stonecipher
2023
If you go into this game believing it to be on the same level as Baba is You, The Witness, or even Return of the Obra Dinn in terms of puzzle complexity, you will be sorely disappointed. Cocoon has no interest in being those games; nearly all of its solutions are crystal clear once you think about them for a few moments. You can only interact with the world around you in few different ways, and the developers intentionally limit you from breaking away from their guided path. Despite the fact that--by the time you get two universe orbs--your options will blossom into myriad possible solutions, the reality is that there are almost always so few solutions that you can trial and error your way through every puzzle. Once you recognize that this is a game made by people who made Inside, and recognize it as more of a roped off experience with amusement park rides disguised as puzzles, you will find much more enjoyment here. In fact, I found myself being wowed several times in the short runtime. The conceit of the game is worth the price of admission alone, as it is used in such a way as to elicit wonder. This is less Zachtronics and more Gorogoa, making the dimension hopping a joy unto itself. Despite this, I couldn't help but feel like this concept could easily be used to craft a truly remarkable and challenging puzzle game. One moment near the end of the game sent my mind racing with possibilities, only to quickly be met by a final "puzzle" that was so milquetoast that I thought I got a bad ending. The game flirts with genius too much to acquiesce to its ultimate objective. It seems unfair to criticize it in this way, as it is clearly in the same lineage as the developers' previous games, but I think it speaks more to the latent potential in the concept.
2023
This review contains spoilers
For all the lip service paid to Game of Thrones through the marketing, aesthetic, and tone of Final Fantasy XVI, there is very little DNA shared between the two at their respective cores. While the bevy of options to explore the lore entries written for the game are interesting reads, they are seldom needed to understand the events of the game’s world. Conflicts happen isolated from one another, ever following the protagonist and bending to the needs of his story. This is not a knock on the game’s story, but it is emblematic of the fact that it is exactly what the title claims. For better and for worse, the latest entry in the series that refuses to stagnate is much more Final Fantasy than its creators and online discourse would lead you to believe. While at several points the attempts to forge a new identity clash with the story’s tendency to err toward series tropes, the end product nonetheless succeeds in almost all of what it sets out to do. The fact is that one will be far more satisfied with this game by expecting a reaffirmation of what is a known love rather than a reinvention.
Despite all of this, the first half of this game will fool you into thinking that a reinvention is happening before your eyes. The story’s tight focus on the branded, magick, and the devastation wrought on the world by the mothercrystals is a sharp left turn for the series, and I was pleasantly surprised by it. Much of the world is convincingly hostile toward Clive’s visible brand, and this is communicated expertly through the sidequests. While nothing mechanically interesting is ever asked of the player, many of them are successful in their goal to either endear or disgust. The hook of Clive’s initial journey, as it shifts from revenge to self-loathing to hero, is a path that follows naturally from the world he exists in. Cid (who is easily the series’ best version of the character) passes on to Clive one of the series’ most defining themes, and what identifies this game as Final Fantasy to its bones: that there is never enough suffering in the world to give up fighting for a better one. In the transition to Clive falling into this archetype though, the game’s narrative becomes strangely unfocused. Once five years are skipped over, the game plays catchup to try and please its many audiences. Suddenly it’s Jill’s time to get some (weak) depth to her character, and then there’s an invasion of the Crystalline Dominion (which so little information is given about that I was begging for Vivian to give a PowerPoint dedicated entirely to it), and then Barnabas finally awakens from his apparent slumber to have an epic faceoff against Clive. This all works for the second half of the game, as Ultima eventually drags the narrative firmly into JRPG territory, but it clashes harshly against the first half as the world becomes centered almost entirely around Clive and the other Dominants. This is not a slight against JRPGs as a genre. Much of the discussion around this game’s narrative and its use of the genre’s tropes have been emblematic of the continued blight (lol) that western games journalism has inflicted upon Japanese Game Discourse. The issue here is that on several levels, it feels like there was some assent to this bashing of the genre as “too weird” that this series was arguably subject to the most of any. In this way, the game is somewhat a victim of its own indecision—unwilling to fully commit to the western aesthetic that it clearly adapts or the tropes that its own series trailblazed.
This all seems very overtly negative for a game that I largely love the hell out of. The Eikon fights are a stroke of genius that come at the intersection of Shounen pathos, ludonarrative synergy, and genuine “next-gen-ness” on a level that this game broke the glass ceiling of. Each one ups the ante, making you question how the next one can possibly be better, achieving it before your eyes, and making you feel like a fool for ever believing that what you did 5 hours ago was the coolest thing that you had, up to that point, experienced. The only aspect that isn’t continually ratcheted up throughout the game is the music which, from the very first fight to the last, is excellent. In a series that has the most impossible expectations for music set for itself, Soken will knock your socks off and convince you that he is probably the best composer in the game right now. It’s his mastery over a litany of genres that rockets this soundtrack to the upper echelons of the series’ offerings. Motifs dance through these genres, making Titan’s theme a pulse-pounding J-Rock riff at one point that flows seamlessly into the triumphant chants that the game turns to for its flourishes. While they never becoming difficult in the slightest, these fights expertly communicate Clive’s growing mastery of his Ifrit form, as you go from a hulking and unwieldy kaiju to an elegant fire-dancer.
By no means am I an expert on action combat, but this game’s flavor of DMC-lite kept me satisfied for most of the experience. Continually getting new Eikons to overhaul your style of play injected a lot of life into a fundamentally simple affair. I’m sure an optimal mix of stagger meter burn and pure damage has been found already, but plugging in a new ability into your existing set and reaching a new level of efficiency was good fun. The only thing clawing at this fun is the enemy variety, which is the most puzzling thing about this game. The first half is exploding with unique enemy types. I was shocked to find that nearly every new area offered a unique set of enemies that, although way too passive, livened up encounters a great deal. However, once the second half rolls around, the developers seemed to be content with reusing old enemies to the point of inducing groans every time I saw another Large Man with an Axe. In a strange way, this turned the combat into an Opus Magnum/Factorio-like, where all my effort was being poured into figuring out the path of least resistance to the Enemies Defeated screen. If you are an action game head, you already knew this game’s combat wasn’t for you, but I think any player would benefit from going in with the expectation to simply enjoy the spectacle of it all.
Perhaps the most frustrating part of this game is its characters. This is less so directed at the way they are written as a whole, but at the way they are utilized. The game’s insistence that, apart from Jill and Torgal (who doesn’t speak), Clive be nearly constantly alone, left me begging for more interactions with these people. The idea that being surrounded by trusted friends and allies will better you as a human being is a distinctly Final Fantasy one. One of this game’s core themes is that Clive cannot save the world by himself, and yet the game presents very few gameplay arguments against that. I’m not asking for a controllable party, or even a robust collection of party interactions, but a steady party at all would have sufficed. Byron was sorely needed as a mood lightener in many parts of the game that he is absent from. Every section of the game with Joshua left me wanting so much more of his unrepentant optimism. In many ways this conspicuous lack of Joshua throughout the second half made the ending hit me harder (read: when Joshua said “Thank you for being my brother” I sobbed uncontrollably), but I’m not sure that was intended in that specific aspect. Being relegated to Jill, whose character goes through the fraught states of “I need closure” to “I now have closure” with the subtlety and heart of a Persona 5 arc, is unacceptable for any game let alone a game in this series. For all the effort and soul that was clearly put into this game by everyone involved, I just wish it was more confident in itself. 16 is at its best when it’s leaning entirely into its own spin on the roots that it grew from: loving someone, experiencing a beautiful world, and saving it from a god because you felt that love viscerally, and you saw beauty first-hand.
Despite all of this, the first half of this game will fool you into thinking that a reinvention is happening before your eyes. The story’s tight focus on the branded, magick, and the devastation wrought on the world by the mothercrystals is a sharp left turn for the series, and I was pleasantly surprised by it. Much of the world is convincingly hostile toward Clive’s visible brand, and this is communicated expertly through the sidequests. While nothing mechanically interesting is ever asked of the player, many of them are successful in their goal to either endear or disgust. The hook of Clive’s initial journey, as it shifts from revenge to self-loathing to hero, is a path that follows naturally from the world he exists in. Cid (who is easily the series’ best version of the character) passes on to Clive one of the series’ most defining themes, and what identifies this game as Final Fantasy to its bones: that there is never enough suffering in the world to give up fighting for a better one. In the transition to Clive falling into this archetype though, the game’s narrative becomes strangely unfocused. Once five years are skipped over, the game plays catchup to try and please its many audiences. Suddenly it’s Jill’s time to get some (weak) depth to her character, and then there’s an invasion of the Crystalline Dominion (which so little information is given about that I was begging for Vivian to give a PowerPoint dedicated entirely to it), and then Barnabas finally awakens from his apparent slumber to have an epic faceoff against Clive. This all works for the second half of the game, as Ultima eventually drags the narrative firmly into JRPG territory, but it clashes harshly against the first half as the world becomes centered almost entirely around Clive and the other Dominants. This is not a slight against JRPGs as a genre. Much of the discussion around this game’s narrative and its use of the genre’s tropes have been emblematic of the continued blight (lol) that western games journalism has inflicted upon Japanese Game Discourse. The issue here is that on several levels, it feels like there was some assent to this bashing of the genre as “too weird” that this series was arguably subject to the most of any. In this way, the game is somewhat a victim of its own indecision—unwilling to fully commit to the western aesthetic that it clearly adapts or the tropes that its own series trailblazed.
This all seems very overtly negative for a game that I largely love the hell out of. The Eikon fights are a stroke of genius that come at the intersection of Shounen pathos, ludonarrative synergy, and genuine “next-gen-ness” on a level that this game broke the glass ceiling of. Each one ups the ante, making you question how the next one can possibly be better, achieving it before your eyes, and making you feel like a fool for ever believing that what you did 5 hours ago was the coolest thing that you had, up to that point, experienced. The only aspect that isn’t continually ratcheted up throughout the game is the music which, from the very first fight to the last, is excellent. In a series that has the most impossible expectations for music set for itself, Soken will knock your socks off and convince you that he is probably the best composer in the game right now. It’s his mastery over a litany of genres that rockets this soundtrack to the upper echelons of the series’ offerings. Motifs dance through these genres, making Titan’s theme a pulse-pounding J-Rock riff at one point that flows seamlessly into the triumphant chants that the game turns to for its flourishes. While they never becoming difficult in the slightest, these fights expertly communicate Clive’s growing mastery of his Ifrit form, as you go from a hulking and unwieldy kaiju to an elegant fire-dancer.
By no means am I an expert on action combat, but this game’s flavor of DMC-lite kept me satisfied for most of the experience. Continually getting new Eikons to overhaul your style of play injected a lot of life into a fundamentally simple affair. I’m sure an optimal mix of stagger meter burn and pure damage has been found already, but plugging in a new ability into your existing set and reaching a new level of efficiency was good fun. The only thing clawing at this fun is the enemy variety, which is the most puzzling thing about this game. The first half is exploding with unique enemy types. I was shocked to find that nearly every new area offered a unique set of enemies that, although way too passive, livened up encounters a great deal. However, once the second half rolls around, the developers seemed to be content with reusing old enemies to the point of inducing groans every time I saw another Large Man with an Axe. In a strange way, this turned the combat into an Opus Magnum/Factorio-like, where all my effort was being poured into figuring out the path of least resistance to the Enemies Defeated screen. If you are an action game head, you already knew this game’s combat wasn’t for you, but I think any player would benefit from going in with the expectation to simply enjoy the spectacle of it all.
Perhaps the most frustrating part of this game is its characters. This is less so directed at the way they are written as a whole, but at the way they are utilized. The game’s insistence that, apart from Jill and Torgal (who doesn’t speak), Clive be nearly constantly alone, left me begging for more interactions with these people. The idea that being surrounded by trusted friends and allies will better you as a human being is a distinctly Final Fantasy one. One of this game’s core themes is that Clive cannot save the world by himself, and yet the game presents very few gameplay arguments against that. I’m not asking for a controllable party, or even a robust collection of party interactions, but a steady party at all would have sufficed. Byron was sorely needed as a mood lightener in many parts of the game that he is absent from. Every section of the game with Joshua left me wanting so much more of his unrepentant optimism. In many ways this conspicuous lack of Joshua throughout the second half made the ending hit me harder (read: when Joshua said “Thank you for being my brother” I sobbed uncontrollably), but I’m not sure that was intended in that specific aspect. Being relegated to Jill, whose character goes through the fraught states of “I need closure” to “I now have closure” with the subtlety and heart of a Persona 5 arc, is unacceptable for any game let alone a game in this series. For all the effort and soul that was clearly put into this game by everyone involved, I just wish it was more confident in itself. 16 is at its best when it’s leaning entirely into its own spin on the roots that it grew from: loving someone, experiencing a beautiful world, and saving it from a god because you felt that love viscerally, and you saw beauty first-hand.
