skylights
56 Reviews liked by skylights
Super Dangan Ronpa 2: Farewell Despair Academy is a story with barely any direction that is salvaged only by a handful of interesting characters. The characters in this game are really good at times which makes me want to like it, but the overall plot is just a no for me. Unlike the first and especially the third mainline game in this series, the daily life sections feel like you're just waiting for a body to show up more than anything else due to how little the main character bonds with the rest of the cast.
Additionally, the gameplay sections can feel very annoying at times with the new minigames being mostly bad. Logic Dive and the new Agree Points are welcome improvements though.
Additionally, the gameplay sections can feel very annoying at times with the new minigames being mostly bad. Logic Dive and the new Agree Points are welcome improvements though.
I want to get off Mr. Monokuma's wild ride.
While the first game had its fair share of problems, I ended the game thinking it was a good time overall. I really can't say the same thing about Danganronpa 2, where it feels like despite exceeding in some of what it does compared to the first, it also ends up doubling down on just how annoying DR1 was at times.
This game ditches the trapped-in and oppressive atmosphere of Hope's Peak Academy for the tropical island setting of the Jabberwock Islands. While I can dig the new atmosphere, it just doesn't manage to hit quite like hopeless scene the first game provided. There is something hiding under the paradise that gets revealed during the final case though, and it is SUPER cool where they take it. The soundtrack is still good, and I do like this game's UI although I'm not too fond of the pixel aesthetic this game sometimes goes for.
However, I really can't stand this game's humor. Nearly every time this game attempts to be funny I want to shove a knife through my abdomen. Sometimes a couple of jokes manage to land, but DR2 loooooves being self-aware or more referential than the first game and it almost never got a chuckle out of me. I also wasn't laughing when characters either act like the biggest idiots ever or can't keep their dick in their pants half of the time; I am talking to YOU, Kazuichi. There are more characters that I like than in the first game, but they make sure to counteract that by having more bad characters, and to make them even more insufferable, as well. I am talking to you TOO, Mikan and Hiyoko.
I'm feeling mixed on the trials. There are some cool things added like consent and the sword duels, but then they made the Hangman's Gambit worse ("improved", my ass) and both it and Logic Dive are inexplicably placed into quite a number of moments where they could just ask a question and lose nothing of value. They also still don't fully get rid of the "Trial Point Getters" issue although it's somewhat better here, I guess.
Cases 3 and 4 are very bad, the Despair Disease is an absolutely trash motive, and the trial is just.. oh, god. DR2 has a really big problem with droning on, and on, and on that's at its worst in Case 4, leading to a pre-trial that made me about as sick of the game as Hajime was at that point. The trial was whatever but I liked the ending. Cases 2 and 6 rock, though. I'm glad they managed to have a good final case this time, considering the underwhelming final trial the last game ended on.
To sum it up, though, DR2 is plagued with bad pacing, the loss of DR1's oppressive atmosphere, insufferable characters, bad humor, and unnecessary additions. I'm not a fan, and I hope V3 manages to do better.
By the way.. check out this spreadsheet I did. We counted both the hopes AND despairs that are either spoken or read (and then some) this time. And most of the former is that stupid white-haired twink's fault.
While the first game had its fair share of problems, I ended the game thinking it was a good time overall. I really can't say the same thing about Danganronpa 2, where it feels like despite exceeding in some of what it does compared to the first, it also ends up doubling down on just how annoying DR1 was at times.
This game ditches the trapped-in and oppressive atmosphere of Hope's Peak Academy for the tropical island setting of the Jabberwock Islands. While I can dig the new atmosphere, it just doesn't manage to hit quite like hopeless scene the first game provided. There is something hiding under the paradise that gets revealed during the final case though, and it is SUPER cool where they take it. The soundtrack is still good, and I do like this game's UI although I'm not too fond of the pixel aesthetic this game sometimes goes for.
However, I really can't stand this game's humor. Nearly every time this game attempts to be funny I want to shove a knife through my abdomen. Sometimes a couple of jokes manage to land, but DR2 loooooves being self-aware or more referential than the first game and it almost never got a chuckle out of me. I also wasn't laughing when characters either act like the biggest idiots ever or can't keep their dick in their pants half of the time; I am talking to YOU, Kazuichi. There are more characters that I like than in the first game, but they make sure to counteract that by having more bad characters, and to make them even more insufferable, as well. I am talking to you TOO, Mikan and Hiyoko.
I'm feeling mixed on the trials. There are some cool things added like consent and the sword duels, but then they made the Hangman's Gambit worse ("improved", my ass) and both it and Logic Dive are inexplicably placed into quite a number of moments where they could just ask a question and lose nothing of value. They also still don't fully get rid of the "Trial Point Getters" issue although it's somewhat better here, I guess.
Cases 3 and 4 are very bad, the Despair Disease is an absolutely trash motive, and the trial is just.. oh, god. DR2 has a really big problem with droning on, and on, and on that's at its worst in Case 4, leading to a pre-trial that made me about as sick of the game as Hajime was at that point. The trial was whatever but I liked the ending. Cases 2 and 6 rock, though. I'm glad they managed to have a good final case this time, considering the underwhelming final trial the last game ended on.
To sum it up, though, DR2 is plagued with bad pacing, the loss of DR1's oppressive atmosphere, insufferable characters, bad humor, and unnecessary additions. I'm not a fan, and I hope V3 manages to do better.
By the way.. check out this spreadsheet I did. We counted both the hopes AND despairs that are either spoken or read (and then some) this time. And most of the former is that stupid white-haired twink's fault.
Pokémon Scarlet
2022
Played with BertKnot.
With each new iteration of Pokémon comes another wagon of this train headed for indignity and turpitude. Year after year, one could point out the structural roots of this situation – the inability to scale up after the extraordinary operational profits made since 2016 or the need to constantly release games for the sake of cross-media –, but none of this makes the end result any more palatable. The result is an abysmal technical polish, which we're getting used to. As soon as the game was released, thousands of comments pointed out the horrible graphics and bugs, which are still not fixed to this day. I won't go into this at length, but it's worth bearing in mind. Pokémon Scarlet seems to be heading in the same experimental direction as Pokémon Legends: Arceus (2022), whose goal was to make the world more dynamic and immersive. Critics were generally very positive about it, highlighting the attempt at innovation and forgiving its shortcomings – technical or game design-wise. This reception was matched by its sales, an exceptional start with 6.5 million copies sold in a fortnight. One might have feared that this situation would lead Game Freak to continue in this direction, brandishing their commercial successes and the totem of immunity that the community has so graciously granted them. But generally speaking, for corporate philosophy reasons, Game Freak is unlikely to make radical changes to their development process, especially as their cycles become shorter and shorter.
In this opus, the player explores the region of Paldea in the company of the legendary Koraidon, as part of a treasure hunt organised by the Naranja Academy. The great innovation is the non-linear aspect of the adventure, made possible by an open world and a division of the objectives into three different storylines. It is possible to follow Nemona to triumph over the classic arenas and the League, but the title also proposes to help Arven hunt Titans and find Mystic Herbs to give back strength to his Mabosstiff; or Cassiopeia to confront Team Star, responsible for bullying in the Academy. However, every one of these plots is a narrative failure.
The open world structure is mostly reminiscent of the Ubisoft formula, which the industry has started to turn away from in recent years, under the influence of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017). This throwback is staggering and breaks the pace of the adventure by sequencing it into an exploration that never manages to charm. The game's technical problems are paired with lacklustre environments. If Pokémon Scarlet is inspired by the Iberian Peninsula, it's only on paper. The layout of the biomes makes no sense and, like Pokémon Legends, the title fails to create realism in the Pokémon biodiversity. At best, the game forms a few groups of creatures, but they never interact with each other. In Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (2022), carnivores can be seen in packs hunting other animals: the absence of such elements in Pokémon Scarlet is surprising and very underwhelming.
On the other hand, the game never manages to create relationships between the protagonist and the different characters. All of their development is done in the last region, where their lives, families and dreams are discussed. It is unfortunate that this information is never present in the first twenty hours. It is only possible to appreciate their presence in the last hour of the game. Nemona, Arven or Penny never accompany the protagonist, which would be the best way to dynamise an open world, through dialogues interjected in the exploration. Such an approach would surely have worked to introduce the backgrounds of Nemona and Penny, who are completely independent from the main plot. Some may have said that the three narrative threads converge in the last act, but this is hardly true: it is purely and simply Arven's story and the presence of the other characters is artificial, even superfluous.
This narrative failure is saddening given that the game shows in its final section that it understood what could have worked. Unfortunately, the first twenty hours are riddled with aberrant flaws and poor design choices. The Team Star bases are a miserable piece of gameplay, sort of pseudo-Pokémon Warriors, that make Musou games look like Devil May Cry. The arena challenges never manage to energise the progression: for example, the auctions are reduced to their strict minimum and give a false impression of interactivity, whereas they only blow smoke. They are not even contextualised as a mini-game, as was the case in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002). The rest is equally forgettable and futile: the descent of the mountain only highlights Koraidon's poor controllability.
Sometimes it is the technical realisation that violently bruises these various quests. Before the duel against Larry, the restaurant changes completely, obviously murdering all the customers who were enjoying their meal. Some triggers don't work at all and it was necessary to restart the game several times to activate some essential cutscenes. The lack of clear markers or the impossibility to change the day and night cycle are other shortcomings that contribute to an unpleasant experience. This lack of attention to detail is both a testament to a development team under the pressure of an overly severe deadline and a general lack of concern for such matters: Game Freak understands that the game continues to break sales records anyway. So why put any effort into the details?
