Rayman 2's another one of those classic 3D platformers that I keep hearing about as a nostalgic favorite. That, and it was on my friend Bubbles's top 25, so I had a feeling this was going to be pretty good. From my experience, I can definitely say that Rayman 2 has fantastic level design; a lot of the 3D platformers of this era do this thing where they don't feel confident enough in their levels to just stick to exclusively 3D platforming, so they'll stick in a shooting minigame here, a kart racing minigame there, and a stealth segment there as diversions from the meat of the game. In Rayman 2 however, the platforming is the core of every level, and they nail it down pat. Even the flying, swimming, and chair rotating sections handle fine because they revolve around a 3D platformer at its core, and thus never feel like gimmicks. As such, Rayman 2 at its core is a fantastic and focused 3D platformer, and it doesn't let you down if you're the core audience.

That said, there are some flaws that could easily be reduced or rectified in a remaster. The camera at times forced perspectives on me where it was hard to make out some of the distance needed for jumps (particularly low lying camera shots), and there were times where I wish the FOV was just a bit larger because there were enemies shooting me off screen that I had to avoid. You also can't rotate the camera upwards or downwards to any degree, so it can be hard to make out when Teensies are caged above you or when you need to avoid enemies firing upon you. A free cam would fix most of these problems, and a FOV slider would fix the other one. I think the combat is also just a little too drawn out (dying from 2-3 standard shots should be just enough), but this is a relatively minor concern overall. And of course, at times I do wish the checkpoints were spread out a bit more evenly; I can't tell you how many times I died during the end of sections of the Precipice or the Pirate Ship only to get clipped by a laser or cannonball and have to restart the whole run again.

It's also worth mentioning that I played this on PC using a GOG version that's a bit scuffed... I had to install quite a few mods to get it running properly, and even then, ran into a glitch on the Iron Mountains where the Pirate Head DRM message popped up on my bought copy to stop me from progressing further. I had to unfortunately skip the end of the level here and move on. I'll acknowledge that this is most likely due to a poor port though, and hopefully Rayman 2: Revolution provides a cleaner experience.

All in all, I can see why Rayman 2 got the praise and acclaim from critics and audiences alike in 1999 as one of the best 3D platformers of its time, and it still holds up quite well. I think a modern remaster released on PC would cement Rayman 2 as unquestionably one of the best 3D platformers of all time alongside Super Mario 64, and I look forward to the day that Ubisoft wakes up and actually makes/remasters Rayman games. Shoutouts to Bubbles once again, you've got great taste and I'm glad I finally got to this, if only because you pointed me towards it.

Kefka is #8 on the “Final Fantasy in least to most order of how lame their major antagonists are” list:

This is probably going to be one of my not-received-very-well takes alongside “I don’t really care for David Bowie’s music all that much,” but I truly do not see what everyone else sees in Kefka. A great deal has been made about his nihilistic worldview, and while I agree that the worldview sure is nihilistic, we stop agreeing in that it’s complex in any way. “You know how like some people are good, and some are like bad? That’s stupid. What if there was just no good or bad? Someone should do something about that.” This guy read the first chapter of Thus Spake Zarathustra and probably meant to finish the rest of the book before being tapped by the empire as a top-ranking general in the death squads and therefore getting all his time used up in that endeavor, which means he never got even close to reading Walter Kaufman’s biography on Nietzsche, and namely the part about how most people really misunderstand him when they declare themselves an ubermensch as an excuse to kill people without consequence. Kefka is not only no more profound than every high school goth dork in every lame slasher movie who decides to rise above mere mortal morality and take it out on girls who refused sex with him in the past, but also to say that he looks unimpressive is an enormous understatement. He... he’s a clown, you guys. He dresses up like a low-rent Venetian carnivale-goer and looks in the mirror each day and says to himself yeah, I look like a badass. You need to understand this, folks, he looks so over-the-top that not even people within the twee-ass final fantasy universe he lives in understand why he does it. Everything about him screams “I’m a huge douche,” and it’s only in the second half of the game that he coasts on the corrupting power of the statues to bring about the world of ruin and provide an impressive final transformation, yes, but even so by no means any more impressive than Exdeath.

He also needs to get my favorite Czech post-modernist author’s name out of his mouth, whose writing has nothing to do with his shallow worldview whatsoever.

Coming into your own and saying goodbye

If you want the short, simple and clean version of how I feel about Kingdom Hearts II then here: My short, simple and clean thoughts on Kingdom Hearts II.