This review contains spoilers
If you’re anything like me, you will end Red Dead Redemption 2 with an album’s worth of screenshots taken. More than any other game, I routinely collected snapshots of moments that begged not to be forgotten. I found that, by the end of my journey with Arthur and John, playing Red Dead 2 is like looking through someone else’s photo album; as you find candid and imperfect shots of people and places you can never fully understand, you get a sense of what they might have been like if you had truly been there—you wonder what infinity of experiences took place to lead them to this perfect moment, and what lies just ahead.
Chapter 1: Arthur Morgan
It seems so strange that, in a game so prideful in its emphasis on player decision and personal morality, that its main character is required to do unambiguously immoral actions. Unlike John Marston in the original Red Dead Redemption, there is no promise of familial safety, or the guise of only killing the bad people propelling Arthur through his journey. Although one obviously has the option to kill many innocents in that game, there is always either the light of freedom or the overhanging cloud of the Pinkertons pushing John through his every action. No matter how many roadside beggars you decide to help as Arthur, you are frequently reminded that he is willing to be unforgivably cruel for the sake of Dutch. Every town that the Van der Linde Gang enters quickly falls into myriad chaos ranging from being converted into a warzone (Rhodes) to, in one of the most jawdroppingly cruel things in the game, going on a purposeless killing spree through Strawberry. Until the final chapter, this all seems to undermine Arthur Morgan when compared to what he is outside of these moments. I can’t speak for everyone, but I was always pulled into doing the right thing as Arthur. Despite the fact that he is, for most of the game, silently complicit with the gang’s murder romps, it felt violating to do the wrong thing as Arthur. From what I see across the internet, this is the impression that I see most people implicitly understanding. It’s the tenderness with which he arches forward to stroke his horse’s muzzle, the transparent and raw regret that he has for his lost love with Mary, or the uncharacteristically (and missable!) tender journal entries that he writes in response to myriad events, that Arthur constantly proves himself to be much more than a gun for hire. When chapter 6 finally rolls around, and the game reveals its hand to the player, what had seemed to be Rockstar’s routine inability to reconcile their gameplay loop and their writing transforms into a denouement that takes full advantage of those assumptions. You aren’t the only one who thinks Arthur is uncharacteristically brutal in light of his typical demeanor, because the world does too. It would have been easy for Rockstar to allow players the simple satisfaction of being forgiven by the beaten debtors ruined along the warpath, but there is no solace to be had; the game shuts you out, leaving only the personal knowledge that an effort was given toward being less of a monster to these people. My Arthur died a rich man, pockets lined with the spoils of many successful heists and required robberies. At least for me, there was never enough to spend it all on. I would have given everything to the wife of the indebted coal miner, or the veteran on the run due to his indigenous wife, or the boy who was unceremoniously robbed of his father for no good reason; I couldn’t do any of that. Arthur wasn’t given that kind of absolution, and there’s no reason he should have. Still though, it’s difficult to ignore the young boy behind the cattleman and revolver, looking to please the only man who hasn’t abandoned him yet. On his unsacred deathbed dying alone and betrayed, I didn’t see a monster in those sunken eyes. I couldn’t; I saw Arthur Morgan arching forward to pat his beloved horse one last time, confessing his fear of death to the nun at the station, giving and giving and giving everything to become anything other than alone in a world and a country and a time rapidly hurdling toward a way of life that is unbearably isolating. It’s a masterstroke of writing for an open world protagonist: a character in perpetual turmoil over what he wants to be versus what he inescapably is; the only way to learn the former is to stray from the beaten path, being a voyeur to what he’s like when nobody else is looking, dismounting under an oil-lit moon and providing company and comfort to the only people lonelier than he. It felt imperative to make sure these moments were saved. In a way, it was my proof that, for most of my time with him, Arthur Morgan was no monster.
Chapter 2: Disney Land
“Ugh my cores are getting low”
“Jesus christ why can’t I run in camp”
“They’re really making me ride from Saint Denis to Strawberry”
These don’t even begin to scratch the surface of the litany of little frustrations Red Dead 2 elicited from me. The game exists somewhere between traditional open world romp and pure simulation, letting you sidestep many of the simulation elements, but reminding you every step of the way that you are, in fact, ignoring them. Most of the time this is a minor inconvenience, but other times you will receive a bounty for accidentally hitting triangle near someone else’s horse because it looked close enough to your horse so now you have to ride to the post office and speed walk to the clerk so you can spend ten of your hard earned American dollars to ensure that the cops don’t open fire on you for mounting and immediately dismounting a random horse. This is, to put it lightly, annoying. This kind of situation is the exception, though. Most of the time, these little annoyances do something unexpected: they pull you in further. In reality, nothing that bad will happen if you let your cores run low or wear clothes that are inadequate for a specific weather condition. You might experience slightly more difficulty in combat, but combat is so trivial that it’s a drop in the bucket. What happened to me is, despite the fact that the simulation aspects of the game didn’t hold much concrete mechanical consequence, I took part in the cowboy life anyway. I drank whisky to keep my deadeye core up, not because it made combat meaningfully easier, but because it gave me more confidence going into a fight. I didn’t brush my horse because it decreased its health degradation (I am literally not sure if this one actually does anything or if the game made me afraid for nothing), but because I wanted my horse to love me. I didn’t want to be the odd man out of the stage-play, breaking character just to satisfy my impatience. This test of immersion resolve comes most powerfully in Red Dead 2’s traversal. No other big budget open world game from the 2010s is this stingy with its fast travel options. There are options that reveal themselves during the game, but many of your hours playing the game will be taken up by typically silent rides from one point to another. It’s reductive, though, to pretend like the majority of my trips in Red Dead 2 happened so linearly. Taking off from wherever the last mission dropped me off in the first hints of dawn, I would chart out for Saint Denis for the next box to check off my list. Halfway there, I would hear a hunter caught in a bear trap, or a woman recently robbed, and I would help them in the way I knew Arthur would. Then I’d see a white question mark appear on my map, and I would discover a woman from the city looking to learn how to hunt, or an amputee veteran who lost his horse. I would satisfy their desires, and on the way find myself in awe of the way the sunset perforated the cloud cover and illuminated the obscuring mist hanging over the swamp. There are very few tangible rewards in Red Dead 2, but the screenshots that I took at moments like these were adequate payment for the time I had taken on the unbeaten path. It’s not just that the game’s beauty is overwhelming in its close hewing to an America that seems unimaginable in its wayward majesty, but the way that it coincides with the themes and historical placement it presents.
Chapter 3: In Medias Res
Red Dead 2 presents itself as portraying the dying breaths of the Wild West, a time that, second to maybe the founding fathers and revolution, is the primary source of myth making for American history. Unlike the beginnings of the country, the period of Wild West has no tangible beginning. One can point to an event like the Louisiana Purchase as a time when European colonists began to explore uncharted lands west of the Mississippi, but that fails to explain the “wild” part of Wild West. The gunslingers robbing trains and the vast, lawless frontier that they rode upon is indicative of something more than what can be defined by a set period of history. It’s present in Dutch’s continual gambits toward finding a world where the gang can live out some stagnant simulation of what they once had. You can see it in the game’s journey eastward, as the player transitions from the freedom of New Hanover and Ambarino to the cramped claustrophobia of Saint Denis; the irony of Dutch’s quest being that he is constantly moving away from what he loves so dearly. Indeed, the Wild West is a microcosm of America’s conflict between its prescription of being a land of freedom from overbearing monarchy in Europe and the descriptive reality of robber barons and a new kind of king. Everything is readily available in Saint Denis, but it isn’t fun to exist in. You constantly find yourself bumping into civilians and other riders, receiving bounties for actions that would go overlooked in other towns. Thinking that I was going to help another distressed character, I got robbed for a significant amount of money in an alley, unable to get it back. It feels like a different game riding around the city, and you never truly feel welcomed there. There isn’t a place for people like Arthur Morgan in Saint Denis, but was there ever a place? Dutch’s gang, and the rival O’Driscolls, routinely feel like losers. They get away with petty crimes here and there, destabilizing settlements of a couple dozen people, but they are never formidable. Run out of Blackwater, the law seems to always think of them as an afterthought, sending two Pinkerton agents to deal with the entire gang. The truth of the Wild West is that it was never very wild at all, at least in the mythological frequency of duels and robberies and complete lawlessness. There was undoubtably a greater freedom due to one’s distance from civilization as they advanced westward, but industry and the order that it necessitates would not be very far behind. There is also the unceremonious exclusion of indigenous people from the freedom that is so widely touted by the Wild West myths. As you get to the tail end of the game, you can witness that it wasn’t the cowboys and swindlers that lost their way of life first, but the people who called that land home. The rebellion that Eagle Flies wages against the US government, and the end of the Van der Linde Gang, both happen in the shadow of Annesburg—A town that is representative of the inevitable expansion of eastern progress to the west. Half of the settlement is taken up by the coal mine, which is surrounded by a sudden onset of tree stumps and billowing smoke. With historical context, one knows that a tragic ending was always in store for Arthur and the gang, the indigenous tribes, and the freedom that they both sought, but the tragedy that Red Dead 2 really exemplifies is that true freedom from tyranny was never anything but a dream. One can only find fleeting gestures toward it in the snapshots taken of wild, uncolonized plains rolling into the horizon. When you can exist in this place for as long as you’d like, watching the distant mountain range meet with a star-perforated sky, you begin to feel like freedom is not only more than just a dream, but something truly attainable.
Epilogue
All signs so far point to Red Dead 2 being a crushingly bleak game. For every moment of beauty observed in the world, there is a reminder that none of it will go untainted in the future. It isn’t universally tragic, though, as John Marston’s epilogue injects some hope into the narrative. John, who is finally convinced into leaving his status as an outlaw due to Abigail’s threat of leaving forever, finds that living a domestic life on a ranch has given him some semblance of peace. Even with the knowledge that this peace won’t last for very long, the enjoyment of it is reflected in gameplay. John’s missions are some of the best in the game, matching the heights of Arthur’s wild rides on the run from whatever chaos he wrought with the complete opposite kind of experience. The game insists that you take your time building John’s house, healing his relationship with Abigail, and finally giving attention to Jack. Jack is different from everyone else who grew up near Dutch. He is a thoughtful boy who has yet to be jaded by a world that can only be disappointing to him. You find that he is some of the better company to have in the game and along with Abigail, Uncle, Charles, and Sadie, he represents the hope that a man like John can cling to in absence of the freedom he once yearned for. While there’s no hope for the America that Dutch idealized to exist, there’s a humble ranch house and a loving family to prove that peace can endure in a brutal world. It is unfortunate, then, that John is unable to allow Arthur’s killer to escape, which kicks off the events that lead to his own murder. However, until that day comes when Edgar Ross knocks on John Marston’s door, there is a sense of finality to the violence. You can take as much time as you’d like to exist in a place where you are loved unconditionally. Time cannot bring with it the progress that will eventually undo the peace you hold, and you can make believe that, for this is the composite of everything you hoped America would be.
Chapter 1: Arthur Morgan
It seems so strange that, in a game so prideful in its emphasis on player decision and personal morality, that its main character is required to do unambiguously immoral actions. Unlike John Marston in the original Red Dead Redemption, there is no promise of familial safety, or the guise of only killing the bad people propelling Arthur through his journey. Although one obviously has the option to kill many innocents in that game, there is always either the light of freedom or the overhanging cloud of the Pinkertons pushing John through his every action. No matter how many roadside beggars you decide to help as Arthur, you are frequently reminded that he is willing to be unforgivably cruel for the sake of Dutch. Every town that the Van der Linde Gang enters quickly falls into myriad chaos ranging from being converted into a warzone (Rhodes) to, in one of the most jawdroppingly cruel things in the game, going on a purposeless killing spree through Strawberry. Until the final chapter, this all seems to undermine Arthur Morgan when compared to what he is outside of these moments. I can’t speak for everyone, but I was always pulled into doing the right thing as Arthur. Despite the fact that he is, for most of the game, silently complicit with the gang’s murder romps, it felt violating to do the wrong thing as Arthur. From what I see across the internet, this is the impression that I see most people implicitly understanding. It’s the tenderness with which he arches forward to stroke his horse’s muzzle, the transparent and raw regret that he has for his lost love with Mary, or the uncharacteristically (and missable!) tender journal entries that he writes in response to myriad events, that Arthur constantly proves himself to be much more than a gun for hire. When chapter 6 finally rolls around, and the game reveals its hand to the player, what had seemed to be Rockstar’s routine inability to reconcile their gameplay loop and their writing transforms into a denouement that takes full advantage of those assumptions. You aren’t the only one who thinks Arthur is uncharacteristically brutal in light of his typical demeanor, because the world does too. It would have been easy for Rockstar to allow players the simple satisfaction of being forgiven by the beaten debtors ruined along the warpath, but there is no solace to be had; the game shuts you out, leaving only the personal knowledge that an effort was given toward being less of a monster to these people. My Arthur died a rich man, pockets lined with the spoils of many successful heists and required robberies. At least for me, there was never enough to spend it all on. I would have given everything to the wife of the indebted coal miner, or the veteran on the run due to his indigenous wife, or the boy who was unceremoniously robbed of his father for no good reason; I couldn’t do any of that. Arthur wasn’t given that kind of absolution, and there’s no reason he should have. Still though, it’s difficult to ignore the young boy behind the cattleman and revolver, looking to please the only man who hasn’t abandoned him yet. On his unsacred deathbed dying alone and betrayed, I didn’t see a monster in those sunken eyes. I couldn’t; I saw Arthur Morgan arching forward to pat his beloved horse one last time, confessing his fear of death to the nun at the station, giving and giving and giving everything to become anything other than alone in a world and a country and a time rapidly hurdling toward a way of life that is unbearably isolating. It’s a masterstroke of writing for an open world protagonist: a character in perpetual turmoil over what he wants to be versus what he inescapably is; the only way to learn the former is to stray from the beaten path, being a voyeur to what he’s like when nobody else is looking, dismounting under an oil-lit moon and providing company and comfort to the only people lonelier than he. It felt imperative to make sure these moments were saved. In a way, it was my proof that, for most of my time with him, Arthur Morgan was no monster.
