Every time a difficult game is released, the argument resurfaces whether game reviewers need to demonstrate a baseline level of competence before their article is considered “valid”. The argument for this is that competency in a game demonstrates understanding, and understanding is a requirement for conveying knowledge. However, I don’t think things are so simple. Games can catch someone’s eye for a variety of reasons, so it’s important to include the different experiences for someone with preexisting competency and someone without it. This gap between the expert-level breakdown and the novice experience might be widest for action games made by Platinum, The Wonderful 101 being the prime example.

Even before players get their hands on the basics of combat, they’ll notice that they’re being rated after every encounter based on the completion time, combo level, and damage taken. This is a useful feature for expert players, who want to get the highest rank they can on the mission overall. However, for new players, seeing "consolation prize" or bronze ranks after every fight is incredibly demoralizing, and they have no way of knowing that these evaluations are even biased against them. Like most Platinum games, important moves are relegated to the shop, but players have no way of knowing how useful these skills will actually be unless they’ve played comparable action games, or have encountered enemies that are already balanced around their use. Even moreso, the utility of some of these moves goes almost entirely unexplained, with the most famous example being the game’s block ability, Unite Guts. The description is as follows: “A Unite Morph materialized from a soul. Time with an incoming attack to bounce the attack back”. The way this is phrased suggests that it functions as a parry, but this is untrue. Not only are some attacks unblockable, but the timing doesn’t matter, and what differentiates blockable attacks from unblockable ones is that they’re “blunt” instead of “stabbing”. Nowhere is this explained, and the information passes mostly through word-of-mouth by the experts, who insist that this didn’t need in-game explanation because the blob of jello the team forms would offer no resistance to a blade. While this defense immediately falls apart when you consider how much resistance jello affords to a “blunt” hammer, the question to be asked is why this isn’t just explained in the game. Depth is created by complex decision making, not coyness about the functionality of core mechanics, and this is a problem that extends to many of the game's core systems and skills. Forcing players to take hits they don’t understand, and be criticized with poor rankings, just creates a hostile mood which isn’t conducive to the excitement these games live or die on.

The whole “turning into jello” thing may have thrown some people for a loop, so to back up, The Wonderful 101’s combat doesn’t have you control one character, but the titular hundred-and-one at the same time. You form a crowd of little heroes, who unite up into different weapons with their own specialties. This is accomplished by drawing shapes with the right analog stick, like a circle for a fist, a line for a blade, and so on. It’s a system that works pretty well, but the fact that you may have anticipated that clause reveals the problem. When it comes to recognizing drawn shapes, the question isn’t “if” the system will ever mess up, it’s “how often”. And truly, it works 95% of the time, but that means that one in twenty attempted morphs will fail. Guns are mistaken as whips, gliders as fists, bombs as hammers, and while novel mechanics do deserve some leeway, one must remember that this is an action game that will gleefully make fun of you for any mistake with a low rank. Not only that, but after an unintended morph, your morphing energy depletes anyway, leaving you in a worse state than you were before. However, this is another criticism that expert players will dismantle by saying they’ve played enough to where it works 99% of the time, and that drawing skills are part of the game. They can also point out how having to draw quickly and use energy efficiently is a valid mechanic, to which I at least partly agree. The reason I don’t like it is because of how nebulous of a skill this is, only developing as a result of errors new players had no way of anticipating. It’s a fun system when you already understand it, but again, making mechanics hard for new players to even experiment with is not equivalent to depth, and The Wonderful 101’s combat will behave more as a finicky barrier to entry rather than the exciting possibility space it should be.

This is the point where fans would point out that the director himself considers the first playthrough to function as a tutorial, and that he anticipated people would initially find the controls finicky and the skills opaque, but this is exactly my point. Is The Wonderful 101 actually that much more complex than other action games? Is the drawing system really as reliable as it could be? Would it be impossible to explain the basics of its mechanics on the first playthrough? The answer to all questions is “no”, so I have to question why this excuse is considered so bulletproof among action fans. I myself agree that one of the major joys of action games is in the discovery, but there’s a difference between giving players a comprehensive overview of the fundamentals while letting them discover the possibilities on their own, and simply failing to explain the basics and criticizing players for not knowing them already.

