It’s very weird to see a series that has until now had such a small, tight team with a very clear authorial voice jump in prestige so that we’re now several rereleases out and firmly in the realm of originally unintended sequels and spinoffs. I didn’t realize that Apollo Justice actually preceded this game in release or I WOULD have played that one first and even now that I’ve committed to cleaving the series in half by trilogy with this little stop off in Investigation town in between. my brain is beginning to itch a bit. But it’s a neat exercise to get such a hard break in style from the original games and this one, which sees Takeshi Yamazaki (who came onto the series during the DS rerelease period and seemed like mostly an odd job guy before getting a planning gig on Apollo Justice) as the scenario writer, working closely with relative series newcomer Motohide Eshiro in the producer role to innovate the gameplay quirks that define this subseries. The fresh writing alone gives the game a very distinct vibe from its predecessors for better and worse.

The shift towards investigating with the intent to prosecute crimes places a greater focus on the methodology of the acts you’re looking into, and cases are generally speaking really complex in this game, and less structured, which I think is good. Investigations are more dynamic to begin with just by virtue of moving a little guy around a usually pretty limited screen, which drastically reduces pixel hunting – but they also only go as long as they need to because you’re not inhibited by the two-or-three day long trial system. It leads to a more natural progression. Edgeworth’s special logic minigame where he pieces together little bits of information in his mind as he collects them is unfortunately simple the whole time but it doesn’t ever stop being satisfying in the way that getting an answer right in these games almost always is. That’s the saving grace of the game – the act of playing Ace Attorney simply feels good.

The grace needs to be saved because the PACING is completely dreadful the entire time. There’s no punch, no drama to any of the cases here. Not even one time do you nail a villain at the end of a chapter with a big drop of a huge reveal or a satisfying click of a puzzle piece coming together. More than once I was caught off guard when I finished a case because I didn’t realize that the small, mundane piece of information I’d just revealed was going to be the clincher. This is at its worst in the final case, which might be the longest finale in the series, or maybe it only FEELS like it is, because it is so deeply tied to the previous case and it completely solved all of the emotional arcs of every major character roughly two hours before the game ends. Yeah you wrap up your spunky teenaged sidekick’s traumatic backstory, you earn the respect and friendship of the interpol detective who hates prosecutors, you solve the decade-old mystery of the phantom thief that’s haunted the game.

But what’s this? You have to catch the guy who runs the smuggling ring! Who killed….some guy! And it’s SO easy. Not once in this sequence did I find myself unable to immediately guess the correct answer to a riddle fifteen minutes before I was allowed to present it, and we are CONSTANTLY being interrupted by new characters storming into the room not to save the day but to do comedy bits. It doesn’t really spoil the mood though because there’s NOT really a mood to spoil because like I’ve mentioned nobody really cares at this point beyond the basic principle of not liking asshole murderers getting away with it!

On the subject of Too Many Characters, this is a place where the game strikes me as particularly insecure. This game is a nonstop parade of guys I Did Not Need To See Again. Why is Maggie Byrde making her third appearance? Why is Officer Meeks here for one scene? How do we, as a polite society, keep letting Wendy Oldbag have bigger and bigger roles in these games even though she continues to have One Joke and it Sucks Ass??? It’s tough because it sucks in both directions. On one hand, everybody involved in this series (including Shu Takumi, he is not innocent here) should be tried in a criminal court for the character assassination of Larry Butz, who in the first game was a kind of mean and stupid guy who is unlucky in love but ultimately has a heart of gold and is a key person in the lives of both of his friends and over time has become a moronic creep who will try to fuck any child he meets and doesn’t understand most of the things that come out of his own mouth. On the other hand I would love to spend more time with Ema Skye, I would love to check in with her, see what she’s up to, hear all about what she’s got going on. There’s a lot of potential for that character, especially free from the shadow of her big story in the re-release of Ace Attorney 1. Why is she only in one screen of the entire game?? If she’s gonna be here she should be here. It feels weird and desperate, like they’re scared I won’t like the game if they don’t constantly jangle keys in the shape of guys I remember in front of my face.

It’s a shame too because I do think the original characters are the actual best part of the game. I like Ema but I think in her original appearance she’s way too much of a Maya clone, distinguished mostly by having a Different Gimmick rather than a different personality. Kay Faraday is a completely different genre of spunky teen sidekick than either of the previous girls, and I find her endlessly funny and charming. Aggressively weird and goofy and cool and with a very fun gimmick that she clings to based on a series of genuinely affecting tragedies. Everyone in her orbit rocks too, Callisto Yew and Detective Badd both hall of fame Ace Attorney guys. Lang’s drama is not convincing to me but his connection to Shih-na is and his reactions to how their relationship evolves salvage him for me, and his affection for his subordinates is by far the funniest joke in the entire series. The original stuff here is consistently the best shit in the game. I wish it felt like they knew that.

For the first game that as far as I know had zero involvement from the series creator, it’s really interesting to see how it feels the same and how it feels different, and where it’s successful and where it’s not. I think the flaws are desperately glaring, and they are unfortunately mostly play-related, but the moment-to-moment act of Doing Ace Attorney is maybe the best it’s ever been. I just wish it was remotely as impactful as it ever had been in the past.

Making the setting of a game like Faith as convincingly rancid as it is, religiously speaking, requires one to be well-read. All the latin here is meaningful, the gnostic symbolism thematically relevant, and in 2022, fifty years deep into this corner of horror storytelling, the territory is well-trod enough that it’s difficult to do anything really original, narratively, so it’s best to synthesize from the best, and Airdorf clearly does that throughout the Faith trilogy. Chapter 3 is the most substantial entry in the series from both a textual and play standpoint, even accounting for the way Chapter 2 is split into two parts, so its influences shine really brightly, in a mostly complimentary way. From the glaringly obvious stuff like the way the entire backbone of the emotional arc is tied to The Exorcist, to the cult plot adapting Rosemary’s Baby in increasingly big ways; to subtler things like pulling thematic context and imagery from Argento’s Inferno; to the ever present haze of Catholic and Protestant Apocrypha that colors the proceedings, there’s a lot to dig into if you want to look at Faith on a meta-level and this stuff I’ve listed is only scratching the surface of overt homage. But the thing I found myself thinking of the most while I played this one was, to my surprise, the 1974 BBC tv movie Penda’s Fen.

Penda’s Fen is about Stephen, the son of a pastor in the English countryside who is struggling through his last year of finishing school, struggling with his latent homosexuality, soon struggling with his conservatism, his faith, his understanding of English history, his understanding of church history, his understanding of his own history. These things manifest themselves as nightmares and hallucinations and eventually visions of imagined conversations and confrontations as Stephen begins to finally process what he imagines to be his weaknesses as he comes to a personal understanding of the violences imposed upon him by a stifling, cruel social order. The final sequence of the film (which you can basically only watch on youtube, and you can and should even though I am going to talk extensively about it here – it’s a very vibes-based experience) is a vision of Stephen on the hill where King Penda, the last Anglo-Saxon king in England and for whom Stephen’s town of Pinvin is named, was killed. He is visited by the spirits of modern British christofascism, who beckon him for the second time in such dreams, try to convince him that he is a chosen child, that he deserves to be their heir, that he will do great work with them and for them. When he rejects them he has to be saved from their wrath (“if we can’t have him no one can,” the Sick Mother says to the Sick Father) by the spirit of King Penda, who asks Stephen to “be secret. Child, be strange, dark, true, impure, and dissonant. Cherish our flame.” And Stephen silently begins his trek down the hill, to the town, to live his life with his eyes open, and under his own agency.

He is not so unlike John Ward. John is a pastor whose life as we know it is defined by his weakness, his victimhood, and his immutable desire to go one in spite of these things. Over the course of the trilogy we see, via flashbacks and visions and nightmares, John’s greatest moment of weakness – failing to exorcise Amy Miller, and in revisiting this moment over and over again the depth of his cowardice comes out. He goes so far as to make a deal with a demon (in disguise but a poor one) to escape the Miller home rather than try to salvage the situation or save the girl, knowing and even swearing that this act will seal her to the worst fate of anyone in the story, to be the vessel for the ultimate evil of the setting. Despite his collar, John doesn’t have faith in his God. It wasn’t strong enough when it mattered, and then it was lost, and it’s barely powerful enough to scrape him by when he needs it today. But he is driven to correct his mistakes, even if he has to suffer for them. And slowly, over the course of all three games, and conditional on the player intuiting the right course of action for John’s wellbeing, he can do this. He can save Amy, he can save his childhood sister figure Lisa from a similar fate, he can protect Father Garcia where he failed to protect his original mentor, he can rid himself of the demonic influence that has hung over his life since he and Lisa were victims of demonic ritual in their orphanage, and he will save the world from the profane sabbath.

Faith Chapter II introduced the idea that the cult recruits and preys upon the socially vulnerable, and Chapter III elaborates upon this idea, setting itself entirely within cult-run facilities: a maternity clinic, an apartment building, and a daycare center. This is an evolution of the origins of the cult, where one of the trilogy’s main villains, Sister Miriam, began the terrible practices that have evolved into the modern leadup to the Profane Sabbath by running an orphanage where she killed and experimented upon the children living there, including John and Lisa. Now her son Gary leads the proceedings towards the end of the world, where he steals babies from pregnant women and tells them they miscarried, or uses them to spawn devil children, and uses his tenants as fodder for his true demonic guests, and teaches the children in his daycare all sorts of things about the new, profane world that is going to arrive before they’re even familiar with the current one, all while beneath their feet the true cult actively works to make that world happen in their underground network of caves and tunnels.

This plays into Satanic panic stuff that has permeated the trilogy, unfounded anxieties by America’s far right and their impressionable suburban retinue about the dangers of abortion clinics and daycare facilities and urbanization and cohabitation; some of the ironic humor from past games is still there too – an example that springs to mind is Gary’s letter to the apartment complex warning them to avoid the demon haunting the building at all costs because it WILL kill them if it finds them, which details (inaccurate) instructions on how to do so, a memo that ends with a lighthearted note about rent collection and cost increases in a faux-affable tone that anyone with a corporate landlord will be intimately familiar with. Satanic Panic wasn’t just a quirky moment of hysteria in America’s past, though, it was a calculated cultural maneuver by the political right to stoke fear that would enable them to grab power and restrict freedoms, to exercise a fascistic view of who Americans Were and what Americans Should Look And Act Like against people who were Poor, Immoral, Unchristian, Nonwhite, and Antiauthoritarian. The police are the force we see actively fighting the cult more than anyone else throughout Faith and I don’t think that’s an accident.

Where a lot of media that inspired Faith is alternately directly or incidentally right wing in social messaging, or depicts the devilish as liberatory, Faith posits a world where these panicked, manufactured fears are real, and subverted against the people they’re designed to help. Something that lots of media in these sorts of spaces neglects when it comes to addressing the ways people create spaces for the marginalized is how fragile these spaces are – how vulnerable to attacks external but also infiltration by subversive power.

The important thing to understand here is that while John may be a man of the cloth with his restored faith by the end of the series, his restored power, the thing that enables him to do all of this, is not the Church. It’s arguably not God either. He is explicitly acting outside or against the orders of the Church throughout the trilogy. His entire life has been steered by institutions, whether he knows it or not, and they have each imposed their ideology upon him violently, to their gain and his personal suffering. He is a victim as much as any of the people he saves. The cult unmade and remade John. It implanted in him doubt, and fear, and demons personal and literal. His traumas inform his personage. They impose their ideology upon all of their acolytes, willingly or unwillingly, through isolation, manipulation, carrot-dangling, coercion, and violence. But the Church is not very different from this, at least to John. His time with the Church is objectively harmful to him. It’s arguable that he was put into situations he wasn’t ready for, wasn’t prepared for, that he was meat for the grinder of the exorcist cause. He is manipulated by Father Garcia into continuing a fight he has lost, and there are versions of the events of this game where he’s forced at gunpoint to finish it. John doesn’t derive sustenance from his faith, he only derives power from it. Nearly everything he gets from the Church is violently imposed upon him, too.

The only overtly supernatural element of Penda’s Fen, the only weird thing that is absolutely 100% tangibly happening outside of the psychoscape of the main character, is that there is a government facility dug underground, underneath the beautiful hills of the pastoral countryside, where some military experiments are happening. Midway through the film some teenagers are driving around late at night, a boy gets out of the car to pee, and stumbles across the facility, and whatever is in there maims him horribly. It’s unclear whether he’ll live. It’s a short sequence, and not revisited, but this is the ultimate wound at the heart of the film: that the hills, the country, the pagan pastures that symbolize freedom from repression and the cultural violence of British modernity IS in fact hollowed out and infiltrated by those same things and there's nowhere to really and truly get away from it. But that doesn’t mean you give into it. That doesn’t mean you become it. You still have to be strange, and dark, and true, and impure, and dissonant, and cherish our flame, as King Penda tells Stephen at the end of the film.

At the end of Faith Chapter III, when all the cultists are killed, and the demons are exorcised, or banished, and Amy Martin is finally put to rest, John is given a choice. The Unspeakable, the abominable horror that caused all of these problems for all these decades, that directed Sister Miriam and dealt with Gary and possessed Amy and was the recipient of the Profane Sabbath, was not defeated, only repelled. Garcia plans to dedicate his life to hunting and killing it. He’ll do this forever. When it’s done, he’ll find another demon to hunt. He’ll do it until he dies. He wants John to come with him. He wants soldiers.

Lisa asks John to put down the cross, to come with her. She doesn’t know where they’ll go, or what they’ll do, but she knows him, and she knows their history, and that they’re both victims, survivors, people without identities who for the first time, ever, have the freedom to figure themselves out if they’re only brave enough to take the first step. And she knows John can’t take that step with that collar around his throat.

If John chooses to go with Garcia, the ending is borderline comical in its machismo. They clasp hands, John says “Let’s hunt some demons,” and they drive off together into a surely badass future. But it’s hollow. John has learned conviction but he hasn’t learned anything else except how to be the person he was raised to be. Going with Lisa feels more true to the John we’ve gotten to know – the weak, morally frail man who found himself in the people he chose to love, radically, despite himself, and despite both sides of his social conditioning telling him at various points that his various mercies would be wrong to perform. John and Lisa also drive into an uncertain future, but first they clasp hands, not in the badass bro-ey way that he does in the Garcia ending but tenderly, fingers intertwined. In both endings the Unspeakable is out there. It could do all this again. An apocalypse was averted but it very much began, and we don’t know what the world looks like, really. But in one of them John is still tied to an institution that molded him into someone who couldn’t be good to other people. In the other he and Lisa are strange, and dark, and true, and impure, and dissonant. But they carry the flame. And it’s hard to believe they won’t be able to make something out of that.

Space Quest offers an interesting stylistic counterpoint to King’s Quest. Designed by Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, guys who have prior Sierra credits as a programmer and an artist respectively, with Crowe in particular being something of a superstar who seems to have done sprite work for essentially every major Sierra franchise release for like a full decade.

Both series sit in a kind of moderately successful space between serious homage to their chosen genres and loving parody with that 80s style of MST3K-esque attitude that is inescapable in works from a certain flavor of 80s nerd culture, but Space Quest feels moderately more sober much of the time. The narrator may be as sardonic as ever, the joke may be that you’re a janitor tasked with saving the galaxy, but there’s still a great deal more mundane death and terror here than is typical of its contemporary Sierra stuff, the villains really straight laced and scary, the danger imminent and prowling. Maybe it was a conscious decision around the time - King’s Quest III would see a similar tonal shift with its slave narrative and wizard villain only a month after this game’s release.

That’s not to say there’s no humor - there’s quite a lot of it, but outside of the diner set piece and a couple of interactions with NPCs that play more like easter eggs than meaningful bits of story, it’s mostly limited to narration and fail screens. My understanding is that this becomes The Comedy Series much more explicitly than King’s Quest does so this was a bit of a surprise for me.

Space Quest feels like it carries an ambition to genuinely thrill the player, to push the limits of visual interactivity in adventure games. There are so many cutscenes in this game, so many sound effects and cinematic screens and animations. Stuff that’s genuinely breathtaking on the hardware this shit runs on, in the year it came out. This would have been thrillingly realistic stuff. It’s still cool today.

I wish it was all in service of a game that was a little less dull. Space Quest is a much more linear affair than any of the three King’s Quests I’ve played, or Colonel’s Bequest, which is fine, good even. But it did also mean that it was rare for me to find myself in a situation where I was genuinely teasing my brain, too. Environments being so closed, with so few characters to interact with and so few ways to investigate problems meant that solutions were usually immediately clear, or revealed after a relatively quick moina of the available space. This does, interestingly, mean that there’s a greater reliance on player dexterity - limiting your movement by having you be pursued by a killer robot for a quarter of the game, or a bridge that comes closer to collapsing every time you cross back and forth over it, or asking the player to avoid physical death obstacles via character movement rather than puzzle solving. These things feel somewhat artificial in the way they impede the player’s ability to progress what might otherwise be a too-simple series of puzzles, but if I were to look at it more generously, which I am always inclined to do, I would say they also feel like a young company trying to figure out fresh ways to stretch the legs of a still pretty new genre. Adventure games certainly weren’t new, but ones with GRAPHICS were, and the idea of the player character’s little avatar really having a presence beyond picking things up and putting them down properly was news! Which sounds wild but norms have to be established! This game is interacted with via a text parser.

And to its credit also I would rather a game be too easy than too hard. I think there is only one truly, genuinely evil moment where this game makes itself unfinishable, where you need to pick a piece of invisible glass up off the ground like an hour before you need it and you don’t need it until after crossing a threshold you can’t return from. This piece of glass is located somewhere I would say is only moderately intuitive to investigate, and if you don’t grab it in a very specific timeframe it becomes basically impossible to retrieve even before you can’t return to that screen.

But that’s the only one. There are other ways to fuck yourself but I think they’re much more player-faulty. It’s fine to let the player dig their own grave, I think, and these games encourage keeping like nine saves to a degree that I don’t think having these kinds of situations is really all that big of a deal - recovering progress goes quickly once you know the tricks.

I think writing about this has made me like it more, which is always a nice feeling to have, but I’m still kind of taken by a feeling of apathy, mostly. Now that I’ve tasted how much Sierra will be pushing the envelope only a couple years from now, I can’t help but go to sleep thinking of Roger Wilco, and dream of Laura Bow.