Kingdom Hearts II is a special video game for me and it'll take a bit out of me to explain why. Around May 2006, I was eleven years old and the only thing I wanted was Kingdom Hearts II after playing Kingdom Hearts to death as a child and forever being allured by the advertisements playing on television and video game stores. I remember having barely enough money to cover the game itself and went everywhere trying to find a copy of the game until I found a copy new but it wasn't sealed, my young impatience really wanted to buy that version then and there but my parents wanted me to get a sealed copy so we went looking for a different store and despite my temporary frustration, we eventually did find one sealed not long after. The car ride and reading the back and the manuals are almost a lost tradition these days with the modern world but I do remember them fondly still. It felt like I was holding onto something that was a long time coming personally back then and sure enough that it was. Kingdom Hearts II was the first video game I ever truly bought with my own money, made from doing grueling labor at my aunt's house for only ten dollars at a time but my family wasn't doing that well growing up at all if ever. I remember playing it during a time where I found out I was gonna move soon and well the sad thing was that I finally actually made some friends back at elementary school. I was always the weird kid growing up but then I finally met some kids that were really nice to me and we would actually hang out and play Pokemon FireRed with the wireless adapters. I remember the feeling of seeing them for the last time ever and then beating the introductory segment to Kingdom Hearts II in which I admit I also just wanted to play as Sora at the time since I was also pretty young back then and didn't play Chain of Memories before. I just remember playing and missing those said friends the whole time especially since I was mostly alone for a long time after moving. Despite that, Kingdom Hearts II itself is what I feel personally the ideal Square Enix and Disney crossover game that they could've made for me.

I always felt like this journey has had the most emotional impact on Sora as a character. The disney characters you meet are always glad to see you and always reassure him that he will find his loved ones at the end of this journey. The way he also sees certain interactions with the characters just always make him feel just as emotional as the player can be during these scenes. It's the game where I truly feel like Sora cares about Riku and Kairi and vice versa with the game managing to show this perfectly. The introduction segment of Kingdom Hearts II is something I feel like we can almost all relate to. The childlike wander of hanging out with your friends and doing shenanigans while realizing you only have so much time until the real world comes for you like it does for all of us. I only hope we can treasure that time together when things were so much simpler. Not to mention the finale segment goes off the wall in how bizarre it can truly get and feels like such a spectacle that it's hard to keep your eyes off while still having that emotional core that Kingdom Hearts II holds firmly throughout the whole experience.

Kingdom Hearts II might the best that can manage the art of "pressing X or A continuously" and yet resulting in a fun and dynamic combat experience. I've always played on Proud for the several playthroughs I have of this game due to the PlayStation 2 version we got here didn't have Critical until in more modern times where we have ports of the Final Mix version now so there was no more excuses. I did my first playthrough on Critical and it feels even more tight than I remember. Sora being able to do flashy moves, the techniques of movement, magic feels more fluid to use and more streamlined so every spell is important is just the icing of this large cake of a never ending struggle. If Kingdom Hearts II on Proud and lower, makes you spam the X or A button then Critical will actually make you think about it in a sense while giving you more fun tools to play around with. This also includes the huge variety of boss fights with different mechanics too which really make each encounter truly unique. Perfect play is rewarded and being reckless will kill you but it lets the combat fully utilize what it can provide for you and what it can provide for your enemies. Drive forms turn Sora into a specialized monster with each form giving you specific abilities including abilities that help Sora's maneuverability in general.

The very first track you hear when you boot up Kingdom Hearts II sets up the tone in a very somber way accompanying the art of two young men sharing ice cream together. Essentially when you hear that piano, you know you're in for a very important moment. It's very hard not to sing the praises of the soundtrack considering how important the music is to me that I remember each of the song's melodies by heart now. If I had to share one song that encapsulates Kingdom Hearts II for me it would be the friends in my heart.

I spent a lot of time playing this game during the past several days that it didn't even dawn on me that I started playing this only three days ago and now here I am writing my thoughts after having beaten it for the fifth time now. I honestly don't think those friends in elementary school even remember me at this point or remember I even exist but I hope they're doing alright. For one of the few times in my childhood, you guys didn't make me feel like something was wrong with me and I thank you for that. I never like to get too personal with my thoughts on video games but Kingdom Hearts II deserves that and so much more and I hope it has done for you what it did for me. I will be lost to time but I hope this game never will be. A coming of age journey across a galaxy just to find the ones you care about the most.

