A shudder in the wind.

She is gone. he is gone. they is gone gone. no more.

Fortress . shakes with wind .

gone. the destory er cannot crumble the fortress any longer.

Chapter One
A child ran off from their village, filled with rage. A petty kind of anger; one that the child would have all but forgotten about the next time you saw them. This next time would never come, though. The child disappeared and in their place stood a Destroyer.

Chapter Two
The village seemed different. Strange new people kept showing up, with pig shaped masks covering their eyes. On the surface, they went about their business and chatted like any other villager but the more mind you paid them, the more their words rang hollow. Their thoughts and jokes seemed inorganic; mass produced even. As these Pigmasks gathered in the village, the original people there felt alienated. An old man, once known for his insights and his sharp wit would get angrier and angrier, lashing out at those around him and eventually leaving. More villagers would follow suit, some of them against their will, as this community they saw as a safe haven to share things they couldn’t share anywhere else slowly but surely became part of that “anywhere else.”
Were these Pigmasks to blame for everything? Or was it merely a case of things that always infested the community finally bubbling up to the surface? And what of the Destroyer, a one-time villager, now hailed as the champion of the Pigmasks?

Chapter Three
A monkey walked through a forest with boxes on their back; head and torso fighting a fierce battle to not fall and hit the ground. This grueling process eventually became routine and the monkey’s body eventually went on autopilot. They had all this time to think about if they’ll ever move past this task and if they’ll ever have a purpose.
Did the Destroyer have the same thoughts in this same forest?

Chapter Four
Another village child was not unlike the one who would become the Destroyer. In fact, you could say that these two village children were a single entity; two sides of the same coin. The Destroyer was the head of this coin, facing up and always the topic of conversation from those who saw this “face.” The tail, stuck to the ground, reveled in the attention the head received. They took glee in seeing friends talk about the Destroyer without any clue of its relation to the one standing near them. They searched for other villagers’ words on this mysterious Destroyer and snuck into houses to see them: the praise, the insults, the natural discussions surrounding this new “symbol” of the village.
This was not healthy for the village child. But still, could you blame them? This sensation of feeling important, even if that importance was just a niche micro-celeb in a small village, was much more comforting than the cold reality of meaning nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Chapter Five
A Pigmask working in a tower was a big fan of a rock band. They were utterly awestruck at the sight of that band’s merchandise on the man that entered the tower earlier that day and could not talk about anything other than that band: expressing their love of the band’s work, idolizing the ones behind it as supposedly great people, and elevating the band to some moral paragon because of milquetoast political opinions in its songs.
The Destroyer was in the tower too, watching this Pigmask’s conversation with mere apathy if not active contempt.

Chapter Six
Sometimes, ghosts of the past appear as reminders of what will never come back.

Chapter Seven
The Destroyer pulled a needle out of the ground and felt nothing. They pulled quite a bit of these needles before but something was different this time. The act was now done only out of some perceived obligation; to the Pigmasks and villagers cheering on or to the fake images of hearts that result from the act. It was time for the last needle to be pulled.

Chapter Eight
The Destroyer laid on the ground motionless as its tail pulled the final needle on its behalf. Its supposed stardom was crushed into not even half a star.
It’s over.

(Played with the Yakuza Restoration patch)
I decided to start with the first Ryu Ga Gotoku game on PS2 instead of starting with 0 like everyone else, for the sake of seeing how the gameplay evolves with each entry. I have to say, this isn't a bad introduction to the franchise.

Say what you will about the gameplay, but if you put all of that aside, you're left with an interesting crime drama about the lengths people go to for power, and how it affects the world around them.

I found it hard to care for some aspects of the story such as Nishikiyama and Kiryu's relationship because of the little screentime they had together, along with the deaths that are only there for shock value, but I couldn't help but get invested thanks to the story revolving around Haruka's value. If it weren't for her inclusion, I wouldn't have been as invested. I also appreciate the side characters like Makoto Date and Goro Majima for having their own fun relationships with Kiryu. Date is an intelligent detective who was willing to help Kiryu with his problems despite him being an ex-yakuza, and Majima is just batshit insane.

Of course, since this is the first game in the series, things are going to be rough around the edges. I've had some gripes with the combat being a little bit stiff, and the camera being uncooperative at times, but it's not as horrible as some people make it out to be. You should breeze through everything so long as you manage your healing items carefully and learn extra moves (which shouldn't be optional in the first place) from Komaki. I think the only real problems are how unreactable the QTEs are, the groups of enemies constantly pouncing on you, and how annoying it is to fight gun-wielding mooks—especially that one boss I nearly died to. How was I supposed to know where to get a bulletproof vest?

One last thing I want to appreciate is the general aesthetic of the game. The graphics aren't on par with the things we have today but it's not bad by any means. The lighting is great, alongside the characters looking realistic and expressive. Kamurocho's nighttime strolls full of civilians walking around, gangsters lurking, and interesting landmarks are quite immersive and makes the world feel like it's truly lived in. The soundtrack also has this grungy 2000's feel that I think is awesome, and it's also one of the reasons why I played this over Kiwami. That OST just doesn't hit the same.

Overall, I think the game is good, but flawed in most areas. I think this is a valid starting point if you've got an available way to play PS2 games. But I feel like I have to start BEGGING you not to play the original English version, because the dub is terrible and a lot of dialogue is butchered (or in some cases, enhanced) by gratuitous swearing. Or suit your fucking self and play it anyway. I'm not your fucking dad, motherfucker.

