poochy
2017
In the opening, a young woman named Claire runs into an old mansion to escape from the rain, oblivious to the intense and terrible journey that was to await her. Much akin, my lack of reading comprehension on vgperson's website made me wander into this game, just wanting another cool and cozy RPG Maker experience, unprepared to lose my mind at the journey ahead. What presents itself as a pulpy horror anthology, and very often is one, turned out to be the root of one person's ongoing mega project that's left me incredibly enticed.
An interesting realization came upon me while playing Witch's Heart: one that probably should have been obvious much sooner, but feels particularly pronounced here. RPG Maker has been utilized by a lot of professional illustrators who wish to display their creative visions in game form: Miwashiba, Omocat, Deep Sea Prisoner, Segawa (I think), Nemlei, IZ (the creator of this game). It makes sense why, it's a relatively easy to get into series of engines that does a lot of the lower-level work for you. Oftentimes this leads to a lot of the fidelity of the games being showcased through illustrated stills, playing to the creators' strengths, and it's something I really love. It makes connecting with the characters in these games so much easier when provided such a vivid visual showcase of them. Witch's Heart is no exception, with a frankly absurd number of CGs throughout each cutscene that add so much to the experience.
When initially faced with the chapter selection, I was under the impression each would lead to an ending of ambiguous canonicity, like much of its RPG Maker ilk. I was kind of right, but you end up playing each storyline in order, with each one rearranging similar set pieces to tell a new storyline that builds off the ones that come before. This framing ends is used really well to shine a spotlight on each of the characters. My early favorite was Ashe, the silliest zoomiest Poochy-bait-est character ever, but despite not being present much until the end, Noel grew on me a ton as well. The story framing also ended up playing into the story itself, culminating in a moment that made a bit emotional towards the end (which isn’t an easy thing to do)!
While most of the story is communicated in effectively a visual novel format, thrown in are adventure segments comparable to moon, where you wander the mansion helping out the monstrous inhabitants. The connective tissue between these two different modes is almost non-existent. You’re just told “okay go help the monsters” for no real reason, not even in the macro sense of why you’re helping them out in the first place. Claire is just that nice, I guess. The total non-sequiturity throws a wrench into the pacing at times, especially when the adventure segments are slammed right before a big story moment. Then you have to figure out how to continue the story and, damn, sometimes you’re just forced to check every room to continue. Thankfully, the mansion itself is fairly small, but it ends up as a consistency annoyance regardless.
In spite of the pacing issues, however, the adventure segments themselves are a cozy time. Much like how the story overlays upon itself with each route, colorful “fantasy zones”, stretching beyond the walls of the mansion, reveal themselves. Each one id full of its own nooks and crannies to explore and often portals deeper into completely different worlds. Venturing through each neon-illuminated landscape can feel almost like a tiny version of Yume Nikki. You even get new tools across each route to interact with these worlds in new ways.
Some areas even include something that could be considered combat!…? In a very bold decision, the game tries to approximate Zelda 1-esque combat under the limitations of the RPG Maker 2003 engine, and it goes about as well as you’d expect. Every time you press the attack button, it pauses to check for an interaction, making it all feel so start-and-stop. It sucks. I can appreciate the attempt to do something different, but it sucks. Graciously, you don’t have to engage with the combat much at all, but it leaves me wondering why bother having it in the first place. It never feels like the game benefits from the combat in a thematic sense, and it finds plenty of non-combat ways to up the tension.
All these issues, as easy they are to gripe about, slip away with just how engrossing the story is. Finishing the third storyline right before having to leave for work left me with such an itch, desperately wanting to know how the book closes on these characters. And well, I still don’t know! Upon completing the fourth route, I discovered this is but Act I of the full Witch’s Heart story and that’s… exciting! I’m all for getting more time with this cast, to see how this story can be layered upon further. Only 2 of the remaining 5 routes have been released in the six years since the original release, but I’m ready to the process. This is now my Deltarune.
An interesting realization came upon me while playing Witch's Heart: one that probably should have been obvious much sooner, but feels particularly pronounced here. RPG Maker has been utilized by a lot of professional illustrators who wish to display their creative visions in game form: Miwashiba, Omocat, Deep Sea Prisoner, Segawa (I think), Nemlei, IZ (the creator of this game). It makes sense why, it's a relatively easy to get into series of engines that does a lot of the lower-level work for you. Oftentimes this leads to a lot of the fidelity of the games being showcased through illustrated stills, playing to the creators' strengths, and it's something I really love. It makes connecting with the characters in these games so much easier when provided such a vivid visual showcase of them. Witch's Heart is no exception, with a frankly absurd number of CGs throughout each cutscene that add so much to the experience.
When initially faced with the chapter selection, I was under the impression each would lead to an ending of ambiguous canonicity, like much of its RPG Maker ilk. I was kind of right, but you end up playing each storyline in order, with each one rearranging similar set pieces to tell a new storyline that builds off the ones that come before. This framing ends is used really well to shine a spotlight on each of the characters. My early favorite was Ashe, the silliest zoomiest Poochy-bait-est character ever, but despite not being present much until the end, Noel grew on me a ton as well. The story framing also ended up playing into the story itself, culminating in a moment that made a bit emotional towards the end (which isn’t an easy thing to do)!
While most of the story is communicated in effectively a visual novel format, thrown in are adventure segments comparable to moon, where you wander the mansion helping out the monstrous inhabitants. The connective tissue between these two different modes is almost non-existent. You’re just told “okay go help the monsters” for no real reason, not even in the macro sense of why you’re helping them out in the first place. Claire is just that nice, I guess. The total non-sequiturity throws a wrench into the pacing at times, especially when the adventure segments are slammed right before a big story moment. Then you have to figure out how to continue the story and, damn, sometimes you’re just forced to check every room to continue. Thankfully, the mansion itself is fairly small, but it ends up as a consistency annoyance regardless.
In spite of the pacing issues, however, the adventure segments themselves are a cozy time. Much like how the story overlays upon itself with each route, colorful “fantasy zones”, stretching beyond the walls of the mansion, reveal themselves. Each one id full of its own nooks and crannies to explore and often portals deeper into completely different worlds. Venturing through each neon-illuminated landscape can feel almost like a tiny version of Yume Nikki. You even get new tools across each route to interact with these worlds in new ways.
Some areas even include something that could be considered combat!…? In a very bold decision, the game tries to approximate Zelda 1-esque combat under the limitations of the RPG Maker 2003 engine, and it goes about as well as you’d expect. Every time you press the attack button, it pauses to check for an interaction, making it all feel so start-and-stop. It sucks. I can appreciate the attempt to do something different, but it sucks. Graciously, you don’t have to engage with the combat much at all, but it leaves me wondering why bother having it in the first place. It never feels like the game benefits from the combat in a thematic sense, and it finds plenty of non-combat ways to up the tension.
All these issues, as easy they are to gripe about, slip away with just how engrossing the story is. Finishing the third storyline right before having to leave for work left me with such an itch, desperately wanting to know how the book closes on these characters. And well, I still don’t know! Upon completing the fourth route, I discovered this is but Act I of the full Witch’s Heart story and that’s… exciting! I’m all for getting more time with this cast, to see how this story can be layered upon further. Only 2 of the remaining 5 routes have been released in the six years since the original release, but I’m ready to the process. This is now my Deltarune.
2024
Balatro is the antethical to everything I've held dear to the medium in recent times: a near-completely artistically stripped down experience devoid of story, made to be repeated in perpetuity. Even the brightest jewels of the roguelike genre—Hades and Inscryption—I cherish largely in spite of their nature as roguelikes. Yet, after spending six hours playing through on release day, I was already hooked in deeply, just to have it embed deeper and deeper into my soul with every game.
There's an inherent trance that every run builds up, setting up the perfect hand with discards before firing off an insane chain reaction of multipliers. So many variables at play that it's pointless to crunch beyond a rough estimate, leaving each hand as something of it's own gamble. Sometimes that leaves you short of a win by only a fraction of the point threshold to hit, but sometimes that hand you thought would net you a few hundred thousand ticks all the way up to 20 million. This has happened to me on multiple occasions! And it's a glorious, visceral experience each and every time.
The biggest strength with Balatro, I feel, is the ease and variety of ways in which it feels like the game can be snapped in two. I have already beaten 7 or 8 runs of the game, more than any other roguelike I've played besides maybe Enter the Gungeon (which I dumped 100 hours into during high school), and am thirsting to do even more. From my experience, most other roguelikes make winning a run a far scarcer experience in order to help perpetuate the gameplay loop. But as it turns out, winning is really fun.
Not only that, every single winning run takes a completely separate angle to win: totally different Joker cards, deck compositions, and hands I aim for. It's so easy to feel like I've found the stupidest possible way to win the run, just to come around to the end 2-3 runs later with something far stupider. And even after each winning run, I feel inclined to continue in the endless mode, where the point thresholds start going up exponentially just to see how far the utter stupidity can take me. Many runs end up becoming less about whether or not I can win with my setup, but rather the far more interesting question of how far towards infinity I can reach with it. I'm prematurely a bit excited for the run I eventually get on that lets me pass my current wall, the 300 million point threshold.
It's pretty impressive how Balatro really just... doesn't have any issues. Thanks to being so stripped down, it manages to be absolutely airtight in its design while providing a cornucopia of variety. It's just an absolute masterpiece of design. A welcome surprise for personal game of the year contender.
There's an inherent trance that every run builds up, setting up the perfect hand with discards before firing off an insane chain reaction of multipliers. So many variables at play that it's pointless to crunch beyond a rough estimate, leaving each hand as something of it's own gamble. Sometimes that leaves you short of a win by only a fraction of the point threshold to hit, but sometimes that hand you thought would net you a few hundred thousand ticks all the way up to 20 million. This has happened to me on multiple occasions! And it's a glorious, visceral experience each and every time.
The biggest strength with Balatro, I feel, is the ease and variety of ways in which it feels like the game can be snapped in two. I have already beaten 7 or 8 runs of the game, more than any other roguelike I've played besides maybe Enter the Gungeon (which I dumped 100 hours into during high school), and am thirsting to do even more. From my experience, most other roguelikes make winning a run a far scarcer experience in order to help perpetuate the gameplay loop. But as it turns out, winning is really fun.
Not only that, every single winning run takes a completely separate angle to win: totally different Joker cards, deck compositions, and hands I aim for. It's so easy to feel like I've found the stupidest possible way to win the run, just to come around to the end 2-3 runs later with something far stupider. And even after each winning run, I feel inclined to continue in the endless mode, where the point thresholds start going up exponentially just to see how far the utter stupidity can take me. Many runs end up becoming less about whether or not I can win with my setup, but rather the far more interesting question of how far towards infinity I can reach with it. I'm prematurely a bit excited for the run I eventually get on that lets me pass my current wall, the 300 million point threshold.
It's pretty impressive how Balatro really just... doesn't have any issues. Thanks to being so stripped down, it manages to be absolutely airtight in its design while providing a cornucopia of variety. It's just an absolute masterpiece of design. A welcome surprise for personal game of the year contender.
This review contains spoilers
At our core, every human is a patchwork of ideas imprinted upon us by others, both consciously and subconsciously. We then continue the cycle of imprinting on those around us, again, both consciously and subconsciously. There’s a reason all art is political, even if not all art desires to engage politically.
It feels impossible, no matter how trite it may feel, to discuss Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass without consistent reference to the inspirations it wears on its sleeve (a strong enough invitation for comparison). Something of a classic Final Fantasy-structured globetrotting adventure with a reinterpretation of Yume Nikki’s transformation system. And, most pressingly of course, a closer set of vibes to what makes the Mother trilogy so beloved than any other game I’ve played. Standing on the shoulders of giants, Jimmy manages, with only a few missteps, to coalesce into an immensely charming RPG with an impressive amount of depth to it.
It’s quickly apparent getting situated in Jimmy’s home atop the clouds it’s some kinda of dream world, beset by the growing rot of the titular Pulsating Mass (an obvious stand-in for… something). This vast world, so rich in variety, is the star of the show. A constant stream of interesting new locales and dungeons reflecting upon Jimmy’s young psyche manages to capture the oh-so-pristine feeling of being a real globe-trotting adventure. It really hits in the endgame cleanup, having the Final Fantasy airship moment and realizing how far I’ve come since the starting island, and how much there still was to experience. Even when I dug well into the game, there was still a solid half-dozen side dungeons with their own unique aesthetics, lore, and gameplay mechanics I never even touched.
Combat alone is chocked to the brim with a stupid number of elements that are so fun to really dig into. Jimmy alone has like 10 separate forms he can switch between in battle, each with completely different niches. As you level them up you unlock pieces of each form to spec base form JImmy into any sort of fearsome fighter. The rest of the team have more predefined niches, but plenty of weapons, equipment, skill manuals, accessories, and collectable furniture that gives a ton of flexibility in the team dynamics. Towards the end, the game does some I LOVE when games do: giving you gimmicky equipment that fundamentally changes how characters work. In the final areas, my healer was rocking with the strongest basic attack in the entire party after an entire game of her being the weakest by a large margin.
The enemies, not to be outmatched, are full of their own little gimmicks, particularly interacting with Goon Jimmy’s grifting. Got an alarm robot in the way? Just steal its voice box and let it flounder in silence. Didn’t steal it and let the alarm summon a Deathbot 3000? Just steal the Deathbot 3000’s voicebox and—oh—that doesn’t prevent it from death-ing you. Of particular interest, basically every boss fight has an interesting gimmick attached to it as well. It’s an interesting contrast to Final Fantasy VII, which (like VI) opens with a boss who’s counterattack serves as a good tutorial to the ATB system, before forgetting boss gimmicks can be a thing until the superbosses. It’s really impressive how well realized Jimmy’s combat ends up being, easily the best combat of any RPG Maker game I’ve played (granted, Omori is probably the only game that remotely competes).
Unfortunately, the game decides to take on particular element from the Mother series that… well… read my Mother 3 review: the combat gets to be a SLOG. While it has the nice QoL feature of being able to ignore some encounters when you hit some arbitrary requirement (I assume level??), each individual encounter is difficult enough and enough of a resource drain to become exhausting, and often leaving you unprepared for boss fights with massive HP pools at the end of a long dungeon.
Almost every boss became a loop of attempting it, realizing I did not have the resources to survive the war of attrition against the boss, then switching to easy mode to get through it. The reason it took so long for me to beat the game was the constant ramming my head against a wall before putting it down for a few weeks, several times over. Until halfway through the game when I decided to just keep easy mode on full time. despite the game pinning normal mode as “the intended experience”, easy mode was so much more enjoyable. It saved the experience for me really, turning it into a really chill adventure overall.
This adventure is constantly intertwined with the adventures of a whole bunch of other characters. While the concept of “reoccuring side characters” is of course not remotely unique, I think its notable how many the game has. Halfway through the game the game stops everything to do what could be called an “every character in the game so far tournament arc” and it’s a delight. It (perhaps counterintuitively) really builds up the sense of adventure and strong vibes.
To reuse the phrasing that certainly made people silently wish death upon me on the Mario Discord, Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is the “quirky Earthbound inspired indie game” that most exactly captures the vibes that made the progenitor trilogy so appealing. I struggle to pick out the exact elements that make them match so hard beyond a lot of very earnest humor interspersed with some really engrossing descriptions (albeit far more R-rated than anything you’d find in Mother). Still, it ended up making for a very similar feeling experience to the one I had playing Mother 3 last year—and not one that felt derivative in the slightest.
The art style does not carry the vibes as well as the writing, with sprites often looking fairly crude in a way that feels amateurish. It gets a tad unbearable in the game’s gorier moments. Sometimes, the game pulls out a pretty impressive looking part that makes me think the spritework is meant to reflect the crudeness and edginess of a child like Jimmy’s thoughts. But then I see the kinda abhorrent spritework for the visual novel section of the game and I lose benefit of the doubt. At least the soundtrack absolutely slaps.
Ironically, the weakest characters end up being the main cast: Jimmy’s family. They’re not bad characters, but just end up feeling kind of thin and “along for the ride” when spending so much of the game with them. And when the story is so focused on Jimmy’s family, it ended up not really emotionally landing for me, especially compared to how I’ve seen it hit some others. It took until near the end, when Jimmy is given brief flashes on consciousness to realize the Pulsating Mass I suspected to be some sort of metaphor (Earthbound-inspired indie RPG about depression REAL???) was literally a Pulsating Mass. It’s a cancerous tumor. Jimmy is in a coma. Then the rest of the game ends up playing out just about how you’d expect it to. While there’s some texture provided, particularly during the glimpses back into reality, to keep it from feel too trite, I can’t help from feeling somewhat dissatisfied.
Jimmy’s adventure is moreso about the journey than the destination, though, and I think the game even makes the case for that. While not some must play game that will stick with me forever, there’s so much heart that it’s hard not to really like it in spite of the issues. It’s a game of impressive craft, especially considering it was a solo development.
For the final, secret form Jimmy can unlock, he imagines himself as the phoenix. “He feels alive. Energized. Jimmy thinks that if he put his mind to it, he could fly right out of bed. He could fly and fly. He could burn bright forever, like a brand new sun.”
It’s a game that knows how to be beautiful.
It feels impossible, no matter how trite it may feel, to discuss Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass without consistent reference to the inspirations it wears on its sleeve (a strong enough invitation for comparison). Something of a classic Final Fantasy-structured globetrotting adventure with a reinterpretation of Yume Nikki’s transformation system. And, most pressingly of course, a closer set of vibes to what makes the Mother trilogy so beloved than any other game I’ve played. Standing on the shoulders of giants, Jimmy manages, with only a few missteps, to coalesce into an immensely charming RPG with an impressive amount of depth to it.
It’s quickly apparent getting situated in Jimmy’s home atop the clouds it’s some kinda of dream world, beset by the growing rot of the titular Pulsating Mass (an obvious stand-in for… something). This vast world, so rich in variety, is the star of the show. A constant stream of interesting new locales and dungeons reflecting upon Jimmy’s young psyche manages to capture the oh-so-pristine feeling of being a real globe-trotting adventure. It really hits in the endgame cleanup, having the Final Fantasy airship moment and realizing how far I’ve come since the starting island, and how much there still was to experience. Even when I dug well into the game, there was still a solid half-dozen side dungeons with their own unique aesthetics, lore, and gameplay mechanics I never even touched.
