they don't make them like this anymore, man. everything about final fantasy x bleeds unfettered confidence and an uncontrollable optimism for games as a medium of art and entertainment alike; not only did kitase and his posse clearly believe video games could Be More but they were doing everything in their power to make those dreams corporeal, to make the future of games become a "here and now" rather than some distant aspiration that video games could one day hope to touch. it's really funny how hallmark western titles like braid or the last of us that would come in the ballpark of a decade later were lauded as "games finally being art," or kojima's insistent and insensitive portrayals of sexual assault in metal gear solid v to apparently "validate" games as art suggest an insecurity in the form, a need to prove itself, when squaresoft in their prime knew games were something special and were putting in all the legwork they could to make people see that and had been doing that since the eighties.

though i treasure final fantasy xvi, i can't help but look at it as having fallen to the same insecurity i alluded to in the aforementioned western titles - which makes ffx's confidence in itself and celebration of its own achievements all the more commanding of respect and admiration. yoshi-p wanted a return to a more conventional fantasy setting so he neutered a lot of the whimsy and off-the-wall wackiness from final fantasy for a grim-and-grisly dark fantasy setting inspired by the hot-button fantasy stories of the era such as game of thrones and god of war. what did kitase do whenever his fanbase demanded a return to a traditional european fantasy setting? he acted in direct defiance of that and instead looked to the folklore, customs, cultures and traditions of east and southeast asia (in particular okinawa) and started from the ground up, sculpting every aspect of the game to make something unlike anything final fantasy had ever seen or would ever see again. that even bleeds into its storytelling - sure, final fantasy x gets a lot of flak as the "goofy" one due to tidus's infamous laugh (fuck you it's one of the best romance scenes in all of final fantasy) or its loud-and-proud nature as a product of the turn of the millenia, but i think this is probably final fantasy's most gripping and eloquent political narrative... even and especially in comparison to the more "serious" political final fantasy games such as tactics, xii and (again) xvi. while a lot of political narratives in jrpgs tend to more broadly broach abstract ideas about classism, imperialism and war, final fantasy x's politics are rooted firmly in okinawa's historical relationship with mainland japan and the ties therein with institutional religion in modern-day japan. it's an aggressively japanese game in just about every manner, to the point where i can't help but wonder if there's a tie between ffx being the laughingstock of the series in the mid-to-late 00s and the really racist hatred of japanese games in the west during the seventh console gen... hmm

speaking of the seventh gen and onward it feels like every single way that developers try to flex the power of their hardware and their grasp over it is just graphics, graphics, graphics, to the point where we're getting diminishing returns and the games just flatly don't look all that great because they're bereft of visual direction and identity. i'm not really gonna do much talking about x's graphics (although this is STILL probably one of the best-looking ps2 games, especially those fmvs - oh my god!)... again, compensating for something, forgetting what makes games what they are. like yeah, games are a medium of art capable of conveying powerful messages and emotions like any other medium, but games are fun too! and man, what a better way to flex the capabilities of the recently-launched playstation 2 by making final fantasy x a GAME's game on top of all the shit it has to say as a story. there's so much shit to do in this game, man. it seems like every other nook and cranny has some minigame, sidequest or post-game content for you to sink your teeth into, squaresoft just packing all this random bullshit into this game because they COULD. like fuck, did you know there's a butterfly hunting minigame in the macalania lake? i sure as hell didn't until this playthrough!

i can't help but mourn what games have become and the state of the industry over the past decade and some change. square enix is a shell of its former self between its unbelievably slimy business practices and the increasingly-cynical nature of its output and middling quality of its games. final fantasy x seems like a relic of a bygone era that we can never return to, a reminder of better times, and a testament to the potential that video games in the AAA sphere have broadly failed to live up to.