Truly my life continues to be run by anime RPGs but I’m breaking my head above water for only a moment to take one evening and return to Sierra On-Line a company whose work I admire probably more than I have liked so far (I looooove King’s Quest III but I could really take or leave those first two games). That all changed tonight though because The Colonel’s Bequest is one of the most charming little things I’ve ever had the joy to tinker around with for eight hours.

It’s a game of mixed identities – somewhere between the classically devilish, borderline bullying puzzles of the Sierra moment it actually belongs to and the more narrative focused, puzzle agnostic adventure games of the genre’s modern revival period; somewhere between an overtly parodic sendup of Agatha Christie-type adventures at large and And Then There Were None in particular and a sincere and spooky homage to it. In a company that was cranking out multiple series that were often differentiated largely by aesthetic sensibility, Laura Bow’s hell night stands out as structurally remarkable, even as it retains almost every core element that made Sierra famous.

It goes like this: reserved 1920s college student Laura Bow has been invited by her outgoing flapper friend Lillian to visit Lillian’s ancient rich grandfather’s estate on a shitty old plantation in the swamps outside New Orleans, where a weekend long family reunion will be taking place. Laura goes because this is a wild thing to get invited to, and indeed once everyone arrives the titular Colonel announces that when he dies his fortune will be split between all the present family members, unless of course any of them should die before he does, in which case everyone else’s shares will increase in size, a thing that is absolutely wild to say if you’re not planning on starting a death game, which he isn’t, but this doesn’t stop murders from immediately and mysteriously plaguing the evening.

So as Laura you’re in the lion’s den with a bunch of awful, shitty little people who all hate each other’s guts, trapped overnight in a swamp island with a killer that nobody else will believe is around and who is very good at hiding bodies after you find them. What you do in this game is Gather Evidence. And the way you gather evidence, almost exclusively, is by Eavesdropping and Spying. Everyone’s got their own rooms, and moves about the grounds and the manor on their business, and everyone has a web of twisted relationships with everyone else, and as Laura all you really need to do is Not Get Murdered for long enough to make it through the night, but if you have enough context for who is doing the killing and why to make some important decisions at the end of the game, well, that’s nice too.

That’s kind of the wild thing about Colonel’s Bequest: you could absolutely get through the entire game by fucking around and then arrive at the ending by accident, clueless, and come out on top. Laura is an extremely passive character, narratively speaking, and the main conflict is actually resolved offscreen for her to stumble upon sadly with a full chapter of game left to go. Her only lasting choice comes right at the end, where she decides which of the two other survivors to shoot as they try to kill each other, and one of them is distinctly innocent and while the other is NOT, they aren’t The Killer. The Killer’s been dead for over an hour. Nothing to do with you. In the bad ending, if you shoot the wrong guy, there’s nothing really that Laura can do about it but go along with how things have shaken out, and on the final screen of the game, as she’s being ferried back to her normal life she thinks to herself that this sucks, that this whole thing is so sad. “Poor Lillian,” she thinks. “Poor everyone.” But that’s true in the Good Ending too. Laura doesn’t do almost anything differently, and there’s not really any justice served that night. Just one act of petty selfishness prevented. It’s not nothing, but I wouldn’t be proud of it either.

There’s not a traditional Sierra style points system here, but rather a little meter that tells you how good of a detective you were with labels like “absent-minded” and “seasoned P.I.”, and then a little notebook that contains a checklist that really is a hint system telling you where you can look to dig into more of the game’s secrets and intricacies. The thing I kept coming back to was the classic Her Story Steam Forums “how do I know when I’m satisfied” post, because there’s literally no reason to investigate the game beyond your own interest, your own drive to uncover What Might Really Be Going On Here. There’s not even really a mystery to the game: the idea that the killer’s identity could even possibly be a mystery is ridiculous by the midpoint, so that by the time you get to any of the number of scenes that might constitute a big Revelation closer to the end, it’s more the culmination of a sickening feeling that’s been building in your gut, an understanding that you’re about to get closure. Laura can’t act on this obviousness, on knowledge that she has because you have it, so you’re just hurtling towards a conclusion that you know’s gonna be sad for everybody, and it is.

And when you go back for your second playthrough with a better understanding of all the secret areas and how best to interact with certain characters and what people’s schedules are like and when to spy on whom to ferret out the best secrets and get the most context for how things might have turned out the way they could have, you get the only answers you were ever possibly going to get: that these people are normal, and mean, and sad, and their stories are all mundane, and mean, and sad. And it sucks that they were murdered for this.

It’s such a weird feeling to have to sit with in a scenario where the guy the game is named for is also named after Colonel Mustard from Clue.

The vibe is really boosted by the presentation though. CB came out in 1989 and it’s easily the most beautiful 4-bit game I’ve ever seen. All sixteen colors are being utilized in the fullest, cleverest ways at all times – no object is every just a solid one or even two shades, but colored in with three or four colors to get depth and character, blended in ways you’d never expect them to be, ways that only a real master of the format would think to use. Basically everything is dithered, too, there’s dithering all over the damn place on every single screen, very few big flat textures here like you’d see in King’s Quest, which really helps sell both the ramshackle nature of the run down plantation house and the encroaching nature that surrounds its grounds. There are a few screens in the game that ditch the traditional perspectives and go for a zoomed in look at an object or location, like the controls or an elevator or a first-person perspective into a deep, dark well and these are highlight screens, always evocative of place, always full of feeling. Usually dread.

The soundscape is another thing that’s just nailed, usually by being totally silent. That’s not new for these games, for music and sound effects to be very selective, but here it feels purposeful rather than utilitarian. There COULD be more going on here sonically then there is, but Laura is in a strange place with strange people and one of them is a murderer. You don’t know their schedules, you don’t know where anyone is at a given time. It makes moments where you’re spontaneously grabbed by the killer or stumble into a corpse all the more shocking, and the silence in between ratchets up the tension. It starts bad and never ratchets down.

And of course, being a Sierra game, there are so many greebly little details, be they expressed via the absurd number of little quirks in the text parser, the outrageous attention paid to the tiniest details in the visual design, the scope of possible interactions you can both witness and instigate between the other guests even without Laura’s direct participation. And even the fact that every single guest has such a meticulously programmed schedule that they’ll stick to regardless of whether you’re there to see them doing it. Majora’s Mask a decade ahead of time and infinitely more complex in scale of interaction. Of course the game is buggy as shit but not as much as you might expect! It’s wild!

I don’t even know how much of the surface I’ve scratched with it. It’s such a gorgeous little thing, a puzzle box I’m having so much fun turning over in my head. I hope that I’ll search it up and find articles and documents and all kinds of shit digging into everything this game has going for it, how it all fits together. I’ve enjoyed the classic Sierra games I’ve played but compared to other adventure games they haven’t really been my cup of tea but bro I’d play fifty of this. I’d play a hundred of this. Laura Bow my beloved. Cannot believe they only made two of these.

I’m one of those Caligula Effect 2 people. Sick game. We love a low budget RPG with best in genre writing and a battle system based on juggling dudes and trans characters who actually read like human people. Couldn’t tell you shit about Caligula Effect 1. I know it’s widely reviled, and that even though I have a lot of friends who have played it only one of them actually likes it and she does a really bad job of selling it any time it comes up so I probably am not gonna look into it further. Blue Reflection is kind of a similar thing, where it was kind of on my radar as a long time fan of its developer, but I only knew it as the unlocalized vita game for perverts that I always confused with the gacha game on phones for perverts, Blue Archive. But then suddenly BR2 came out and all my friends played it and they were like yo this shit rocks this shit is incredible. And I was like damn ok dope what about that first one I see its PS4 rerelease got localized and everyone is like don’t worry that one sucks ass. Just play 2.

However in the intervening years I’ve fully become a “do media in release order” bitch so BR 1 it is and I really went in expecting the worst and given that mindset I was so pleasantly surprised. It’s not that this isn’t a game for perverts because certainly it is, deeply. But the creep shit in this game is simultaneously so present and also so incidental, so just kind of irrelevant to anything happening except that it’s there too, it very quickly kind of washed over me. Never not chafing but almost always accompanied by a game that, when I let it in, revealed itself to be more thoughtful, more economical, and more tightly constructed than it seemed at first glance.

Blue Reflection follows Hinako Shirai, a teenaged ballet dancer at the top of her game who has suffered a catastrophic injury that has left her able to walk but fully unable to exercise at all beyond a light jog, let alone continue her ballet career, which she had until now dedicated her life entirely to. She was good at it. She had a future. It was her passion. Gone. And she’s fifteen. So Hinako is experiencing the midlife ennui of a person mourning their life at an unfortunately early age, she’s entering her fancy school late in the semester due to her intensive physical therapy, in the regular program, not the scholarship program for gifted students that she was accepted into because her gift has been taken from her, and she’s depressed, and she’s ashamed, and she’s kept her circumstances as secret as she can.

This is the person that mysterious magical girls Yuzu and Lime intentionally target to enlist in their secret war against the Sephirot, ancient beings in competition to remake the world to their desired image, while the magical girl Reflectors fight to preserve humanity from within the Common, a realm of collective unconscious that manifests itself based on the heightened emotions of the people unlucky enough to find themselves in the vicinity of the Sephirot, like the people as Hinako’s school. Once she’s been roped into the scheme with the promise that if they win she’ll get one wish granted (she will wish for the returned use of her leg, obviously) and accepted her mantle as the point man Reflector of their little team, the shape of the game emerges, where each chapter is centered around one of the girls’ classmates going through some emotional crisis and the girls entering her brainspace to stabilize her feelings via the combo powers of beating up monsters and also Hinako learning to empathize with people. The literal power of friendship. Occasionally a fifteen story tall tank made of meat or something will roll in and try to level the school but this only happens like nine times.

All of this could come off as very rote, and because it’s a Vita game clearly designed with a handheld stop and go philosophy in mind, stories are relatively thin and their volume is high instead. Most chapters will have a girl be introduced in one scene, there will be a second scene where her problem is explained and she freaks out, there’s a very brief dungeon crawl in her brain, and then the resolution is an equally short cutscene. Then, between chapters there are periods of side questing and Persona-esque social linking for as long as you want before you opt into the next story events. Only maybe four of the twelve supporting characters factor into the story in a big way after their introductory chapter, so how well you get to know these characters is entirely up to you, and I wouldn’t say all of them are even worth getting to know. Maybe half? But with fifteen main characters I’d say half is a pretty good hit rate for interesting guys.

The glue here is Hinako herself. One of my favorite recent video game protagonists, she’s the only person who doesn’t realize that she’s in a story about the power of friendship. Or rather, she isn’t convinced that that’s a thing that is worth making all that big of a fuss over. Hinako is depressed, and short tempered, and inarticulate. She can barely find it in herself to be civil with almost anyone on a good day if whatever they’re saying doesn’t hold her interest, but she has good reason to be pissed off. People are needling her constantly: volunteering her for extracurricular activities without her consent, needling her about her absences, joking with her about her leg, pestering her Not To Give Up The Dream Of Ballet, bullying and then bribing her to be a superhero against her will when she’d really rather just be left alone. NOBODY will leave her alone, and nobody really tries to understand why she’s not happy to be treated like she should be happy or plucky.

Of course the story won’t let her be this way for long, not entirely, and her job does require her to understand and empathize with other people in order to help them heal emotionally, something that is challenging for her, because she’s not healed emotionally herself. But eventually she comes around enough to want to be for other people what she isn’t getting. “I want to understand her better” is a line that starts popping up over and over in the back half of the game, even when she backslides, even when she lashes out, even when she’s challenged by people who hate her and when she’s most vulnerable and when she feels betrayed by people she thought she trusted.

It’s okay that the immediate stories of the supporting cast are so thin because all of them feed back to Hinako’s interiority, and this story is so intensely focused on her growth from someone who is isolated and apathetic to someone who Gets It and wants to be the person who helps other people Get It, even when everything else is in pieces.

Because Blue Reflection understands how being a teenager can be such a deeply isolating experience, that this is a feeling so many of us carry around when we’re that age, and that it can manifest in a lot of ways and in so many circumstances. Every girl in the game is going through their own shit but almost all of them are really just experiencing a loneliness or a fear of loneliness that they don’t know how to get out from underneath. Hinako knows this better than anyone because the stakes of her situation aren’t reversible, which puts her in a position to relate to everyone easily but also use the experience of helping them to figure out how to cope with her own issues.

This is all enhanced by the structure and style of the game. While there are obvious stylistic cues from the Persona 3 school of anime teenager games in terms of the social link-esque systems that drive the side content, Blue Reflection strategically has no time management feature and no expendable resources that limit the way you interact with the cast or the world. As long as you don’t choose to advance the story, you can live out as many days as you want between chapters. You can max out your friendship with everybody, take your time doing those sidequests, spend your leisure in the Common grinding out materials for crafting. An endless malaise of this dreamlike, dissociative routine, cutting everything but the stuff than anchors you: no school, no adults, no travel, shit dude, no transitions between animation poses. Only the thick haze of the summer afternoons, locked forever into the twilight hour of a sunset so dense you can’t see people on the roof if you catch them at the wrong angle, slowly gliding through the hallways to the softly ethereal piano-led edm that never stops, just tinkling away through every moment of the game.

This malaise is so hard to break out of, but Hinako learns to, slowly. I think the power of friendship gets a lot of hate as like, a concept, but it’s good, it’s a good thing to hitch a story to, you just have to do the work. Blue Reflection does that work. It becomes meaningful when the person who utilizes the Power Of Friendship to battle gods and shit has to do a lot of work on herself and with herself and others to empathize with other people and reach out to them actively, even though she is loathe to do it. It’s not nothing. Throughout the game Hinako is doing this stuff but she’s also being used, manipulated, lied to, and betrayed, in cruel ways, ways that cut to the most vulnerable parts of her, by people who mean a lot to her because of her experiences as a Reflector. This doesn’t come out all at once, but unfolds, small revelations unwinding over the course of the back half of the game, and it means more for her to choose to love and to protect other people anyway when she thinks she will come out the loser for it than it would if Hinako was a plucky character who believed in hard work and like, enjoyed other people’s company lol.

All in all I’d say I had a great time with Blue Reflection, way better than I thought I would. I even liked the parts where you play it, which most people seem to think are bad too. But given how much I got out of the vibes and the narrative (the game is STRONGLY vibes-based I’m not gonna sugarcoat how much of this clicking has to do with music and visuals hitting heavy) when most people seem to think it’s not worth the bother or like, mediocre at best, maybe I am just built different. Perhaps I am simply the champion of mid RPGs. The world may never know. I do feel like I should clarify though, having not really mentioned it much, that the game is like 75% pervert shit, there is just really no talking around it. It’s nonstop pervert shit, just pervert stuff all the way down. All the good stuff is there too but it’s coated in this layer of pervo nonsense. You just gotta take your lumps sometimes I guess.

Anyway if you’ll excuse me I’m a busy lady I have to go watch a 26 episode Blue Reflection anime that nobody has even heard of that inexplicably got an English dub two years after it came out even though no Gust game has been dubbed for like fifteen years. So I can play the sequel game afterwards. Obviously.

After really digging into the devilish details of Final Fantasy VII Remake’s excellent battle system on my second playthrough, I was really happy to see how much Intermission doubles down on the quirky complexities of those combat encounters at their best. Despite making up a whole new guy to hang out with Yuffie, she’s the only controllable character, with Sonon taking a weird support/ambient role that is unique from the way party members behave in the main game, so the challenge here became twofold: first, we’re fitting an entire party’s worth of abilities into one guy. Making Yuffie and Yuffie alone a close up and ranged attacker, a tank, a magician, a speedy guy, and an aggro manager all at once without overcomplicating her moveset or making her feel overpowered. The second is designing combat encounters that are interesting and challenging for this uniquely skilled duo, a prompt admirably filled by a significantly ramped up average combat difficulty level and several of the best bosses in the game. It’s been a question for me since this episode came out, how all of this would be handled, but it was only recently that I got my hands on a PS5 so I’m happy to find out how good it all is even if I’m a little late to the party.

Much more heartening though, is Yuffie herself, and the way her narrative is handled in such a way as to assure me that everything I liked about Remake was in fact not the fluke that I was worried it might be. I liked Remake quite a bit when it came out, but hot off the heels of my first time playing the original VII I think I was judging it too harshly for not embodying my idea of What Final Fantasy VII Is, which ironically distracted me from some of Remake’s loudest themes and best ideas. Today the entire body of Remake hits me super hard, and I’ve come around to full champion status, ready to sing the game’s praises all the way.

But if the stuff about Fate and Feeling and making A Choice to live all hit better - and I think, more uniquely to this game than the normal version of that you often see in RPGs and anime that it is often compared to but that is for another bit of writing – the stuff that I liked to begin with rang just as strongly today. The sorely needed expansion of Barrett’s character into both the game’s political core and its beating heart; the elaboration of AVALANCHE into a splintered group of infighting leftists; the bracing and genuine depiction of poverty and community in the slums, a life given no empathy in Final Fantasy VII but afforded a familiar realism in Remake; even Tifa’s naysaying – because even if she is wrong and I think it sucks that it has to be her being That Guy so hard and I do hope they calm down about it in the next couple of games, those are good conversations to make Barrett and Tifa and even Cloud have with each other.

But you know how it is, it’s fuckin Square! You want to believe!!! You do!!! But you truly never know with these guys, ESPECIALLY when it’s not like Final Fantasy VII itself was exactly on top of the revolutionary messaging to begin with specifically wrt AVALANCHE. But This game was so good dude. It was easier to write it all off before it came out and was mostly just really good. Now the fear of god is in me. Now I care whether they fuck it up. Now I want Rebirth to be good. It’s a fucking curse. So I take no small amount of comfort in the confident and graceful direction of Episode interMISSION, which in only a small handful of hours reassures me that yes, they knew what they were doing, and yes, it was all on purpose, and yes, they’re interested in the same parts of it that I’m interested in, and they might even revisit them down the road.