Thank you for reading.

this game is a lot smarter than a lot of people will ultimately give it credit for. it's a perfect anniversary game, a metatextual remake of the original final fantasy in the general shape of a 'soulslike' (though it's much easier than any souls game ive played past the first boss). its an anti-jrpg masquerading as a straight jrpg, looping around to being a straight jrpg masquerading as an anti-jrpg, a polemic of jrpgs, and a polemic of polemics of jrpgs (particularly obvious in the character writing, and when i say jrpg here im mostly referring to the narrative and stylistic conventions of the form rather than their ludoexpression which this game doesnt really touch upon being a straightforward action game). there's layers. it's sadly buried under a very poor first impression narratively speaking, which might put some (many) people in the position of "this game is sincerely incompetent and is funny because of it", and i think that's a shame, almost every scene thats been mocked on twitter has been intentionally constructed to be puzzling and off-sounding, to tick one off into thinking deeper as to the whys, and others (the so-called limp bizkit scene) are genuine attempts at humour. so while i think the game's poor initial impressions do not help, it will be eyebrow raising to me if someone plays through this whole thing and doesn't realise the game and the developers are in on the 'trick' (it's not purely a joke). very wonderful game.

I’m sure the learned scholars of Backloggd will already be familiar with I, We, Waluigi: a Post-Modern analysis of Waluigi, a foundational lens through which we can view almost every video game mascot ever conceived - Ms. Pac Man, Ken Masters, Evil Ryu, Roxas, Shadow Mario, Dark Link, Dark Pit, Dark Prince, Dark Samus, and, of course: Shadow the Hedgehog. But who is Shadow the Hedgehog? Following the tenets of Waluigi Theory, it’s safe to say he’s a copy of the individual shaped by the signifier - a stencil-clone of Sonic the Hedgehog, who himself exists as a reflection of Super Mario, having been created for the express purpose of giving his codemasters a jumping mascot to stick on the box of a video game machine¹. Appropriate then that this black-furred badass lab rat would be called Shadow, existing as he does in the literal shadows of his progeniting mascots. You think I’m taking the piss, right? Well, Shadow the Hedgehog (the game) thinks the same thing I do about Shadow the Hedgehog (the character): that Shadow is just that - a shadow, an unindividual who ceases to exist when Sonic the Hedgehog inevitably moves from the light. And in the year 2005, Sonic the Hedgehog was almost standing in the dark.

Shadow the Hedgehog’s writing team, keenly aware that the 8 year olds playing the game may not have read the works of Swiss semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure, choose to expound this metaphor in a more explicit manner, and centred it in the game’s narrative. Shadow the Hedgehog (the game) begins with a literal Judgement Day, The Creator appearing to Shadow the Hedgehog (the character) in a biblical vision evocative of Exodus 3:3. The Black Doom asks: I created you, but who or what are you? And what form shall you take? Follow my commandments, and you can become as God. (Though unlike the Bible, Shadow the Hedgehog is more interested in getting you to follow the tenets of Collect 8 Orbs than not making unto thee any graven image) Late in the events of Shadow the Hedgehog (the game), it is revealed that Shadow the Hedgehog (the character) isn’t actually Shadow the Hedgehog at all, but in fact an android replica of Shadow the Hedgehog who is imitating the memories and actions of his predecessor, Shadow the Hedgehog. The shadow must define itself in a battle between the unconscious aspect of the self and the conscious ego that does not identify in itself, or the entirety of the unconscious; that is, everything of which a person is not fully conscious. In short, Shadow the Hedgehog is the unknown.

And how does the unknown choose to define itself? Well, this Sega of America-developed video game takes place during the great uncertainty of the War on Terror. Not just in the figurative sense that the game came out four years after 9/11; it literally places Shadow’s mission to collect the Chaos Emeralds in the middle of a war between the United States government (referred to in-game as Westopolis) and an enemy ‘terror force’ called “the black aliens” (the US President in the game always uses this term for them!! that shit is NOT a coincidence baby!!!!). As with his foray into Saussurian philosophy, Takashi Iizuka doesn’t quite trust the patrons of DeviantArt to grasp the nettle of his argument he’s making here, and eventually has to have characters say things like “we don’t negotiate with terrorists!” and “if you’re not with me, you’re against me!”. Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith was released six months earlier.

