umikaze
5 reviews liked by umikaze
This game is FUCKING CRAZY. I was skeptical over whether they'd top Sky the 3rd yet they somehow did.
I don't know how they did it, they somehow made three back-to-back 5-star, 10/10 games. This has NEVER happened to me in another series, even my favourites.
It's extremely emotional, the artstyle is awesome, it's fun to play (the small gameplay additions compared to Zero are appreciated), the characters are all awesome, they throw so many twists at you, the likes of which I haven't been this affected by since finishing my top 10 favourites across all media, that you can't help but binge. The backtracking is some of the least tedious in the entire genre from what I've seen. This is one of the closest things I've seen to perfection, from concept to execution, in my life. My only actual complaint is that the difficulty curve is kind of unreasonable in the last few fights of the game, but who cares, it was really hype.
And oh my GOD, the music... Trails already secured its place as #1 in terms of OST, beating Umineko, but this is on a whole other level. You have so many bangers, like the Azure Arbitrator or Mystic Core, but they're far from the only ones.
In terms of favourites, I'd place it around Utawarerumono 3. It's just that good.
I will be slowing down with my Trails binging and going through Cold Steel at a more leisurely pace so that I don't burn out but... wow, I'm definitely a fan.
I don't know how they did it, they somehow made three back-to-back 5-star, 10/10 games. This has NEVER happened to me in another series, even my favourites.
It's extremely emotional, the artstyle is awesome, it's fun to play (the small gameplay additions compared to Zero are appreciated), the characters are all awesome, they throw so many twists at you, the likes of which I haven't been this affected by since finishing my top 10 favourites across all media, that you can't help but binge. The backtracking is some of the least tedious in the entire genre from what I've seen. This is one of the closest things I've seen to perfection, from concept to execution, in my life. My only actual complaint is that the difficulty curve is kind of unreasonable in the last few fights of the game, but who cares, it was really hype.
And oh my GOD, the music... Trails already secured its place as #1 in terms of OST, beating Umineko, but this is on a whole other level. You have so many bangers, like the Azure Arbitrator or Mystic Core, but they're far from the only ones.
In terms of favourites, I'd place it around Utawarerumono 3. It's just that good.
I will be slowing down with my Trails binging and going through Cold Steel at a more leisurely pace so that I don't burn out but... wow, I'm definitely a fan.
The Last Guardian
2016
There seems to be a prevailing expectation that as games evolved, they also became exponentially more approachable. Higher budgets resulted in smoother graphics and fewer bugs. More complex controls (adding left/right triggers, then adding one/two joysticks, then dabbling with motion inputs, etc) gave players a firmer grasp over their characters. AI became more predictable as their algorithms became more intricate to capture a wider range of responses. In a sense, as the technology expanded, the resulting products seemingly became more streamlined to better suit the player’s needs while more thoroughly capturing a developer’s vision.
Team Ico has never been about following tradition, however. If anything, the evolution of their titles embodies the regression of player control, choosing to instead utilize technological advancements not just to refine its premise via "design by subtraction" as chump has pointed out, but to deliver an entirely new experience altogether. Ico was a classic tale of boy meets girl; the girl had to be freed from her cage and pulled around the castle, as the boy protected her against everything in her way to prevent her demise. Shadow of the Colossus, however, was a story concerned with the struggle over control. The lone wanderer, in his quest to revive Mono, hunts down various several-story colossi capable of swatting him about like a fly. In the resulting desperate dance of death, he at first struggles to climb their hulking figures, hanging on for dear life until he discovers their weak points and stabs the colossi while they helplessly flail about. In other words, it's a game about trying to regain any semblance of control until you realize after the fact that the only shadow left was the literal shadow cast by Wander over their fallen corpse.
The Last Guardian then, can be thought of as the natural evolution of Team Ico titles, in that it melds previous design sensibilities and thrives off of disempowering the player throughout its entirety. Trico, the player’s companion and a cross between cat and bird, is essentially the analog to Wander’s horse in Shadow of the Colossus, Agro. Fumito Ueda designed Agro as a companion rather than just a vehicle, and had his team develop specific movement algorithms that would allow Agro to steer herself without the player’s explicit control, forcing players to put their trust in their steed during certain fights emphasizing bow aiming. Ueda and his new team at GenDesign iterated upon this idea, explicitly creating environments where the player was forced to rely upon Trico’s actions to progress and thus establish dependency between the boy and his companion.
