sleepytitan
1749 Reviews liked by sleepytitan
Sorry, I'm not playing three games' worth of this kiddie shit. I only play badass games where you use guns and kill people so miss me with that "platformer that fades into obscurity until an unreasonable amount of people want the main character in Smash" garbage.
This review contains spoilers
This is less of a proper review, but more of a big wall of messy ideas and unfiltered thoughts. I normally wouldn't make a post for something like this, but this game felt like an exception for me.
Act 1 of Dragon Quest XI is in no uncertain terms, very close to the ideal Dragon Quest adventure for me in a lot of ways. The beginning has a unique drive to it, and it doesn't waste a lot of time sending you out of your hometown on horseback. Party members are slewed out nicely (oftentimes in pairs) and the pace at which the world expands feels very meticulous and orchestrated. After getting the boat, I sort of entered this zen state going "yeah, this game is actually kind of really fucking good!" This building momentum which Act 1 moves at is honestly really impressive to me, and the Lonalulu mermaid scenario might genuinely be my second favorite part of the entire game. By the time I reached Arboria, I wanna say I had like, 30 hours played? As I watched Yggdrasil fall and stuff I was totally like "god shit is gonna get so real and Dragon Quest is gonna do it again!"
The Definitive Edition of DQXI adds four new interlude chapters before Act 2 Actually Starts, and I think they're kind of on a spectrum of quality. I don't really like Jade's, Sylvando's and Erik's are neat, and Rab's interlude chapter is my favorite part of the entire game. It's kind of a mixed bag, but it honestly kind of had me excited for what was gonna happen during Act 2 (because like holy shit Mordegon was kind of a dick for that)
And then the game just gets like, kinda really boring for a while.
A very clear cut comparison I can make to Act 2 would be something like the World of Ruin from FFVI. The world is kinda fucked, and hey wow all of my friends are scattered around the joint and I gotta find them. The problem with DQXI's Act 2 is that, outside of joining forces with Hendrick and revisiting Heliodor, the world you're traversing and interacting with doesn't actually feel different. Sure, sometimes people are sad and the sky looks kind of cloudy, but there's genuinely nothing new or interesting about Erdrea that keeps this from feeling like a dull retread of Act 1 stripped of its novelty. It doesn't really help that the orbs are reintroduced as well, almost as if there wasn't really an effort made in trying to deny it at all. This also being one of the most strictly linear parts of the game as well isn't doing it any favors either if I'm being honest.
Yggdrasil is the epicenter of Erdrea's existence, and there is legitimately not really anything meaningful DQXI has to show for the consequences of it being razed to the ground. In FFVI, towns were shattered and some were even abandoned. The overworld music was haunting, and the terrain you walked on was scorched and shifted by the calamity. When the transitional text into the second half of that game said "on that day the world was changed forever" it's not something you were meant to treat as hyperbole. Now, I'm not saying I wanted XI's map to be entirely restructured or something like that, it's an unreasonable expectation I wouldn't really put on any game of this stature. I just wanted something, anything significant for me to latch onto.
Something I've seen Act 2 get praised for a lot is how it develops its characters, and for a pretty good amount of the cast, I actually kind of agree! Sylvando meeting with his dad after ten years of absence and realizing that no matter what, he'll always be there and care for him unconditionally is heartwarming. Serena reconciling with the death of Veronica and using it as a way to strengthen her resolve so that her sister can live on through her is beautiful. Rab denying a perfect life built from his memories so he can bear the hardship of the present and be there for his grandchild (you!) is still the best part of the entire game for me.
Outside of those 3 examples though, I kinda don't have a lot of very nice things to say about everyone else. Hendrick is like, I dunno he's fine, I like his relationship with Jasper but I also did permanently bench him as soon as I got everyone else back, so suffice to say I didn't really care about him a lot. Erik and Jade are kind of uniquely awful though.
Amnesia is maybe one of my least favorite narrative tropes, like ever, and it's something I've only ever enjoyed under the pretense of it being used for a deliberate use of dramatic irony, or as a way to mess with the person engaging with the work. DQXI does neither of these things, and I cannot for the life of me understand what the point of Erik having amnesia is. It's just so like, effortlessly solved too. You roll up to Sniflheim, watch his memories through a root of Yggdrasil (honestly kind of confused how this still works when the tree is dead) and that's it. I'm just kind of baffled by it, this whole subplot feels like the result of facing the simple problem of "hey how do we convey Erik's backstory to the party and the player" and just deciding on the most ridiculously outlandish solution possible when there's like a million better ways of handling it naturally. It's so much funnier if you meet up with Erik a bit earlier than you're "supposed" to as well, as he pretty much just stands around and hangs out like he's your awkward little brother. All of the stuff regarding him is just even worse if you played vanilla over Definitive Edition too, in which they don't even EXPLAIN why Erik gets amnesia in the first place since his interlude chapter isn't there. I don't even really think the explanation behind it is that good either, but that's neither here nor there at this point.
It's important to understand that Jade, and Octagonia by extension is a sort of homage/reinterpretation of the Alena chapter from DQIV. A scenario in which a tomboy princess kicks so much ass that she ends up having to be the person to defend her own bodyguards, and it ends with her completely dominating a tournament in what is easily the most iconic setpiece of that game. The way Jade is set up is very similar, as she's initially posed as a princess martial artist that's far more physically capable than her mentor. But by time you reach Dundrasil in Act 1, you learn she's a far more layered and sympathetic character. Her prowess doesn't come from a desire to be strong, but from the need to protect those around her so that she never has to risk losing them again. It's amazing, and she's so cool! I instantly gravitated towards her, and I was genuinely excited to see where her character went.
I'm not really going to mince words here, I think the way Act 2 handles Jade is terrible. The initial setup of her going to liberate Octagonia works as a good premise, but it just falls apart so fucking badly once you go up to the arena and meet Booga. You're given a yes/no prompt to put on a bunny suit for his pleasure, and the game doesn't really give you a choice to say no, because he'll kill a bunch of kids or some shit. It's not the most senseless or revolting thing I've ever seen or anything, but it honestly feels kind of disgusting to me out of principle. She doesn't even successfully revolt with the other prisoners either, as the Luminary and The Guys have to show up and save her. To see a character like Jade reduced to this is not only extremely disappointing, but it almost feels like a mockery when you consider what it was directly paying homage to as well. Unfortunately, Dragon Quest isn't really a stranger to some occasional eyebrow raising stuff regarding it's treatment of women at times. It's something that even my favorite games in the series (VII and VIII) don't get away with, but XI's treatment of Jade is quite frankly embarassing and all things considered it's personally upsetting to me.
One the note of paying tributes and homages to previous games, I think DQXI can feel a bit lopsided at times. It's adoration towards the past of the series very much feels genuine, but I cant help but think that adoration takes center stage in a way that oftentimes sacrifices some of the unique ground it has to stand on. That's not to say there isn't clever nods to be found within DQXI, the way the interlude chapters are structured like those of DQIV was not lost on me, and even if it was a bit on the nose I really appreciated how some of the songs were used. What makes a lot of those small tributes tick for me is that they exist by design, and the game never interrupts itself to go "Hey, do you remember so and so?" However, it's the stuff with Erdwyn that honestly began to really wear on me as the game went on. I understand that DQIII is very beloved game, and even if it's not my favorite, I absolutely respect it and admire what it was able to accomplish. DQXI is not shy about establishing the parallels between Erdwyn and Erdrick, and if I'm being honest, it just feels so tiring. It's such an endemic tendency throughout DQXI to show unambiguous reverence towards this game in particular to the point that it feels like it's living in its shadow rather than existing on its own terms at times.
Despite all of the mean things I've said about this game, I still kinda like it honestly? The Character Builder is arguably the best progression system in the series, and the way it coincided with the narrative really impressed me. Pep is a fun twist on combat, and having the turn based system go from being premeditated to conditional was a welcome change even if it took a while for me to get used to it. It's a gorgeous game with vibrant towns, and Toriyama's art will always be lovely to me no matter the context. Dragon Quest as a series has a lot of predominant fundamental strengths, and XI tends to do a very good job at adhering to them.
As of now, I haven't played Act 3, and honestly? I don't really plan to. Now, it's not because I heard people say it bad and that it undid certain plot elements, but moreso that I've already put over 60 hours into DQXI. It's not much of a secret that I'm not particularly enamored with this game, and I don't think I have it in me to follow through with something that's considered post game when there's other interests I could be pursuing. I guess that's just what happens when you play six of these in a row.
Act 1 of Dragon Quest XI is in no uncertain terms, very close to the ideal Dragon Quest adventure for me in a lot of ways. The beginning has a unique drive to it, and it doesn't waste a lot of time sending you out of your hometown on horseback. Party members are slewed out nicely (oftentimes in pairs) and the pace at which the world expands feels very meticulous and orchestrated. After getting the boat, I sort of entered this zen state going "yeah, this game is actually kind of really fucking good!" This building momentum which Act 1 moves at is honestly really impressive to me, and the Lonalulu mermaid scenario might genuinely be my second favorite part of the entire game. By the time I reached Arboria, I wanna say I had like, 30 hours played? As I watched Yggdrasil fall and stuff I was totally like "god shit is gonna get so real and Dragon Quest is gonna do it again!"
The Definitive Edition of DQXI adds four new interlude chapters before Act 2 Actually Starts, and I think they're kind of on a spectrum of quality. I don't really like Jade's, Sylvando's and Erik's are neat, and Rab's interlude chapter is my favorite part of the entire game. It's kind of a mixed bag, but it honestly kind of had me excited for what was gonna happen during Act 2 (because like holy shit Mordegon was kind of a dick for that)
And then the game just gets like, kinda really boring for a while.