Combat alone is chocked to the brim with a stupid number of elements that are so fun to really dig into. Jimmy alone has like 10 separate forms he can switch between in battle, each with completely different niches. As you level them up you unlock pieces of each form to spec base form JImmy into any sort of fearsome fighter. The rest of the team have more predefined niches, but plenty of weapons, equipment, skill manuals, accessories, and collectable furniture that gives a ton of flexibility in the team dynamics. Towards the end, the game does some I LOVE when games do: giving you gimmicky equipment that fundamentally changes how characters work. In the final areas, my healer was rocking with the strongest basic attack in the entire party after an entire game of her being the weakest by a large margin.
The enemies, not to be outmatched, are full of their own little gimmicks, particularly interacting with Goon Jimmy’s grifting. Got an alarm robot in the way? Just steal its voice box and let it flounder in silence. Didn’t steal it and let the alarm summon a Deathbot 3000? Just steal the Deathbot 3000’s voicebox and—oh—that doesn’t prevent it from death-ing you. Of particular interest, basically every boss fight has an interesting gimmick attached to it as well. It’s an interesting contrast to Final Fantasy VII, which (like VI) opens with a boss who’s counterattack serves as a good tutorial to the ATB system, before forgetting boss gimmicks can be a thing until the superbosses. It’s really impressive how well realized Jimmy’s combat ends up being, easily the best combat of any RPG Maker game I’ve played (granted, Omori is probably the only game that remotely competes).
Unfortunately, the game decides to take on particular element from the Mother series that… well… read my Mother 3 review: the combat gets to be a SLOG. While it has the nice QoL feature of being able to ignore some encounters when you hit some arbitrary requirement (I assume level??), each individual encounter is difficult enough and enough of a resource drain to become exhausting, and often leaving you unprepared for boss fights with massive HP pools at the end of a long dungeon.
Almost every boss became a loop of attempting it, realizing I did not have the resources to survive the war of attrition against the boss, then switching to easy mode to get through it. The reason it took so long for me to beat the game was the constant ramming my head against a wall before putting it down for a few weeks, several times over. Until halfway through the game when I decided to just keep easy mode on full time. despite the game pinning normal mode as “the intended experience”, easy mode was so much more enjoyable. It saved the experience for me really, turning it into a really chill adventure overall.
This adventure is constantly intertwined with the adventures of a whole bunch of other characters. While the concept of “reoccuring side characters” is of course not remotely unique, I think its notable how many the game has. Halfway through the game the game stops everything to do what could be called an “every character in the game so far tournament arc” and it’s a delight. It (perhaps counterintuitively) really builds up the sense of adventure and strong vibes.
To reuse the phrasing that certainly made people silently wish death upon me on the Mario Discord, Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is the “quirky Earthbound inspired indie game” that most exactly captures the vibes that made the progenitor trilogy so appealing. I struggle to pick out the exact elements that make them match so hard beyond a lot of very earnest humor interspersed with some really engrossing descriptions (albeit far more R-rated than anything you’d find in Mother). Still, it ended up making for a very similar feeling experience to the one I had playing Mother 3 last year—and not one that felt derivative in the slightest.
The art style does not carry the vibes as well as the writing, with sprites often looking fairly crude in a way that feels amateurish. It gets a tad unbearable in the game’s gorier moments. Sometimes, the game pulls out a pretty impressive looking part that makes me think the spritework is meant to reflect the crudeness and edginess of a child like Jimmy’s thoughts. But then I see the kinda abhorrent spritework for the visual novel section of the game and I lose benefit of the doubt. At least the soundtrack absolutely slaps.
Ironically, the weakest characters end up being the main cast: Jimmy’s family. They’re not bad characters, but just end up feeling kind of thin and “along for the ride” when spending so much of the game with them. And when the story is so focused on Jimmy’s family, it ended up not really emotionally landing for me, especially compared to how I’ve seen it hit some others. It took until near the end, when Jimmy is given brief flashes on consciousness to realize the Pulsating Mass I suspected to be some sort of metaphor (Earthbound-inspired indie RPG about depression REAL???) was literally a Pulsating Mass. It’s a cancerous tumor. Jimmy is in a coma. Then the rest of the game ends up playing out just about how you’d expect it to. While there’s some texture provided, particularly during the glimpses back into reality, to keep it from feel too trite, I can’t help from feeling somewhat dissatisfied.
Jimmy’s adventure is moreso about the journey than the destination, though, and I think the game even makes the case for that. While not some must play game that will stick with me forever, there’s so much heart that it’s hard not to really like it in spite of the issues. It’s a game of impressive craft, especially considering it was a solo development.
For the final, secret form Jimmy can unlock, he imagines himself as the phoenix. “He feels alive. Energized. Jimmy thinks that if he put his mind to it, he could fly right out of bed. He could fly and fly. He could burn bright forever, like a brand new sun.”
It’s a game that knows how to be beautiful.
How does a glorified game jam the team put together in a week and change feel like the first level of a fully complete game?
This review contains spoilers
The Compilation of Final Fantasy VII project was always meant to end with the remake of it’s cornerstone. A bold proposition, considering Square’s attempts to remake the game on both PS2 and PS3 were both halted by a simple fact: a game with the scope and detail of Final Fantasy VII cannot be faithfully envisioned in modern fidelity without an unholy amount of resources being poured into it. Not that Square is a stranger to damn near tanking the company off of massive Final Fantasy projects. It could not have been easy making the decision to develop the remake into multiple parts. People generally do not like when they experience an incomplete story, when its arcs and themes are left unresolved until the next part. While most multi-part adaptions try to manage this by having the next part be relatively shortly after, videogames are pincered by the ever-bloating length of development times. By its conclusion, the FF7 remake trilogy will be the product of a near 15-year development cycle.
The original Final Fantasy VII is a beautifully-told epic about identity and motivation, which remains as powerful in 2024 as it did back in 1997. However, since these themes are largely explored in the back half of the game, what does that make a restoration of what is essentially the game’s extended opening? Could they have played it all straight, making the perhaps easy decision to bank on nostalgia now and let those themes flourish nearly a decade later? Realistically, they could’ve gotten away with it. Instead they took an insightful re-examination of what Midgar is, to construct a brand new exploration of themes out of its scaffolding. What is left in the end, the Final Fantasy VII Remake, is perhaps the most respectful understanding of the original masterpiece we could have got: a contemplation of what it means to free ourselves from the shackles of our capitalist overlords.
From the drop, the remake takes a hold of its legacy firmly with its lavish remake of the opening. Despite beating the original game only the day prior, the sweeping shot of Midgar as the game's logo flashes onto the screen and the iconic theme swells still managed to enrapture me with emotion. Even now, it makes me a little tingly thinking about it. The entire game looks and sounds absolutely beautiful, with some of the best production values of any game I’ve ever played. Then, right into the bombing mission, and before long, you're thrust head-first into the combat. Let the battles begin.
The game makes a stark contrast to Square's previous attempt at a party-based ARPG mainline Final Fantasy. Landing blows on enemies feels satisfying and, wow, you actually have options on how to fight enemies! The recontextualization of the ATB system into a pause menu with an ever-expanding rolodex of actions to utilize how you see fit captures the feeling of the original’s combat while just being incredibly satisfying in its own right. And that’s just within each individual character, with the entire team synergizing together so well no matter the composition. It’s so easy to get into the zone of switching between characters firing off their ATB charges, focusing on the targets they’re best suited for, then switching over to the next.
The combat’s glory is never made as clear as in the boss fight. Each one has been amped up into an absolutely ridiculous display, ratcheting things up further with every phase passing in one big feast, audiovisual and gameplay alike. I greatly admire the restraint it must have took to hold off on their lavish rendition of ‘Fight On!’ until the Airbuster fight a good 10-15 hours in. These setpieces do reveal a few weird tuning decisions, particularly in regards to the stagger meter. It felt almost designed such that you pull off the stagger, get ready to wail on the boss, and then… the next phase is triggered almost immediately. It’s a minute thing, but there was a slight tinge of dissatisfaction each time, especially when it takes away your chance to pull off your Limit Breaks on the staggered foe. Limit Breaks are essentially impossible to use outside of bosses for some inexplicable reason, which sucks when they were such a fun (and consistently present!) element of the original’s combat.
When outside of combat, you’re sure doing a lot of… slowly walking down corridors. It quickly becomes apparent that FF7R’s biggest weakness is the box it put itself in from the jump, constraining itself to just being Midgar. While it’s the only reasonable span of the game it could be before going all the way to where Rebirth is ending off—and at that point like 70% of the game has been made—but oh my god is it samey. Chapter after chapter of sliding through tight spaces in tunnels, rubble, factories (a LOT of factories), laboratories, and other samey one-screen areas from the OG stretched into chapter-spanning excursions with a level of hallway syndrome rivaling The Thousand Year Door. Sure, it helps plays into the overall oppression of Midgar as an environment, but it quickly gets rather tiring to traverse. This is especially pronounced in the few chapters where the game pauses and asks you to do a handful of fetch quests that send you back down the same hallways as before (often several times). It’s hard to shake the feeling that most areas in the game could be shaved off a little and end up with a much tighter game that’s only 25 hours long instead of 35, one that ends up something closer to perfection.
In a saving grace, however, the many slow corridors are filled by the game’s surprisingly great script that make traversing them not just tolerable but even pretty enjoyable. While the original’s writing was pretty good, it languished in a horribly rushed translation and an unfortunate racist-feeling handling of Barrett. Here, here’s absolutely the star of the show, playing well against the expanded role of Shinra’s oppressiveness in the story. Plus, it’s just great to see him be Marlene’s dad. The entire cast (barring Tifa, whom I’m sure will get her dues plenty in Rebirth and especially the third game) has been fleshed out incredibly, getting way more opportunities to play off each other in fun ways. Traveling across the rooftops of Sector 5 with Aerith, having her tease Cloud as the beautiful music plays in the background was a really memorable moment in its understatedness. Even the sidequests, while by themselves fairly dull, have nice tidbits that flesh out the space of Midgar and end up coalescing into the final sidequest in such a well-designed way you just gotta respect it.
I already knew of the game’s plot divergences from years of being adjacent to soooooooooo much of the game’s discourse, but I didn’t know quite how, aside from the final boss. I will admit, it was a tough pill to swallow at first seeing the effects of the Sector 7 plate collapse, such a pivotal moment for the original, having its death toll greatly reduced. Still an important moment of course, but it lacked the same immediate impact. Reaching the end, however, it became clear I was having a moment of dissonance. I was experiencing the same plot beats (roughly) as I had a few days prior, but they were communicating an entirely different message to me.
The Final Fantasy VII Remake takes Shinra and builds it up as a unilateral force, one with eyes and hands everywhere, and asks the question: what can we do against that? And it ends up showing a bunch of small actions, not just by the main party but many of the side characters they build report with, slowly chipping away at Shinra’s impenetrable wall. The only reason so many survive the plate collapse is a Shinra guard seizing his humanity and opening the gate blockading evacuees. Parallel to it is Sephiroth, and ultimately the party’s, attempt to fight against the impenetrable wall of fate. Both seem like a perpetual state of being, where loss is inevitable, and yet beyond that is a vast world of possibility, where things can be better.
By shattering these walls at the end, both the part and the game as a whole open up a whole new world. One that can be just as exciting as the original adventure it’s based on, expanding it into something new. One where Avalanche still gets to have a presence?! One where Aerith, perhaps, doesn’t have to die????? And with most of my issues with the pacing and uniformity of the Remake being down to its very conception, Rebirth seems to have well fixed them. I have pretty good faith that by the end, unless something goes really wrong, the remake trilogy will go down as one of the most interesting, bold series of big budget games ever produced. I’m so glad I get to be here for it now.
The original Final Fantasy VII is a beautifully-told epic about identity and motivation, which remains as powerful in 2024 as it did back in 1997. However, since these themes are largely explored in the back half of the game, what does that make a restoration of what is essentially the game’s extended opening? Could they have played it all straight, making the perhaps easy decision to bank on nostalgia now and let those themes flourish nearly a decade later? Realistically, they could’ve gotten away with it. Instead they took an insightful re-examination of what Midgar is, to construct a brand new exploration of themes out of its scaffolding. What is left in the end, the Final Fantasy VII Remake, is perhaps the most respectful understanding of the original masterpiece we could have got: a contemplation of what it means to free ourselves from the shackles of our capitalist overlords.
From the drop, the remake takes a hold of its legacy firmly with its lavish remake of the opening. Despite beating the original game only the day prior, the sweeping shot of Midgar as the game's logo flashes onto the screen and the iconic theme swells still managed to enrapture me with emotion. Even now, it makes me a little tingly thinking about it. The entire game looks and sounds absolutely beautiful, with some of the best production values of any game I’ve ever played. Then, right into the bombing mission, and before long, you're thrust head-first into the combat. Let the battles begin.
The game makes a stark contrast to Square's previous attempt at a party-based ARPG mainline Final Fantasy. Landing blows on enemies feels satisfying and, wow, you actually have options on how to fight enemies! The recontextualization of the ATB system into a pause menu with an ever-expanding rolodex of actions to utilize how you see fit captures the feeling of the original’s combat while just being incredibly satisfying in its own right. And that’s just within each individual character, with the entire team synergizing together so well no matter the composition. It’s so easy to get into the zone of switching between characters firing off their ATB charges, focusing on the targets they’re best suited for, then switching over to the next.
The combat’s glory is never made as clear as in the boss fight. Each one has been amped up into an absolutely ridiculous display, ratcheting things up further with every phase passing in one big feast, audiovisual and gameplay alike. I greatly admire the restraint it must have took to hold off on their lavish rendition of ‘Fight On!’ until the Airbuster fight a good 10-15 hours in. These setpieces do reveal a few weird tuning decisions, particularly in regards to the stagger meter. It felt almost designed such that you pull off the stagger, get ready to wail on the boss, and then… the next phase is triggered almost immediately. It’s a minute thing, but there was a slight tinge of dissatisfaction each time, especially when it takes away your chance to pull off your Limit Breaks on the staggered foe. Limit Breaks are essentially impossible to use outside of bosses for some inexplicable reason, which sucks when they were such a fun (and consistently present!) element of the original’s combat.
When outside of combat, you’re sure doing a lot of… slowly walking down corridors. It quickly becomes apparent that FF7R’s biggest weakness is the box it put itself in from the jump, constraining itself to just being Midgar. While it’s the only reasonable span of the game it could be before going all the way to where Rebirth is ending off—and at that point like 70% of the game has been made—but oh my god is it samey. Chapter after chapter of sliding through tight spaces in tunnels, rubble, factories (a LOT of factories), laboratories, and other samey one-screen areas from the OG stretched into chapter-spanning excursions with a level of hallway syndrome rivaling The Thousand Year Door. Sure, it helps plays into the overall oppression of Midgar as an environment, but it quickly gets rather tiring to traverse. This is especially pronounced in the few chapters where the game pauses and asks you to do a handful of fetch quests that send you back down the same hallways as before (often several times). It’s hard to shake the feeling that most areas in the game could be shaved off a little and end up with a much tighter game that’s only 25 hours long instead of 35, one that ends up something closer to perfection.
In a saving grace, however, the many slow corridors are filled by the game’s surprisingly great script that make traversing them not just tolerable but even pretty enjoyable. While the original’s writing was pretty good, it languished in a horribly rushed translation and an unfortunate racist-feeling handling of Barrett. Here, here’s absolutely the star of the show, playing well against the expanded role of Shinra’s oppressiveness in the story. Plus, it’s just great to see him be Marlene’s dad. The entire cast (barring Tifa, whom I’m sure will get her dues plenty in Rebirth and especially the third game) has been fleshed out incredibly, getting way more opportunities to play off each other in fun ways. Traveling across the rooftops of Sector 5 with Aerith, having her tease Cloud as the beautiful music plays in the background was a really memorable moment in its understatedness. Even the sidequests, while by themselves fairly dull, have nice tidbits that flesh out the space of Midgar and end up coalescing into the final sidequest in such a well-designed way you just gotta respect it.
I already knew of the game’s plot divergences from years of being adjacent to soooooooooo much of the game’s discourse, but I didn’t know quite how, aside from the final boss. I will admit, it was a tough pill to swallow at first seeing the effects of the Sector 7 plate collapse, such a pivotal moment for the original, having its death toll greatly reduced. Still an important moment of course, but it lacked the same immediate impact. Reaching the end, however, it became clear I was having a moment of dissonance. I was experiencing the same plot beats (roughly) as I had a few days prior, but they were communicating an entirely different message to me.
The Final Fantasy VII Remake takes Shinra and builds it up as a unilateral force, one with eyes and hands everywhere, and asks the question: what can we do against that? And it ends up showing a bunch of small actions, not just by the main party but many of the side characters they build report with, slowly chipping away at Shinra’s impenetrable wall. The only reason so many survive the plate collapse is a Shinra guard seizing his humanity and opening the gate blockading evacuees. Parallel to it is Sephiroth, and ultimately the party’s, attempt to fight against the impenetrable wall of fate. Both seem like a perpetual state of being, where loss is inevitable, and yet beyond that is a vast world of possibility, where things can be better.
By shattering these walls at the end, both the part and the game as a whole open up a whole new world. One that can be just as exciting as the original adventure it’s based on, expanding it into something new. One where Avalanche still gets to have a presence?! One where Aerith, perhaps, doesn’t have to die????? And with most of my issues with the pacing and uniformity of the Remake being down to its very conception, Rebirth seems to have well fixed them. I have pretty good faith that by the end, unless something goes really wrong, the remake trilogy will go down as one of the most interesting, bold series of big budget games ever produced. I’m so glad I get to be here for it now.
2019
The background of Hypnospace Outlaw, an alt-90s internet space approximating Geocities/AOL, is not something I ever got to experience for myself. By the time I first started to seriously experience the internet as a kid in the early 2010’s, Web 2.0 was well underway, with Hypnospace’s inspirations already well on their way to becoming a relic embedded firmly in history. Yet when playing this game, it’s so easy to see the fantastical allure of what the internet could be. Even as an obviously curated space, I think its poignant that this is the most fun I’ve had just “browsing the web” in a long time. More still, it highlights how even as a lot about the internet has changed, a lot remains similar at the core: people who want to express themselves struggling with greater corporate interests.
Every page of Hypnospace is a meticulously constructed, multi-media collage of clip art, funny-looking early 3D models, and hyper-compressed videos that all feel right at home together. It's also really fucking funny. Whether seeing an old man failing to put together a properly functioning page (props for the effort though) or a bunch of teenagers sticking the same image uniting themselves against the teenzone bully, every page has a—and typically a whole array of—absolutely ridiculous bits that are a delicacy to experience. Indeed, so much of this game's comedy born out of the fact that the way people express themselves is often really funny, whether intentionally or not.