While the game can be thought of as an inversion of Ico in this sense, its design influence upon The Last Guardian should not go overlooked, particularly in how the game captures Ico’s physicality. Ico’s key strength was establishing a sense of presence through minimalist puzzles that lacked overly gamey elements, namely in how Ico interacted with his surroundings. Players are subtly guided into climbing chains, pulling levers, sitting on stone sofas to save, and most importantly, holding down R1 to hold Yorda by the hand around the castle and pull her out of danger whenever captured. The Last Guardian innovates upon this by combining several of the traversable elements and the companion into one. To better navigate the vast ruins, the boy must guide Trico and utilize their tall body of climbable feathers in order to scale heights, while occasionally dragging around their large tail and dangling it over ledges to safely climb down. Most importantly, you get to pet Trico whenever you feel like it to comfort your friend in both their happiest and most emotionally taxing moments. In both Ico and The Last Guardian, the player’s constant contact with both the environment and their companion keeps them firmly rooted within its constructed sense of reality by regularly reminding them of their companion’s physical presence.
This physicality would not be as significant without the lessons learned from Shadow of the Colossus however, not just regarding AI behavior but also specifically in how it adapts the game’s sense of scale. Trico is large, and the boy is small. As mentioned previously, Trico can utilize their size to lean against walls and give the boy a step up, but they can also utilize their weight to hold down large chains and swipe away at imposing bodies of armor. Meanwhile, the boy is much more agile and can fit into otherwise inaccessible small spaces by Trico, squeezing through narrow tunnels and gaps in metal gates to pull switches and let his partner through. This obvious difference in size creates consistent room for contrast, not just in how the two characters differ in terms of functionality but also in terms of their scale when measured against the traversed liminal spaces of the ruins, constantly transforming from immense empty rooms to constrained and suffocating tunnels and corridors.
What is particularly interesting is not just The Last Guardian’s disempowerment or sense of scale, but rather what it manages to achieve with said elements and the resulting contrast to establish interdependency between the two characters and solidify their relationship. The combat, an almost complete inverse of Ico’s combat, is the most obvious example. Rather than defending Yorda by whacking shadow enemies with a stick, the roles have been reversed, in that the player must rely upon Trico to guard against scores of possessed armor as to avoid getting kidnapped himself. Even so, the game plays around with this idea of vulnerability, shifting the onus of responsibility about as the boy often finds himself in positions where he must actively support or protect Trico, such as disposing of glass eyes that scare his friend or scrambling to pull a nearby switch to lower a bridge and give Trico room to climb up to safety. The game is even willing to occasionally break its own rules to demonstrate how this sense of caring evolves past its defined guidelines. In almost any other game, this mechanical inconsistency would be regarded as a flaw, but it is this sense of doubt that creates room for the relationship to build from in the first place, and is perhaps the game’s most understated strength.
This is not to say that The Last Guardian was bereft of limitations regarding the execution of its ambitious scope. The most pressing challenge that Ueda and his team faced was how to balance its constructed sense of reality with regards to player expectations; that is, it had to find meaningful ways to commit to its vision of establishing the relationship between the boy and Trico while also acknowledging and appeasing players that would otherwise get lost or frustrated. Perhaps the most obvious downgrade from Ico is the presence of constant button prompts appearing on-screen to alert the players on how to better control the boy and instruct Trico; while the frequency of the prompts lessens over time, it is a slight disappointment that the game doesn’t simply force the players to experiment with inputs and commands as a more subtle and trusting substitute. This downfall however, is an anomaly amongst The Last Guardian’s other shortcomings, as it manages to successfully disguise many of its other concessions and limitations. There’s a classic “escape from the collapsing structure” sequence where all you do is hold forward and jump, but the game gets away with it because the player is used to being framed as a helpless participant. There’s occasional voice-over dialogue hints whenever the player has been stuck for a while in the same area, but it feels far less intrusive than Dormin’s repeated and booming hints in Shadow of the Colossus because the game has already established itself as a retrospective re-telling from the now grown boy’s point of view. Trico doesn’t respond immediately to the boy’s commands when being told where to go, but it makes sense that they wouldn’t function like clockwork and would need time to spot and process the situation from their own point of view, so the lag in response feels justified. It doesn’t matter that certain isolated elements of the game would crumble under scrutiny. What matters is that the situational context to allow players to suspend their disbelief is almost always present; in other words, the illusion holds up.