A very clear cut comparison I can make to Act 2 would be something like the World of Ruin from FFVI. The world is kinda fucked, and hey wow all of my friends are scattered around the joint and I gotta find them. The problem with DQXI's Act 2 is that, outside of joining forces with Hendrick and revisiting Heliodor, the world you're traversing and interacting with doesn't actually feel different. Sure, sometimes people are sad and the sky looks kind of cloudy, but there's genuinely nothing new or interesting about Erdrea that keeps this from feeling like a dull retread of Act 1 stripped of its novelty. It doesn't really help that the orbs are reintroduced as well, almost as if there wasn't really an effort made in trying to deny it at all. This also being one of the most strictly linear parts of the game as well isn't doing it any favors either if I'm being honest.
Yggdrasil is the epicenter of Erdrea's existence, and there is legitimately not really anything meaningful DQXI has to show for the consequences of it being razed to the ground. In FFVI, towns were shattered and some were even abandoned. The overworld music was haunting, and the terrain you walked on was scorched and shifted by the calamity. When the transitional text into the second half of that game said "on that day the world was changed forever" it's not something you were meant to treat as hyperbole. Now, I'm not saying I wanted XI's map to be entirely restructured or something like that, it's an unreasonable expectation I wouldn't really put on any game of this stature. I just wanted something, anything significant for me to latch onto.
Something I've seen Act 2 get praised for a lot is how it develops its characters, and for a pretty good amount of the cast, I actually kind of agree! Sylvando meeting with his dad after ten years of absence and realizing that no matter what, he'll always be there and care for him unconditionally is heartwarming. Serena reconciling with the death of Veronica and using it as a way to strengthen her resolve so that her sister can live on through her is beautiful. Rab denying a perfect life built from his memories so he can bear the hardship of the present and be there for his grandchild (you!) is still the best part of the entire game for me.
Outside of those 3 examples though, I kinda don't have a lot of very nice things to say about everyone else. Hendrick is like, I dunno he's fine, I like his relationship with Jasper but I also did permanently bench him as soon as I got everyone else back, so suffice to say I didn't really care about him a lot. Erik and Jade are kind of uniquely awful though.
Amnesia is maybe one of my least favorite narrative tropes, like ever, and it's something I've only ever enjoyed under the pretense of it being used for a deliberate use of dramatic irony, or as a way to mess with the person engaging with the work. DQXI does neither of these things, and I cannot for the life of me understand what the point of Erik having amnesia is. It's just so like, effortlessly solved too. You roll up to Sniflheim, watch his memories through a root of Yggdrasil (honestly kind of confused how this still works when the tree is dead) and that's it. I'm just kind of baffled by it, this whole subplot feels like the result of facing the simple problem of "hey how do we convey Erik's backstory to the party and the player" and just deciding on the most ridiculously outlandish solution possible when there's like a million better ways of handling it naturally. It's so much funnier if you meet up with Erik a bit earlier than you're "supposed" to as well, as he pretty much just stands around and hangs out like he's your awkward little brother. All of the stuff regarding him is just even worse if you played vanilla over Definitive Edition too, in which they don't even EXPLAIN why Erik gets amnesia in the first place since his interlude chapter isn't there. I don't even really think the explanation behind it is that good either, but that's neither here nor there at this point.
It's important to understand that Jade, and Octagonia by extension is a sort of homage/reinterpretation of the Alena chapter from DQIV. A scenario in which a tomboy princess kicks so much ass that she ends up having to be the person to defend her own bodyguards, and it ends with her completely dominating a tournament in what is easily the most iconic setpiece of that game. The way Jade is set up is very similar, as she's initially posed as a princess martial artist that's far more physically capable than her mentor. But by time you reach Dundrasil in Act 1, you learn she's a far more layered and sympathetic character. Her prowess doesn't come from a desire to be strong, but from the need to protect those around her so that she never has to risk losing them again. It's amazing, and she's so cool! I instantly gravitated towards her, and I was genuinely excited to see where her character went.
I'm not really going to mince words here, I think the way Act 2 handles Jade is terrible. The initial setup of her going to liberate Octagonia works as a good premise, but it just falls apart so fucking badly once you go up to the arena and meet Booga. You're given a yes/no prompt to put on a bunny suit for his pleasure, and the game doesn't really give you a choice to say no, because he'll kill a bunch of kids or some shit. It's not the most senseless or revolting thing I've ever seen or anything, but it honestly feels kind of disgusting to me out of principle. She doesn't even successfully revolt with the other prisoners either, as the Luminary and The Guys have to show up and save her. To see a character like Jade reduced to this is not only extremely disappointing, but it almost feels like a mockery when you consider what it was directly paying homage to as well. Unfortunately, Dragon Quest isn't really a stranger to some occasional eyebrow raising stuff regarding it's treatment of women at times. It's something that even my favorite games in the series (VII and VIII) don't get away with, but XI's treatment of Jade is quite frankly embarassing and all things considered it's personally upsetting to me.
One the note of paying tributes and homages to previous games, I think DQXI can feel a bit lopsided at times. It's adoration towards the past of the series very much feels genuine, but I cant help but think that adoration takes center stage in a way that oftentimes sacrifices some of the unique ground it has to stand on. That's not to say there isn't clever nods to be found within DQXI, the way the interlude chapters are structured like those of DQIV was not lost on me, and even if it was a bit on the nose I really appreciated how some of the songs were used. What makes a lot of those small tributes tick for me is that they exist by design, and the game never interrupts itself to go "Hey, do you remember so and so?" However, it's the stuff with Erdwyn that honestly began to really wear on me as the game went on. I understand that DQIII is very beloved game, and even if it's not my favorite, I absolutely respect it and admire what it was able to accomplish. DQXI is not shy about establishing the parallels between Erdwyn and Erdrick, and if I'm being honest, it just feels so tiring. It's such an endemic tendency throughout DQXI to show unambiguous reverence towards this game in particular to the point that it feels like it's living in its shadow rather than existing on its own terms at times.
Despite all of the mean things I've said about this game, I still kinda like it honestly? The Character Builder is arguably the best progression system in the series, and the way it coincided with the narrative really impressed me. Pep is a fun twist on combat, and having the turn based system go from being premeditated to conditional was a welcome change even if it took a while for me to get used to it. It's a gorgeous game with vibrant towns, and Toriyama's art will always be lovely to me no matter the context. Dragon Quest as a series has a lot of predominant fundamental strengths, and XI tends to do a very good job at adhering to them.
As of now, I haven't played Act 3, and honestly? I don't really plan to. Now, it's not because I heard people say it bad and that it undid certain plot elements, but moreso that I've already put over 60 hours into DQXI. It's not much of a secret that I'm not particularly enamored with this game, and I don't think I have it in me to follow through with something that's considered post game when there's other interests I could be pursuing. I guess that's just what happens when you play six of these in a row.
Signalis
2022
This game deserves proper critique as much as it deserves its praise.
Gameplay is poorly designed. Ammo, inventory space, level design and respawning enemies are all SUFFOCATING. These elements don't work well together and just frustrate you.
Signalis just poorly replicates old mechanics, while forgetting why these elements worked in the first place. Most ps1 RE games had 8-slots inventory while Signalis tightens it to 6, but also constantly drops at you quest items(Like Silent Hill did) that are far more common than in RE. Because of that backtracking reaches insane levels of tedium. Add to that tight corridors filled with enemies that will respawn later on and it becomes even worse. I had far more fun with majority of psx survival horrors despite them being 20 years older than Signalis.
But despite all of that you can swallow it up and gameplay, while annoying, still will be... serviceable. After all, game tries to be story focused. But story isn't that good either.
Remember principle of "Show, not tell" technique? Well, Signalis OVERuses and UNDERuses it at the same time. Let me explain, there's two primary sources of storytelling in Signalis:
1. Vivid dreamy incomprehensible cutscenes with hundred hidden meanings
2. Ten thousand notes and journals that just infodump on you everything with no context.
Remember Silent "two hour videoessay" Hill 2? People keep analyzing it decades after, I know comparing Signalis to THE Silent Hill 2 is unfair, but the story is simple and perfectly comprehensible without German/Chinese knowledge and reading King in Yellow. Silent Hill KNOWS when to be subtle and when to be blatant. Good luck with understanding Signalis though, because game just tells you to screw yourself and figure everything out by yourself.
Story itself isn't bad, but the game is AFRAID to tell you anything. It comes off as pretentious 2deep4u Evangelion wannabe, instead of presenting cohesive storytelling. It's just blueballing you with introducing a lot of cool stuff like replikas' past lives or cosmic horror, but doesn't provide any fricking answer, all is left is fans' theories. Hell, you won't even know why you ended up at Sierpinski in the first place!!!
The game has positive sides, like outstanding art direction or unique lore, but people just straight up ignore fundamental problems that prevent it from being "instant classic" or "greatest silent hill game since silent hill 3". But ig because lesbian representation is so rare, people treat it like angel simply because it has WLW story(Which is thankfully executed really damn well, but introduced WAY TOO LATE).
I really wanted to love this game. Sadly, I couldn't.
Gameplay is poorly designed. Ammo, inventory space, level design and respawning enemies are all SUFFOCATING. These elements don't work well together and just frustrate you.