Chapter 2: Disney Land
“Ugh my cores are getting low”
“Jesus christ why can’t I run in camp”
“They’re really making me ride from Saint Denis to Strawberry”
These don’t even begin to scratch the surface of the litany of little frustrations Red Dead 2 elicited from me. The game exists somewhere between traditional open world romp and pure simulation, letting you sidestep many of the simulation elements, but reminding you every step of the way that you are, in fact, ignoring them. Most of the time this is a minor inconvenience, but other times you will receive a bounty for accidentally hitting triangle near someone else’s horse because it looked close enough to your horse so now you have to ride to the post office and speed walk to the clerk so you can spend ten of your hard earned American dollars to ensure that the cops don’t open fire on you for mounting and immediately dismounting a random horse. This is, to put it lightly, annoying. This kind of situation is the exception, though. Most of the time, these little annoyances do something unexpected: they pull you in further. In reality, nothing that bad will happen if you let your cores run low or wear clothes that are inadequate for a specific weather condition. You might experience slightly more difficulty in combat, but combat is so trivial that it’s a drop in the bucket. What happened to me is, despite the fact that the simulation aspects of the game didn’t hold much concrete mechanical consequence, I took part in the cowboy life anyway. I drank whisky to keep my deadeye core up, not because it made combat meaningfully easier, but because it gave me more confidence going into a fight. I didn’t brush my horse because it decreased its health degradation (I am literally not sure if this one actually does anything or if the game made me afraid for nothing), but because I wanted my horse to love me. I didn’t want to be the odd man out of the stage-play, breaking character just to satisfy my impatience. This test of immersion resolve comes most powerfully in Red Dead 2’s traversal. No other big budget open world game from the 2010s is this stingy with its fast travel options. There are options that reveal themselves during the game, but many of your hours playing the game will be taken up by typically silent rides from one point to another. It’s reductive, though, to pretend like the majority of my trips in Red Dead 2 happened so linearly. Taking off from wherever the last mission dropped me off in the first hints of dawn, I would chart out for Saint Denis for the next box to check off my list. Halfway there, I would hear a hunter caught in a bear trap, or a woman recently robbed, and I would help them in the way I knew Arthur would. Then I’d see a white question mark appear on my map, and I would discover a woman from the city looking to learn how to hunt, or an amputee veteran who lost his horse. I would satisfy their desires, and on the way find myself in awe of the way the sunset perforated the cloud cover and illuminated the obscuring mist hanging over the swamp. There are very few tangible rewards in Red Dead 2, but the screenshots that I took at moments like these were adequate payment for the time I had taken on the unbeaten path. It’s not just that the game’s beauty is overwhelming in its close hewing to an America that seems unimaginable in its wayward majesty, but the way that it coincides with the themes and historical placement it presents.
Chapter 3: In Medias Res
Red Dead 2 presents itself as portraying the dying breaths of the Wild West, a time that, second to maybe the founding fathers and revolution, is the primary source of myth making for American history. Unlike the beginnings of the country, the period of Wild West has no tangible beginning. One can point to an event like the Louisiana Purchase as a time when European colonists began to explore uncharted lands west of the Mississippi, but that fails to explain the “wild” part of Wild West. The gunslingers robbing trains and the vast, lawless frontier that they rode upon is indicative of something more than what can be defined by a set period of history. It’s present in Dutch’s continual gambits toward finding a world where the gang can live out some stagnant simulation of what they once had. You can see it in the game’s journey eastward, as the player transitions from the freedom of New Hanover and Ambarino to the cramped claustrophobia of Saint Denis; the irony of Dutch’s quest being that he is constantly moving away from what he loves so dearly. Indeed, the Wild West is a microcosm of America’s conflict between its prescription of being a land of freedom from overbearing monarchy in Europe and the descriptive reality of robber barons and a new kind of king. Everything is readily available in Saint Denis, but it isn’t fun to exist in. You constantly find yourself bumping into civilians and other riders, receiving bounties for actions that would go overlooked in other towns. Thinking that I was going to help another distressed character, I got robbed for a significant amount of money in an alley, unable to get it back. It feels like a different game riding around the city, and you never truly feel welcomed there. There isn’t a place for people like Arthur Morgan in Saint Denis, but was there ever a place? Dutch’s gang, and the rival O’Driscolls, routinely feel like losers. They get away with petty crimes here and there, destabilizing settlements of a couple dozen people, but they are never formidable. Run out of Blackwater, the law seems to always think of them as an afterthought, sending two Pinkerton agents to deal with the entire gang. The truth of the Wild West is that it was never very wild at all, at least in the mythological frequency of duels and robberies and complete lawlessness. There was undoubtably a greater freedom due to one’s distance from civilization as they advanced westward, but industry and the order that it necessitates would not be very far behind. There is also the unceremonious exclusion of indigenous people from the freedom that is so widely touted by the Wild West myths. As you get to the tail end of the game, you can witness that it wasn’t the cowboys and swindlers that lost their way of life first, but the people who called that land home. The rebellion that Eagle Flies wages against the US government, and the end of the Van der Linde Gang, both happen in the shadow of Annesburg—A town that is representative of the inevitable expansion of eastern progress to the west. Half of the settlement is taken up by the coal mine, which is surrounded by a sudden onset of tree stumps and billowing smoke. With historical context, one knows that a tragic ending was always in store for Arthur and the gang, the indigenous tribes, and the freedom that they both sought, but the tragedy that Red Dead 2 really exemplifies is that true freedom from tyranny was never anything but a dream. One can only find fleeting gestures toward it in the snapshots taken of wild, uncolonized plains rolling into the horizon. When you can exist in this place for as long as you’d like, watching the distant mountain range meet with a star-perforated sky, you begin to feel like freedom is not only more than just a dream, but something truly attainable.
Epilogue
All signs so far point to Red Dead 2 being a crushingly bleak game. For every moment of beauty observed in the world, there is a reminder that none of it will go untainted in the future. It isn’t universally tragic, though, as John Marston’s epilogue injects some hope into the narrative. John, who is finally convinced into leaving his status as an outlaw due to Abigail’s threat of leaving forever, finds that living a domestic life on a ranch has given him some semblance of peace. Even with the knowledge that this peace won’t last for very long, the enjoyment of it is reflected in gameplay. John’s missions are some of the best in the game, matching the heights of Arthur’s wild rides on the run from whatever chaos he wrought with the complete opposite kind of experience. The game insists that you take your time building John’s house, healing his relationship with Abigail, and finally giving attention to Jack. Jack is different from everyone else who grew up near Dutch. He is a thoughtful boy who has yet to be jaded by a world that can only be disappointing to him. You find that he is some of the better company to have in the game and along with Abigail, Uncle, Charles, and Sadie, he represents the hope that a man like John can cling to in absence of the freedom he once yearned for. While there’s no hope for the America that Dutch idealized to exist, there’s a humble ranch house and a loving family to prove that peace can endure in a brutal world. It is unfortunate, then, that John is unable to allow Arthur’s killer to escape, which kicks off the events that lead to his own murder. However, until that day comes when Edgar Ross knocks on John Marston’s door, there is a sense of finality to the violence. You can take as much time as you’d like to exist in a place where you are loved unconditionally. Time cannot bring with it the progress that will eventually undo the peace you hold, and you can make believe that, for this is the composite of everything you hoped America would be.
2018
“You are just an animal, passing on your cruelty and rage! You will never change!”
In the same way that many youths spend their days musing on the tales of Greek gods and goddesses, spurned by the literary and pop obsession with them, I have spent my early adulthood in equal wonder of the Norse pantheon. Everything about it, from its incompleteness to the fact that it foretells an ending that hasn’t yet occurred, brings me on endless daydreams; I wonder if Loki would be seen as anything but a villain if his story was more complete, and what these stories even meant to the people who wrote them. In 2022 it’s almost impossible to separate Norse mythology from the other ancient texts that were later spliced into it, but one can see what it could have been. This is a mythology that was obviously of great importance to those who told it. There are stories that build on characters, and it all feels like it’s leading up to something, and then it does! Ragnarok happens; there are prophesies that get fulfilled and most of the characters meet their ends. It’s all very evocative, and there’s a reason it’s so widely referenced throughout various media. However, it lacks a true conclusion. These selfish, uncaring, arrogant gods never really learn their lesson beyond simply death. If the point of this series of tales was to tell the story of terrible gods never learning their lesson, then they were very successful. Is this what the Old Norse wanted their legacy to be? No one can be certain, but I certainly believe there was something more to their mythology that was lost. God of War (2018) is another splicing of Norse myths. It takes many liberties with the gods it adapts in the same way Marvel does, but importantly, it ties together the many thematic threads that lay unfinished from the myths. Although its sequel is imminent, I can’t help but see it as an admirable attempt at giving some finality, meaning, and poignancy to these shattered texts.
It’s easy to write off the original trilogy of God of War games as spectacle-filled romps first and mythologically considerate stories fifth. Nothing is learned in the three games other than the fact that pretty much everybody involved deserved what was coming to them (Kratos included). If there’s one thing to be pulled out though, it’s that the world of Greek gods perished because of their unwillingness to change their ways. Kratos eventually prevails over the gods of Olympus, but at massive personal cost. It isn’t even fully clear at many points why Kratos is on his quest. Now this is most likely because story wasn’t exactly a primary goal when developing these games, but it serves as a tie that binds Kratos to the gods he seeks to slay. They are all bound by an invisible and unchangeable goal. It’s easy to criticize Kratos as a simple character, but would a complexly layered character fit in with a collection of personifications? Character complexity regularly shows up in Greek myths, but it is very frequently shown by non-god characters. The gods of Greek mythology are meant to be fairly stagnant representations of certain aspects of the world. This isn’t to say that stagnation doesn’t apply to the Norse gods, because it absolutely does. In fact, the death of all the major gods in Ragnarok is brought upon specifically because they are unwilling to set aside their own personal beliefs. Odin, the master of deception, is killed by the one creature he was unable to deceive through his own means. Thor, the most powerful god, is killed not in battle, but by the lingering effects of poison. Ironically, these gods are eventually bested by their confidence in the very fact they are gods of something. Odin seeks knowledge, Thor seeks glory, Freyr seeks love. They are all bound by these goals, and they die because of them. Loki stands as the exception though. His goals are more mysterious than the other gods discussed by the Norse texts. He seems to do things out of impulse rather than a pursuit of anything in particular. Loki is frequently portrayed as the villain of the story. He and his offspring are the beings that will bring about Ragnarok, and he is currently in captivity because of his orchestrating the death of Baldr. Baldr is one of the gods whose story is probably lost to the erosion of time, but his death is one of the most famous stories in Norse myth. It is seen as the greatest crime committed by a god, and the one Loki can’t weasel his way out of. It’s in the midst of so much unnecessary bloodshed by Odin and Thor, the cold indifference toward Loki’s children, and the near genocide of the giants, that it is Loki who commits the crime with the harshest penalty. I hope that it’s easy to see why I think it’s silly that Loki is the one who is thought to be the villain of Norse myth. The only reading of Loki that makes sense, and that applies to the narrative of this game, is that he is an agent of subversion.