The most blatant evidence of this lack of respect is surely found in the cultural representation of the Iberian Peninsula. Pokémon Sword/Shield (2019) was already weak in this respect, but the duels in the stadiums operated in the spirit of English football matches. Here, the world is empty and incoherent. While the beginning of the game charms with a nice set-up – the short walk to Nemona's house is really lovely, with beautiful vegetation – the edifice quickly crumbles as the player approaches Mesagoza. The smooth textures contrast horribly with the city's gaudy mosaics, just giving the whole thing a muddled look. The buildings all appear similar and it's no longer possible to enter the houses. Instead, the game lines up a dozen or so similar restaurants, which offer the same menu. The player can choose to eat sandwiches or Chinese food, in a restaurant with a clichéd façade. Iberian Peninsula, mind you. The other cities follow the same approach and are sorely lacking in identity. The Pokémon themselves share this misrepresentation. Quaquaval is inspired by the Rio carnival, while Garganacl looks like a ziggurat or a pre-Columbian pyramid. These confusions show a particularly regrettable disregard from Game Freak. The cleaning lady in Nemona's mansion is another unfortunate example: she is a Black character – the first one to be seen – which is a particularly cruel and tasteless irony, regardless of whether it was intentional or not.
The gameplay remains largely unchanged. The main mechanic in this game is the Terastal Transformation, which is generally irrelevant. When it prevents the opposing Pokémon from using certain attacks, the mechanic becomes more interesting, but it doesn't go beyond being a simple end-of-battle expedient, growing more tiresome than anything else with the time it wastes. The title feels much easier than its predecessors, at least in terms of progression. Since the arenas and various objectives never scale with the player's level, adversity is non-existent, except for a few rare fights. The very artificial splitting of the areas does not help this. Even if the player fails, the fact that each objective is placed within a few meters of a Pokémon Center nullifies any dramatic tension. As a result, the game remains consistently flavorless in its gameplay phases. The Academy lessons are a good reflection of this fact: they are a sort of contextualised tutorial that drags on and teaches the player mechanics that they would have already seen for themselves. Besides, their non-ergonomic aspect never encourages the player to do them.
Despite these lengthy criticisms, the game is not without merit. Nemona carries the cast single-handedly: as a solid interpretation of the rival, after the era of antipathetic characters, she has a great chemistry with the protagonist – this is an observation I make with the girl protagonist; I think that with the boy counterpart, the result would be more of a very angsty heterosexual dynamic. Game Freak also gives a lot of space to non-binary characters, without insisting on their gender: this is very satisfying and is clearly a step in the right direction. Again, the last area and the discussions between the characters about their lives should have been the whole game. It shows that Game Freak is able to come up with good concepts, but it is infuriating that they never integrate them organically into the adventure, whose formula is, inevitably, always the same.
Pokémon Scarlet appears as this deceptively lighthearted adventure. The treasure hunt ends with the classic observation that the friends made along the way are what matters. Why not, this is a perfectly workable theme for children. But the hypocrisy lies in the fact that the protagonist never travels with their friends during the dozens of hours of gameplay, unlike the manga or anime. The other themes are treated with the same carelessness, while ignoring them in the core of the game design. This muddled feeling can be found everywhere, from the gameplay to the technical execution, from the music to the cultural representation. For a company that boasts hundreds of millions of dollars in operating profits, these failings are inexcusable. As much as one appreciates the franchise – and I admit I have no particular nostalgia or affection for it –, it seems to me that it is appropriate to be uncompromising about the quality of titles the community religiously buys every year. It is clear that this is still not the case: Game Freak and the Pokémon Company have no reason to change a development strategy that, for the worse, works.
With each new iteration of Pokémon comes another wagon of this train headed for indignity and turpitude. Year after year, one could point out the structural roots of this situation – the inability to scale up after the extraordinary operational profits made since 2016 or the need to constantly release games for the sake of cross-media –, but none of this makes the end result any more palatable. The result is an abysmal technical polish, which we're getting used to. As soon as the game was released, thousands of comments pointed out the horrible graphics and bugs, which are still not fixed to this day. I won't go into this at length, but it's worth bearing in mind. Pokémon Scarlet seems to be heading in the same experimental direction as Pokémon Legends: Arceus (2022), whose goal was to make the world more dynamic and immersive. Critics were generally very positive about it, highlighting the attempt at innovation and forgiving its shortcomings – technical or game design-wise. This reception was matched by its sales, an exceptional start with 6.5 million copies sold in a fortnight. One might have feared that this situation would lead Game Freak to continue in this direction, brandishing their commercial successes and the totem of immunity that the community has so graciously granted them. But generally speaking, for corporate philosophy reasons, Game Freak is unlikely to make radical changes to their development process, especially as their cycles become shorter and shorter.
In this opus, the player explores the region of Paldea in the company of the legendary Koraidon, as part of a treasure hunt organised by the Naranja Academy. The great innovation is the non-linear aspect of the adventure, made possible by an open world and a division of the objectives into three different storylines. It is possible to follow Nemona to triumph over the classic arenas and the League, but the title also proposes to help Arven hunt Titans and find Mystic Herbs to give back strength to his Mabosstiff; or Cassiopeia to confront Team Star, responsible for bullying in the Academy. However, every one of these plots is a narrative failure.
The open world structure is mostly reminiscent of the Ubisoft formula, which the industry has started to turn away from in recent years, under the influence of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017). This throwback is staggering and breaks the pace of the adventure by sequencing it into an exploration that never manages to charm. The game's technical problems are paired with lacklustre environments. If Pokémon Scarlet is inspired by the Iberian Peninsula, it's only on paper. The layout of the biomes makes no sense and, like Pokémon Legends, the title fails to create realism in the Pokémon biodiversity. At best, the game forms a few groups of creatures, but they never interact with each other. In Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (2022), carnivores can be seen in packs hunting other animals: the absence of such elements in Pokémon Scarlet is surprising and very underwhelming.
On the other hand, the game never manages to create relationships between the protagonist and the different characters. All of their development is done in the last region, where their lives, families and dreams are discussed. It is unfortunate that this information is never present in the first twenty hours. It is only possible to appreciate their presence in the last hour of the game. Nemona, Arven or Penny never accompany the protagonist, which would be the best way to dynamise an open world, through dialogues interjected in the exploration. Such an approach would surely have worked to introduce the backgrounds of Nemona and Penny, who are completely independent from the main plot. Some may have said that the three narrative threads converge in the last act, but this is hardly true: it is purely and simply Arven's story and the presence of the other characters is artificial, even superfluous.
This narrative failure is saddening given that the game shows in its final section that it understood what could have worked. Unfortunately, the first twenty hours are riddled with aberrant flaws and poor design choices. The Team Star bases are a miserable piece of gameplay, sort of pseudo-Pokémon Warriors, that make Musou games look like Devil May Cry. The arena challenges never manage to energise the progression: for example, the auctions are reduced to their strict minimum and give a false impression of interactivity, whereas they only blow smoke. They are not even contextualised as a mini-game, as was the case in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002). The rest is equally forgettable and futile: the descent of the mountain only highlights Koraidon's poor controllability.
Sometimes it is the technical realisation that violently bruises these various quests. Before the duel against Larry, the restaurant changes completely, obviously murdering all the customers who were enjoying their meal. Some triggers don't work at all and it was necessary to restart the game several times to activate some essential cutscenes. The lack of clear markers or the impossibility to change the day and night cycle are other shortcomings that contribute to an unpleasant experience. This lack of attention to detail is both a testament to a development team under the pressure of an overly severe deadline and a general lack of concern for such matters: Game Freak understands that the game continues to break sales records anyway. So why put any effort into the details?
The most blatant evidence of this lack of respect is surely found in the cultural representation of the Iberian Peninsula. Pokémon Sword/Shield (2019) was already weak in this respect, but the duels in the stadiums operated in the spirit of English football matches. Here, the world is empty and incoherent. While the beginning of the game charms with a nice set-up – the short walk to Nemona's house is really lovely, with beautiful vegetation – the edifice quickly crumbles as the player approaches Mesagoza. The smooth textures contrast horribly with the city's gaudy mosaics, just giving the whole thing a muddled look. The buildings all appear similar and it's no longer possible to enter the houses. Instead, the game lines up a dozen or so similar restaurants, which offer the same menu. The player can choose to eat sandwiches or Chinese food, in a restaurant with a clichéd façade. Iberian Peninsula, mind you. The other cities follow the same approach and are sorely lacking in identity. The Pokémon themselves share this misrepresentation. Quaquaval is inspired by the Rio carnival, while Garganacl looks like a ziggurat or a pre-Columbian pyramid. These confusions show a particularly regrettable disregard from Game Freak. The cleaning lady in Nemona's mansion is another unfortunate example: she is a Black character – the first one to be seen – which is a particularly cruel and tasteless irony, regardless of whether it was intentional or not.
The gameplay remains largely unchanged. The main mechanic in this game is the Terastal Transformation, which is generally irrelevant. When it prevents the opposing Pokémon from using certain attacks, the mechanic becomes more interesting, but it doesn't go beyond being a simple end-of-battle expedient, growing more tiresome than anything else with the time it wastes. The title feels much easier than its predecessors, at least in terms of progression. Since the arenas and various objectives never scale with the player's level, adversity is non-existent, except for a few rare fights. The very artificial splitting of the areas does not help this. Even if the player fails, the fact that each objective is placed within a few meters of a Pokémon Center nullifies any dramatic tension. As a result, the game remains consistently flavorless in its gameplay phases. The Academy lessons are a good reflection of this fact: they are a sort of contextualised tutorial that drags on and teaches the player mechanics that they would have already seen for themselves. Besides, their non-ergonomic aspect never encourages the player to do them.