Remake packs a truly wild amount of character into the little conversations you overhear as you walk around its hub areas. Every npc’s dialogue updates with every major story event and it’s all voiced, sometimes playing only randomly, but many of those nameless little characters have fleshed out story arcs, whether they end up intersecting with our heroes or not. Lots of them don’t though, and are there only to further color a world in a game that is in no small part dedicated to fleshing its world out in fine detail. A lot of the dialogue you overhear as cloud, a lot of the ambient conversation, has to do with Shinra’s totally effective propaganda campaign against Wutai, the country they’ve recently won a bloody war against. We never get many details about the conflict itself, but we do get the picture of Wutai’s national character that’s been painted by Shinra and that the people of Midgar by and large believe, even people who don’t like Shinra, even people our heroes work with, and even, tacitly, our heroes themselves. The boogeyman version of Wutai is a lawless nation of honorless, bloodthirsty criminals who, having lost the war, will stop at nothing to seek revenge for their decimated nation now that their hope is lost. There’s a real bone-deep paranoia towards a culture that clearly very few people in Midgar understand and even fewer have a care to learn anything about, even from the handful of refugees and immigrants who have made their ways into their communities. These are the tidbits you pick up when you walk by people as Cloud throughout the game, a mosaic of public thought you can piece together from dozens of scraps of overheard conversation in between equally weighted comments about the neighborhood watch, or the train graveyard, or weapons shop guy’s broken water filter.

As Yuffie, this is all you hear. As a teenager from Wutai who is in fact on an anti-Shinra espionage mission representing the new government, every inch of Midgar feels hostile and alien to begin with; Yuffie doesn’t like it here, doesn’t want to be here, and wants to spend as little time in the city as possible on the way to the job she actually came here to do. It’s hard to blame her, given her history. So it’s no surprise that when you’re walking around town in Yuffie’s shoes, the snippets of conversation that she overhears don’t include the neighborhood watch, or the train graveyard, or weapons shop guy’s broken water filter. She only hears people talking about Wutai. About their spies, their plans, their awful character, how they’re behind the recent bombings, the bastards. How our neighbor down the street is from there, I heard, so suspicious. It’s such a small detail. Of course these aren’t suddenly the only things anybody in Sector 7 are talking about, but Yuffie, the actual target of this discrimination, is more tuned into it than Cloud, who is entirely unaffected by this kind of talk and at worst has to brush it off when he’s being false flagged using another victim’s identity. He’s got other stuff on his mind. Yuffie is never thinking about anything else. How could she be?

It isn’t just the small details, though. The absolute best choice interMISSION makes is to introduce us to a small slice of the AVALANCHE that Barrett’s group split off from, and they are truly the most rancid batch of little shithead assholes you could possibly imagine. When I say “the 7 Remake DLC made me feel better about liking the game’s politics the instant I realized it was about petty leftist infighting” and tell you that for the first half of it you’re hanging out with the AVALANCHE group that wants to do a peaceful protest in the street but only if they’re not blocking traffic, it conjures certain images of a Kind Of Guy and that’s exactly who shows up.

“But Ina,” I know you’re saying to me, “Yuffie and her partner Sonon are working for a government that explicitly wants to commit violent military action against Shinra, isn’t it weird that they would team up with these guys over Barrett’s group?” Well yeah, for sure it is, but we learn here that the schism in AVALANCHE was recent enough that the Wutaians don’t know Barrett’s group exist, and the second he finds out about them Sonon is like shit shit shit we teamed up with the wrong guys. As it stands their primary contact for the team they work with is pretty overtly racist to them the whole time they hang out with them and even tells Yuffie at one point that the only reason they’re teaming up at all is because they didn’t want Barrett’s group to make contact and establish a relationship with the Wutaians. Despite all this, Yuffie is like wow she’s so nice and cool. Sonon is more actively bloodthirsty than Yuffie but he’s not wrong that this AVALANCHE cell isn’t their friend, that this is a union of convenience, and likely a short-lived one.

These aren’t conflicts that will be resolved, maybe not conflicts that CAN be resolved. At first glance this feels like it’s because this is a tiny slice of a small chunk of Final Fantasy VII’s narrative tableau, one that we know will end with the Sector 7 plate dropping, one that we know results in Sonon being somehow removed from the narrative and Yuffie separated from her purpose and unsuccessful in the mission she’s been assigned. But like Remake before it, interMISSION is a complete thematic work, even if it’s a small chapter withing a larger story. Yuffie is traumatized by the war in her country and she’s old enough to be radicalized politically and to be able to act against Shinra, but she’s young enough that people being superficially nice to her or professionally cordial can throw her off the subtext of their relationships. That doesn’t make her stupid, or wrong, though. Sonon cares a lot less about casualties in Midgar than Yuffie quickly comes to, but like Barrett’s AVALANCHE before them they never truly disagree and they never try to do anything but the mission they came here for.

There’s a moment where Yuffie tells Sonon something along the lines of “Y’know before we got here I was kind of expecting everyone in Midgar to be just like the soldiers who ruined Wutai during the war. So most people just being normal and chill is kind of a relief. I feel kind of stupid for thinking that way.” And Sonon clearly doesn’t hold this opinion of the people of Midgar and especially not of the AVALANCHE members they’re working with but he does validate her feelings and he can empathize with her, even if he thinks the only good thing to do with Midgar is burn it down.

These moments, and Yuffie’s thoughts and feelings here, coexist with the racist whispers in Sector 7, with the open paranoia in the streets and the propaganda on the news, with the way Midgar natives are actively disgusted by the snack beans Yuffie offers to everyone she meets. And Yuffie and Sonon don’t get a chance to hash out their political differences, if that was something they ever might have done anyway. No one confronts their AVALANCHE cohort, because they die in the Sector 7 plate drop. Just like a lot of these moments in Remake, and in life, interMISSION asks us to sit with the discomfort of the knowledge that all of us are entangled in these kinds of thorns, these dissonance of how we think and feel in a world that we can’t ever entirely fit comfortably into, whose ills we are to some degree complicit in and others that we might have to commit further to if we’re to change anything.

So, even if they completely fuck it up, even if Rebirth whiffs huge and Remake 3 is awful and all of this praise I’ve heaped on the writing in this first installment backfires on me, it won’t really matter, because these are two complete stories. They’ll never be able to take Barrett lifting his arm and praying to Marlene in front of that portal from me. And they’ll never take Yuffie and Sonon trying to negotiate their twisted up feelings about what the future might even be allowed to look like if they dare to imagine it as they pick their way through that junk yard either.

Castlevania has been kind of nothing but hits for me so far. I’ve found a lot to like in the popular series punching bags like Simon’s Quest, which has become probably a top ten video game for me, and The Adventure, which has become a game I will halfheartedly defend as actually fine when it comes up in casual conversation. Even popular games that I don’t get along with like Super IV and Symphony of the Night are obviously incredibly well done experiences, just ones that don’t rub me the right way. On average though I think Castlevania might have the highest hit rate of any series I’ve played this many entiries in bar like, Final Fantasy where (has not played 16 voice) I think literally every one is very good to great. So I came into Legends with a very open mind. Castlevania has basically never steered me wrong yet, I find myself more positive than average it seems, you get to play as a cool anime girl, and I’ve quite enjoyed the weird formal experiements that the limitations of the Gameboy hardware make necessary in these early portable entries. How could it POSSIBLY go wrong.

I’ll tell you how. I’ll tell you.

It’s subtle because Legends might not be obviously unpleasant if you were to just watch somebody play it. It looks FINE. It feels FINE. It’s level of challenge is FINE. It has a some interesting ideas – replacing subweapons with equippable magical powers that you earn by killing bosses, giving you the super saiyan mode that this game is most famous for, multiple endings determined by how well you explored the stage (sort of, we’ll get to it) – and I think some of the charm of the earlier Gameboy titles is still here, like in the way that they still apparently just can’t crack the code on making stairs on the Gameboy so all vertical movement happens via climbing up and down ropes.

The problem with Legends is that it’s so SWAGLESS, dude. They forgot to season my Castlevania, they just cooked it as it came and like yeah it’s well made and sure I can eat it but it doesn’t TASTE like anything! Everything feels like it’s been dialed way back from Belmont’s Revenge. Enemies aren’t as weird or interesting to look at, and there are no level gimmicks at all, let alone cool ones. The mega man level structure is gone too, which is fine too, but it does call attention to the way that even when we’ve returned to a traditional Storming Castlevania level structure here everything feels REALLY indistinct. There are familiar motifs to fall back on for this sort of thing by this point in the series but it doesn’t feel like Legends even really does that. The clock tower, for example, has gears and stuff in it, but the stuff that you’re DOING and the way you’re moving around and the guys you’re hitting don’t feel very different from the way all these things feel in the keep or the graveyard.

And while I applaud any time we try to do a lot of new cool shit, I think the new cool shit in this game is also the stuff that works the least when it all comes together. The way you get the good ending is to fully explore each level until you find a hidden artifact at the end of its alternate path (the items are classic Castlevania subweapons which is very goofy I have legitimately no idea what this is supposed to be signaling about the mythic value of these objects given this game’s position as the Origin Of All Castlevania), but the levels aren’t really structured in a way that makes finding them actually interesting or challenging. Every time you’re just going to come to a point where you have to arbitrarily decide which direction to go down and at some point you’re either going to luck into your key item OR you’re eventually going to hit the boss screen and because Legends has actually pretty rigorous checkpointing you’ll have basically beefed your chance to get the item for that level unless you intentionally burn through all of your lives upon your realization and play through the level again on a fresh continue. This game carries the beautiful Castlevania tradition of giving you infinite continues and electing to use one will just start you at the top of a level rather than your most recent checkpoint, and if you were to do a perfect run with no mistakes and no deaths the game maybe has an hour or 90 minutes of content so it’s not exactly a huge ask but it’s the kind of thing where it’s like why am I the one doing this work and making these excuses, why is the game set up in this tedious way?

They’re all like this. Burning Mode, you’re super sick hyper powerful mega mode, is basically just the button you hit to win fights, and you get to pop it once per stage at any time. It doesn’t refresh after you use it but it DOES refresh if you die, so it’s incredibly easy to just pop it on every single boss in the game. I would say that for more than half of the dudes you fight here, including Dracula, I don’t even know their patterns because I just made Sonia an unstoppable monster and hit them nine times before they could do literally anything.

The power system that replaces subweapons is interesting in theory, and I especially like the idea that they’re meted out with intentionality over the course of your linear progression through the stages, but there doesn’t seem to be a ton of reason towards the order they’re given to you. You get the equivalent of the stopwatch first, and it’s mondo cheap to use, which makes it the most useful power in the game by far. The general ease of the game coupled with the lax punishments for failure make your twenty-heart-cost full heal basically worthless, and by the time you get the one that deals damage to every enemy on the screen at once you have precious few trap rooms that sic tons of enemies on you left, which are the most dangerous screens in the game where that would offer the most utility. Coupled with the fact that the whip powerup system returns from previous Gameboy entries and you really do feel arguably the most equipped to kill that I’ve ever felt in Castlevania, but it feels like a LOT when all the guys you fight are like, skeletons who don’t seem to be aware that you’re there and wiggly ghosts.

There’s at least one interesting encounter here, in both a callback to the Soleil fight in Belmont’s Revenge and presumably a bit of nice brand synergy with the contemporaneously released Symphony of the Night, Alucard pops in halfway through the fifth stage to tell you to be like “uhgghhh my beloved, you’re so cool but this is my fight alone please let me go fight dracula by myself you’re too pure and sexy to fight a mean vampire” and Sonia is like “wow Alucard that’s so true I am a stupid loser baby woman wait hang on a second what the fuck that’s dumb” and then HE’S like “oh okay well allow me to test your STRENGTH” and then you have to fight him it sucks bro. But finally at least towards the end of the game there’s a one on one duel with a guy with good AI and an interesting moveset and ha ha I’m just kidding dude I immediately activated burning mode and destroyed him in six seconds before he could literally move or act at all.

To get back to how Castlevania Legends absolutely could not pick up anybody at the bar on account of an utter lack of girlswag, I’d like to complain about how this game looks and sounds, which again, isn’t BAD. In fact the first level is scored to a pretty good remix of Bloody Tears (simon’s quest’s strongest soldier logging on), replacing the drum part with a driving baseline, changing the way the NES version has the melody constantly ascend going into the “chorus” with a neat little minor key dip, and adding that patented gameboy soundchip Crunch that I love so much. It’s great. But then alllll the way until the Dracula fight itself which is another remix of an existing Castlevania song, everything is entirely forgettable, the most absolutely generic stomping through a dungeon type shit you could possibly imagine, or not imagine as the case may be because I sure as shit can’t recall a single note of it. And I don’t mean this in a “it doesn’t Sound Like Castlevania” way because neither of the previous GB Castlevanias really did either but I think Belmont’s Revenge lowkey has some of the best music in the series in there, often eerie and weird and entirely fitting the bold art choices that game was making.

Maybe that’s also part of the problem: Legends LOOKS bland. Not bad! Fine! Okay! Medium! There isn’t anything wrong here. I hate to be that guy who’s like “well why isn’t it as good as the other one” but a lot of the ways that Legends feels bad to me is as this itch under my skin, this way that it feels like you’re wearing your shoes on the wrong feet – like yeah sure I can walk around fine but pretty soon my feet do hurt and I am going to have blisters at the end of it. It’s just an ugly kind of fine. The suggestions of environments that are boring, the gravestones and brick walls and clock tower gears and scary trees all the most basic and unexciting versions of themselves artistically. Coming off of Belmont’s Revenge which I think might actually be the best looking Gameboy game I’ve ever seen, whose greatest strength might actually be how good and subtle and creepy its art is, it’s hard not to look at Dracula’s shitty little throne and be like...that’s where Dracula sits? Do you remember the gigantic, looming, ethereal skeletons and wavering scythes dotting the background in the leadup to Dracula’s room in Belmont’s Revenge? Do you remember how the castle itself was portrayed as a bulbous, insectoid monstrosity, as vile as its own inhabitants, radiating life as much as it did cruelty in Castlevania The Adventure? Where’s the fucking SAUCE, Legends?

Playing Legends right off of Symphony of the Night makes for an interesting juxtaposition, especially considering their American releases were almost right on top of each other. I really don’t like almost any part of the act of playing Symphony, but there is such a passion behind every single element of that game, it’s so overdesigned and lovingly rendered and weird and pulsing with this almost unquantifiable desire to exist. Legends is the exact opposite, a game that feels functionally completely fine to play but otherwise very tired, and bored, and uninterested in being there, which can’t even be true because there are innovations here. There are mixups on the Castlevania formula, a lot of them, and not only ones necessitated by the hardware they made the game for. Looking up the division of Konami that made this game, their first ever project was VANDAL HEARTS and then after that they make almost exclusively ports, sports games, and mobile adaptations of existing Konami franchises, like this. But this was early, it was their second full game. I wonder if they achieved their vision, or if they had a strong vision, or if this studio existed from the beginning to squeeze pennies out of the portable market, make as much money as they thought they could get from easy marks like sports or affection for stuff they already knew people liked.

It’s a bummer, man. It feels wrong that I’m saying all this shit about the game where you fuck Alucard Symphonyofthenight without a condom. Can you believe that? That I can say “Once there was a canon Castlevania game that revealed that Alucard is straight (lmao no wonder they got rid of this one) and he fucked a girl who goes super saiyan like goku from Dragon Ball and it is DEFINITIVELY the worst one in the series.” It’s unbelievable. Sonia deserved better. Can’t believe they cancelled her Dreamcast game. 3D Castlevania girl game launch title for the Sega Dreamcast would have fucked harder than any other game maybe ever forever. Konami has been ruining franchises for decades longer than any of us even realized. It’s so fucked.

NEXT TIME: CASTLEVANIA 64

LAST TIME: SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT

“It’s is very funny to me that your castlevania journey stalled hard on Symphony of the Night, one of the most beloved and influential games of all time.” These words by a close friend of mine have haunted me for months bro.

Classic Ina Followers may recall that last year I spent the month of November playing every Castlevania game in release order, a project that started when I bought that collection of most of the classic games on a whim and sort of just went to town once I realized how entirely my shit every single thing about the series is. Castlevania’s been something of a blindspot for me – as a kid I played AND QUITE LOVED Castlevania 64 and later Order of Ecclesia, and then specifically Lords of Shadow 2, and maybe a couple years ago I had a really great time with Aria of Sorrow but other than futzing around with the first couple of NES games in a false start at this project that was the full extent of my scattered Castlevania experience.

How much I love Aria really set me up for a surprise then because the reason I haven’t posted about Castlevania in a year is that I actually got through like 60 or 70% of this game right after I finished Bloodlines and I was so entirely turned off that I put it down and just didn’t come back for eleven months. I think if I wasn’t so committed to making this a “play every game in the series” kind of thing I may never have.

BUT I DID THIS WEEK and I ZOOMED THROUGH THIS MOTHER FUCKER and I’m SO TORN BRO. Well, not really, I think actually I mostly just don’t like it, but I hope I can adequately explain why.

Because obviously there is so much to love in Symphony, and so much stuff that’s specific to my personal taste too. Aesthetically, the game is a dream, holy SHIT. Everybody knows how good looking it is, experienced sprite artists taking advantage of the fancy new hardware to push what they’re capable of. You see it everywhere, from obvious stuff like Alucard’s butter-smooth animations to the absolutely METICULOUS details in nearly every background in the game, used to dial up a sense of place and atmosphere in as maximal a way as possible but with a slightly different flavor than we got even from powerhouse games like Bloodlines and Super IV. But I don’t just like how GOOD the game looks, I also like how a lot of the time the game looks kind of messy and bad? There are a TON of reused sprites from Bloodlines in this game and listen man I LOVE Bloodlines but it is a stiffer and more early 90s arcadey looking game. It’s that in a way that suits it but compared to the way original sprites look and move in Symphony things just kind of stand out when they’re contrasted. It’s not just that either – the most realistic visual fidelity the series has seen yet along with a much less strong sense of theming than any of its three mainline predecessors (necessitated, I’m sure, by how much exponentially bigger and more open Symphony is) means they really mash ALLLLL the inspirational shit for this series together in a big soup in a way that feels a lot more overt than ever before. You have grotesque horror imagery, fairy tale mystique, hollywood horror guys, and overt cartoon monsters all chilling in this same castle, and often on the same screens as each other, with no sense of visual cohesion tying them together in a way that just didn't come through as hard on, say the NES.