Signalis just poorly replicates old mechanics, while forgetting why these elements worked in the first place. Most ps1 RE games had 8-slots inventory while Signalis tightens it to 6, but also constantly drops at you quest items(Like Silent Hill did) that are far more common than in RE. Because of that backtracking reaches insane levels of tedium. Add to that tight corridors filled with enemies that will respawn later on and it becomes even worse. I had far more fun with majority of psx survival horrors despite them being 20 years older than Signalis.
But despite all of that you can swallow it up and gameplay, while annoying, still will be... serviceable. After all, game tries to be story focused. But story isn't that good either.
Remember principle of "Show, not tell" technique? Well, Signalis OVERuses and UNDERuses it at the same time. Let me explain, there's two primary sources of storytelling in Signalis:
1. Vivid dreamy incomprehensible cutscenes with hundred hidden meanings
2. Ten thousand notes and journals that just infodump on you everything with no context.
Remember Silent "two hour videoessay" Hill 2? People keep analyzing it decades after, I know comparing Signalis to THE Silent Hill 2 is unfair, but the story is simple and perfectly comprehensible without German/Chinese knowledge and reading King in Yellow. Silent Hill KNOWS when to be subtle and when to be blatant. Good luck with understanding Signalis though, because game just tells you to screw yourself and figure everything out by yourself.
Story itself isn't bad, but the game is AFRAID to tell you anything. It comes off as pretentious 2deep4u Evangelion wannabe, instead of presenting cohesive storytelling. It's just blueballing you with introducing a lot of cool stuff like replikas' past lives or cosmic horror, but doesn't provide any fricking answer, all is left is fans' theories. Hell, you won't even know why you ended up at Sierpinski in the first place!!!
The game has positive sides, like outstanding art direction or unique lore, but people just straight up ignore fundamental problems that prevent it from being "instant classic" or "greatest silent hill game since silent hill 3". But ig because lesbian representation is so rare, people treat it like angel simply because it has WLW story(Which is thankfully executed really damn well, but introduced WAY TOO LATE).
I really wanted to love this game. Sadly, I couldn't.
Sifu
2022
Sloppy.
Sifu is one of few games on Backloggd that has fewer total plays that it does people who are planning on playing it. At the time of writing, I'm following 36 people; of those, two have played Sifu, and nine have it either wishlisted or on their backlog. Most of the games I've seen on here do not have numbers like that. Sifu is a very obvious outlier, though pinning down exactly why leaves me kind of stumped; it's been a game that I was looking forward to playing for a long time, but I can't remember where I first saw it or why I was excited to play it. I have to imagine that most Sifu stories are similar. It might just be the fact that it was locked to the Epic Games Store for about a year on PC, and the people who wanted it then put it aside until it could get released elsewhere and then never got around to playing it. Regardless, I come to you all now as someone who was like you, just days prior. I wishlisted Sifu, it sat on that wishlist for however long it's been on there, and I've finally broken free of the vortex to play it for myself. With these new eyes and this new perspective, I can tell you this: don't bother.
I got the feeling I was going to be in for some shit when, about five minutes into the first level, you walk into a hallway and are immediately treated to the Oldboy shot. Great. I love it when a bunch of French people cobble together all five of the movies they've ever seen where a fistfight happens in the hopes of making something that can come together in the edit. You ever seen The Raid? How about Kill Bill (not Lady Snowblood, since nobody actually watches movies made before the new millennium)? Have you ever wanted to play a facsimile of some of the fight scenes from those movies but with enemies who can shrug off every hit you throw at them? Haven't you wanted to see some mook slowly get chipped down over the course of a full minute before he powers up and then takes another full minute of chipping away at before finally going down? No? "Part of the appeal of those movies that are being referenced is that those fight scenes against swarms of people are brutal and fast", you say? Huh? No, what you liked about The Bride squaring off against O-Ren wasn't the fact that they only landed two strikes total between both of them; you just liked that it took place in the snow. The action itself doesn't have the fun bounce of something like Police Story or Fong Sai Yuk, nor does it have the grit of the new wave of Indonesian action films like The Night Comes for Us or Headshot. It's just this gray paste of not enough influences and not enough understanding, swirled together into something that feels somehow uninspired in spite of the obvious inspirations which act as the glue between scenes.
Much like Sekiro, the enjoyment of the moment-to-moment action is regularly brought down by blatant technical issues like the camera constantly clipping into the fucking walls and making it so you can't see what's happening. Unlike Sekiro, though — and unarguably worse for it — is the fact that Sifu doesn't have a lock-on. It's got that DmC: Devil May Cry soft lock-on stuff where you mostly gravitate towards the closest enemy, though this is never consistent. Sometimes an enemy will fly in from off-screen like they're hitting Bob Beamon's 29-foot Olympic long jump, and the game often isn't ready to change your target direction for you. Given that you as the player have zero control over who you're trying to look at in any given moment, this compounds an already-frustrating set of mechanical problems. I feel like I'm riding a bike with a rusted-out chain.
Hell, I didn't like Sekiro, but even I can admit that the dual health-and-stagger bars for enemies was an interesting concept. The less health an enemy had, the slower they recovered stagger, which made it almost inevitable that you'd break their guard so long as you could get enough good hits in. Whittling down their health bars made it easier to win a battle of attrition; they have their resources, and you're expected to grind down all of them to deliver the kill. Sifu does not do this. It has enemy health bars, it has enemy stagger bars, but neither one informs the other. The most optimal strategy for the last three (of five!) bosses seems to just be based around running away until they hit you with a singular, simple sequence that you parry over and over again. You'll only ever hit them to try and speed things up, but hitting the bosses contributes such a marginal amount of stagger while also requiring that you press more than one button. You'd be better off not swinging. Either you focus almost solely on parries, or you find the one attack that completely breaks their AI and lets you loop it on itself for an easy kill. It's remarkably simple to get one of several infinites on Yang's phase one where you punch him in his dick or heavy-punch-swap-positions with him over and over for sixty straight seconds. The new problem we run into is that this kills the boss, which is what will guarantee that you get the bad ending.
Enough has been written about Sifu's stupid "revenge is bad" plot contrasted with how the player has no issue slaughtering goons in the run-up to the boss that I won't dig into it further than to say that it doesn't work. It's clunky, and it doesn't work. What I do feel gets ignored, however, is the rest of the story leading up to the point where you find out that revenge is bad. This is one of those "the lore is the story!" games that people who don't care for the Dark Souls narratives accuse the Dark Souls narratives of being. There are all sorts of little incidental trinkets and slips of paper that you can collect and read at your hideout conspiracy board, and it all broadly boils down to "the antagonists killed your father to steal some elemental talismans that they were otherwise forbidden from using". How this is meant to excuse them slitting a child's throat and then the game itself painting you as a bad person for killing them is left as an exercise to the player; more accurately, it's left to the 100% completionists who are planning to make "ENDING EXPLAINED" videos in the first week of release. A lot of people have mentioned feeling like the "revenge is bad" twist comes out of nowhere, and that's because there's very little given to the player across all of the cutscenes. It's there, it's set up, but it's not executed well.
But what's unforgivable is the fact that I invested into a focus build only to find out that the final boss is inexplicably immune to all focus attacks. My entire strategy was invalidated by the fact that the developers made him fucking invincible against a core strategy that has, up to this point, never once been hinted at to be something that wouldn't work. I was either going to have to try beating Yang using a completely hobbled skill set with nothing that would actually help in fighting him, or I was going to have to restart the entire game to set up a better build that I could actually bring into the final boss. Your skills get locked in after every level, which would mean starting over from scratch and ignoring one of the core mechanics of the game because I now had the meta-knowledge that it just doesn't work at the end for some reason. Fuck off. Imagine if Devil May Cry 3 took away your devil trigger for the final Vergil fight, or if the Elden Beast was immune to magic. Some YouTuber or streamer must have dropped the line "focus is a crutch" at some point because it's the only thing that the fucking parrots discussing this on Reddit (type "focus" "crutch" site:www.reddit.com/r/sifugame into Google and count the number of pages that show up) can come up with when someone makes a thread asking why they took the mechanic away just in time for the game to end. I know they didn't all come up with the exact same quote independently of each other, so I'm making an open call to my minions to go track down whoever said it. I'm putting up bounties and shit. We will find them.
The game is gorgeous, and I won't pretend like that isn't worth celebrating. There are a lot of really lovely touches with this watercolor-esque shader and bold lighting shifts. It doesn't always work — one fight takes place in the rain with only a spotlight illuminating a center area, and so you'll spend most of it in the dark trying to figure out where you are — but it hits far more often than it misses in the visual department. It's clear that, if nothing else, the team behind this has a genuine passion for the art side of things. If Sifu was an animated short film, it'd only really need a better script to be something special. It's regrettable that Sloclap made a video game, instead.
A friend of mine said he was upset that they never made an Absolver 2. I'll share his pain. I'd also like an Absolver 2. It'd probably stop them from making another Sifu.
Sifu is one of few games on Backloggd that has fewer total plays that it does people who are planning on playing it. At the time of writing, I'm following 36 people; of those, two have played Sifu, and nine have it either wishlisted or on their backlog. Most of the games I've seen on here do not have numbers like that. Sifu is a very obvious outlier, though pinning down exactly why leaves me kind of stumped; it's been a game that I was looking forward to playing for a long time, but I can't remember where I first saw it or why I was excited to play it. I have to imagine that most Sifu stories are similar. It might just be the fact that it was locked to the Epic Games Store for about a year on PC, and the people who wanted it then put it aside until it could get released elsewhere and then never got around to playing it. Regardless, I come to you all now as someone who was like you, just days prior. I wishlisted Sifu, it sat on that wishlist for however long it's been on there, and I've finally broken free of the vortex to play it for myself. With these new eyes and this new perspective, I can tell you this: don't bother.