Despite these lengthy criticisms, the game is not without merit. Nemona carries the cast single-handedly: as a solid interpretation of the rival, after the era of antipathetic characters, she has a great chemistry with the protagonist – this is an observation I make with the girl protagonist; I think that with the boy counterpart, the result would be more of a very angsty heterosexual dynamic. Game Freak also gives a lot of space to non-binary characters, without insisting on their gender: this is very satisfying and is clearly a step in the right direction. Again, the last area and the discussions between the characters about their lives should have been the whole game. It shows that Game Freak is able to come up with good concepts, but it is infuriating that they never integrate them organically into the adventure, whose formula is, inevitably, always the same.
Pokémon Scarlet appears as this deceptively lighthearted adventure. The treasure hunt ends with the classic observation that the friends made along the way are what matters. Why not, this is a perfectly workable theme for children. But the hypocrisy lies in the fact that the protagonist never travels with their friends during the dozens of hours of gameplay, unlike the manga or anime. The other themes are treated with the same carelessness, while ignoring them in the core of the game design. This muddled feeling can be found everywhere, from the gameplay to the technical execution, from the music to the cultural representation. For a company that boasts hundreds of millions of dollars in operating profits, these failings are inexcusable. As much as one appreciates the franchise – and I admit I have no particular nostalgia or affection for it –, it seems to me that it is appropriate to be uncompromising about the quality of titles the community religiously buys every year. It is clear that this is still not the case: Game Freak and the Pokémon Company have no reason to change a development strategy that, for the worse, works.
One of the absolute best and most underrated games I've ever played. The gameplay is so insanely unique that I don't think there is really anything like it. Every puzzle completely uses the mechanics to their fullest and puts the player in the best situation to comfortably find the solution, and it never feels poorly designed or frustrating. Everything is very well thought out and fully intuitive which makes it a very rewarding experience.
The story is also immensely well executed. It's basically hard to say anything about this game without spoiling but it somehow piles mystery on top of mystery and manages to give everything a satisfying answer and has a straight up perfect conclusion. The writing is very clever and funny while also packing emotional weight when it needs to. Shu Takumi's writing style shines as much as it did with the Ace Attorney games and the amount of personality he puts in is unparalleled by most games.
The art style and animation are super unique and creative as well, every character has so many little details and quirks that give them a ton of personality. The music, just as in Ace Attorney, is extremely good as well. Something about Masakazu Sugimori's style is just very charming and always evokes DS nostalgia for me.
I cannot recommend this game enough, as I said it is hard to say much without spoiling but it is an immensely gratifying gaming experience that there is really nothing like still. It's also extremely accessible and can be enjoyed by probably anyone, especially people who love the Ace Attorney series.
I'm not asking anymore play it NOW
The story is also immensely well executed. It's basically hard to say anything about this game without spoiling but it somehow piles mystery on top of mystery and manages to give everything a satisfying answer and has a straight up perfect conclusion. The writing is very clever and funny while also packing emotional weight when it needs to. Shu Takumi's writing style shines as much as it did with the Ace Attorney games and the amount of personality he puts in is unparalleled by most games.
The art style and animation are super unique and creative as well, every character has so many little details and quirks that give them a ton of personality. The music, just as in Ace Attorney, is extremely good as well. Something about Masakazu Sugimori's style is just very charming and always evokes DS nostalgia for me.
I cannot recommend this game enough, as I said it is hard to say much without spoiling but it is an immensely gratifying gaming experience that there is really nothing like still. It's also extremely accessible and can be enjoyed by probably anyone, especially people who love the Ace Attorney series.
I'm not asking anymore play it NOW
In an optional, visually stunning level in the early Jungle world of the game, players can peek through the leaves and foliage to see pirate ships, docked by the beach in the distance. That same beach and those same pirate ships make up the scenery for the game’s second world, and as you progress further through it you notice more and more how the ships are showing up torn and mangled to pieces. By the end of the world, the weather grows stormier and a huge octopus appears from below the surface, gruesomely tearing ships apart in the background of the stage before challenging the big ape himself.
Donkey Kong Country as a series has never placed any real focus on its storytelling, yet as all its fans will tell you it is shockingly good at being atmospheric and moody. And while Returns specifically often gets buried inbetween the praise for the original trilogy and Tropical Freeze, I find it excels at this in a sort of unique way - by having the entire island truly feel like one big, cohesive entity. The scenario I described earlier is never called attention to, yet takes place over the course of about 10 levels, with each step being a very gradual shift from one environment to the next whilst still adhering to their worlds’ visual themes. While many other platformers strive to impress you with their creativity and variety, I find there’s a beauty in trying to make each level feel like a natural progression of the world - that it’s not simply a collection of fun video game environments, but the natural extension of a living, breathing world.
The “Returns” subtitle doesn’t feel like its simply there to denote the franchise coming out of hiatus, but to quite literally describe the game as the first since the series’ inception to truly place the focus on Donkey Kong Island itself. There’s no kidnapping, no journeying, no drastic environmental change - this game, even more so than the original 1995 game, is about showing you the ecosystem and inhabitants of Donkey Kongs home. This is part of why I find the Tiki Tak Tribe to be such a good antagonistic force for the game: rather than turning the conflict into just a brawl against an invading faction, their brainwashing powers mean that now every part of the island is hostile and out of balance to serve someone else’s agenda. Whilst the Tikis take control of an inhabitant of each of the island's areas to serve as the game’s bosses, each area in the game is also befitted with one or more natural rulers outside of this - the Squeekly bats of Crowded Cavern are left completely undisturbed by the mole miners of the cave area, the horde of Muncher spiders in the forest devour anyone who gets close, and a large eyeball-robot observes your every move in the Factory level, seemingly manipulating your progress forward. Throughout this involuntary tour of the island, it feels as DK is constantly intruding on the’ territory of these rulers, disrupting the natural ecosystem and flow of life, to quell a conflict they barely seem aware of. The harmony between rulers and the natural state of the island has been disrupted by the Tikis, all for the sake of them believing their own king is the one who deserves to rule the island as a whole.
So then, with all that said - who’s the ruler of the Jungle?
That’s right - Donkey Kong.
What makes the grueling difficulty of this adventure in particular feel so rewarding to overcome is that, similar to Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, it truly feels as if the great ape is asserting his absolute dominance with every world he conquers. Frail as he may seem with only being able to take two hits, he moves with such a visceral weight, slamming onto the heads of enemies with both fists and hitting the ground with a slight thud every time he lands. It’s theorized that a big part of why Donkey Kong himself was sidelined in the Country series in favor of his extended Kong family was due to the difficulty in nailing both the weight and size of this character – play the original Donkey Kong Country, and you’ll notice DK’s silhouette drastically changes when he’s standing still, running, and jumping, which leads to a somewhat inconsistent feel moving the character around. To have this grand return of the character not only emphasize his weight and power, but also seemingly theme the entire story around reasserting his rightful place as ruler of the island, just feels absolutely perfectly befitting. Yet he defeats the king of the Tikis atop DK Island’s volcano, not to claim any sort of dominance or rule of his home, but to return things to the way they were before, and reform that balance of nature. Indeed, in both narrative and design this Return is not here to say that the new should rule and the old has no place, but that all kings have their place in the world.
There are a lot of very valid reasons as to why the game isn’t as fondly remembered as the rest of the series, mostly attributing to Retro Studios’ unfamiliarity in designing for the genre. A big one is the way collectibles are handled, an area the game falls completely flat on compared to how perfectly the trilogy handled it. The puzzle piece system may be a cute way to unlock concept art, but when these somewhat-short levels can have up to nine puzzle pieces on top of the KONG-letters, suddenly the pacing in stages come to a screeching halt. It’s cool that you’re consistently rewarded for pattern recognition, of seeing a stray banana just barely off-screen and following it to reveal a hidden path, but with up to 13 collectibles per stage you’re just bound to miss one lest you check quite literally every possible hiding place one could be in. That means moving left at the start of every level, scraping against every possible wall, collecting every single banana, blowing on every dandelion, and intentionally dying in every split-path just to give yourself the opportunity to double-check the other path. The KONG-letters are far stronger collectibles in terms of how the game is themed, as they’re consistently rewarded to you for actively platforming well and utilizing DK’s abilities to the fullest rather than for having the keen eye of an explorer. The fatigue that can set it from feverishly looking for these collectibles may only enhance the somewhat repetitive level progression: Imagine the feeling of mastering everything a level has to see, only to realize that the next feels virtually identical aside from having a focus on bouncy flowers now.
The game sticking to the standard visuals of its area relatively closely may again be a remnant of Retro’s work on Metroid Prime - rather than indulge in whatever crazy level concept the team could think up for a one-off level akin to Super Mario 3D World, each level is given a sort of purpose on the island, a significance that forms part of the whole. At first, I questioned the sudden appearance of a pirate ship level in the Ruins area, since I was already well past having beaten the Beach area. It was only after I played the level and later reached the world’s boss that the dots connected: The pirate ship level focused on firing explosive bombs, and the boss of the area is a great bird who hoards a collection of explosives all to itself. This not only lets the level serve as great preparation for the properties of these explosives, but can easily be pieced together to form worldbuilding theories, of the pirate crew bargaining with this greedy hoarder to gain access to this artillery. There’s even a great care placed on moving Donkey Kong from area to area, as the first level of most worlds opens with a brief moment of letting the player transition out of the old area into the new, showing for instance the overgrown edge of the caverns leading naturally into the Forest area.