And I think that fucking rips ass dude. I’m sure I’ve spoken about this in these Castlevania writeups before but I think the fact that Symphony of the Night exists so permanently in the cultural memory as this titanic Important Game that people are still playing, especially with its legendary status in the ever-more-popular speedrun world, that it’s easy to forget that it was at one point a game that like, came out, in 1997, in a moment in history. One where 2D games were spoken of by pretty much everyone as if they were relics on their way out the door. That was surely on the minds of the Symphony of the Night team too, who had this game’s obnoxious 3D cutscenes foisted on them by their corporate managers, who were making a game for the Playstation, a console that’s so powerful but also famously kind of bad at running 2D games, who were surely working on this with the understanding that they may not get many more chances to make a game like this, if they got to make any more Castlevanias like this at all.

You can FEEL this energy vibrating through all of Symphony of the Night; it feels like a swan song, a chance to pay homage to everything everyone loved about every single previous iteration of the series and ALSO to cram in every idea they thought might have been cool in this format before the boss came in and started making people learn how to model skeletons riding motorcycles in 3D. SO there’s just all kinds of weird bullshit in here – yeah sure there’s an input based spell system, uhh puzzles will be tied to the game clock, hide a third of the game behind some really oblique bullshit I promise it will be worth it when they figure it out, oh hey what if the game was an RPG and it had the worst menus of all time. Feels like my man Hagihara simply did not say no to anything anyone asked him if they could put in the game and honestly god bless him.

The addition of Ayami Kojima as the key character artist coupled with a returning Michiru Yamane using the strengths of the Playstation's sound doohickeys (idk shit about that stuff man) to deliver something altogether moodier and synthier than we got from previous Castlevanias create the outrageously intense arch-goth style that people identify with this series for the first REAL time I think. There have always been shades of this, it’s a bit hard to avoid when you’re dealing with the subject matter Castlevania does, and the soundtracks have dipped into this vibe from time to time when they’re not fully rocking out but this is a very distinct artistic shift away from both the original 80s hollywood vibes and the more modern anime stylings the series had leaned on up til this point, and I think these aesthetics suit it really well. It looks and sounds like you made a Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream get drunk at the kind of nightclub where people still do ecstasy.

It’s so fucking boring though. This is the hardest part for me because ON PAPER Symphony is still theoretically doing the kinds of things that I like to see in exploration based games. The castle is huge but the game leads you directly through very little of it, and there are massive chunks of it that have nothing to do or see in them. So often you’ll work your way through some challenging puzzle room or gauntlet of enemies, maybe even fight a boss, and be rewarded with a swords that’s like fifty times shittier than the knife you’ve been rocking for two hours. That’s fine by me, I do like to get a little treat if it’s gonna be something cool or interesting, but I hate feeling like the only reason to explore in a game is to get to the treasure chest or Lore Nugget or whatever at the end of whatever I’m doing. I rarely feel like Symphony of the Night is doing that though, both because the rewards are genuinely terrible almost every single time (including the important ones! There are SO many upgrades and abilities in this game that are just like complete garbage lmao we are truly filling a list we made the castle so big oh piss oh fuck) but also because almost all of the areas in the game are so distinctly designed and full of personality; I WANT to poke around in them, even if I’m always only doing it to soak up the atmosphere and maybe see what kind of big freak I get to stab at the end.

The big problem for me then is that I think the actual act of moving around the castle feels like complete shit almost all of the time. Not the act of moving Alucard – that feels incredible – but the act of moving inside of the space of the castle. I think something was fumbled pretty badly in the transition from tightly designed levels to a big open world that’s intended to be crossed back and forth over many times. There are certainly a lot of cool rooms that offer neat layouts and challenges to overcome, but SO much of this castle is just big hallways with a few guys copy-pasted in them. It’s not like this didn’t ever happen in Castlevania before, but it was way less common, generally speaking, to see enemies just plopped somewhere without a feeling of intent to where and how they were placed, and I think that almost feels like the MAJORITY of enemies in Symphony of the Night. Space fillers. Overwhelming the player with numbers and leaving it up to me to figure out how to deal with it using his robust arsenal and moveset rather than filling the game with more considered encounters. And I understand how that sounds, for sure; by the sounds of things the game had a rushed development as it is, and I think the piece that we got is pretty astounding considering that, but it doesn’t change tedious it is to just get around. And when there IS a challenge that’s satisfying and tough or even just like difficult and a relief to clear, damn I am usually a lot less enamored with them the third or fourth time I have to truck through that area. The Clock Tower is my arch enemy in this game (I was bad at the switch puzzle).

My other big sticking point is that Castlevania is an RPG now but I think this sucks? I think this sucks dude. I so rarely feel like a proper balance is struck in how this plays out. There’s equipment everywhere and it’s all useless. I like finding the secret abilities, that’s cool, but I am not as crazy about filling my inventory up with fifty shirts that all suck ass. The main issue for me though is the way this affects interacting with enemies, where encounters often boil down to getting turbo stomped and dealing scratch damage based on my level or being able to kill guys by stepping on them – rarely does it feel like I’m properly tuned to stretch my resources from one save point to another.

All of this coalesced on my first playthrough when I got to the upside down castle and found that every enemy suddenly killed me in just a few hits and the nature of the designs of every room meant that while things were somewhat cleverly crafted insofar as the upside down layout accounts for all of your abilities, what that actually means is you have to spend a LOT of time as that awful bat or doing your super jump thing and I really just don’t like how any of the extra traversal stuff in this game feels at all! And that was enough for me to take a break that became a couple weeks that became a couple months that became me restarting the game almost exactly one year later. I did finish it this time, but I find that my feelings haven’t changed very much. I just don’t get along with the part of the game where you’re playing it. Which is, unfortunately, basically all of it.

And yet.

And yet there’s that room with the confessional where you can get the good nice guy who gives you the grape juice or the shitty twisted guy who stabs you, but also you can sit in his chair and a lady will show up and SHE might try to stab you and that is also really cool. You can sit in basically every chair in the game except the one you kill at the end and none of them even do anything, except make you look fucking cool. You can look in that telescope and see the guy in his little boat! If you get some peanuts you throw them into the air and you have to catch them in your mouth to get the health boost because I guess Alucard will only interact with peanuts via fun party tricks. If you have your bat buddy equipped and you turn into your bat form he gets really psyched and then when you turn back into a vampire he’s like damn that sucks. There are seemingly infinite little hidden details and skills and secrets tied to equipment and combinations of equipment and certain inputs and shit. Is that the fucking guy from Kid Dracula? I think it is the fucking guy from Kid Dracula. There are so many greebly little details stuffed into this game for seemingly no reason at all other than that it would be cool to have them in there, and it’s truly impossible not to be charmed by them.

I’m similarly charmed by the story, as scant as it is. I think the character sketches here are strong, and while Maria is pretty swagless here these are the coolest takes on Death and Dracula so far easily. I even think the localization is good, like sincerely I think this is a very fun script with a strong sense of character that matches the tone of the rest of the game. Some of the voice actors are certainly weak links but you’re not gonna catch me saying SHIT about the guy doing Dracula here he is fucking EATING. I think the only time I actually laughed because the game caught me on something silly was when Alucard hit us with that fake Edmund Burke quote in the ending; I guess whatever else he was up to in his exile, Alucard was making sure to keep up with 1700s British politics.

I hope that when I get some more distance from Symphony of the Night that’s the stuff that stands out to me. The verve and playfulness on display here; the expansive lineup of Guys, the beautiful background art. I worry that it will be the bad vibes, which I tried my best to resist. I wanted to like this game more than I did but at some point I had to give up the goat and admit to myself that this was the first time I had ever just really wished I wasn’t playing the game while I was in the middle of it. I know a lot of the big players on this team will go on the be involved in like fifty more games iterating on the foundation laid here, and I know for a fact that I really love at least one of them, so I do hope this one’s a fluke. But even if Symphony is a personal low point for me, that’s like, that’s pretty good right? I guess if this is how I’m feeling about one of the most beloved and influential games of all time then we’re in a pretty good spot, right? Only up from here I’m sure.

NEXT TIME: CASTLEVANIA LEGENDS

LAST TIME: BLOODLINES

2023

Most of the conversation I’ve seen around Venba has revolved around the story of the entire family the game is about, but centered on the point of view of Kavin, the child. A second generation immigrant, Kavin experiences the social pressures of otherness growing up and we see this expressed through his own insecurities with his situation and his attempts to fit in throughout his life as well as via the way his mother Venba vents her frustrations with how she feels he’s rejecting his culture and his family, with his dad Paavalankind of caught in an empathetic middle ground. I get why this happens – I think a lot of the people who like, actually play the game are more likely to identify with Kavin, and the game shifts more focally to his perspective in the back half, and he’s admittedly something of a reflection of the lived experiences of the game’s lead designer, whose life the game is heavily drawn upon. And I don’t want to downplay Kavin’s experience; obviously modern second gen kids’ relationships with their parents are stories that a lot of people connect strongly to – it’s a really common thing in my generation. But when I was playing the game I couldn’t help but find myself so much more drawn to Venba herself.

My wife is from India, and while it seems kind of funny in hindsight there was in fact a lot of hubbub when we first got together. We were dating in secret for a long time because there was sure to be controversy over my whiteness and my religion. When we got found out it was a little longer before I was allowed to meet her parents and then a lot longer before I felt like, actually accepted, which is fair. Things were very different from how they were expecting things to go, even if my wife herself never really planned to adhere to these expectations. I always thought her mom HATED me though, even after the CONTROVERSY of our relationship cooled off. She was so quiet around me, so distant, and I never knew how to talk to her. But it turned out she also felt that way about me. Insecure and weird about this stranger that she felt like she had zero common ground with.

Eventually we bonded over two things: our mutual love of roasting the shit out of my wife and my sincere appreciation for her cooking. She’s got this deep well of recipes and they’re all so fuckin good dude but neither of her kids have any real interest in cooking like at all, even before my wife became too disabled for that to be something she could realistically do, so I think she took some genuine pleasure from it when I started asking persistently for her to teach me how to make some of her stuff when we would visit each other, and now I have a pretty good stock of family recipes that’s still steadily growing, with my wife and mother-in-law’s seal of approval. (In fact I would say that if you have a working knowledge of how to cook most basic Indian foods then most of the puzzle elements of Venba will be essentially negated because it doesn’t matter whether you’re in Tamil Nadu or West Bengal, a masala is a masala and a biryani is a biryani and a dosa is a dosa). But I’ve also spent a lot of time with her now over the years, doing this stuff, and a pretty good amount of time with her alone, and you start to know people, and I see so much of her in Venba.

A woman who moves about as far away from her life, her home, her family as it is possible to move, unwillingly, as a matter of practicality, Venba never quite assimilates. A qualified, highly educated worker in her home country arbitrarily unable to find work in her new one for racist reasons, relying on a stressed partner to make ends meet while she handles domestic duties and isolates herself, partially because her new society rejects her and partially because she rejects it. “I have Paavalan,” she says at one point. “I have Kavin.” There are all kinds of reasons why and they might even create a twisted ouroboros sometimes but ultimately Venba just doesn’t like it in Canada, and she did like it in India, and if she had her way she would probably just like, go home. It hurts her to be apart from her parents when they get old and get sick. It hurts her to see her son so easily slip into this culture she feels embittered towards and treat her like part of the embarrassing thing to leave behind.

I think my mother in law feels that way a lot of the time, especially since both of her children have left the nest, although this is where her experience diverges from Venba’s. My wife and her brother are very close to their mom, and I think that’s part of what anchors her here, despite everything. They don’t have the contentious relationship that Venba and Kavin have that gives Venba kind of a freedom to return to where she’s happy, or to necessitate the reunion and reconciliation that they loosely share in the final chapter. ac

While my secondhand experience with a life that Venba so strongly evokes in my mind’s eye does make me feel a little frustrated at how cleanly this game resolves its lingering conflicts by the end of it all, I don’t think it falls into the trap of, as a friend of mine wisely phrased it yesterday, “barren sentimentality” that I think even well-meaning games often fall into when they try to tackle real subject matter. Venba may be a short game whose focus on food and small scope limits the windows into these lives that we’re allowed to peer into, but its dialogue is often cutting, it knows when not to pull punches, and it says a lot without words.

The writing is uniformly excellent but I think the best stuff is consistently the way the game communicates without words. The way Kavin’s letters unfold more slowly across his word balloons when he speaks Tamil vs when his parents do or when he’s speaking English for most of the game because he’s less comfortable with the language; the way that the last time you play as Venba there’s minimal interactivity because at this point in her life she’s memorized her recipes and developed her own techniques and using newer equipment for the most part, so there are no puzzles to solve and all the game asks from the player is a couple of button presses or stick rotations; the way that when you’re playing as Kavin he just kind of drops or tosses ingredient containers gracelessly back onto the counter vs the way Venba would put them back down like a normal person. There’s a moment where you’re texting and the game is auto-advancing the conversation but once you’re given the freedom to exit the conversation you can actually scroll up and see the entire thing again, including the beginning chunk of it that you weren’t originally shown and it is as horrible as you would imagine. Venba is such a short game and its vignettes are necessarily so focused that this intimate attention to detail makes a huge difference in the texture of the world.

Applicability is very real, I suppose. On its face Venba is an incredibly generic immigrant story, with only the food angle making it stand out narratively, but even then it isn’t even the only “wholesome indie game about a second generation immigrant trying to reconnect somehow to a parent via family recipes” that I know of off the top of my head. We all know people who have lived the broad details of this family’s story. But the particular voices that come out of their mouths are bold and articulate and human. Enough for it to evoke specific traumas in my wife, who loved this game, enough to make me wistful about my relationship with her mother, which is occasionally complicated. And I know other people who have felt similarly. It’s easy for me to imagine a lesser version of this game and I’m glad I don’t have to talk about that one haha.

As I write this we’re four days into a six day visit from my wife’s dad, whom I often struggle to get along with, and who doesn’t know that I’m transgender, and her brother, who is cool but who left early this afternoon. Today has been the first time we’ve had a break from work or being around them constantly since they arrived. It’s been a long and stressful week, but getting a couple hours to play through this game was in turns relaxing and sad and fun and cathartic. And we’re about to go out to eat at a South Indian restaurant with her dad, which was a happy coincidence that we’ve had planned for a couple of weeks. I think we’re gonna go ham on some dosas. Maybe try not to cry about Venba while we do.

“Being touched makes me feel safe. But at the same time it also makes me anxious. After all, I have no idea how I could ever repay someone who makes me feel this happy. I can’t find the words to say. With just a simple hug, all of these feelings are revolving around inside me, and I’m just so afraid that I’ll end up crushing this moment into dust. And just like that, the happiness has faded away completely, leaving nothing but coarse anxiety coursing through my heart. Am I just not used to dealing with kindness?”

“Maybe I’m a little lonely.”


Okay now were those quotes from Sayoko, the protagonist of the video game Ghostpia after the first time someone was nice to her in so long that she can’t remember the last time she physically touched anyone, or was that a quote from Ina, the me who’s writing this little thing about the video game Ghostpia four months into an acute mental health episode that my doctor recently described as “really concerning”?

Jkjk obvi these are quotes from the first few minutes of Ghostpia but I did find myself struck throughout the ten or so hours I spent with the game just how well it captured with words the vibe of Being Depressed, which I do think is really hard to do in the format that developer Chosuido has chosen for this story. Being a visual novel with absolutely no player input beyond proceeding the text and which never leaves Sayoko’s perspective means you’re really sitting in the sludge with her, and while she’s a really engaging character, she’s often a difficult one to be around. Unmotivated, sad, and anxious, she actively avoids her friends in the early goings of the story, and even by the end of the game she is still largely nonverbal in group settings. But a combination of incredible scene direction, one of the most clever localizations I think I’ve ever seen, and a really lovely score help bolster an already very strong character voice. I think it’s a lot easier to communicate a VIBE of depression than having to constantly assert the fog of it with a running first person narration, but Chosuido makes it look easy.

“Hopefully I’m not so empty that the wind blows me away.”

Ghostpia takes place in a city surrounded on all sides by a vast desert of snow, populated by immortal people who live nocturnally and whose forms are painfully melted by the light of day. If they’re ever caught by the sun or otherwise killed, they simply reform and wake up within a couple days at the local garbage dump, which also happens to all inanimate objects in the town upon damage or consumption. The population is small and fixed – no one has ever been able to leave, and no outsider has ever shown up. There’s a fascist church that nominally runs the town but given that it’s difficult to cause any permanent harm to anyone or anything, even stuff as extreme as murder or arson seems to kind of slide out of consequence if the perpetrator gets away with it for more than a day or two.

Lots of things “happen” in this game and lots of things “have happened” over the course of ghostpia’s five episodes. It becomes evident pretty quickly that the literal only thing Sayoko is good at in life (death?) is killing people, with guns, with her hands. She’s amnesiac and the church seems to have a vested interest in her not remembering the circumstances around the last time she and her only two friends last tried to permanently escape the town. She gets to know professional worlds both legitimate and criminal. Schemes are hatched, assassinations plotted, battles beyond the scale you might expect are waged. None of this really coalesces into much of anything though. There’s a lot of worldbuilding, and it’s all interesting. There’s a lot of teasing, a lot of implication, hints that there is a coherent vision of What’s Going On here, but Ghostpia is firmly Season One of a planned two seasons and the core of this game is obviously an emotional one, uninterested in answering literally any of the questions it opens up.

“She’s so dazzling, I can’t help but look down at the floor to avert my gaze. She and I are different. The two of us are actually quite distant from each other, but only just so happen to be physically close right now. Just thinking about it like that makes me want to cry.”

The throughline that ties the season together is the arrival of the town’s first ever New Person in, well, no one is sure. Nobody keeps time, they don’t age, they don’t measure things, there’s no real point. All the days are the same, and over time it becomes evident that the milieu that consumes Sayoko enough that she rarely leaves home and doesn’t bathe or eat without instruction is silently haunting everyone. Everyone’s going through their motions, and the thing that makes her different is that she doesn’t have any motions to go through. The ghosts don’t technically have physical needs, so doing things like eating and bathing and staying warm are comforting rituals they keep going to make themselves feel like they’re retaining what they guess to be their essential human nature. Performing humanness is to some degree an essential part of a ghost’s life, and it’s ambiguous how seriously we’re meant to take it when early on one of Sayoko’s friends says they haven’t really hung out with her for several years.