To tie a bow on the whole treatise, the war is ultimately hijacked by a hypercapitalist/industrialist force - lead by a Northrop Grummanesque Dr. Robotnik - who reveals that Shadow the Hedgehog (the android) isn’t actually an android, but is in fact the original Shadow the Hedgehog (the character) after all, conditioned to believe he was an android replica of himself for a purpose the game doesn’t explain. Presumably the developers trusted the player to digest such philosophical matters on their own time, so allow me to explain the game’s message: capitalism has created your character, Shadow the Hedgehog, a being who can only exist in reference to other things. Shadow is the true nowhere man/hedgehog, without the other things he reflects, inverts and parodies he has no reason to exist. Shadow’s identity only comes from what and who he isn’t – without a wider frame of reference he is nothing. He is not his own man. In a world where our identities are shaped by our warped relationships to brands and commerce we are all Waluigi Shadow the Hedgehog.

To sum up this game in a sentence: Charmy Bee leads an assault on a United States federal prison.

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¹ Super Mario himself is a reference to Jump Man (star of Donkey Kong (1983)), who was in turn an homage to Nintendo of America’s Brooklyn landlord. This arguably makes Shadow the Hedgehog the inversion of a reflection of a copy of a signifier of Mario Segale, a 62 year old landlord.

Legends: Arceus is incredibly fortunate that it's a Pokémon game, as there's a lot here that would be nearly unforgivable in any other context.

The story has some nice moments, and a handful of enjoyable characters, but is achingly plodding, tedious in its repetitions, and ultimately overstays its welcome. The core gameplay loop often feels like it amounts to little more than making numbers go up and ticking boxes. The boss fights were actually pretty enjoyable to me just because they broke up the core gameplay loop, but they do amount to an E-Grade Souls rip-off with some pretty bad game-feel. In general I think game-feel is something Legends: Arceus really struggles with, especially when this aspect collides headlong into some of the ways where the game feels unfinished (attempting to traverse hills and edges of terrain makes this really obvious).

The game also feels like it is suffering a bit of an identity crisis at times; a common occurrence for the first half of the runtime is that you'll end up in a battle with some story character, you'll have six monsters to their one or two meaning you can never really lose no matter what happens, and then as soon as you win your party is healed for you. It's like they didn't want the trainer battles to define the game, but were too scared to move away from them to a more dramatic extent in case the lack of them might disappoint long-time fans.

Easily the most damning problem though, and the one I really can't shake, is the world design. These environments are just so lifeless, so lacking in intrigue. Big, bland, bumpy, and ultimately distractingly ugly, expanses that exist solely to plonk down critters upon. If you removed the Pokémon themselves from the equation it's hard to imagine people actually wanting to exist in these spaces, or having any real desire to explore them.

Legends Arceus has a lot wrong with it, and yet despite this it is still a Pokémon game and this does some serious heavy lifting in its favour. Despite all my many complaints, sometimes you just see the most perfect, adorable little critter wandering around in the wild, you crouch down in the grass to try and sneak up on it, and in that moment it's hard to harbour any ill-will against what's going on here. Pokémon has always been a franchise that carries with it an incredible amount of charm and the best moments in Legends Arceus are the ones where that charm shines through, and for all the game's faults I was left smiling more than this review might suggest just because it's hard to feel too bad when you get to spend your time vibing around all these lovely monster-friends.

Raphaël Colantonio’s decision to leave Arkane stemmed from wanting to get away from the bloated-ness and inefficiency of AAA game development – he often used the example of how chairs would take 2 days to model during the making of Prey 2017, while during the days of Arx Fatalis it was closer to 2 hours. So how’s his first experiment in scaling down to the indie realm gone? Pretty well, all things considered. I’ve felt for a long time now that Colantonio is one of the best game directors currently working and I’m happy to say that Weird West is another solid attestation to that, with the caveat that it takes a good while before it clicks.

For anyone who’s familiar with immersive sims, the most immediately offputting part about Weird West is its camera perspective. I almost fell prey to this myself, but once you become more comfortable with the game, you’ll start to realise that all the juicy emergent goodness that makes this design philosophy (or, if you dare, this genre) tick is still there, even if you’re not witnessing it from the same point of view as your character. More than once, I set off an unintended chain reaction of events via independent but interlinking gameplay systems that ended up revealing a new path through an area or which allowed me to complete a quest in a roundabout, unscripted way, and these sorts of organic, player-directed experiences are what Looking Glass Studios ultimately predicated the term upon in 1997. Where so many games popularly touted as living up to the definition just don’t, Weird West surely does.