I’m still learning more about the game to this day. There are so many little details that I wouldn’t have spotted upon a first playthrough, and it’s an absolute joy finally getting to gush upon spotting them in replays. Of course it makes sense that you can’t just issue specific commands to Trico at the very start as a sequence-break despite not being taught by the game; after all, Trico hasn’t had time to observe you and mimic your actions to carry out such commands. Of course the hostile creatures that look exactly like your friend behave similarly; how can you then use your preconceived knowledge of their physiology to aid your friend in a fight against their copycat? I also can’t help but appreciate how GenDesign condensed so much learning within its introduction; in the first ten minutes alone, you’re hinted on how to later deal with the bodies of armor (the magical runes that appear before waking up are the exact same as the runes that appear when grabbed, and are dispelled in the same manner of furiously mashing buttons), you get to figure out how Trico’s eyes change colors depending upon whether they’re mesmerized or hostile, and it quickly establishes the premise of building up trust with a very wary creature that’s more than likely to misunderstand or ignore you at first. Combine all of these nuances with the game’s ability to destabilize and diversify playthroughs via Trico’s innate curiosity and semi-unpredictable instincts, and you get a game that becomes easier to appreciate the more the player familiarizes themselves with its inner workings.
I think a lot of criticism for The Last Guardian ultimately comes down to less of what we perceive the game is and more of what we perceive the game isn’t. It’s not a fully player-controlled puzzle-platforming game like Ico, it’s not a puzzle-combat game with spectacle like Shadow of the Colossus, and it’s certainly not a classic companion escort-quest game where you can just order Trico around like a robot and expect automatic results every time. Instead of focusing on the progression of more complex controls and puzzles, The Last Guardian is focused on the progression of a seemingly more complex relationship. I’m not going to pretend that everyone will get something out of this game, as it definitely requires a good deal of patience and player investment to meet the game halfway. It’s certainly more difficult to appreciate given its lack of influence unlike Ico or its lack of exhilarating boss encounters unlike Shadow of the Colossus. That said, it’s this element of danger in its ability to commit to its vision while alienating impatient players that makes it such a compelling title once it finally clicks. Many before me have pointed out how powerful the bond between the player and Trico felt upon learning from others that improperly caring for Trico results in your companion stubbornly ignoring the player’s commands; after all, volume swells cannot exist without contrast to provide room for growth. Perhaps this is why at the end of the day, I find myself transfixed by every word that Fumito Ueda has to offer. In an era where developers feel overly concerned with the best and brightest, he doesn’t seem concerned about what video games mean so much as what video games are. I can only hope that someday, he and GenDesign will return to bring us a new title that captures our imagination as thoroughly as many of his works already have for me.
Team Ico has never been about following tradition, however. If anything, the evolution of their titles embodies the regression of player control, choosing to instead utilize technological advancements not just to refine its premise via "design by subtraction" as chump has pointed out, but to deliver an entirely new experience altogether. Ico was a classic tale of boy meets girl; the girl had to be freed from her cage and pulled around the castle, as the boy protected her against everything in her way to prevent her demise. Shadow of the Colossus, however, was a story concerned with the struggle over control. The lone wanderer, in his quest to revive Mono, hunts down various several-story colossi capable of swatting him about like a fly. In the resulting desperate dance of death, he at first struggles to climb their hulking figures, hanging on for dear life until he discovers their weak points and stabs the colossi while they helplessly flail about. In other words, it's a game about trying to regain any semblance of control until you realize after the fact that the only shadow left was the literal shadow cast by Wander over their fallen corpse.