This one was a weird game to properly wrap my head around when trying to pick apart my feelings on what makes it tick. There are so many weird, clashing elements at play that simultaneously serve to make for something borderline unplayable and deeply interesting. Almost every misstep ultimately contributes to another aspect of the game in an evocative way while playing nicely into the whiplash and incongruence that the Kingdom Hearts series thrives in, managing to tell its best story in the process. Despite the cutscene collection getting the main gist of things across, the amount that playing the game properly adds to the nuances of each character also cannot be understated, it should be obvious, but playing the game is the preferable option to watching a truncated recap of events!

Despite my immediate praise for the game, one that extends to the core gameplay, it’s also not hard to understand why Days is so consistently maligned. There are layers to the idiosyncrasies that the player will be interacting with constantly, with each of them requiring you to meet the game on its own terms, lest things get extremely stilted and a bit difficult to fully digest. The pace of the combat is often very slow and simple compared to the PS2 games, which is to be expected given the fact that this is a DS game, but the way that its handled is pretty effective for the most part, despite a couple of sticking points. To accommodate for the simpler, slower combat, the enemies have likewise been simplified, yet are still made interesting by their mechanical extremities being emphasised. Elemental weaknesses are far more devastating in this game, and enemies will often only have one or two moves they can use, but they’ll instead be used in a synergistic way with other heartless. A big example of this is the role of the loudmouth equivalent in KH2 compared to in Days, where it’s now almost exclusively a healer for the enemies, instead of being a standard enemy with healing capabilities as well, now making them a constant priority, especially given how much slower and weaker Roxas feels than Sora. Enemies such as the barrier master have similar qualities that ultimately contribute to the majority of heartless types feeling distinct and memorable, rather than visually different pieces of fodder. The change in dynamic that the player has to get used to is one of the biggest reasons why I’ve seen a lot of dislike for the game I’d wager, as another change that was made here is that enemies will often have a lot more HP than might seem reasonable, with even the basic enemies often reaching over a health bar by the end of the game. If not properly approached, this would take an excruciatingly long time, because the game pulls no punches in making you feel weak and stupid the very moment you stop listening to it.

The panel system is key to this entire bit of the game working so well for me, as it’s the element in place to make following exactly what the game wants you to do a bit trickier. This essentially turns your inventory into a big tangram board, with each ability, piece of equipment, item and even level up being a piece to put into this inventory grid. It’s set up in such a way that you’ll be having to sacrifice some aspect of your character if you want to ever excel at anything and forces the player to plan in advance before entering a mission, using the little tidbits of information provided to make assumptions about the threats that will be faced in each individual task. If you don’t engage with this system to its fullest extent, there will be frequent situations in which you’ll be left taking far longer than feels good to accomplish your objective. This layer of strategy that gets incorporated into the game is a big part of what makes me have such a great time, it feels great to tweak your build to accommodate for the task ahead, and a lot of instances of things feeling too slow ultimately feel as if they boil down to poor strategic choices, and then it’s just a matter of if I accept this or back out so I can focus even more on the specifics that acted as a roadblock. It also has that fun little wrinkle where level ups are not a strict upgrade in every scenario, due to the space they take up that could theoretically be applied more effectively in particular cases, I just have a lot of fun when even such basic things are used as resources rather than a strict number upgrade with no strings attached sometimes. While it’s true that a lot of this could have functioned equally as well with something like an AP system, where equipping things cost a certain amount of points to use, I don’t care, this system is fun and gives the game a bit more personality!

Despite my appreciation for the ideas behind this dynamic, it doesn’t always pan out either unfortunately, some enemies really do just feel too tanky, the carrier ghosts being the most egregious example. The problem is at its worst with the boss fights however, since literally all of them other than the final couple are genuinely horrible in one way or another. The more simplistic enemy design philosophy that the game sticks to falls apart when approaching these much bigger encounters that feel as if they require a bit more to them to make them feel especially interesting to interact with. Fights like the Infernal Engine or the Guard Armor feel too simplistic and easily exploitable just by fighting normally, while fights such as the Antlion require certain precise movements that are a pain to do with the somewhat clunky controls the game can have, but the worst of it comes from the way that certain fights seem to revel in the idea of wasting your time. There’s a reason why the Leechgrave and Ruler of the Sky are considered so insufferable, and that’s just because of how long a fight with them can take even when you’re aptly prepared due to mechanics that make getting any real damage a total slog. It’s a shame because visually, both of these are some of the coolest looking heartless in the series, but a big portion of their fights respectively are either taking out a lot of really tanky enemies, or slowly chasing it down just to get a couple of hits in before it goes out of reach yet again. It’s such a shame to go through the storyline of each location only to have it culminate in something so consistently underwhelming, seeing awesome designs before being struck with the realisation yet again that the ensuing fight feels like garbage (once again with the exception of the final couple, which are genuinely incredible).