Environmental interactivity arguably doesn’t quite approach the craziness of Prey 2017, but Weird West’s integration of status effects into its physics engine gives it a leg of its own to stand on. I’m a huge fan of how soaked containers dynamically fill up with water for loads of reasons, but special mention also goes to the sheer amount of stuff you can set on fire, because there’s nothing quite like accidentally burning down an entire farmstead or patch of forest in the process of fending off an ambush. I like how these properties are applied to character abilities too because of the room for experimentation it allows, especially when you combine several at once. I particularly enjoy secreting poison pools as the Pigman and then setting them alight with explosive shotgun shells to make a porky mini-nuke on demand, but the beauty of games like this is that I'll probably look back on a current favourite tactic like that and eventually think of it as rudimentary compared to what's possible when you dig deeper into its systems.

Weird West’s story is more interesting than it’s being given credit for on here, but I don’t blame anyone for tapping out before it gets to the point where you can say that. I get the need to ease people into an unorthodox setting with a vanilla premise, but Jane Bell’s narrative hook goes beyond vanilla and pivots itself on something that you as a player have no reason to care about. Jane might be fussing about where her husband is, but I’m not. Who is he to me? It runs the risk of driving a wedge between the player and their character, but the other four protagonists (especially the one immediately after Jane) more than make up for this in terms of intrigue and how elegantly they fill the “blank slate player avatar” role, albeit not quite as perfectly as Morgan Yu.

In terms of niggles, the movement comes to mind. Dishonored 1 and Prey 2017 have some of the most liberating, intrinsically satisfying movement in the medium – you explore every nook and cranny of Dunwall and Talos I not because you're told to, but because it feels so good to do it that you naturally want to. Despite the impressive size of its world, I never felt that same enticement in Weird West because its movement options are so paltry in comparison. And how’s about those character portraits not matching their models? Like, at all? I’m willing to chalk this up to a case of “small indie company please understand,” because I can’t imagine anyone actively wanted lean, bearded, grizzled veteran gunslingers to share the same in-game appearance as (oddly abundant) overweight, alcoholic Asian women. It’s true that this camera angle allows for some mental abstraction on the player’s part – Fallout 1&2, both big influences on Weird West, use one animation for loads of different stuff – but past a certain point, I feel like I’m being asked to deny what’s in front of my eyes. Or even what’s happening around me, sometimes, considering how often my companions would try attacking invincible children or be rendered immobile by an ankle-high step, the deadliest of all the west’s creatures.

In the grand scheme of things, though, issues like these are probably worth looking past. Immersive sims have been around for longer than I’ve been alive, and in that time, there's not been nearly as many breakout hits or unambiguous commercial successes as you'd assume from the notoriety of examples like Deus Ex or System Shock; we’re pretty fortunate to still be getting any new spins on the formula at all. And as a new spin on the formula, Weird West’s definitely an impressive first showing for WolfEye, but also one with more than a few holdovers of the days when its staff were still under the watchful eye of Bethesda’s investors – hopefully their newfound freedom permits them to become a bit bolder and weirder from here on out.

fuck, croc, i was rooting for you. i really was. you deserved better.

the story goes that croc was originally pitched by argonaut games to nintendo as a yoshi game, as what would be the first ever 3D platformer: Yoshi Racing. miyamoto was apparently enthusiastic about the idea, but nintendo turned them down. argonaut had previously had a very close working relationship with nintendo. they helped make many of their first 3D games on the snes, including the original star fox. but things started to seem iffy when nintendo decided not to release star fox 2, which was already completed. when nintendo turned down argonaut on their yoshi project, argonaut forged forward with the idea and ended up making croc. and nintendo? well, whether or not they took the idea directly or not, they made super mario 64, a game with a similar premise and with a legacy that continues to endure, while croc has faded into obscurity and argonaut fizzled out in the 2000s. jez san, the founder of argonaut, said miyamoto himself apologized to him for how nintendo handled the situation, and that at least croc was doing well for them. but jez san felt that the bridge had already been burned a long time ago.

this firmly solidifies croc as an underdog, a scrappy and ambitious game who had its thunder stolen by one of the biggest gaming companies of all time. we all love an underdog story, i'm sure. but underdogs aren't always good at their job. and croc, frankly, isn't.