An amazing moment occurs during the first mission to copyright strike images of one 1964 cartoon character "Gumshoe Gooper". You spend a while idling through the vast space available to you, browsing page after page with no luck, until you finally strike the jackpot... a first grade teacher posting the drawings her students made online. Welp! Get on scrubbing those pics, pig. The comedy just ratchets itself up as the game progresses, and you get to see these same webpages evolve, opening the door to so many fun developments (many of which you don't get to truly appreciate the payoff until the end of the game). Part of me wants to be as vague as possible talking about the various elements of the game, because it all deserves to be experienced blindly. Yet, because there's such an immense amount of things to experience, it doesn't really matter "spoiling" a few things.
Short digression I orginally had near the end but moved up here for pacing reasons: There's a very particular focus on music sub-cultures that spawned on the internet, from what I can tell spawning from the creator's own experience in such groups. However, as a relative music normie who just puts on the music I think sounds nice without caring to get too much into the weeds, I felt some of the intricacies of the discussions on various pages were lost to me. This isn't a failure of the game so much as on myself, but I just found it interesting.
Thanks to the sheer joy of scrolling through each and every webpage, it allows for the actual gameplay of Hypnospace to be brave in a sense. It is always a fine wire for the puzzle adventure game to cross between giving the player a freedom with which they're able to answer questions. A game that limits the players responses to a pre-defined list of answers, like choosing clues in Ace Attorney, may lead to the player just selecting the most right sounding options versus truly intuiting the logic of the answer. That's not necessarily an issue, but it can lead to the deduction process feeling unsatisfying if handled incorrectly. On the other hand, a game can let the player respond freely to the question in an attempt to be as realistic of a deduction process as possible, but that a path that very easily leads to a frustrating experience. Not to mention, it's a nightmare of answer parsing, something Square Enix tried to tackle with their eloquently named "SQUARE ENIX AI Tech Preview: The Portopia Serial Murder Case" and, um, well. Lol.
Hypnospace Outlaw skews towards the later option, giving you a page-tagging keyword system and a search bar that lets you search those keywords. While there's plenty of pages accessible from the various "zone" landing pages, many others require you to dig through other pages to find links to them. Some pages require you to intuit very specific keywords to access them. There's like 3 or 4 different secret areas that require you to get through multiple layer of security and keyword intuition to access! Yet I only had to look at a guide for all of this a single time (which, once I did the thing required, really was my fault for not reading correctly), which is incredibly rare for a chronic guide looker-at-er such as I! Even if I couldn't find the thing I was looking for, it was so easy to rabbit hole myself down some other interesting series of pages, often leading to a bunch of different secrets that may or may not be relevant to the main task assigned. Then, eventually, I would stumble upon the information that triggers that all-so-wonderful lightbulb moment, and progress would be forged soon after. It's an incredibly seamless experience, bouncing to and from the "main path" of the game, and one that made me feel so smart with each one of those lightbulb moments.
With all that, I'd be so easy for Hypnospace to be a really well designed puzzle adventure game with an amazing sense of humor, but there's something the game really surprised me with; the element that brings it into the realm of one of my favorite games of all time.
At its core, Hypnospace Outlaw is a game about communities: how they are born, how they prosper, and—perhaps most poignantly—how they wither away and die. You are an internet cop intentionally on the outside of the communities you patrol, an agent of the corporate minds who's capitalist ambitions directly fly in the face of the well-being of these communities. You never directly speak with most of the people who populate Hypnospace, and in fact are forbidden from doing so by your job. Yet, despite all that separation, it's impossible not to grow an attachment to so many of these characters, with a surprising amount of depth both in their interactions amongst themselves and with the corporate overlord Merchantsoft.
Then, towards the end of the game, the game pulls something really interesting that I will not divulge any more into that gives the game a sense of mournfulness to it. No matter how long communities exist, they'll fall apart eventually. Sometimes it's by the nature of people drifting apart as their lives diverge, or those apart of it passing away; oftentimes it's by the forceful cudgel of corporate interests or all sorts of other ugliness. Yet the people within these communities persist, and the great memories of the communities stored within them persist.
Hypnospace recognizes the humanity of internet spaces so well, and caps things off with an ending that, to my total shock, made me a bit emotional! The incredible soundtrack definitely helped pull off the moment. A goodbye to Hypnospace is a bittersweet goodbye to a web of communities I never got to be apart of and yet still grew to know so well. Even as the communities die, the memories remain archived forever.
And may we forever stand with Gooper.
Every page of Hypnospace is a meticulously constructed, multi-media collage of clip art, funny-looking early 3D models, and hyper-compressed videos that all feel right at home together. It's also really fucking funny. Whether seeing an old man failing to put together a properly functioning page (props for the effort though) or a bunch of teenagers sticking the same image uniting themselves against the teenzone bully, every page has a—and typically a whole array of—absolutely ridiculous bits that are a delicacy to experience. Indeed, so much of this game's comedy born out of the fact that the way people express themselves is often really funny, whether intentionally or not.
An amazing moment occurs during the first mission to copyright strike images of one 1964 cartoon character "Gumshoe Gooper". You spend a while idling through the vast space available to you, browsing page after page with no luck, until you finally strike the jackpot... a first grade teacher posting the drawings her students made online. Welp! Get on scrubbing those pics, pig. The comedy just ratchets itself up as the game progresses, and you get to see these same webpages evolve, opening the door to so many fun developments (many of which you don't get to truly appreciate the payoff until the end of the game). Part of me wants to be as vague as possible talking about the various elements of the game, because it all deserves to be experienced blindly. Yet, because there's such an immense amount of things to experience, it doesn't really matter "spoiling" a few things.
Short digression I orginally had near the end but moved up here for pacing reasons: There's a very particular focus on music sub-cultures that spawned on the internet, from what I can tell spawning from the creator's own experience in such groups. However, as a relative music normie who just puts on the music I think sounds nice without caring to get too much into the weeds, I felt some of the intricacies of the discussions on various pages were lost to me. This isn't a failure of the game so much as on myself, but I just found it interesting.
Thanks to the sheer joy of scrolling through each and every webpage, it allows for the actual gameplay of Hypnospace to be brave in a sense. It is always a fine wire for the puzzle adventure game to cross between giving the player a freedom with which they're able to answer questions. A game that limits the players responses to a pre-defined list of answers, like choosing clues in Ace Attorney, may lead to the player just selecting the most right sounding options versus truly intuiting the logic of the answer. That's not necessarily an issue, but it can lead to the deduction process feeling unsatisfying if handled incorrectly. On the other hand, a game can let the player respond freely to the question in an attempt to be as realistic of a deduction process as possible, but that a path that very easily leads to a frustrating experience. Not to mention, it's a nightmare of answer parsing, something Square Enix tried to tackle with their eloquently named "SQUARE ENIX AI Tech Preview: The Portopia Serial Murder Case" and, um, well. Lol.
Hypnospace Outlaw skews towards the later option, giving you a page-tagging keyword system and a search bar that lets you search those keywords. While there's plenty of pages accessible from the various "zone" landing pages, many others require you to dig through other pages to find links to them. Some pages require you to intuit very specific keywords to access them. There's like 3 or 4 different secret areas that require you to get through multiple layer of security and keyword intuition to access! Yet I only had to look at a guide for all of this a single time (which, once I did the thing required, really was my fault for not reading correctly), which is incredibly rare for a chronic guide looker-at-er such as I! Even if I couldn't find the thing I was looking for, it was so easy to rabbit hole myself down some other interesting series of pages, often leading to a bunch of different secrets that may or may not be relevant to the main task assigned. Then, eventually, I would stumble upon the information that triggers that all-so-wonderful lightbulb moment, and progress would be forged soon after. It's an incredibly seamless experience, bouncing to and from the "main path" of the game, and one that made me feel so smart with each one of those lightbulb moments.
With all that, I'd be so easy for Hypnospace to be a really well designed puzzle adventure game with an amazing sense of humor, but there's something the game really surprised me with; the element that brings it into the realm of one of my favorite games of all time.
At its core, Hypnospace Outlaw is a game about communities: how they are born, how they prosper, and—perhaps most poignantly—how they wither away and die. You are an internet cop intentionally on the outside of the communities you patrol, an agent of the corporate minds who's capitalist ambitions directly fly in the face of the well-being of these communities. You never directly speak with most of the people who populate Hypnospace, and in fact are forbidden from doing so by your job. Yet, despite all that separation, it's impossible not to grow an attachment to so many of these characters, with a surprising amount of depth both in their interactions amongst themselves and with the corporate overlord Merchantsoft.
Then, towards the end of the game, the game pulls something really interesting that I will not divulge any more into that gives the game a sense of mournfulness to it. No matter how long communities exist, they'll fall apart eventually. Sometimes it's by the nature of people drifting apart as their lives diverge, or those apart of it passing away; oftentimes it's by the forceful cudgel of corporate interests or all sorts of other ugliness. Yet the people within these communities persist, and the great memories of the communities stored within them persist.
Hypnospace recognizes the humanity of internet spaces so well, and caps things off with an ending that, to my total shock, made me a bit emotional! The incredible soundtrack definitely helped pull off the moment. A goodbye to Hypnospace is a bittersweet goodbye to a web of communities I never got to be apart of and yet still grew to know so well. Even as the communities die, the memories remain archived forever.
And may we forever stand with Gooper.
2012
There’s something comical going into one of the most widely beloved games ever made and coming out with one of my favorite games of all time. It's the ideal punchline really. I expected to like the game, sure, but why didn't I anticipate something more than that from Final Fantasy VII? Instead I spent so much time going on a pilgrimage, having the exact same deep-seated reaction over and over again: "I get it now".
Funnily enough, the person 2 reviews below this one presented with their review the exact same gif I sent to my friends several times. It's a common sentiment, I suppose.
One of the reasons Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is near and dear to my heart, despite the myriad of structural issues playing it, is how much the game feels like an honest-to-god adventure. It was one of the first games to give me such a strong feeling, adventuring through the vast and varied worlds of the cloud seas, and few games in my (admittedly limited) playography have captured the vibe since then. Then playing FInal Fantasy VII, that strong feeling returned to me. Even if on paper there may not be that many locations, with many of them being made up of like 2 screens and a couple of room interiors, the game makes it work sooooo well. Going from the slums of Midgar, out into the world across several coastal towns, into the mountains and eventually snowcaps, ultimately into the skies above (and beyond even that!); you feel like such a small part of the game's world and it's incredible. Thanks to the use of pre-rendered scenes, the game manages to make its world so unique and varied in a way just can't replicate with the constraints of a reasonable development.
It's a damn shame no non-Nintendo company realized they shouldn't burn all their dev materials the second a game is out until the 7th generation. Yet even in their 240p glory, the backgrounds of this game still manage to be incredibly evocative, contributing a great deal to the game's scope and beauty. There's a certain charm to the contrast of fidelity in the game as is, with the blocky but incredibly sharp models on the high-fidelity but low-res backgrounds. Then sometimes the background becomes a FMV and, sure, it's blurry as hell, but woah! They're allowed to do that?! It almost feels like the game breaking its own rules and ends up always being a surprising little treat.
With the world being so compelling by itself, it adds a lot to the moment-to-moment exploration of each area. There's so many little secrets tucked away, often in the form of some useful materia, that makes the deeper exploration worthwhile. Aside from the normal on foot exploration, the game throws in so many crazy gameplay moments that, for the most part, all work pretty well, whether it be performing CPR on a child, trying to escape an execution chamber, or stopping a train. We don't talk about Fort Condor. The trek up Great Glacier was a particular highlight, with the need to warm up and the ending section of being lost in the snowstorm capturing the vibes of an arduous mountain hike incredibly well. For as many wild swings this game takes, it's incredibly impressive and a testament to the game's legacy how much of it holds up perfectly.
And throughout this exploration is, of course, the combat. I was initially a bit uneasy upon the realization that the Steam version lacked a few of the "cheats" available in the more modern console versions, aside from being able to go to the Squeenix website and mod your save file so you have max of everything???? That's not fun! I might not have gotten through Mother 3 if it wasn't for the save states and speedup features for grinding thanks to an emulator, even though I loved that game. Fortunately, it soon became clear that's not an issue, thanks to FF7 being an incredibly easy game.
Instead of a struggle, the combat becomes a playground for trying out the game's coolest feature: the Materia system. By giving every character essentially the same pallet to work from, the party ends up being incredibly morphable both for when the situation calls for it or just when you feel like changing things up. Adding in the enhancement Materia allows for so much stupid but incredibly fun opportunities, like making Cloud attack twice and have a chance to poison enemies upon hit (until hitting a boss that's immune to poison and, well, oopsies!) or having a full team heal spell that's incredibly MP efficient. I particularly loved the Enemy Skill Materia—which I did not know was in the other games as well until after beating this game, besides XV cause that game sucks—giving me an ever-expanding rolodex of unique moves that made Tifa (my E. Skill wielder) the clear MVP.
Perhaps my main reason for not expecting such a strong attachment to the game was the belief that I had already grasped onto most of the story through cultural osmosis. But two things surprised me: 1) Aerith's death acted as something of a vortex sucking up most discussion of the game, and so I ended up never having heard of several major plot points prior to playing the game 2) even things that I did know, watching them occur in game with all the tact the game has just makes them hit different. The way the game builds up and lingers upon Aerith's death is so artistically gripping, it was able to make me a bit emotional even knowing full well what was about to occur leading up to it. There's something incredibly special about the fight with JENOVA afterwards, with Aerith's theme playing over the entire duel, and then JENOVA eventually running out of "energy" and just letting you slay it. The entire ordeal feels so mournful, a reminder what exactly you're fighting for.
The way the entire cast comes together over the course of the game, from a rag-tag group each with their own goals brought together by convenience more than anything to a strong support group. The case does have its issues. Some feel a bit underdeveloped (Cid, Vincent despite how AWESOME he is), Barret is very clearly butchered by a translation and perhaps original script that feels quite racist at times, and Cait Sith can really just go fuck himself (regardless of how funny the Cait Sith 2 bit was). Yet, those issues largely melt away in a really loveable group that was always a joy to see talking to each other in the big "roundtable" scenes.
At the center of it, both literally and emotionally, is Cloud, who came out of it being one of my favorite characters in videogames. His incredibly messy arc of growing from a traumatized, fraudulent mercenary into someone who truly cares, motivated by the others brought into his life (and more importantly, Tifa) is a really compelling experience (something that's being built upon interestingly in what I've played so far of the remake). The final speech he makes to the party, compelling them to go out and find their own reason for fighting, something more personal than the fairly nebulous goal of "fighting for the planet"—that he wouldn't blame them if they don't end up returning in their final days—wraps up the game's themes of life and purpose so succinctly, and shows how much Cloud has grown himself.
There's so much more that could be said about this incredible experience, and obviously a lot that has been said over the past 27 years, much of it by people far better at writing than I am! It feels so great to finally be in-the-know about this special, special game, to truly understand the fervor brought about by its long-anticipated remake, and now getting wrapped up in that anticipation myself. Even after the journey came to an end in its beautiful finale, I was immediately ready for more of this world, hence why I started playing FF7R the same day, and will be there for Rebirth on PC day one no matter what. There's good reason it's one of the most beloved games of all time, and it has all the right to remain that way.
Funnily enough, the person 2 reviews below this one presented with their review the exact same gif I sent to my friends several times. It's a common sentiment, I suppose.
One of the reasons Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is near and dear to my heart, despite the myriad of structural issues playing it, is how much the game feels like an honest-to-god adventure. It was one of the first games to give me such a strong feeling, adventuring through the vast and varied worlds of the cloud seas, and few games in my (admittedly limited) playography have captured the vibe since then. Then playing FInal Fantasy VII, that strong feeling returned to me. Even if on paper there may not be that many locations, with many of them being made up of like 2 screens and a couple of room interiors, the game makes it work sooooo well. Going from the slums of Midgar, out into the world across several coastal towns, into the mountains and eventually snowcaps, ultimately into the skies above (and beyond even that!); you feel like such a small part of the game's world and it's incredible. Thanks to the use of pre-rendered scenes, the game manages to make its world so unique and varied in a way just can't replicate with the constraints of a reasonable development.
It's a damn shame no non-Nintendo company realized they shouldn't burn all their dev materials the second a game is out until the 7th generation. Yet even in their 240p glory, the backgrounds of this game still manage to be incredibly evocative, contributing a great deal to the game's scope and beauty. There's a certain charm to the contrast of fidelity in the game as is, with the blocky but incredibly sharp models on the high-fidelity but low-res backgrounds. Then sometimes the background becomes a FMV and, sure, it's blurry as hell, but woah! They're allowed to do that?! It almost feels like the game breaking its own rules and ends up always being a surprising little treat.
With the world being so compelling by itself, it adds a lot to the moment-to-moment exploration of each area. There's so many little secrets tucked away, often in the form of some useful materia, that makes the deeper exploration worthwhile. Aside from the normal on foot exploration, the game throws in so many crazy gameplay moments that, for the most part, all work pretty well, whether it be performing CPR on a child, trying to escape an execution chamber, or stopping a train. We don't talk about Fort Condor. The trek up Great Glacier was a particular highlight, with the need to warm up and the ending section of being lost in the snowstorm capturing the vibes of an arduous mountain hike incredibly well. For as many wild swings this game takes, it's incredibly impressive and a testament to the game's legacy how much of it holds up perfectly.
And throughout this exploration is, of course, the combat. I was initially a bit uneasy upon the realization that the Steam version lacked a few of the "cheats" available in the more modern console versions, aside from being able to go to the Squeenix website and mod your save file so you have max of everything???? That's not fun! I might not have gotten through Mother 3 if it wasn't for the save states and speedup features for grinding thanks to an emulator, even though I loved that game. Fortunately, it soon became clear that's not an issue, thanks to FF7 being an incredibly easy game.
Instead of a struggle, the combat becomes a playground for trying out the game's coolest feature: the Materia system. By giving every character essentially the same pallet to work from, the party ends up being incredibly morphable both for when the situation calls for it or just when you feel like changing things up. Adding in the enhancement Materia allows for so much stupid but incredibly fun opportunities, like making Cloud attack twice and have a chance to poison enemies upon hit (until hitting a boss that's immune to poison and, well, oopsies!) or having a full team heal spell that's incredibly MP efficient. I particularly loved the Enemy Skill Materia—which I did not know was in the other games as well until after beating this game, besides XV cause that game sucks—giving me an ever-expanding rolodex of unique moves that made Tifa (my E. Skill wielder) the clear MVP.