So when a new girl shows up, immediately on the church’s bad side, and Sayoko rescues her, and gives her a name, and a place to crash for a while, well, it becomes immediately harder to be isolated. So as much of the game is taken up by the intrigue of the new girl, Yoru’s, situation, and by association the aspects of the lives of Sayoko’s other friends that she had either forgotten or never taken enough of an interest in before to learn about, the core of the experience is really just hanging out. Conversation. Establishing and re-establishing bonds. Learning to be vulnerable, and getting to know someone well enough that you can be vulnerable with them without being open with them.

“I don’t understand why you believe in her so much.”

“She doesn’t know what it means to love someone. She’s only ever been loved...That’s all she lives for...I find myself unpleasant. I know my mind is warped and repulsive. But I want to keep doing what I’m doing as long as I can.”

“I don’t understand you. But I might be jealous.”

It’s very easy for me to focus on the bits of Ghostpia that I connected with, because they resonate very strongly with me and I think when the game is on it’s so fucking on. I find the main cast pretty uniformly incredible – there’s Pacifica, who is tall and kind and shrewd and confident and ambiguously evil (no one is QUITE sure what her job is but “criminal kingpin” seems not implausible); Anya is handy and moody and warm and deeply invested once she opens up, which comes easier than she suggests it does; Yoru is bubbly and crude and perceptive and unreadable. Sayoko herself, when she starts to feel safe again, never stops being awkward but it does seem like she is kind of just Like That in a way that is flavored differently from the way people clam up when they’re anxious, she’s also a little bit genuinely cruel and deeply empathetic.

Each episode ultimately revolves around Sayoko’s ability to connect with one of her circle of friends or otherwise deeply relate with a side character, often ones who are hostile and cruel. Everywhere she goes she finds mirrors of her loneliness, her fear of vulnerability, her anger, and her aching want for the relationships she thinks other people have. And while this isn’t a game about “getting over it” or otherwise shrugging off depression, through those mirrors Sayoko is able to find a version of herself who is comfortable and able to believe that the people around her want to be there, and believe that when they tell her they feel about her the same way she feels about them, they’re being genuine.

“YOU JUST DON’T VIBE WITH HER.”

That shit isn’t the totality of the game though. Ghostpia is a lot of things, including, often, zanier than I would prefer? Not that I dislike jokes, and I do in fact like a lot of the comedy here, but there’s a juvenile streak that feels really out of place with the rest of it. A strange fascination with the word “poop” that spans the entire game, a mean-spirited running bit aimed at a homeless man that thankfully disappears relatively early on, and a bunch of out of left field otaku goofs at the eleventh hour stand out the loudest in my memory as Goofers that just don’t hit, but Ghostpia’s wacky diversions fall flat for me as often as they hit. If the characters and their dialogue weren’t so compelling through pretty much any scenario they get pitched into this stuff would be way more of a problem for me structurally.

This extends to action and violence too. The game is outright gruesome, and I think it’s to the writers’ credit that when they choose to play that gruesomeness for drama or horror it works really well even though characters are constantly reminding us and each other that death has literally no meaning for them and in fact would often get them out of the pickles they find themselves in. But probably 85% of the time the violence (which is usually like, A Lot, is what I want to emphasize) is played for comedy by the narrative even if Sayoko is taking herself seriously – the people of the town call her The Ninja because she jumps around and is so good at murder, and whenever she’s about to get into something there’s a cartoonish Ninja Flute Musical Cue to herald the coming bloodshed. Characters are bisected, mutilated, impaled, sometimes graphically, almost always for The Bit and I’m not OPPOSED to that sort of thing (I’m a documented sicko and in fact with one character who is the most consistent target of this to the point that it’s a running joke I think it’s pretty funny), I just don’t really get what we’re going for with the tone a lot of the time here. The weirdest bits are when the stakes of the genuine character drama are tied up in this cartoonish violence that otherwise comes off as a really dumb bit. The main plot of one episode revolved around one of the main characters being abused by her employer but the circumstances of this abuse are so brazenly stupid that it’s hard to feel the way I assume the developer wants me to feel about the scene. Nothing really offensive happening, it just feels a little at odds with what feels like the game at its best in multiple other directions.

“I don’t really wanna say something like ‘that’s the power of friendship’ because that’d be so cheesy. So I say it ironically. As a joke.”

Obviously, though, I HAVE connected pretty strongly with Ghostpia. I don’t think of those things I was just complaining about. I think about Sayoko’s endlessly evocative narration, and the soundtrack when it’s jaunty and the soundtrack when it’s melancholic. I think of the way all of the main characters are united in their hatred for Clara, the local nun in training who is so genuinely cheerful and naive that our misfit losers can’t help but be intrinsically disgusted by her mere presence.

I think of how, in chapter one, when she’s reconciling with Anya after going no contact over a slight she can’t even remember anymore, Sayoko says I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and Anya tells her “you don’t have to say it twice.” And then I think about how, at the end of the game, when Yoru is at her lowest and she’s testing the boundaries of the shaky relationship she’s developed with Sayoko, and she’s admitting to her that she knows more about everything and everyone than she lets on but that she can’t say any of it, and needs to know whether Sayoko could understand this, whether she’ll stay with her, Sayoko says “Of course I do. Of course,” and Yoru replies “I get it. You don’t have to say it twice.” I think about stagnancy, and transformation, and how to be content. Those things seem bigger in hindsight. I think Sayoko might agree.

Do I desperately miss the stories and the business management elements? Yes.

Is the handling of gender and bodies cowardly and prejudiced? Yes.

Is there a BAFFLING lack of a neckware category? Yes

Do I get a bigger rush than anything else in my entire life when someone deems my avatar worth making a thoughtful outfit for, or when they like an outfit that I made for them? Yeah man. Yeah. Sorry. Can't help it. Nothing like it.

CW for a very brief mention of self-harm toward the end of the “Deja Vu” segment

Okay please bear with me until we get to the hook here I promise I'm working my way up to something. (this writeup is about fanfiction)

I’ve got a flavor of depression called dysthymia, which is just like, when you’re just kind of a little bit depressed all the time, ambiently, forever. I had more immediately obvious emotional issues and more attention-grabbing family members growing up, and ours wasn’t the kind of family that acknowledged this sort of thing in the first place really, so this went undiagnosed until I essentially shut down altogether as a functioning person during my first year of college and had to drop out of school and move back in with my parents. Even then, I didn’t get consistent treatment for a few years after that. BUT, my mental health has never been as bad as it was that year, real low point for me.

A cool thing that can happen when you’re dysthymic though, is that you can still be prone to the big, fuck you depressive episodes that characterize major depressive disorder. This is called Double Depression when it happens, that’s the official medical terminology, which IS very funny. So that happens to me in a way that lasts for a couple-ish weeks usually maybe two or three times a year.

Alright so PERSONA 5 is IMO a like, vacuous game. Completely empty of themes and ideas at best, contradictory of its purported ideas and deeply mean-spirited at its worst. Fails entirely to capitalize on almost every seed it plants, uninterested in plumbing the depths of almost any of its characters in an interesting way beyond their introductions (and sometimes even during them). (Don’t argue with me in the comments if you think this game rocks that’s not what we’re doing here just keep reading I promise I’m doing a thing here.) But it IS a compelling game in your hands. I’m by no means immune to the charms of Persona, even if my feelings towards the modern iteration of the series are lukewarm. I played Persona 5 on its initial release and didn’t particularly enjoy myself. I caught Royal on a MASSIVE discount sometime since it came out but never really had it in mind to play it until one of my mutuals did a few months ago and was tweeting a lot about it, in such a way that reminded me of the kind of fun there is to find in these games if you’re willing to take them as they are and not as you wish they were. So right at the end of August I booted up Royal to see if I could find that. And I did! I’ve had a pretty good time with it over the last couple months. If nothing else, Persona 5 is an incredibly smooth game to play at all times, and Royal even more so. Goes down easy.

Then at the beginning of September my brain just like completely fell apart. I entered the worst depressive episode I’ve experienced in over a decade, since that time when I was 18 that I mentioned earlier. All kinds of weird brain shit that I haven’t had problems with for years and years has been coming back to me and it’s been hitting hard. And I don’t even know why! No apparent trigger. And it’s still happening! This is a very long time for me to be like this dude it sucks. I can’t get in with my doctor until the end of November, hopefully we can figure something out man idk.

All of this is to say that Persona 5 became a weird thing that I have clung to for these last couple of months; the game’s looping structure makes it easy to indulge in “one more day” thinking, punctuated by long stints of very relaxing, methodical dungeon crawling. There’s a rhythm to it, and enough depth that I could really sit down and crack the thing open to engage in the challenge content after a certain point. Max out the compendium, all that shit. As much engagement as you want it to be, but never any friction.

I also, have read, uh, somewhere between 6 and 7 million words of Persona 5 fanfiction since the beginning of September. I think this game’s cast, widely, is pretty easily my favorite in the series, or the IDEAS of them are. As I’ve mentioned, I think almost everyone in this game is an incredibly compelling SKETCH of a person, and that Atlus has almost across the board fudged the details in coloring them in. So I was like damn I bet there’s some good fanfic for this game. And there is, of course. P5 is one of the most popular games around, especially with the kinds of people who write fanfiction. And bro I sleep like four hours a night at absolute maximum right now, I have needed a lot of shit to get me through those hours without thinking about, y’know, anything else. So that’s what I’ve been doing with almost every moment of free time for ten weeks.

I didn’t initially intend to review Persona 5 here – I think it’s a game that’s been pretty thoroughly discussed over the years - but I thought it might be fun to recommend some of the fics that I’ve enjoyed during this very bizarre chapter of my life. Of course, in talking about what I like so much about a lot of these stories, there’s going to be a lot of natural comparison to how the game handles parallel ideas, so evaluation of the game is going to be peppered throughout. This isn’t a comprehensive review by any means, just a small sampling of stuff that I’ve read recently and stuff that’s really stuck with me since I’ve started my reading. Most if not all of these should be tagged pretty well and a lot of them are good about giving content warnings at the top of individual chapters if there’s tough shit in them. I didn’t include anything here that’s just porn but a few of these have sex in them at some point, AO3 has a whole rating system, you can’t miss it if you don’t want to see that stuff. Okay so let’s get into it:

Actually, I have to disclose first that I fuckin hate when people have personas talk to their persona users inside their heads, nobody has ever done it in a way that I didn’t think sucked ass but it IS gonna be in some of these and I think those stories are cool anyway but bro I need you to know I don’t condone that practice okay now we can get to it.

This is a very small sample size of only a few fics that I quite liked off the top of my head, in no particular order:

--------------------------------Take Your Time---------------------------------------------------

One Year On Probation by FlOrangey 44 chapters, 214k words, last updated June 2020

My favorite kind of fanfiction for stories like this has always been the sort that removes the supernatural elements. My favorites of these stories are always conduits for human drama, so foregrounding that sort of thing always appeals to me. A project like One Year On Probation is especially interesting, because where most fics that I’ve read that do stuff like this will put characters and perhaps versions of their canon conflicts into mundane scenarios (including some I’ll recommend further down), this one aims to retell the events of the game, just, without the superpower bits.

It makes for an interesting thought exercise when you take a scenario that is to some degree about offering powerless people the power fantasy of being able to exert influence over abusive elements of society that are otherwise untouchable and take that catharsis away from them. But if we’re still adapting the narrative beats, how do these kids handle the people hurting them? I think FlOrangey does a good job here of not letting those answers feel cheap or easy, especially not for the Madarame story, which this fic, seemingly long abandoned (dropped for two years in 2018, a few chapters in 2020, and nothing since), comes so close to finishing that you can see the outline of where it’s going.

The removal of the metaverse has other ripple effects – characters tied closely to it lead very different, more stable lives, particularly Futaba and Akechi. Without the narrative out of just showing it to him, Yusuke’s wake-up call is longer and colder. Morgana is, obviously, a regular cat. And this interpretation of Joker is just a guy tryin’ to get by, dealing with a pretty bad anxiety disorder that he’s at least developed since the events leading up to the game, but it’s implied he could have exhibited signs of earlier. Author’s notes suggest that FlOrangey is writing that stuff from experience and it does read like it. While that becomes a big part of Akira’s character here, and you might expect it to given his circumstances, he’s not like, a conduit for trauma, he’s a pretty roundly written guy.

These are very warm iterations of these characters without feeling like they rely much on you being a fan of the game to like them, which is always nice. You can tell it was being written with that really long plan in mind, and Makoto, despite being essentially the secondary main character by the time the fic stops, is definitely the character who feels the most like “ah damn yeah I bet this version of her would really go places if this writer had gotten the chance to get to the parts of the story where she’s center stage.” As it is though I don’t think this fic feels terribly incomplete, even if it does abruptly end like 9/10ths of the way through the second part of a like eight part story. It’s very long as it is, 215k words, and there’s a lot of good shit here to dig into.

--------------------------------Take Your Time---------------------------------------------------

Black & Red by Alexilulu, 18 chapters, 126k words, last updated April 2020

Another one loosely adapting the events of the game that gets cut off midway through the Madarame story arc, Black & Red’s method of shuffling the story around is by being entirely from Haru’s perspective and moving her whole central story up to take place during and after the initial story arc of the game. It’s nice to have a story that makes the main character transgender but doesn’t have her constantly thinking about that, tbh, even though I have read other fics where trans characters ARE thinking about it all the time and that can be good too, I like diversity in my t-slur representation. It’s also an interesting choice to make her the perspective character and putting the focus on her burgeoning relationship with Joker without actually having her get involved with the Phantom Thieves.

There’s not NOTHING else happening but this fic is pretty heavily focused on Haru and Joker coming together, and a big part of that early on is them being edgy teens smoking on the high school roof in the rain, him clearly wanting to let down the walls of his goofy Dangerous Delinquent persona that he’s built up so people don’t approach him and he can be a Phantom Thief in relative solitude, while also trying to keep her at arm’s length because obviously being a Phantom Thief is scary and dangerous, and Alexilulu does interpret their adventures more violently than average, and without the conveniences of extreme healing magic a lot of writers adapt from the games. This could all be fine on its own but it reflects really well on Haru’s character – Alexilulu really emphasizes an anger that is present in the game but never really explored. As someone who is in a genuinely horrific abuse situation, having it made pretty obviously clear that she’s being fucked around with by one of the very few people she’s been able to open up to leads to a lot of really good scenes of the teens Sitting Around And Talking About How Fucked Up They Are which is one of my favorite kinds of fanfic writing.

The elements of Haru’s story that are fleshed out are pitched well too – it’s easy to write her abusive fiance really over-the-top and Alexilulu occasionally rides that line but never in scenes where it really matters. Essentially too, they give Haru’s father some more, uhhh, I’ll say believable notes of humanity, without making him sympathetic (I think he is actually more evil than he is in the game, on a personal level, by the time he makes his final appearance in this story). Elements of Haru’s family history and social link story also get folded in here and complicated in ways that the game simply isn’t interested in and they all make for a richer personal tableau; there was a lot of meat left on this bone, should the fic have continued, but given that it didn’t, it’s good that Persona 5’s inherently clean, arc-based nature got us through the one so heavily focused on the fic’s main character. There’s some sense of closure even without a resolution.

Alexilulu has written a lot of Persona 5 fics, mostly one-shots and most of them porn. I’ve read several of them and like pretty much everything I’ve read of theirs, but I might particularly also recommend What I Want to Say (Without Saying ‘I Love You’), about post-school-aged Ryuji and Ann and their nebulously defined sexual relationship as they feel like they’re kind of adrift in that ennui of being an adult with no direction and no sense of future, surrounded by peers who are Doing Stuff and Going Places (10k words) and A Garden For Traitors, two stories about Ann and Haru getting together, both short one shots, both very sweet. Alexilulu seems to have moved on from P5 writing but they did have a great voice for these characters.

--------------------------------Take Your Time---------------------------------------------------

i wanna kiss your silhouette by wtfoctagon, 5 chapters, 35k words, complete

My favorite thing about fanfiction generally speaking is the way writers naturally bring out and emphasize different aspects of characters they’re writing about. Maybe someone is gonna hit a character pitch perfectly the way they’re portrayed in the original work, but I’m a lot more interested when you see people’s inclinations drawing stuff that’s already present in a character and sharpening it. Persona 5, having most of its characterization be so scattered and messy throughout, has a lot of potential for this.

wtfoctagon stages this fic as a romance between Ann and Makoto (imo an EXTREMELY underrated pairing), and it is, and it’s a really compelling one too, but it’s also a pretty thorough look at a side of Ann we don’t see much after the opening hours of the game – the one who is contemplative, keen, and empathic. The Ann in this fic is the Ann from that scene where she sees Yusuke’s painting and feels the honesty of intention behind it, and touches him with her comments, and knows intrinsically that Madarame can’t be who he says he is. This is a good look for her, and it comes through without losing the way that she is also easily flustered, easily bored, compassionate, and quietly the emotional rock of her friend group.

The dialogue is really sharp but a lot of this characterization – for both girls — comes from the prose. The narration from Ann’s perspective carries a loose, casual vibe but communicates strongly her ability to perceive every small detail about Makoto: her anger, her insecurity, her practiced way to use body language to hide herself in plain sight. Something that’s not really emphasized in Persona 5 but makes for great food for fanfiction writers is that almost any combination of main characters in that game can relate to each other on some level via their bad experiences. The specifics of their hardships don’t always align but portions of them do, and the ways people react to trauma can. Ann and Makoto both know what it is to feel small, to wish to not be seen at all, and to have that contradictory feeling of simultaneously wishing to be seen on their own terms. They both know what it is to be lonely, and to be powerless, and to be angry.