it's all so rote as to be asinine to describe: croc consists of running and jumping between FOUR COLORFUL WORLDS and collecting FLOATING ICOSAHEDRONS and saving these little fuzzy critters called "gobbos", which i can't take seriously at all, partially because its a silly name, but mostly because i once stumbled into some erotica about lesbians turning into goblins that was very intensely into body odor fetish and she referred to herself as a "gobbo" and that's all i can think about when i hear it now. the levels are trivially short if you don't go for the collectibles, which at least can make completing this game less painful. but i don't even like 3D platformers that much to begin with, and this game is maligned even among those fans.

i'm sure there a bunch of reviews on youtube or whatever that go into the particular design failures of croc. i don't really want to get into it too deep. but a note on tank controls: i think tank controls are fine. i like them. they do need to exist in a context, though. croc is a 3D platformer, which usually shouldn't have that, but i do genuinely think you could have a decent 3D platformer with tank controls. but this isn't it. controlling croc doesnt feel great, but it could be a lot worse, it's better than bubsy 3d. honestly the bigger issue is his tailwhip attack, where he yells "kersplat!!" or "kaboof!!" or "kapow!!" and pretty much never hits any enemy and dies because the hit detection in this game is terrible. for me the problem of game feel is exacerbated by everything else. it has this classic 3d platformer design, the same kind that underwhelmed me in spyro and crash, and in fact the extension of design in the mascot platformers of the previous era, a game of just "Stuff in Places". its far from the worst example of that design, collectibles are usually framed within some particular challenge or puzzle, but it’s just not enough. everything is forgettable. it instills this sense of meaninglessness to these objects and it doesn't help that along with that, moving croc around never feels great.

i know people have nostalgia for these kinds of games, but there is a very good reason mascot platformers have died out. they were always banking on the likability of their funny animals, but there's only one mickey mouse. there are some great ones, sure. but do you like mr nutz, kao the kangaroo, donk the samurai duck? probably not, and if you do, you probably stan gex ironically. because when you're banking on the character, you're not really spending much time on everything else. i dont know what most of these enemies are supposed to be, the levels mostly look the same, couldn't hum you any of these songs. but that doesn't matter. just look at the funny animal, go through 8 levels in green grass forest place collecting MAGIC GEMERALDS and then 8 levels in the sewer and then 8 levels in ice world and then the end of the game. these games lack so much personality even though that's the exact thing they're trying to cash in on. croc, my friend, i'm trying to give you a chance, i'm listening to you when you say "kersplat!!", i want you to be the clumsy yet triumphant underdog, but theres so little to care about, i dont care about the secret jewels, and every single time i save one of these little gobbos all i can think about is that goblin lesbian porn i read. how did i even find it? i can't even remember, but it was about a virus that turns people into very stinky goblins and orcs. ive got no problem with the green lesbians, i respect and cherish them. but i have so many questions. why "gobbo"? is that seriously sexy? why was it so clearly a reference to covid-19? with quarantine measures and such? how would a virus even change your bone structure? maybe it can, im not a doctor. and why did it then frame the virus as something that would project into social standing? it constantly highlights prejudices and judgements cast on those who become smelly goblins. are there unanswered issues with racial politics within its fantasy? why was it also very deliberately using an epistolary style, as if on reddit? are cockney accents for goblins supposed to be sexy? why was the stinkiness so important? are goblins and orcs particularly stinky? they were always talking about the smell, i'm not even sure what smell i was supposed to imagine. i know that's a fetish but like why? is reading about the odor enough to illicit a response? i'm not even really disgusted by it i am just trying to process it. there are so many weird twists and turns with the interiority of the characters that we see, how they respond. stinky gobby girl and her big giant smelly orc gf. im happy for them but also what. is it supposed to be a metaphor for something specific? queerness, transness, disease, disability, racism, classism, something else entirely? who is all this even for? is it for me? did i like it? i don't THINK i liked it, but i definitely found it somehow, and i definitely read it to the end, and i definitely am still thinking about right now when i'm trying to play croc: legend of the gobbos and i’m definitely considering reading it again

Nekopara is a series of adult visual novels you've most likely heard of in passing from post-post-post-ironic weeaboos online who wear Ahegao hoodies in public and think being horny is a personality trait. It's the funny anime game about the catgirl cafe that's garnered a status comparable to something like Bad Rats: a gag gift best sent to your friends during a Steam sale for a quick laugh (which is how I obtained my copy back in high school), or something you play so your "hilarious" Steam status pops up on your friend's screens during their CS: GO matches. In honor of the holiday, I thought "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if I played the porn game about cat girls and published a review on it online?", but while I slogged through one of the most joyless visual novels I've ever read, I came away with a lot to ruminate on betwixt the standard anime hijinks and incestuous little sister jokes.