Perhaps my main reason for not expecting such a strong attachment to the game was the belief that I had already grasped onto most of the story through cultural osmosis. But two things surprised me: 1) Aerith's death acted as something of a vortex sucking up most discussion of the game, and so I ended up never having heard of several major plot points prior to playing the game 2) even things that I did know, watching them occur in game with all the tact the game has just makes them hit different. The way the game builds up and lingers upon Aerith's death is so artistically gripping, it was able to make me a bit emotional even knowing full well what was about to occur leading up to it. There's something incredibly special about the fight with JENOVA afterwards, with Aerith's theme playing over the entire duel, and then JENOVA eventually running out of "energy" and just letting you slay it. The entire ordeal feels so mournful, a reminder what exactly you're fighting for.
The way the entire cast comes together over the course of the game, from a rag-tag group each with their own goals brought together by convenience more than anything to a strong support group. The case does have its issues. Some feel a bit underdeveloped (Cid, Vincent despite how AWESOME he is), Barret is very clearly butchered by a translation and perhaps original script that feels quite racist at times, and Cait Sith can really just go fuck himself (regardless of how funny the Cait Sith 2 bit was). Yet, those issues largely melt away in a really loveable group that was always a joy to see talking to each other in the big "roundtable" scenes.
At the center of it, both literally and emotionally, is Cloud, who came out of it being one of my favorite characters in videogames. His incredibly messy arc of growing from a traumatized, fraudulent mercenary into someone who truly cares, motivated by the others brought into his life (and more importantly, Tifa) is a really compelling experience (something that's being built upon interestingly in what I've played so far of the remake). The final speech he makes to the party, compelling them to go out and find their own reason for fighting, something more personal than the fairly nebulous goal of "fighting for the planet"—that he wouldn't blame them if they don't end up returning in their final days—wraps up the game's themes of life and purpose so succinctly, and shows how much Cloud has grown himself.
There's so much more that could be said about this incredible experience, and obviously a lot that has been said over the past 27 years, much of it by people far better at writing than I am! It feels so great to finally be in-the-know about this special, special game, to truly understand the fervor brought about by its long-anticipated remake, and now getting wrapped up in that anticipation myself. Even after the journey came to an end in its beautiful finale, I was immediately ready for more of this world, hence why I started playing FF7R the same day, and will be there for Rebirth on PC day one no matter what. There's good reason it's one of the most beloved games of all time, and it has all the right to remain that way.
2022
Neon White felt like the perfect companion piece to my awaited playthrough of Final Fantasy VII: a lighting-fast action game to contrast a slower-paced JRPG. Yet, within the first few levels of playing Neon White, I knew this plan was shot by a game that contrasts itself far too well to put down.
The game has an incredibly well-defined gameplay loop for each level. First, figuring out the fastest path through the level to slowly whittle down the time to an Ace-rank medal (and even an elusive dev time-beating Red Ace medal once for me) in attempt after attempt of high-precision gameplay. Then, taking a fine-tooth comb to the level to find the hidden present and, more importantly, figure out how to actually collect it. Rinse and repeat for the next level. The present portion serves almost as a reward for getting an appropriate time on the level, something that often takes upwards of 10 minutes in the later levels. Without this "break", speedrunning levels back to back would almost certainly get exhausting.
Yet, both portions are able to remain incredibly stimulating with how they force you to thing about the physical space you're platforming through in each level. It'd be so easy for each level to be a linear, binary skill test, but the possibility space for each level is immense. They end up being these multi-faceted puzzles where absolutely everything around you needs to be considered in really interesting ways. So often you'll go through a level one way, be 10 seconds off from the Ace rank time, and then it just requires thinking about the tools to get through the level and how, if used in a completely different way, you shave off so much time.
The possibility space just continues growing the further in you get, with each new weapon added to your arsenal providing more freedom to utilize than the last. In the last few worlds, the grenade launcher that lets you both rocket jump up the side of walls and expend the weapon for a grappling hook completely blows the doors off the limitations of what 's possible if you're smart, and the game really makes you think about it. The game pulls the "figure out a way to conserve your bazookas throughout the level so you can stock up on blasts to scale up the side of a massive building to find a present" card more times than it really should be able to, but it remains satisfying to do every single time.
The game tries to replicate its high-octane/relaxing pace on a more macro structure as well, but it... doesn't work quite as well. The story the game tries to tell, in every facet down to its voice acting, feels overly thin for the amount of times the game dedicates to it. While nothing about it stuck out as outwardly bad to me, a lot of my paging through the dialogue, particularly in the individual character sidequests, felt like an obligation to get to the next portion of actual gameplay. By the end of the game, I ended up getting a bit annoyed at Neon Violet's yandere-isms, which I did not anticipate from my initial impressions of her (I am typically very tolerant of that kind of stuff)!
It's a shame how much space the lacking story takes place compared to what's a practically perfect gameplay experience. While I don't wish for the story to have been removed entirely, I think that would be a detriment to the game itself, sometimes you just wish something was a bit better! Still, it doesn't detract from the experience that much—and I think anybody who seriously docks the game for it needs to grow up a bit. Neon White as an incredibly enthralling, unique experience that understands speedrunning so well. I've been waiting to play the game since it released a year and a half ago, never getting around to it for one reason or another but always knowing it would be Poochycore. It feels good getting to this point and knowing my gut feeling was right!
The game has an incredibly well-defined gameplay loop for each level. First, figuring out the fastest path through the level to slowly whittle down the time to an Ace-rank medal (and even an elusive dev time-beating Red Ace medal once for me) in attempt after attempt of high-precision gameplay. Then, taking a fine-tooth comb to the level to find the hidden present and, more importantly, figure out how to actually collect it. Rinse and repeat for the next level. The present portion serves almost as a reward for getting an appropriate time on the level, something that often takes upwards of 10 minutes in the later levels. Without this "break", speedrunning levels back to back would almost certainly get exhausting.
Yet, both portions are able to remain incredibly stimulating with how they force you to thing about the physical space you're platforming through in each level. It'd be so easy for each level to be a linear, binary skill test, but the possibility space for each level is immense. They end up being these multi-faceted puzzles where absolutely everything around you needs to be considered in really interesting ways. So often you'll go through a level one way, be 10 seconds off from the Ace rank time, and then it just requires thinking about the tools to get through the level and how, if used in a completely different way, you shave off so much time.
The possibility space just continues growing the further in you get, with each new weapon added to your arsenal providing more freedom to utilize than the last. In the last few worlds, the grenade launcher that lets you both rocket jump up the side of walls and expend the weapon for a grappling hook completely blows the doors off the limitations of what 's possible if you're smart, and the game really makes you think about it. The game pulls the "figure out a way to conserve your bazookas throughout the level so you can stock up on blasts to scale up the side of a massive building to find a present" card more times than it really should be able to, but it remains satisfying to do every single time.
The game tries to replicate its high-octane/relaxing pace on a more macro structure as well, but it... doesn't work quite as well. The story the game tries to tell, in every facet down to its voice acting, feels overly thin for the amount of times the game dedicates to it. While nothing about it stuck out as outwardly bad to me, a lot of my paging through the dialogue, particularly in the individual character sidequests, felt like an obligation to get to the next portion of actual gameplay. By the end of the game, I ended up getting a bit annoyed at Neon Violet's yandere-isms, which I did not anticipate from my initial impressions of her (I am typically very tolerant of that kind of stuff)!
It's a shame how much space the lacking story takes place compared to what's a practically perfect gameplay experience. While I don't wish for the story to have been removed entirely, I think that would be a detriment to the game itself, sometimes you just wish something was a bit better! Still, it doesn't detract from the experience that much—and I think anybody who seriously docks the game for it needs to grow up a bit. Neon White as an incredibly enthralling, unique experience that understands speedrunning so well. I've been waiting to play the game since it released a year and a half ago, never getting around to it for one reason or another but always knowing it would be Poochycore. It feels good getting to this point and knowing my gut feeling was right!
This review contains spoilers
I knew Final Fantasy XV was a massive mess of a game. I’ve known it ever since the game came out in 2016, consequently seeing them try to patch it together into something more coherent. Despite that deep-seeded knowledge, what drew me to this? Was it a pressing desire to engage in high octane combat after a series of games with sparse physical gameplay engagement? The fact it was on sale for $14? A gut feeling that I would actually think the game is pretty good (I mean it was patched a bunch)??? Was it the twinks????????? The answers naturally follow: yes. Ultimately, it’s the hunter to blame for being slain by the beast if they were given sufficient precaution to its ferocity.
These initial drawings started to wear away quite quickly. After an opening that throws you into it with little pretense and the "Stand By Me" car pushing scene that I always thought was referring to the movie when people have talked about it prior, combat rears its fangs. You can attack enemies with a volley of sword swings, warp to enemies, have your allies pull off their own moves, aaaaand... that's about it!
To be blunt: the combat sucks. Even my desire for something physically engaging is shot by the fact that the basic cadence the sword not feeling very satisfying. Otherwise, you can use the complete non-starter of a magic system or cutscene attacks that lose their luster almost immediately. With so few options at your disposal, it ends up being perhaps the very epitome of hold attack to win... very slowly... either taking down one giant dude with way too much health, or handling a way too large number of goons in a game severely lacking in crowd control options, often just leading to a several minute long clusterfuck.
Sword warping is perhaps the most disappointing element, when its so clearly meant to be this combat's "thing". You can warp to an enemy to do a fairly strong attack, you can warp to a safe point to heal, and... again, that's it! Frustratingly, the game does show the cinematics it so desperately wants for all of two boss fights: following them throughout the air, clashing arms, sending them to the ground. It makes every other uninteresting, incredibly samey-feeling fight all the most frustrating, because there's clearly potential here that's barely tapped into.
This fleeting potential is a story that repeats itself throughout just about every single aspect of the game. A couple of moments of absolute brilliance that's drowned out by a flood of incredibly poor construction. One particularly prominent beacon of light shines during the open world exploration, a fairly novel approach to it where you're largely stuck to your car as a base, going from it out to do sidequests before wrapping back to a campsite or hotel after a couple to cash in your experience. While the world itself is fairly barren—with a number of enterable buildings rivaling that of the latest Pokemon games and sparse incentive for natural exploration outside of sidequests—the interactions with your cast are such a treat that it made the mundanity of the moment-to-moment gameplay itself so much more tolerable.
Noctis's entourage—Prompto, Gladiolus, and Ignis—are the blazing heart and soul of the game. There's a bevy of unique lines for each location and quest and really eloquently made animations for each camping section. One of my favorite moments was after camping for the night, when Prompto asked me to wake up early the next morning for a short sidequest to capture a picture of a giant monster nearby. It was such a natural excursion that really made the game feel alive for those few moments, like I was really going on a road trip with my bros. It's a great feeling! Prompto ended up my favorite of the bunch, not just because he's the cutest (though that does help!), but the way his photography integrates so naturally over the course of the game. It's such a joy flipping through the snapshots while camping as a brief retrospect of what you did, saving the best to create a growing compendium of your entire adventure. And to the game's credit, it very well knows this!
It's so great then when the game decides to rip off what little appeal is left draped on its shambling corpse. I was well aware that the open world is abandoned in the game's back half for something strictly linear, but it didn't properly prepare me for how much it would make the open nature of the game prior a fading star. All of the time spent on a roadtrip with your pals is thrown out for traveling down a fuckton of barren hallways getting into the nitty gritty bullshit of its swiss cheese-ass story. It's really, really hard to care about a lot of the events that are going on when the game never takes the care to set them up properly due to its immensely fucked up dev cycle. How am I supposed to care about the death of Ravus when he's in two scenes of the game prior and gets his demise announced in a completely missable radio broadcast???
So many characters in the game end up unceremoniously killed despite having 5 minutes of screentime prior. Noctis's dad being assassinated in a nonsensical supercut of a scene from the Kingsglaive movie that wasn't even in the game prior to its day one patch. Jared's death leading to Noctis having an outsized breakdown for a character that is the most literal who imaginable. Lunafreya being such an important cornerstone of the game's plot, but the swift knife of messy development basically cutting her out of the game!!! Did you know: the developers of the game called her a strong female character? Despite the only thing she actually does in the game is help make sure her groom-to-be could continue on his destined path???? But hey, another character calls her strong for doing this in a flashback several hours after her death, so its fine.
The linearity really comes to a head in the penultimate Chapter 13, a winding gauntlet where you're stripped of both allies and weapons. You have to slowly plod through this place, slowly gaining back what you've lost to overcome the odds. I can see the intention: illuminating the weaknesses and insecurities of Noctis as a solitary figure, split apart from the allies so vital to him. It's meant to be scary, but it just ends up being tedious. It really had no reason to keep going and going and going AND GOING, keeping up the same monotony for a solid hour. And this is after the patch that gave you the ability to sprint during the chapter and let you kill enemies way faster! I can only imagine how miserable playing this chapter must've been at launch.
But for all the misses with its ideas the game has, again, some of its ideas are still able to shine through. After Ignis is blinded due to [DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT], you spend Chapter 11 traversing a dungeon where the tensions of the group are at an all time high. Gladiolus just got done yelling at Noctis for his inabilities and now you have to slowly walk through this pit while making sure the cane-wielding Ignis doesn't fall behind. If you try to go ahead, Prompto and Gladio will passive-aggressively snark at you to wait up. The whole experience genuinely started to piss me off, bringing me right into their shared mindset. By focusing on these characters I already grew an attachment to in the game's first half, it ends up being an incredibly effective, and genuinely impressive, unity of gameplay and story beats.
This game has a vision that illuminates so clearly in its final act. Noctis Lucis Caelum: a pampered prince thrust out into the real world, going on a 10-year journey to learn the sacrifices we must make for each other such that he is able to become the King of Kings and free his kingdom and his people of the darkness once and for all. When he's able to enter the throne room for his final duel, he takes one last look through the photographs saved throughout the journey, a reflection of all everything that led to him being the man he's become. This moment shows that the developers knew what they had here, and it hit me so well. Then Noctis enters the throne room, and makes the ultimate sacrifice to complete his destiny. And the final scene transitioning into the game's logo. Beautiful on a level few games are able to reach. On paper, it is such an incredible epic to be told.
Which makes it so supremely frustrating that's not what Final Fantasy XV is.
The losses Noctis has suffered are almost all stunted by being characters with so little screentime or being omitted almost entirely. The 10-year timeskip just kinda happens without much reasoning behind it, besides it advancing what the devs wanted the endpoint of the game to be. It ends up being really jarring, and hampers Noctis's grand return when he was only gone for like 30 minutes of actual game time. The game brings itself to such an epic conclusion, with its lavishly rendered cutscenes and incredible music, without building up a story that deserves such a finale.
And yet, the final campfire scene, where Noctis, about to leave behind his friends for good, tearfully bears out his love for them. And it got me! Because I love these characters! It's such a genuine, hearfelt, incredible place to leave them off, it almost makes me angry. Noctis, Prompto, Gladio, and Ignis deserve the 9/10 game this 4/10 game so desperately wants to be, but it's too late for that to happen.
—————————————————
I also played the four DLC episodes that released, the first three presenting the truth of things that happen to the three members of Noct's entourage in their absence that are never elaborated on in the game. While on their own they're largely inoffensive (a tedious enemy gauntlet, a not very good feeling shooter, and an actually pretty cool elemental combat system), they mainly suffer from the fact that, since they're so disconnected from the game itself, what happens in them can't actually have an impact on the main game's story. Gladio's and Prompto's stories don't end up adding to their respective characters much, and perhaps even worse, Ignis's does!!!
Finding out the reason Igniswent blind is that he sacrificed it to put on a holy ring and save his king is so much cooler than what I expected the reason to be and fits in so well with the game's central theming of sacrifice. It makes it all the more frustrating that this can't be explored in the main game because the reasoning for his blindness is completely skimmed over there. I don't understand if its out of a greedy desire to make people buy the DLC or a prideful desire to only show this reveal in the best light possible, but even if they couldn't rewrite the story with the mess they had... at least mention this plot point! Even the messy development can't really excuse the nonsensicality of this.
Then there's Episode Ardyn, following the eponymous villain of the game (which was spoiled for me due to the DLC's description. lol. lmao). The gameplay is genuinely really cool, with what's by far the best boss fight in the entire game, for as low a bar as it is. Yet, letting the story sink in during the following hours has soured me a fair bit on it. Selfsame to my problem with the other episodes, the story it covers just does not interact well with the main game its supposed to slide into, and even worse feels kind of contradictory. Ardyn turns out to have been the true king chosen by the gods and Noctis's ancestor, the first king of Insomnia, acknowledges himself as something of an illegitimate heir? Perhaps I did not read well enough, but that sense of Ardyn being a tragic villain who was betrayed does not come across AT ALL in the main game. In fact, it makes the whole story of Noctis coming back to reclaim his throne feel kinda weird!
This was meant to be the start of a series of DLCs, Dawn of the Future, with an alternate telling of the game's story, before being unceremoniously canned in possibly the strangest developer broadcast of all time. Ardyn and Noctis and others were to team up against the gods and unseal themselves from the fate set upon them, with a drastically different ending from the one in the main game. While I'm not against the concept of DLC delving into alternative storylines, its such a bizarre decision here. Final Fantasy XV's ending is already its best realized part and is firmly rooted in the idea of Noctis fulfilling his destiny. To make a path focused on breaching that destiny feels like it undermines what made the original ending so powerful.
All of this DLC doesn't change what Final Fantasy XV is: a deeply disappointing, unfinished, not very fun to play game. If they didn't want to make the full effort to integrate these stories into the game, I really don't think they should've bothered. It's not that I would expect them to do that, considering how much effort would need to be put in to wrangle this game together into a something that's truly quality. This isn't something that could be, or should be fixed. The effort required would be so much better put into new stories and experiences. I don't even feel like I wasted time with this game, despite having such a distain for so much of it. Despite everything, this game still managed to make me care about Final Fantasy as a series. I've dabbled in VI & VII, but this was my first time digging really deep into one, and now I'm voracious for me. I'm already planning on playing VI, and VII and VII remake and XVI when it hits PC. Final Fantasy XV is perhaps the most interesting failure of a game I have ever played, and for all of that, it at least managed to make an experience I would call unforgettable.