The main thematic push of God of War is parenthood. Kratos must pass through various “trials” that amount to seeing various dysfunctional parent/child relationships and learning something from them. This includes his own style of parenting, which he realizes must change if he wants to avert Atreus becoming anything like his father. Through this, Kratos goes through a change himself. He becomes aware of the hatred he has for himself, and that he isn’t so different from the Norse gods disturbing the peace he now seeks. These gods are twisted by obviously modern interpretations of the myths they come from. Baldr, the invulnerable god of beauty, is arrogant and bloodthirsty. Although the myths never talk about his thoughts, Mimir has a vendetta against Odin for binding him to a tree for eternity. The game doesn’t portray these gods as they are in the myths, but how they would exist as permanent beings outside of narrative snapshots. I doubt anyone with even a passing knowledge of Norse myth played this game and didn’t wonder “where’s Loki”. Even the gods who don’t appear physically in the game are talked about in some capacity by Mimir. This, of course, excludes Loki. The twist, that Atreus has been Loki this whole time, is an undeniable shocker. It’s The Thing that everyone talked about after finishing the game, and for good reason. Atreus, who goes through his phases of anger and godly arrogance but eventually ends the game as an emotionally intelligent boy, is nothing like the trickster Loki. It makes an abundance of sense though. Way before Kratos, Atreus is the character in this story with the most depth to their goals. In response to Mimir’s tales of the gods, Atreus questions why the world must be at the mercy of these brutal rulers. As much as Atreus learns from the mistakes of Kratos, Kratos learns purpose from his son. Kratos defies every character he has ever known, as well as the audience, and becomes dedicated to a purpose beyond vengeance. It's impossible for me not to ruminate on how this game’s sequel will cap of the story of Kratos and Atreus. My one hope is that, regardless of narrative particulars, the writers maintain that Loki is not the villainous trickster, but the necessary humanity.
In the same way that many youths spend their days musing on the tales of Greek gods and goddesses, spurned by the literary and pop obsession with them, I have spent my early adulthood in equal wonder of the Norse pantheon. Everything about it, from its incompleteness to the fact that it foretells an ending that hasn’t yet occurred, brings me on endless daydreams; I wonder if Loki would be seen as anything but a villain if his story was more complete, and what these stories even meant to the people who wrote them. In 2022 it’s almost impossible to separate Norse mythology from the other ancient texts that were later spliced into it, but one can see what it could have been. This is a mythology that was obviously of great importance to those who told it. There are stories that build on characters, and it all feels like it’s leading up to something, and then it does! Ragnarok happens; there are prophesies that get fulfilled and most of the characters meet their ends. It’s all very evocative, and there’s a reason it’s so widely referenced throughout various media. However, it lacks a true conclusion. These selfish, uncaring, arrogant gods never really learn their lesson beyond simply death. If the point of this series of tales was to tell the story of terrible gods never learning their lesson, then they were very successful. Is this what the Old Norse wanted their legacy to be? No one can be certain, but I certainly believe there was something more to their mythology that was lost. God of War (2018) is another splicing of Norse myths. It takes many liberties with the gods it adapts in the same way Marvel does, but importantly, it ties together the many thematic threads that lay unfinished from the myths. Although its sequel is imminent, I can’t help but see it as an admirable attempt at giving some finality, meaning, and poignancy to these shattered texts.
It’s easy to write off the original trilogy of God of War games as spectacle-filled romps first and mythologically considerate stories fifth. Nothing is learned in the three games other than the fact that pretty much everybody involved deserved what was coming to them (Kratos included). If there’s one thing to be pulled out though, it’s that the world of Greek gods perished because of their unwillingness to change their ways. Kratos eventually prevails over the gods of Olympus, but at massive personal cost. It isn’t even fully clear at many points why Kratos is on his quest. Now this is most likely because story wasn’t exactly a primary goal when developing these games, but it serves as a tie that binds Kratos to the gods he seeks to slay. They are all bound by an invisible and unchangeable goal. It’s easy to criticize Kratos as a simple character, but would a complexly layered character fit in with a collection of personifications? Character complexity regularly shows up in Greek myths, but it is very frequently shown by non-god characters. The gods of Greek mythology are meant to be fairly stagnant representations of certain aspects of the world. This isn’t to say that stagnation doesn’t apply to the Norse gods, because it absolutely does. In fact, the death of all the major gods in Ragnarok is brought upon specifically because they are unwilling to set aside their own personal beliefs. Odin, the master of deception, is killed by the one creature he was unable to deceive through his own means. Thor, the most powerful god, is killed not in battle, but by the lingering effects of poison. Ironically, these gods are eventually bested by their confidence in the very fact they are gods of something. Odin seeks knowledge, Thor seeks glory, Freyr seeks love. They are all bound by these goals, and they die because of them. Loki stands as the exception though. His goals are more mysterious than the other gods discussed by the Norse texts. He seems to do things out of impulse rather than a pursuit of anything in particular. Loki is frequently portrayed as the villain of the story. He and his offspring are the beings that will bring about Ragnarok, and he is currently in captivity because of his orchestrating the death of Baldr. Baldr is one of the gods whose story is probably lost to the erosion of time, but his death is one of the most famous stories in Norse myth. It is seen as the greatest crime committed by a god, and the one Loki can’t weasel his way out of. It’s in the midst of so much unnecessary bloodshed by Odin and Thor, the cold indifference toward Loki’s children, and the near genocide of the giants, that it is Loki who commits the crime with the harshest penalty. I hope that it’s easy to see why I think it’s silly that Loki is the one who is thought to be the villain of Norse myth. The only reading of Loki that makes sense, and that applies to the narrative of this game, is that he is an agent of subversion.
The main thematic push of God of War is parenthood. Kratos must pass through various “trials” that amount to seeing various dysfunctional parent/child relationships and learning something from them. This includes his own style of parenting, which he realizes must change if he wants to avert Atreus becoming anything like his father. Through this, Kratos goes through a change himself. He becomes aware of the hatred he has for himself, and that he isn’t so different from the Norse gods disturbing the peace he now seeks. These gods are twisted by obviously modern interpretations of the myths they come from. Baldr, the invulnerable god of beauty, is arrogant and bloodthirsty. Although the myths never talk about his thoughts, Mimir has a vendetta against Odin for binding him to a tree for eternity. The game doesn’t portray these gods as they are in the myths, but how they would exist as permanent beings outside of narrative snapshots. I doubt anyone with even a passing knowledge of Norse myth played this game and didn’t wonder “where’s Loki”. Even the gods who don’t appear physically in the game are talked about in some capacity by Mimir. This, of course, excludes Loki. The twist, that Atreus has been Loki this whole time, is an undeniable shocker. It’s The Thing that everyone talked about after finishing the game, and for good reason. Atreus, who goes through his phases of anger and godly arrogance but eventually ends the game as an emotionally intelligent boy, is nothing like the trickster Loki. It makes an abundance of sense though. Way before Kratos, Atreus is the character in this story with the most depth to their goals. In response to Mimir’s tales of the gods, Atreus questions why the world must be at the mercy of these brutal rulers. As much as Atreus learns from the mistakes of Kratos, Kratos learns purpose from his son. Kratos defies every character he has ever known, as well as the audience, and becomes dedicated to a purpose beyond vengeance. It's impossible for me not to ruminate on how this game’s sequel will cap of the story of Kratos and Atreus. My one hope is that, regardless of narrative particulars, the writers maintain that Loki is not the villainous trickster, but the necessary humanity.
2022
I doubted From Software. I will be the first to admit that, after the proverbial dreg heap that was Sekiro and the reminder of how stunningly mediocre Souls games can be with the Demon’s Souls remake, I came at Elden Ring with a healthy amount of caution. The irony is that I have a deep love for From Software when they’re firing on all cylinders. While I have always been weary of the fantasy genre and the often maligned “dark fantasy” label, the world of Dark Souls speaks to me. Although I have very little appreciation for the lore present in the series, I respect the uncompromising vision that the lore follows. As a vehicle for unforgettable visuals is where the lore shines, though. I doubt anyone who has played the Dark Souls series will forget things like Sen’s Fortress, flanked by a lush forest and standing ominously as a roadblock to a city bathed in light. The Dark Souls series is filled with displays of From Software flexing their visual design muscles, proving time and again that there is no other studio who can bring such horrifically beautiful creatures and worlds to life at such high frequency. Irithyll, Anor Londo, Duke’s Archives, Yharnam, Lothric, The Fishing Hamlet and I could name at least ten more locations from these games that all came out within the same decade that are among the most breathtaking areas in any game that I’ve played. The only lore that I need is that someone built these places, and that they are no place for the speck in this world that I’m playing as. Their size frequently dwarfs your player character, reinforcing the fact that this place is hostile to you, that despite any level of undeniable beauty that still remains, that you are not welcome here.
There is comfort to this fear of the great unknown though. I was recently introduced to the works of Thomas Moran during an art history class that I’ve been taking. Moran’s career was defined by his paintings of the Grand Canyon, and his experiences there were clearly a combination of awe and unease. See, Moran was in the company of an expedition that was mapping out the American west for an industry raring to exploit it for everything it is worth. It soon became evident to these explorers that this land was too important to be tilled by big business. This importance was not due to the mineral housed within the Grand Canyon’s fertile ground, but the sheer wonder that it inspired in them. Take a look at any of his paintings, and one can see exactly why they wanted to protect this land. It feels otherworldly, like a place that is too perfect and awe-inspiring to be a physical place on earth. That feeling would be founded in the truth, because the places Moran painted are not real. Moran painted composites of the Grand Canyon area. The places he painstakingly captured cannot be visited and looked upon with the same wonder you may have imagined he did. In a way, Moran’s paintings were “propaganda” for the conservationist cause. They captured a feeling rather than a specific time and place. This feeling, although it basks you in the light of beauty that is beyond the description of prose, is also tinged with the same unease that Anor Londo might evoke. Moran felt that to prove the pricelessness of the Grand Canyon, it was not only imperative that its indescribable wonder be on full display, but also its titanic hostility. Beauty can be overlooked in the name of profit, but it’s more difficult when the unknowable wilderness lies beyond. Pictured in his most famous painting are tiny figures representing the expedition, standing like ants at the precipice of a sheer drop. Any great gust of wind or tectonic shift could send them plummeting off into certain death. Beyond, on the horizon is a thunderous waterfall. It is fantastical and alluring, but god help you if you get caught in its uncaring flow. I want to be there, standing next to the explorers and even going out into the painted world, but at the same time I feel my fragility pang. From Software has distilled the essence of Moran’s paintings down to a concentrated formula. The worlds they create are three dimensional recreations of this feeling strung together in a barrelling journey toward more and more danger. They are anxiety filled trips to places that are constantly out to hurt you and make you feel true, unrelenting fear. The fear that all the progress you made through this world will suddenly be halted by something insurmountable. Something that has seen a thousand people like you, and disposed of them like any of the birds or unclothed zombies that you dash past. Despite the danger and confusion and seemingly endless unfair obstacles that these games are defined by, they hold some allure with us. We keep bashing our heads against these walls because they are walls that are splendid to look at.
Elden Ring is an embarrassment of beautiful walls. It feels like a scavenger hunt where around every corner a new Moran painting lies in wait. Breath of the Wild hid shrines around the world, but everyone knew that the real reward was the intrinsic joy of finding an abandoned temple embedded with sleeping guardians. It was scaling a mountain you’ve seen in the distance for the last five hours, reaching the top, and seeing that not only do dragons exist in this world, but there’s one right in front of you. Elden Ring is like Breath of the Wild if every shrine was replaced with a dragon at the top of a mountain. At every turn there is a mine filled with stone-skinned humanoids wholly concerned with stripping away the gem laden walls, or a ravine that ends in a climb through scaffolding and jutting cliffs with a magma spewing wyrm guarding its peak, or a castle just as intricate as the best Dark Souls levels taunting you with its grandeur. Everything here taunts you. Elephant sized wolves that can murder you in one fell swoop taunt you in the same way Moran taunted everyone who looked upon his paintings. It’s a dare that no matter how dangerous they can make something, we will always edge closer to it to get a better look at its grotesque beauty. It’s the dare that, my 10,000 souls be damned, you will platform through treacherous ramparts of a castle in disrepair to see what lies at the end. Elden Ring taunts me constantly, and its rewards are greater than 10,000 or 100,000 souls or runes or whatever they’re called now. All I know is that I should have never doubted From Software’s propensity to allure me with venomous curiosity.