Beyond all of this analysis and babble, the game remains a great platformer first and foremost. The game is still extremely successful at providing that rewarding escalation of challenge that DKC has historically done so perfectly, paired with controls with tons of speed potential. Even though the Wii version in particular has been derided for its Wii-isms, I can’t stress enough how often I feel it genuinely adds to the experience. From your own shaking matching the intense pummeling DK lets out onto the Tikis at the end of each world, to the Wii remote speaking giving you direct and gloriously satisfying sound feedback to each enemy you bop and collectible you get, to genuinely feeling the weight of the handslam attack…
Okay, so maybe the simple, primitive part of my brain took over just now, the part wanted to just call this game a fun, well paced, good platformer from the start without doing this silly literary analysis. And, well... who am I to challenge the king of the jungle?
[Playtime: 8 hours]
[Key word: Reclaim]
Donkey Kong Country as a series has never placed any real focus on its storytelling, yet as all its fans will tell you it is shockingly good at being atmospheric and moody. And while Returns specifically often gets buried inbetween the praise for the original trilogy and Tropical Freeze, I find it excels at this in a sort of unique way - by having the entire island truly feel like one big, cohesive entity. The scenario I described earlier is never called attention to, yet takes place over the course of about 10 levels, with each step being a very gradual shift from one environment to the next whilst still adhering to their worlds’ visual themes. While many other platformers strive to impress you with their creativity and variety, I find there’s a beauty in trying to make each level feel like a natural progression of the world - that it’s not simply a collection of fun video game environments, but the natural extension of a living, breathing world.
The “Returns” subtitle doesn’t feel like its simply there to denote the franchise coming out of hiatus, but to quite literally describe the game as the first since the series’ inception to truly place the focus on Donkey Kong Island itself. There’s no kidnapping, no journeying, no drastic environmental change - this game, even more so than the original 1995 game, is about showing you the ecosystem and inhabitants of Donkey Kongs home. This is part of why I find the Tiki Tak Tribe to be such a good antagonistic force for the game: rather than turning the conflict into just a brawl against an invading faction, their brainwashing powers mean that now every part of the island is hostile and out of balance to serve someone else’s agenda. Whilst the Tikis take control of an inhabitant of each of the island's areas to serve as the game’s bosses, each area in the game is also befitted with one or more natural rulers outside of this - the Squeekly bats of Crowded Cavern are left completely undisturbed by the mole miners of the cave area, the horde of Muncher spiders in the forest devour anyone who gets close, and a large eyeball-robot observes your every move in the Factory level, seemingly manipulating your progress forward. Throughout this involuntary tour of the island, it feels as DK is constantly intruding on the’ territory of these rulers, disrupting the natural ecosystem and flow of life, to quell a conflict they barely seem aware of. The harmony between rulers and the natural state of the island has been disrupted by the Tikis, all for the sake of them believing their own king is the one who deserves to rule the island as a whole.
So then, with all that said - who’s the ruler of the Jungle?
That’s right - Donkey Kong.
What makes the grueling difficulty of this adventure in particular feel so rewarding to overcome is that, similar to Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, it truly feels as if the great ape is asserting his absolute dominance with every world he conquers. Frail as he may seem with only being able to take two hits, he moves with such a visceral weight, slamming onto the heads of enemies with both fists and hitting the ground with a slight thud every time he lands. It’s theorized that a big part of why Donkey Kong himself was sidelined in the Country series in favor of his extended Kong family was due to the difficulty in nailing both the weight and size of this character – play the original Donkey Kong Country, and you’ll notice DK’s silhouette drastically changes when he’s standing still, running, and jumping, which leads to a somewhat inconsistent feel moving the character around. To have this grand return of the character not only emphasize his weight and power, but also seemingly theme the entire story around reasserting his rightful place as ruler of the island, just feels absolutely perfectly befitting. Yet he defeats the king of the Tikis atop DK Island’s volcano, not to claim any sort of dominance or rule of his home, but to return things to the way they were before, and reform that balance of nature. Indeed, in both narrative and design this Return is not here to say that the new should rule and the old has no place, but that all kings have their place in the world.
There are a lot of very valid reasons as to why the game isn’t as fondly remembered as the rest of the series, mostly attributing to Retro Studios’ unfamiliarity in designing for the genre. A big one is the way collectibles are handled, an area the game falls completely flat on compared to how perfectly the trilogy handled it. The puzzle piece system may be a cute way to unlock concept art, but when these somewhat-short levels can have up to nine puzzle pieces on top of the KONG-letters, suddenly the pacing in stages come to a screeching halt. It’s cool that you’re consistently rewarded for pattern recognition, of seeing a stray banana just barely off-screen and following it to reveal a hidden path, but with up to 13 collectibles per stage you’re just bound to miss one lest you check quite literally every possible hiding place one could be in. That means moving left at the start of every level, scraping against every possible wall, collecting every single banana, blowing on every dandelion, and intentionally dying in every split-path just to give yourself the opportunity to double-check the other path. The KONG-letters are far stronger collectibles in terms of how the game is themed, as they’re consistently rewarded to you for actively platforming well and utilizing DK’s abilities to the fullest rather than for having the keen eye of an explorer. The fatigue that can set it from feverishly looking for these collectibles may only enhance the somewhat repetitive level progression: Imagine the feeling of mastering everything a level has to see, only to realize that the next feels virtually identical aside from having a focus on bouncy flowers now.
The game sticking to the standard visuals of its area relatively closely may again be a remnant of Retro’s work on Metroid Prime - rather than indulge in whatever crazy level concept the team could think up for a one-off level akin to Super Mario 3D World, each level is given a sort of purpose on the island, a significance that forms part of the whole. At first, I questioned the sudden appearance of a pirate ship level in the Ruins area, since I was already well past having beaten the Beach area. It was only after I played the level and later reached the world’s boss that the dots connected: The pirate ship level focused on firing explosive bombs, and the boss of the area is a great bird who hoards a collection of explosives all to itself. This not only lets the level serve as great preparation for the properties of these explosives, but can easily be pieced together to form worldbuilding theories, of the pirate crew bargaining with this greedy hoarder to gain access to this artillery. There’s even a great care placed on moving Donkey Kong from area to area, as the first level of most worlds opens with a brief moment of letting the player transition out of the old area into the new, showing for instance the overgrown edge of the caverns leading naturally into the Forest area.
Beyond all of this analysis and babble, the game remains a great platformer first and foremost. The game is still extremely successful at providing that rewarding escalation of challenge that DKC has historically done so perfectly, paired with controls with tons of speed potential. Even though the Wii version in particular has been derided for its Wii-isms, I can’t stress enough how often I feel it genuinely adds to the experience. From your own shaking matching the intense pummeling DK lets out onto the Tikis at the end of each world, to the Wii remote speaking giving you direct and gloriously satisfying sound feedback to each enemy you bop and collectible you get, to genuinely feeling the weight of the handslam attack…
Okay, so maybe the simple, primitive part of my brain took over just now, the part wanted to just call this game a fun, well paced, good platformer from the start without doing this silly literary analysis. And, well... who am I to challenge the king of the jungle?
[Playtime: 8 hours]
[Key word: Reclaim]
Note that I won't really attempt to dissect the story in much of any way in this review, mainly because at the time of writing I didn't have enough confidence in myself to be able to do much of any deep-dive story analysis about themes or whatever. There's plenty other analysies of this game online by bigger fans of the game than me for that.
This'll instead be my thoughts on the game as a more casual experience, and only really cover what the story and characters made me feel in that context. So yes, this is spoiler-free. Anyway!
I went into this game not really knowing exactly what to expect beyond a quirky murder mystery game and a lot of really tasteless elements, and yep, I did indeed get both of those. Let's get it out of the way immediately, compared to a game like Ace Attorney the experience was far more uneven, with elements that I both greatly enjoyed and elements that really put me off. What I'll say about the story in broad strokes is that its very well paced in unraveling the greater mystery from chapter to chapter, and even when individual chapters drag on for a bit too long, it always gives you just enough info on the story at large to make you interested in it. Ace Attorney, for comparison, makes its cases a lot more isolated, even when they hold weight for the game as a whole. They happen and the focus shifts almost entirely to them, and most of the overarching story beats don't really get much attention in comparison. Here, meanwhile, it feels like both parts get equal attention: An individual chapter will still focus on the chapter's big mystery, but events from prior chapters will linger in characters' thoughts, and some things set up won't be revealed at all until the endgame. This of course was obviously going to lead to the individual cases being weaker and less tightly focused than they are in Ace Attorney but even by those standards I felt as if the mystery-solving aspect of the game wasn't quite as strong as it should've been. A lot of plainly obvious details are ignored for a lot longer than they should be, characters argue sometimes just for the sake of arguing despite the path to solving the mystery being pretty clear, etc.