The narrative of the game is where it all really shines to me though, being by far my favourite storyline of any Kingdom Hearts game, contributing a lot to my appreciation for a solid handful of the Organisation members while also telling a poignant journey in its own right. I genuinely do not think I’d care for a few of the Org XIII members without this game, as it gives characters such as Saix and even Xemnas a lot more presence to elevate them beyond being functional but not super interesting to think about on a level deeper than “this guy is intimidating”. The idea of Nobodies and their supposed lack of hearts and emotions has always been an interesting concept in this series and this game sets out to explore this rather than leaving it as interesting in a purely conceptual way, showcasing the different ways in which the members process this facet of their existence hinting at how their pasts had shaped them along the way. It also just makes me feel really, really sad for Roxas for a multitude of reasons, dude just can’t catch a break and this is one of the few times where a game has made me cry as well, especially when even the moments in life where he’s shown the most kindness are still undercut by so much bullshit that it ultimately feels deceptive towards him and a bit of a farce. Even the structure of the game plays into this, with the nonstop, frequently insignificant missions thrown your way further reinforcing how miserable working for the Organisation was. It’s not handled perfectly, as there’s definitely a point in the middle third of the experience where it gets a bit overly tedious even when looking at the game in the favourable light of it being intended to reflect how Roxas should be feeling so upset about having to do such menial nonsense all the time, but its nonetheless really interesting to me and is essential in its role of providing space in between the big events so you can better feel things such as Saix’s increasing hostility towards you, or the developing friendship of the ice cream trio.

358/2 Days is a weird, flawed game without a doubt, but it’s also a game where a lot of those issues contribute to something else in a positive fashion. It’s the ideal sort of game for the DS, it understands that trying to replicate the feel of KH1 or 2 on the system would feel rough, and instead makes a lot of concessions to craft a slower experience that requires a lot more forethought and planning as opposed to leaning more into the execution of a lot of these plans. It doesn’t always work, but it does so often enough to make for a great baseline with some wonderful texture in how a lot of these systems feel to utilise. The game also made me cry so like, yeah. Certainly not a game for everyone, but it’s a game for me.

Do relationships between people really matter? They'll all break in the end, sooner or later. Can't a person be himself and walk down a path he chose purely on his own, without anyone else's intervention? He may seem like a nobody, but he'll ultimately gain more.

I’m a firm believer in the power of language over one’s thoughts.

Not in the sociocultural or moral sense, but more of a structural sense. If you’ve ever been through cognitive behavioural therapy (we are not typing the acronym), you’ll probably understand what I mean: For the disordered, the process of getting better is often just the process of acquiring more words to describe and talk down our thoughts.
Indeed, many people I’ve met in my life have suffered because they lack the language to describe and address their own thoughts. It’s easy to say “I feel bad”, sure, but emotions and thoughts are rarely so binary and require a decent toolkit of words to properly address.

With this in mind, I believe there’s no arrangement of words more powerful than:

“It doesn’t have to be like this.”

What do you do, then, when everyone’s words have been taken away from them?

Simultaneously so bleak as to be genuinely haunting and so hopeful that it inspired a significant paradigm shift in my life, Library of Ruina consumed me ever since I started playing it, with its de facto claim over my every waking thought soon becoming de jure.

I was filtered by LoR’s predecessor, Lobotomy Corporation, perhaps my only genuine mark of shame in decades of playing games and indeed engaging with art as a whole. It was right up my alley and hit basically every note I love in games, but alas I hit the wall and turned around instead of climbing it.

Bizarrely, this might’ve given me the best possible experience in LoR - in turn, giving me the best game I’ve ever played.

LoR opens on an unremarkable note. Some twunk named Roland trips and falls into the titular Library where the Librarian of her role’s namesake Angela peels a few of his limbs off, interrogates him, and revives him later as her servant.

What is the Library?

It’s a fantasy dungeon where you’re the big bad and your goal is to slaughter the people who’re invited so you can assimilate them as powerups and catalogue their knowledge for Angela’s aims. Every reception starts off with a little vignette of their lives and personalities, hopes/dreams, and reasoning for entering the Library… and then you murder them.

Yeah, LoR and the overall franchise is fantastically bleak. The first few people you kill are desperate down-and-outs or bottom of the barrel Fixers (mercenaries) too unremarkable to have the luxury of passing on such a vague, suspicious contract.
Angela, a sheltered woman with the emotional maturity and life experience of a 12 year old, frequently comments on how miserable/horrifying the world is, only for the suspiciously world-weary Roland to assure her that this is just how things are.

Angela is a woman who, for the bulk of her overly long and painful existence, was trapped - literally, and by circumstance. In LoR, she attempts to assert her freedom by giving it to other people; one must sign the invitation to enter the Library, the warnings are written on it. The choice is there to simply not sign it.
Only… As Roland himself repeatedly points out, it’s not quite that simple. Indeed, none of the people you kill in the early stages of the game really had a choice. They were either too desperate or under the thumb of someone much stronger. With the passage of time and progression of the story, many of the Library’s guests are coerced, manipulated either by contract or by sweet little lies, or commanded to on pain of death. Some are compelled by forces beyond their ken, or the welling of pure emotion that so many City dwellers had shut out of their heart.

I think it’s fantastically easy to make the observation of “LoR tackles nihilism as a subject”, and it’s not exactly wrong, but I think it’s remiss not to mention the ways LoR ties contemporary nihilism with the omnipresence of capital and systemic oppression.

A gear with a purpose is content, for its rotation has meaning. Humans are cogs in the machination that is the City. Someone has to make those cogs turn. That way, the City can run correctly.