I got the feeling I was going to be in for some shit when, about five minutes into the first level, you walk into a hallway and are immediately treated to the Oldboy shot. Great. I love it when a bunch of French people cobble together all five of the movies they've ever seen where a fistfight happens in the hopes of making something that can come together in the edit. You ever seen The Raid? How about Kill Bill (not Lady Snowblood, since nobody actually watches movies made before the new millennium)? Have you ever wanted to play a facsimile of some of the fight scenes from those movies but with enemies who can shrug off every hit you throw at them? Haven't you wanted to see some mook slowly get chipped down over the course of a full minute before he powers up and then takes another full minute of chipping away at before finally going down? No? "Part of the appeal of those movies that are being referenced is that those fight scenes against swarms of people are brutal and fast", you say? Huh? No, what you liked about The Bride squaring off against O-Ren wasn't the fact that they only landed two strikes total between both of them; you just liked that it took place in the snow. The action itself doesn't have the fun bounce of something like Police Story or Fong Sai Yuk, nor does it have the grit of the new wave of Indonesian action films like The Night Comes for Us or Headshot. It's just this gray paste of not enough influences and not enough understanding, swirled together into something that feels somehow uninspired in spite of the obvious inspirations which act as the glue between scenes.
Much like Sekiro, the enjoyment of the moment-to-moment action is regularly brought down by blatant technical issues like the camera constantly clipping into the fucking walls and making it so you can't see what's happening. Unlike Sekiro, though — and unarguably worse for it — is the fact that Sifu doesn't have a lock-on. It's got that DmC: Devil May Cry soft lock-on stuff where you mostly gravitate towards the closest enemy, though this is never consistent. Sometimes an enemy will fly in from off-screen like they're hitting Bob Beamon's 29-foot Olympic long jump, and the game often isn't ready to change your target direction for you. Given that you as the player have zero control over who you're trying to look at in any given moment, this compounds an already-frustrating set of mechanical problems. I feel like I'm riding a bike with a rusted-out chain.
Hell, I didn't like Sekiro, but even I can admit that the dual health-and-stagger bars for enemies was an interesting concept. The less health an enemy had, the slower they recovered stagger, which made it almost inevitable that you'd break their guard so long as you could get enough good hits in. Whittling down their health bars made it easier to win a battle of attrition; they have their resources, and you're expected to grind down all of them to deliver the kill. Sifu does not do this. It has enemy health bars, it has enemy stagger bars, but neither one informs the other. The most optimal strategy for the last three (of five!) bosses seems to just be based around running away until they hit you with a singular, simple sequence that you parry over and over again. You'll only ever hit them to try and speed things up, but hitting the bosses contributes such a marginal amount of stagger while also requiring that you press more than one button. You'd be better off not swinging. Either you focus almost solely on parries, or you find the one attack that completely breaks their AI and lets you loop it on itself for an easy kill. It's remarkably simple to get one of several infinites on Yang's phase one where you punch him in his dick or heavy-punch-swap-positions with him over and over for sixty straight seconds. The new problem we run into is that this kills the boss, which is what will guarantee that you get the bad ending.
Enough has been written about Sifu's stupid "revenge is bad" plot contrasted with how the player has no issue slaughtering goons in the run-up to the boss that I won't dig into it further than to say that it doesn't work. It's clunky, and it doesn't work. What I do feel gets ignored, however, is the rest of the story leading up to the point where you find out that revenge is bad. This is one of those "the lore is the story!" games that people who don't care for the Dark Souls narratives accuse the Dark Souls narratives of being. There are all sorts of little incidental trinkets and slips of paper that you can collect and read at your hideout conspiracy board, and it all broadly boils down to "the antagonists killed your father to steal some elemental talismans that they were otherwise forbidden from using". How this is meant to excuse them slitting a child's throat and then the game itself painting you as a bad person for killing them is left as an exercise to the player; more accurately, it's left to the 100% completionists who are planning to make "ENDING EXPLAINED" videos in the first week of release. A lot of people have mentioned feeling like the "revenge is bad" twist comes out of nowhere, and that's because there's very little given to the player across all of the cutscenes. It's there, it's set up, but it's not executed well.
But what's unforgivable is the fact that I invested into a focus build only to find out that the final boss is inexplicably immune to all focus attacks. My entire strategy was invalidated by the fact that the developers made him fucking invincible against a core strategy that has, up to this point, never once been hinted at to be something that wouldn't work. I was either going to have to try beating Yang using a completely hobbled skill set with nothing that would actually help in fighting him, or I was going to have to restart the entire game to set up a better build that I could actually bring into the final boss. Your skills get locked in after every level, which would mean starting over from scratch and ignoring one of the core mechanics of the game because I now had the meta-knowledge that it just doesn't work at the end for some reason. Fuck off. Imagine if Devil May Cry 3 took away your devil trigger for the final Vergil fight, or if the Elden Beast was immune to magic. Some YouTuber or streamer must have dropped the line "focus is a crutch" at some point because it's the only thing that the fucking parrots discussing this on Reddit (type "focus" "crutch" site:www.reddit.com/r/sifugame into Google and count the number of pages that show up) can come up with when someone makes a thread asking why they took the mechanic away just in time for the game to end. I know they didn't all come up with the exact same quote independently of each other, so I'm making an open call to my minions to go track down whoever said it. I'm putting up bounties and shit. We will find them.
The game is gorgeous, and I won't pretend like that isn't worth celebrating. There are a lot of really lovely touches with this watercolor-esque shader and bold lighting shifts. It doesn't always work — one fight takes place in the rain with only a spotlight illuminating a center area, and so you'll spend most of it in the dark trying to figure out where you are — but it hits far more often than it misses in the visual department. It's clear that, if nothing else, the team behind this has a genuine passion for the art side of things. If Sifu was an animated short film, it'd only really need a better script to be something special. It's regrettable that Sloclap made a video game, instead.
A friend of mine said he was upset that they never made an Absolver 2. I'll share his pain. I'd also like an Absolver 2. It'd probably stop them from making another Sifu.
the way this leverages hyakkimaru hunting down 48 demons to recover his 48 body parts to slowly dole out more and more features is so system shock coded. it's soo good. killing a boss in the prologue and seeing the game transition from black&white to full colour cos you reclaimed your eye is absolute tip top stuff. being forced to amble as slowly as possible before you get your leg... yes... yes... I love this. this was made for me. I am the one person on earth who likes that you can't recover from knockdowns without an ear
I'm so on board with everything here that I don't care that the hitboxes largely range from active to lingering to humungous to vertically infinite. don't care that the maps are gigantic and full of nothing but enemies and swords like it's drakengard. you bet your ass I hunted down every last yokai to get my chakra and lymph nodes back even tho I still don't understand what half the stats do. I'm vibing man, who cares
it's cool that the common moral thruline across every story beat is that those who desire disproportionate wealth and power should probably be killed. also cool that one of the major metroidvania upgrades you get half way thru the game is controller vibration. sega was on some astral shit with this one; if someone told me modern camera controls were hidden behind an optional boss I'd nod like it was the most obvious thing I ever heard
as a reimagining of the manga it oscillates between playing stuff 1:1 and riffing on the source material in a way only a 2004 hack-n-slash called BLOOD WILL TELL ever could. the new twist reminds me of the scene in adaptation where the goofy nicolas cage twin describes his screenplay for a film called "The Three" about a killer, victim, and cop who all turn out to be the same person with multiple personality disorder. it's such a dumb ass Whoa Dude way of answering questions that don't matter, and it rules
sick ass game
I'm so on board with everything here that I don't care that the hitboxes largely range from active to lingering to humungous to vertically infinite. don't care that the maps are gigantic and full of nothing but enemies and swords like it's drakengard. you bet your ass I hunted down every last yokai to get my chakra and lymph nodes back even tho I still don't understand what half the stats do. I'm vibing man, who cares
it's cool that the common moral thruline across every story beat is that those who desire disproportionate wealth and power should probably be killed. also cool that one of the major metroidvania upgrades you get half way thru the game is controller vibration. sega was on some astral shit with this one; if someone told me modern camera controls were hidden behind an optional boss I'd nod like it was the most obvious thing I ever heard
as a reimagining of the manga it oscillates between playing stuff 1:1 and riffing on the source material in a way only a 2004 hack-n-slash called BLOOD WILL TELL ever could. the new twist reminds me of the scene in adaptation where the goofy nicolas cage twin describes his screenplay for a film called "The Three" about a killer, victim, and cop who all turn out to be the same person with multiple personality disorder. it's such a dumb ass Whoa Dude way of answering questions that don't matter, and it rules
sick ass game
Slave Zero X
2024
I want to state my purpose here up front: I want to praise Slave Zero X because I think it’s the kind of game I’d like to see more of made. It’s a genuinely impressive package, but I also think there are a lot of glaring issues with the title that will make many people hate it. So let’s do a compliment sandwich and do some constructive criticism.
Slave Zero X is, if nothing else, oozing with style. The art is full with biopunk monstrosities and sexy twinks. The music is brimming with cyberpunk arpeggios, wailing guitars, and thumping breakbeat. The spritework is beautiful and intricate, and watching this game in motion (especially a skilled player) can be a thing of beauty. You can unlock special shaders, which I think is a fun touch. If nothing else. This is a small easter egg, but I also think it’s really cool that the levels in the Episode Enyo prequel are actually based on the 3D environments you move through in this game.