There's a lot of nitpicks you could make with how the writing in the Class Trials is set up of course, but at the end of the day it still feels satisfying and its all well directed, and it has a very distinctly its-own feel. In terms of Trial gameplay especially, the focus on stress and tension was an interesting change of pace compared again to Ace Attorney. In those games, the focus is on carefully looking over what you have and making careful choices, with suspenseful yet calm music setting the tone of adults overviewing things in a professional manner. Here meanwhile, the timer and more action-focused arguing system, with characters throwing insults over each other as they're testifying, it does a really good job of conveying that feeling of stress that comes from a group argument. The lack of punishment for dying may be a bit of a copout, but I'm glad they didn't try to make the game difficult or anything despite its stress-induced tone, and realized most people playing this do so for the story.
I have some small little issues with how its executed still: The controls aren't exactly ergonomic since you basically need to clawgrip the controller in order to Focus, Silence and Shoot quickly. (Holding R1, Pressing X, and LIGHT TAPS of Triangle since holding Triangle is a different action, being required to sometimes do all right alongside each other) Cycling through your Bullets with L1 without knowing which ones will be next in the list gives me terrible flashbacks to why I never L/R cycle in the Mega Man games, and I wish you could just quick select between up to four different ones with the four directions of the D-pad. It would free up L1 for absorbing statements and not make the only option for picking the exact statement you want be to pull up a menu that obscures the gameplay.
Thinking back though, I think the central criticism I hold toward the game's execution of its gameplay was how it just...lets you view all of your evidence, whenever, pausing the whole game. You can do this in Ace Attorney and other mystery games, absolutely, but remember that the element of stress is supposed to be what sets Danganronpa apart from its contemporaries. That feeling of rummaging through your counterpoints in your head while everyone is yelling over one another is almost entirely lost when you can at almost any point just pause the current discussion to look in your file and connect the dots calmly in your head. Its not even really something you can ignore doing: The Truth Bullets, the evidence you use per each argument, is only ever displayed with just the name of the evidence, which means that in cases with a lot of evidence you'll end up forgetting what stuff like "Aoi's Account" or "Chem Lab Shelf" even mean until you pause to check. A solution to this would've been to use a button to bring up the evidence's definition in real-time during the argument, since most descriptions are really short anyway.
The other elements of the game are fine enough, I like that you can choose to spend time with different characters and get different Skills to equip accordingly, gives the game a fun little twist for replays, even if I don't think there's enough here mechanically to warrant a lot of the skills existing. I enjoy the feeling of being in one location at all times but, again just like the Evidence system, the cool meaning and purpose this has is a little ruined by QOL, in this case a fast-travel system. Forcing the player to actually move around this one singular location for the entire game rather than giving them an easy teleport would be a really effective way to convey that feeling of being trapped, as well as opening up a lot of other possibilities that games like Shenmue tap into. Maybe you can get a peek into where each student spends their time every day, so that if you want to spend your free time with them you'll need to get some kind of understanding of where they tend to be in the school? You'd get to know characters on a deeper level by learning about their routines outside of just visual novel dialogue scenes, and hell learning the layout of the overworld through repetition can lead into challenge segments outside of Class Trials as well. Granted of course this could lead to the game focusing far too much on what is pretty obviously meant as just fluff inbetween the real game, but given that they even bothered to put a fully explorable hubworld in here it to me is a shame they don't do anything with it, especially when its such an easy way to sell good atmosphere.
Moving on to the writing, while I do think a lot of the more 'morbid' writing and jokes work well even when they catch you off guard, some parts of the game really, REALLY left a bad taste in my mouth, again back to that issue of inconsistency. It doesn't exactly pair well with the...perverted aura that hangs over so many parts of the writing. You could argue, of course, that it is all to aid the atmosphere of the game: The perverted little nudges paired with how little respect is shown to a lot of the characters killed add to a feeling of unease and wanting to get to the end. But personally, I'm not sure if I can gel with that. Still, it IS what Danganronpa chose to identify itself with first and foremost, and if you're looking for something with more teeth than the average visual novel then you'll find it here, but I do wish it just had a little more maturity to it. I'm fine with darker themes and crassness - I play Suda51 games for gods sake - but Danganronpa to me feels as if its constantly overstepping a line that goes from charmingly crass and with a point to make, to just foul for the sake of getting reactions.
Just a final personal grievance: I'm not good with death. I hate the feeling of seeing a character not get the proper closure they deserve, and so naturally this aspect of the games was always going to turn me off. Your mileage may vary, and I was never really crying sobbing over a character death here, moreso it just left me unfulfilled and annoyed in a lot of cases where characters were really not given the ending they deserve. At least one character does get a really satisfying and fun to watch arc throughout the whole game though, so he pretty easily became my favorite without contest.
But still, though it didn't click with me entirely, I am glad I'm playing these games and trying to get out of my comfort zone more. The first Danganronpa was enjoyable on the whole, yet so many elements of it, intentional or not, just left me with a big lump in my stomach. I don't think I'll want to revisit this first game again because of that despite its charm.
[Playtime: ~25 hours]
[Keyword: Despair]
This'll instead be my thoughts on the game as a more casual experience, and only really cover what the story and characters made me feel in that context. So yes, this is spoiler-free. Anyway!
I went into this game not really knowing exactly what to expect beyond a quirky murder mystery game and a lot of really tasteless elements, and yep, I did indeed get both of those. Let's get it out of the way immediately, compared to a game like Ace Attorney the experience was far more uneven, with elements that I both greatly enjoyed and elements that really put me off. What I'll say about the story in broad strokes is that its very well paced in unraveling the greater mystery from chapter to chapter, and even when individual chapters drag on for a bit too long, it always gives you just enough info on the story at large to make you interested in it. Ace Attorney, for comparison, makes its cases a lot more isolated, even when they hold weight for the game as a whole. They happen and the focus shifts almost entirely to them, and most of the overarching story beats don't really get much attention in comparison. Here, meanwhile, it feels like both parts get equal attention: An individual chapter will still focus on the chapter's big mystery, but events from prior chapters will linger in characters' thoughts, and some things set up won't be revealed at all until the endgame. This of course was obviously going to lead to the individual cases being weaker and less tightly focused than they are in Ace Attorney but even by those standards I felt as if the mystery-solving aspect of the game wasn't quite as strong as it should've been. A lot of plainly obvious details are ignored for a lot longer than they should be, characters argue sometimes just for the sake of arguing despite the path to solving the mystery being pretty clear, etc.
There's a lot of nitpicks you could make with how the writing in the Class Trials is set up of course, but at the end of the day it still feels satisfying and its all well directed, and it has a very distinctly its-own feel. In terms of Trial gameplay especially, the focus on stress and tension was an interesting change of pace compared again to Ace Attorney. In those games, the focus is on carefully looking over what you have and making careful choices, with suspenseful yet calm music setting the tone of adults overviewing things in a professional manner. Here meanwhile, the timer and more action-focused arguing system, with characters throwing insults over each other as they're testifying, it does a really good job of conveying that feeling of stress that comes from a group argument. The lack of punishment for dying may be a bit of a copout, but I'm glad they didn't try to make the game difficult or anything despite its stress-induced tone, and realized most people playing this do so for the story.
I have some small little issues with how its executed still: The controls aren't exactly ergonomic since you basically need to clawgrip the controller in order to Focus, Silence and Shoot quickly. (Holding R1, Pressing X, and LIGHT TAPS of Triangle since holding Triangle is a different action, being required to sometimes do all right alongside each other) Cycling through your Bullets with L1 without knowing which ones will be next in the list gives me terrible flashbacks to why I never L/R cycle in the Mega Man games, and I wish you could just quick select between up to four different ones with the four directions of the D-pad. It would free up L1 for absorbing statements and not make the only option for picking the exact statement you want be to pull up a menu that obscures the gameplay.
Thinking back though, I think the central criticism I hold toward the game's execution of its gameplay was how it just...lets you view all of your evidence, whenever, pausing the whole game. You can do this in Ace Attorney and other mystery games, absolutely, but remember that the element of stress is supposed to be what sets Danganronpa apart from its contemporaries. That feeling of rummaging through your counterpoints in your head while everyone is yelling over one another is almost entirely lost when you can at almost any point just pause the current discussion to look in your file and connect the dots calmly in your head. Its not even really something you can ignore doing: The Truth Bullets, the evidence you use per each argument, is only ever displayed with just the name of the evidence, which means that in cases with a lot of evidence you'll end up forgetting what stuff like "Aoi's Account" or "Chem Lab Shelf" even mean until you pause to check. A solution to this would've been to use a button to bring up the evidence's definition in real-time during the argument, since most descriptions are really short anyway.
The other elements of the game are fine enough, I like that you can choose to spend time with different characters and get different Skills to equip accordingly, gives the game a fun little twist for replays, even if I don't think there's enough here mechanically to warrant a lot of the skills existing. I enjoy the feeling of being in one location at all times but, again just like the Evidence system, the cool meaning and purpose this has is a little ruined by QOL, in this case a fast-travel system. Forcing the player to actually move around this one singular location for the entire game rather than giving them an easy teleport would be a really effective way to convey that feeling of being trapped, as well as opening up a lot of other possibilities that games like Shenmue tap into. Maybe you can get a peek into where each student spends their time every day, so that if you want to spend your free time with them you'll need to get some kind of understanding of where they tend to be in the school? You'd get to know characters on a deeper level by learning about their routines outside of just visual novel dialogue scenes, and hell learning the layout of the overworld through repetition can lead into challenge segments outside of Class Trials as well. Granted of course this could lead to the game focusing far too much on what is pretty obviously meant as just fluff inbetween the real game, but given that they even bothered to put a fully explorable hubworld in here it to me is a shame they don't do anything with it, especially when its such an easy way to sell good atmosphere.