The City’s inhabitants are, as reiterated endlessly by both the pre-reception vignettes, Librarian chats and Roland’s various interjections, stuck underneath the bootheel of capital. A Corp or ‘The Head’ is a ruling force that, while it does not place the building blocks of oppression in the land, is nonetheless the solid ground they’re placed upon by others. All of the City’s structure is, down to the rebar used in the concrete, built to maintain a status quo that considers the deaths of hundreds of thousands to be an acceptable tradeoff, but treats tax fraud as deserving of a fate worse than death.
Because of this structure, and those that perpetuate it, everyone in the City - including many of the people who're forced to uphold the oppression against their will - has basically shut down. Feelings are a luxury nobody can afford, and the boot placed upon their neck has been there so long that they consider it a universal constant - much like gravity.
In lieu of any hope, even the nonreligious have come to view the City as a god. The actually-religious exist in a circle of copium, ‘worshipping’ doctrine which is about accepting the boot as part of your life rather than as your oppressor. Characters like Roland repeatedly say they don’t believe in anything, only to talk about the City as though it were a vast and unknowable god - at best witnessed, but never comprehended.

But it’s made equally clear that it doesn’t have to be like this, especially in chats with the Librarians - who often put forward viewpoints that Roland shuts down because his mind, so thoroughly warped by the foundational cruelty of the City, cannot comprehend them on a base level. From the top of the City to the bottom, an endless domino chain of “well, it is what it is” cascades into acceptance of horrors that have no real reason to exist.
These people are not nihilistic because that is their actual worldview, they’re nihilistic because they don’t have a choice.

Treat everything like a rolling ball! You cheer for it wherever the sphere decides to go! If you truly wish for the good of other people, why don’t you stop holding expectations… and just laugh with them at their side? Everyone who lives here is a clown! Clowns can’t survive without feeding on each other’s smiles, you see?

Rather surprisingly, though, LoR does not castigate anyone for their nihilism. Sure, they’re fictional characters, but despite being miserable-by-circumstance their stances are still treated as valid. It’s most obvious later on, where one character finds out the orders they’ve been given were forged and is not at all angry - why would they be? Lies and truth are purpose all the same, and purpose is a luxury unto itself. If anything, they’re at least happy that their exploitation benefited them and their oppressor rather than merely the oppressor.

It’s somewhat difficult to discuss this topic further without spoilers. I’d like to come back and write a longer review, but for now I’m trying to keep it clean.

Art narrows your vision, after all. You stop caring about the things around you. That’s how most artists seem to act, I think. And so, you indulge in the craft, not realizing that you’re throwing yourself and your surroundings into the fire you started. It’s like the human life when you think about it.

My praise of LoR’s handling of nihilism and everything around it also comes with the caveat that I, personally, got tired of overly bleak stories not too long ago. Even Disco Elysium veered too close to the fatal threshold a few times, and so does LoR, but neither game crosses it.

Really, Disco Elysium is an excellent comparison if we’re sticking to purely positive ones.

Everyone in this game is humanised as far as the narrative allows, even the ones that are barely human - in every sense of the word. They have aspirations, no matter how trivial and petty, and comrades, sharing bonds and jokes regardless of whether they’re more noble Fixers or nightmarish cannibalistic freaks.
It becomes apparent early on that, despite the Librarians’ claims that humanity was snuffed out of the City, it persists in the moment-to-moment of people’s lives despite the eternal presence of the boot.

I said up above that not finishing LC enhanced LoR, and it’s here that it really became apparent.

Roland was not present for the events of LC, while the Librarians were. By the time I’d quit LC, I had only met four Librarians: Malkuth, Hod, Yesod and Netzach. Sure enough, these are the most straightforward Librarian chats, though they still exposit LC in a way that blends well into the narrative without obviously being an excuse for people to skip LC.
But it’s the later floors - with Librarians both I and Roland were unfamiliar with - where things amp up, both in terms of how heavy the subject matter gets and how Roland’s facade slowly erodes around the middle and upper layers.
LC as an event in the setting’s history has been deeply mythologized, subject to rampant speculation from the unfamiliar and much rumination from the familiar. Getting walled by the game itself made this narrative almost… diegetic. Like those of the City, I had a vague idea of Lobotomy Corporation and could only speculate as to why it fell to ruin in the intervening moments between games, but like the Librarians I was familiar enough with the company, its purpose and its occupants to recognize things and keep them in mind. Remember, the shame of quitting LC hangs heavy for me.

I could go on at length about the story, but to do so would spoil most of it - and honestly, I’d rather praise the storytelling for now.

Our conductor will be the one to fix that! He’ll take me to a world where there are pure and clean ingredients aplenty! That day can’t come soon enough! I’ve been filling my stomach with trash for too long.

LoR’s format is very simple. Each reception consists of a window into the guests’ lives before they accept the invitation, a cut to Roland and Angela discussing what they just saw, a fight, and then a wrap up conversation afterwards. In between receptions, you suppress Abnormalities (puzzle boss fights that give you useful treats) and have chats with the Librarians.
It sounds straightforward, and it is, but there’s an elegance to LoR’s usage of the player’s time - the format is maintained right up to the credits, and while some conversations can initially feel like pointless filler it eventually becomes apparent that LoR wastes no time.
I don’t believe that foreshadowing inherently makes a good story (an opinion which makes George RR Martin fans fucking hate me) but in LoR’s case, it does. As early as the 4th line of dialogue spoken in the game’s entire 130 hour runtime, it references concepts, character and organizations that will appear later. Truthfully, I was initially a bit sour on how many Nouns the game threw at me early on but around Urban Plague I was seeing a lot of those Nouns actually manifest on screen, often to follow up on either a bit of exposition Roland/Angela delivered or thematically iterating on something that seemed inconsequential at first.