The Last Guardian then, can be thought of as the natural evolution of Team Ico titles, in that it melds previous design sensibilities and thrives off of disempowering the player throughout its entirety. Trico, the player’s companion and a cross between cat and bird, is essentially the analog to Wander’s horse in Shadow of the Colossus, Agro. Fumito Ueda designed Agro as a companion rather than just a vehicle, and had his team develop specific movement algorithms that would allow Agro to steer herself without the player’s explicit control, forcing players to put their trust in their steed during certain fights emphasizing bow aiming. Ueda and his new team at GenDesign iterated upon this idea, explicitly creating environments where the player was forced to rely upon Trico’s actions to progress and thus establish dependency between the boy and his companion.
While the game can be thought of as an inversion of Ico in this sense, its design influence upon The Last Guardian should not go overlooked, particularly in how the game captures Ico’s physicality. Ico’s key strength was establishing a sense of presence through minimalist puzzles that lacked overly gamey elements, namely in how Ico interacted with his surroundings. Players are subtly guided into climbing chains, pulling levers, sitting on stone sofas to save, and most importantly, holding down R1 to hold Yorda by the hand around the castle and pull her out of danger whenever captured. The Last Guardian innovates upon this by combining several of the traversable elements and the companion into one. To better navigate the vast ruins, the boy must guide Trico and utilize their tall body of climbable feathers in order to scale heights, while occasionally dragging around their large tail and dangling it over ledges to safely climb down. Most importantly, you get to pet Trico whenever you feel like it to comfort your friend in both their happiest and most emotionally taxing moments. In both Ico and The Last Guardian, the player’s constant contact with both the environment and their companion keeps them firmly rooted within its constructed sense of reality by regularly reminding them of their companion’s physical presence.
This physicality would not be as significant without the lessons learned from Shadow of the Colossus however, not just regarding AI behavior but also specifically in how it adapts the game’s sense of scale. Trico is large, and the boy is small. As mentioned previously, Trico can utilize their size to lean against walls and give the boy a step up, but they can also utilize their weight to hold down large chains and swipe away at imposing bodies of armor. Meanwhile, the boy is much more agile and can fit into otherwise inaccessible small spaces by Trico, squeezing through narrow tunnels and gaps in metal gates to pull switches and let his partner through. This obvious difference in size creates consistent room for contrast, not just in how the two characters differ in terms of functionality but also in terms of their scale when measured against the traversed liminal spaces of the ruins, constantly transforming from immense empty rooms to constrained and suffocating tunnels and corridors.
What is particularly interesting is not just The Last Guardian’s disempowerment or sense of scale, but rather what it manages to achieve with said elements and the resulting contrast to establish interdependency between the two characters and solidify their relationship. The combat, an almost complete inverse of Ico’s combat, is the most obvious example. Rather than defending Yorda by whacking shadow enemies with a stick, the roles have been reversed, in that the player must rely upon Trico to guard against scores of possessed armor as to avoid getting kidnapped himself. Even so, the game plays around with this idea of vulnerability, shifting the onus of responsibility about as the boy often finds himself in positions where he must actively support or protect Trico, such as disposing of glass eyes that scare his friend or scrambling to pull a nearby switch to lower a bridge and give Trico room to climb up to safety. The game is even willing to occasionally break its own rules to demonstrate how this sense of caring evolves past its defined guidelines. In almost any other game, this mechanical inconsistency would be regarded as a flaw, but it is this sense of doubt that creates room for the relationship to build from in the first place, and is perhaps the game’s most understated strength.