There is comfort to this fear of the great unknown though. I was recently introduced to the works of Thomas Moran during an art history class that I’ve been taking. Moran’s career was defined by his paintings of the Grand Canyon, and his experiences there were clearly a combination of awe and unease. See, Moran was in the company of an expedition that was mapping out the American west for an industry raring to exploit it for everything it is worth. It soon became evident to these explorers that this land was too important to be tilled by big business. This importance was not due to the mineral housed within the Grand Canyon’s fertile ground, but the sheer wonder that it inspired in them. Take a look at any of his paintings, and one can see exactly why they wanted to protect this land. It feels otherworldly, like a place that is too perfect and awe-inspiring to be a physical place on earth. That feeling would be founded in the truth, because the places Moran painted are not real. Moran painted composites of the Grand Canyon area. The places he painstakingly captured cannot be visited and looked upon with the same wonder you may have imagined he did. In a way, Moran’s paintings were “propaganda” for the conservationist cause. They captured a feeling rather than a specific time and place. This feeling, although it basks you in the light of beauty that is beyond the description of prose, is also tinged with the same unease that Anor Londo might evoke. Moran felt that to prove the pricelessness of the Grand Canyon, it was not only imperative that its indescribable wonder be on full display, but also its titanic hostility. Beauty can be overlooked in the name of profit, but it’s more difficult when the unknowable wilderness lies beyond. Pictured in his most famous painting are tiny figures representing the expedition, standing like ants at the precipice of a sheer drop. Any great gust of wind or tectonic shift could send them plummeting off into certain death. Beyond, on the horizon is a thunderous waterfall. It is fantastical and alluring, but god help you if you get caught in its uncaring flow. I want to be there, standing next to the explorers and even going out into the painted world, but at the same time I feel my fragility pang. From Software has distilled the essence of Moran’s paintings down to a concentrated formula. The worlds they create are three dimensional recreations of this feeling strung together in a barrelling journey toward more and more danger. They are anxiety filled trips to places that are constantly out to hurt you and make you feel true, unrelenting fear. The fear that all the progress you made through this world will suddenly be halted by something insurmountable. Something that has seen a thousand people like you, and disposed of them like any of the birds or unclothed zombies that you dash past. Despite the danger and confusion and seemingly endless unfair obstacles that these games are defined by, they hold some allure with us. We keep bashing our heads against these walls because they are walls that are splendid to look at.
Elden Ring is an embarrassment of beautiful walls. It feels like a scavenger hunt where around every corner a new Moran painting lies in wait. Breath of the Wild hid shrines around the world, but everyone knew that the real reward was the intrinsic joy of finding an abandoned temple embedded with sleeping guardians. It was scaling a mountain you’ve seen in the distance for the last five hours, reaching the top, and seeing that not only do dragons exist in this world, but there’s one right in front of you. Elden Ring is like Breath of the Wild if every shrine was replaced with a dragon at the top of a mountain. At every turn there is a mine filled with stone-skinned humanoids wholly concerned with stripping away the gem laden walls, or a ravine that ends in a climb through scaffolding and jutting cliffs with a magma spewing wyrm guarding its peak, or a castle just as intricate as the best Dark Souls levels taunting you with its grandeur. Everything here taunts you. Elephant sized wolves that can murder you in one fell swoop taunt you in the same way Moran taunted everyone who looked upon his paintings. It’s a dare that no matter how dangerous they can make something, we will always edge closer to it to get a better look at its grotesque beauty. It’s the dare that, my 10,000 souls be damned, you will platform through treacherous ramparts of a castle in disrepair to see what lies at the end. Elden Ring taunts me constantly, and its rewards are greater than 10,000 or 100,000 souls or runes or whatever they’re called now. All I know is that I should have never doubted From Software’s propensity to allure me with venomous curiosity.
I have always been drawn to these types of games. Even at their worst, when they exist solely as slaves to the choices you make, the novelty of choosing your own path is almost always compelling to me. Telltale has always been more willing to railroad players into their predetermined story than to allow it to diverge in massive ways. This is a blessing and a curse, as while their games usually lack meaningful consequences to your choices, the quality of their stories almost always benefit from that linearity. It’s tragic that Batman: The Enemy Within was one of Telltale’s final games in their original incarnation, because the understanding of its medium is at a level that few other games like this display. Although I love the first season of this series for the risks it takes with the Batman mythos, those risks are continued here and combined with some truly great writing.
It’s impossible to talk about this game’s writing without talking about John Doe. To many (including me), Joker is a stale character. Like many aspects of Batman, vague implications are seen as a substitute for good writing. The fact that Joker and Batman are inextricably linked is gestured at and danced around any time they clash, but that link is never explained like it is here. The manipulative and delusional clown that terrorizes Gotham is a reflection of Bruce Wayne. This isn’t implied or meant to be understood as law, but shown through your own actions. It seems meant to be that Joker, a character partially defined by the cruel ultimatums he gives Batman, is born out of a game like this. Every decision you make regarding John is haunted by your knowledge of other Batman media, and there's no way to make him a true "hero". More than any lecture that can be given to Bruce about his true heroism, the tragedy of John Doe is the biggest refutation of the notion that Batman is a hero. At best, he is an out of touch socialite with good intentions, and at worst he's Gotham's biggest enemy.
Not being a psychopath, I did my best to lead John down the best part for him. I told him to be himself, to do what he felt was right, and to trust Bruce Wayne with his life. I believed that, despite my alliance with Amanda Waller and the agency that sought only the worst for him, John would know that Bruce loved him as a friend. It was easy for Bruce Wayne to give up things like his secret identity, his notions of the Wayne legacy, and even his reputation to Gotham, but what The Enemy Within shows is that Bruce Wayne is a man who needed more help than what was afforded to him. Even with the knowledge that his parents were heartless monsters, the trauma of their death leaves him in eternal solitude. After everything he goes through with Selina, John, and even Alfred, he will leave them all behind in his endless crusade to cure his own pain. Typically, Telltale games conclude on their weakest note, unable to make good on their promise of a branching storyline. That's what makes this game's final episode all the more shocking, when it delivers on that promise and then some. Many of the events that play out for you may be drastically different, but the strength of the game's writing persists. You can affect the losses you endure, but you can't maintain all of Bruce's relationships. The price of carrying the burden of solving an entire city's problems is paid by the end of this game. It's the tragedy of Joker, but it's just as much the tragedy of Batman that nobody but Telltale is willing to tell the story of.
It’s impossible to talk about this game’s writing without talking about John Doe. To many (including me), Joker is a stale character. Like many aspects of Batman, vague implications are seen as a substitute for good writing. The fact that Joker and Batman are inextricably linked is gestured at and danced around any time they clash, but that link is never explained like it is here. The manipulative and delusional clown that terrorizes Gotham is a reflection of Bruce Wayne. This isn’t implied or meant to be understood as law, but shown through your own actions. It seems meant to be that Joker, a character partially defined by the cruel ultimatums he gives Batman, is born out of a game like this. Every decision you make regarding John is haunted by your knowledge of other Batman media, and there's no way to make him a true "hero". More than any lecture that can be given to Bruce about his true heroism, the tragedy of John Doe is the biggest refutation of the notion that Batman is a hero. At best, he is an out of touch socialite with good intentions, and at worst he's Gotham's biggest enemy.
Not being a psychopath, I did my best to lead John down the best part for him. I told him to be himself, to do what he felt was right, and to trust Bruce Wayne with his life. I believed that, despite my alliance with Amanda Waller and the agency that sought only the worst for him, John would know that Bruce loved him as a friend. It was easy for Bruce Wayne to give up things like his secret identity, his notions of the Wayne legacy, and even his reputation to Gotham, but what The Enemy Within shows is that Bruce Wayne is a man who needed more help than what was afforded to him. Even with the knowledge that his parents were heartless monsters, the trauma of their death leaves him in eternal solitude. After everything he goes through with Selina, John, and even Alfred, he will leave them all behind in his endless crusade to cure his own pain. Typically, Telltale games conclude on their weakest note, unable to make good on their promise of a branching storyline. That's what makes this game's final episode all the more shocking, when it delivers on that promise and then some. Many of the events that play out for you may be drastically different, but the strength of the game's writing persists. You can affect the losses you endure, but you can't maintain all of Bruce's relationships. The price of carrying the burden of solving an entire city's problems is paid by the end of this game. It's the tragedy of Joker, but it's just as much the tragedy of Batman that nobody but Telltale is willing to tell the story of.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve barely scratched the surface of Batman media. I’ve seen all the mainstream stuff, and I recently delved into some of the comics. A running theme throughout all of this is disappointment. The concept of Batman as a force of purely good intentions is flawed from the outset. Most modern takes on the character use Bruce Wayne’s status as an ivory tower dwelling playboy as a springboard for their storylines. Any worthwhile criticism is quickly thrown away when either DC higher-ups refuse to let writers tarnish their cash cow, or the tangled web of morality leaves said writers too scared to continue with it. Telltale’s Batman, by contrast, is unrelenting in its criticism of Gotham’s elite. Although its writing falters in ways that are unavoidable with this type of game, the writing’s dogged pursuit to eviscerate its audience’s perspective on established characters is extremely admirable. The Telltale format, while the origin of some of its weaker aspects, is perfect for a character that is so plagued by the comic book industry’s inability to commit to meaningful change. You become Bruce Wayne, and with that comes the often contradictory choices he is forced to make. It’s all so much more complex than the usual black and white decision making endemic to Telltale games, as Bruce Wayne’s entire life is tied to a legacy of immorality. This is what Telltale’s Batman gets so right as opposed to every other Batman story I’ve consumed. It isn’t afraid to (if the player chooses) tackle the problem at the heart of Gotham: its uncaring elite. The Court of Owls storyline in the comics came so close to doing the same thing, but it was so ready to absolve the Waynes from any wrongdoing they would have absolutely been involved in.
Thomas Wayne, who is almost always a paragon of virtue, is detestable in this game. Not one moment is dedicated to forgiving him once his crimes have been revealed. It’s almost shocking to see, as I constantly expected the game to say “just kidding” and commit to absolutely nothing in the name of safety. Because Thomas Wayne is the source of essentially every problem in this story, his presence constantly haunts both Bruce and the player. My actions constantly fluctuated on a dime, as I questioned Bruce’s place in Gotham. Should I use my corrupt father’s dirty money to attempt some form of justice, or walk away from everything to spare everyone the trouble? In the end, my decisions were guided by Alfred, who is way better than literally any other incarnation I’ve seen, and I would struggle to believe he is better in anything else. Catwoman is also a highlight, and her existence as a broken and isolated person while also being a potential love interest never compromise each other. I was shocked when, though I had thought I did everything right in the pursuit of her love, she scoffed at the thought of getting attached to someone after such a short time, and abandoned Bruce on the spot. Gordon is Gordon. His incarnation is nothing mind blowing, but there are clear similarities to his Year One version, which is never a bad thing. Bruce’s arc of fighting for those he has learned to love through experiences together rather than those with whom he shares family ties proves that telling a compelling Batman story doesn’t require reinventing the wheel. This has been a core storyline that Batman stories have run with in the past, but it is made far more interesting here because of the freefall that Bruce is thrown into upon learning about his past. He is forced to find a purpose that doesn’t involve the childish revenge seeking that he started his journey with. I was teary eyed when Alfred referred to Bruce as his son, and crushed when Selina didn’t reciprocate his feelings. This story is about Bruce Wayne becoming less of a machine fueled by hate, and reclaiming the experiences that he lost in the architecture of his one man war.
Unfortunately, this game was not given the chance it deserved. Telltale’s engine is unforgivably bad. I say this as someone who is usually very lenient on bugs or glitches. I couldn’t go five minutes in this game without encountering a visual bug at best, or a missing character model at worst. The game crashed on me once, and dialogue would frequently be cut off or desync from the corresponding lip movements. It took a lot of steam out of an otherwise riveting experience. The actual gameplay is also not great, but it’s a Telltale game, so your expectations shouldn’t be anywhere but the gutter. Besides the technical flaws, there are some unfortunate writing blunders. Almost all of these issues stem from the game’s villains, which it has too many of. I typically don’t like to criticize a character for acting “unrealistic”, but Harvey Dent brushes up against my tolerance a lot. If I’m being generous with his character, his immediate heel turn on Bruce could be seen as a refutation of the latter’s money being a ticket to universal acceptance. Harvey Dent, who from the very beginning is ready to do whatever it takes for power, is willing to immediately drop his closest ally once it becomes opportunistic to do so. However, his transformation into Two Face is undeniably rushed. Some extra foreshadowing to his authoritarian and unstable thoughts would have been much appreciated. The Penguin suffers from a similar lack of meaningful screen time. I enjoyed the main villain of the game, but their immediate usurping of Penguin from main villain status did no service to his character. The best aspect of the villains is that they are all the result of Bruce being too trusting of his legacy, and believing that with enough power and political ties, everything will just blow over. The elite that Bruce was so used to using as his shield turns against him. One of the most interesting plotlines in the game is the board that Bruce must answer to as CEO. I’m not sure if it was intentional or not, but the promises fed to Bruce by the completely out of touch with Gotham board members I continually tried to please amounted to nothing. Whether or not the fizzling out of this thread was an intended plot beat or a decision matrix they forgot about, it is one of the most genius things I’ve ever encountered in Telltale Game. It actively goads the player into trying to please these useless and detestable people, and nothing is given back in return. I also wish this game had more of John Doe, but I know that the sequel has got me covered on that front. Here’s hoping that it continues this game’s willingness to break every rule in the name of good writing.