Moving on to the writing, while I do think a lot of the more 'morbid' writing and jokes work well even when they catch you off guard, some parts of the game really, REALLY left a bad taste in my mouth, again back to that issue of inconsistency. It doesn't exactly pair well with the...perverted aura that hangs over so many parts of the writing. You could argue, of course, that it is all to aid the atmosphere of the game: The perverted little nudges paired with how little respect is shown to a lot of the characters killed add to a feeling of unease and wanting to get to the end. But personally, I'm not sure if I can gel with that. Still, it IS what Danganronpa chose to identify itself with first and foremost, and if you're looking for something with more teeth than the average visual novel then you'll find it here, but I do wish it just had a little more maturity to it. I'm fine with darker themes and crassness - I play Suda51 games for gods sake - but Danganronpa to me feels as if its constantly overstepping a line that goes from charmingly crass and with a point to make, to just foul for the sake of getting reactions.
Just a final personal grievance: I'm not good with death. I hate the feeling of seeing a character not get the proper closure they deserve, and so naturally this aspect of the games was always going to turn me off. Your mileage may vary, and I was never really crying sobbing over a character death here, moreso it just left me unfulfilled and annoyed in a lot of cases where characters were really not given the ending they deserve. At least one character does get a really satisfying and fun to watch arc throughout the whole game though, so he pretty easily became my favorite without contest.
But still, though it didn't click with me entirely, I am glad I'm playing these games and trying to get out of my comfort zone more. The first Danganronpa was enjoyable on the whole, yet so many elements of it, intentional or not, just left me with a big lump in my stomach. I don't think I'll want to revisit this first game again because of that despite its charm.
[Playtime: ~25 hours]
[Keyword: Despair]
The creator of Danganronpa once said that the ending of Danganronpa V3 was to channel their frustrations at how the series went from being a murder mystery to a sensationalist honeypot akin to a reality TV show.
and that's why I despise DR2.
Less interesting characters, less interesting cases and an unneeded continuation of the Hope's Peak arc that feels like it was written on the philosophy of "If it fills a shitton of Wiki pages, that means it's good".
DR2 was nothing but fatiguing to finish to the point that it burned me out on wanting to try anything else in the franchise.
and that's why I despise DR2.
Less interesting characters, less interesting cases and an unneeded continuation of the Hope's Peak arc that feels like it was written on the philosophy of "If it fills a shitton of Wiki pages, that means it's good".
DR2 was nothing but fatiguing to finish to the point that it burned me out on wanting to try anything else in the franchise.
This was the final AA game I needed to play since it didn't get officially localized until 2021 and before that I always heard from people who watched it subbed that it was possibly the best game in the series. I heard constant praise for this game and I expected another AAI2. When I played it, it certainly was... good. Nothing mindblowing. Somehow the one filler case ended up being my favorite, genuinely great cae and a great use of the location and time period. 1 and 3 are pretty good too, and then when I saw how the last case was formatted I knew this would not be matching AAI2. At the end, this game was pretty good. 2nd or 3rd favorite AA game with T&T.
As a whole, TGAAC is like a 9/10, better than the sum of its parts.
As a whole, TGAAC is like a 9/10, better than the sum of its parts.
Sonic Forces
2017
Sonic Forces sucks so much it killed me. I am dead, but my soul still screams in anguish and horror.
Please take me off life support and let me die peacefully.
Please take me off life support and let me die peacefully.
I made a fairly snarky quip for my review of this game before, but I felt the need to expand on at least one point I have against this game to feel right in rating the game this low.
This game has a number of things going for it, but the way it handles its cast ruins it for me and makes it a noticeable step back from 1 in my eyes. The best characters of this game, like Fuyuhiko easily surpass anyone from the original game, but these are few and far between in a group that mostly feels flat character-wise. Most of the characters don't really have much to do in the plot besides act out their over-the-top personalities, which feels far more blatant in this game than the others. One could argue that V3 goes even further with making the cast extremely over-the-top, but it's less egregious since they have more going on besides that with a web of relationships and internal conflicts that keep them engaging throughout. 2 really doesn't have that besides Nagito's actions and a love triangle that doesn't really add much. In fact, I'd say it actively snuffs out a dynamic like that before it can really go anywhere. It's disappointing after DR1, while not doing it masterfully, was effective at keeping tension within the group high in meaningful ways. I think the game is held back by a few other aspects outside of the characters, but they're definitely what make its faults hard to look past.
This game has a number of things going for it, but the way it handles its cast ruins it for me and makes it a noticeable step back from 1 in my eyes. The best characters of this game, like Fuyuhiko easily surpass anyone from the original game, but these are few and far between in a group that mostly feels flat character-wise. Most of the characters don't really have much to do in the plot besides act out their over-the-top personalities, which feels far more blatant in this game than the others. One could argue that V3 goes even further with making the cast extremely over-the-top, but it's less egregious since they have more going on besides that with a web of relationships and internal conflicts that keep them engaging throughout. 2 really doesn't have that besides Nagito's actions and a love triangle that doesn't really add much. In fact, I'd say it actively snuffs out a dynamic like that before it can really go anywhere. It's disappointing after DR1, while not doing it masterfully, was effective at keeping tension within the group high in meaningful ways. I think the game is held back by a few other aspects outside of the characters, but they're definitely what make its faults hard to look past.
For many reasons, playing this game consistently gave me a headache. One of those headaches got so bad I vomited. Ultra Despair Girls gets the honor of being the first game to make me physically sick.
In my rating system, I reserve .5 stars for predatory, unplayable, or evil games, and in Ultra Despair Girls' case, I'm confident arguing it is a form of evil. (There's a lot I want to blast it for first, but I'll get there!) Even if you're a fan of the typical Danganronpa visual novels, stay the hell away from this. Not only do you have to play two games to understand what's happening in Ultra Despair Girls, playing Ultra Despair Girls will, at most, let you better understand like 2 episodes of the anime Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School - Despair Arc for 1 character that ends up having zero plot relevance before they literally fuck off to outer space. That is not a joke. I cannot overstate how much this game is not worth it.
Wow, just thinking about this game again to write this review makes me nauseous! So let's get into it.
This collection of headache inducing factors masquerading as entertainment can be split into the game's presentation and the game's story content. Ultra Despair Girls is the series' first with 3D gameplay, after previous entries were primarily visual novels. Transitioning genres to 3rd person shooter caused a lot of friction. Development shortcuts are obvious and plentiful, and the team’s intuition for the needs of the new genre is painfully off. But surprise, Ultra Despair Girls is still almost as much a visual novel as the mainline Danganronpa games, and all the gameplay sections are literally filler until more cutscenes can happen.
If you skip all the cutscenes and look at the game's bones, it is a cheap, functional 3rd-person shooter. You'll be asked to trek through the same environments forwards and backwards with slightly different paths blocked or opened, each one a decorated hallway. There are only a handful of enemy types with a handful of ammo types meant to counter them, with puzzles littered throughout the level requiring some light thinking if you want a higher score.otherwise you can progress by blasting everything anyway
Coming from a series known for loud, garish colors, Ultra Despair Girls goes for broke. Where before coloration functioned to keep interest in a visual novel that required hours of reading, the same assault of neon, acidic tones is hard to look at in a 3D environment. Environments have no atmospheric effects and little to no dynamic lighting - the game feels like an HD release of an early PS2 game with bad art direction. The plainly implemented camera wildly shifts whenever you ready your weapon, made even worse if you turn on the unpredictable auto-aiming feature. Maybe you won’t get dizzy as the camera whips around harshly colored environments at disorienting speeds, maybe you won’t get turned around in same-y looking environments when surrounded by copy-pasted enemies. But I did, and I had a real bad time!
Did I mention the game is boring to play? Did I mention the game is slow? That you'll be holding down the run button almost the entire time, often wondering if it even made a difference? That combat is so easy you'll forget it's possible to die until you walk into a pit and get an instant Game Over? That some of the puzzles are glitched and won’t consistently give you credit for solving them? That the game even failed to load cutscenes a couple times and forced me to restart my whole system?
And let me tell you, the story parts of the game are FAR worse.
Make no mistake, the writing in Danganronpa has always been bad. The premise is crass, the characters are distillations of Hot Anime Nonsense, and surprising or shocking the player is valued over logical consistency. But the ways in which the Danganronpa games are bad is at least balanced around being engaging, schlocky fun. Ultra Despair Girls completely fails its handling of its characters and subject matter in ways both bone headed and insulting - and the Hot Anime Nonsense is cranked up to toxic levels.
Here's the game’s premise: a group of genius grade schoolers have taken control of an army of murder robots to brainwash every child on an island. They then use these robots and brainwashed children to mass murder all the adults on the island.
Let me establish here: this premise is very dumb. Leaning into the dumbness, I could see some room for jokes. But Ultra Despair Girls plays this concept completely straight. The aggressors are ruthlessly efficient at their goal, and the adults are massacred. But before I tear into the story, I’d like to touch on a side-effect of this setting that makes the game harder to play.
In the Danganronpa franchise, blood is stylized to be flaming hot pink. This is because the mainline Danganronpa games are about teenagers murdering each other, so a level of abstraction stops the tone from getting too heavy. Ultra Despair Girls keeps this abstraction while building upon it, making every NPC's model washed out in bright electric blueso the developers can copy-paste the same two models infinitely without you noticing right away.