These initial drawings started to wear away quite quickly. After an opening that throws you into it with little pretense and the "Stand By Me" car pushing scene that I always thought was referring to the movie when people have talked about it prior, combat rears its fangs. You can attack enemies with a volley of sword swings, warp to enemies, have your allies pull off their own moves, aaaaand... that's about it!
To be blunt: the combat sucks. Even my desire for something physically engaging is shot by the fact that the basic cadence the sword not feeling very satisfying. Otherwise, you can use the complete non-starter of a magic system or cutscene attacks that lose their luster almost immediately. With so few options at your disposal, it ends up being perhaps the very epitome of hold attack to win... very slowly... either taking down one giant dude with way too much health, or handling a way too large number of goons in a game severely lacking in crowd control options, often just leading to a several minute long clusterfuck.
Sword warping is perhaps the most disappointing element, when its so clearly meant to be this combat's "thing". You can warp to an enemy to do a fairly strong attack, you can warp to a safe point to heal, and... again, that's it! Frustratingly, the game does show the cinematics it so desperately wants for all of two boss fights: following them throughout the air, clashing arms, sending them to the ground. It makes every other uninteresting, incredibly samey-feeling fight all the most frustrating, because there's clearly potential here that's barely tapped into.
This fleeting potential is a story that repeats itself throughout just about every single aspect of the game. A couple of moments of absolute brilliance that's drowned out by a flood of incredibly poor construction. One particularly prominent beacon of light shines during the open world exploration, a fairly novel approach to it where you're largely stuck to your car as a base, going from it out to do sidequests before wrapping back to a campsite or hotel after a couple to cash in your experience. While the world itself is fairly barren—with a number of enterable buildings rivaling that of the latest Pokemon games and sparse incentive for natural exploration outside of sidequests—the interactions with your cast are such a treat that it made the mundanity of the moment-to-moment gameplay itself so much more tolerable.
Noctis's entourage—Prompto, Gladiolus, and Ignis—are the blazing heart and soul of the game. There's a bevy of unique lines for each location and quest and really eloquently made animations for each camping section. One of my favorite moments was after camping for the night, when Prompto asked me to wake up early the next morning for a short sidequest to capture a picture of a giant monster nearby. It was such a natural excursion that really made the game feel alive for those few moments, like I was really going on a road trip with my bros. It's a great feeling! Prompto ended up my favorite of the bunch, not just because he's the cutest (though that does help!), but the way his photography integrates so naturally over the course of the game. It's such a joy flipping through the snapshots while camping as a brief retrospect of what you did, saving the best to create a growing compendium of your entire adventure. And to the game's credit, it very well knows this!
It's so great then when the game decides to rip off what little appeal is left draped on its shambling corpse. I was well aware that the open world is abandoned in the game's back half for something strictly linear, but it didn't properly prepare me for how much it would make the open nature of the game prior a fading star. All of the time spent on a roadtrip with your pals is thrown out for traveling down a fuckton of barren hallways getting into the nitty gritty bullshit of its swiss cheese-ass story. It's really, really hard to care about a lot of the events that are going on when the game never takes the care to set them up properly due to its immensely fucked up dev cycle. How am I supposed to care about the death of Ravus when he's in two scenes of the game prior and gets his demise announced in a completely missable radio broadcast???
So many characters in the game end up unceremoniously killed despite having 5 minutes of screentime prior. Noctis's dad being assassinated in a nonsensical supercut of a scene from the Kingsglaive movie that wasn't even in the game prior to its day one patch. Jared's death leading to Noctis having an outsized breakdown for a character that is the most literal who imaginable. Lunafreya being such an important cornerstone of the game's plot, but the swift knife of messy development basically cutting her out of the game!!! Did you know: the developers of the game called her a strong female character? Despite the only thing she actually does in the game is help make sure her groom-to-be could continue on his destined path???? But hey, another character calls her strong for doing this in a flashback several hours after her death, so its fine.
The linearity really comes to a head in the penultimate Chapter 13, a winding gauntlet where you're stripped of both allies and weapons. You have to slowly plod through this place, slowly gaining back what you've lost to overcome the odds. I can see the intention: illuminating the weaknesses and insecurities of Noctis as a solitary figure, split apart from the allies so vital to him. It's meant to be scary, but it just ends up being tedious. It really had no reason to keep going and going and going AND GOING, keeping up the same monotony for a solid hour. And this is after the patch that gave you the ability to sprint during the chapter and let you kill enemies way faster! I can only imagine how miserable playing this chapter must've been at launch.
But for all the misses with its ideas the game has, again, some of its ideas are still able to shine through. After Ignis is blinded due to [DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT], you spend Chapter 11 traversing a dungeon where the tensions of the group are at an all time high. Gladiolus just got done yelling at Noctis for his inabilities and now you have to slowly walk through this pit while making sure the cane-wielding Ignis doesn't fall behind. If you try to go ahead, Prompto and Gladio will passive-aggressively snark at you to wait up. The whole experience genuinely started to piss me off, bringing me right into their shared mindset. By focusing on these characters I already grew an attachment to in the game's first half, it ends up being an incredibly effective, and genuinely impressive, unity of gameplay and story beats.
This game has a vision that illuminates so clearly in its final act. Noctis Lucis Caelum: a pampered prince thrust out into the real world, going on a 10-year journey to learn the sacrifices we must make for each other such that he is able to become the King of Kings and free his kingdom and his people of the darkness once and for all. When he's able to enter the throne room for his final duel, he takes one last look through the photographs saved throughout the journey, a reflection of all everything that led to him being the man he's become. This moment shows that the developers knew what they had here, and it hit me so well. Then Noctis enters the throne room, and makes the ultimate sacrifice to complete his destiny. And the final scene transitioning into the game's logo. Beautiful on a level few games are able to reach. On paper, it is such an incredible epic to be told.
Which makes it so supremely frustrating that's not what Final Fantasy XV is.
The losses Noctis has suffered are almost all stunted by being characters with so little screentime or being omitted almost entirely. The 10-year timeskip just kinda happens without much reasoning behind it, besides it advancing what the devs wanted the endpoint of the game to be. It ends up being really jarring, and hampers Noctis's grand return when he was only gone for like 30 minutes of actual game time. The game brings itself to such an epic conclusion, with its lavishly rendered cutscenes and incredible music, without building up a story that deserves such a finale.
And yet, the final campfire scene, where Noctis, about to leave behind his friends for good, tearfully bears out his love for them. And it got me! Because I love these characters! It's such a genuine, hearfelt, incredible place to leave them off, it almost makes me angry. Noctis, Prompto, Gladio, and Ignis deserve the 9/10 game this 4/10 game so desperately wants to be, but it's too late for that to happen.
—————————————————
I also played the four DLC episodes that released, the first three presenting the truth of things that happen to the three members of Noct's entourage in their absence that are never elaborated on in the game. While on their own they're largely inoffensive (a tedious enemy gauntlet, a not very good feeling shooter, and an actually pretty cool elemental combat system), they mainly suffer from the fact that, since they're so disconnected from the game itself, what happens in them can't actually have an impact on the main game's story. Gladio's and Prompto's stories don't end up adding to their respective characters much, and perhaps even worse, Ignis's does!!!
Finding out the reason Igniswent blind is that he sacrificed it to put on a holy ring and save his king is so much cooler than what I expected the reason to be and fits in so well with the game's central theming of sacrifice. It makes it all the more frustrating that this can't be explored in the main game because the reasoning for his blindness is completely skimmed over there. I don't understand if its out of a greedy desire to make people buy the DLC or a prideful desire to only show this reveal in the best light possible, but even if they couldn't rewrite the story with the mess they had... at least mention this plot point! Even the messy development can't really excuse the nonsensicality of this.
Then there's Episode Ardyn, following the eponymous villain of the game (which was spoiled for me due to the DLC's description. lol. lmao). The gameplay is genuinely really cool, with what's by far the best boss fight in the entire game, for as low a bar as it is. Yet, letting the story sink in during the following hours has soured me a fair bit on it. Selfsame to my problem with the other episodes, the story it covers just does not interact well with the main game its supposed to slide into, and even worse feels kind of contradictory. Ardyn turns out to have been the true king chosen by the gods and Noctis's ancestor, the first king of Insomnia, acknowledges himself as something of an illegitimate heir? Perhaps I did not read well enough, but that sense of Ardyn being a tragic villain who was betrayed does not come across AT ALL in the main game. In fact, it makes the whole story of Noctis coming back to reclaim his throne feel kinda weird!
This was meant to be the start of a series of DLCs, Dawn of the Future, with an alternate telling of the game's story, before being unceremoniously canned in possibly the strangest developer broadcast of all time. Ardyn and Noctis and others were to team up against the gods and unseal themselves from the fate set upon them, with a drastically different ending from the one in the main game. While I'm not against the concept of DLC delving into alternative storylines, its such a bizarre decision here. Final Fantasy XV's ending is already its best realized part and is firmly rooted in the idea of Noctis fulfilling his destiny. To make a path focused on breaching that destiny feels like it undermines what made the original ending so powerful.
All of this DLC doesn't change what Final Fantasy XV is: a deeply disappointing, unfinished, not very fun to play game. If they didn't want to make the full effort to integrate these stories into the game, I really don't think they should've bothered. It's not that I would expect them to do that, considering how much effort would need to be put in to wrangle this game together into a something that's truly quality. This isn't something that could be, or should be fixed. The effort required would be so much better put into new stories and experiences. I don't even feel like I wasted time with this game, despite having such a distain for so much of it. Despite everything, this game still managed to make me care about Final Fantasy as a series. I've dabbled in VI & VII, but this was my first time digging really deep into one, and now I'm voracious for me. I'm already planning on playing VI, and VII and VII remake and XVI when it hits PC. Final Fantasy XV is perhaps the most interesting failure of a game I have ever played, and for all of that, it at least managed to make an experience I would call unforgettable.
This review contains spoilers
If there’s one thing I’ve learned this year, being lied to is awesome—in media anyways. Going into the Scott Pilgrim anime, knowing that it wouldn’t follow the exact plot of the books but still expecting an adaption akin to what the movie did. Then at the first episode’s closing, I was strapped in for 3.5 hours of a brand-new story my mind was not prepared for. Such a jolt of emotion unexpectedly thrust upon me, leaving such an awesome, intensely memorable experience in its wake.
The first Somnium Files game built up an incredibly engaging mystery, peeling back layer after layer of reveals as it developed a cast I fell in love with. But within all of that, one of the most memorable moments was falling down the Annihilation Route, watching the murders therein take place, hitting the lock, and getting whisked to the timeline screen I had never visited before then. Finding out solving the mystery involved hopping across timelines completely changed the dynamic of the game. It is really, really cool to get expectations shattered in such a way you never even considered a possibility. Then I finally get around to Nirvana Initiative and hearing from several friends it's got some really audacious twists in store. What a word to use for it: audacious.
Obviously, I knew going in about the game's general structure: hopping between multiple timelines to solve the Half Body Serial Murders, following a co-protagonists Ryuki and Mizuki. Yet, I was unaware them two make up near-completely disparate halves of the game, separated by 6 years*. But whatever, it's a cool setup to explore more of the detective goodness from the first game!
The immediate standout is how monumental of an improvement the Somnium gameplay segments are. While I get the concept of the first's fairly nonsensical Somniums are meant to reflect the reality of subconscious, as it turns... nonsensicality does not facilitate itself to a good gameplay experience. Who woulda thought. While this game's Somniums skew a bit to the linear side, they're filled with so many fun concepts and (surprisingly) a couple of genuinely good puzzles that make even the least notable Somniums here better than the vast majority of the first game's. Particular shoutouts to Tearer's Somnium for its cool number puzzles integrated into a series of really interesting discoveries, and the incredible symmetry of Amame's two Somnium's.
Even with the first game's dogwater gameplay, the main appeal was the characters and story, which is really where Nirvana Initiative felt like it faltered. The new cast in particular was the weakest link, with so many different characters both new and returning that it just couldn't juggle as efficiently as the first game's core set of 4 main characters. I grew attached to Shoma, Komeji, and Gen large in part thanks to their really well done ends, but no matter how many times the game shoved it in my face, I was not going to like Lien and Kizuna (aside from the cute dance he did holding her). Regardless of who it was though, a lot of their development felt really... weird... despite there being a 6 year time skip right down the center, it felt like they had really inconsistent development**. And why do none of them get timeskip redesigns?
Still, there was a lot portrayed that I did get fairly invested into. The new cast slowly unveiling to be essentially a support group of genetic abnormalities was really cool, and carried a lot of the most emotional moment of the game. Then it was really interestingly wrapped up with Naix, showcasing not only a really cool fleshed out cult integrating so much historic/mythological/spiritual precedent into its ideology, but also how cults like this end up trapping the most vulnerable in our society. Funnily topical too, considering this game released like 2 weeks after Shinzo Abe got owned. I'm always down for seeing what topics Uchikoshi did a Wikipedia binge in the middle of a writing session.
And, hey... the writing in general, while mostly really charming and funny, also felt a tad sloppy? A lot of seemingly important plot moments just being lost to the aether, or not fitting together in a way that didn't make a ton of sense. What happened to Ryuki's demotion? Or the supposed event happening on the 15th in the Slayers X video? Why does it feel like I'm being told to watch the same video several times? Something felt off, but eventually all of those strange moments got flooded out with a bunch of new information in the ongoing case.
So I got towards the end of the game, finding out the twist of there being two separate bodies of "Jin" and there being two different Mizuki's. They're certainly twists, but nothing that I didn't at least intuit something close to it leading up to their reveals. Really, most of the game leading up to the end felt like meandering through a pretty decent story, but not one that came within a shot of the first game. I was feeling quite whelmed.
And then. The twist.
The helix twist.
I spent a good 20-30 minutes trying to recover from the shock of finding out the past 20-something hours were spent being totally gaslit by this game into believing I was experiencing the game in linear chronology. The next 30 minutes were followed with the game explaining in every way "hey idiot, remember this thing you found strange a couple hours ago and completely forgot about. You could've figured this out!" And hey, it's right! If I wasn't such a rube that could comprehend the idea of experiencing a story non-chronologically, the pieces were ripe for putting together! I totally get why this twist is so decisive, even amongst the people I've talked about the game with. It's such a ballsy decision, and not everyone is down for media that actively lies to their face. But her in particular, it's mystery clicks so violently into place in such an overwhelming way, in a way I haven't seen any other video game do before, I simply must respect it.
So it creates this really harsh contradiction, where the game leaves itself off on such a strong footing thanks in large part to its twist (and a finale that's just good fun), but as I said before, a game leading up to it that's... enjoyable but nothing really all that special. It's hard to grow an attachment to these characters when so many of the interactions you have with them are purposefully misleading. Not to mention poor Ryuki. Even after the big twist, he's left with absolutely nothing to do in the story beyond continuing to be a little trauma boy. He's just unceremoniously taken out in the final battle! What was that about! I don't want to be all choosing between the twist and better character development, because I don't think it needed to be a choice. Really, if Ryuki was given any sense of closure beyond short peptalk from Date in the cathedral, I'd probably think the game more of a 8/10.
Even if it ends up being a game I respect more than I like, I still did like Nirvana Initiative. The game took a massive swing and hit it for me, and everything else worked well enough even if it wasn't as well as I truly hoped for it to be. I'll much sooner take a game that fails in some places and remains on my mind long after than an unremarkable experience. If Uchikoshi and the rest of the devs want to take a similarly bold swing with Somnium Files 3 (assuming it happens), I'll be their strongest soldier.
The first Somnium Files game built up an incredibly engaging mystery, peeling back layer after layer of reveals as it developed a cast I fell in love with. But within all of that, one of the most memorable moments was falling down the Annihilation Route, watching the murders therein take place, hitting the lock, and getting whisked to the timeline screen I had never visited before then. Finding out solving the mystery involved hopping across timelines completely changed the dynamic of the game. It is really, really cool to get expectations shattered in such a way you never even considered a possibility. Then I finally get around to Nirvana Initiative and hearing from several friends it's got some really audacious twists in store. What a word to use for it: audacious.
Obviously, I knew going in about the game's general structure: hopping between multiple timelines to solve the Half Body Serial Murders, following a co-protagonists Ryuki and Mizuki. Yet, I was unaware them two make up near-completely disparate halves of the game, separated by 6 years*. But whatever, it's a cool setup to explore more of the detective goodness from the first game!
The immediate standout is how monumental of an improvement the Somnium gameplay segments are. While I get the concept of the first's fairly nonsensical Somniums are meant to reflect the reality of subconscious, as it turns... nonsensicality does not facilitate itself to a good gameplay experience. Who woulda thought. While this game's Somniums skew a bit to the linear side, they're filled with so many fun concepts and (surprisingly) a couple of genuinely good puzzles that make even the least notable Somniums here better than the vast majority of the first game's. Particular shoutouts to Tearer's Somnium for its cool number puzzles integrated into a series of really interesting discoveries, and the incredible symmetry of Amame's two Somnium's.
Even with the first game's dogwater gameplay, the main appeal was the characters and story, which is really where Nirvana Initiative felt like it faltered. The new cast in particular was the weakest link, with so many different characters both new and returning that it just couldn't juggle as efficiently as the first game's core set of 4 main characters. I grew attached to Shoma, Komeji, and Gen large in part thanks to their really well done ends, but no matter how many times the game shoved it in my face, I was not going to like Lien and Kizuna (aside from the cute dance he did holding her). Regardless of who it was though, a lot of their development felt really... weird... despite there being a 6 year time skip right down the center, it felt like they had really inconsistent development**. And why do none of them get timeskip redesigns?
Still, there was a lot portrayed that I did get fairly invested into. The new cast slowly unveiling to be essentially a support group of genetic abnormalities was really cool, and carried a lot of the most emotional moment of the game. Then it was really interestingly wrapped up with Naix, showcasing not only a really cool fleshed out cult integrating so much historic/mythological/spiritual precedent into its ideology, but also how cults like this end up trapping the most vulnerable in our society. Funnily topical too, considering this game released like 2 weeks after Shinzo Abe got owned. I'm always down for seeing what topics Uchikoshi did a Wikipedia binge in the middle of a writing session.
And, hey... the writing in general, while mostly really charming and funny, also felt a tad sloppy? A lot of seemingly important plot moments just being lost to the aether, or not fitting together in a way that didn't make a ton of sense. What happened to Ryuki's demotion? Or the supposed event happening on the 15th in the Slayers X video? Why does it feel like I'm being told to watch the same video several times? Something felt off, but eventually all of those strange moments got flooded out with a bunch of new information in the ongoing case.