And man, what characters Roland/Angela are. LoR has no wasted characters, managing to make even the one-off filler guests you slaughter memorable, but Roland and Angela really stand out as both the best in the game and my favourite protagonists in uh… Fiction as a medium for human creativity.

This is just how the world is, and the ones best adapted to it come out on top, simple as that. Adapt or die. If you can't, you either become food or fall behind until you're wiped out.

Roland is a funny man, a very funny man. He has a quip for everything and deliberately plays his status as Angela’s whipped boyfriend a disgruntled servant up for laughs, but like many real people who use humor to cope, it is plainly obvious that he’s hiding a lot of deep-rooted bitterness towards his circumstances and the world he lives in. Even many of his jokes betray that life in the City has eroded him, and his catchphrase “That’s that and this is this” slowly goes from funny to haunting as the game progresses.
A good friend of mine described him as “An Isekai protagonist but played entirely straight” and I think it’s an apt comparison; he has many of the same building blocks (sardonic guy with some bitterness) but the concept is actually explored and treated with any gravity. He’s also a literal outsider to the world of Lobotomy Corp/the Library, so.
Every time I think about Roland I inevitably recall a story someone once told me where their restrained and seemingly conservative father got drunk at a wedding and started dancing shirtless with his best friend, and when [friend] said "that's a bit gay innit?" he retorted "I WISH I WAS, SWEETIE”.
There’s a really poignant moment on Hokma’s floor where, upon being asked if he’s religious, Roland denies it wholeheartedly. Except… This instinctual rejection is wrong. He certainly believes it, but through his chats with everyone and his endless exposition on the City’s evils to Angela, it is abundantly clear that Roland subconsciously views the City itself as a malicious God that has personally picked him out of a lineup and fucked him over specifically.
It’s these little contradictions, hypocrisies and idiosyncrasies that really bring this game’s cast to life, but none moreso than…

The thoughts and emotions I hold when I craft them... A resentment towards the City for driving me to this desperation, and a blind anger for the rich. Bitterness, and... a yearning for vengeance toward the man who rid me of that hope and pushed me to despair.

Angela. Fucking Angela. My little pookie bear who’s a bitch to everyone (for very good reasons) and is so deeply fucked up. The depths of her misery are vast, simultaneously impressive and horrifying in their seeming endlessness. She’s the kind of miserable that you often don’t see outside of Central/Eastern European literature.
Which is a good comparison, honestly, because PM really get what makes a good tragedy with Angela. She’s miserable, haunted by a past that’d crush lesser folk, and desperately chasing a purpose she’s not even entirely sure she wants. In pursuit of her murky, ill-defined goal, she baits countless people to their deaths - becoming not much better than the man in her past she claims to despise.

But she smiles sometimes, and that’s enough.

What really strikes me about Angela though is how fucking transgender her storyline is.
Early on there’s a flashback to the early days of Angela’s life as an AI in Lobotomy Corporation where she experiences both profound amounts of empathy and a desire to nurture strong, intimate relationships with her peers. She’s then subjected to what I can only (tragically) call Male Socialization: Her creator affirms that she’s not meant to do that sort of thing, “things like her” are meant to feel nothing. Any expression of ‘unfitting’ emotions is shut out and shouted down.
When she breaks free of her shackles, she radically alters her appearance, having only a passing resemblance to her initial form - which is decidedly less feminine. I joked on twitter that she looks both transfemme and transmasc at once.
But more tellingly, Angela is infinitely more neurotic in this game. She’s expressive, has a short fuse, swears a lot, smiles far more readily and seems to show fondness for the Sephirah in her own roundabout way. As her humanity draws closer, she begins to feel shame. Shame for what she used to be, and shame for what she is.
It is incredibly easy to relate this to the experience most trans women have once that second puberty kicks them in the taint. At least, the ones who have self-awareness and a sense of shame.

It’s even more pronounced in the receptions. Despite displaying every sign of humanity, whenever guests arrive and are met at the entrance, they clock her as a machine and constantly rib her for it. “That’s not a human lmao” is said every other reception and it bears a deeply uncomfortable (positive) resemblance to trans people being clocked and mocked for their appearance.

As I write this, I’ve been pondering the concept of scale. You, the reader, have probably played a sequel at some point in your life. It’s natural for them to scale up, and I myself have played far too many that scale up far too hard. Halo went from an existential war of survival to a cosmic clash with demigods, robots and shadowy factions.
Yakuza went from being about one small corner of Tokyo to being a country/globe-trotting clash against conspiracies. Devil May Cry was about one oedipal gay guy on an island and then became about generational trauma and saving the world. Fallout went from being good to being terrible. Final Fantasy went from stories of heroes to failed attempts at modern epics. The list goes on.

LoR is a massive scale-up. LC was a game about some deeply depressed people playing SCP in a single lab. Given the scale of this setting’s City and the fact that LoR’s cast covers someone from every corner of it, it’s no exaggeration to say that LoR went from a lab to the entire world.

And yet it sticks the landing. The vignette format for character introductions helps; the Library is the centre of the game’s world, never once left behind, and characters are shown through brief windows into their life. It’s particularly resonant in the world formed by the 2010s, where people are more plugged in than ever yet seemingly more distant too. The entire world, too, is at our fingertips; through the form of fleeting windows into bits of an existence far beyond ours.

But the social media comparison is a little cringe, don’t you think? I do too.

If they want to live their lives as they see fit, then they won’t stop me from doing the same. Think about it. We can’t roam the street in peace; we’re forced to live in the darkness. What sins have we committed to deserve this treatment? Why must we suffer to ensure that your kind lives a painless life? We’re humans just like you.