This is not to say that The Last Guardian was bereft of limitations regarding the execution of its ambitious scope. The most pressing challenge that Ueda and his team faced was how to balance its constructed sense of reality with regards to player expectations; that is, it had to find meaningful ways to commit to its vision of establishing the relationship between the boy and Trico while also acknowledging and appeasing players that would otherwise get lost or frustrated. Perhaps the most obvious downgrade from Ico is the presence of constant button prompts appearing on-screen to alert the players on how to better control the boy and instruct Trico; while the frequency of the prompts lessens over time, it is a slight disappointment that the game doesn’t simply force the players to experiment with inputs and commands as a more subtle and trusting substitute. This downfall however, is an anomaly amongst The Last Guardian’s other shortcomings, as it manages to successfully disguise many of its other concessions and limitations. There’s a classic “escape from the collapsing structure” sequence where all you do is hold forward and jump, but the game gets away with it because the player is used to being framed as a helpless participant. There’s occasional voice-over dialogue hints whenever the player has been stuck for a while in the same area, but it feels far less intrusive than Dormin’s repeated and booming hints in Shadow of the Colossus because the game has already established itself as a retrospective re-telling from the now grown boy’s point of view. Trico doesn’t respond immediately to the boy’s commands when being told where to go, but it makes sense that they wouldn’t function like clockwork and would need time to spot and process the situation from their own point of view, so the lag in response feels justified. It doesn’t matter that certain isolated elements of the game would crumble under scrutiny. What matters is that the situational context to allow players to suspend their disbelief is almost always present; in other words, the illusion holds up.
I’m still learning more about the game to this day. There are so many little details that I wouldn’t have spotted upon a first playthrough, and it’s an absolute joy finally getting to gush upon spotting them in replays. Of course it makes sense that you can’t just issue specific commands to Trico at the very start as a sequence-break despite not being taught by the game; after all, Trico hasn’t had time to observe you and mimic your actions to carry out such commands. Of course the hostile creatures that look exactly like your friend behave similarly; how can you then use your preconceived knowledge of their physiology to aid your friend in a fight against their copycat? I also can’t help but appreciate how GenDesign condensed so much learning within its introduction; in the first ten minutes alone, you’re hinted on how to later deal with the bodies of armor (the magical runes that appear before waking up are the exact same as the runes that appear when grabbed, and are dispelled in the same manner of furiously mashing buttons), you get to figure out how Trico’s eyes change colors depending upon whether they’re mesmerized or hostile, and it quickly establishes the premise of building up trust with a very wary creature that’s more than likely to misunderstand or ignore you at first. Combine all of these nuances with the game’s ability to destabilize and diversify playthroughs via Trico’s innate curiosity and semi-unpredictable instincts, and you get a game that becomes easier to appreciate the more the player familiarizes themselves with its inner workings.
I think a lot of criticism for The Last Guardian ultimately comes down to less of what we perceive the game is and more of what we perceive the game isn’t. It’s not a fully player-controlled puzzle-platforming game like Ico, it’s not a puzzle-combat game with spectacle like Shadow of the Colossus, and it’s certainly not a classic companion escort-quest game where you can just order Trico around like a robot and expect automatic results every time. Instead of focusing on the progression of more complex controls and puzzles, The Last Guardian is focused on the progression of a seemingly more complex relationship. I’m not going to pretend that everyone will get something out of this game, as it definitely requires a good deal of patience and player investment to meet the game halfway. It’s certainly more difficult to appreciate given its lack of influence unlike Ico or its lack of exhilarating boss encounters unlike Shadow of the Colossus. That said, it’s this element of danger in its ability to commit to its vision while alienating impatient players that makes it such a compelling title once it finally clicks. Many before me have pointed out how powerful the bond between the player and Trico felt upon learning from others that improperly caring for Trico results in your companion stubbornly ignoring the player’s commands; after all, volume swells cannot exist without contrast to provide room for growth. Perhaps this is why at the end of the day, I find myself transfixed by every word that Fumito Ueda has to offer. In an era where developers feel overly concerned with the best and brightest, he doesn’t seem concerned about what video games mean so much as what video games are. I can only hope that someday, he and GenDesign will return to bring us a new title that captures our imagination as thoroughly as many of his works already have for me.