Thomas Wayne, who is almost always a paragon of virtue, is detestable in this game. Not one moment is dedicated to forgiving him once his crimes have been revealed. It’s almost shocking to see, as I constantly expected the game to say “just kidding” and commit to absolutely nothing in the name of safety. Because Thomas Wayne is the source of essentially every problem in this story, his presence constantly haunts both Bruce and the player. My actions constantly fluctuated on a dime, as I questioned Bruce’s place in Gotham. Should I use my corrupt father’s dirty money to attempt some form of justice, or walk away from everything to spare everyone the trouble? In the end, my decisions were guided by Alfred, who is way better than literally any other incarnation I’ve seen, and I would struggle to believe he is better in anything else. Catwoman is also a highlight, and her existence as a broken and isolated person while also being a potential love interest never compromise each other. I was shocked when, though I had thought I did everything right in the pursuit of her love, she scoffed at the thought of getting attached to someone after such a short time, and abandoned Bruce on the spot. Gordon is Gordon. His incarnation is nothing mind blowing, but there are clear similarities to his Year One version, which is never a bad thing. Bruce’s arc of fighting for those he has learned to love through experiences together rather than those with whom he shares family ties proves that telling a compelling Batman story doesn’t require reinventing the wheel. This has been a core storyline that Batman stories have run with in the past, but it is made far more interesting here because of the freefall that Bruce is thrown into upon learning about his past. He is forced to find a purpose that doesn’t involve the childish revenge seeking that he started his journey with. I was teary eyed when Alfred referred to Bruce as his son, and crushed when Selina didn’t reciprocate his feelings. This story is about Bruce Wayne becoming less of a machine fueled by hate, and reclaiming the experiences that he lost in the architecture of his one man war.
Unfortunately, this game was not given the chance it deserved. Telltale’s engine is unforgivably bad. I say this as someone who is usually very lenient on bugs or glitches. I couldn’t go five minutes in this game without encountering a visual bug at best, or a missing character model at worst. The game crashed on me once, and dialogue would frequently be cut off or desync from the corresponding lip movements. It took a lot of steam out of an otherwise riveting experience. The actual gameplay is also not great, but it’s a Telltale game, so your expectations shouldn’t be anywhere but the gutter. Besides the technical flaws, there are some unfortunate writing blunders. Almost all of these issues stem from the game’s villains, which it has too many of. I typically don’t like to criticize a character for acting “unrealistic”, but Harvey Dent brushes up against my tolerance a lot. If I’m being generous with his character, his immediate heel turn on Bruce could be seen as a refutation of the latter’s money being a ticket to universal acceptance. Harvey Dent, who from the very beginning is ready to do whatever it takes for power, is willing to immediately drop his closest ally once it becomes opportunistic to do so. However, his transformation into Two Face is undeniably rushed. Some extra foreshadowing to his authoritarian and unstable thoughts would have been much appreciated. The Penguin suffers from a similar lack of meaningful screen time. I enjoyed the main villain of the game, but their immediate usurping of Penguin from main villain status did no service to his character. The best aspect of the villains is that they are all the result of Bruce being too trusting of his legacy, and believing that with enough power and political ties, everything will just blow over. The elite that Bruce was so used to using as his shield turns against him. One of the most interesting plotlines in the game is the board that Bruce must answer to as CEO. I’m not sure if it was intentional or not, but the promises fed to Bruce by the completely out of touch with Gotham board members I continually tried to please amounted to nothing. Whether or not the fizzling out of this thread was an intended plot beat or a decision matrix they forgot about, it is one of the most genius things I’ve ever encountered in Telltale Game. It actively goads the player into trying to please these useless and detestable people, and nothing is given back in return. I also wish this game had more of John Doe, but I know that the sequel has got me covered on that front. Here’s hoping that it continues this game’s willingness to break every rule in the name of good writing.
2020
Despite every trend of the open world genre seeking to doom this game, the obvious love and passion shroud every banal task with a sense of importance. Whether that importance is reflected in the world that surrounds you or the character you play as, every sidequest feels as though it has much more importance than its literal value. Red Dead Redemption 2 would be the closest comparison I could make, as both make you feel like a part of a living world through the use of very convincing character instances. Unlike Red Dead Redemption 2, this game's combat is pretty serviceable. Nothing stands out as spectacular, but I'd much rather spend another 20 hours with this game's combat than damn near any other triple A open world game. It's a combination of Arkham and Sekiro, and while that surely isn't the most flattering comparison, the two work well together. It's way more enjoyable than either of those games due to the variety of tools the game gives you. While they add very little depth to combat or stealth situations, they add to a power fantasy that I rarely see balloon to such amazing proportions in open world games. The combat does a satisfying evolution from high stakes parry focused to a a god amongst men slaughtering as he sees fit. It curves almost perfectly with the narrative as Jin becomes more adept and ruthless when fighting off the Mongols. The story is nothing revolutionary, but it's amplified by how much you invest yourself in Tsushima as a lived in place. It tackles the social hierarchy that Samurai existed in in a way that I didn't fully expect, and the ending surprised me with where it was willing to go. None of these things are where Ghost of Tsushima's strengths lie, though. The magic of discovering a campfire gathered to hear a folk tale, and the ensuing quest to find the origin of said tale, is something really special. It reminds me of the TV series Kung Fu or any of the episodic series from days gone by. It feels like I'm recalling an episode of a Samurai TV series from my childhood that I had forgotten about. To me, this is not only Sucker Punch's best game since the Sly series, but it also shares that series' strong sense of identity. More than any of the other Sony exclusive open world games, this one feels confident in its own vision, and it executes on that vision almost perfectly.
Warning: This essay contains visceral descriptions of mental illness. What was initially intended as more of a critique of The Last of Us Part 2’s narrative became something much more personal, and I don’t want to give a false impression of what this is based on the website it’s posted to. To reiterate, this is intensely personal. Proceed with caution.
What would you do if your life’s purpose was pulled out from under you? How do we find solace in a world that seems to revel in taking everything it can from you? Is it worth living when stability is the only thing protecting you from cold uncertainty? Fundamentally, these questions define both The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part 2. While these extremely open-ended questions are answered in appropriately differing ways in both games, they are used as the backdrop to frame almost every character action in them. In the same way that Joel’s yearning to maintain the only thing that resembles stability in his life endeared many players to the first game, Ellie’s quest of seemingly aimless vengeance polarized many when playing its sequel. It tests players’ willingness to go through the same things its characters go through rather than taking more than a few safe roads. It helped me realize my own answers to the questions it asks of Joel and Ellie, and it’s difficult for me to go more than a day without thinking about them. I love The Last of Us, but The Last of Us Part 2 is bolder, more poignant, and unforgettable.
Despite this essay primarily being a gushfest about The Last of Us Part 2, I still believe the first game displays a large amount of character complexity, but I think the response to its narrative was born out of a character that one can easily relate to. The only thing that stands between Joel and his closest loved one is three people that are about to kill her. Would you not do the same to preserve the last person tethering you to sanity? Personally, I believe that there are very few people in the world who wouldn’t make the same decision in Joel’s shoes. This isn’t to say that this makes Joel’s character simple or easily read, it makes him painfully human. Through all of the murder and zombies, we all see a bit of ourselves in Joel. Framed ambiguously, this contributed greatly to the success of The Last of Us’s narrative with a wide audience. It was a perfect storm of relatability, shock value, fuel for disingenuous water cooler talk, and just plain good character writing. People talk about the negative effect that The Last of Us had on Triple A games, but as far as I’m concerned, studios should take more cues from its simple yet effective writing.
It seemed to most people that The Last of Us Part 2 was a shot into left field compared to the first game, but where else could the series feasibly go? The events of its narrative are bold for high budget games, but I struggle to think of a more natural continuation from the first game’s story. Joel even foreshadows the events of the second game when he tells Ellie how broken he was after losing Sarah. We’re not privy to the 20 years between Joel’s loss and him meeting Ellie. The theme of retaliation against a brutal world is obscured by this time skip to show its evolution: finding solace in what little mercy the world has given you. In that way, both games in this series represent two sides of the same coin. There is solace to be found in Abby’s part of the game, and her story is kind of like an abridged version of Joel’s story in the first game. This time Naughty Dog even included the part where the character finds little meaning in a path defined by hate, almost to yell at the player what they were supposed to learn from Joel. There is much to be said about Abby and how her life is destroyed in different ways compared to Ellie, but honestly I’m not extremely interested in her as a character. I like it in the same way I like the first game, but it doesn’t affect me in a strong way. Ellie’s story wouldn’t work as well without Abby’s, but its value to me is almost entirely predicated on how it improves Ellie’s character.
Perhaps my initial response to this game was so different because of how I see Ellie. Ellie, in my experience, is the closest any fictional character has ever come to accurately portraying my mental illness. The willingness to go to great lengths to show people that the world can be just as grim to them as it is to you, even at the expense of your own wellbeing, hit impossibly close to home for me. My depression isn’t defined by withdrawal, but lashing out at others so they can feel the same pain I do. The fear that everyone will either abandon me of their own volition, or do so before I make peace with it is one that permeates my waking thoughts. I’m not proud of this urge, as it gnaws its way into the way I interact with others. It imparts a hostility to my interactions with others, as my inert response is that they will leave me or hate me. It doesn’t sit well with me when I gain a sick satisfaction out of pushing people away, and just ending it before I get too attached. The few people that I can’t push away despite my best efforts are the only stability I have, and I’m not sure what I’ll do when I lose them. So when Ellie returns to the world all the violence it has shown her because it took away her stability, it made more sense to me than anything anyone has done in any other story. It spoke to me like no doctor or therapist or counselor has ever come close to doing before. All I needed to know was that I wasn’t alone in what I felt; that all the emotions I feel so ashamed of were validated in a strange way, and done with so much uncomfortable accuracy. When the end of the game revealed its hand, and Ellie was left with exactly what she had feared the most, I felt more fear than I had in any enemy encounter. It was as if the writers of the game dispelled the facade with which they were communicating to me through, and told me the bitter truth of my life. This game’s narrative certainly didn’t fix me, but it allowed me to accept that I’m not the only person who bears this curse. It’s the curse of remembering people through their polar moments, only recognizing the best and worst that someone has shown you. It’s focusing on that bad until you lose them, and then reaching out desperately for the good that you ignored the whole way.
I’ve attempted to rationalize The Last of Us Part 2 being my favorite game through the lens of its holistic qualities, believing that its characters, themes, and gameplay were markedly better than many of its competitors. It was my attempt to bridge the gap between what I knew as the most profoundly touching piece of media I had ever consumed, and what most others saw as a solid third person action game. The truth is that for most people, that’s exactly what this game will be. Like most Naughty Dog games, its appeal comes from the combination of many things done well. There will always be a stealth game with more depth, a more complex character study, and a more focused narrative. It’s easy to be ashamed of a story you like almost strictly based on its emotional resonance with you. Recognizing that it’s that story’s ability to reach out and comfort you beyond the very text that contains it is when you let go of that shame, and it’s where that story’s true value lies. Allow yourself to love and be loved by the stories you read and the characters you meet.
What would you do if your life’s purpose was pulled out from under you? How do we find solace in a world that seems to revel in taking everything it can from you? Is it worth living when stability is the only thing protecting you from cold uncertainty? Fundamentally, these questions define both The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part 2. While these extremely open-ended questions are answered in appropriately differing ways in both games, they are used as the backdrop to frame almost every character action in them. In the same way that Joel’s yearning to maintain the only thing that resembles stability in his life endeared many players to the first game, Ellie’s quest of seemingly aimless vengeance polarized many when playing its sequel. It tests players’ willingness to go through the same things its characters go through rather than taking more than a few safe roads. It helped me realize my own answers to the questions it asks of Joel and Ellie, and it’s difficult for me to go more than a day without thinking about them. I love The Last of Us, but The Last of Us Part 2 is bolder, more poignant, and unforgettable.
Despite this essay primarily being a gushfest about The Last of Us Part 2, I still believe the first game displays a large amount of character complexity, but I think the response to its narrative was born out of a character that one can easily relate to. The only thing that stands between Joel and his closest loved one is three people that are about to kill her. Would you not do the same to preserve the last person tethering you to sanity? Personally, I believe that there are very few people in the world who wouldn’t make the same decision in Joel’s shoes. This isn’t to say that this makes Joel’s character simple or easily read, it makes him painfully human. Through all of the murder and zombies, we all see a bit of ourselves in Joel. Framed ambiguously, this contributed greatly to the success of The Last of Us’s narrative with a wide audience. It was a perfect storm of relatability, shock value, fuel for disingenuous water cooler talk, and just plain good character writing. People talk about the negative effect that The Last of Us had on Triple A games, but as far as I’m concerned, studios should take more cues from its simple yet effective writing.