but - true to the game's main message - final fantasy x also acts as a reminder of what games can be, what we can hope for and expect out of games, and a reminder that games are not inherently as rotten as the industry nowadays would lead you to believe. who knows? i certainly don't, but i also don't want to just give up and accept the stagnation that games have broadly been reduced to, or resign myself that this spiral of cynical corporate product-pushing is all that there is.

and i don't have to, really. the glory days of the aaa sphere might be over, but making games (and sharing them) is easier than ever. the titans of tomorrow are getting their start now with nothing more than their passion for the medium and a desire to connect with people whose passion matches theirs. ultimately, that's what brings people together to begin with: shared convictions, shared faith, shared ideals and shared love for their favorite things in the world.

and when that love brings people together and unites them in a common belief, thus enabling them to exert their will upon the world at whatever scale their numbers and determination allow for... things change. isn't it wonderful?

Reload is a really conflicting experience for me. At its core, it's still Persona 3, one of the most important games of my life. The message is still the same, the core character arcs haven't changed, all of the broad strokes are there. But there's a lot of small tweaks to the experience that really drag the game down for me, things that I can understand others seeing as nitpicks but for me are notable enough to comment on.

My biggest issue with the game is the characterization. Yukari's new voice direction makes her feel a lot less grounded, her snark is gone and is replaced with a much friendlier persona despite her dialogue being mostly the same. Akihiko is another character subject to a change in voice direction that leads to a vastly different take on the character, but he and Mitsuru are subject to a bigger issue: Persona 4 Arenafication. Akihiko lost a lot of his charm and has had it replaced with being a gigantic meathead who shovels protein into his mouth nonstop, Mitsuru going from a somewhat aloof rich girl into a full on ice queen; both changes that have been character traits since Arena/Q that weren't anywhere near as prevalent in their original appearances. I don't take any issue with the new cast, I think they all do an excellent job (especially Junpei, I have some issues with him being a bit friendlier at the start as well but his voice actor is a perfect fit), but the direction does make them feel fairly different from the version of the cast that I hold so dear. I do think Ken is an overall upgrade though, his new voice makes him a lot more sympathetic and his link episodes feel like natural additions to his character.

Beyond my issues with the character writing there are also changes in regards to the game's identity and visual direction that detracted from the experience for me. The menus are very pretty, yes, but the lighting outside of Tartarus feels very flat and boring, which is an issue when you spend the majority of your time in these areas. The new anime cutscenes, despite having a more polished artstyle than those of the original game, lack any sort of interesting direction and are all fairly static and bland to look at. A lot of the bigger scenes in the story went from anime cutscenes to in-engine ones as well, making me wonder why they even bothered this time around. The first cutscene you see is a perfect example of this, gone is the intrigue and tense direction of the original, replaced with a boringly lit sequence that opted to keep Yukari's dialogue from Portable (as this game's script is largely based on that release as opposed to FES) which takes away a lot of the intensity from the sequence. It's not just the anime cutscenes though, some of the in-game ones also feel lacking in execution. Akihiko and Ken's resolutions both have worse camera angles and cut out the characters getting frustrated and punching their nearby scenery, very tiny changes but ones that make the scenes so much less impactful.

There are some changes I enjoyed. Social links being fully voiced also adds a lot to some of the less memorable ones, with Strength becoming a lot more compelling due to how good Yuko's voice actor is, with the best ones such as Sun becoming even greater thanks to the addition. Also, despite my issues with the writing in some link episodes, I do think it's nice being able to spend more time with the members of SEES. The gameplay as a whole is also a vast improvement, with Tartarus being a lot more enjoyable to explore and party members feeling all around more balanced (although Akihiko continues to get the short end of the stick in this game, being absolutely gutted compared to his original toolkit). Speaking of balance though, this is the easiest Persona game bar none. In an already easy franchise, Reload takes the cake due to theurgies absolutely breaking any semblance of strategy.