It’s also just, genuinely, a really romantic story. Lovely writing. Other good stuff by wtfoctagon includes i’m just feeling low, feeling low, a one shot where makoto and akira commiserate over their respective bad days on the roof for 1500 words, and several Tales of Berseria fics that you know I gotta shout out because I’m a huge ToB head over here. Mostly their stories are shipping fics between Magilou and Eleanor but wtfoctagon does seem to know in their heart that magilou/eleanor/velvet is a true OT3 and I respect them hugely for this. They run the gamut from real world AU stuff to stuff set during the game to an 80k word post-game story that I haven’t gotten around to but I’m saving for a rainy day. Big fan of this writer's voice.

--------------------------------Take Your Time---------------------------------------------------

a storm is coming in by canticle, 6 chapters, 40k words, complete

A fic that takes place the summer after the events of the game, where Ryuji goes to visit Akira for the entire break. It’s evident that Ryuji is depressed and that he’s avoiding SOMETHING that’s happened in Tokyo since the game ended but it takes a long time for Canticle to get around to disclosing that stuff. This is a very slow-paced fic, very much more about soaking in the vibe of a bad summer than the catharsis of a horrific revelation. The revelation isn’t horrific either, it’s really mundane, and so is the depiction of Ryuji’s depression. He’s just really tired, he doesn’t want to do stuff, he avoids talking to his friends. His time with Akira is fun, sort of, but it’s also a form of harmful escapism, even as they figure out a routine, and even as things get……….a little bit homo.

Not to open THIS can of worms, I PROMISE I don’t mean anything by this I’m JUST more familiar with the girl shit, but the whole romance carries the vibe of a soft yuri, one where all the moves on both ends are hesitant. The most like, romantically forward thing anyone does before they’re kissing is when Ryuji starts sad wearing the hoodie that Akira wore when he was pretending to be dead during Persona 5, without commenting on it, which could be perceived as a power play but could also just be like, a weird thing to do. Mostly it’s a lot of increasingly gay cuddling, falling asleep with his forehead pressed against Akira’s which is NORMAL FOR BROS. When you’re sad it’s normal to wear your bro’s hoodie all week.

There’s a bit in this fic where Akira helps him re-bleach his hair, and afterwards Ryuji can’t stop thinking about how he LOOKS the same as he always does after he does his own hair but he FEELS different because it was Akira putting his hands on him and it was like, in a way Akira marking him and holy SHIT dude that energy is nowhere else in this thing. Just the tiniest hint of the kind of shit I like but I was hooting and hollering. I know I can get that elsewhere in P5 fandom and I can probably even get it from canticle but to do so in an m/m situation you pretty much HAVE to be willing to let one of the boys be Akechi and I am simply NOT INTERESTED.

This one’s really pleasant though. Eventually all the other Phantom Thieves come to hang out and Ryuji gets scenes specifically with Ann and Makoto, who are always good characters to pair him with. Ryuji and Makoto are another one of those duos who Just Work that basically nobody is really tapping into, but when people do it rocks. BUT HEY HOW ABOUT ANOTHER ONE ABOUT AKIRA DYEING RYUJI’S HAIR BUT THAT’S THE ENTIRE THING THIS TIME

--------------------------------Take Your Time---------------------------------------------------

Dyeing To Kiss You by Mysecretfanmoments and Suggestivescribe, one shot, 9k words

This one really only aims to be a romantic moment of an initial getting together between Ryuji and Akira, and it does that well, but there’s more meat on the bone than I might have expected going into it. Both boys are really well characterized, especially when they’re being described from the other one’s perspective (something I always like to see, I’m realizing as I write about these various fics), and there are little hints at the deeper layers to each of them – specifics about Ryuji’s relationship with his mom, hints at Akira’s sensitivities about how much living at Leblanc actually would suck and how fragile his pre-Tokyo relationships turned out to be.

But the really great shit here IS the stuff centered specifically on the romance. Ryuji only realizing his feelings are romantic like forty minutes into being actively aroused by his buddy having a degree of intimate control over him while they go through the steps to bleach his hair really just rules, and when things to escalate to acting and, later, talking, the authors do a good job at keeping Ryuji sounding gruff and inarticulate without making him sound stupid or cartoonish, which is something a lot of writers struggle with for him and characters like him.

Likewise I think the authors are really great at just like, describing the sensation of touching? Of how good it can feel to touch someone and be touched by them in an uncomplicated way, especially when it’s in places that people don’t normally touch each other (i’m not even talking about sex stuff!), and the sense of romance is palpable without omitting things like pauses to negotiate how they want to go about stuff once they are going. This kind of writing isn’t easy to do as well as they’ve done it here but they make it LOOK easy which is about the highest compliment I can think to give.

--------------------------------Take Your Time---------------------------------------------------

The Lonely Fortune Teller’s Club by petaldancing, one shot, 14k words

I have found that other than the shockingly high number of Joker/Iwai fics, there really aren’t very many out there that focus on the adult cast members of Persona 5, and even fewer that are like, actually very good lol. Takemi and Kawakami and Iwai to a lesser extent are often PRESENT because so many stories try to adapt the events of the game and those three have prominent early roles in a logical progression of the story, and they’re well-liked characters for sure, but it’s rare to really get to see these people as actual people beyond the limits of what the game gave them, and even rarer to get inside their heads. This is one of the few stories I’ve seen that’s not porn that’s focused on Chihaya and I think petaldancing does very well by her.

Chihaya is one of my favorite confidants in Persona 5, kind of existing in a middle space of age and maturity between the teenaged characters and the rest of the adult cast. As with most of them, her story gets a little goofy in the details and is let down thematically and in its resolution by Being In Persona 5 but in the broad strokes I think it’s pretty affecting and she’s characterized in a really charismatic way throughout it.

This story takes place in the year after the game, and manages to make Chihaya getting a job working the desk at Takemi’s clinic seem entirely un-contrived, which is a genuine feat, and while this is a story about the two of them making a romantic connection, and it indulges in my least favorite romance story structure (a long tease out and then ending with the acknowledgment of feelings when it feels like there are a lot of depths to plumb still, were the actual relationship to be explored), the story really reads more as a character study on Chihaya, a what-if story about what her life would logically have to look like after she blows it up at the end of her social link, which was a good thing that she was right to do, but did leave her at a crossroads that the structure of a Persona game is unprepared to address. In that regard I think petaldancing does everything right here; they nail the voice, they nail the beats, they say what they want to say and get out in a relatively succinct little story.

Petaldancing has one other Persona story called But Even Iron Trembles, another long oneshot from Hifumi’s perspective in a version of the game events where her mother has a full-blown palace that the Phantom Thieves draw themselves into in the time between stealing Kunikazu Okumura’s heart and the press conference he calls to resolve that story arc. It’s got a backgrounded Hifumi/Makoto romance built entirely off of the supposition that those two would hit it off and start hanging out after that scene in the game where you might run into Hifumi while hanging out with Makoto in the neighborhood with all the bookstores, and that stuff is good, but it’s also the best fleshing out of Hifumi’s family life and her feelings about her situation that I’ve read, which there aren’t MANY of (Hifumi another character I would have expected to be more popular with fanfic people tbh) but like, I’ve tried them all lol. So I recommend that too.

--------------------------------Take Your Time---------------------------------------------------

Fate Written Into Stone by KindredTea, 24 of 26 planned chapters at time of writing, 394k words, ongoing haha oops nevermind I’ve been writing this document for so long that she actually finished the fic while I was working on it, 26/26 chapters, 405k words

This one feels a little bit like cheating because at first glance it’s much more a Persona 3 fic than a Persona 5 one. I AM about to spoil Persona 3, which due to its upcoming remake is presumably about to get a lot of first timers but the premise of this story is like entirely predicated upon the ending of that game so if you care that’s the heads up.

FWIS takes place ten years after P3 and three after P5, opening with an extremely frail, malnourished, 28-year-old Kotone Shiomi (the official name for Persona 3’s female player character) being found on the side of the road by Ann from Persona 5, and it’s immediately clear to the reader that this is not a coincidence, but that Kotone, who by all means should not be alive, was placed deliberately in Ann’s path by someone who knows the identities of all of the Phantom Thieves and is deliberately fucking with them. It doesn’t take long for the Thieves to find out Kotone is a Persona Protagonist and take her under their wing, but it also doesn’t take long for all the guys from Persona 3 to figure out that she’s mysteriously alive and also presumably not in place over the Great Seal, which does herald the return of the Dark Hour and apathy syndrome and all that other bad shit from Persona 3, so very quickly the questions are raised of How Did This Happen, Why Did This Happen, Does Kotone Need To Sacrifice Herself Again, Are We Willing To Seek Another Solution While Things Fall Apart, and also Is Kotone A Human Person?? We did, after all, cremate her body ten years ago.

That describes maybe the first like, six? Chapters of this story, which is dense with plot and is constantly twisting and turning with big new ideas and huge swerves, which I mean in a complimentary way. I usually find really plot-heavy stuff that’s entirely original kind of boring or unconvincing when it’s trying to build out the existing supernatural elements of the work, but KindredTea has it down pat dude. She’s doing a ton of stuff in this fic that feels like it fits right into the shared world of these games but more importantly has kept me on the hook for hundreds of thousands of words beyond a desire to get to the next set of character interactions.

Those are great too, though, don’t get me wrong. KindredTea makes a fascinating Kotone here; it’s not unusual to interpret this character as one who wears a mask of really overt cheerfulness to cover some combination of depression or anger or loneliness (she is the protagonist of Persona 3 after all lol, but also dialogue options in the game support this) but KT’s Kotone is eventually fleshed out into someone who WAS like that as a kid, grew into genuinely being cheerful and fulfilled by her experience in Persona 3, and is now faced with the dilemma of having to choose to die again, alone, and confused, and without the support of the people who she loves dearly, all of whom feel really differently about her after she’s been dead for ten years and they’ve done varying degrees of moving on.

All of the P3 cast’s characterizations kick ass in this fic, and they all respond differently to the idea that some version of Kotone may be alive, but the real star of probably the entire story is Yukari. In KindredTea’s telling of Persona 3, Yukari and Kotone were a couple, and she both had the hardest time moving on from Kotone’s death and the most virulent reaction to the idea that she could be alive again (and also may need to die again too). Yukari is a character who is in a lot of ways defined by grief – throughout all of the games she appears in, and I think KindredTea does a really great job of not simplifying the complex weirdness of this scenario for her.

I lied when I said she’s the star though the real star in my heart is SAE NIIJIMA, a character who I think is very cool, like at least 60% because I think she’s cool LOOKING, but another one who I think is just really underserved by the Persona 5 Fanfic Community. Sae is often treated as a cartoonishly evil character, with people just like grossly overdoing her mistreatment of Makoto (I think the way Sae is abusive in the game is actually generally well handled – passive aggressively, mostly quietly screw-turning in a way that just never really lets up, it’s so normal – just not very present due to the way the game is structured), or, in works set post-game, she’s usually just Nice. And that’s fine for what it is I guess; these stories are rarely ABOUT Sae, but I guess I just wish that they were! She’s cool! You could do a lot with her! And guess what mother fuckers FWIS does! Sae may be a good person now but she’s also portrayed as deeply lonely here, someone who turned her career around to suit her idealism but that didn’t like, solve any of her personal problems, it just made her a Good Person. She’s still a woman ambiguously in her late 20s with no social life because she had one friend who was really a coworker she didn’t like and he’s a dead teenager. When she meets Kotone she kind of throws herself at her, romantically, but also because they both immediately pick up that the other is really aching for a connection with someone their own age who gets what they’re feeling. And this new, kinder, gentler Sae isn’t a different person either; some of the best writing around her comes from when she gets hurt or other people fuck up around her and she reflexively snaps into the cold, mean personality she carried in Persona 5. Easier than being hurt again, easier than admitting that you can be suckered into feeling so bad about people leaving you, again.

I haven’t mentioned that the other pillar of this fic is the long-term romantic relationship between Makoto and Ann? And it’s great? This story is technically a sequel to two fanfictions KindredTea previously wrote, Whim of Rebellion, a huge oneshot following Makoto and Ann figuring their shit out over the entire course of P5, and I didn’t compromise just for the love, which does something similar for P3, intercut with scenes of Yukari grieving Kotone in the year following her death. All of these stories are good, but I do think FWIS is the crown jewel here (and it even adapts the P3 portions of I didn’t compromise late in its run). KindredTea is a deft plotter, and has come up with a really fun premise and multiple really fun twists to go along with it, but I think her biggest strength as a writer is how good she is at understated character writing. It’s an underrated skill in fanfic writing to be able to say a lot with a little, or to strongly communicate what characters think and feel without coming out with it, but KT’s got that down hard. There’s a bit in chapter 8 of this fic that I’ve shown like four people, two of whom don’t even know what Persona is, I just can’t stop thinking about it. Good fic. I like it. I still need to read the last six chapters lol but I really want to post this writeup at some point.

--------------------------------Take Your Time---------------------------------------------------

Deja Vu by Daxiefraxie and JaneTheNya, 101 chapters at time of writing, 645k words, ongoing

There’s a somewhat popular subgenre of video game fanfiction called New Game + fics, where the main character is forced, usually by some supernatural means, to relive the events of the game with all of their memories and usually all of their powers or abilities or whatever that they had at the end of the story, as if they were experiencing a new game plus of their story but like, y’know, applying the logic of that to them being a real person. The idea is usually that things will play out somehow differently, or they might try to make them play out the same way but the effects of their knowledge and power will ripple out until things go off the rails irreparably. I find this type of story to be almost uniformly uncompelling, either because the writers trying to take this format on don’t seem to really have any ideas on how they want to make the story particularly different or more interesting for having the wrinkles they’re introducing, or because the ways these experiences affect the characters going through this time travel often boil down to the subject feeling TORTURED and ANGRY about it in a very rote, juvenile sort of way, the way you think of when you’re being really mean about fan fiction.

I haven’t fucked with a lot of Persona 5 NG+ fics, largely because, having dipped my toes into a few, I’ve found my opinions to be largely validated, but in running my filters by things like “SHOW ME STORIES WITH TRANS CHARACTERS” (don’t make fun of me), Deja Vu did just keep popping up until I gave in and checked it out. Being awake all night every night means anything THIS long warrants at least a look for me. Deja Vu’s trick is that rather than the standard P5 NG+ tactic of having Joker return to the beginning of the game upon being killed by the traitor in the bad ending, the writers simply have Ren receiving packages with letters and items from a version of himself in the doomed future of a previous timeline, something that’s it’s suggested has actually happened to many Rens over hundreds of cycles. Eventually he starts seeing memories belonging to the previous Ren too, intrusively, and it’s all pretty fucked. This creates a lot of drama without making our Ren knowledgeable or powerful or out of place in his own story, and the variables that the authors introduce right off the bat and continue to introduce throughout the story, including the casts of Persona 3 and 4 (ALWAYS DICEY but it pays off here in a big way) make this plot feel like it could be anything, even when it’s still adhering fairly strictly to the tenants of Persona 5’s story arc before things do eventually fly entirely off the rails.

While I do think the balancing act that Daxiefraxie and JaneTheNya manage with their plotting is really impressive, I’m certainly personally here for the character work. There are some clear objectives in Deja Vu when it comes to how the characters are approached: the first is to make much more explicit their social vulnerabilities. Every Phantom Thief is somehow queer now, many of them are transgender in ways that profoundly affect their experiences, and disabilities and mental health issues are given serious consideration in how everyone is written throughout. The second is to emphasize the ways these kids are trauma survivors, and in this story that means pretty much universally digging a lot more deeply into the effects of their experiences than the game did, and occaionally making things explicit that were left to implication in the canon story. Everyone’s stories are tweaked, with Ann and Ryuji getting a lot more detail and time spent on their feelings during and after their spotlight arcs, Yusuke and Haru’s stories see significant additions, and Kasumi and Makoto’s are reworked entirely - Makoto’s in a way that brings her experiences more in line with the rest of the crew’s and, I think, reflects the authors’ contempt for the police as an institution (rightly lol get Makoto’s cop shit from the game OUTTA MY FACE please, every writer who makes Makoto be like “what the fuck was I thinking I am not going to be a cop actually” is a hero).

There’s certainly a way about this story where just by describing the kinds of things that happen in it, or going by its tags, or by its very careful chapter-by-chapter content warnings, that would make it easy to write it off as over the top in its darkness, as edgy, and it’s definitely true that this is pound for pound the most intense story I’ve got on this list. But it’s not about rolling around in that, and it’s certainly not GRAPHIC when it gets into this stuff. It’s a lot more about these characters opening up to each other and finding a sense of solidarity together; the hot pot scene from early in the game becomes a recurring moment in this fic, where every time a new thief joins the group they share a meal and let each other in on their baggage, give the new person space to do that or not at their discretion. There’s a lot of careful attention paid to how even though the supernatural power to force the immediate change you need IS cathartic, it doesn’t FIX you the way you might wish it did or feel like you need, and the lingering effects of everyone’s experiences are present thought the narrative.

I think maybe the best, most obvious example of all of these factors together is the way Akechi is handled. While he pretty much retains his characterization and role from the game for most of this story, and certainly he’s a sicko and a turbo murderer, there’s also an acknowledgment that he was an abused child who was groomed into being basically a serial killer by the adults who had complete authority over him?? And regardless of his own motivations and how complicit he may be and how he may feel about his own actions, a kid in that situation simply can’t be fully responsible for the person he’s become and the shit Akechi’s done. But it’s not treated in such an open-and-shut way either. He’s a lot closer to being an adult than a kid at this point, and he’s not stable, and him having been manipulated isn’t gonna un-murder Futaba’s mom. There’s an entire story arc dedicated to the problem of What To Do About Akechi, and exploring how the very large cast feel about him as individuals, with a lot of characters arguing for and against how sympathetically he should be handled, and a wide gradient of feelings across both sides of the debate. Even when things are made more severe and more explicit in Deja Vu, they’re also treated with a degree of nuance that the game isn’t interested in. Here, exploring that nuance feels like one of the driving motivators of telling this story.

Daxiefraxie told me in a comment reply that they were using both authors’ first and secondhand experiences to inform all of the hard stuff in the fic, and I think you can feel that here. There’s a lot of shit in this story that I also have firsthand experience with and while it can be an emotionally intense read, it’s never been an overwhelming one for me; this is one of the only stories I’ve read, particularly in fanfiction, that deals directly and extensively with cutting that hasn’t triggered me, which I think says something about the approach the writers have taken given the active intrusive thoughts I’ve been having over these last couple months.