It seemed to most people that The Last of Us Part 2 was a shot into left field compared to the first game, but where else could the series feasibly go? The events of its narrative are bold for high budget games, but I struggle to think of a more natural continuation from the first game’s story. Joel even foreshadows the events of the second game when he tells Ellie how broken he was after losing Sarah. We’re not privy to the 20 years between Joel’s loss and him meeting Ellie. The theme of retaliation against a brutal world is obscured by this time skip to show its evolution: finding solace in what little mercy the world has given you. In that way, both games in this series represent two sides of the same coin. There is solace to be found in Abby’s part of the game, and her story is kind of like an abridged version of Joel’s story in the first game. This time Naughty Dog even included the part where the character finds little meaning in a path defined by hate, almost to yell at the player what they were supposed to learn from Joel. There is much to be said about Abby and how her life is destroyed in different ways compared to Ellie, but honestly I’m not extremely interested in her as a character. I like it in the same way I like the first game, but it doesn’t affect me in a strong way. Ellie’s story wouldn’t work as well without Abby’s, but its value to me is almost entirely predicated on how it improves Ellie’s character.
Perhaps my initial response to this game was so different because of how I see Ellie. Ellie, in my experience, is the closest any fictional character has ever come to accurately portraying my mental illness. The willingness to go to great lengths to show people that the world can be just as grim to them as it is to you, even at the expense of your own wellbeing, hit impossibly close to home for me. My depression isn’t defined by withdrawal, but lashing out at others so they can feel the same pain I do. The fear that everyone will either abandon me of their own volition, or do so before I make peace with it is one that permeates my waking thoughts. I’m not proud of this urge, as it gnaws its way into the way I interact with others. It imparts a hostility to my interactions with others, as my inert response is that they will leave me or hate me. It doesn’t sit well with me when I gain a sick satisfaction out of pushing people away, and just ending it before I get too attached. The few people that I can’t push away despite my best efforts are the only stability I have, and I’m not sure what I’ll do when I lose them. So when Ellie returns to the world all the violence it has shown her because it took away her stability, it made more sense to me than anything anyone has done in any other story. It spoke to me like no doctor or therapist or counselor has ever come close to doing before. All I needed to know was that I wasn’t alone in what I felt; that all the emotions I feel so ashamed of were validated in a strange way, and done with so much uncomfortable accuracy. When the end of the game revealed its hand, and Ellie was left with exactly what she had feared the most, I felt more fear than I had in any enemy encounter. It was as if the writers of the game dispelled the facade with which they were communicating to me through, and told me the bitter truth of my life. This game’s narrative certainly didn’t fix me, but it allowed me to accept that I’m not the only person who bears this curse. It’s the curse of remembering people through their polar moments, only recognizing the best and worst that someone has shown you. It’s focusing on that bad until you lose them, and then reaching out desperately for the good that you ignored the whole way.
I’ve attempted to rationalize The Last of Us Part 2 being my favorite game through the lens of its holistic qualities, believing that its characters, themes, and gameplay were markedly better than many of its competitors. It was my attempt to bridge the gap between what I knew as the most profoundly touching piece of media I had ever consumed, and what most others saw as a solid third person action game. The truth is that for most people, that’s exactly what this game will be. Like most Naughty Dog games, its appeal comes from the combination of many things done well. There will always be a stealth game with more depth, a more complex character study, and a more focused narrative. It’s easy to be ashamed of a story you like almost strictly based on its emotional resonance with you. Recognizing that it’s that story’s ability to reach out and comfort you beyond the very text that contains it is when you let go of that shame, and it’s where that story’s true value lies. Allow yourself to love and be loved by the stories you read and the characters you meet.
This is meant to be more of a review of the environment that this game created, as I have very little credibility when it comes to the critique of its mechanics. I don’t play Super Smash Brothers Ultimate competitively, and I have rarely looked into the deeper mechanics at play. I still get frustrated by Sephiroth’s neutral B catching me while not paying attention, and I frequently spam Banjo’s side B to my friends’ equal dismay. If you’re interested in reading the experiences of a high-level Ultimate player, this is not the place to do it. What this game accomplishes on the gameplay side of things is enough to facilitate having fun with my friends, and that is all it has to do. Smash Ultimate was more than just a game to me in the excess of three years it has continually been in the public eye for. While the character reveals for Smash 4 were monumentally hype, especially as it opened to door for characters like Cloud and Ryu, Smash Ultimate solidified the “character reveal event” with the Fighter Passes. Everyone would come together for each Nintendo event with bated breath, wondering if enough time finally passed for a new fighter to be revealed. These characters captured everyone’s imagination, and Joker’s reveal gave credence to anyone’s left field bozo pick. Dante? Definitely in the conversation. Doom Guy? Not too out there. Steve from Minecraft? He actually made it in, and it still feels like a fever dream. The funny thing is that, other than Sephiroth, I don’t particularly love any of the DLC characters included. Even Sephiroth, while a very left field pick, didn’t really wow me in the same way Cloud did for obvious reasons. The truly surprising door was already opened by the likes of Cloud and Joker, and every character that followed them was a little less surprising. The community aspect was still there for characters like Byleth and Min Min, but nobody’s dream was coming true. That kind of cynicism that felt so antithetical to Smash Brothers, the series that embodied everyone’s childhood fantasies, started to creep its way in. For the final DLC character, it felt like almost an inevitability that they would disappoint. Despite the overwhelming amount of soul that Masahiro Sakurai (one of my all-time favorite creators) has given Smash Brothers as a series, and the equally astounding care put into each character in their every facet, even I started to feel like Smash Ultimate would end on a down note. I was ready to post some unoriginal and unfunny joke when I believed the character would be from Dark Souls. I was anticipating my cynicism to be rewarded as it usually is in this world, and I would feel the momentary satisfaction of coming down on this labor of love that shouldn’t exist. It wasn’t even the knowledge that Sora would be the final character that quelled this feeling. I had considered Sora to be a leading candidate despite the licensing nightmare that is his existence. It was the love that was put into his cinematic, and the silly but bittersweet knowledge that Sakurai’s wild ride was coming to an end.
I don’t even like Kingdom Hearts that much. I think 2 is a fine game, and Birth By Sleep and underrated gem, but the rest of the series I can take or leave. I grew up banging my head against the original Kingdom Hearts, having restarted it countless times. The game was difficult, and the narrative was like nothing I had seen in any other game. I never grew to like the game, but I certainly remember it like few other games. I would probably call Kingdom Hearts my least favorite series that I cannot get enough of. There are times where I truly hate it with a passion, but there are other moments that still get me teary eyed. I’m not sure why I expected to look upon a hypothetical Sora reveal with steely eyed stoicism. Any representative from a game that I had played tirelessly before the age of 10 would have had an effect on me. Sakurai could have thrown Crash Bandicoot in and my heart would have fluttered a little bit. Sora, in his great experience with doing so, unlocked something in my heart. The unashamed love that I could have for something, a feeling that I seldom experience in my 20s, came back to me for a while. I sat watching this silly sales pitch for downloadable content in a game I have spent over $100 on, knowing exactly what it was, but not being able to stop the tears in my eyes. The image of all these characters I’ve spent my life with emerging from their plastic state and having one last hurrah for their final visitor made me more emotional than I should be willing to admit. I don’t know if there’s going to be anything like this for the rest of my life, but I can’t imagine it will be as exciting. I’m not part of the “smash community” (and I don’t know if I want to be), but I am part of the internet community. It’s this larger group of people that made Smash Ultimate special. I couldn’t go two hours after the reveal of Sora before I heard the news being talked about among people outside of my circles in real life. Everyone, regardless of how they felt about this character or how much they play Smash Brothers, knew that there was magic in what Sakurai did. In retrospect, that magic was always present, and we didn’t appreciate it enough. It’s not until summer vacation is over that you regret taking it for granted.
I don’t even like Kingdom Hearts that much. I think 2 is a fine game, and Birth By Sleep and underrated gem, but the rest of the series I can take or leave. I grew up banging my head against the original Kingdom Hearts, having restarted it countless times. The game was difficult, and the narrative was like nothing I had seen in any other game. I never grew to like the game, but I certainly remember it like few other games. I would probably call Kingdom Hearts my least favorite series that I cannot get enough of. There are times where I truly hate it with a passion, but there are other moments that still get me teary eyed. I’m not sure why I expected to look upon a hypothetical Sora reveal with steely eyed stoicism. Any representative from a game that I had played tirelessly before the age of 10 would have had an effect on me. Sakurai could have thrown Crash Bandicoot in and my heart would have fluttered a little bit. Sora, in his great experience with doing so, unlocked something in my heart. The unashamed love that I could have for something, a feeling that I seldom experience in my 20s, came back to me for a while. I sat watching this silly sales pitch for downloadable content in a game I have spent over $100 on, knowing exactly what it was, but not being able to stop the tears in my eyes. The image of all these characters I’ve spent my life with emerging from their plastic state and having one last hurrah for their final visitor made me more emotional than I should be willing to admit. I don’t know if there’s going to be anything like this for the rest of my life, but I can’t imagine it will be as exciting. I’m not part of the “smash community” (and I don’t know if I want to be), but I am part of the internet community. It’s this larger group of people that made Smash Ultimate special. I couldn’t go two hours after the reveal of Sora before I heard the news being talked about among people outside of my circles in real life. Everyone, regardless of how they felt about this character or how much they play Smash Brothers, knew that there was magic in what Sakurai did. In retrospect, that magic was always present, and we didn’t appreciate it enough. It’s not until summer vacation is over that you regret taking it for granted.
2020
In the middle of two much larger projects I'm working on, I decided to take a little time to write down my experience with this game. For context, I enjoy Journey quite a bit. I also enjoyed Abzu despite its lack of originality. It was like eating the same really good meal for lunch and dinner. If The Pathless was "Journey in a forest" in the same way Abzu with "Journey in the ocean" I would have been satisfied. Unfortunately, The Pathless is a study in maximalist game design, and minimal originality. In a misguided attempt at adding new gameplay mechanics, Giant Squid walks a terrible line between not being mechanically interesting or allowing you to fall into that "Journey Feeling". While Journey was never a mechanic heavy game, it submerged you in a world that never took you out by throwing a million red targets all over the landscape. It all feels like the developers had an okay concept, but began adding things to it to make it more “full featured”. In many ways, it’s a very bad attempt at mimicking Breath of the Wild’s success. Someone should have told Giant Squid that Breath of the Wild was not great because it added a hundred tepid puzzles around the world, it was in spite of that. Speaking of those puzzles, if you thought they were boring in Breath of the Wild, you have a tall glass of lukewarm water to sip on here. The only concrete reward you get from most of these puzzles are essentially keys to unlock the next level. I nearly wrote that that was the only reward you got from these puzzles, because the other reward is a miniscule amount of progress on a bar. This bar, when filled up all the way, increases your run meter. I believe many of this game’s issues all lead back to this meter. Its existence pushed the developers into adding so much unnecessary filler to the world. One of the game’s main draws is its movement, and this meter just puts a limit on how much fun you can have with it. Well, it would have if the movement was any good at all. It’s not even as fun as pressing R2 in the Insomniac Spider-Man games. At least in those games there was some sense of momentum, that every swing would bleed fluidly into the next and (pardon my cliche) make you feel like Spider-Man. If you let go of the run button in this game, your character grinds to a halt. In fact, doing anything except holding forward, holding the run button, and pressing R2 over and over again to hit targets ends any semblance of inertia. I feel like this is a step backwards from the simplicity of Journey and Abzu. In the process of trying to make the movement more of a mechanical interaction, Giant Squid removed any overlooking I can do in favor of aesthetic.
It goes without saying that The Pathless also rips Team Ico off at many turns. Its bosses are big forces of nature that have an attempt at seizing empathy in their death. While its narrative isn’t wordless, it certainly feels like it should be. It’s the desolate world that evokes Ueda’s output the most though. It’s no surprise that The Pathless doesn’t do a good job with its Team Ico inspiration (I can’t really think of a game that does), but its attempts at replicating the smaller moments really irked me. In all of Team Ico’s games you would happen upon little interactions with your NPC companion. These range from dialogue to animations to physical input from the player. It’s a little time for you to grow closer to the person/animal you’re journeying with. They have no pretensions, and just give some humanity to digital creatures. I almost put my controller down and shut off my console when The Pathless directed me to press square to pet my eagle. This was, of course, after a forced stealth segment where I had to turn my brain off lest I lose my mind of boredom. The way it all plays out is downright insulting, down to the miniscule patches of darkness that you have to go back and rub before you proceed. This game is just so passe. I don’t remember the last time I’ve played a game this bankrupt on fresh ideas or simple fun. I’ve also never played a game whose title reflects the developers much better than the product itself.