So I got towards the end of the game, finding out the twist of there being two separate bodies of "Jin" and there being two different Mizuki's. They're certainly twists, but nothing that I didn't at least intuit something close to it leading up to their reveals. Really, most of the game leading up to the end felt like meandering through a pretty decent story, but not one that came within a shot of the first game. I was feeling quite whelmed.
And then. The twist.
The helix twist.
I spent a good 20-30 minutes trying to recover from the shock of finding out the past 20-something hours were spent being totally gaslit by this game into believing I was experiencing the game in linear chronology. The next 30 minutes were followed with the game explaining in every way "hey idiot, remember this thing you found strange a couple hours ago and completely forgot about. You could've figured this out!" And hey, it's right! If I wasn't such a rube that could comprehend the idea of experiencing a story non-chronologically, the pieces were ripe for putting together! I totally get why this twist is so decisive, even amongst the people I've talked about the game with. It's such a ballsy decision, and not everyone is down for media that actively lies to their face. But her in particular, it's mystery clicks so violently into place in such an overwhelming way, in a way I haven't seen any other video game do before, I simply must respect it.
So it creates this really harsh contradiction, where the game leaves itself off on such a strong footing thanks in large part to its twist (and a finale that's just good fun), but as I said before, a game leading up to it that's... enjoyable but nothing really all that special. It's hard to grow an attachment to these characters when so many of the interactions you have with them are purposefully misleading. Not to mention poor Ryuki. Even after the big twist, he's left with absolutely nothing to do in the story beyond continuing to be a little trauma boy. He's just unceremoniously taken out in the final battle! What was that about! I don't want to be all choosing between the twist and better character development, because I don't think it needed to be a choice. Really, if Ryuki was given any sense of closure beyond short peptalk from Date in the cathedral, I'd probably think the game more of a 8/10.
Even if it ends up being a game I respect more than I like, I still did like Nirvana Initiative. The game took a massive swing and hit it for me, and everything else worked well enough even if it wasn't as well as I truly hoped for it to be. I'll much sooner take a game that fails in some places and remains on my mind long after than an unremarkable experience. If Uchikoshi and the rest of the devs want to take a similarly bold swing with Somnium Files 3 (assuming it happens), I'll be their strongest soldier.
2018
If there are two things you should know about me, it's that I have a very low tolerance for both repetition and friction in the games I play. That naturally leads to me rarely if ever replaying games and 100%ing them at a similar nonexistent rate. Yet here I am, having downloaded Celeste onto my Steam Deck just to try out the device on a game that'd be easy to immediately jump into. Then I ended up not only replaying the game to completion after my original playthrough in 2018, but to 100% completion. All 25 levels, all strawberries, and the Moon Berry (and 2 Goldies for good measure).
I got the game largely on a whim when I was 14 going on 15, and even seeing the radiant reviews it got did not prepare me for how dearly I would latch onto it. Getting invested into the story, attaching to Madeline, struggling through the C-Sides on the bus on the way to school every day for weeks. It was one of the first really good indie experiences I got my hands on and helped inform a lot of the way I view games today. Even before the replay, I felt confident saying it was my third favorite game of all time! I could go with the cliche bit about how "oh I was worried if the game would live up to my memories", but... I knew it'd be an amazing time. It's Celeste.
Now, did I anticipate that my appreciation for the game would reach a whole new level and I'd tear up over it in joy? Not quite! But it happened!
Here's the thing about playing Celeste today versus back then... I'm OLD. No matter how mature I thought I was at 14, my capacity for engaging with and understanding the media I experience has naturally grown vastly in the intervening years. These reviews are an exercise in understanding all these different games I play and figuring out how I'm supposed to share my findings with others. Rationally, it makes perfect sense; of course I can engage with art better when I'm older, but the internalization of this was a constant thought it my head during my entire present playthrough. Now when I look at this game, I'm so much better able to comprehend how it works, how it tutorializes its plethora of advanced mechanics, how it plays with its characters, and builds up its set pieces, and rewards, and teases, and makes me tear up. And—most importantly—I can appreciate better than ever how masterfully it pulls everything off.
One thing I had lost sight of as my memories of the game flattened out was just how different the A-sides are to the B and C-sides, with a heightened focus on exploration for all the strawberries and other collectables. The main path itself for most of these is over in a matter of 5 minutes, but there's such a strong appeal to digging into all these side challenges and secrets, my eagle eyes spotting a whole that is very clearly a secret area, then spotting a secret area within that secret area, and so on. The levels end up feeling like such vast expanses, with finding the main path often being part of the level's challenge! The level I remember having the least gracious memories of, Mirror Temple, ended up being one of my highlights this go around thanks to how hard it goes into being a big winding maze of pure collectable challenges. Reflecting on it now... it makes total sense the next game they're making is a Metroidvania! It plays off on the DNA of the A-sides almost perfectly.
To my pleasant surprise, there was a plethora of small moments interspersed throughout the A-Side experience beyond just the raw story and gameplay that had entirely left my memory, making the experience all the more special. Positioning the feather to steady Maddy's breaths has stuck in my mind ever since I first experienced it, but how about the scene where Madeline and Theo just talk at the end of 5A under the canopy of a dialogue tree that must encompass like half of the game's entire dialogue? It's such a natural conversation and I love how it gives Madeline the chance to let out all her feelings. Or the way the monster creatures in 5A are tutorialized by having you temporarily control one of them, to kill Madeline in her mind? It's so easy to forget, when most of my memories of the game consisted of throwing myself at the gameplay-oriented B and C sides how thorough of an experience Celeste is.
This isn't to knock the B and C sides though, because I love them still very much. It's obvious the game's credits rolls, while the end of Madeline's main arc, is but the "first act" of the entire gameplay experience. Instead of talking with the player predominantly on the basis of narrative, it shifts to guiding you with a (very) light hand through all of its challenges, and still introducing a bevy of new ideas and techniques even as the level themes are recycled. Even after the first 14 whole levels, 7B introduces the super wall jump and the game from then on out demands you know how to use it! In 8C when you have to learn how to grounded wavedash (I'm not looking up their actual terms LOL) from the tutorial bird, and slowly honing it through the gauntlet of its third screen. Then, at the very end, that fucking bird that I hate pops up again in front of the most mechanical implementation of the grounded wavedash since the very start, as if to say "you've better mastered it by now, bitch". And if we ignore the fact I died to that final trial like 10 times, I sure did master it.
Another surprise from this replay was that, wow, I really am just better at videogames than I used to be huh. My original playthrough took 42 hours with an incomplete strawberry list and a record of over 11k deaths. It only took me 17 hours this go around to beat every level with all the strawberries and two whole golden berries, all in a cool 3.6k and change deaths. It felt really cathartic going through these levels that caused me so much strife prior and have a pretty chill, but still demanding, time. Even when the difficulty really ratchets up with 7C, 8C, and Farewell, no one section kept me banging against my wall for all too long, sans one screen in Farewell that was remedied with the miracle cure of... taking a break to do something else and coming back to it! I beat it in one (1) minute on my return! Wow!
It all culminated well with the final few screens of the game. I flew through them with the wind at my back (sometimes literally!), knowing instinctively my path through the level. Then, the final screen of the entire campaign: a brutal gauntlet that demands a good 90 seconds of solid execution to succeed. After the first few attempts, I certain smugness set within me: "this isn't that hard". And what do you know, about 15 minutes worth of attempts later, my smugness was vindicated and victory was achieved. An immensely satisfying way to send off my gameplay experience with Celsete.
Something else about me has changed too, of course, one of the most important changes even. I realized I was trans, just like Madeline. The timeline of Celeste's designer Maddy Thorson realizing Madeline was trans as she herself figured out her gender identity, to revealing it in a 2020 blogpost missed out on overlapping with my own processing of my identity by a bit over a year. I already had Celeste being a transgender story pretty well squared away in my mind, never truly reckoning with it once it became something I could personally relate to.
Back during my first playthrough, back when Mount Celeste was a metaphor for depression and nothing more, I could recognize how good of a story Celeste told—it was one of the reasons I loved it so much—but it wasn't something I could relate to. Now though, coming back as an adult, as a woman who's gone through a hell of a lot to figure myself out, I get it now. Despite not being consciously written as a story about a girl learning to embrace her own identity, the transgender reading is so blatantly obvious—it was certainly unconsciously written as one. Thorson summed it up in her blog post on the matter. If you haven't read it, it feels essential to do so.
"Celeste is a game written and designed by a closeted trans person who was struggling with their gender identity, scored by a trans woman, with art and code and sound and other labor from their inspiring and irreplaceable friends."
Even if I have by and large figured myself out and am living as the best woman I can be in all aspects of life, it's still such a vulnerable thing to be. It's still so rare to have the experiences I have gone through be reflected in what I watch and play. To have it sink in how this game I love to death is really the unfiltered experience of someone just like me, I feel so seen. It makes me wanted to cry. When seeing Madeline and Badeline embrace each other, as Madeline embraces identity and gains the newfound resolve to keep moving forward, it made we want to cry. And reflecting on it all now, it still makes me want to cry.
There's a happenstance as Madeline climbs the Summit in 7A. Remember, Madeline was not yet understood by Thorson to be trans at the game's initial release. Yet, when she soars through the sky thanks to the newly embraced part of her, the sky is painted in streaks of blue, pink, and white: a canvas of trans pride surrounding her. She keeps moving forward, unafraid of failure, just glad she is trying. The fact she is pushing forward, that *I* am pushing forward, in spite of the immense challenges that loom an impossible shadow over us; our greatest victory is that we continue to be who we are.
I got the game largely on a whim when I was 14 going on 15, and even seeing the radiant reviews it got did not prepare me for how dearly I would latch onto it. Getting invested into the story, attaching to Madeline, struggling through the C-Sides on the bus on the way to school every day for weeks. It was one of the first really good indie experiences I got my hands on and helped inform a lot of the way I view games today. Even before the replay, I felt confident saying it was my third favorite game of all time! I could go with the cliche bit about how "oh I was worried if the game would live up to my memories", but... I knew it'd be an amazing time. It's Celeste.
Now, did I anticipate that my appreciation for the game would reach a whole new level and I'd tear up over it in joy? Not quite! But it happened!
Here's the thing about playing Celeste today versus back then... I'm OLD. No matter how mature I thought I was at 14, my capacity for engaging with and understanding the media I experience has naturally grown vastly in the intervening years. These reviews are an exercise in understanding all these different games I play and figuring out how I'm supposed to share my findings with others. Rationally, it makes perfect sense; of course I can engage with art better when I'm older, but the internalization of this was a constant thought it my head during my entire present playthrough. Now when I look at this game, I'm so much better able to comprehend how it works, how it tutorializes its plethora of advanced mechanics, how it plays with its characters, and builds up its set pieces, and rewards, and teases, and makes me tear up. And—most importantly—I can appreciate better than ever how masterfully it pulls everything off.
One thing I had lost sight of as my memories of the game flattened out was just how different the A-sides are to the B and C-sides, with a heightened focus on exploration for all the strawberries and other collectables. The main path itself for most of these is over in a matter of 5 minutes, but there's such a strong appeal to digging into all these side challenges and secrets, my eagle eyes spotting a whole that is very clearly a secret area, then spotting a secret area within that secret area, and so on. The levels end up feeling like such vast expanses, with finding the main path often being part of the level's challenge! The level I remember having the least gracious memories of, Mirror Temple, ended up being one of my highlights this go around thanks to how hard it goes into being a big winding maze of pure collectable challenges. Reflecting on it now... it makes total sense the next game they're making is a Metroidvania! It plays off on the DNA of the A-sides almost perfectly.
To my pleasant surprise, there was a plethora of small moments interspersed throughout the A-Side experience beyond just the raw story and gameplay that had entirely left my memory, making the experience all the more special. Positioning the feather to steady Maddy's breaths has stuck in my mind ever since I first experienced it, but how about the scene where Madeline and Theo just talk at the end of 5A under the canopy of a dialogue tree that must encompass like half of the game's entire dialogue? It's such a natural conversation and I love how it gives Madeline the chance to let out all her feelings. Or the way the monster creatures in 5A are tutorialized by having you temporarily control one of them, to kill Madeline in her mind? It's so easy to forget, when most of my memories of the game consisted of throwing myself at the gameplay-oriented B and C sides how thorough of an experience Celeste is.
This isn't to knock the B and C sides though, because I love them still very much. It's obvious the game's credits rolls, while the end of Madeline's main arc, is but the "first act" of the entire gameplay experience. Instead of talking with the player predominantly on the basis of narrative, it shifts to guiding you with a (very) light hand through all of its challenges, and still introducing a bevy of new ideas and techniques even as the level themes are recycled. Even after the first 14 whole levels, 7B introduces the super wall jump and the game from then on out demands you know how to use it! In 8C when you have to learn how to grounded wavedash (I'm not looking up their actual terms LOL) from the tutorial bird, and slowly honing it through the gauntlet of its third screen. Then, at the very end, that fucking bird that I hate pops up again in front of the most mechanical implementation of the grounded wavedash since the very start, as if to say "you've better mastered it by now, bitch". And if we ignore the fact I died to that final trial like 10 times, I sure did master it.
Another surprise from this replay was that, wow, I really am just better at videogames than I used to be huh. My original playthrough took 42 hours with an incomplete strawberry list and a record of over 11k deaths. It only took me 17 hours this go around to beat every level with all the strawberries and two whole golden berries, all in a cool 3.6k and change deaths. It felt really cathartic going through these levels that caused me so much strife prior and have a pretty chill, but still demanding, time. Even when the difficulty really ratchets up with 7C, 8C, and Farewell, no one section kept me banging against my wall for all too long, sans one screen in Farewell that was remedied with the miracle cure of... taking a break to do something else and coming back to it! I beat it in one (1) minute on my return! Wow!
It all culminated well with the final few screens of the game. I flew through them with the wind at my back (sometimes literally!), knowing instinctively my path through the level. Then, the final screen of the entire campaign: a brutal gauntlet that demands a good 90 seconds of solid execution to succeed. After the first few attempts, I certain smugness set within me: "this isn't that hard". And what do you know, about 15 minutes worth of attempts later, my smugness was vindicated and victory was achieved. An immensely satisfying way to send off my gameplay experience with Celsete.
Something else about me has changed too, of course, one of the most important changes even. I realized I was trans, just like Madeline. The timeline of Celeste's designer Maddy Thorson realizing Madeline was trans as she herself figured out her gender identity, to revealing it in a 2020 blogpost missed out on overlapping with my own processing of my identity by a bit over a year. I already had Celeste being a transgender story pretty well squared away in my mind, never truly reckoning with it once it became something I could personally relate to.
Back during my first playthrough, back when Mount Celeste was a metaphor for depression and nothing more, I could recognize how good of a story Celeste told—it was one of the reasons I loved it so much—but it wasn't something I could relate to. Now though, coming back as an adult, as a woman who's gone through a hell of a lot to figure myself out, I get it now. Despite not being consciously written as a story about a girl learning to embrace her own identity, the transgender reading is so blatantly obvious—it was certainly unconsciously written as one. Thorson summed it up in her blog post on the matter. If you haven't read it, it feels essential to do so.
"Celeste is a game written and designed by a closeted trans person who was struggling with their gender identity, scored by a trans woman, with art and code and sound and other labor from their inspiring and irreplaceable friends."
Even if I have by and large figured myself out and am living as the best woman I can be in all aspects of life, it's still such a vulnerable thing to be. It's still so rare to have the experiences I have gone through be reflected in what I watch and play. To have it sink in how this game I love to death is really the unfiltered experience of someone just like me, I feel so seen. It makes me wanted to cry. When seeing Madeline and Badeline embrace each other, as Madeline embraces identity and gains the newfound resolve to keep moving forward, it made we want to cry. And reflecting on it all now, it still makes me want to cry.
There's a happenstance as Madeline climbs the Summit in 7A. Remember, Madeline was not yet understood by Thorson to be trans at the game's initial release. Yet, when she soars through the sky thanks to the newly embraced part of her, the sky is painted in streaks of blue, pink, and white: a canvas of trans pride surrounding her. She keeps moving forward, unafraid of failure, just glad she is trying. The fact she is pushing forward, that *I* am pushing forward, in spite of the immense challenges that loom an impossible shadow over us; our greatest victory is that we continue to be who we are.
2023
Despite being such a Mario nut, and a general enjoyer of RPGs, Super Mario RPG has always been one of my blind spots. I've got very little experience with any of the SNES Squaresoft library beyond 10 or so hours of Final Fantasy VI on my SNES Classic a couple years ago. Leading up to release, I was feeling a fairly mild inclination towards it, weak enough that I probably would've been find passing over the $60 cost for a couple months to focus on the other games in my backlog. But then, in the days after release I see my friends posting screenshots and clips from the game, seeing how charming the writing actually was. Then the game being added to the website Wario64 keeps shilling, so I could get it for only $40??? I'm certainly not one to be immune to FOMO.
Perhaps it is good going into a game like this to remember that it served as the foundation for the Mario RPGs, spawning two series of games I love dearly. Every starting point will have it's growing pains, and part of the appeal will be that it was doing something entirely novel for its time. But even now, Super Mario RPG's reputation precedes itself, a game still spoken of in the upper echelons of the Mario RPGs even by those who played it far after its novelty had faded. Some YouTubers may even say the game raises the bar for what a rpg is able to be! So it leaves me a bit surprised to dig into this game and find something... really light?
The game has a pace of a bullet train, blasting from area to area, never letting a point linger on for a second too long. Ideas, characters, entire areas are introduced, toyed with for not a second longer than desired, then sealed away for something completely different. There’s an appeal to it in a way, being taken on this nonstop ride where any of the sparse few intolerable parts last a couple minutes at most. Let me be clear, despite everything I’m going to discuss, I still liked the game. It’s a good, highly well made and seeping with charm, but my experience felt like I was going on autopilot with a light smile on my face. Very similar to how I digested End Roll a couple months back, but when that was a dinky little RPG Maker game, versus a big, prestigious, full-price remake—it stings a bit more.
The game for its most part follows a pretty standard formula for the first two-thirds of the game: going through a short overworld area, reaching a new town with a problem to solve, trekking through a short dungeon (which is more or less the same gameplay-wise as the overworld area), probably a minigame or two somewhere in there, then meeting the boss and fucking them up. Over this entire loop that spans roughly an hour each iteration, there’s never really an attempt to give texture these areas and characters. They’re just another stop on the journey to reach the ending. The Smithy Gang especially feels like they got the short end of the stick, with there being like 20 boss dudes in their ranks but nobody gets more than 5 minutes of screentime including the fight itself.