I also love the boldness of its narrative. It is unabashedly gay, for one, but I also think there is a deeper subtext of sex and gender here, of being at war with ones own body and seeking to reshape it. There is also an anarchist bent to its politics, which tie into Hegelian dialectics of power and rejects all authorities it can, be it government or gods. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s super highbrow. It’s all over the place. The lore bites range from some silly notes to eerie eschatological poetry. It’s very brash and loud. There’s a vulgarity to it, both in its satire and in its visuals, that feels like this hideous, pulsating mass of raw anger.
Okay, let’s change gears. Most people who say they like hard games are kind of lying, including me. What they mean is that they want games that are hard in specific ways. They want games that challenge them in familiar ways. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people say, “I like hard games, but this is just unfun”; sometimes it’s coming from my own mouth. Games like Volgarr the Viking come to mind, unrelenting and unorthodox challenge boxes. Ugh, I’ll try to keep this short. The point is that “hardness” is a nebulous and subjective thing that is seen as something that we can mark objectively and quantitatively, even though the exact ways in which a game is hard or unfair depends on so many variables intersecting. I’m not making a novel point here, but that’s why some games get lauded for their difficulty and others are scorned.
I think that’s what Slave Zero X is. A game that is hard in ways people usually don’t want. That’s partially because of its ambition: it wants to be a fighting game and an action game in one. I think Slave Zero X wants to be Strider 2 but ends up being more like Ninja Warriors Return. And hey, that’s not a bad thing at all. What I mean is that combat in Slave Zero X, like in Ninja Warriors Return, tends to be very flat. You can launch and juggle people in the air, sure, but the majority of the game is forward movement. I really think the game could have done with a lot more verticality, but that also might have resulted in new issues. But it also ends up feeling a bit repetitive at times.
But if you run through this game mashing the light attack button, you will eventually hit a brick wall, and wonder why the game is punishing you. That’s partially because the game isn’t very good at communicating to you what’s going on. The tutorial is quite bad; it just throws a dozen pages of text explaining the mechanics at you once and then sets you loose. But it goes deeper than that, I think. For example, you have a parry that you execute by pressing a direction toward the attack, but since it has no animation and is in a very small window, it’s often not clear when or why you’re missing the mark with your timing. You get a score at the end of sections, but it's not super clear why you got a better or worse score, which should be one of the best ways to communicate to a player how they're doing. And while there’s a training room, all that really helps you with is comboing. And comboing does feel great here, it really does. But that’s also not the thing you need the most practice on in order to beat the game.
I think the key issue with Slave Zero X comes down to encounter design. One of the common action game design paradigms right now is a style that sees players progress through a series of arenas where enemies funnel in as you fight through them for some amount of time before eventually moving on. This is often paired with a combat system that produces self-sustaining feedback loops (recovering health or ammo, that is) that sort of dictates the flow of combat. As pointed out by one Campster, this kind of structure often lead to combat feeling pretty samey, as the pace of combat is entirely determined by the player and thus does not often get disrupted. But this trope has its place, and can be done well, but in order for it to be fun for long periods of time, you often need to be introducing new mechanics and enemies on a pretty frequent basis, which doesn’t really happen here.
Slave Zero X’s arenas end up feel awfully repetitive. New enemies aren’t introduced often, and you have to fight hundreds of them. The screen will often be filled with dozens of identical enemies for you to hack away through, which can be okay as fodder, I guess, but these masses can combo you, often for a long time. If you don’t have Burst up, you just have to lie back and take it for however long they juggle you. And getting combo’d is one of those classic things thats fun to do to an enemy but never for an enemy to do to you. It’s no coincidence that Slave Zero X is at it’s best when you’re fighting a small number of enemies rather than in its massive cavalcades of fodder.
A lot of the tougher enemies have attacks with insanely fast windups that lead into combos; even in a one-on-one fight I couldn’t really counter them consistently. They’re so fast that I think they may be literally impossible to parry reliably, and even if they’re not, they might as well be for most players. This is all exacerbated by the encounter design, which means that will all the enemies being thrown at you, it is often hard to tell what’s hitting you, let alone predict it and counter.
So when you’re not successfully juggling armored cops and parrying like the cyberninja you’re supposed to be, you’re often getting bodied and juggled in a way that makes you feel powerless. The result is a game that will frustrate most players. I’m not going to backseat game design and act like I know exactly how to fix it, though I definitely have ideas. But that is the reality: this is a game that’s hard in a way that many people will reject. It’s unfortunate, because I think with changes, it could be a much stronger and approachable game with a wider appeal.
But despite all these issues, I can’t say I think it’s a bad game. It’s a mess, yes, but it’s got so much style, so much ambition, and it’s combat does feel great when it works. During the right boss fight or the right set up of enemies, it feels like a dynamic flurry of blades, and you’ve somehow mastered it at the center of it all. While you’re not given a lot of opportunities for customization of your kit, your kit feels good to begin with. X-Shou feels sort of sticky and rigid in a way that is very novel, making in a distinctive feeling combat where a lot of your movement is done through attacks and dashes rather than running or walking. You juggle and bounce and parry and slash and gib fascists. It can be a blast.
Again, this is a game I want to see more games like. I want to see games that take inspiration from the arcade era, that are ambitious in their design, that go hogwild on their fiction, that inexplicably reboot forgotten titles as completely different games, that are gay and radical and flashy and deranged, that are extra in every way possible, that are like Slave Zero X is.
Slave Zero X is, if nothing else, oozing with style. The art is full with biopunk monstrosities and sexy twinks. The music is brimming with cyberpunk arpeggios, wailing guitars, and thumping breakbeat. The spritework is beautiful and intricate, and watching this game in motion (especially a skilled player) can be a thing of beauty. You can unlock special shaders, which I think is a fun touch. If nothing else. This is a small easter egg, but I also think it’s really cool that the levels in the Episode Enyo prequel are actually based on the 3D environments you move through in this game.
I also love the boldness of its narrative. It is unabashedly gay, for one, but I also think there is a deeper subtext of sex and gender here, of being at war with ones own body and seeking to reshape it. There is also an anarchist bent to its politics, which tie into Hegelian dialectics of power and rejects all authorities it can, be it government or gods. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s super highbrow. It’s all over the place. The lore bites range from some silly notes to eerie eschatological poetry. It’s very brash and loud. There’s a vulgarity to it, both in its satire and in its visuals, that feels like this hideous, pulsating mass of raw anger.
Okay, let’s change gears. Most people who say they like hard games are kind of lying, including me. What they mean is that they want games that are hard in specific ways. They want games that challenge them in familiar ways. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people say, “I like hard games, but this is just unfun”; sometimes it’s coming from my own mouth. Games like Volgarr the Viking come to mind, unrelenting and unorthodox challenge boxes. Ugh, I’ll try to keep this short. The point is that “hardness” is a nebulous and subjective thing that is seen as something that we can mark objectively and quantitatively, even though the exact ways in which a game is hard or unfair depends on so many variables intersecting. I’m not making a novel point here, but that’s why some games get lauded for their difficulty and others are scorned.
I think that’s what Slave Zero X is. A game that is hard in ways people usually don’t want. That’s partially because of its ambition: it wants to be a fighting game and an action game in one. I think Slave Zero X wants to be Strider 2 but ends up being more like Ninja Warriors Return. And hey, that’s not a bad thing at all. What I mean is that combat in Slave Zero X, like in Ninja Warriors Return, tends to be very flat. You can launch and juggle people in the air, sure, but the majority of the game is forward movement. I really think the game could have done with a lot more verticality, but that also might have resulted in new issues. But it also ends up feeling a bit repetitive at times.
But if you run through this game mashing the light attack button, you will eventually hit a brick wall, and wonder why the game is punishing you. That’s partially because the game isn’t very good at communicating to you what’s going on. The tutorial is quite bad; it just throws a dozen pages of text explaining the mechanics at you once and then sets you loose. But it goes deeper than that, I think. For example, you have a parry that you execute by pressing a direction toward the attack, but since it has no animation and is in a very small window, it’s often not clear when or why you’re missing the mark with your timing. You get a score at the end of sections, but it's not super clear why you got a better or worse score, which should be one of the best ways to communicate to a player how they're doing. And while there’s a training room, all that really helps you with is comboing. And comboing does feel great here, it really does. But that’s also not the thing you need the most practice on in order to beat the game.
I think the key issue with Slave Zero X comes down to encounter design. One of the common action game design paradigms right now is a style that sees players progress through a series of arenas where enemies funnel in as you fight through them for some amount of time before eventually moving on. This is often paired with a combat system that produces self-sustaining feedback loops (recovering health or ammo, that is) that sort of dictates the flow of combat. As pointed out by one Campster, this kind of structure often lead to combat feeling pretty samey, as the pace of combat is entirely determined by the player and thus does not often get disrupted. But this trope has its place, and can be done well, but in order for it to be fun for long periods of time, you often need to be introducing new mechanics and enemies on a pretty frequent basis, which doesn’t really happen here.
Slave Zero X’s arenas end up feel awfully repetitive. New enemies aren’t introduced often, and you have to fight hundreds of them. The screen will often be filled with dozens of identical enemies for you to hack away through, which can be okay as fodder, I guess, but these masses can combo you, often for a long time. If you don’t have Burst up, you just have to lie back and take it for however long they juggle you. And getting combo’d is one of those classic things thats fun to do to an enemy but never for an enemy to do to you. It’s no coincidence that Slave Zero X is at it’s best when you’re fighting a small number of enemies rather than in its massive cavalcades of fodder.