To wrap up this review, which is possibly the rantiest I’ve ever posted, I would like to note a couple things. Firstly, that I don’t intend to give the impression that this game is just terrible. There’s a reason why it has such a cult following, the people who really understand it can have a great time. It’s also not that anyone who isn’t an action game fan shouldn’t play this, but they will probably feel like they’re being repeatedly slapped in the face for trying to do so. It's to the point where even games analysts who praise the game's perfection and the importance of discovery will, somewhat hypocritically, post hour-long tutorials on how new players could even begin to enjoy themselves. As for myself, I had barely played any action games before my first try at The Wonderful 101, and quit about 70% of the way through for exactly this reason. By the time I went back and completed the HD version on PC, I had beaten the following action games:

Devil May Cry 1/2/3/4/5, Bayonetta 1/2, God Hand, Metal Gear Rising, P.N. 03, Nier Automata, Killer is Dead, Nioh, Viewtiful Joe, Vanquish, and Sekiro

… and even then, with more action game experience than 95% of players would ever have, The Wonderful 101 still felt insultingly obtuse at times. We, as the people who enjoy action games, shouldn’t just accept this sort of mediocrity because it’s the kind that resonates with us. Saying that the first sixteen-hour-long playthrough is supposed to be a frustrating tutorial, and that people should just git gud, kills interest in the genre and hurts everyone. And if The Wonderful 101 is trying to teach us anything, it’s that we’re stronger when we work together.

Outer Wilds is the perfect example of why you should always approach games that are considered "All time classics"/"Masterpieces" with a shit load of skepticism because despite all of the praises I hear about this game I can't for the love of god even bring myself to say anything remotely positive about it

First off, who thought putting a time restriction in an exploration focused game was a good idea? The amount of backtracking you need to do because of the supernova that triggers every 20 minutes coupled with the amount of annoying unforeseeable traps that also lead to your death is absolutely ridiculous, which was also the main motivator behind killing my intrigue to explore somewhat of a cohesive world with neat ideas and puzzles.
Now onto the elephant in the room, the controls are fucking abysmal which makes simply moving around quite annoying and they had the gall to design multiple segments that revolve solely around controlling your spaceship, which I can only describe as janky. Most of the deaths in this game either happen due to poor controls, random traps that you cant see coming & of course the stupid supernova which is basically the game's way of saying "Uh oh you couldn't explore everything within the measly 20 minutes we gave you? Time to send you back to the very beginning of the game with no way to fast travel" And I have a massive bone to pick with incompetent game devs that don't respect the player's time.
The story here is also quite non-existent and the people who insist otherwise are just plain out wrong because gathering wiki articles and putting them together does not make up for a very cohesive narrative that suck you into the experience, it's jarring if anything. I also don't see the appeal of the tracks here either, they don't fit the tone of the game at all but honestly speaking they're simply just lame.

Whoever thinks Outer Wilds is a masterpiece or a timeless classic, stop lying to yourself
This game sucks

I considered strongly putting together a long-form critique of this game, but the most damning statement I could possibly make about Final Fantasy XVI is that I truly don't think it's worth it. The ways in which I think this game is bad are not unique or interesting: it is bad in the same way the vast majority of these prestige Sony single-player exclusives are. Its failures are common, predictable, and depressingly endemic. It is bad because it hates women, it is bad because it treats it's subject matter with an aggressive lack of care or interest, it is bad because it's imagination is as narrow and constrained as it's level design. But more than anything else, it is bad because it only wants to be Good.

Oxymoronic a statement as it might appear, this is core to the game's failings to me. People who make games generally want to make good games, of course, but paired with that there is an intent, an interest, an idea that seeks to be communicated, that the eloquence with which it professes its aesthetic, thematic, or mechanical goals will produce the quality it seeks. Final Fantasy XVI may have such goals, but they are supplicant to its desire to be liked, and so, rather than plant a flag of its own, it stitches together one from fabric pillaged from the most immediate eikons of popularity and quality - A Song of Ice and Fire, God of War, Demon Slayer, Devil May Cry - desperately begging to be liked by cloaking itself in what many people already do, needing to be loved in the way those things are, without any of the work or vision of its influences, and without any charisma of its own. Much like the patch and DLC content for Final Fantasy XV, it's a reactionary and cloying work that contorts itself into a shape it thinks people will love, rather than finding a unique self to be.

From the aggressively self-serious tone that embraces wholeheartedly the aesthetics of Prestige Fantasy Television with all its fucks and shits and incest and Grim Darkness to let you know that This Isn't Your Daddy's Final Fantasy, without actually being anywhere near as genuinely Dark, sad, or depressing as something like XV, from combat that borrows the surface-level signifiers of Devil May Cry combat - stingers, devil bringers, enemy step - but without any actual opposition or reaction of that series' diverse and reactive enemy set and thoughtful level design, or the way there's a episode of television-worth of lectures from a character explaining troop movements and map markers that genuinely do not matter in any way in order to make you feel like you're experiencing a well thought-out and materially concerned political Serious Fantasy, Final Fantasy XVI is pure wafer-thin illusion; all the surface from it's myriad influences but none of the depth or nuance, a greatest hits album from a band with no voice to call their own, an algorithmically generated playlist of hits that tunelessly resound with nothing. It looks like Devil May Cry, but it isn't - Devil May Cry would ask more of you than dodging one attack at a time while you perform a particularly flashy MMO rotation. It looks like A Song of Ice and Fire, but it isn't - without Martin's careful historical eye and materialist concerns, the illusion that this comes even within striking distance of that flawed work shatters when you think about the setting for more than a moment.