Why this matters for gameplay: every level is littered with corpses. You'll find mounds of corpses in the middle of the street. Corpses nailed unevenly to walls. Lone corpses slumped in chairs. With hot pink blood splashes on every surface, and unshaded blue blobs peppering every locale, the already same-y and forgettable level geometry becomes even more incomprehensible. Landmarks become invisible once overshadowed by the same scenarios of copied corpses as you’ve been seeing the whole game. For how simple the levels are constructed, it is astounding to reflect back on how often I had to open the map.
Within this prevalence of corpses does the tainted soul of Ultra Despair Girls start to emerge. Because it is a choice to show all these corpses. Not every game with disaster stricken cities shows the human devastation. But the murder robots and the children didn't just kill all the adults - the brainwashed children are also playing with the corpses.
Children will be gathered around corpses, poking them with sticks, encircling them with dances and games, singing in makeshift choirs. And not just the same copy and pasted scenarios over and over, (even though you will see the same kid Fornite taunting atop a car near a dozen times (random family members still beneath the tires, random kids gathered to watch)). There are hand-placed corpses everywhere. Someone whose leg got hurt, and limped behind some furniture before they bled out. Someone who was running and was slashed in the back while they tried to escape. Throats slashed while seated at an outdoor patio, children pilfering their drinks
There is a commitment to this concept that baffles me. Gameplay wise, it is wholly unnecessary. You only shoot at the robots, not the children. Even boss fights against the genius elementary students have you shoot at their remote controlled mechs. But this commitment is not limited to the level’s set dressing - the pointless collectables strewn throughout the levels include dozens of awful notes from children and adults how they want to kill each other. All collectables look the same until obtained, so you have no idea ahead of time if you are picking up a health upgrade, or four pages of text graphically detailing a plan to feed a human their dismembered limbs. You can nearly taste the self-conscious shame of either the original writer or the translator (or both) in trying to sell this garbage.
So our premise is played straight, but the intention is crashing against the presentation. The visuals are too goofy to work as horror, but the content is too gross to be glossed over. And it is in this failing juxtaposition that we introduce the secret ingredient that takes this project from merely “bad art” to “morally irresponsible”: Hot. Anime. Nonsense.
Hot Anime Nonsense is a collection of cliches and character archetypes that metastasized from decades of anime creators basing their characters off of other anime characters instead of their own imaginations or human experiences. It's a form of repetition that transcends shorthand to become prescription. With Ultra Despair Girls, Danganronpa forgos any glimmer of originality to use anime character cliches exclusively in the most rote, lifeless, plot-first writing possible.
The two playable main characters consist of an upbeat “average” (idiot) girl and mean tsundere girl. (A tsundere is an English anime word stolen from Japanese that means “is a bitch to everyone so you might feel something when they are nice to the main character once in the final episode.” (you will not.)) Upbeat average girl has, at the time of the story’s beginning, been kept imprisoned in isolation for a year and a half. If you thought her time being imprisoned would change her character, give her nuance, or be at all plot relevant, you would be wrong. She was peppy going in, and just as optimistic coming out. Mean tsundere girl is a stalker and has a split personality with a man-hating serial killer. This has nothing to do with her being a mean tsundere stalker girl.
Every interaction between the two follows this script. Average girl says something nice to tsundere girl. Tsundere girl says something mean to average girl. Average girl is hurt and / or misunderstands what tsundere girl said to think maybe tsundere girl is being nice. Regardless, tsundere girl says something mean again. This formula is repeated for every collectible they have a discussion about. This formula is repeated in every cutscene. It does not change for the entire game. It happens this way because the “chemistry” between an “average” girl and a “tsundere” girl is supposed to be comedic. Not by the will of this game’s developers, but by the definitions of how these cliches interact with each other. I don’t know in what anime this dynamic ever worked, but it has been lost to time. All that remains is this formula, hollow and pointless, and woefully inappropriate for this game.
Because unless you couldn’t tell, there is nothing funny happening in this story. There is no room for jokes. Kids are being brainwashed! The kids have killed their parents! The city’s on fire! Our main characters kind of hate each other! The villains are children, being sold lies from super villains! The neutral side characters are billionaire war profiteers! But every single character follows an anime trope to a tee, and interacts with every other anime trope with dialog written in strict adherence to the anime trope’s unwritten rules. The problem is, several of these tropes are meant to be comedic, either alone or in tandem, and nothing is done to adapt to the story being told.
This slavish trope adherence crystalized for me when I reached the backstory of one of the genius elementary students, a pink-haired loli. (A loli is an English anime word stolen from Japanese (stolen from English) that refers to a pre-teen girl the work invites you to think about sexually. The pink-haired variant is loud, shrill, impetuous, manipulative, and self-infantilizing.) In an effort to bolster her daughter’s acting career, loli’s mother sold both the loli and herself into prostitution to the producers of the industry. Loli is triggered by her multiple experiences with rape any time she hears the word “gentle,” as her father promised all clients would be “gentle” with her.
The instant her flashback is over, the duration of which she has been having an obvious PTSD episode, she takes a cartoonish tumble and falls on her face, camera pointed directly at her exposed polka-dotted panties.
I reeled so hard I had to put down the controller for a moment. Was this game so unaware of what it had done? That it had just invited me to share a mindspace with a child rapist? To demean a child sex-trafficing victim? In service of - a “comedic” panty shot? Because that was the kind of “joke” associated with pink-haired lolis? Was this “joke” preordained the moment they selected the pink-haired loli archetype, irrevocable regardless of the backstory they gave her?
Because she popped right back up and reacted with a taunt, teasing the main character for feeling flustered for seeing her panties. This is not how any human behaves. This is not how the character just described to us would behave. This is how the pink-haired loli archetype behaves. After being abstracted to this degree, all of this behavior becomes pointless on its own, and only given meaning via context. And in thoughtlessly being applied to this scenario, the context makes the representation reckless, vulgar, irresponsible, evil.
It is evil because it establishes the existence of real evils that exist in the real world as also existing in this fictional world, and does not keep the viewer on the correct side of the scenario. It is evil because this invitation is done involuntarily, without pretext, without commentary, without purpose. It is evil because it is ignorant of its own nature. It is evil because it is pointless.
Ultra Despair Girls is evil because it utterly fails its responsibility to give meaning to the atrocities it invents.
The cruelest joke of the whole game is, average girl is not allowed to become a hero within this game. Because her brother is the virtuous modest everyman trope from the first Danganronpa game. By the rules of Hot Anime Nonsense, no one else in this fictional world can be like him, because the writers can’t handle two virtuous characters at once. It would ruin their template for how characters talk to each other. So after the events of the end of this game, average girl has to remain an average girl.
Spoilers, if you somehow still want to suffer through this game yourself. There is no resolution. There is no moralizing. There is a continuation of the status quo, which I need remind you, is the adults are dead, the island is cut-off from the world, and thousands of children are being brainwashed as hostages. Why was this done? Because of reasons dreamed up by characters in other games that are never revealed. How does this get resolved? The brainwashed children, the trapped survivors, the main character’s separation from her family? None of this is resolved in any other game or anime adaptation.
Ultra Despair Girls is grotesque misery porn. It is the bone-headed utilization of shocking imagery in absurd scenarios for ends so oblivious, so shallow as to be nothing besides window dressing. It fails to understand that depictions of child abuse, rape, torture, dismemberment, and familicide tend to make real people, like the ones playing this game, uncomfortable when done senselessly. Ultra Despair Girls shows these topics, and more, artlessly, passionlessly, in ways that are both boring and offensive. I hold this game in the utmost contempt and pity every hard working developer who contributed to a project that objectively made the world a little worse off.
In my rating system, I reserve .5 stars for predatory, unplayable, or evil games, and in Ultra Despair Girls' case, I'm confident arguing it is a form of evil. (There's a lot I want to blast it for first, but I'll get there!) Even if you're a fan of the typical Danganronpa visual novels, stay the hell away from this. Not only do you have to play two games to understand what's happening in Ultra Despair Girls, playing Ultra Despair Girls will, at most, let you better understand like 2 episodes of the anime Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School - Despair Arc for 1 character that ends up having zero plot relevance before they literally fuck off to outer space. That is not a joke. I cannot overstate how much this game is not worth it.
Wow, just thinking about this game again to write this review makes me nauseous! So let's get into it.
This collection of headache inducing factors masquerading as entertainment can be split into the game's presentation and the game's story content. Ultra Despair Girls is the series' first with 3D gameplay, after previous entries were primarily visual novels. Transitioning genres to 3rd person shooter caused a lot of friction. Development shortcuts are obvious and plentiful, and the team’s intuition for the needs of the new genre is painfully off. But surprise, Ultra Despair Girls is still almost as much a visual novel as the mainline Danganronpa games, and all the gameplay sections are literally filler until more cutscenes can happen.
If you skip all the cutscenes and look at the game's bones, it is a cheap, functional 3rd-person shooter. You'll be asked to trek through the same environments forwards and backwards with slightly different paths blocked or opened, each one a decorated hallway. There are only a handful of enemy types with a handful of ammo types meant to counter them, with puzzles littered throughout the level requiring some light thinking if you want a higher score.
Coming from a series known for loud, garish colors, Ultra Despair Girls goes for broke. Where before coloration functioned to keep interest in a visual novel that required hours of reading, the same assault of neon, acidic tones is hard to look at in a 3D environment. Environments have no atmospheric effects and little to no dynamic lighting - the game feels like an HD release of an early PS2 game with bad art direction. The plainly implemented camera wildly shifts whenever you ready your weapon, made even worse if you turn on the unpredictable auto-aiming feature. Maybe you won’t get dizzy as the camera whips around harshly colored environments at disorienting speeds, maybe you won’t get turned around in same-y looking environments when surrounded by copy-pasted enemies. But I did, and I had a real bad time!