A lot of the tougher enemies have attacks with insanely fast windups that lead into combos; even in a one-on-one fight I couldn’t really counter them consistently. They’re so fast that I think they may be literally impossible to parry reliably, and even if they’re not, they might as well be for most players. This is all exacerbated by the encounter design, which means that will all the enemies being thrown at you, it is often hard to tell what’s hitting you, let alone predict it and counter.
So when you’re not successfully juggling armored cops and parrying like the cyberninja you’re supposed to be, you’re often getting bodied and juggled in a way that makes you feel powerless. The result is a game that will frustrate most players. I’m not going to backseat game design and act like I know exactly how to fix it, though I definitely have ideas. But that is the reality: this is a game that’s hard in a way that many people will reject. It’s unfortunate, because I think with changes, it could be a much stronger and approachable game with a wider appeal.
But despite all these issues, I can’t say I think it’s a bad game. It’s a mess, yes, but it’s got so much style, so much ambition, and it’s combat does feel great when it works. During the right boss fight or the right set up of enemies, it feels like a dynamic flurry of blades, and you’ve somehow mastered it at the center of it all. While you’re not given a lot of opportunities for customization of your kit, your kit feels good to begin with. X-Shou feels sort of sticky and rigid in a way that is very novel, making in a distinctive feeling combat where a lot of your movement is done through attacks and dashes rather than running or walking. You juggle and bounce and parry and slash and gib fascists. It can be a blast.
Again, this is a game I want to see more games like. I want to see games that take inspiration from the arcade era, that are ambitious in their design, that go hogwild on their fiction, that inexplicably reboot forgotten titles as completely different games, that are gay and radical and flashy and deranged, that are extra in every way possible, that are like Slave Zero X is.
Nine Sols
2024
Im having a hard time figuring out where to start in unpacking my thoughts on Nine Sols, their pullulation of which make them hard to grasp . Im going to try coming at this in a more procedural way, starting with more superficial things I could say and digging deeper from there. The most useless thing I could say about Nine Sols is: its one of the best games Ive ever played in an era of some of the best games ever made.
The next thing I want to say that is a little clumsy but I dont think I can leave out: Nine Sols is Hollow Knight if, instead of “Dark Souls meets Metroid”, it was 30% Metroid and 70% Sekiro. This isnt a shallow comparison, Nine Sols directly shares some conventions with Hollow Knight (map acquisition, charm analogue, pogo-style platforming) but with a reduction in the platforming and map complexity in favor of more dedicated combat systems. As a Metroidvania curmudgeon, this ratio of influences suits me so much more.
Heres the rub tho: very few games even begin to come close to Fromsofts level of quality and combat spectacle, especially Sekiros - so its in fact breathlessly exciting that Nine Sols, a game made by a dev who previously only made horror games, manages to stand shoulders with titans and deliver some of the most badass combat experiences in gaming to date. Part of what drives me the most in video games is “gamefeel”, a term used somewhat nebulously but which for me refers to the experience of moving around in the game world. Nine Sols has a sense of speed and momentum, youre zipping back and forth around your enemy leaving them pockeyed with explosions in your wake; youre leaping into the air to bounce and fling yourself between the deflections of your enemies attacks like some sort of lethal bird poised to swoop down and deliver a flurry of blows in every brief window you can find. To me this is like opium, the humming nirvanaous frequency my mind vibrates at while it processes the complex array of swords and knives being thrown my way is the closest thing to euphoria Ive ever experienced without a heavy prescription and I cannot overstate how much I fucking love that shit.
I feel like I need to expound on this. Theres just...... something about the sensation of being airborne in a video game. When its done right theres a mezmerizing and immensely satisfying rhythm to sustaining the lofting of your character. Its surprising then how rare this is, among action games, how terrified most games are to let you waft and fly around an arena. The crown is left uncontested for Nine Sols as it engineers moments of fluttering aerial jousting, swaying in elliptical lateraluses through your enemies with motions that feel vageuly Tai-Chi. "There is frankly not enough here" cries the man hopelessly addicted to the flow state.
But it wasnt good enough that Nine Sols could exceed my expectations just as an action game, no, Red Candle had to also somehow create a dense, expertly crafted, brilliantly laid-out taoist parable of ambition and suffering. The withholding, secretive style of narrative popularized by the Souls games is fashioned into a faceted character-driven drama in an unexpected and kinda visionary sort of way. Red Candle demonstrates an almost capricious amount of creative range, even somehow figuring out ways to infuse Nine Sols with moments of their horror pedigree. On a kickstarted budget of $420,000 Nine Sols eclipses the stories of AAA games working with 10x the financial backing, hands down, not even close. Who the hell let them cook??? For as excellent as Fromsofts work is, you wanna know one thing their games usually dont do? Make me mfing cry during the ending !! Shout it so people in the back can hear you: “Hurt People hurt people”.
The next thing I want to say that is a little clumsy but I dont think I can leave out: Nine Sols is Hollow Knight if, instead of “Dark Souls meets Metroid”, it was 30% Metroid and 70% Sekiro. This isnt a shallow comparison, Nine Sols directly shares some conventions with Hollow Knight (map acquisition, charm analogue, pogo-style platforming) but with a reduction in the platforming and map complexity in favor of more dedicated combat systems. As a Metroidvania curmudgeon, this ratio of influences suits me so much more.
Heres the rub tho: very few games even begin to come close to Fromsofts level of quality and combat spectacle, especially Sekiros - so its in fact breathlessly exciting that Nine Sols, a game made by a dev who previously only made horror games, manages to stand shoulders with titans and deliver some of the most badass combat experiences in gaming to date. Part of what drives me the most in video games is “gamefeel”, a term used somewhat nebulously but which for me refers to the experience of moving around in the game world. Nine Sols has a sense of speed and momentum, youre zipping back and forth around your enemy leaving them pockeyed with explosions in your wake; youre leaping into the air to bounce and fling yourself between the deflections of your enemies attacks like some sort of lethal bird poised to swoop down and deliver a flurry of blows in every brief window you can find. To me this is like opium, the humming nirvanaous frequency my mind vibrates at while it processes the complex array of swords and knives being thrown my way is the closest thing to euphoria Ive ever experienced without a heavy prescription and I cannot overstate how much I fucking love that shit.
I feel like I need to expound on this. Theres just...... something about the sensation of being airborne in a video game. When its done right theres a mezmerizing and immensely satisfying rhythm to sustaining the lofting of your character. Its surprising then how rare this is, among action games, how terrified most games are to let you waft and fly around an arena. The crown is left uncontested for Nine Sols as it engineers moments of fluttering aerial jousting, swaying in elliptical lateraluses through your enemies with motions that feel vageuly Tai-Chi. "There is frankly not enough here" cries the man hopelessly addicted to the flow state.
But it wasnt good enough that Nine Sols could exceed my expectations just as an action game, no, Red Candle had to also somehow create a dense, expertly crafted, brilliantly laid-out taoist parable of ambition and suffering. The withholding, secretive style of narrative popularized by the Souls games is fashioned into a faceted character-driven drama in an unexpected and kinda visionary sort of way. Red Candle demonstrates an almost capricious amount of creative range, even somehow figuring out ways to infuse Nine Sols with moments of their horror pedigree. On a kickstarted budget of $420,000 Nine Sols eclipses the stories of AAA games working with 10x the financial backing, hands down, not even close. Who the hell let them cook??? For as excellent as Fromsofts work is, you wanna know one thing their games usually dont do? Make me mfing cry during the ending !! Shout it so people in the back can hear you: “Hurt People hurt people”.
Final Fantasy XV
2016
With how much of an emphasis critiques of FFXV place on its mythical development history and mountains of side material, I’m surprised by how uneventful my reasons for not really vibing with it are??? Its empty open world, bland script, unengaging combat, and extreme level of systems bloat are all just common factors of big budget AAA games. Even its much talked about misogyny and its less talked about masturbatory obsession with divine right of kings are issues that existed within the RPG genre since Day 1. There are things I like about it (Chapters 6 and 11 have really cool set pieces that use Noctis’s teleportation moveset well, Chapter 13 places interesting limitations to work around, and main antagonist Ardyn is just an endearing kind of camp) and I can kind of see an argument in favor of it as this story of a person in his formative years losing every little piece of his newfound agency until the ending but it’s hard for me to be sold on everything Noctis has lost when after a certain point, the game literally lets you travel back in time to access the open world because god forbid a player could miss out on content. Like idk, with how Final Fantasy stands as quite possibly the most interesting, experimental and artistically accomplished series in the medium, I just didn’t expect my reasons for finally finding one I disliked out of the 11 mainlines and 1 spin-off I played to be things as boring as it has conventional AAA open world game design.
Also, on the topic of its misogyny, people criticizing it on that front should bring up its attempt at “more female CEOs” style liberal “feminism” with that one town that has a workforce that’s primarily women more often because it’s extremely funny.
Also, on the topic of its misogyny, people criticizing it on that front should bring up its attempt at “more female CEOs” style liberal “feminism” with that one town that has a workforce that’s primarily women more often because it’s extremely funny.
I dunno about any of y'all, but I was gettin' real tired of that Italian asshole hoot and hollering and disturbing my Netflix experience with his patronizing tone, so we got this racecar driver to take his place.