Oddly enough, the one thing I believe the game was in most dire need of improvements towards went completely untouched. The story's pacing is still garbage. The first 2/3s of the plot contain absolutely nothing of note, with very little happening until October besides your once-a-month Full Moon fights. Considering how they decided to stray from faithfulness in regards to the characterization, it really baffles me why they didn't put any focus into improving the most glaring flaw of the experience.

Overall, I think it's a disappointing remake from the perspective of somebody who holds the original in as high regard as I do. If you've never played any earlier versions of the game, this is a great game. You'll still get the core story and the themes are all still there and still excellent. Characters may have changed a bit but the cast is still largely the same and you get to spend more time with them than you could before. It's a much more accessible experience and I'm not crazy enough to tell you you have to play FES instead, I know it's dated. But the tiny things lost were important things to me and part of why I found the game so cool before. I wish I could love this version as much as I do FES or Portable. I'm happy it exists because it will give a lot more people the opportunity to enjoy a story that means a lot to me, I'm just disappointed that some of what resonated with me the most was lost in the polish.

The student becomes the master overnight.

Lies of P is a game that came completely out of nowhere, left no impression on me beyond "why would someone make a dark, moody game about Pinocchio", and then managed to completely eclipse every expectation I had. I got back on Game Pass for Starfield and PAYDAY 3, and decided to give this a crack solely as a might-as-well-try-it; not only is this the better of those, it's one of the finest games I've ever played. I mean this honestly and heretically: it is better than all three mainline entries of the Dark Souls series.

Yes, Lies of P is derivative. No, this does not detract from its quality. The obsession with "newness", both as an inherent virtue and as something all creators ought to strive for, is an ideal forced to take root almost exclusively at the behest of European bourgeois Romantics all looking to (ironically enough) copy what Rousseau was telling them to do in the 1700s. Art as a whole has spent centuries upon centuries cribbing from other pieces to put itself together, and it's a fairly recent development that doing shit that someone else did but in your own way is seen as a failure of the artist. I, personally, do not care about this in the slightest. If you do, I would ask only that you examine why you believe this to be so; do you have a legitimate grievance against derivative works for any reason other than because others have told you that they're some synonym for "bad"?

Round8 Studio has come almost completely out of nowhere to deliver something that's immensely fun to play, narratively engaging, and utterly gorgeous in just about every area you can find yourself in. Any developer that can come out swinging this hard and connect with just about every blow deserves to be celebrated. There's a lot to talk about, and certainly a lot of it is in regards to the way that people are talking about it. I'll get my core thesis out of the way, first:

If you like Dark Souls, you'll probably like this game.

If you've made liking Dark Souls into a defining personality trait of yours, you're going to fucking hate this game.

Lies of P rides a fine line of being distinct, but not different. The overlap between FromSoft's PS3-and-onward output is broad, borrowing bits and pieces and rearranging them around; something similar to Sekiro parries, something similar to a Bloodborne dodge, something similar to the Dark Souls 3 enemy ambushes. But Lies of P is distinct enough in its execution of these elements that long-time Souls players will unilaterally be chin-checked when they try bringing over their muscle memory from these other titles.

Perfect guards are a guard, not a parry, and tapping the block button Sekiro-style will make you eat a hit. The dodge offers fast, generous invincibility, but it's never as safe as the one in Bloodborne is; enemies using their big red attacks will cut through your i-frames by design, encouraging you to either parry or move well out of the way. Enemies will usually come in ones and be very obvious, but many will hide just out of sight in the hopes of clipping players who haven't yet been trained to look around before charging past a blind corner. The game is uncompromising in demanding the player to meet it on its terms, rather than copying wholesale from the games that obviously inspired it and allowing the skills you learned there to completely carry over.

If you try playing this exactly like every other FromSoft Souls game you've played up to this point, you will lose, and hard. If you can not (or will not) adapt, you will probably get filtered out by the Archbishop and start publicly wondering why anyone likes this game.