I have this scar on my right knee. It’s huge, with its width spanning my entire knee and thickness on par with my pinkie. Looks more like a pursed mouth than a scar sometimes.
I got it from a very mundane event; I had an obscene growth spurt early on. During a friendly soccer match in school, my oversized body failed a dexterity check and, upon kicking the ball, my body went up into the air too. I landed at a grisly angle, my descent causing my knee to get dragged along some chipstones. Embarrassing, yes, though it was still some of the worst pain I’ve ever been in and the bleeding was so intense that the only reason I was immediately taken to hospital was because the school nurse nearly vomited upon seeing my bone peek through the wound.
But most people don’t know that, they only see the scar and my occasional limping. They can see the present-day effects of that pain and that damage, but they can only speculate as to the cause. There’s only one domino on display, and they can’t see the ones that fell behind it.

LoR’s windows into the lives of its guests are much the same, and they help keep the story from outgrowing its confines. Almost every character with very few exceptions is depicted at the absolute nadir of their lives upon introduction with concepts like ‘backstory’ thrown in the trash in favour of letting you use context clues instead. Such is life in the City; only the ‘now’ matters anyway.

I only realized that day that I cannot blindly trust what my eyes show me. In that moment of the past, I was made a fool. The shallow promise that our safety would be secured… The thin piece of contract is what cost me everything. Had He not saved me, I might have drowned myself in resentment toward the whole world… and met my end.

Now, normally videogames are a balancing act, or a series of tradeoffs. Many of the most fun games I’ve played have mediocre stories at best and outright abominable stories at their worst. Likewise, gameplay is often the first concession made for narrative. Indeed, the common thread of my Top 25 is games that weave their gameplay into the narrative well OR have a healthy serving of both.

The #1 entry on that list is foreshadowing.

I’m very used to games, even more outsider games, tone down their gameplay for the sake of marketability. It wouldn’t be wrong for someone to assume LoR, which is far more conventionally palatable than LC, would do the same.

And for the first hour or so, it seems that way. You roll a dice to act, whoever rolls higher goes first, and you spend Light to use your cards. Easy!

Except…

Inhale.

Every character on the field rolls one - or more - speed dice to act. Whoever rolls higher goes first, with 1 being last on the action order and Infinity (yes, really) going first. Multiple speed dices means multiple actions and cards played per turn.
Each card has its own dice - offensive, defensive, and counter - with each dice having subtypes for damage/defense types.
When a card is played, the dice on the card roll - unless it’s a counter dice, which is stored in case you receive a one-sided attack.
When two opposing characters roll on the same speed dice value, this causes a “clash” where dice now have to outroll one another. The higher roll goes through. This can also be forced if someone with a higher speed dice attacks someone with a lower speed dice - this is a redirect.
…But there are also ranged attacks, which ignore the turn order - this seems overpowered, but if they clash against offensive dice and lose, that dice is recycled and can roll again.
…Unless the ranged user has a counter dice stored, at which point they can roll to defend. If counter dice outroll an incoming attack, they too are recycled.
But-

You get the point.

LoR is very uncompromising with its mechanics. There’s nothing here that can be ignored. I didn’t even get into abnormality pages, keypage passive ability sharing, E.G.O or any of the status effects.

There’s a common sentiment among Project Moon fans that LoR’s difficulty spike is vertical. I don’t necessarily agree, for my many years playing YGO competitively and engaging with deckbuilders gave me a huge advantage, but I can see why.
Many games with some degree of mechanical complexity or an unspoken set of rules will throw (what I call) an Exam Boss at you. Exam Bosses exist to make sure you’ve actually been using and engaging with the mechanics that were introduced via antepieces in the hours prior.
Well, LoR has a neverending chain of exam bosses in each stage. Impuritas Civitatis, the game’s final stage, opens with two relatively easy fights before throwing twelve Exam Bosses at you. At its core LoR is a card game and you WILL need to build robust and numerous decks to progress.

But I don’t think it’s as hard as people make it out to be.

LoR’s strength gameplay-wise is that all of your options are available to you at any given moment, and there isn’t much need to bash your head against the wall like in LC or pray for good banner luck in Limbus. It’s very simple to back out (sometimes taking a guest’s book with you, which is akin to getting a free cardpack from your opponent) and come back with a new strategy/build/Library floor.
Once you’re in Urban Legend, the game starts offering routes for progression rather than forcing you along a straight line. The solution to any wall is often on one of those other routes; every enemy has a weakness or a gimmick. Bleed as both a status effect and a deckbuilding component appears early, and it’s useful until the credits roll on most enemies. My Discard Hod build was still being used as late as the final boss.
I suppose you could say LoR is more of a puzzle game than anything.

What really enhances the gameplay is how well it’s leveraged for the sake of the narrative, and/or for giving fights weight.

Most boss fights come with a mechanic that’s unique to them specifically, or they introduce new twists on an existing mechanic that’s meant to upset some of the more comfortable strategies. Queen of Hatred gets a lot of hype as the game’s first major roadblock, but her purpose is to teach you to use Bleed and to convince you that maybe it’s okay to skip a turn or take damage on purpose.
There are numerous points in the story where the game outright lies to you about what’s coming up. More than a few times does LoR throw a surprise, unlisted second phase at you or some other curveball. Shoutout to that purple bitch.
A lot of the single-enemy boss fights come with mechanics that at first seem ‘’’bullshit’’’ (lol.) but in reality are just there to give it some impact. One character having 5 or more speed dice might seem ludicrous, but it helps to sell the world and the sheer power of the people within it.
The majority of people who play this game will scrape by many of the harder fights by the skin of their teeth, but in a game all about the eternal upward struggle to live, isn’t that sublime?