Of course, it’s all a Mario game; naturally the focus will be predominantly on the gameplay versus the story and world, which I’m perfectly fine with! Wonder is my favorite game I’ve played thus far this year after all. Yet I look at the following Mario RPGs and even at their thinnest (ignoring Sticker Star), they provide just a bit more to their world that I can chew on that feels like it goes a long way. The first chapter of Paper Mario 64 has several Koopa Bros encounters leading up to their fight, which helps flesh them out juuuust enough to feel like actual dudes versus just bosses in the way.
The exceptions to this are when the game takes a break from the star hunt during Booster Tower and Nimbus Town, which are not-coincidentally the best areas of the game! Booster and Valentina are fun characters that contribute to several fun scenes and add in a bit more texture to their corresponding dungeons as a result. I really like how Valentina tied in as a micro-antagonist to Mallow’s storyline concurrently to the main story. It’s kinda funny both of them have to do with marriages being done under false pretenses. Yet, them being a diversion to the star hunt does make the pacing feel weird when the game redirects itself. Star Road is an area that conceptually should have a lot going on—it’s Geno’s home!—but because Booster was the focus of the chapter, it ends up just being a place where you grab the star and… that’s literally it. In contrast, Valentina comes at the end of what’s already the largest gap between stars in the game. Then the game springs another dungeon upon you, then its boss fight, then another boss fight immediately after! While the volcano dungeon was good enough and I certainly didn’t mind going through more content, the contrast to what the game had set up for the first 5 stars is really jarring. It makes throwing on yet another thing to do before you reach the star feel a bit long in the tooth, despite the game being so brief.
Boss fight after boss fight… oh does the game love throwing them at you one after another towards the end. At least the game gives the curtesy to refresh you after each one, but it does get a bit ridiculous after a certain point. In some cases, like at the end of Bowser’s Castle, you fight a boss, watch a cutscene, then are immediately thrown into another boss. Or the very end of the game being one long corridor where you fight FOUR bosses in a row right before the final boss, with the middle three being pallete swaps of each other. I get what the joke they were telling there was, but also come on man.
This all wouldn’t really be an issue if the combat wasn’t so easy to steamroll for the most part. It’s another reason of why so much of the game felt like I was going on autopilot. You have a fair few options available and a massive cast of enemies each with their own weaknesses you could consider, but why bother with them when Mallow’s AoE attacks and a few normal hits will take out just about anything within a turn or two. Fortunately, there’s an inherent pleasure to pulling off the timed hits and defeating the enemies quicker, but again, I just wish for a bit more meat to it than that. And the thing is…. there is! Smithy and Culex’s fights ratchet up the pressure enough to force you to engage with the mechanics presented to you, prepare strategies and react to stuff that happens in the battle. I think those two fights were the only time I seriously used Peach in the entire game, where otherwise a DPS approach was simply more pragmatic, but she was truly the MVP for them. They were genuinely great fights, and so it’s a tad frustrating realizing the combat system as it exist has some pretty great potential, but (at least from the base game content) is tragically underutilized. I haven’t done the post-game rematches yet, but I’ve heard similarly good things about them.
Yes, I know Super Mario RPG is meant as a baby’s first RPG, but so are the first two Paper Mario games and the entire Mario & Luigi series. I think those games did a better job engaging in combat throughout the entire experience compared to this first attempt.
Though even many of the boss fights that weren’t mechanically engaging at least offered a secret actual appeal. Sometimes the game decides to eschew a fight… for a stage play. There’s a delight to seeing the chef twins panic over their wedding cake possibly being alive, or Johnny challenging Mario to a tussle mano a mano. Not just the game’s writing is excellent, but its choreography is too. I was constantly giggling at the antics these stubby characters were getting up to with their silly little animations. Every scene has at least one bit that’s incredibly charming about it, and that’s by far the game’s biggest strength. The charm persists in seeing how the game plays with elements of the series from when it was barely a decade old. As a Mario nut, seeing Mario go through a choice of numbered doors in Bowser’s Castle and instantly knowing it’s a reference to World’s final level, yet it still being it’s own spin on the idea, is immensely gratifying.
Super Mario RPG does himge pretty hard on it being a Mario game for it’s appeal… and that’s okay! Mario is a funny little dude who everyone loves to see do funny little stuff, and this was the game to crack the nut on that. Even if its actual game structure leaves something to be desired, it still left me with a smile on my face almost the entire way through. As long as I don’t stew on it too hard (which I did in this review lol), the game remains a simple pleasure and, again, that’s perfectly okay!
Perhaps it is good going into a game like this to remember that it served as the foundation for the Mario RPGs, spawning two series of games I love dearly. Every starting point will have it's growing pains, and part of the appeal will be that it was doing something entirely novel for its time. But even now, Super Mario RPG's reputation precedes itself, a game still spoken of in the upper echelons of the Mario RPGs even by those who played it far after its novelty had faded. Some YouTubers may even say the game raises the bar for what a rpg is able to be! So it leaves me a bit surprised to dig into this game and find something... really light?
The game has a pace of a bullet train, blasting from area to area, never letting a point linger on for a second too long. Ideas, characters, entire areas are introduced, toyed with for not a second longer than desired, then sealed away for something completely different. There’s an appeal to it in a way, being taken on this nonstop ride where any of the sparse few intolerable parts last a couple minutes at most. Let me be clear, despite everything I’m going to discuss, I still liked the game. It’s a good, highly well made and seeping with charm, but my experience felt like I was going on autopilot with a light smile on my face. Very similar to how I digested End Roll a couple months back, but when that was a dinky little RPG Maker game, versus a big, prestigious, full-price remake—it stings a bit more.
The game for its most part follows a pretty standard formula for the first two-thirds of the game: going through a short overworld area, reaching a new town with a problem to solve, trekking through a short dungeon (which is more or less the same gameplay-wise as the overworld area), probably a minigame or two somewhere in there, then meeting the boss and fucking them up. Over this entire loop that spans roughly an hour each iteration, there’s never really an attempt to give texture these areas and characters. They’re just another stop on the journey to reach the ending. The Smithy Gang especially feels like they got the short end of the stick, with there being like 20 boss dudes in their ranks but nobody gets more than 5 minutes of screentime including the fight itself.
Of course, it’s all a Mario game; naturally the focus will be predominantly on the gameplay versus the story and world, which I’m perfectly fine with! Wonder is my favorite game I’ve played thus far this year after all. Yet I look at the following Mario RPGs and even at their thinnest (ignoring Sticker Star), they provide just a bit more to their world that I can chew on that feels like it goes a long way. The first chapter of Paper Mario 64 has several Koopa Bros encounters leading up to their fight, which helps flesh them out juuuust enough to feel like actual dudes versus just bosses in the way.
The exceptions to this are when the game takes a break from the star hunt during Booster Tower and Nimbus Town, which are not-coincidentally the best areas of the game! Booster and Valentina are fun characters that contribute to several fun scenes and add in a bit more texture to their corresponding dungeons as a result. I really like how Valentina tied in as a micro-antagonist to Mallow’s storyline concurrently to the main story. It’s kinda funny both of them have to do with marriages being done under false pretenses. Yet, them being a diversion to the star hunt does make the pacing feel weird when the game redirects itself. Star Road is an area that conceptually should have a lot going on—it’s Geno’s home!—but because Booster was the focus of the chapter, it ends up just being a place where you grab the star and… that’s literally it. In contrast, Valentina comes at the end of what’s already the largest gap between stars in the game. Then the game springs another dungeon upon you, then its boss fight, then another boss fight immediately after! While the volcano dungeon was good enough and I certainly didn’t mind going through more content, the contrast to what the game had set up for the first 5 stars is really jarring. It makes throwing on yet another thing to do before you reach the star feel a bit long in the tooth, despite the game being so brief.
Boss fight after boss fight… oh does the game love throwing them at you one after another towards the end. At least the game gives the curtesy to refresh you after each one, but it does get a bit ridiculous after a certain point. In some cases, like at the end of Bowser’s Castle, you fight a boss, watch a cutscene, then are immediately thrown into another boss. Or the very end of the game being one long corridor where you fight FOUR bosses in a row right before the final boss, with the middle three being pallete swaps of each other. I get what the joke they were telling there was, but also come on man.
This all wouldn’t really be an issue if the combat wasn’t so easy to steamroll for the most part. It’s another reason of why so much of the game felt like I was going on autopilot. You have a fair few options available and a massive cast of enemies each with their own weaknesses you could consider, but why bother with them when Mallow’s AoE attacks and a few normal hits will take out just about anything within a turn or two. Fortunately, there’s an inherent pleasure to pulling off the timed hits and defeating the enemies quicker, but again, I just wish for a bit more meat to it than that. And the thing is…. there is! Smithy and Culex’s fights ratchet up the pressure enough to force you to engage with the mechanics presented to you, prepare strategies and react to stuff that happens in the battle. I think those two fights were the only time I seriously used Peach in the entire game, where otherwise a DPS approach was simply more pragmatic, but she was truly the MVP for them. They were genuinely great fights, and so it’s a tad frustrating realizing the combat system as it exist has some pretty great potential, but (at least from the base game content) is tragically underutilized. I haven’t done the post-game rematches yet, but I’ve heard similarly good things about them.
Yes, I know Super Mario RPG is meant as a baby’s first RPG, but so are the first two Paper Mario games and the entire Mario & Luigi series. I think those games did a better job engaging in combat throughout the entire experience compared to this first attempt.
Though even many of the boss fights that weren’t mechanically engaging at least offered a secret actual appeal. Sometimes the game decides to eschew a fight… for a stage play. There’s a delight to seeing the chef twins panic over their wedding cake possibly being alive, or Johnny challenging Mario to a tussle mano a mano. Not just the game’s writing is excellent, but its choreography is too. I was constantly giggling at the antics these stubby characters were getting up to with their silly little animations. Every scene has at least one bit that’s incredibly charming about it, and that’s by far the game’s biggest strength. The charm persists in seeing how the game plays with elements of the series from when it was barely a decade old. As a Mario nut, seeing Mario go through a choice of numbered doors in Bowser’s Castle and instantly knowing it’s a reference to World’s final level, yet it still being it’s own spin on the idea, is immensely gratifying.
Super Mario RPG does himge pretty hard on it being a Mario game for it’s appeal… and that’s okay! Mario is a funny little dude who everyone loves to see do funny little stuff, and this was the game to crack the nut on that. Even if its actual game structure leaves something to be desired, it still left me with a smile on my face almost the entire way through. As long as I don’t stew on it too hard (which I did in this review lol), the game remains a simple pleasure and, again, that’s perfectly okay!
2011
This review contains spoilers
To The Moon was one of those games I've heard about here and there before playing it, more than most other RPG Maker games I've been playing over the past few months. It makes perfect sense why: a well-made heart-wrencher of an indie game right at the beak of the indie boom is a recipe for acclaim. So here I come 12 years late to the party, thinking this is just some quaint story that handles autism well and seeing the game has spawned 2? 3? 4? 5 (kinda) sequels????? And one of them is called Im-im-IMPOSTER Factory??? What could be going on here! Frankly, I'm still not sure what's up with Imposter Factory, but To The Moon has left me very interested to find out.
Gonna be honest, my first play session was rough. The WASD keys did nothing and the game prompted me to click to interact with stuff... a point and click RPG Maker game? A lot of devs have wrangled a lot of different things out of the engine, but this I was really unsure about. Having to wait to see my character trawl across the screen had atrocious feel as opposed to just moving them manually. After about 20 minutes of playing, I put it down for the night, wanting to return but feeling unsure if I could stand the control scheme...
...then 2 minutes into my second session I realized the manual controls were mapped to the arrow keys. Oopsies!
Still, with all that said of my misleading interpretation of the game feel, it's not like there's much game here! Even compared to many of its RPG Maker contemporaries, the gameplay here is incredibly straightforward. Even during the short "exploration" segments, I don't think I ever had to double-back because I missed something, large in part thanks to the mouse cursor showing you interactable objects. There's a tile flipping puzzle repeating more times than really necessary, though one that's too brief to cause any pain, a sparse few segments that change up the gameplay a bit, aaaaand... thats about it. Everything here is laser focused on the story.
Which is perfectly fine by me, because the writing here is wonderful. It explores the relationship of couple John and River in a montage of memories spanning their entire lives. Each scene offers a unique perspective into their relationship with absolutely beautiful dialogue that manages to feel extremely real. Bolstering it is the incredibly novel way in which their lives are shown —reverse chronologically—watching the layers of their relationship slowly peeled back to reveal what brough them to where you saw them previously in the story. It's truly hard to overstate how well developed John and River feel, and how compelling it is find out more of the mystery behind who they really are in such a genuine way. My only real wish is that more time was spent with the older versions of the characters, which is by design the focus of the earlier portions of the game, but the stuff I felt was ultimately the most compelling. Peppered in is some commentary from the scientists scrubbing through these memories, which despite a select few bits of writing that feel distinctly early 2010s, remains charming and complements the emotional core well.
I know I added a spoiler warning for the review, but considering how much of a story focused game it is, I want to talk in depth about the ending from here on out. Second spoiler warning! It's genuinely a story worth experiencing and is on sale on Steam for like $2 if you're reading this within 4 days after I write this... or y'know... whenever there's a Steam sale... but you do you!
The reverse chronological playback of memories takes up the first act of the game's labeled three acts, which feels odd considering the second act lasts all of 15-20 minutes. As the game rockets towards its climax, it starts to focus more on the logistics and the ethics of tampering with memories. The emotional core is never lost, but I myself felt a bit lost as the game tried to explain some of its timey whimey (memory schmemory?) to me and it just kind of... mostly making sense I guess? There's a part towards the very end where one of the doctors suddenly starts making decisions without the input of the other doctor, and the game frames it as a heel turn of sorts. Of course, it ends up that she had a very specific plan of altering memories such that everything would turn out well. What was the plan? Um. Erm. Don't worry about it.
—Hi, Poochy about to post this here. Let me bundle my kinda-nitpicky comments on the game together by mentioning that for some reason the sole "beat the game" achievement simply does not seem to unlock. Weird! Good thing I don't care about achievements! Anyways—
Truly, don't worry about it. I wasn't worrying as the final scene played out before my eyes. Watching John and River fulfill their dreams of heading out to the moon, seeing their rocket pierce the gleaming sunset. Them getting their last moments of happiness together, at this point multiple lifetimes of memories. Hearing John's heart monitor steadily beep in the background, hanging on it its last moments out of sheer willpower. Everything is just as it should be.
Then, his heartbeat goes flat.
Then, credits.
Everything is just as it should be.
Gonna be honest, my first play session was rough. The WASD keys did nothing and the game prompted me to click to interact with stuff... a point and click RPG Maker game? A lot of devs have wrangled a lot of different things out of the engine, but this I was really unsure about. Having to wait to see my character trawl across the screen had atrocious feel as opposed to just moving them manually. After about 20 minutes of playing, I put it down for the night, wanting to return but feeling unsure if I could stand the control scheme...
...then 2 minutes into my second session I realized the manual controls were mapped to the arrow keys. Oopsies!
Still, with all that said of my misleading interpretation of the game feel, it's not like there's much game here! Even compared to many of its RPG Maker contemporaries, the gameplay here is incredibly straightforward. Even during the short "exploration" segments, I don't think I ever had to double-back because I missed something, large in part thanks to the mouse cursor showing you interactable objects. There's a tile flipping puzzle repeating more times than really necessary, though one that's too brief to cause any pain, a sparse few segments that change up the gameplay a bit, aaaaand... thats about it. Everything here is laser focused on the story.
Which is perfectly fine by me, because the writing here is wonderful. It explores the relationship of couple John and River in a montage of memories spanning their entire lives. Each scene offers a unique perspective into their relationship with absolutely beautiful dialogue that manages to feel extremely real. Bolstering it is the incredibly novel way in which their lives are shown —reverse chronologically—watching the layers of their relationship slowly peeled back to reveal what brough them to where you saw them previously in the story. It's truly hard to overstate how well developed John and River feel, and how compelling it is find out more of the mystery behind who they really are in such a genuine way. My only real wish is that more time was spent with the older versions of the characters, which is by design the focus of the earlier portions of the game, but the stuff I felt was ultimately the most compelling. Peppered in is some commentary from the scientists scrubbing through these memories, which despite a select few bits of writing that feel distinctly early 2010s, remains charming and complements the emotional core well.
I know I added a spoiler warning for the review, but considering how much of a story focused game it is, I want to talk in depth about the ending from here on out. Second spoiler warning! It's genuinely a story worth experiencing and is on sale on Steam for like $2 if you're reading this within 4 days after I write this... or y'know... whenever there's a Steam sale... but you do you!
The reverse chronological playback of memories takes up the first act of the game's labeled three acts, which feels odd considering the second act lasts all of 15-20 minutes. As the game rockets towards its climax, it starts to focus more on the logistics and the ethics of tampering with memories. The emotional core is never lost, but I myself felt a bit lost as the game tried to explain some of its timey whimey (memory schmemory?) to me and it just kind of... mostly making sense I guess? There's a part towards the very end where one of the doctors suddenly starts making decisions without the input of the other doctor, and the game frames it as a heel turn of sorts. Of course, it ends up that she had a very specific plan of altering memories such that everything would turn out well. What was the plan? Um. Erm. Don't worry about it.
—Hi, Poochy about to post this here. Let me bundle my kinda-nitpicky comments on the game together by mentioning that for some reason the sole "beat the game" achievement simply does not seem to unlock. Weird! Good thing I don't care about achievements! Anyways—
Truly, don't worry about it. I wasn't worrying as the final scene played out before my eyes. Watching John and River fulfill their dreams of heading out to the moon, seeing their rocket pierce the gleaming sunset. Them getting their last moments of happiness together, at this point multiple lifetimes of memories. Hearing John's heart monitor steadily beep in the background, hanging on it its last moments out of sheer willpower. Everything is just as it should be.
Then, his heartbeat goes flat.
Then, credits.
Everything is just as it should be.