Edit: Out of morbid curiosity I finished the game. I can't believe how bad the ending is. I thought that the ending would lift the game up in a similar fashion as Journey and Abzu, but I was wrong. I knew that they would assume that I cared at all about the eagle, but I didn't know that that was going to be the main conceit of the ending. My review also neglected to mention the lack of a health bar, which worked in Giant Squid's previous game, but it siphons any stakes from the boss fights in this game. It's not like simply placing a health bar into the game would make it any better though, as every boss is insultingly easy after you learn their patterns. For some reason, the final boss has the most evergreen patterns in the game. Once you beat his first phase, you will have a hard time failing. This is probably the worst game I've played since Outlast 2. It's a Frankenstein's Monster of good ideas from other people, but with none of the tact to bring it back to life.
It goes without saying that The Pathless also rips Team Ico off at many turns. Its bosses are big forces of nature that have an attempt at seizing empathy in their death. While its narrative isn’t wordless, it certainly feels like it should be. It’s the desolate world that evokes Ueda’s output the most though. It’s no surprise that The Pathless doesn’t do a good job with its Team Ico inspiration (I can’t really think of a game that does), but its attempts at replicating the smaller moments really irked me. In all of Team Ico’s games you would happen upon little interactions with your NPC companion. These range from dialogue to animations to physical input from the player. It’s a little time for you to grow closer to the person/animal you’re journeying with. They have no pretensions, and just give some humanity to digital creatures. I almost put my controller down and shut off my console when The Pathless directed me to press square to pet my eagle. This was, of course, after a forced stealth segment where I had to turn my brain off lest I lose my mind of boredom. The way it all plays out is downright insulting, down to the miniscule patches of darkness that you have to go back and rub before you proceed. This game is just so passe. I don’t remember the last time I’ve played a game this bankrupt on fresh ideas or simple fun. I’ve also never played a game whose title reflects the developers much better than the product itself.
Edit: Out of morbid curiosity I finished the game. I can't believe how bad the ending is. I thought that the ending would lift the game up in a similar fashion as Journey and Abzu, but I was wrong. I knew that they would assume that I cared at all about the eagle, but I didn't know that that was going to be the main conceit of the ending. My review also neglected to mention the lack of a health bar, which worked in Giant Squid's previous game, but it siphons any stakes from the boss fights in this game. It's not like simply placing a health bar into the game would make it any better though, as every boss is insultingly easy after you learn their patterns. For some reason, the final boss has the most evergreen patterns in the game. Once you beat his first phase, you will have a hard time failing. This is probably the worst game I've played since Outlast 2. It's a Frankenstein's Monster of good ideas from other people, but with none of the tact to bring it back to life.
I really want to like this game. It has the classic Ratchet gameplay that I've always loved since I was young, and Rift Apart's base combat is among the best in the series. The game is also a graphical showpiece for the PS5. Demon's Souls and Returnal look fantastic, but this game's graphics are on another level. The variety of locations really sells that graphical power, as you travel from bustling cities to bright mining facilities. Jumping between these locations with the new rifts is the first time I've been sold on this generation as a sizeable leap from the last. These aspects of the game do a good job of distracting you from several major flaws that are present throughout its entirety. Many of these issues aren't unique to this game, but a few of them are, and they really make me worried about the future of the series.
The biggest flaw is the enemy variety. This is at its worst with the bosses, but the regular enemies are guilty of this too. I couldn't tell you when I first realized I was fighting the same giant robot boss for the the fourth or fifth time because it happens so many times that I lost count. If you take out all the variants of bosses, there are only around 5 unique bosses in this game. The worst part is that none of these bosses are particularly fun to fight. It's so disappointing that a game so beautiful is stuck throwing the same robot and T Rex at you over and over again. In a game with such diverse worlds to explore, the bosses should reflect those worlds in some way. The regular enemies stoke similar feelings in me. I understand that this is a universe with an iron fisted emperor, but that isn't an excuse to make 3/4 of the enemies boring orange dome robots. This is one of the longer Ratchet games, and the lack of enemy variety really hurts when you're getting to the end of the second act. It all feels like they were playing it too safe with the enemies, and that feeling extends to every other issue I have with the game.
The more I think about the story in this game, the more it baffles me. It's a feeling similar to what I felt when I played the PS4 remake of the original game. It messes with a formula so simple that I was essentially rewriting events from the game in my head as they happened. It's so easy to see a world in which the story in this game could have been good, but not even the dimensionator could materialize it. Ratchet and Clank has always relied on the same basic themes of bonds the importance of friendship rather than the concept of "destiny". Rivet is introduced as an alternate universe version of Ratchet. She never met her universe's version of Clank, and there are so many interesting ways to take that plot point. You could explore how Rivet's life is a lot harder, but that she pushes through it anyway because of her unique ambitions. You could also go the opposite way, and show how empty her life is because of her solitary adventures. While Ratchet faces off against the buffoon that is Doctor Nefarious, Rivet lives in fear of the much more threatening Emperor Nefarious. I always think about the attic scene in Uncharted 4 when it comes to characterization in a video game. That scene shows a side of Nathan Drake that is almost entirely absent from the rest of the series. It's only when he's alone that these feelings get fleshed out. Rivet never gets a moment like this. You never get to see how Rivet lives, or what she believes, or what her deeper ambitions are. Her characterization reminds me too much of Ratchet's in the PS4 remake. She's just good because she's good and that's that. She doubts the honesty of Clank for like, one level, and then believes him instantly. Wouldn't someone like Rivet be a little more on edge when it comes to trusting anyone? This point is more of an issue with the overall plot. Ratchet and Rivet come in contact very early in the game, and this hurts their characterization and gameplay immensely. Once Ratchet and Rivet contact each other, all characterization is thrown out the window. The story becomes a checklist where characters are driven by the plot instead of the other way around. Before that happens, I was actually getting invested in Rivet and Clank's relationship. It reminded me a lot of the original Ratchet and Clank, and that made me love this series in a way I haven't since A Crack in Time. The story is at its worst when it comes to Kit, Clank's alternate dimension counterpart. First of all, I think this type of character shouldn't have been in the game at all. I think any way you slice it, Rivet would have been much more interesting without Kit. It feels like Kit herself doesn't even want to be in the story, as she continues to bring up this manufactured drama that ends in a pining to go back to her home planet. It reminds me of bad movie writing, and that makes sense when you look at the writers for this game. I love that two women were the lead writers, but it's incredibly evident from their portfolio and their work on this game that they tried to make their own bad comic book movie here. This is all ignoring the lack of character this universe has been plagued with since Deadlocked. A Crack in Time is my favorite game in the series, but even that game is missing the grime that the PS2 Ratchet games had. That was a world where everyone looked out for themselves, and people had motivations beyond "I'm good" and "I'm evil". I'm not saying Chairman Drek is a revelation when it comes to character writing, but he runs circles around Emperor Nefarious. As a final side not, I feel like Doctor Nefarious has stumbled his way into being the iconic Ratchet and Clank villain. To me, he's one of the weaker villains in the series, and he just happens to be in two of the strongest games. It truly annoys me how Insomniac insists on putting him in like every Ratchet game now.
I'd like to end this on a more positive note, and talk about Blizar Prime. Blizar Prime is one of the best levels in the entire series, and I would almost say sells the game by itself. A mining planet destroyed by machinery gone haywire, Rivet has to swap between the blasted off remains and an universe where it hasn't been destroyed. Seeing a planet enveloped by the void of space come back to life buzzing with energy is jaw dropping in a way few games are. There are levels like this in games like Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2, but this one is on another level when it comes to true childlike wonder. It's moments like these that make Rift Apart worth it even with its flaws. The pure joy of shooting a giant laser through a crowd of robots is enough to almost outweigh any negatives.
The biggest flaw is the enemy variety. This is at its worst with the bosses, but the regular enemies are guilty of this too. I couldn't tell you when I first realized I was fighting the same giant robot boss for the the fourth or fifth time because it happens so many times that I lost count. If you take out all the variants of bosses, there are only around 5 unique bosses in this game. The worst part is that none of these bosses are particularly fun to fight. It's so disappointing that a game so beautiful is stuck throwing the same robot and T Rex at you over and over again. In a game with such diverse worlds to explore, the bosses should reflect those worlds in some way. The regular enemies stoke similar feelings in me. I understand that this is a universe with an iron fisted emperor, but that isn't an excuse to make 3/4 of the enemies boring orange dome robots. This is one of the longer Ratchet games, and the lack of enemy variety really hurts when you're getting to the end of the second act. It all feels like they were playing it too safe with the enemies, and that feeling extends to every other issue I have with the game.
The more I think about the story in this game, the more it baffles me. It's a feeling similar to what I felt when I played the PS4 remake of the original game. It messes with a formula so simple that I was essentially rewriting events from the game in my head as they happened. It's so easy to see a world in which the story in this game could have been good, but not even the dimensionator could materialize it. Ratchet and Clank has always relied on the same basic themes of bonds the importance of friendship rather than the concept of "destiny". Rivet is introduced as an alternate universe version of Ratchet. She never met her universe's version of Clank, and there are so many interesting ways to take that plot point. You could explore how Rivet's life is a lot harder, but that she pushes through it anyway because of her unique ambitions. You could also go the opposite way, and show how empty her life is because of her solitary adventures. While Ratchet faces off against the buffoon that is Doctor Nefarious, Rivet lives in fear of the much more threatening Emperor Nefarious. I always think about the attic scene in Uncharted 4 when it comes to characterization in a video game. That scene shows a side of Nathan Drake that is almost entirely absent from the rest of the series. It's only when he's alone that these feelings get fleshed out. Rivet never gets a moment like this. You never get to see how Rivet lives, or what she believes, or what her deeper ambitions are. Her characterization reminds me too much of Ratchet's in the PS4 remake. She's just good because she's good and that's that. She doubts the honesty of Clank for like, one level, and then believes him instantly. Wouldn't someone like Rivet be a little more on edge when it comes to trusting anyone? This point is more of an issue with the overall plot. Ratchet and Rivet come in contact very early in the game, and this hurts their characterization and gameplay immensely. Once Ratchet and Rivet contact each other, all characterization is thrown out the window. The story becomes a checklist where characters are driven by the plot instead of the other way around. Before that happens, I was actually getting invested in Rivet and Clank's relationship. It reminded me a lot of the original Ratchet and Clank, and that made me love this series in a way I haven't since A Crack in Time. The story is at its worst when it comes to Kit, Clank's alternate dimension counterpart. First of all, I think this type of character shouldn't have been in the game at all. I think any way you slice it, Rivet would have been much more interesting without Kit. It feels like Kit herself doesn't even want to be in the story, as she continues to bring up this manufactured drama that ends in a pining to go back to her home planet. It reminds me of bad movie writing, and that makes sense when you look at the writers for this game. I love that two women were the lead writers, but it's incredibly evident from their portfolio and their work on this game that they tried to make their own bad comic book movie here. This is all ignoring the lack of character this universe has been plagued with since Deadlocked. A Crack in Time is my favorite game in the series, but even that game is missing the grime that the PS2 Ratchet games had. That was a world where everyone looked out for themselves, and people had motivations beyond "I'm good" and "I'm evil". I'm not saying Chairman Drek is a revelation when it comes to character writing, but he runs circles around Emperor Nefarious. As a final side not, I feel like Doctor Nefarious has stumbled his way into being the iconic Ratchet and Clank villain. To me, he's one of the weaker villains in the series, and he just happens to be in two of the strongest games. It truly annoys me how Insomniac insists on putting him in like every Ratchet game now.
I'd like to end this on a more positive note, and talk about Blizar Prime. Blizar Prime is one of the best levels in the entire series, and I would almost say sells the game by itself. A mining planet destroyed by machinery gone haywire, Rivet has to swap between the blasted off remains and an universe where it hasn't been destroyed. Seeing a planet enveloped by the void of space come back to life buzzing with energy is jaw dropping in a way few games are. There are levels like this in games like Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2, but this one is on another level when it comes to true childlike wonder. It's moments like these that make Rift Apart worth it even with its flaws. The pure joy of shooting a giant laser through a crowd of robots is enough to almost outweigh any negatives.
Anyone who doesn't like the last hour of this game is a coward and a fraud.
On a superficial level, this game is very similar to Sly 2 and 3. However, any look deeper into the intricacies of this game reveal that it could not be more different. It lacks any of the soul, charm, or love that was put into those games. Everything about it is just wrong. The redesigns are disgusting, the story feels like filler, the humor feels way more kid oriented. Think about the worst gimmick from Sly 2 or 3. Every gimmick in this game is as bad or worse than that one. Also everything in this game is a gimmick. The whole point of this game is traveling around time collecting boring gimmicks that serve to pad out two or three missions. I'm not really sure how they ruined such a banger concept. This game feels like what Sly 2 would have been if Sucker Punch forgot that they covered the basics in 1. It's so sad that the series has to end on this note, and it's even worse that people think this is acceptable.