In fairness, Final Fantasy XVI does bring more than just the surface level into its world: it also brings with it the nastiest and ugliest parts of those works into this one, replicated wholeheartedly as Aesthetic, bereft of whatever semblance of texture and critique may have once been there. Benedikta Harman might be the most disgustingly treated woman in a recent work of fiction, the seemingly uniform AAA Game misogyny of evil mothers and heroic, redeemable fathers is alive and well, 16's version of this now agonizingly tired cliche going farther even than games I've railed against for it in the past, which all culminates in a moment where three men tell the female lead to stay home while they go and fight (despite one of those men being a proven liability to himself and others when doing the same thing he is about to go and do again, while she is not), she immediately acquiesces, and dutifully remains in the proverbial kitchen. Something that thinks so little of women is self-evidently incapable of meaningfully tackling any real-world issue, something Final Fantasy XVI goes on to decisively prove, with its story of systemic evils defeated not with systemic criticism, but with Great, Powerful Men, a particularly tiresome kind of rugged bootstrap individualism that seeks to reduce real-world evils to shonen enemies for the Special Man with Special Powers to defeat on his lonesome. It's an attempt to discuss oppression and racism that would embarrass even the other shonen media it is clearly closer in spirit to than the dark fantasy political epic it wears the skin of. In a world where the power fantasy of the shonen superhero is sacrosanct over all other concerns, it leads to a conclusion as absurd and fundamentally unimaginative as shonen jump's weakest scripts: the only thing that can stop a Bad Guy with an Eikon is a Good Guy with an Eikon.

In borrowing the aesthetics of the dark fantasy - and Matsuno games - it seeks to emulate, but without the nuance, FF16 becomes a game where the perspective of the enslaved is almost completely absent (Clive's period as a slave might as well not have occurred for all it impacts his character), and the power of nobility is Good when it is wielded by Good Hands like Lord Rosfield, a slave owner who, despite owning the clearly abused character who serves as our introduction to the bearers, is eulogized completely uncritically by the script, until a final side quest has a character claim that he was planning to free the slaves all along...alongside a letter where Lord Rosfield discusses his desire to "put down the savages". I've never seen attempted slave owner apologia that didn't reveal its virulent underlying racism, and this is no exception. In fact, any time the game attempts to put on a facade of being about something other than The Shonen Hero battling other Kamen Riders for dominance, it crumbles nigh-immediately; when Final Fantasy 16 makes its overtures towards the Power of Friendship, it rings utterly false and hollow: Clive's friends are not his power. His power is his power.

The only part of the game that truly spoke to me was the widely-derided side-quests, which offer a peek into a more compelling story: the story of a man doing the work to build and maintain a community, contributing to both the material and emotional needs of a commune that attempts to exist outside the violence of society. As tedious as these sidequests are - and as agonizing as their pacing so often is - it's the only part of this game where it felt like I was engaging with an idea. But ultimately, even this is annihilated by the game's bootstrap nonsense - that being that the hideaway is funded and maintained by the wealthy and influential across the world, the direct beneficiaries and embodiments of the status quo funding what their involvement reveals to be an utterly illusionary attempt to escape it, rendering what could be an effective exploration of what building a new idea of a community practically looks like into something that could be good neighbors with Galt's Gulch.

In a series that is routinely deeply rewarding for me to consider, FF16 stands as perhaps its most shallow, underwritten, and vacuous entry in decades. All games are ultimately illusions, of course: we're all just moving data around spreadsheets, at the end of the day. But - as is the modern AAA mode de jour - 16 is the result of the careful subtraction of texture from the experience of a game, the removal of any potential frictions and frustrations, but further even than that, it is the removal of personality, of difference, it is the attempt to make make the smoothest, most likable affect possible to the widest number of people possible. And, just like with its AAA brethren, it has almost nothing to offer me. It is the affect of Devil May Cry without its texture, the affect of Game of Thrones without even its nuance, and the affect of Final Fantasy without its soul.

Final Fantasy XVI is ultimately a success. It sought out to be Good, in the way a PS5 game like this is Good, and succeeded. And in so doing, it closed off any possibility that it would ever reach me.

It doesn’t really surprise me that each positive sentiment I have seen on Final Fantasy XVI is followed by an exclamation of derision over the series’ recent past. Whether the point of betrayal and failure was in XV, or with XIII, or even as far back as VIII, the rhetorical move is well and truly that Final Fantasy has been Bad, and with XVI, it is good again. Unfortunately, as someone who thought Final Fantasy has Been Good, consistently, throughout essentially the entire span of it's existence, I find myself on the other side of this one.

Final Fantasy XV convinced me that I could still love video games when I thought, for a moment, that I might not. That it was still possible to make games on this scale that were idiosyncratic, personal, and deeply human, even in the awful place the video game industry is in.

Final Fantasy XVI convinced me that it isn't.