I think, for the most part, it is reasonable to expect (or at least hope) that a studio slowly improves their game-crafting skills with each new release, ideally making them better and better. Of course, that can't always be the case. Some games are good enough to beckon the question "how the hell are they supposed to top this", and which follows the acceptance that it'd probably be okay if what follows is comparatively as good or even a little worse. AstralShift's Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum (a title I will always type out in full out of sheer amusement) from earlier this year, for as much obtuseness and opaqueness as it relished in, was a pretty good game! Then apparently, they already had their next game right around the corner: a step away from RPG Maker, an incredible looking artstyle, more meat added to the gameplay, and being a prequel to Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum? It felt like this game had the potential to be something really special!
And now we're here... and now I've played it... and it's... fine.
The biggest up-front appeal here is clearly the visuals, something the game is completely unashamed of. Of course, the game is drop-dead gorgeous, almost every frame of it looking like 90s anime eye candy. In motion, it looks even better, with well done animation and a really subtle static-y noise filter at night that adds soooo much to the vibes. The dungeon areas you go through every night double down on the wonderful aesthetics, with so many little visual effects and setpieces that love to mesh together different artstyles in ways that are a sight to behold. Shoutouts too to the minigames, presented as fancifully-decorated arcade machines that really sell the experience. I do think Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum ultimately went further with its setpieces and playing with different artstyles, but this game still manages to impress all the same.
Funny anecdote: the game's credits are split between the art team and the programming team for the game. You're only able to skip the later one for whatever reason. I don't think it actually means anything, but its very clear how (rightfully!) proud they are of the aesthetic work put in here.
Yet, under the veneer of these fanciful graphics, the underlying game is kinda lacking? Focusing on the gameplay, it's split between its time management-y social sim elements during the daytime and going through short dungeons more reminiscent of Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum at night, and both are unfortunately pretty rough around the edges.
A lot of the game focuses on meter management with your health, hunger, sanity, and suspicion meters. The cycle is pretty simple: various things in the game lower these meters (raise in suspicion's case), you get money by selling items/playing minigames, then use the money to buy items to rectify those drops. If you don't, you die. On paper, a fairly simple system to add stress to the player, as one does in a kinda-sorta-horror-y game. However, the scope of the game is small enough that it basically throttles you into playing just enough minigames that you have enough money to get all the items you need to survive, but not much more. When combined with how relatively-consistently these meters drain, buying items to manage the meters becomes more of a chore than anything, ESPECIALLY with how overbearing the UI becomes when you're low on one of them.
Shoutouts to when I had to go through half a dungeon with low sanity while the edges of the screen were covered in dark tendrils and the music was muffled by the constant murmuring of ghosts. It wasn't an issue of "oh do I have enough money to survive???", but "oh I guess I'm stuck dealing with this until I can reach the next shop". I wasn't under threat, I was just annoyed.
Speaking of the dungeons, they're the classic RPG Maker horror game mechanics: enemies to avoid, fairly simple puzzles to complete, and a good few chase sequences—as one does. For the most part they're alright, with some interesting puzzles here and there, but as you go on in them they start to get a bit unwieldy. The second-to-last one stands out as the biggest offender, asking you to wander two large lake areas fairly aimlessly while high-damage ghosts chase you down as long as you're not standing on land, which sometimes is just impossible to reach in-between first seeing the ghost and it hitting you. There's a reason the first Steam guide for the game was made specifically for getting through that dungeon. The final chase sequel also to throw out obstacles that are impossible to naturally react to (including one that appeared while i was in the middle of an animation and killed me) while the camera loves to barely show what's in front. Not to mention the door shuffle puzzle you have to repeat THREE times over the course of this sequence that instantly kills you if you get it wrong. The dungeons have just enough moments of bullshit to them, it was hard to look through to their good, largely aesthetics-based, elements. There was also the forbidden fruit of puzzle design: a SLIDE PUZZLE. It was optional but still. What the fuck?
Don't think I forgot about you putting one in, Origami King. Fuck you.
ANYWAYS, aside from all of this, the rest of the game comprises of dealing with an increasingly paranoid village who might or might not think you are a witch, while courting the girl of your desires. Both of which are fairly interesting and well-done! I personally chose Freya as my bride-to-be, and it was all really sweet, fluffy, gay as hell romance. I loved all of the adorable portraits that popped up during their dates, showing them gingerly grow close together. In contrast, the village was a really compelling showcase of mass paranoia and how it overtakes communities. The dynamics of the various villagers as various blights infect the town were simple, but still engaging. This is where the suspicion meter comes into play, gauging how close you are to being hung by the townspeople or something along those lines. I never got close to filling up the meter, and I don't really know how you can even do so unless intentionally seeking it out or being really really stupid, but I still can appreciate the ludonarrative element to it.
All of this dialogue is nicely written and such, but even that gets a tad dicey when having to often replay segments and, in one of the most baffling things I have seen in a videogame recently, it's a total coinflip whether or not you can skip through dialogue! Seriously! There is a fast forward button that only appears during certainly dialogue sequences and cutscenes for reasons totally beyond by conception. It's awesome to go die in a tough boss-like segment or accidentally choose a dialogue option that instantly kills you/locks you out of something (the game loves to do this), multiple times, then the cutscene you're booted back before is—of course—unskippable!!!
And all of this to experience a story that's... pretty straightfoward. While Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum forced you to pull the story out of it like you were desecrating a corpse, that mystique to it was a big reason as to why I liked it as much as I did. Being a more mainstream-targeted game, especially published by Square Enix, it makes sense that this game's story is a lot more outwardly comprehensible, and really I have no issues with that. For what it is, the story is still fairly well done, enhanced a lot by the aforementioned dating and town paranoia elements. Yet, as someone who had already played Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum, I was hoping I wasn't able to intuit the entire story from the very beginning of the game. Hoping for some twist that shaked things up while still keeping up continuity with the game prior, but then I reached the end and everything rolled out... exactly as I expected. That said, I was waiting the entire game for Him to finally appear, and then He did appear and I Leonardo DiCaprio pointed at the screen and it was awesome. So who can say if it was bad or not?
There are so many other smaller things that prick me with the game I could delve into, like the map design basically being a straight line that you walk back and forth across WAY too much for there to be no fast travel system. A lot of these things could probably (hopefully!) be rectified in a few patches, but it's a bit too late for me now. By the end of it, going through that last chase sequence, I was pretty ready to be done with the game. Yet, looking at the amount of time I put into it in a mere 4 days, only a bit less than I put into Eastward for what was still a much less frustrating experience. Getting through all the gruff the game has, there's a pretty decent experience underneath!
I kind of feel like if I went into this without having played Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum and the world had more mystique to it, I probably would have had a better time. Conversely, if I played Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum after this, I probably wouldn't have found that game quite as engrossing as I did at the time. It feels weird and a bit bad bad to feel like the games are stuck in this zero-win situation together. I would love to talk to someone who played the games in reverse order to me and how it affected their thoughts on the game. If nothing else, its a really interesting duology for every interesting decision they do, and its hard not to respect them.
And now we're here... and now I've played it... and it's... fine.
The biggest up-front appeal here is clearly the visuals, something the game is completely unashamed of. Of course, the game is drop-dead gorgeous, almost every frame of it looking like 90s anime eye candy. In motion, it looks even better, with well done animation and a really subtle static-y noise filter at night that adds soooo much to the vibes. The dungeon areas you go through every night double down on the wonderful aesthetics, with so many little visual effects and setpieces that love to mesh together different artstyles in ways that are a sight to behold. Shoutouts too to the minigames, presented as fancifully-decorated arcade machines that really sell the experience. I do think Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum ultimately went further with its setpieces and playing with different artstyles, but this game still manages to impress all the same.
Funny anecdote: the game's credits are split between the art team and the programming team for the game. You're only able to skip the later one for whatever reason. I don't think it actually means anything, but its very clear how (rightfully!) proud they are of the aesthetic work put in here.
Yet, under the veneer of these fanciful graphics, the underlying game is kinda lacking? Focusing on the gameplay, it's split between its time management-y social sim elements during the daytime and going through short dungeons more reminiscent of Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum at night, and both are unfortunately pretty rough around the edges.
A lot of the game focuses on meter management with your health, hunger, sanity, and suspicion meters. The cycle is pretty simple: various things in the game lower these meters (raise in suspicion's case), you get money by selling items/playing minigames, then use the money to buy items to rectify those drops. If you don't, you die. On paper, a fairly simple system to add stress to the player, as one does in a kinda-sorta-horror-y game. However, the scope of the game is small enough that it basically throttles you into playing just enough minigames that you have enough money to get all the items you need to survive, but not much more. When combined with how relatively-consistently these meters drain, buying items to manage the meters becomes more of a chore than anything, ESPECIALLY with how overbearing the UI becomes when you're low on one of them.
Shoutouts to when I had to go through half a dungeon with low sanity while the edges of the screen were covered in dark tendrils and the music was muffled by the constant murmuring of ghosts. It wasn't an issue of "oh do I have enough money to survive???", but "oh I guess I'm stuck dealing with this until I can reach the next shop". I wasn't under threat, I was just annoyed.
Speaking of the dungeons, they're the classic RPG Maker horror game mechanics: enemies to avoid, fairly simple puzzles to complete, and a good few chase sequences—as one does. For the most part they're alright, with some interesting puzzles here and there, but as you go on in them they start to get a bit unwieldy. The second-to-last one stands out as the biggest offender, asking you to wander two large lake areas fairly aimlessly while high-damage ghosts chase you down as long as you're not standing on land, which sometimes is just impossible to reach in-between first seeing the ghost and it hitting you. There's a reason the first Steam guide for the game was made specifically for getting through that dungeon. The final chase sequel also to throw out obstacles that are impossible to naturally react to (including one that appeared while i was in the middle of an animation and killed me) while the camera loves to barely show what's in front. Not to mention the door shuffle puzzle you have to repeat THREE times over the course of this sequence that instantly kills you if you get it wrong. The dungeons have just enough moments of bullshit to them, it was hard to look through to their good, largely aesthetics-based, elements. There was also the forbidden fruit of puzzle design: a SLIDE PUZZLE. It was optional but still. What the fuck?
Don't think I forgot about you putting one in, Origami King. Fuck you.
ANYWAYS, aside from all of this, the rest of the game comprises of dealing with an increasingly paranoid village who might or might not think you are a witch, while courting the girl of your desires. Both of which are fairly interesting and well-done! I personally chose Freya as my bride-to-be, and it was all really sweet, fluffy, gay as hell romance. I loved all of the adorable portraits that popped up during their dates, showing them gingerly grow close together. In contrast, the village was a really compelling showcase of mass paranoia and how it overtakes communities. The dynamics of the various villagers as various blights infect the town were simple, but still engaging. This is where the suspicion meter comes into play, gauging how close you are to being hung by the townspeople or something along those lines. I never got close to filling up the meter, and I don't really know how you can even do so unless intentionally seeking it out or being really really stupid, but I still can appreciate the ludonarrative element to it.
All of this dialogue is nicely written and such, but even that gets a tad dicey when having to often replay segments and, in one of the most baffling things I have seen in a videogame recently, it's a total coinflip whether or not you can skip through dialogue! Seriously! There is a fast forward button that only appears during certainly dialogue sequences and cutscenes for reasons totally beyond by conception. It's awesome to go die in a tough boss-like segment or accidentally choose a dialogue option that instantly kills you/locks you out of something (the game loves to do this), multiple times, then the cutscene you're booted back before is—of course—unskippable!!!
And all of this to experience a story that's... pretty straightfoward. While Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum forced you to pull the story out of it like you were desecrating a corpse, that mystique to it was a big reason as to why I liked it as much as I did. Being a more mainstream-targeted game, especially published by Square Enix, it makes sense that this game's story is a lot more outwardly comprehensible, and really I have no issues with that. For what it is, the story is still fairly well done, enhanced a lot by the aforementioned dating and town paranoia elements. Yet, as someone who had already played Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum, I was hoping I wasn't able to intuit the entire story from the very beginning of the game. Hoping for some twist that shaked things up while still keeping up continuity with the game prior, but then I reached the end and everything rolled out... exactly as I expected. That said, I was waiting the entire game for Him to finally appear, and then He did appear and I Leonardo DiCaprio pointed at the screen and it was awesome. So who can say if it was bad or not?
There are so many other smaller things that prick me with the game I could delve into, like the map design basically being a straight line that you walk back and forth across WAY too much for there to be no fast travel system. A lot of these things could probably (hopefully!) be rectified in a few patches, but it's a bit too late for me now. By the end of it, going through that last chase sequence, I was pretty ready to be done with the game. Yet, looking at the amount of time I put into it in a mere 4 days, only a bit less than I put into Eastward for what was still a much less frustrating experience. Getting through all the gruff the game has, there's a pretty decent experience underneath!
I kind of feel like if I went into this without having played Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum and the world had more mystique to it, I probably would have had a better time. Conversely, if I played Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum after this, I probably wouldn't have found that game quite as engrossing as I did at the time. It feels weird and a bit bad bad to feel like the games are stuck in this zero-win situation together. I would love to talk to someone who played the games in reverse order to me and how it affected their thoughts on the game. If nothing else, its a really interesting duology for every interesting decision they do, and its hard not to respect them.
There I was, October 18th, idly scrolling through Steam for, as one does. Usually there’s nothing all too interesting in my bored searches, especially with a Steam recommendation algorithm that thinks I would be even the slightest fraction of a bit interested in Mortal Kombat 1. But that time around, there was a game presented under “Because You Liked Tales of the Black Forest” (tangent: I never got around to writing a review for Black Forest, but it was a pretty solid RPG Maker horror game that felt like an interesting window into the Japanese Lost Decade, despite being made by Chinese devs). Another RPG Maker horror game, with a good art style and a hell of a tag line—and a hell of a lineup of art in the game’s news feed! It seemed like a curious thing, but still I made a small note of it in my mind and moved on.
Then, the next day, I saw a huge post about it on Twitter—several in fact! It had appeared to me that I had discovered this game a day before most everyone else had. What a weird feeling it is to be ahead of the curve like that. Seeing it thrown into the discourse piqued my interest and I just had to know what was actually up with this game beyond what everyone can see on its Steam page. And y’know what? It’s pretty damn good!
Now of course, it goes without saying this game is not for everyone; not for most people even. It pretty heavily features cannibalism and incest and other topics of the sort, and it’d be disingenuous to claim it’s not at least somewhat fetishistic about some of that stuff. Even as someone who is personally not bothered with most stuff, a few specific, visceral parts to when you’re butchering a human body made me squirm. It’s not a bad thing of course, horror games are made to bring us into uncomfortable territories.
Despite me calling it a horror game, largely because it follows the structure of a typical RPG Maker horror game, its not a scary game at all. It’s a black comedy, and damn, it’s funny as hell. The writing captures a very specific snarky, almost irony-poisoned vibe to it that really landed with me, way more than I anticipated. It hashes well with the absolutely FUCKED world it takes place in.
Even more fucked is the relationship between the sibling protagonists, Andrew and Ashley Graves. Truly they need to be taken apart from each other, but seeing their constant struggle with their deeply engrained codependency issues is really compelling. The constant highs and lows of seeing Andrew maybe come close to making the sheer toxicity of their relationship not wear him away, before collapsing back into the norm. Seeing them stumble down the path of engaging in cannibalism out of pure survival to doing it more out of spite. In a lot of ways, its a similar experience to what I loved seeing in Scott Pilgrim’s journey. Though, while Scott trends more or less positively, while the Graves… not so much!
The story is all complemented with a surprising amount of really good looking art, for what I believe is a solo dev project. Practically every scene has half a dozen illustrations expressing it. The world itself sells its dourness well, and I particularly love the overworld sprites. Look at these little depressed scrimbly creature things.
The gameplay exists. You walk around to do simple tasks, a couple rudimentary puzzles, exactly what you’d expect for this sort of game. It was pretty funny reading a dev thing about how they got help implementing the puzzles and, not to be judgmental to a solo indie dev but, wondering what exactly the help was needed for. It works!
Really, I’m left just wishing I waited to play the game until after it was finished. The last chapter, which seems to be very (completely?) different depending on the ending gotten in Chapter 2, is coming sometime next year. Now that I’m legitimately invested in where the fucked up twins end up, it sucks to wait! But hey, that’s a significantly better outcome than I could’ve expected first finding that Steam page.
Then, the next day, I saw a huge post about it on Twitter—several in fact! It had appeared to me that I had discovered this game a day before most everyone else had. What a weird feeling it is to be ahead of the curve like that. Seeing it thrown into the discourse piqued my interest and I just had to know what was actually up with this game beyond what everyone can see on its Steam page. And y’know what? It’s pretty damn good!
Now of course, it goes without saying this game is not for everyone; not for most people even. It pretty heavily features cannibalism and incest and other topics of the sort, and it’d be disingenuous to claim it’s not at least somewhat fetishistic about some of that stuff. Even as someone who is personally not bothered with most stuff, a few specific, visceral parts to when you’re butchering a human body made me squirm. It’s not a bad thing of course, horror games are made to bring us into uncomfortable territories.
Despite me calling it a horror game, largely because it follows the structure of a typical RPG Maker horror game, its not a scary game at all. It’s a black comedy, and damn, it’s funny as hell. The writing captures a very specific snarky, almost irony-poisoned vibe to it that really landed with me, way more than I anticipated. It hashes well with the absolutely FUCKED world it takes place in.
Even more fucked is the relationship between the sibling protagonists, Andrew and Ashley Graves. Truly they need to be taken apart from each other, but seeing their constant struggle with their deeply engrained codependency issues is really compelling. The constant highs and lows of seeing Andrew maybe come close to making the sheer toxicity of their relationship not wear him away, before collapsing back into the norm. Seeing them stumble down the path of engaging in cannibalism out of pure survival to doing it more out of spite. In a lot of ways, its a similar experience to what I loved seeing in Scott Pilgrim’s journey. Though, while Scott trends more or less positively, while the Graves… not so much!
The story is all complemented with a surprising amount of really good looking art, for what I believe is a solo dev project. Practically every scene has half a dozen illustrations expressing it. The world itself sells its dourness well, and I particularly love the overworld sprites. Look at these little depressed scrimbly creature things.
The gameplay exists. You walk around to do simple tasks, a couple rudimentary puzzles, exactly what you’d expect for this sort of game. It was pretty funny reading a dev thing about how they got help implementing the puzzles and, not to be judgmental to a solo indie dev but, wondering what exactly the help was needed for. It works!
Really, I’m left just wishing I waited to play the game until after it was finished. The last chapter, which seems to be very (completely?) different depending on the ending gotten in Chapter 2, is coming sometime next year. Now that I’m legitimately invested in where the fucked up twins end up, it sucks to wait! But hey, that’s a significantly better outcome than I could’ve expected first finding that Steam page.