There's a very strange — and frankly, it feels borderline dishonest — set of complaints I've seen where people are just outright wrong about the way the game functions, and they then use their incorrect assumptions as a base from which to knock on the game. I've seen complaints that large weapons aren't viable because you don't get poise/super armor on heavy attacks; this is blatantly untrue, and charge attacks with heavy weapons will regularly blow straight through an enemy hit. People say the dodge is unreliable, but it really isn't; if you're getting caught, you're either messing up a (fairly generous) timing or you're getting hit by red fury attacks, which the game clearly tells you cannot be rolled through. People say it's an aesthetic rip-off of Bloodborne, and this really only applies to a couple of the eldritch enemies; Parisian streets, circus theming, and fantastical automatons lend to a pretty distinct visual identity from any of the other heavy-hitters in the genre.

People say the voice acting is bad, but most of the cast is made up of established, talented stage and screen actors returning from other games like Elden Ring and Xenoblade Chronicles 3, where their performances were lauded; they sound borderline identical to what they've done since just last year, so what makes it acceptable there, and laughable here? People say the translation is bad, but I only noticed a single grammar mistake and typo in my entire playthrough, and they were both buried in the flavor text of a gesture; the rest of the writing offered some evocative lines that managed to bounce between introspective, beautiful, and the coolest fucking thing I've ever read in my life. Where are these complaints coming from? Did we play the same game? It makes no sense. I'm losing my mind trying to figure out how anyone even came to most of these conclusions. It really feels like the most vocal naysayers only played enough of Lies of P to come up with a few surface observations and then made up the rest wholesale.

None of this is to imply that the game is without fault, because it isn't. Boss runs are still present in all of their vestigial glory, consistently adding a mandatory and boring twenty seconds before you can retry a failed boss attempt. Elite enemies — especially in the late game — are often such massive damage sponges that it's a complete waste of time and resources to actually bother fighting the ones that respawn. The breakpoint at which an enemy gets staggered is a hidden value, so you're always just hoping that the next perfect guard will be enough to trip it; we've already got visible enemy health bars here, so I can't see why we don't get enemy stamina bars, too. (Stranger of Paradise continues to be the most mechanically-complete game in this sub-genre.)

For these faults, though, there are at least as many quality-of-life changes that I'm astounded haven't been adopted elsewhere already. Emptying your pulse cells (your refillable healing item) allows you the opportunity to get one back for free if you can dish out enough damage. Theoretically, as long as you can keep up both your offense and defense, you have access to unlimited healing. It's such a natural extension of the Rally system, where you can heal chip damage by hitting foes; Bloodborne's implementation of blood vials looks completely misguided next to this. If you have enough Ergo to level up, the number in the top right corner of the screen will turn blue, no longer requiring you to manually check if you've got enough at a save point. When a side quest updates, the warp screen will let you know that something has happened, and where to start looking for the NPC that it happened to.

It's a challenging game, but it really isn't that hard. I do agree with the general consensus that it would be nice if the perfect guards could be granted a few extra frames of leniency. I managed to start hitting them fairly consistently around halfway through the game, but it's going to be a large hurdle that'll shoo off a lot of players who don't like such tight timings. Tuning it just a little bit would help to make it feel a bit more fair without completely compromising on the difficulty. Everything else, I feel, is pretty strongly balanced in the player's favor; I got through just about every boss in the game without summoning specters and without spending consumables, but they were all there for me if I really needed them. I'd like to go back and play through it again, knowing what I know now, and really lean into the item usage. It's not like you won't wind up with a surplus, considering how easy everything is to farm.

I understand that Bloodborne is something of a sacred cow, especially on this website — it's currently two of the top five highest-ranked games — so anything that seems like it's trying to encroach on its territory is going to be met with hostility before all else. I understand. It's a special game for a lot of people. That said, I'd suggest going into Lies of P with an open mind and a willingness to engage with the game on its own terms; you might manage to find it as impressive of a work as I do.

Quartz is stored in the P-Organ.

