes, has been a source of exceptional joy.
No doubt the fact that I shared this experience with my parents – in that respect, how perfect is the Ace Attorney franchise for introducing newcomers to video games! – makes it special. But few games, in any case, are able to take me from tears to laughter in a matter of moments. It's a title that makes no concessions on its themes, on its political discourse, and that remains exceptionally sweet, with a high level of humanity. John Watson, in the Holmesian canon, observed of Mary Marson: "A wondrous subtle thing is love, for here were we two, who had never seen each other before that day, between whom no word or even look of affection had ever passed, and yet now in an hour of trouble our hands instinctively sought for each other... So we stood hand in hand like two children, and there was peace in our hearts for all the dark things that surrounded us." The atmosphere in this quote is the feeling that The Great Ace Attorney evokes in my heart, when I think of it again. A masterwork, without any doubt.
I have so much to say about this one that I don't know how to structure it in a coherent or meaningful way, so I'll try to keep it short. This is exclusively for the base game; I'll record my thoughts on the expansions separately.
Final Fantasy XI strikes a balance between the traditional simple writing of classic JRPGs (like the first five Final Fantasy games) and the thematic density that defined the JRPGs of the late 90s (like the five Final Fantasy games that came before it). What it lacks in character writing, it makes up for in the strength of its themes and a hyper-sharp focus on the single most important part of any MMO: the world.
Vana'diel as a setting is the true main character of Final Fantasy XI, and every aspect of the game is sculpted in a way that strengthens its distinct feel. Vana'diel wouldn't feel the same without the game's trademark extreme difficulty, nor the somber and mournful tone of the lore, nor the otherworldly ambiance that permates the very act of simply existing in one of the game's many enormous zones. In many ways I feel as if playing the game solo in what is effectively a dead server only intensified this experience; much of Final Fantasy XI is shaped around the idea of Vana'diel's permanent change (or lack thereof) in the wake of a cataclysmic event that changed the world forever. When wandering around alone in the remains of what was once a trailblazing title in the MMO sphere, one's connection with Vana'diel's ever-present sense of sorrow and loss is only intensified: there was once something lively and prosperous here, only to wither away until it and its inhabitants manage to simply skirt on by.
Masato Kato's writing accentuates this feeling; he builds on many of the same themes, ideas and messages as in his previous title Chrono Cross (My Favorite Game Of All Time Btw) while managing to convey them using a more streamlined and conventionally-coherent plot structure. Admittedly the mechanical structure of the game hampers the impact of these ideas a bit (as much as Kato loves to write about the plight of wildlife and beastfolk in JRPGs, it's hard to take it at face value when slaughtering them en masse is the most efficient way to level your jobs), but they're so resonant with the identity of Vana'diel as a world that I can't help but commend them.
FFXI's gameplay is more than anything defined by being bullshit. Sometimes it's bullshit in a charming and endearing way that one can approach like a puzzle and others it's bullshit in a way that's just sort of poorly designed. Again - not to downplay how frustrating it can be, which is often - this just works for what it is: Vana'diel is a hostile, unpredictable and dangerous world defined by conflict. To exist within it is to not know what awaits around the corner, and to accept that prosperity is equally likely to come as a swift death.
It's such a unique gamefeel that I can't really describe it but I think everything about it works together to make something that is very singular and unique even today. While the sense of thriving community is gone, the experience of wandering in what remains of it persists and lives on as Final Fantasy XI's primary attraction.
This change defines Final Fantasy XI in the current day and age, much like Vana'diel is defined by the lingering effects of the war that tore it asunder.
Final Fantasy XI strikes a balance between the traditional simple writing of classic JRPGs (like the first five Final Fantasy games) and the thematic density that defined the JRPGs of the late 90s (like the five Final Fantasy games that came before it). What it lacks in character writing, it makes up for in the strength of its themes and a hyper-sharp focus on the single most important part of any MMO: the world.
Vana'diel as a setting is the true main character of Final Fantasy XI, and every aspect of the game is sculpted in a way that strengthens its distinct feel. Vana'diel wouldn't feel the same without the game's trademark extreme difficulty, nor the somber and mournful tone of the lore, nor the otherworldly ambiance that permates the very act of simply existing in one of the game's many enormous zones. In many ways I feel as if playing the game solo in what is effectively a dead server only intensified this experience; much of Final Fantasy XI is shaped around the idea of Vana'diel's permanent change (or lack thereof) in the wake of a cataclysmic event that changed the world forever. When wandering around alone in the remains of what was once a trailblazing title in the MMO sphere, one's connection with Vana'diel's ever-present sense of sorrow and loss is only intensified: there was once something lively and prosperous here, only to wither away until it and its inhabitants manage to simply skirt on by.
Masato Kato's writing accentuates this feeling; he builds on many of the same themes, ideas and messages as in his previous title Chrono Cross (My Favorite Game Of All Time Btw) while managing to convey them using a more streamlined and conventionally-coherent plot structure. Admittedly the mechanical structure of the game hampers the impact of these ideas a bit (as much as Kato loves to write about the plight of wildlife and beastfolk in JRPGs, it's hard to take it at face value when slaughtering them en masse is the most efficient way to level your jobs), but they're so resonant with the identity of Vana'diel as a world that I can't help but commend them.
FFXI's gameplay is more than anything defined by being bullshit. Sometimes it's bullshit in a charming and endearing way that one can approach like a puzzle and others it's bullshit in a way that's just sort of poorly designed. Again - not to downplay how frustrating it can be, which is often - this just works for what it is: Vana'diel is a hostile, unpredictable and dangerous world defined by conflict. To exist within it is to not know what awaits around the corner, and to accept that prosperity is equally likely to come as a swift death.