Lords of the Fallen
2023
This is definitely one of my favorite extremely flawed games I've ever played. At its core, Lords of the Fallen is a more than competent souls-like that had me addicted like any other game in the genre would. There is a lot going on in this game, and it is very overwhelming at first, along with just being pretty slow to start, so I would understand why the first part of the game might turn a lot of people off. Once I got going though, getting stronger, building my character how I wanted and discovering some of the later areas, I very quickly got really into the game and pretty much marathon'd it to the end.
The areas are huge, and FULL of secrets, often entire separate areas that you could easily miss that have hours of content and several bosses of their own. The game does not direct you basically ever, with so little explained that I was forced to look up quite a bit due to how easily it is to get lost in progression and have no idea where to go next. The game does fall into the 'don't tell you anything' trap of souls-likes probably more than any I've played, but luckily already there are plenty of resources out there if you get stuck to where I can generally overlook it.
There are several pretty massive flaws with this game, the most obvious and game-ruining being the technical issues that are pretty much always present, at times so bad that it will get you killed in-game. I played on Performance Mode on PS5, and have got to say it's one of the worst optimized games I've ever played on this console. Frame drops happen extremely often, textures do not load currently, sounds cut out, load times are weird, and there are a plethora of glitches and bugs throughout that are very unfortunately noticeable. Frame drops in boss fights were particularly awful, often causing me to miss-time a dodge or parry and get hit or worse. If these technical issues were not present, I can confidently say that the overall opinion on this game would be much more positive.
The game's boss fights are all pretty mediocre as well, with far too many that are just defeating regular enemies but with more health (like Elden Ring mini-bosses but less forgivable), and many that are just either boring are extremely obnoxious to fight. Hexworks also managed to make some of the most obnoxious enemy placements I've ever seen, making me absolutely lose my mind in some areas, particularly due to the seemingly infinite follow range and perfect accuracy from way too far that so many enemies have. The area design itself is really great, and the environments area beautiful, albeit a bit spoiled by the aforementioned technical issues.
Overall, though, Lords of the Fallen kept me extremely engaged from about 25% in to the end. Character upgrades are very satisfying, and once you figure out what everything does you'll see how great and in-depth it can be. Like I said earlier, there is a lot going on in this game, for better or for worse, but for the most part I found the depth to be quite positive and had a ton of fun with the Strength/Inferno build I decided to go for, particularly with the spell that is more or less just Blasphemous Blade's Taker's Flames from Elden Ring. I would very much look forward to playing a sequel or DLC to this game, and hope that as the developers work so hard on patches as they already have, people in the future will be able to enjoy the game even more. I would definitely recommend this to Souls-fans, if you think you'll be able to forgive some of the flaws.
8/10 (very generously, I just had a ton of fun with this game so I can't help it)
The areas are huge, and FULL of secrets, often entire separate areas that you could easily miss that have hours of content and several bosses of their own. The game does not direct you basically ever, with so little explained that I was forced to look up quite a bit due to how easily it is to get lost in progression and have no idea where to go next. The game does fall into the 'don't tell you anything' trap of souls-likes probably more than any I've played, but luckily already there are plenty of resources out there if you get stuck to where I can generally overlook it.
There are several pretty massive flaws with this game, the most obvious and game-ruining being the technical issues that are pretty much always present, at times so bad that it will get you killed in-game. I played on Performance Mode on PS5, and have got to say it's one of the worst optimized games I've ever played on this console. Frame drops happen extremely often, textures do not load currently, sounds cut out, load times are weird, and there are a plethora of glitches and bugs throughout that are very unfortunately noticeable. Frame drops in boss fights were particularly awful, often causing me to miss-time a dodge or parry and get hit or worse. If these technical issues were not present, I can confidently say that the overall opinion on this game would be much more positive.
The game's boss fights are all pretty mediocre as well, with far too many that are just defeating regular enemies but with more health (like Elden Ring mini-bosses but less forgivable), and many that are just either boring are extremely obnoxious to fight. Hexworks also managed to make some of the most obnoxious enemy placements I've ever seen, making me absolutely lose my mind in some areas, particularly due to the seemingly infinite follow range and perfect accuracy from way too far that so many enemies have. The area design itself is really great, and the environments area beautiful, albeit a bit spoiled by the aforementioned technical issues.