So yeah idk I think the whole package is pretty good. I’m maybe ten chapters away from being caught up – I stalled out on a lot of these really long fics when I got close to current with them because I hadn’t finished the game yet, and I do think that having the events of the game in mind has been good while reading these stories. Not that all of them feel like they rely on you knowing the plot of the game to fill in gaps – I would say any good one that aims to retell the story of the game doesn’t, for example – but knowing where we came from helps me appreciate what we’re doing now. So I’m eager to go back and catch up fully. These might be my favorite takes on Ann and Haru especially.

--------------------------------Take Your Time---------------------------------------------------

Aces High and Queens Wild by SpellStruck, 3 chapters at time of writing, 21k words, ongoing

This is a VERY new story, which seems to post a chapter every couple months so far, but it’s very COOL so I wanted to include it here. Will it continue? Idk. Will it finish? Who can say. But it’s got a sick opening.

There’s a popular type of story in Persona fanfic called Arcana Swaps, which uh, is what it sounds like. In the games all the important characters have a Tarot arcana associated with them which usually offer some narrative relevance to the themes of their personal stories, and in arcana swap fics the author will shuffle those arcana around, which can mean a lot of things, but always means familiar characters assuming the narrative roles of other characters in the stories. Sometimes this means also bringing with them elements of their own stories, sometimes it means pasting them into an adapted version of the original story for the arcana they’ve stepped into. If the writer is trying, or they’re good, they will still take the narrative significance of the arcanas into account when they’re writing the new stuff. Lots of ways this can play out.

So in this story our main character, our Fool, is Ann. She’s joker in this story, coming to Tokyo on a train to live with a guardian she doesn’t know after doing some kind of criminal assault that we don’t get the full details for. Her guardian is Maruki rather than Sojiro, and he is recognizably Maruki, but we get to see a side of him we don’t see in the game – his personal home, his neighborhood, his job before going to Shujin. He’s Maruki though, and he’s friendly, and welcoming, and tries to be really openly communicative with Ann. A human Morgana is the Ryuji, Yusuke is the Ann, and Madarame is the Kamoshida. That’s about as far as these early chapters take us.

It’s just really well-written, I think! I think I’m pretty on the record at this point as an Ann Liker, and to see an introspective, maybe insecure, definitely uncertain version of her trying to feel out her place in a new world is really stimulating, especially her interplay with Maruki, a type of adult she very clearly has no idea what to do with. There’s drama just pulsing through the establishing moments of this story in a way that makes me wish it was a no metaverse thing because I’m just like that BUT as it is I’m just happily waiting for whatever we get, whenever we get it. I really do hope that SpellStruck keeps posting chapters, it’s off to a sick start.

--------------------------------Take Your Time---------------------------------------------------

Not Enough Time by SpaceCakes, 29 chapters, 102k words, complete

Finally, I am closing it out (more because I am tired of writing this document and want to get this thing out the door than because I have run out of Persona 5 fanfiction to talk about), with one for the heterosexuals.

This is another of my precious No Metaverse AU stories that follows a college-aged Haru who, in this telling, has managed to stave off her arranged marriage until after she finishes her university education. The story begins right at the end of her second of three years, and she’s starting to really keenly feel the time slipping away from her. The key difference between this story and canon, besides the lack of supernatural elements, is that Haru didn’t know any of the other characters in high school, and at the start of this story is only friends with Makoto, who is her ONLY friend, actually, and whom she met in college. This is a romance between Ren and Haru, and that’s good, I like the mellow but sure characterization he gets here, and think it pairs especially well with this somewhat rattled, insecure version of Haru, but I do think Haru’s internal life is the good shit in this fic.

This is a pretty grounded take on Haru’s situation, and in that sense it can be a tough read without ever becoming explicit or graphic in content. She’s a woman who has learned, desperately, how to manage the men in her life, but who knows she can’t walk that tightrope forever. She’s bargained a tiny amount of freedom from her father – single life for a couple extra years, and an apartment to live in while she’s in school – but it’s all conditional. She has to answer her phone quickly enough and often enough, she has to answer questions in a satisfying way, she has to wear the right clothes and say the right things and of course, she has to marry a man that she and her father both know is vile. Sugimura too, is a constant presence who has total power over her and knows it, constantly pushing the already paper-thin boundaries between them, held at bay more by his own ultimate disinterest in Haru as an object than by a belief that he couldn’t get away with anything he wanted to. And the moment she’s out of line all of the freedoms she’s bargained for herself as insulation from these pressures could disappear isntantly. They’re going to disappear anyway, in a year.

That’s why Haru only has one friend, and hasn’t told her about her upcoming marriage. The plan is to quietly cut contact with Makoto and assume Makoto cares a lot less about Haru than Haru does about her, not enough to really care where she went. And selling this oppressive atmosphere of resignation is what makes it feel like such a relief when Haru does start hanging out with Makoto’s friends (and not only Ren either), something that takes a surprisingly long time to happen. It’s scary, too, though. The other shoe is always ready to drop.

This is, of course, a fluffy romance story with a sex scene at the end, so things do resolve sweetly, but they don’t resolve cleanly, which is something I always appreciate about good Haru stories. And the sex scene at the end is good! Shoutouts to the heteros. See? I am a fair and balanced media consumer.

--------------------------------Take Your Time---------------------------------------------------

Edit 12/17/23: Even as I have finished the game and I quickly approach the end of a couple of the spinoffs I find that my appetite for P5 fanfic hasn’t really left me, so I may turn this review into something of a living document, come back and add stuff to it as I read new things that really catch me, and I have read a couple of really good ones since I initially posted this so that first one may come soon. My hope is that this thing will be like a good pu’er tea, y’know - it’s good if you drink it right now but it will probably continue to improve with age. Thanks for reading!

If you look up discussion of these games in forums or reddit, you’ll often find people asking if they’re worth going back to or if they’re a good place to start with the series, and obviously, gamers being gamers, the answer is always a huge “no.” I never see anyone ever recommending these games, even these SNES remakes. Always described as too clunky, too difficult, simultaneously too simple and too opaque, just all around too old. And it’s true on some level that if you’re used to most post-nocturne SMT games then I don’t think that what you get in especially Megami Tensei I is going to particularly resemble the series you love. If, however, you’re a fan of WIZARDRY, well then do I have a very cool little evolution of that strand of late-80s famicom RPG design for YOU.

The Megami Tensei duology exists in such a weird little liminal period in time for Megami Tensei The Franchise, and it shows in the game itself. It’s popularly known that this franchise in general pulls its aesthetic and setting inspirations from Nishitani Aya’s Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei novels, some of which have complete fan translations and are totally readable if you want to seek them out! They’re kind of sick! People don’t really like them these days and I do understand why; they’re unabashedly trashy in all respects, and the main character is pretty genuinely repulsive and not in a sort of “ah this boy will learn to be better” sort of way. It’s also easy to see why they were such a big hit in Japan, though. Certainly they were part of a larger boom of overtly horrific occult-based media at the time, and they were part of a larger planned multimedia push that included a now-famous OVA adaptation and finally, of course, these games. But they are themselves brimming with a weird energy, mixing the vibes of a transgressing western-style anti-christian occult sensibility with classical mythology with modern technology in a schlocky soup that any teenager would be happy to slurp down. The OVA captures this vibe and translates it perfectly into the kind of bristling erotic violence that OVAs of that era are now infamous for.

So it’s interesting that Digital Devil Story Megami Tensei The Video Game kind of doesn’t even try? What we get is something I might call “loosely inspired by” its namesake rather than an adaptation of it. You have the same main characters in roughly the same roles – the same people act as reincarnations of goddesses, Cerberus and Loki and Set are here being Important Guys, but beyond these superficial trappings there’s nothing else really anchoring us to the original premise of “kid with school shooter energy summons demons and ruins everything instead of doing a school shooting, slow-motion tragedy unfolds.” It’s not quite doing its own thing either, though; only two of the original three novels were out at the time this game was released, and dialogue here suggests this is kind of an original sequel capstone to those books? Maybe even just the first book. Characters at the very least seem to be familiar with each other, and based on how heroically you behave in the game I guess we’re kind of massaging Nakajima’s image too. It’s all very strange, taking a story that’s about a gross, pulpy horror scenario playing out mostly inside of a school building and instead making it an epic quest to destroy Lucifer inside of his massive labyrinth in the demon world.

That’s not to say I don’t LIKE it though. As we have established, I looooove Wizardry, and this game makes explicit a lot of the shit that early Wizardry asks you to kind of do the mental legwork on yourself. The entire game takes place inside this evil labyrinth and it’s stacked with weird fuckers to hang out with. There’s whole towns inside the labyrinth, and all these cool little details about the kinds of people and demons you’ll meet in there, not all of whom will be hostile regardless of your recruitment game mechanic. Deeper down these towns stop being safe zones from random encounters, but they’re still often populated by guys who might have crucial advice or shop stock or hints for you.

Otherwise it’s a pretty smooth ride. Gameplay is simply for anyone with a passing familiarity with RPGs, with ultimately every single fight in the game ending up as a sheer contest of who can make the biggest number the fastest, but there is satisfaction in being the guy who can make the biggest number the fastest. I love Wizardry but I also love Dragon Quest 1. Eventually you have to be able to cover yourself from things like level drain and instant death spells but that’s about as complex as magic gets here beyond healing and occasional status afflictions that rarely have huge impact on a fight.

The Kyuuyaku versions at least (idk about the famicom original) do have the magnetite system, where you gain a second currency by winning encounters that drains with every step you take based on the number of demons in your party and how high their levels are. Once it runs out your demons will start taking damage every step instead, and MP is a precious resource so you really can’t have that. I find this system frustrating because the balance never feels quite right – ideally for something like this you would be feeling some pressure about it, like you need to weigh your options and figure out whether pushing it too hard will tip the scales away from you. Here though I feel like I’m always either completely in danger of tapping out or I’m so abundant on the stuff that I’m not even checking it. Ultimately it’s not a huge deterrent and there are plenty of ways to get powerful demons when you need them but I do think ditching this system later on and letting player level be the determining factor in how fucked up of a guy you can make was a wise move.

I imagine that the biggest barrier to these games for many people will be the dungeons themselves, but I think a lot has been done in these SNES versions of the games to make them pretty smooth. The auto-map feature is a game-changing addition, and when the late game dungeons start adding things like teleporters, one-way doors, and illusory walls it goes from necessary convenience to essential feature. When you can be punted as many floors as this game is willing to fuck you with I can’t imagine having to chart your own shit. There’s also a series of backtracking-based quests to find hidden items associated with every boss that will make them significantly easier to fight, and it’s actually required to do this in by far the most difficult area of the game to be able to kill the final boss at all, which is, I’m not too proud to admit, very tedious when you feel the end coming up in your bones.

I did like Megami Tensei I and I’ll admit that I’m really easy to please when it comes to the kind of very straightforward blobber that it succeeds at being, but the real star of this package is the sequel, which starts directly after the ending of the first game, no credits, no booting you back to the menu, just the ending screens for the first game, following by one of the most startling nuclear apocalypses in games. A flickering, screaming facsimile of a human face flashing in monochrome under an image of the missiles striking. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Now everything you were doing only moments ago seems smaller. Oops! You got some Shin in my Megami Tensei! Fully leaving any pretense of the novels or their original premise behind, the team behind the original game leap the story ahead 30 years to post-apocalyptic Tokyo, where humans live in underground bunkers, fearful of the demons that rule the wastes, or aboveground in cities where they live in communities that serve and worship cults and armies of demon warlords.

Your characters here are Gamers, who accidentally unleash the demon Pazuzu from the video game he was trapped in by the demon Bael (lmao). He says hello everyone I am PAZUZU and I work for GOD from THE BIBLE don’t worry about it I’m super chill and since you freed me you must be THE MESSIAHS please go kill Bael and don’t think about how he’s the most powerful demon in Tokyo and if he was dead I would be the most powerful demon in Tokyo okay see ya later. And your characters are like yeah that checks out I guess we are the saviors of the world! They’re so fucking stupid it rocks. It’s not until the third main character shows up and is like “have you guys considered that Pazuzu is obviously turbo evil” that you are even given the option to be like oh yeah shit that’s so true but even then your buddy will do the classic megaten move of breaking up with you and threatening to kill you next time you meet. Pazuzu even gives you Orthrus to hang out with! That’s Cerberus’ evil pallet swap! MR POLICE I GAVE YOU ALL THE CLUES, and other things of that nature. This isn’t the only time your protagonist demonstrates the brain power of my recently deceased pet cats either, like another time in the middle of the game you have to go get a thing and the thing is inside of the mouth of a big evil statue with blood all over it and you stick your WHOLE ARM IN THERE, and not only that but the arm that has your demon summoning computer and everything!!! And the statue of course fucking bites it off!!!! OBVIOUSLY. But you do get the status effect LOSARM out of this whole situation, as you have to scrabble your way back to the local mad scientist so he’ll make a robot arm for you, taking damage every step and unable to fight or summon new demons until you do. This whole sequence takes maybe fifteen minutes but it’s all time good SMT shit for me. This is also the diagetic way that the game comes up with for upgrading your demon capacity. You got more ram in your robot arm I guess.

Considering that Megami Tensei I is such a clear first run at an idea that feels very within the scope of what one might imagine both a first run at this franchise to look like and also what that would look like on the famicom, it’s kind of wild that Megami Tensei II just IS essentially a modern Shin Megami Tensei game almost fully formed from the ether. The setting is here, you’ve got your shitty friends who stick with you or ditch you based on your alignment choices (although the alignment system for the player character isn’t actually here yet – you’re essentially playing out a scripted version of what would today be considered a sort of combination neutral-law story), the ending is affected by key decisions that would be a little esoteric if they weren’t so obvious, Lucifer is here and behaving much more in tune with how he’s gonna act in almost all of his future appearances – a frustrated guy who sees humans as similarly beleaguered to his own people, if not still generally at the bottom of the worth-pyramid according to his own personal philosophies (in early games, at least). The kitsch comedy is dialed up, the mad science and esoteric fantasy are more heavily emphasized, and the horror is less overt and more ambient, based more in the smog of having the curtain peeling back on the knowledge that your existence isn’t your own and that resistance to the power that governs life is nearly unthinkable. But also like 70% of sapient life would be down to eat you. Both things.

There’s a degree to which SMT as a series but especially the core entries are just telling the same stories over and over again, filtering characters and details but with core identifying elements and story beats and character archetypes, to in my opinion a much greater degree than a lot of series that do a similar sort of thing. I might have expected a kind of bare take on that framework from a Famicom originator of many of those ideas but even today Megami Tensei II feels pretty fresh! In particular I like what the first half of the game is cooking, the post-apocalyptic Tokyo here being the domain of demon lords all jockeying for power against each other in a perpetual status quo rather than there being a real sense of alignment-based organization between the forces of law and chaos. There’s no big war happening right now, the war’s over, this is just the way things are at the moment, especially with no leaders present for most of the game, so it makes sense that it’s only when Pazuzu arrives on the scene to scam a bunch of idiots into starting shit with the biggest guy in town that things really start to spiral out of control. Pazuzu himself is the most interesting character in the game, because I leave it all genuinely uncertain about whether he actually is a representative of God or not? It initially all seems like a scam, one that he has other demons in on like Orthrus, but he DOES give you that special ring to signify your party’s places as messiahs, and later on an angel does speak fondly of him. He does seem to be mostly interested in seizing power for himself though, and for a demon to switch sides with an ulterior motive is equally interesting. The game leaves it ambiguous, or at least I didn’t talk to the right people to know for sure, and I think it’s really cool! There are a lot of NPCs with a ton of personality in this game, enough for the world to feel rich, to have me doing things like speculating on motivations and making observations about cultures and laughing at individual quirks of specific guys. Really impressive stuff.

This kind of early, wizardry-like first-person dungeon crawler exists in a tough spot, where for people who really like the genre and play a lot of these games I think these remakes that simultaneously preserve the really old, simple mechanics but also provide a lot of quality of life improvements, might be a little too simple to hold interest from a play perspective, even with the demon summoning and negotiation element grafted to the top. For players familiar with modern SMT or who are more general RPG fans though, I think even these simpler, easier dungeon crawlers might be a little bit more opaque and unforgiving than they’re used to and comfortable with and I understand that being a turnoff, even if I do think it’s a hump worth getting over (I did and I’m having a wonderful time exploring this genre). Megami Tensei’s personality is truly the thing that sets it apart; visually, sonically, personality-wise, there wasn’t much else even trying to do this kind of shit at the time and it still has a strongly individual vibe, strong enough that I think this collection is totally worth looking into, even if you skip to the second game. But if you’re already a fan of the series, I can’t emphasize enough that it’s really a nonstop parade of treats. I’m begging everyone to play old games. They’re so cool. Everybody wins.

Despite the recent announcement of a thirty-fourth game, Mystery of the Seven Keys, it’s hard not to feel like Her Interactive’s Nancy Drew series as it was is definitively over. The streak of releases they had perhaps erroneously executed for sixteen years will end in 2015 (the game we’re talking about today is the second game for 2012), and beyond the fact that the next game wouldn’t arrive until 2019 and the following one, the aforementioned Seven Keys is still TBD, almost everything is different now. A new engine that leads to a new mode of movement and play, a new voice for Nancy (if you only read these reviews that may not sound huge but Lani Minella is an enormously important part of this series’ identity), almost total staff turnover at Her Interactive. Marketing for Seven Keys has been going hard since the formal announcement and despite seemingly having very little to actually show, the company seems keen to tie this new game to the legacy of its predecessors, evoking visual cues, inventory items, and even things as vague as Setting Tropes that became iconic to this series over the years. Without knowing whether this new game will resemble the tepidly received franchise-reboot-for-mass-appeal-esque Midnight In Salem or something more traditional remains to be seen. It’s hard to know what to take away from the vague advertisements on the official Nancy Drew PC Game social media accounts.