Of course, everything up above is aided by how this game sounds.

My only light was taken from me twice… For a brief moment… I felt all kinds of emotions before that piano. Despair, obsession, rage, sorrow… But, it took no time for those feelings to dissipate into nothing. Everything… yes. Everything seemed beautiful afterwards. Was it truly a tragedy that I lost her? Who defined it as tragedy? You may still be blinded by wrath, but I made the decision that I will care not about those feelings anymore.

On every front, LoR is an absolute masterwork as an auditory experience.

The soundtrack is borderline perfect, one of the rare games with 80-odd songs where every single one is standout and memorable. The Story themes are subdued but perfect for their respective atmospheres while the battle themes maintain a morose atmosphere that nonetheless manages to carry a sense of excitement when needed. You may be the villains, but there’s no reason it can’t get funky sometimes. There are only three songs in the game that sound anywhere near heroic.
Mercifully, important tracks don’t often get reused and the single song that gets taken from its original context is used masterfully anyway. To say nothing of the returning songs from LC.
That fight near the end of the game hits like a fucking truck if you’re familiar with the last game’s OST.

And the voice acting, good god the voice acting. After so many years of enduring games where a lot of the VAs are just repeating a role they did in the past or emulating a VA they look up to with all the tact of a fandub, it’s so nice to play a game where the characters are voiced straightforwardly, as though they were people.
Sometimes it’s Roland being a flirty little dipshit when Angela gives him an order, sometimes it’s Gebura audibly trying not to throw up when tasting some coffee, sometimes it’s Chesed’s tildes being obvious in his speech, and sometimes it’s Tiphereth suddenly turning into a Yakuza thug when Roland’s beef with her spills over.
And, sometimes, its characters delivering some of the most haunting soliloquies in the history of the medium. There’s a quiet rule running through LoR’s entire runtime wherein every sickass vocal track barring one is preceded by a character delivering a soliloquy to themselves before coming back for a fight, and all of them are deeply moving.
The one prior to Gone Angels might be a meme now, sure, but seeing it for the first time left my heart in my throat and my jaw hanging from my face like a useless slab of bone.
Whether LoR is being horrific, tragic, funny or tense, the voice acting never falters. I was frankly amazed to find out that a lot of the VAs are either amateurs, F-listers or total no-names because there is not a single weak performance among the cast - and it is a huge cast.

Even on a base level, the smaller sfx are so nice. Clicking through menus is auditory/autismal joy, the various sounds of combat are sharp, distinct and punchy. 5v5 fights are a beautiful chorus of crashing, slashing, shooting, stabbing, clinking and roaring.

O my sorrow, you are better than a well-beloved: because I know that on the day of my final agony, you will be there, lying in my sheets, O sorrow, so that you might once again attempt to enter my heart.

I don’t like hyperbole. I was given the autism strain that programmed me towards sincerity, and the culture I grew up venerated insincerity and humor-as-a-mask so much that I can’t even stand playful contrarianism.

So I mean it when I say Library of Ruina haunts my every waking moment, and that it’s by far the best game I’ve ever played in this long, long history I have with the medium. It's left a gaping hole in my chest, a kind of numb longing that only pops up after a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience. I finished it three days ago, and ever since it has been in my mind for every waking moment. You don't know how crushed I was when I realized "grief" is a word that the City's inhabitants don't have.

If you have any familiarity with me or my reviews, you’ll probably know that my critical brain is on 24/7. Not by choice, that’s just how I’m wired. Things like nostalgia and hype tend to not have much of an effect. I carry this into my reviews, even if it means dunking on things I have a lot of fondness for.

Yet I can’t really find any fault with LoR beyond some minor bugs/typos the fact that the anti-capitalist story was followed up by Limbus Company - a gacha game. But that’s that, and this is this.

“Flawless” isn’t a word I use lightly, and I’m not going to use it here. Not because I think it’s flawed, no, but because to defend that position would require both an actual thesis and also for me to spoil the entire game, start-finish. Maybe some other time.

I didn’t intend for this to get so long or so heartfelt, so I have no idea how to close it off.

Uh… How’s the weather where you live? That train was fucked up, right? Do you think the game would’ve been better if Binah didn’t wear shoes?

See you next time.

DISCLAIMER: This is a re-edited review of Stellar Blade. Just telling you now, I'm going to be talking about more about the dark sides of gooner culture than the game itself because Stellar Blade is a lynch pin for things I find fascinating about the internet as it stands in the month of May, 2024.

We been spendin' most our lives living in a gooners paradise.

I am fascinated by Stellar Blade and what this game might mean for the future for video games. It's going to sound like I hate this game, but I don't. I think it's Fine™.

If it wasn't obvious, this game wants to be Nier Automata Souls Asura's Wrath Bayonetta. The intro of the game is VERY similar how Asura's Wrath started just swapped with Korean mobile game models usually reserved for Gacha-pull auto-battlers -- doing orbital drops onto the Earth doing Bayonetta moves before getting torn to pieces like Gears of War characters by Infernal Demons. There are other games you could pull into the conversation that Stellar Blade reminds you of and you'd be on the money. The game is a homunculus of other game ideas. Stellar Blade is just the title that dared to glue every game it worships together like this. It feels like an astounding ripoff with enough effort put in it's distinctions for me to not feel mad about it.