Bloodborne and I did not get off on the right foot. I was borrowing my friend's PS4, but instead of taking it to my own place to play, I started off by visiting his place to play the game. This meant planning out specific times in the week and trying to make as much forward progress as possible.

This external stress made the flaws of Bloodborne's beginning more apparent and exponentially more frustrating for me. The blood vial and bullet economy at the beginning is harsh, Cleric Beast is (in my opinion) a subpar boss for introducing the game's combat, the performance is inconsistent, and there are a few mechanics that the game does a terrible job of explaining, even more so than other FromSoft titles. My frustration reached a peak with Vicar Amelia, a great boss that unfortunately broke me down due to external stressors and the constant grinding for blood vials.

But I was also a fool. I took the PS4 (with my friend's permission obviously) and began playing on my own time. And as I kept playing, I learned to love this game. Holy hell, what a masterpiece. Bloodborne has one of the most inspired and fully realized settings and themes of any game I've ever played, and shit just gets more and more real the more you progress through it. Although I find Dark Souls' themes more powerful and thought-provoking, the world of Yharnam is truly unlike anything else I've seen before. There are so many tiny little details that are easy to miss, but they all add up to make the world feel as fully realized as Miyazaki possibly could.

I fell in love with the combat; I did a Skill/Bloodtinge build with Threaded Cane / Repeated Pistol and while the start of the game was rough for me, it ended up being a super fun playstyle. The bosses are consistently strong, too. I can't think of a single main one I actively disliked, save for some fucked up chalice dungeon bosses. And on the topic of chalice dungeons, they are actually pretty fun. I got burned out of them by the end because there's just so many, but it was worth it to check out all the additional bosses.

The DLC is also incredible but you've definitely heard that before. The most impressive thing about it to me is just how much content is actually in it. This thing is like three whole new, super large areas and 5 brand new bosses, some of which being the very best that FromSoft has ever created.

So yeah Bloodborne is a masterpiece and I was dumb for thinking the game was bad. Just uhhh please port it to PC and fix the blood vial economy and then the game is basically flawless 👍

Alright, fuck. I was wrong. Sometimes you do get it perfect on your first try.

Of course, this is pretty far removed from the original release of Resident Evil; it’s a remaster of a remake of Resident Evil with plenty of bits shuffled around and new mechanics stretched overtop. Still, though, these new trappings are just a couple extra layers of flesh. This is Resident Evil deep in the marrow of its bones. Slow, shuffling zombies taking up just too much space in cramped corridors, creaky floors, doors that fall apart, giant man-eating plants and a very silly conspiracy centered around the most obviously evil man alive that nobody suspects until he reveals himself at the end; this is what you ought to be thinking of when someone says the phrase “survival horror” around you.

It’s been an open secret for quite a while (even if Shinji Mikami refused to acknowledge it for decades) that this game is more-or-less a Japanese take on 1992’s Alone in the Dark; same creepy mansion, same spooky monsters, same arcane puzzles, same unconventional camera angles that obscure the action to throw the player off. It’s all present here, just as it was about four years before the original Resident Evil dropped; what sets (and continues to set) Resident Evil apart, however, is entirely in how it constructs an atmosphere. Unlike how Alone in the Dark had Edward Carnby slapping the shit out of every zombie he came across like that one Sonic video, Resident Evil plays the whole thing much more reservedly. This game is tense, and deep, and fucking scary. I sat awake late in bed one night after playing, trying to come up with a safe route through the mansion, and getting progressively more and more panicked when I realized just how few options I actually had. This was after I had stopped playing for the night. Resident Evil sticks to your insides. It goes down hard and it refuses to digest easily. You will play on its terms, and it will kill you anyway.