I’ve mentioned this before in passing, but it does make it feel like, regardless of the literal truth of the statement, the Nancy Drew Cyber Mystery Series is rapidly reaching something of a conclusion, and thinking of this last set of games in that context has me reflecting a lot on the past, which is difficult not to do. It happened to me with Megaman too; when a series is dozens of installments that are all kind of riffing on each other, after a certain point it’s hard to not be constantly making internal comparisons, especially if you play them back to back to back to back. I haven’t quite done that with Nancy Drew but cramming 30+ games in less than two years is a different experience than one every six months or so.

With The Deadly Device, I’m specifically thinking about tone. It’s the first game since, if I recall correctly, the literal first game, Secrets Can Kill, to feature a murder as the driving force behind the mystery. In this case, Nancy has been hired by Jeff Bridges From Iron Man 1 to go undercover at his, like, nondescript science lab that happens to be located at the top of a mountain or something equally wild in Colorado in the middle of winter, where a key researcher at whatever they’re doing there which is truly not important has been killed by the giant tesla coil they keep in the middle of their big lab room, which should theoretically not be possible. So all the research has been halted, all the researchers live at this lab and can’t leave, partially because of the investigation and partially because there’s a big snowstorm that’s expected to blow in soon, and Nancy has to find out who the killer is among them while she poses as a different kind of investigator on behalf of like a realtor or something idk her cover story is so flimsy everybody pretty much figures it out right away.

I’ve felt conflicted about really bringing this up in detail across the last few games but Deadly Device offers a perfect encapsulation of the discord I’ve been feeling so here it is: these games have always walked a tightrope between their stated goal of being nominally educational or at least stimulating content for Young Girls, being workable as all ages entertainment that holds the attention and interest of adults, and, increasingly, what feels to me like the growing tension to want to age up with their audience. Which isn’t to say that early Nancy Drew games are for babies and late Nancy Drew games are edgy affairs. These games have always flirted with the kinds of themes you would find in Nancy’s saucier, sleazier affairs from her college age books that they take a lot of direct inspiration from; death and drugs and crimes of nations and even deep personal trauma flits through these games from the beginning, it just usually does so in the distant past, or on the margins of the stories.

Recently though, those elements stick out at the forefront a little more. Shadow at the Water’s Edge putting the commonly-seen historical side of its story only one generation behind us, rippling directly into the lives of the main cast whose inability to process their grief drives the plot is a stark tonal difference even from the similarly themed Haunted Carousel, which tells a story like this one through the comedy stylings of an annoying robot bird who might have spoken in rhyme? The Captive Curse’s standard scooby doo real estate scheme plot is both used to explore the main side character’s lingering grief and also parallel Nancy’s personal problems, the first ones she’s really ever had in the whole series. Are they good? No. But that doesn’t matter for what we’re talking about here. Alibi in Ashes, of course, puts a question to the very idea of Nancy Drew and what life around her would even look like for regular people and, maybe surprisingly, it’s pretty nasty and mean-spirited about it! The game suggests that Nancy gets to live the life she lives and enjoy the success she does almost entirely because of her wealth and privilege, that any moment one bad day could see everything she has and all of her work fall down around her if she only makes the wrong person mad or tries to pull her brand of justice in a town that’s just a little too corrupt. This will never happen, of course, not in our games, but knowing that it’s happened to other people and that it happens in the world she lives in makes everything she does hit a little differently. Tomb of the Lost Queen similarly pulls its past story straight to the lives of pivotal characters in ways that are toxic and destructive and doesn’t try to work around them either; another game that revisits ideas of an early game with, well, not less nuance, but more willingness to let discomfort exist. Lost Queen may end with a conflict resolved and a peace achieved between factions but it is certainly not the offensive idealism of Mexican government employees happily saluting the people looting their country for profit.

Deadly Device is so far I think the pinnacle of this new subtle shift to slipping this shit into otherwise stock standard Nancy Drew affairs, by like, being about a murder. They get around this of course by keeping the details of the death in the margins; Nancy arrives long after the body has been removed, and she’s only interviewing people for the most part. But when you’re interviewing a lot of angry, stressed people whose careers are functionally over who all already suspect that one of their number is a malicious saboteur with killing on the brain? Well. You’re doing all the Nancy Drew Stuff. You’re doing all the same kind of puzzles (for my money the best puzzles in the entire series by far – diagetically satisfying and almost all of them challenging and engaging), the same kinds of social interactions, you have a day/night cycle to manage, you even have the dumbass Hardy Boys on the phone. But it hits weird. A guy’s dead. A murderer is still around.

Point and click adventure games are one of the best gaming vehicles for horror in my opinion, partially because they distill the player agency at the heart of many horror games to its finest solution. You have very little to do in the moment to moment but direct yourself to the next screen. You feel constantly vulnerable but you’re always the one who has to pull the trigger on the transition to whatever you’re going to see next, and in a lot of games, especially older ones, that’s an instant transition. It’s basic but if it’s a feeling that’s catered to it’s really effective. Nancy Drew games often employ this towards their endings, when a culprit is identified but you haven’t caught them yet, where Nancy is doing whatever she needs to do but you know the bad guy is Around. Sometimes this leads to a direct confrontation at the end of the game but sometimes there’s a situation where the villain is clearly Present or even stalking Nancy and as a point and click character who is also a nebulously teenaged girl, it’s very easy to feel vulnerable in these bits.

Deadly Device capitalizes on this really well. A lot of the time you’re sneaking into people’s work areas, or distracting people with alarms in one part of the facility so you can get to somewhere you’re not meant to be that will only be safe for a really unclear amount of time. One of the main ways to get around is a grated elevator that moves soooooooo slooooooowly so there’s almost always a tension of seeing the person you’re afraid of on the other side of that grate as your view comes up or down from the darkness of the space between floors. And finally when you do identify the culprit, you also know that he already knows you know, and is likely to try to kill you. But by now you don’t know where he is. But you do know that he’s a very large man, and prone to angry outbursts, and the team at Her Interactive understands really well that that’s basically the scariest thing in the world to a young woman. Just about the tensest moments of play I can recall from these games since a similar sequence in Shadow Ranch, but I think it’s done better here, because it’s not a chase, it’s just the fear of not knowing where he is or when he might appear.

That said, the game isn’t terribly dour. It mostly just plays out like a normal Nancy Drew mystery, which is what I mean when I talk about that tonal tightrope – the lack of a present corpse and slight removal in time from the murder means Nancy herself is just kind of operating as usual, which for her means extremely insensitively. You get to call the Hardy Boys, which sucks for me every time they show up because they’re fucking cop losers even worse than Nancy and they get impressively more annoying every game. Their thing this time is that one of them is making up new words by mashing together existing words and being really annoying about it, and the other one is really insistent about the importance of grammar and the immutability of the perfect english language, which is itself an enormous red flag. Get these fucking losers out of my games!!!!! Her actually did make one Hardy Boys game on the Nintendo DS so I have to wonder if they have their personalities from this series in that. If they do that might explain why they only got one go at it. Disaster shit.

Don’t worry though everybody Nancy Drew Cuck Watch is alive and well, it’s just from the most unexpected but welcome place in the form of Nancy’s rival Deirdre from Alibi In Ashes. Or, well, I say Rival but what I mean is she is a regular criminology student and all around normal person who doesn’t like Nancy very much because Nancy is the least likable person of all time, and Nancy thinks they’re rivals because she’s unable to understand the concept of someone knowing who she is and being like “I could go for not hanging out with Nancy.” This has flipped somewhat though to Deirdre basically being like a whiny flirt to Nancy nonstop in this game???? Half of the time complaining loudly about having to do anything and the other half of the time seeming very amused that Nancy thinks she doesn’t like her and continues to insist that Deirdre is her enemy even though Deirdre is obviously into her, which Nancy will never catch on to because she doesn’t know about gay people. It’s good. Deirdre continues to be my shining beacon of light even in a game I already enjoy very much. More on this story as it develops. AND IT HAD BETTER DEVELOP.

PREVIOUSLY: TOMB OF THE LOST QUEEN
NEXT TIME: GHOST OF THORNTON HALL

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

This review contains spoilers

I’ve got a reputation among friends as The World’s Only Cal Kestis liker. My impression of Jedi: Fallen Order is that it’s an enormously POPULAR game, given that it fulfilled everyone’s wishes for a story-driven single-player AAA Star Wars game about lightsabers where you actually tangibly swing one around, something that is not actually uncommon at all but I guess five years feels like a long time for a franchise that gets a new thing every six months. But despite being a AAA game that everyone played I never got the sense that Fallen Order was an especially beloved game; people have big quibbles with its sort of chunky approximation of souls combat, its admirable commitment to No Fast Travel and Not Even That Many Shortcuts, making you walk back and forth across levels at length (which has a side effect of making traversal powers and equipment feel REALLY game changing every time but I digress), and also smaller quibbles that add to the pile like, why are you killing so many ANIMALS in that game?? It’s weird how many like, alligators you’re just fuckin chopping up they’re just chilling! The biggest stickler for many people is of course Cal Kestis himself. Cal Lightsaber. Gotham’s The Joker. Star Wars Archie Riverdale. People HATE Cal. They hate how he talks. They hate that they feel his backstory is overused in extra-filmic Star Wars media. They hate his cool ponchos. They hate the way his character develops. They hate his name for some reason. They loudly hate how he looks which is rude considering he is just a face capture of his actor.

Not me though. I love Cal. Is he generic? Sure. Is his story predictable? Yes. That’s fine though dude. I’m playing a Star Wars game is it supposed to revolutionize storytelling? Was I expecting the 200 million dollar EA published Respawn game to shock and surprise me? I’m not watching frickin’ A Brighter Summer Day over here bro. Cal Kestis is a lil frickin’ cutie. Love me some Cal Kestis, he’s my guy. And I think the first game set the stage to take him and his winning supporting cast in all kinds of directions, it really could have been anything.

I find myself a little bit surprised at the direction that Survivor takes itself. If Fallen Order is a game that is, rotely and blandly, about learning to live trauma, Survivor is a game that is about this same group of people but especially Cal asking themselves what it looks like to live, period, and that’s a much headier question that the game admirably doesn’t pretend there are easy answers to. If the first game ends on something of a note of “well our quest was a bit of a bust but we’ve learned valuable spiritual lessons and come out the stronger for it, Cal has faced his fear and he’s finally found something to fight for and people to fight with,” then Survivor reexamines what it means that the thing he found to fight for was that he deeply internalized the last thing his master saying to him, when he was fourteen years old and fleeing for his life, being “hold the line.”

So a few years after the first game this expresses itself as Cal working for Saw Guerrera, a Star Wars character famous for being a guy who the narratives of Star Wars always say “whoa look out that’s the guy who’s a rebel but he’s Too Extreme and Goes To Far” but actually any time he’s onscreen he’s just being cool and morally correct about literally everything he ever does. So Cal’s working for him for seemingly years now, apart from his old crew which has broken up, and he’s taken on the responsibility of the Jedi Order which to him, a guy who was beginning to come of age at the philosophical nadir of the Jedi as a political organization and during a war in which the Jedi were moved from being The Cops to being The Army, means he has a moral responsibility to use all of his unique and considerable power to fight the empire in a militarized way every single day with no breaks, because every second of his downtime is a second that other people who need help that only he can give aren’t getting it. It’s a very single-minded way to approach the problem of how he can help people against the Empire and he is in fact so fucking weird about this that the only other Jedi he knows, Cere, has stopped hanging out with him over it and they’re not on speaking terms.

The central idea of the game being how to best live under the Empire and how best to fight them is like, shockingly well-woven between every main character. As one might guess, the main plot of the game, about some loser from the disastrously awful High Republic media line is brought out of cryogenic stasis and reveals that there’s a super secret planet that is effectively impossible for the Empire to know about or travel to, and everybody is like oh sick we could go live in peace there! But this guy, Dagan Gera, is like no no you see actually I’m like an evil weirdo 200 year old Jedi and I’m the bad guy now okay see ya later. And so the game becomes a series of quests to find bits and bops of various doohickeys to help Cal beat Dagan to the Ultimate Doohickey that unlocks the Special Planet or whatever it doesn’t REALLY matter, the important thing is that it’s an excuse to have Cal parade around the galaxy and reunite with his shipmates from the first game so they can all hash out their shit and explain the themes of the game to him.

Greez, the original pilot of the ship you fly around in, has settled on a remote frontier world called Koboh, and opened a little bar in a small town menaced by the raiders that Dagan commands. Greez was never fit to fight the empire, he was always just a guy, and a pretty frazzled one, and it makes sense for him to get out of dodge. This is cool. This is okay! He’s had a room in the basement set up for Cal for five years but Cal is so petulantly angry at him and so wrapped up in his own sense of mission that he hasn’t visited once. Merrin, who joined the crew after living most of her life alone among the ghosts of her people’s dead, left the crew, and the Fight, to find her identity. She’s toured the galaxy, and importantly she has helped people out, and decided that the place most appropriate for her most of the time is with Cere, who has joined a group of Jedi cultists who specifically aim to collect and preserve Jedi knowledge and relics from across the galaxy in secret, while also harboring and shuttling people who need protection from the Empire – an elaboration upon the group’s mission from the first game. Cal sees this as quitting, as walking away, and he can’t understand that it’s a different and important part of a fight against an enemy that is all-powerful, monolithic, and who wins by eliminating culture more than by killing people.

It’s cool that this game takes place after such a long timeskip because it’s clear that all of the fights you see have been had many times and really after like the first one with Greez all of the emotions in these arguments are very cooled. Cal is genuinely trying to let go of the betrayal he feels, he’s just not ready to understand what people are telling him, and they aren’t even trying to fight, they only want him to see a broader vision of what life is allowed to be, even in a world where justice legitimately does need to happen via violence.

The game is mature enough to understand that Cal is wrong but it’s also mature enough to know that the answer isn’t “Cal should lay down his lightsaber and embrace a retirement from his fight.” It’s ultimately temperance that everyone comes to understand is necessary for him. Cere knows that her path isn’t Cal’s path and she doesn’t try to convince him, ever, to join her. Merrin knows that she can do more with a group or a partner than she’s done on her own, but also that her newfound wisdom is a valuable asset to her. And Cal is shown multiple examples of the kinds of things that single-minded obsession with noble goals can do to someone in his position via the game’s villains.

Dagan Gera is of course a Jedi, but he is obsessed with his utopian vision of a future for the order that he controls via his discovery of the special planet and his guidance of new Jedi there, and when things start to go wrong he thinks he can pull it out of the fire himself. He truly believes that only he can make things go the way they’re supposed to, and a combination of betrayal by his closest ally and then finding the state of the galaxy when he is resurrected 200 years later to find a tyrannical empire in charge, having decimated the Jedi Order, he thinks his feelings of superiority have been justified, and that now it’s only he who stop this Empire, and he immediately starts doing awful shit in the name of fighting them. And there is of course the true villain of the game, Bode, who is present for most of the time as Cal’s newest and most stalwart ally, just a guy with a daughter he needs to protect, a dead wife he wants to avenge, and a thirst for stormtrooper blood that will never be quenched, but who is also generally very friendly and a quiet emotional rock for Cal at all times. He is, of course, a spy, but an unwilling one, with his daughters safety guaranteed only so long as he operates for the Imperial Security Bureau. Bode’s villain reveal is extremely predictable but the nuances of it may be less so. He is, like Cal, a Jedi survivor, but one who has obviously strayed a little (but importantly ONLY a little) further from his old ideals than Cal has. Protecting his daughter is now the only thing Bode REALLY cares about and he uses that as a shield for the thousands of people he gives up to the empire, but he also, genuinely, didn’t want to do it – it’s suggested that he’s fully prepared to turn tail and run with his kid to the secret planet with our heroes until they start talking about using it as a rebel safe harbor, and he’s just too scared and too selfish to let that kind of risk in. This single-mindedness mirrors Cal’s; it’s the only thing he really talks about, and he behaves increasingly extremely in the service of it. He and Cal both tap fully into what Jedi would call the Dark Side of the force by the end of the game to serve their desperate needs to protect what little family they have left, but Cal listens to his when they has him to be true to himself as he uses this power, and Bode is too scared to do anything but lash out at his daughter. Ultimately both men are desperate to feel a sense of control over the things that are important to them in a world where, fundamentally, they can’t control anything, and a big part of the game is about learning to accept that this isn’t possible. Bode can’t, and he dies.

Cal does, though. His last words, and the last moments of the game before the credits, spoken to a departed friend, are that he knows what he has to do, but he’s scared. This feels on the surface like a walking back of previous game, which was very much about Cal overcoming fear that he had lived with for the years since the Empire’s rise to power and the events of the game. But the fear Cal feels at the end of Survivor is wisdom. It’s the fear of vulnerability, of really letting people in again, of being himself, of letting go of a philosophy that was poisonous in its day and that can’t serve him in the present. Cal thought at the beginning of the game that everyone wanted him to stop fighting, but what they actually wanted was for him to fight and be a person, and that’s so much harder. It’s a much more uncertain place to leave things than the previous game left us with, and indeed if you boot up the post-game there’s now a Star Destroyer hanging in the sky over Koboh – the Empire comes for everyone eventually. But it’s a confident ending, and it feels right. Cal doesn’t have answers, and he doesn’t even really have peace with himself, but he’s opened himself up in a healthier way than he was able to in the beginning, and in a situation like the one these characters find themselves, I don’t think that’s nothing.

It’s somewhat unfortunate that due to the nature of how AAA games are produced, the tv show Andor was conceived, produced, and aired entirely during the dev cycle for Survivor, because these two works do take place in generally the same setting within Star Wars and cover an overlapping set of themes. Through that lens Survivor does feel a little bit like We Have Andor At Home but I think it’s served well by its very zoomed-in focus on Cal’s approach to the question of How To Live And Perform Rebellion vs Andor’s wider-lens, and, in the words of a dear friend of mine, there are MUCH worse things to be in this world than Andor At Home. So I’m left impressed and surprised by Survivor. I do think the game is improved over its predecessor in every single way even if I’m not talking about the play of the game, but like as much as I’m The World’s Only Cal Kestis Fan, that was notable largely because Fallen Order’s writing is so aggressively forgettable, which itself is a staggering improvement over all other writing from Respawn as a studio. I hope that now there will be more of us. I hope that now I will be Only One Of Many Cal Kestis Fans. I imagine it helps that he’s way hotter in this one. I put the windswept hair on him with a short beard. It was the right thing to do.