A speedster to the end, Captain Falcon leaps from the starting line without an introduction sequence or title screen to speak of. We were lucky to even get the file select screen going, but Falcon was so impatient! Who needs a plumber, when you can zip past the opposition with relative ease? Who needs stars? Simply Falcon Punch the door down, Captain Falcon ain't got time for that nonsense. Captain Falcon has a grand prix to win after this, and he cannot afford to run late. When you ain't got the time to painstakingly swing Bowser around, you simply sock him in the jaw, that'll learn'em. Just don't sock him in the jaw while he's tilting the platform on the lava stage, because something insanely unfunny happens, no I'm totally not goading you into doing it yourself or anything, I assure you it's actually quite depressing and won't lighten your mood and make you laugh your ass off.
Probably the closest thing I'll get to that Captain Falcon game I've been wanting from Nintendo for a while. I'm still begging for that Yakuza-like with a Goroh everywhere mechanic where he challenges you to everything from street races to Electronic Battleship. Hell, throw in some singing with Jack Levin while we're at it. You could potentially flesh out the cast even more with such a game, and expand on everything outside the track, but alas. Many only think of the racing for F-Zero, but to me there's a rich world to explore beyond it as well, but I guess I'll keep on dreaming. I'll just have to stick to this funny hack where you can Falcon Kick a bunch of Goombas at the speed of light, and blow up Big Bob-omb with a punch instead of having to constantly sneak up behind him and drop him on his fragile bum, I don't need to dream about this at least.
Forever he will be my hero~ 🎵
and now that I'm not just a dreamer~ 🎵
A speedster to the end, Captain Falcon leaps from the starting line without an introduction sequence or title screen to speak of. We were lucky to even get the file select screen going, but Falcon was so impatient! Who needs a plumber, when you can zip past the opposition with relative ease? Who needs stars? Simply Falcon Punch the door down, Captain Falcon ain't got time for that nonsense. Captain Falcon has a grand prix to win after this, and he cannot afford to run late. When you ain't got the time to painstakingly swing Bowser around, you simply sock him in the jaw, that'll learn'em. Just don't sock him in the jaw while he's tilting the platform on the lava stage, because something insanely unfunny happens, no I'm totally not goading you into doing it yourself or anything, I assure you it's actually quite depressing and won't lighten your mood and make you laugh your ass off.
Probably the closest thing I'll get to that Captain Falcon game I've been wanting from Nintendo for a while. I'm still begging for that Yakuza-like with a Goroh everywhere mechanic where he challenges you to everything from street races to Electronic Battleship. Hell, throw in some singing with Jack Levin while we're at it. You could potentially flesh out the cast even more with such a game, and expand on everything outside the track, but alas. Many only think of the racing for F-Zero, but to me there's a rich world to explore beyond it as well, but I guess I'll keep on dreaming. I'll just have to stick to this funny hack where you can Falcon Kick a bunch of Goombas at the speed of light, and blow up Big Bob-omb with a punch instead of having to constantly sneak up behind him and drop him on his fragile bum, I don't need to dream about this at least.
Forever he will be my hero~ 🎵
and now that I'm not just a dreamer~ 🎵
Portal
2007
So back when reviewing Aperture Desk Job for the steamdeck some people were surprised it was the first Valve game I had played. The thing is that I stopped PC gaming in the mid 90's and have always been a console gamer either through finances or where friends played but getting a steamdeck and joining steam's eco system really opened my eyes quite a bit. I even bought a gaming PC and have been venturing into it steadily. I still love my consoles and retro gaming but having more avenues to experience titles in different ways is never a bad thing.
With that in mind and the Aperture Desk Job link to Portal I figured I should finally play this well know piece of gaming history I have a blank on. Now I'm not really a puzzle gamer. I dabble in a few here and there but it's just not really to my tastes as I get impatient if that is all I am doing. Portal feels like it has a great balance of puzzles being both overly simple and challenging at the same time. I never felt I was breezing through but rarely felt stuck, at the minimum I could see what I needed to do even if occasionally pulling it off wasn't so easy.
Portal's gameplay is in it's very name. You create portals using a gun whilst going through test areas in the Aperture Science Enrichment Centre. Each area has different puzzles and sometimes multiple rooms to figure out to get to the elevator to the next area. It's a linear game and though your mechanics are limited to creating two portals that link and picking up boxes it's impressive how far Valve manages to inspire you to use them in different ways. Creating paths for energy balls to power up doors, getting into seemingly locked off rooms and my favourite, using multiple portals to get the velocity to launch yourself, or as GLaDOS your Aperture computer guide states:
"speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out"
Now if the game was just the puzzles I'd be a little luke warm about it being just kind of ok but the writing and voice acting do a lot of heavy lifting to pull Portal up to something more I feel. The only real voiced character is GLaDOS but her sarcasm, dry tone and implications as the game progresses are really witty and entertaining. Without her this would be a decent puzzle game but with her it's a great overall experience.
Glad I finally played it and have been dabbling with some of the extras like the advanced maps and challenges. The game is pretty short which to me is not a negative here. It's a game that knows not to wear out it's welcome while keeping things entertaining and I look forward to playing it's much lauded sequel sometime in the future.
Recommended.
+ Puzzles are balanced well.
+ GLaDOS is often hilarious and keeps the game from getting stale as you progress.
+ Just the right length.
With that in mind and the Aperture Desk Job link to Portal I figured I should finally play this well know piece of gaming history I have a blank on. Now I'm not really a puzzle gamer. I dabble in a few here and there but it's just not really to my tastes as I get impatient if that is all I am doing. Portal feels like it has a great balance of puzzles being both overly simple and challenging at the same time. I never felt I was breezing through but rarely felt stuck, at the minimum I could see what I needed to do even if occasionally pulling it off wasn't so easy.
Portal's gameplay is in it's very name. You create portals using a gun whilst going through test areas in the Aperture Science Enrichment Centre. Each area has different puzzles and sometimes multiple rooms to figure out to get to the elevator to the next area. It's a linear game and though your mechanics are limited to creating two portals that link and picking up boxes it's impressive how far Valve manages to inspire you to use them in different ways. Creating paths for energy balls to power up doors, getting into seemingly locked off rooms and my favourite, using multiple portals to get the velocity to launch yourself, or as GLaDOS your Aperture computer guide states:
"speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out"
Now if the game was just the puzzles I'd be a little luke warm about it being just kind of ok but the writing and voice acting do a lot of heavy lifting to pull Portal up to something more I feel. The only real voiced character is GLaDOS but her sarcasm, dry tone and implications as the game progresses are really witty and entertaining. Without her this would be a decent puzzle game but with her it's a great overall experience.
Glad I finally played it and have been dabbling with some of the extras like the advanced maps and challenges. The game is pretty short which to me is not a negative here. It's a game that knows not to wear out it's welcome while keeping things entertaining and I look forward to playing it's much lauded sequel sometime in the future.
Recommended.
+ Puzzles are balanced well.
+ GLaDOS is often hilarious and keeps the game from getting stale as you progress.
+ Just the right length.
What the hell is this new item mcdonalds? I was very excited to try out this new mcnugget because the original chicken mcnuggets are fucking delicious! This new one doesn't even taste like a chicken nugget, it just looks like one and it tastes very bad >:( Fuck you mcdonalds for making such a disgusting item.
Finished a while back, forgot to log. Played on the Advance Collection.
Immediately, Harmony of Dissonance feels a lot more floaty- very weird feeling coming off of CotM but I prefer the trade off of not needing to double tap to dash. I missed the backdash so much- and hey, you even get a front dash in this one! It does get a bit repetitive just dashing through the castle, mashing the L/R buttons but it's been a while since i've felt good moving through the castle from the get- usually it takes a while before you get to that point.
It's also great seeing the melodrama return- one thing greatly missing from CotM. I neglected to talk about it because I figured it wasn't really worth noting but CotM feels incredibly stilted dialogue wise, something I figured was just because it was just trying to be a CV on the GBA. Comparatively, Iga's flavor comes out on a ton of fronts throughout this title. Plot wise it's fairly vanilla throughout, but Juste and Maxim have that right amount of melodrama even for as little screen time as you get for the two. I appreciate details like both characters realizing there's alternate dimension-personae encounters pretty early on rather than dragging that out.
I also really appreciate how many set-piece rooms are littered throughout this castle, a lot of rooms where there's just one element they throw in just to make the castle feel a bit more interactable. For example the room with a pendulum and a giant knight, baiting the knight under the pendulum and knocking him into a wall opens up a new section with some nice trinkets. It's a lot of fun to enter and explore the new areas of the castles, with a lot of goodies sprinkled throughout to keep interest up.
The main point of contention here is the castle itself, being an already extraordinary labyrinth compared to most other maps in the series, with a lot of dead ends and tangled sections to explore at first, then mitosis'd into a Castle 'B' that you've been entering in and out of for a good chunk of the first half. Here's where exploring gets bipolar, needing to remind yourself of whether you've explored certain segments as thoroughly on one side as the other and juggling between which castle has the next plot/item beat before reaching the climax in the center of the castle. Although I do appreciate the lack of rooms hidden behind destructible walls for this game distinctly.
This game also has a lot more bosses than CotM and while the quality of the 'fights' feels a bit better on average, the quality of the 'boss' aspect varies greatly. Most of them have some pretty distinct phases and well telegraphed attacks, making for a much smoother time handling boss fights compared to some of the more repetitive fights in COTM. However, certain other fights are just 'here's a larger version of an enemy', there's not as much of a distinct scale as some of the standout fights in COTM like Adramelech or the Zombie Dragons.
Overall, I didn't find myself feeling as fatigued going through this compared to previous Castlevanias. No need to grind for cards, perfectly manageable difficulty curve, lot of items to actually use, and while the story isn't all too complicated the writing feels more in line to what I come to expect from the series. A pretty good translation of the Igavania style to GBA.