Now obviously, Nekopara is porn, and if you came here expecting anything other than the world's most boring set-up to catgirl hentai, you were barking up the wrong tree. But as I was reading through lines and lines of filler text and moeblob cuteness, I found myself thinking about the common archetypes you find in the female characters written for this sort of media: the incestuous little sister romance, the (worryingly) child-like girl, or in Nekopara's case, pets. These all have a connective through-line, which is a lack of independent agency and an innate dependency on a superior of some kind (usually the self-insert main character of the story.) This throughline isn't something specific to Japanese media by any means, but these are just some of the few I noticed while reading Vol. 1.

The very concept of catgirls as they are written in Nekopara are a bastard child of the aforementioned archetypes mentioned previously: They're pretty explicitly stated in the text to be analogous to cats, displaying numerous cat-like mannerisms. They have a limited understanding of human society and abstract concepts (money, emotional awareness, etc.) and are even required to be "chipped" in a sense via the possession of an "Independent Action Permit", a mix between an ID and a Driver's License, in order to be allowed in polite society without being detained by Animal Control. They mature at roughly the same rate as a regular cat (it's stated offhandedly that a 6 month old catgirl is roughly equivalent to a 12 year old girl), but retain roughly the same intellect and mannerisms of a child. But most importantly for Nekopara's main intent, they can't bear human children, the existence of catgirl-human sexual relations is both normal and widely accepted alongside those who keep them as regular pets or family members in this society, and they are "excessively honest and uncomplicated", which means that emotional miscommunication and conflict basically never happens (unless its in service of anime tropes, like "jealous clingy tsundere").

What this means is that Nekopara's catgirls are the "idealized woman" for the target audience: a walking fleshlight in the shape of an girl, who has an innate attraction to the self-insert main character and will basically never reject them. A mirage of a character who only exists for pleasure. This is taken to the extreme in the context of Nekopara, in which the main character (who has helped raise the two leading catgirls ever since they were kittens and explicitly views them as daughters and family) enters a sexual relationship with what is essentially his pet cats/younger twin sisters, the ultimate fetishistic culmination of tropes to create the most dependent females possible for the express purpose of sexual pleasure. Incestuous threesomes and shower sex are sandwiched in-between the most trite rom-com anime scenarios and paragraphs of pure filler text to create the perfect visual novel for the modern-day weeb, the equivalent of a corporate blockbuster designed to appeal to the otaku equivalent of John Q. Public. This isn't an original conclusion by any means, and it's one that's not even necessarily a negative in terms of Nekopara's main goal (be titillating and provide comfort to its target audience), but it's telling that the series can basically excise the naughty 18+ bits from its story and still achieve success in other medium adaptations with little editing to the main girls' writing.

It's a formula that obviously works: Nekopara has numerous sequels, spinoffs and is one of the biggest rags-to-riches success stories to come from the eroge scene in recent memory. It's the kind of monumental success that makes someone with an ahegao anime girl avatar on Twitter thrust their arms towards the sky in joy to celebrate the "Based" culture of the Land of the Rising Sun, as if the success of an eroge where a guy sticks his dick in his pet cat is some kind of cultural dunk on the puritanical Westerners who would seek to deprive them of their catgirl waifus. Nekopara wasn't the first, nor was it the last time a bog-standard anime-flavored media property with weird sexual content and weirder fans is used as another lamppost for the proverbial moths to flock to. It's just another drop in the bucket as far as weeaboo culture is concerned.

“As we go about our lives, we touch people, we see people, and interact with them; and in doing so we feel many things. Sometimes we make others happy, sometimes we hurt them, we sympathize, and we disagree. In the midst of this, we learn that people’s thoughts and feelings are not a one-way street.” - Kazuki Takahashi, creator of Yu-Gi-Oh!