Did I mention the game is boring to play? Did I mention the game is slow? That you'll be holding down the run button almost the entire time, often wondering if it even made a difference? That combat is so easy you'll forget it's possible to die until you walk into a pit and get an instant Game Over? That some of the puzzles are glitched and won’t consistently give you credit for solving them? That the game even failed to load cutscenes a couple times and forced me to restart my whole system?
And let me tell you, the story parts of the game are FAR worse.
Make no mistake, the writing in Danganronpa has always been bad. The premise is crass, the characters are distillations of Hot Anime Nonsense, and surprising or shocking the player is valued over logical consistency. But the ways in which the Danganronpa games are bad is at least balanced around being engaging, schlocky fun. Ultra Despair Girls completely fails its handling of its characters and subject matter in ways both bone headed and insulting - and the Hot Anime Nonsense is cranked up to toxic levels.
Here's the game’s premise: a group of genius grade schoolers have taken control of an army of murder robots to brainwash every child on an island. They then use these robots and brainwashed children to mass murder all the adults on the island.
Let me establish here: this premise is very dumb. Leaning into the dumbness, I could see some room for jokes. But Ultra Despair Girls plays this concept completely straight. The aggressors are ruthlessly efficient at their goal, and the adults are massacred. But before I tear into the story, I’d like to touch on a side-effect of this setting that makes the game harder to play.
In the Danganronpa franchise, blood is stylized to be flaming hot pink. This is because the mainline Danganronpa games are about teenagers murdering each other, so a level of abstraction stops the tone from getting too heavy. Ultra Despair Girls keeps this abstraction while building upon it, making every NPC's model washed out in bright electric blue
Why this matters for gameplay: every level is littered with corpses. You'll find mounds of corpses in the middle of the street. Corpses nailed unevenly to walls. Lone corpses slumped in chairs. With hot pink blood splashes on every surface, and unshaded blue blobs peppering every locale, the already same-y and forgettable level geometry becomes even more incomprehensible. Landmarks become invisible once overshadowed by the same scenarios of copied corpses as you’ve been seeing the whole game. For how simple the levels are constructed, it is astounding to reflect back on how often I had to open the map.
Within this prevalence of corpses does the tainted soul of Ultra Despair Girls start to emerge. Because it is a choice to show all these corpses. Not every game with disaster stricken cities shows the human devastation. But the murder robots and the children didn't just kill all the adults - the brainwashed children are also playing with the corpses.
Children will be gathered around corpses, poking them with sticks, encircling them with dances and games, singing in makeshift choirs. And not just the same copy and pasted scenarios over and over, (even though you will see the same kid Fornite taunting atop a car near a dozen times (random family members still beneath the tires, random kids gathered to watch)). There are hand-placed corpses everywhere. Someone whose leg got hurt, and limped behind some furniture before they bled out. Someone who was running and was slashed in the back while they tried to escape. Throats slashed while seated at an outdoor patio, children pilfering their drinks
There is a commitment to this concept that baffles me. Gameplay wise, it is wholly unnecessary. You only shoot at the robots, not the children. Even boss fights against the genius elementary students have you shoot at their remote controlled mechs. But this commitment is not limited to the level’s set dressing - the pointless collectables strewn throughout the levels include dozens of awful notes from children and adults how they want to kill each other. All collectables look the same until obtained, so you have no idea ahead of time if you are picking up a health upgrade, or four pages of text graphically detailing a plan to feed a human their dismembered limbs. You can nearly taste the self-conscious shame of either the original writer or the translator (or both) in trying to sell this garbage.
So our premise is played straight, but the intention is crashing against the presentation. The visuals are too goofy to work as horror, but the content is too gross to be glossed over. And it is in this failing juxtaposition that we introduce the secret ingredient that takes this project from merely “bad art” to “morally irresponsible”: Hot. Anime. Nonsense.
Hot Anime Nonsense is a collection of cliches and character archetypes that metastasized from decades of anime creators basing their characters off of other anime characters instead of their own imaginations or human experiences. It's a form of repetition that transcends shorthand to become prescription. With Ultra Despair Girls, Danganronpa forgos any glimmer of originality to use anime character cliches exclusively in the most rote, lifeless, plot-first writing possible.
The two playable main characters consist of an upbeat “average” (idiot) girl and mean tsundere girl. (A tsundere is an English anime word stolen from Japanese that means “is a bitch to everyone so you might feel something when they are nice to the main character once in the final episode.” (you will not.)) Upbeat average girl has, at the time of the story’s beginning, been kept imprisoned in isolation for a year and a half. If you thought her time being imprisoned would change her character, give her nuance, or be at all plot relevant, you would be wrong. She was peppy going in, and just as optimistic coming out. Mean tsundere girl is a stalker and has a split personality with a man-hating serial killer. This has nothing to do with her being a mean tsundere stalker girl.
Every interaction between the two follows this script. Average girl says something nice to tsundere girl. Tsundere girl says something mean to average girl. Average girl is hurt and / or misunderstands what tsundere girl said to think maybe tsundere girl is being nice. Regardless, tsundere girl says something mean again. This formula is repeated for every collectible they have a discussion about. This formula is repeated in every cutscene. It does not change for the entire game. It happens this way because the “chemistry” between an “average” girl and a “tsundere” girl is supposed to be comedic. Not by the will of this game’s developers, but by the definitions of how these cliches interact with each other. I don’t know in what anime this dynamic ever worked, but it has been lost to time. All that remains is this formula, hollow and pointless, and woefully inappropriate for this game.
Because unless you couldn’t tell, there is nothing funny happening in this story. There is no room for jokes. Kids are being brainwashed! The kids have killed their parents! The city’s on fire! Our main characters kind of hate each other! The villains are children, being sold lies from super villains! The neutral side characters are billionaire war profiteers! But every single character follows an anime trope to a tee, and interacts with every other anime trope with dialog written in strict adherence to the anime trope’s unwritten rules. The problem is, several of these tropes are meant to be comedic, either alone or in tandem, and nothing is done to adapt to the story being told.
This slavish trope adherence crystalized for me when I reached the backstory of one of the genius elementary students, a pink-haired loli. (A loli is an English anime word stolen from Japanese (stolen from English) that refers to a pre-teen girl the work invites you to think about sexually. The pink-haired variant is loud, shrill, impetuous, manipulative, and self-infantilizing.) In an effort to bolster her daughter’s acting career, loli’s mother sold both the loli and herself into prostitution to the producers of the industry. Loli is triggered by her multiple experiences with rape any time she hears the word “gentle,” as her father promised all clients would be “gentle” with her.
The instant her flashback is over, the duration of which she has been having an obvious PTSD episode, she takes a cartoonish tumble and falls on her face, camera pointed directly at her exposed polka-dotted panties.
I reeled so hard I had to put down the controller for a moment. Was this game so unaware of what it had done? That it had just invited me to share a mindspace with a child rapist? To demean a child sex-trafficing victim? In service of - a “comedic” panty shot? Because that was the kind of “joke” associated with pink-haired lolis? Was this “joke” preordained the moment they selected the pink-haired loli archetype, irrevocable regardless of the backstory they gave her?
Because she popped right back up and reacted with a taunt, teasing the main character for feeling flustered for seeing her panties. This is not how any human behaves. This is not how the character just described to us would behave. This is how the pink-haired loli archetype behaves. After being abstracted to this degree, all of this behavior becomes pointless on its own, and only given meaning via context. And in thoughtlessly being applied to this scenario, the context makes the representation reckless, vulgar, irresponsible, evil.
It is evil because it establishes the existence of real evils that exist in the real world as also existing in this fictional world, and does not keep the viewer on the correct side of the scenario. It is evil because this invitation is done involuntarily, without pretext, without commentary, without purpose. It is evil because it is ignorant of its own nature. It is evil because it is pointless.
Ultra Despair Girls is evil because it utterly fails its responsibility to give meaning to the atrocities it invents.
The cruelest joke of the whole game is, average girl is not allowed to become a hero within this game. Because her brother is the virtuous modest everyman trope from the first Danganronpa game. By the rules of Hot Anime Nonsense, no one else in this fictional world can be like him, because the writers can’t handle two virtuous characters at once. It would ruin their template for how characters talk to each other. So after the events of the end of this game, average girl has to remain an average girl.
Spoilers, if you somehow still want to suffer through this game yourself. There is no resolution. There is no moralizing. There is a continuation of the status quo, which I need remind you, is the adults are dead, the island is cut-off from the world, and thousands of children are being brainwashed as hostages. Why was this done? Because of reasons dreamed up by characters in other games that are never revealed. How does this get resolved? The brainwashed children, the trapped survivors, the main character’s separation from her family? None of this is resolved in any other game or anime adaptation.
Ultra Despair Girls is grotesque misery porn. It is the bone-headed utilization of shocking imagery in absurd scenarios for ends so oblivious, so shallow as to be nothing besides window dressing. It fails to understand that depictions of child abuse, rape, torture, dismemberment, and familicide tend to make real people, like the ones playing this game, uncomfortable when done senselessly. Ultra Despair Girls shows these topics, and more, artlessly, passionlessly, in ways that are both boring and offensive. I hold this game in the utmost contempt and pity every hard working developer who contributed to a project that objectively made the world a little worse off.