I wasn’t especially hot on the game by the time I’d finished Jill Mansion 1. I was constantly getting lost, constantly getting bogged down by too many inventory items, constantly failing to figure out what I even needed to do to make any progress. I kept drawing unfavorable comparisons to my beloved Silent Hill: why can’t I carry all this ammo at once? Why can’t I have unlimited slots for key items? Why can’t the map give me some information as to what the rooms actually are instead of just giving me unlabelled floor plans? I knew it was all intentional, but there was something about the execution that felt sloppy. I understood it, but I didn’t really get it, if that makes any sense.

The minute I gained access to the courtyard, though, I felt something click. Maybe it was just getting a moment outside on the most linear path imaginable that gave me a much-needed break to clear my head. I cleaned out the area, blitzed through the puzzles, broke Lisa Trevor’s ankles like she was Wesley Johnson screening Harden, and walked right back into the mansion like I owned the place. The hunters spawned in, giving me more than enough incentive to start spending all of the ammo I’d been hoarding, and I realized just how much easier I could have made the early game on myself once I killed every single one of them and still had buckets of grenades and shotgun shells to spare. Don’t let the speedrunning, invisible-enemies, knife-only people trick you; you’ve gotta play this game carefully, but you really don’t need to be that careful.

The big trick of it all was that I’d fallen entirely for the brutal design of the mansion and allowed my nerves to muck up my decision-making. Every zombie I’d encountered took so many bullets to go down, and other zombies would stumble in from the other rooms, and some of them would even get back up stronger than ever if I forgot to burn the bodies. I put my pistol away and sprinted through the rooms and just prayed I wouldn’t get grabbed around a corner. That was all a part of the trick, though; it’s actually shockingly easy and reliable to kill just about every zombie in the game so long as you’re careful about how you budget your resources. It’s the layout of the mansion on your first go that fucks you up; all of the obfuscatory angles and hallways that lead to locked doors and dead ends that loop around on themselves with a zombie blocking the only way back. The architect must have been an axe murderer. It’s an evil fucking residence, hence the title. When you finally have your Kevin McCallister “I’m not afraid anymore!” moment, you realize that the zombies can only hurt you if you let them. The second half of the Kevin McCallister moment where he runs and screams and hides under the covers comes when a hunter pounces on you from behind and you remember that you are, in fact, still incredibly afraid.

I beat the game with newfound confidence, immediately booted it back up as Chris, and breezed through the first part of the mansion in a fraction of the time it had originally taken me. I cleared out all of the rooms, stuffed my pockets with items, burned every corpse I left, and found myself with more green herbs sitting in my item box within the first hour than I could ever possibly use before credits rolled. The design wasn't sloppy, I was just playing it wrong. I wasn't engaging with enough of the game's systems; I had all of these tools that were provided to me, and I cowered against Resident Evil's glare. What I should have done was square my shoulders and fight back, and never once did that click for me on my first trip through the mansion. Going back through it as Chris proved that idea: all I needed to do was not be so afraid.

Horror as a genre has something of an inherent problem to it, where that sense of fear is often wholly dependent on surprise. This isn't to imply that it's all reliant on jump scares, but a scary movie is always going to be the same every time you go through it. You can be shit-your-pants terrified on your first watch, but pop the same film in again and you'll start anticipating the moments that got you the last time around. This is a big part of the reason why a lot of people like to "beat" horror media; they laugh, they rewatch, they dissect it and break it down, because horror is a lot less scary once we understand it. Rather than passively accept this, though, the Resident Evil team leans into it. You stumble through the game once, groping at the walls and frantically checking every doorknob in the hopes that you accidentally discover progression. You boot it up for the second time, and you turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger. You know where the zombies are, you know where the items are, you know how many you can afford to kill in a given moment, you know how to juke around zombies and make them grab air instead of you. People lament the loss of this type of survival horror game and how something like Resident Evil 4 completely actionized the franchise, but that wasn't a move that came out of nowhere.

It starts here. It's genius.

Chris in this looks kind of like a very sad monkey with a bad haircut and I laugh a little whenever he gets a dramatic close-up.