I’ll be upfront, writing a review for this game is one of the hardest things I’ve ever attempted to do as a writer. Writing about this game has left me stuck in a place where I don’t know how well I can properly express it. Originally, I was planning on doing a massive overview of every aspect that the game had to offer. I wanted to go over its art direction, the character designs, the fantastic soundtrack, its unique and innovative gameplay systems, and its masterful storytelling and character work. In fact, I have multiple google docs of my attempt to do that, and I’m still really proud of what I wrote there. The point of the matter is that I wanted to do something that could do my favorite game of all time justice, something that would put everything else I’ve written on this site to shame. But once the time came to get down everything I could about the story, words… failed me. This isn’t the first time I’ve run into this issue, I’ve tried to write a massive review of Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, another game I hold incredibly close to my heart, and the sheer scope of that was something that collapsed on me. But this felt different, what I was trying to write just felt off about it. It’s only now that it feels like I realized what was truly going wrong with my writing for this game. It didn’t feel like I was writing to express my passion for the game like I wanted to, it felt like I was writing to prove myself. To prove that I can keep up with friends around me that were able to write longform pieces just as well as, if not better than me. To prove that the game had so many masterful elements to it, and that people around me who were tearing it down or underwhelmed more than I expected were missing what made it truly special. That line of thinking sort of put me in a rut of writing in general, which just piled on a number of things going on in my life that were putting me in a really rough spot emotionally. After seeing a couple of conversations of people having similar struggles writing about their favorite games, it helped me realize that I wasn’t really seeing what I should’ve been doing, just writing about what the game really means to me.

In a way, exploring this game set me on my own emotional journey, sort of like everyone else running through those weeks in Shibuya, enduring things that would encourage them to close themselves off, doubt themselves, do what comes naturally. In that sense, more than anything else I could write about in some 10+ page paper, the most important thing I can say about my relationship with TWEWY is that I can see a piece of myself in all of the main characters. In Shiki, I can see my struggles with constantly comparing myself to my peers and a lack of faith in who I really am. In Beat, I can see some of my own self-destructive tendencies and my own failure of being someone those closest to me can look up to. Even in Joshua, I can see how I allow myself to justify and feed into some intrusive thoughts and flawed outlooks I have in life. Trying to analyze everyone in this is like staring into shards of a mirror with a reflection that stares more deeply back at me as I put the pieces together. And at the center of it, the piece that shows the clearest reflection of me… is Neku.

On the surface, Neku is… a total dick. He’s pretty rude, closes himself off from everyone, and looks down upon the very idea of opening up. I think a lot of people interpret this at the surface level, as him being an asshole who goes through an arc of not being an asshole. However, that’s not the Neku I really see, and especially not the part I see in myself. Beyond his intense snark and attitude, I don’t see someone who’s disgusted by the idea of becoming friends and getting close to people, I see someone who’s scared of opening up to others and the risks that entails. Putting yourself out there is a pretty scary prospect, it makes you more vulnerable to people who don’t have that kind of respect for you, who want to use you for their own gain, or potentially leaving you empty if they’re gone. What he says to Shiki after the climax of day 4 doesn’t feel like him trying to make a “gotcha!” moment out of a tragic situation, he’s letting out a good chunk of his insecurities in the only way he really knows how. I wouldn’t say I’ve struggled with that quite to the degree that Neku seems to, but it’s an aspect I pretty deeply resonate with.

From the way I’ve been writing about this so far, you might think that the main piece that makes it connect with me is that they go through a lot of the same struggles that I do. While that’s definitely a part of it, what I think makes it truly special is seeing the light that enters their lives as they do take the chance to open up and put themselves out there. When Neku notices that something’s up with Shiki and allows her to open up about everything she’s been holding in, it really hits him. It gives him the revelation that all of this fear and anxiety he keeps bottled up, it’s something that all sorts of people go through. Experiencing that kind of realization for himself is the big thing that really sets him on this path of growth, that makes him really learn to care about everyone around him, despite a prevalent week 2 character’s efforts to drive him back into his old mindset. Seeing him break out of his hardened shell and connect with others, most notably with how he applies what he learned when talking to Beat, it’s… beautiful. It’s beautiful to see how much he’s grown through his interactions with others, especially with how human everyone in this game feels. Even games I’ve played before and after that try similar things don’t strike that chord with me quite as much because of how real TWEWY’s interactions feel.

I frequently wonder if I would ever really be in the same place that I am now without the people closest to me, especially those I’ve met online that have made me really come to understand some of my values and introduced me to wonderful experiences that I’ll treasure forever. I feel like the brightest parts of my current life come from how I was able to put myself out there and form connections and couldn’t have otherwise. If seeing those pieces of myself running around in that city for those few weeks showed me anything, it’s that people aren’t as simple as what you see on the surface, and the way to look beyond that is to expand your world.