Immediately, Harmony of Dissonance feels a lot more floaty- very weird feeling coming off of CotM but I prefer the trade off of not needing to double tap to dash. I missed the backdash so much- and hey, you even get a front dash in this one! It does get a bit repetitive just dashing through the castle, mashing the L/R buttons but it's been a while since i've felt good moving through the castle from the get- usually it takes a while before you get to that point.
It's also great seeing the melodrama return- one thing greatly missing from CotM. I neglected to talk about it because I figured it wasn't really worth noting but CotM feels incredibly stilted dialogue wise, something I figured was just because it was just trying to be a CV on the GBA. Comparatively, Iga's flavor comes out on a ton of fronts throughout this title. Plot wise it's fairly vanilla throughout, but Juste and Maxim have that right amount of melodrama even for as little screen time as you get for the two. I appreciate details like both characters realizing there's alternate dimension-personae encounters pretty early on rather than dragging that out.
I also really appreciate how many set-piece rooms are littered throughout this castle, a lot of rooms where there's just one element they throw in just to make the castle feel a bit more interactable. For example the room with a pendulum and a giant knight, baiting the knight under the pendulum and knocking him into a wall opens up a new section with some nice trinkets. It's a lot of fun to enter and explore the new areas of the castles, with a lot of goodies sprinkled throughout to keep interest up.
The main point of contention here is the castle itself, being an already extraordinary labyrinth compared to most other maps in the series, with a lot of dead ends and tangled sections to explore at first, then mitosis'd into a Castle 'B' that you've been entering in and out of for a good chunk of the first half. Here's where exploring gets bipolar, needing to remind yourself of whether you've explored certain segments as thoroughly on one side as the other and juggling between which castle has the next plot/item beat before reaching the climax in the center of the castle. Although I do appreciate the lack of rooms hidden behind destructible walls for this game distinctly.
This game also has a lot more bosses than CotM and while the quality of the 'fights' feels a bit better on average, the quality of the 'boss' aspect varies greatly. Most of them have some pretty distinct phases and well telegraphed attacks, making for a much smoother time handling boss fights compared to some of the more repetitive fights in COTM. However, certain other fights are just 'here's a larger version of an enemy', there's not as much of a distinct scale as some of the standout fights in COTM like Adramelech or the Zombie Dragons.
Overall, I didn't find myself feeling as fatigued going through this compared to previous Castlevanias. No need to grind for cards, perfectly manageable difficulty curve, lot of items to actually use, and while the story isn't all too complicated the writing feels more in line to what I come to expect from the series. A pretty good translation of the Igavania style to GBA.
La-Mulana
2005
I dropped off La-Mulana quite close to finishing it after I realised I hadn’t had any fun in the past, like, 20 hours. The combat often felt like an active hindrance to exploration, and the way fast-travel gets restricted (in this version, at least) meant moving to any particular lategame area could wind through three or four others, even when using shortcuts. The slight unresponsiveness of certain movement options made travelling between those areas feel even more gruelling at times. Most importantly, though, too many of the smaller puzzles had frustratingly vague solutions that felt like trial-and-error. Not only did the presence of those ‘try-everything’ solutions lessen the satisfaction of overcoming the larger riddles, it feels at odds with the cautious exploratory nature that the game set out to achieve. And yet I can’t deny how entranced I still am by the game and the myriad things it does so incredibly well, even after coming to terms with my unenjoyment and putting down the game for good (or so I tell myself).
Its areas boast a stunning level of creativity and personality where uniqueness bursts through not only in their presentation and layouts, but the way they test and torment you through the particularities in each of their sets of traps and riddles. The world interlinks on itself in excitingly nonsensical ways that make exploration and discovery a joy as you finally crack open a shortcut or break into a new part of an old area, and make mapping joyously frustrating as you grapple with how nonsensical it really is. It’s very easy for exploration to take you into intimidatingly alien areas that you have no idea if you have any business in, that you might not even get a name for until much later on – highlighting the game’s sprawling and unrelenting scale, which feels neverending even when you’re certain you’ve seen the last of it. In order to solve its world-spanning riddles, the game necessitates manual mapping, constant notetaking and an extreme attention to detail, which develops a much deeper connection between yourself and its impressive world. In this nebulous yet strict “metroidvania” genre that’s ostensibly about exploration, this relationship between the player and the world is what means the most to me, yet it’s a connection that even the most beloved games in the genre struggle to make. But here was a game whose world managed to charm and captivate me fully, an infamous game whose legacy deserves so much more than to dwell purely on its roughest edges. I’m glad I played La-Mulana, even though I ultimately didn’t enjoy it.
Its areas boast a stunning level of creativity and personality where uniqueness bursts through not only in their presentation and layouts, but the way they test and torment you through the particularities in each of their sets of traps and riddles. The world interlinks on itself in excitingly nonsensical ways that make exploration and discovery a joy as you finally crack open a shortcut or break into a new part of an old area, and make mapping joyously frustrating as you grapple with how nonsensical it really is. It’s very easy for exploration to take you into intimidatingly alien areas that you have no idea if you have any business in, that you might not even get a name for until much later on – highlighting the game’s sprawling and unrelenting scale, which feels neverending even when you’re certain you’ve seen the last of it. In order to solve its world-spanning riddles, the game necessitates manual mapping, constant notetaking and an extreme attention to detail, which develops a much deeper connection between yourself and its impressive world. In this nebulous yet strict “metroidvania” genre that’s ostensibly about exploration, this relationship between the player and the world is what means the most to me, yet it’s a connection that even the most beloved games in the genre struggle to make. But here was a game whose world managed to charm and captivate me fully, an infamous game whose legacy deserves so much more than to dwell purely on its roughest edges. I’m glad I played La-Mulana, even though I ultimately didn’t enjoy it.
Shinobi
2002
I love this sullen, gangly, size zero interpretation of shinobi. I love the freezeframe bisection polyptychs, the d'n'b soundtrack, and the mobility. it's an exceptionally stylish, confident game, and while a lot of folks have already said it: when it works it really works
the big draw past the point when you're no longer in awe of its scarf physics and relentless bangers is the tate (殺陣; fatal wind) mechanic. it's like the chip BURST chip dynamic modern action games love, only instead of an mmo-grade phase rotation it's more of a split second setplay puzzle where the "burst" is seeing an entire health bar explode in a single hit while you go full vogue
each successive kill within a four second window builds power and prolongs the chain until it's ready to come together for the photogenic finish. it's the most shinobi shit on the planet, and when everything plays out the way you planned you immediately forget how much the camera made you wanna bite the controller as hard as you could ten seconds prior. you no longer wanna send magazine cutout letters to the guy who decided the wretched lock-on should only target stuff you've never seen before. you might even find it in your heart to forgive the paul ws anderson lasers (I actually kinda liked em!)
main knock against it's that the levels & encounters are borderline procgen. on 3A I was getting a bit dozy and for a second there you could've successfully convinced me I was playing persona 4. there's no discernable sense of structure or pacing to the stages; they go on, cycle through a handful of identical rooms with identical enemy setups, and then a boss shows up whenever the mappers felt there were enough empty boxes, shiba dogs, and bottomless pits to call it a day
but the one thing that puts a bullet in the idea of replaying it on higher difficulties is the final boss. I hate this hocus pocus motherfucker. iframes and teleports out the ass, flying minions with wonky hurtboxes, one of those long intro sequences where the real fight doesn't start til you're a minute in. the sighs and groans I made when he decided to spin like a beyblade every time I managed to get the 8-chain going were downright ancestral -- real cave creature shit. I never wanna do that again, and I probably never will
happy to have played it but happy to be done. I hate mages so much man, you don't even know
the big draw past the point when you're no longer in awe of its scarf physics and relentless bangers is the tate (殺陣; fatal wind) mechanic. it's like the chip BURST chip dynamic modern action games love, only instead of an mmo-grade phase rotation it's more of a split second setplay puzzle where the "burst" is seeing an entire health bar explode in a single hit while you go full vogue
each successive kill within a four second window builds power and prolongs the chain until it's ready to come together for the photogenic finish. it's the most shinobi shit on the planet, and when everything plays out the way you planned you immediately forget how much the camera made you wanna bite the controller as hard as you could ten seconds prior. you no longer wanna send magazine cutout letters to the guy who decided the wretched lock-on should only target stuff you've never seen before. you might even find it in your heart to forgive the paul ws anderson lasers (I actually kinda liked em!)
main knock against it's that the levels & encounters are borderline procgen. on 3A I was getting a bit dozy and for a second there you could've successfully convinced me I was playing persona 4. there's no discernable sense of structure or pacing to the stages; they go on, cycle through a handful of identical rooms with identical enemy setups, and then a boss shows up whenever the mappers felt there were enough empty boxes, shiba dogs, and bottomless pits to call it a day
but the one thing that puts a bullet in the idea of replaying it on higher difficulties is the final boss. I hate this hocus pocus motherfucker. iframes and teleports out the ass, flying minions with wonky hurtboxes, one of those long intro sequences where the real fight doesn't start til you're a minute in. the sighs and groans I made when he decided to spin like a beyblade every time I managed to get the 8-chain going were downright ancestral -- real cave creature shit. I never wanna do that again, and I probably never will
happy to have played it but happy to be done. I hate mages so much man, you don't even know
MultiVersus
2024
Big congratulations to Multiversus for violating the concept of zero-point energy by taking the slowest fucking thing that could possibly exist and somehow making it even slower.