Overall, though, Lords of the Fallen kept me extremely engaged from about 25% in to the end. Character upgrades are very satisfying, and once you figure out what everything does you'll see how great and in-depth it can be. Like I said earlier, there is a lot going on in this game, for better or for worse, but for the most part I found the depth to be quite positive and had a ton of fun with the Strength/Inferno build I decided to go for, particularly with the spell that is more or less just Blasphemous Blade's Taker's Flames from Elden Ring. I would very much look forward to playing a sequel or DLC to this game, and hope that as the developers work so hard on patches as they already have, people in the future will be able to enjoy the game even more. I would definitely recommend this to Souls-fans, if you think you'll be able to forgive some of the flaws.
8/10 (very generously, I just had a ton of fun with this game so I can't help it)
Spec Ops: The Line
2012
This review contains spoilers
as someone said on a different site: neoliberal nothingness.
it fails to deliver on its message because it has such a black and white perspective on war as a whole. theres no nuance to a sensitive topic that is complex and difficult to address, it instead just blames the player and the individual soldiers for war without isolating the real problems with it that arent just "war are bad", and it never attempts to attribute the problem to anything beyond "video games that glorify war are bad and the player is bad for wanting to play shooter games".
honestly, i think we're at a point where messages like these are just not worth caring about anymore. if this game had balls it would've gone for WHO benefits off of war, and why its important to think critically about the effects of media like this, instead of..... going after people that enjoy shooter games. it's victim blaming at its finest, down to that "The Army does not condone killing civilians, but this is fake so why should you care?" loading screen. i dont even like umurangi generation (at all), but it does a wayyy fucking better job at political commentary than this.
in any case even without all of this political commentary, the story isnt that good, the characters are bland, the ending is stupid, etc. its inspired but never in a good way, it just feels like its repurposing better media about this same sort of thing (obviously the stuff that the devs have said influenced this game massively). also its worth mentioning that i love playing games where you can be unapologetically terrible when the characters all around you arent worth caring about in the slightest. thus this is the type of game where being a piece of shit just makes sense, because everyone around you isnt worth caring about, everyone's a generic stereotype of a character that only gets slightly deconstructed as the game goes on (by deconstructed i mean the characters just get a little ooooo crazyyy). this game also fails to give the player any incentive to make you feel like playing the saint is something worth doing. especially during the lynching scene, which i ironically felt less about mowing down citizens than i did in mw2.
oh yeah and the gameplay is fucking awful. the whole excuse for the gameplay being bad is "ooooo war is badddd war feels so dumb and bad isnt it baddddd" which would be a valid excuse if the story were any good at all, if the political commentary were any good at all. instead you just have bad political commentary with zero nuance, and a mediocre ugly ass gears of war military shooter clone hybrid that is utterly soulless.
someone else here pointed this out but the game constantly rewards you for killing with slo-mo special effects, satisfyingly brutal kill animations, and achievements. i've removed a diatribe about undertale (and umurangi generation) for your sanity, but im still going to point out that this is hilariously counter to how to make the player feel like what theyre doing is wrong, and undertale tackled this same issue better by actively punishing the player with constant disappointments and increasing difficulty. meanwhile this game gives you silly achievements for murdering innocent people whilst at the same time, bemoaning you for killing innocent people. even fucking FUNNY GAMES didnt show the audience any satisfying deaths, and the devs excuse this by saying these aspects are supposed to make the concept of FPS games having these features feel unrealistic and ridiculous. the reality is that this game feels ridiculous.
in closing, this shit just doesnt work. terrible game. there are better double-A shooters out there, and MUCH better politically conscious games as well. this game doesnt do a single fucking thing right.
it fails to deliver on its message because it has such a black and white perspective on war as a whole. theres no nuance to a sensitive topic that is complex and difficult to address, it instead just blames the player and the individual soldiers for war without isolating the real problems with it that arent just "war are bad", and it never attempts to attribute the problem to anything beyond "video games that glorify war are bad and the player is bad for wanting to play shooter games".