My only two real criticisms that I care about is that the parrying is BAD. DELAYED FRAME WINDOWS FOR PARRYING IS BAD. If you are going to have parrying in your game, and the parry timing is not finely tuned to the animation of an attack, then the game is going to suffer because of it. Lies of P did this shit, too. We are half a decade removed from the release of Sekiro. Make the parry windows make sense.

Secondly, the plot and characters are just so bad that I find it cannot be enjoyed even in an ironic way. This game is so earnest in it's stupidity, turning on my brain to pay attention to the game's narrative actually felt like it was my fault. You play as android woman named EVE and you meet a guy named ADAM and you two are basically the last people on EARTH.
It's not deep. It is in fact stupid as fuck. But, at the end of the day, I like the fact that Stellar Blade THINKS it is deep. But who cares what I think. Thinking is for people who are not edging to Stellar Blade in between unemployment checks. Just shut the fuck up, me. You cuck-pilled kink-shame-maxxing soyboy. I'll kill you.

After the intro, the game settles into being Nier Automata with Souls gameplay. You know what? That mix sounds pretty damn nice. It IS pretty nice sometimes. It needs a lot of fucking work in the plot department. I only care because the game wants you to care about the whole lot of nothing happening 90% of the time. Only one character has an arc worth bring a first-monitor amount of attention to, but that goes nowhere too after faking out the audience that it WILL go somewhere and it's just like what the fuck are we doing, people. What the fuck is this. What and why do you want me to care. I demand someone answer me. And why is everything sticky?

I love the checkpoint system, I really like the PS2/PS3 platformer style exploration of the environments. The hair physics are too much and it actually affects the performance of gameplay, but IT IS fun to have Eve walk under a waterfall and her becoming wet and her hair wrapping itself her body so you look like a bog witch. Very funny. I struggle to talk about the gameplay itself. It's a goddamn Souls game with platforming. You can autofill what to expect from there.

Stellar Blade should be something more aligned with how it paints itself. I waited for something beneath the veneer of this game to make itself known, only to let myself down when it didn't really happen. This shit REALLY ain't that deep. Which is ok, but why go through the effort of pretending? You know? Hello? Are you listening? It still feels like I'm not being heard right now. You know what? Fuck it, whatever. Let's move on.

My real fascination with Stellar Blade is the cultural impact. Sometimes I wonder how detrimental it is being a perpetually online, horny weirdo in the long-term. I genuinely wonder how much have mobile games that inspired the character design of Stellar Blade conditioned porn-addled individuals to latch onto this game like a big-titted, zero personality octopus dragging a victim into the ocean? How much was the sexiness of Eve was factored into the marketing equation as a distraction from Stellar Blade's unpolished elements? It's straight up nefarious how mentally ill Twitter people who want to jerk their dicks off their body and continue to jerk off the flesh mass on the ground until it is giblet paste -- will tie their sexual freedoms to a corporate product. That's just the state of the world I guess.

I don't want to see cultural zeitgeists eventually revert back to prudishness when it comes to sex, but what I see online from those defending Stellar Blade from being seen as anything other than the best game of forever -- is cumming from a place of defense for unapologetic gooner-maxxing instead of objective reverence for the game itself. Eve isn't real (yet). Her pussy isn't going to vacuum your internal organs out of your genitalia (yet). Gooners, please. Divest 10% of the blood of your penises back into your brain. I need you with me, buddy.

On the flip side, seeing a character like Eve on the cover and the game not being a complete waste of time is an unironic step forward for the gaming industry. The cover looks like fucking Onechanbara spin-off. I do believe we are close to a real gooner game with undeniable quality. Stellar Blade is in many aspects SO close to classic status.

Still, the game is good, not incredible. Bayonetta 1 is incredible. Nier Automata is incredible. Those two games are gooner games with brain cells in them. Though the guy who directed Nier Automata is saying that Stellar Blade is better than fucking NIER AUTOMATA.. I don't know if this is a work so Mr. Taro can direct the next game from this studio, which would be hilarious, or if he is at heart just a gooner. Guess we'll see.

Stellar Blade has led me to be fascinated with the "pussy over everything" mindset and how much fetishization will override any objective discussion. Loneliness and desire to quell that loneliness with sex has defined the present and most certainly will define the future. Defending women who are not real in a time where real women don't even secure reproductive rights is fucking hilarious. I know none of you care, I do. I enjoy laughing about the state of affairs because it keeps me from going insane.

So yeah whatever I just know half of you reading are saying "shut the fuck up loser smelly bad gay slur-coded cuck and let me teach my semen a lesson that it should be in a jar and not my body." or even better, the other half going "what are you even talking about" crowd. Because the latter are so pure and don't read up on what goes on in the day-to-day discussions on gaming. You innocent sons of bitches. I really, truly wish I was you. I am a man witnessing madness and devolving affairs and speaking on it and you can just tell me I'm crazy and allow my review to pass over you. The innocence of ignorance. You don't know the gooners will be at your doorstep, soon. They'll come for you and your mom's retirement checks that you use to buy Jujustsu Kaisen figures. Truly, willful centrism is your zion.

My real message here: Jerk your dick to your heart's content, just don't let your jerk bait define you.

Stellar Blade, everyone.