It's such a unique gamefeel that I can't really describe it but I think everything about it works together to make something that is very singular and unique even today. While the sense of thriving community is gone, the experience of wandering in what remains of it persists and lives on as Final Fantasy XI's primary attraction.
This change defines Final Fantasy XI in the current day and age, much like Vana'diel is defined by the lingering effects of the war that tore it asunder.
Street Fighter
1987
This game fucking sucks.
Oh my god this is so peak. Storytelling, art style, music are all so so soo good! It took me a little bit to adjust to the combat part of the game, but when I came to it, it was so satisfying obliterating hordes of enemies. Definitely ranks highly as a game for me.
Pseudoregalia
2023
Pseudoregalia is one of those games where you just want to keep playing because of how fun the movement is, and traversing this world is a blast just because of how many options you have available to you. Really, I wish the game was a bit longer because it only took me around 4.5 hours to beat, and that was with getting lost a few times inbetween areas, but at its price it's still an absolute steal.
Back when I was a kid my older brother got this game after seeing me struggle so much trying to play BoF IV. He didn't really like it that much, we were big JRPG heads and anything that didn't look or play like Final Fantasy was discarded as a waste of time. I thought it looked pretty cool tho so it always hovered somewhere in the back of my mind.
Over the years i've only heard this game mentioned as the "bad one", "the one that's plays badly", etc etc.
After my BoF IV replay I was willing to give it a shot cause I was always fascinated by the concept of "you're stuck underground and your journey is to make it to the outside world." Turns out I shouldn't ever trust other people's opinion on video games because it was one of the most enjoyable game I've played in the recent years. The combat system is phenomenal, and the constant anxiety of trying to outrun the constantly ticking time limit is something I've never seen in a game before, nor since.
I'm a big sucker for metanarratives, and I get what they were shooting for here. Stumbling through these longs dungeons that have no checkpoints, that constant doomsday clock ticking over your head, the lack of safe area where you can just relax and heal up. You get none of that, you have to spend every little ressources trying to move forward and get no chance to catch your breath. Why would you anyway? The air is disgustingly polluted so there is no reason to stop until the end of your journey.
But by far the best part about this game is those extremely hard and unfair boss fights at the end of each dungeons. I was annoyed at first, but then Bosch said "Protect your friends or save yourself, you can't do both !" and suddenly I understood. They are meant to be unfair because the game gives you a choice every single time: will you start over from a previous save so you can be stronger and more efficient (saving your friends by hurting yourself), or will your be selfish and summon the Dragon to make the boss easy? (Saving yourself by hurting Nina). After struggling for so long I decided Nina shouldn't be the one to suffer for my dumb mistakes, and I replayed the entire game without using the Dragon form until the very end, and I'm so glad I did.
I want to save Nina. TO THE SKY!
Over the years i've only heard this game mentioned as the "bad one", "the one that's plays badly", etc etc.
After my BoF IV replay I was willing to give it a shot cause I was always fascinated by the concept of "you're stuck underground and your journey is to make it to the outside world." Turns out I shouldn't ever trust other people's opinion on video games because it was one of the most enjoyable game I've played in the recent years. The combat system is phenomenal, and the constant anxiety of trying to outrun the constantly ticking time limit is something I've never seen in a game before, nor since.
I'm a big sucker for metanarratives, and I get what they were shooting for here. Stumbling through these longs dungeons that have no checkpoints, that constant doomsday clock ticking over your head, the lack of safe area where you can just relax and heal up. You get none of that, you have to spend every little ressources trying to move forward and get no chance to catch your breath. Why would you anyway? The air is disgustingly polluted so there is no reason to stop until the end of your journey.
But by far the best part about this game is those extremely hard and unfair boss fights at the end of each dungeons. I was annoyed at first, but then Bosch said "Protect your friends or save yourself, you can't do both !" and suddenly I understood. They are meant to be unfair because the game gives you a choice every single time: will you start over from a previous save so you can be stronger and more efficient (saving your friends by hurting yourself), or will your be selfish and summon the Dragon to make the boss easy? (Saving yourself by hurting Nina). After struggling for so long I decided Nina shouldn't be the one to suffer for my dumb mistakes, and I replayed the entire game without using the Dragon form until the very end, and I'm so glad I did.
I want to save Nina. TO THE SKY!
Lethal Company
2023
As someone who's very averse to horror games (sic: pussy), I don't really seek too many out of my own volition. This one caught my eye, however. It being multiplayer eases alot of the initial tensions I have, as well as the heavy teamwork aspect. I actually really like the gameplay loop as well: Get inside, get as much as you can, get the fuck out before anything tries to kill you. There's so many different enemy types and locations to keep you on your toes, with more presumably to come. Definitely a really fun one to play with friends.
Mega Man 5
1992
This box art is the stuff that inspired me to keep drawing dumb shit for the rest of my life.
Like, Rock isn't even looking at Gravity Man's lightning beam or his stupid stomach gauge, man is running forward MID-PARRY saying "nah bitch, get that weak ass shit outta here, not worth my time", I love it
Like, Rock isn't even looking at Gravity Man's lightning beam or his stupid stomach gauge, man is running forward MID-PARRY saying "nah bitch, get that weak ass shit outta here, not worth my time", I love it
Max Payne
2001
How the hell do you take this idea and make it perfect on the first go, this is bonkers
Sonic CD
1993
Playing some of the worst zones to the best soundtrack is like getting punched in the balls while getting blown by a goth, which I do not recommend under most circumstances