honestly, i think we're at a point where messages like these are just not worth caring about anymore. if this game had balls it would've gone for WHO benefits off of war, and why its important to think critically about the effects of media like this, instead of..... going after people that enjoy shooter games. it's victim blaming at its finest, down to that "The Army does not condone killing civilians, but this is fake so why should you care?" loading screen. i dont even like umurangi generation (at all), but it does a wayyy fucking better job at political commentary than this.
in any case even without all of this political commentary, the story isnt that good, the characters are bland, the ending is stupid, etc. its inspired but never in a good way, it just feels like its repurposing better media about this same sort of thing (obviously the stuff that the devs have said influenced this game massively). also its worth mentioning that i love playing games where you can be unapologetically terrible when the characters all around you arent worth caring about in the slightest. thus this is the type of game where being a piece of shit just makes sense, because everyone around you isnt worth caring about, everyone's a generic stereotype of a character that only gets slightly deconstructed as the game goes on (by deconstructed i mean the characters just get a little ooooo crazyyy). this game also fails to give the player any incentive to make you feel like playing the saint is something worth doing. especially during the lynching scene, which i ironically felt less about mowing down citizens than i did in mw2.
oh yeah and the gameplay is fucking awful. the whole excuse for the gameplay being bad is "ooooo war is badddd war feels so dumb and bad isnt it baddddd" which would be a valid excuse if the story were any good at all, if the political commentary were any good at all. instead you just have bad political commentary with zero nuance, and a mediocre ugly ass gears of war military shooter clone hybrid that is utterly soulless.
someone else here pointed this out but the game constantly rewards you for killing with slo-mo special effects, satisfyingly brutal kill animations, and achievements. i've removed a diatribe about undertale (and umurangi generation) for your sanity, but im still going to point out that this is hilariously counter to how to make the player feel like what theyre doing is wrong, and undertale tackled this same issue better by actively punishing the player with constant disappointments and increasing difficulty. meanwhile this game gives you silly achievements for murdering innocent people whilst at the same time, bemoaning you for killing innocent people. even fucking FUNNY GAMES didnt show the audience any satisfying deaths, and the devs excuse this by saying these aspects are supposed to make the concept of FPS games having these features feel unrealistic and ridiculous. the reality is that this game feels ridiculous.
in closing, this shit just doesnt work. terrible game. there are better double-A shooters out there, and MUCH better politically conscious games as well. this game doesnt do a single fucking thing right.
Spec Ops: The Line
2012
Much has already been said about the story of Spec Ops, all by people who’ve made it their life’s goal to bring this medium to a respectable podium, much like myths, literature, theatre, art, and film before it. A blunt and loose adaptation of Heart of Darkness it is, but that never stopped people from heaping praise on Apocalypse Now, and neither has it stopped video game connoisseurs and casuals from doing the same. Instead, I’ll put my two cents on one particular thing: the gameplay. Yes I know that it’s nothing new to criticize the gameplay, it’s been done before. It usually boils down to “it works and gets the job done, nothing more or less”, which is true to admit. It’s why it’s also disappointing that this game could not, thought it came so very close, reconcile the gulf between its mechanics and the narrative in my eyes, and it’s all because of a mechanic I did absolutely like. Said mechanic involved the game rewarding the player extra ammo by engaging enemies in melee combat, which has had a light shown on its presentation from clinical to barbaric as the main character descends deeper into madness. While I love the presentation, I adored the fact that a simple mechanic could make the player be the very monster they’re playing as and work as a supplement to the animated presentation. Granted, I know other games, especially of the cover shooter variety, from time to time, rewards the player for aggressiveness with flashy movements and gibs, but the intimacy of the mechanic combined with its descent into barbarity add just that little detail that could’ve been in the entire gameplay loop, and would’ve elevated what is otherwise painfully average mechanics into something that further elevates the story. In that vein, it could’ve been to the sublime grotesquery of violence that is Spec Ops The Line what the oppressive human limitations of Pathologic’s gameplay is to its story. Still, it is an absolutely spectacular interactive experience who’s whole structure ultimately outweighs what is essentially one missing lug nut on a car wheel.