Steeb
17 reviews liked by Steeb
It’s so easy to forget just how much sauce a Mario game can have when these motherfuckers try
For as huge of a fan as I am of the Mario franchise, I feel like one major subsection of it has eluded me all these years, that being all of the RPGs. I didn't actually sit down and finish a Mario RPG until, kinda fittingly, Mario RPG's remake last year and I blame this in part on just how inaccessible Nintendo has often made these games on modern consoles (though they have been doing better recently). So, despite hearing several people go on and on about just how great Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door was I was kinda just resigned to never playing it and not getting the appeal. That being said, Nintendo being as unpredictable as ever worked a miracle for the fans who thought their voices would never be heard and remade the one game they had been asking for all these years. And because of this miracle remake I can now finally see why everyone praises this game up and down, at least for the most part.
I think the most standout part of Thousand Year Door to me was just how interesting and different it's world was from anything seen in any other Mario game. Instead of taking place in the Mushroom Kingdom like 90% of Mario games do, Thousand Year Door takes place on a completely separate continent complete with its own locations, inhabitants, atmosphere, and history. It's through this entirely different setting that the game really shines, introducing new races of creatures and putting spins on familiar ones to make characters that stand out and leading you to explore several different locations that are far more interesting than the familiar archetypes that other Mario games so often fall into. The game is just so commendably creative with its worldbuilding, and I was always excited to move on in the story and see what kind of new ideas it would throw at me next.
Thousand Year Door's story is another really strong part of the experience. Plot-wise it's pretty standard, Mario has to rescue Peach and collect 7 crystal stars while he's at it to unlock the titular Thousand Year Door and the treasure hidden behind it, but despite the plot being generic the journey to it is far from. Throughout the course of the story you'll find yourself in several fun and interesting scenarios like uncovering a conspiracy in a floating city while you try to become the world's greatest wrestler at the same time, or solving family drama within the Pianta mafia just to name a few. There's also several heartfelt character moments that come from the companion characters that join you along the way and how they develop. While not all of these characters were super compelling to me, the ones that were I found myself becoming really endeared to and I enjoyed having them present in my party just to see more of them. While most of the story centers around Mario's journey the game does pause from his story after ever chapter to let you see what's going on with two other characters being Peach and Bowser. While in any other Mario game Peach would just be kidnapped and we wouldn't see her until the end when Mario rescues her, Thousand Year Door takes a different approach to her character allowing us to see her circumstances while kidnapped by the villainous group of the game, the X-Nauts. While being held hostage by the group Peach comes into contact with the supercomputer TEC who asks her to teach him about the concept of love seeing as he knows nothing about it, these sections are short and sweet and often involve Peach doing some menial task for TEC but they all build to a climactic conclusion by the end of the game that actually really impressed me in terms of the feelings it stirred in me. Then there's the Bowser sections which were just really fun and enjoyable in their own right. Bowser's presence in the game's story is minimal and yet that's what makes it so great. Seeing as he is for once not the one behind Peach's kidnapping and not the one to set Mario on his grand quest Bowser is playing catch up the entire game, seemingly always one step behind the events of the story and hilariously clueless to the serious events that are unfolding. It's in this state that he kind of works really well as a comic relief, never really being a super big threat but trying so hard to be one in a place where he's just out of his depth. All three of the game's stories start coming together by the end of the game and without spoiling anything, the finale is a really interesting and climactic ending to the whole expereience. Through the game's engaging characters, sharp writing, and fun and outlandish ideas Paper Mario The Thosaund Year Door tells a great story that I will not soon forget.
Finally we get to the gameplay which is where the few gripes I have with the game lie. The strongest part of the gameplay I'd say would be the actual battle system, it's very well crafted and uses all the tropes of a traditional turn based system well and in unique ways to make battles just really fun to engage in. The action commands connected to the attacks are a great way to keep the player engaged while in the midst of turn based combat and while I never fully got the hang of the Guard and Superguards they're fun to go for as well and pulling one off with the right timing feels very satisfying. My only problem with this system is just how much is left up to pure RNG sometimes. There were several times during tense fights that the game decided to just do something to screw me over like having a shy guy get up and drop a light on my party causing damafe or having the stage lights fall and burn or freeze my party out of nowhere, while this also happens inversely to enemy parties as well it's just an element that doesn't feel completely fair at times and can really screw you over if you're not expecting it, which by merit of it being random you never will be. Outside of the battles you explore the overworld and this is the part of the gameplay I had the most problems with. While running around back and forth on an overworld is something common to all RPGs there are several things that make it feel just kinda boring in Thousand Year. For one Mario moves at what feels like a snails pace, having no run button and only moving across the screen at a light trot traversing screens in this game is just not that fun. There are however, light puzzles spread around the world and things that can only be accessed with Mario's abilities and these do a bit to make this whole process a little more interesting. The dungeons in the game are also really fun, placing you in different environments with lots of puzzles to solve and unique enemies to fight all of which is capped off with a pretty fun boss fight to get the crystal star of that location. And then there's the backtracking which is easily my biggest problem with the game. After you obtain a crytal star at the end of each chapter you have to go back to the Rougeport underground and traverse all the way back to the Thousand Year Door for it to be revealead where to got for the next crystal star. While not absolutely abhorrent, the trek back to the door every time to start a new chapter just feels a bit like padding to me and I can't help but wonder if there was no better way to do this. Overall though I did have a lot of fun with the game's battles and dungeons and while the slightly boring to traverse overworld and unnecessary backtracking drag it down a little bit they weren't enough to ruin the whole gameplay experience.
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is an endearing classic of a game and one that absolutely deserved the remake treatment it got after being ignored for so long. Having finally played the game I can deffinitly see why people hold this game in such high regard. While my issues with a few of it's aspects hold it back from masterpiece status in my eyes, I'm really happy for those who got to enjoy it for those who do love this game and I sincerely hope Nintendo will take a page out of this game's book for whatever they do next with the Paper Mario series.
I think the most standout part of Thousand Year Door to me was just how interesting and different it's world was from anything seen in any other Mario game. Instead of taking place in the Mushroom Kingdom like 90% of Mario games do, Thousand Year Door takes place on a completely separate continent complete with its own locations, inhabitants, atmosphere, and history. It's through this entirely different setting that the game really shines, introducing new races of creatures and putting spins on familiar ones to make characters that stand out and leading you to explore several different locations that are far more interesting than the familiar archetypes that other Mario games so often fall into. The game is just so commendably creative with its worldbuilding, and I was always excited to move on in the story and see what kind of new ideas it would throw at me next.
Thousand Year Door's story is another really strong part of the experience. Plot-wise it's pretty standard, Mario has to rescue Peach and collect 7 crystal stars while he's at it to unlock the titular Thousand Year Door and the treasure hidden behind it, but despite the plot being generic the journey to it is far from. Throughout the course of the story you'll find yourself in several fun and interesting scenarios like uncovering a conspiracy in a floating city while you try to become the world's greatest wrestler at the same time, or solving family drama within the Pianta mafia just to name a few. There's also several heartfelt character moments that come from the companion characters that join you along the way and how they develop. While not all of these characters were super compelling to me, the ones that were I found myself becoming really endeared to and I enjoyed having them present in my party just to see more of them. While most of the story centers around Mario's journey the game does pause from his story after ever chapter to let you see what's going on with two other characters being Peach and Bowser. While in any other Mario game Peach would just be kidnapped and we wouldn't see her until the end when Mario rescues her, Thousand Year Door takes a different approach to her character allowing us to see her circumstances while kidnapped by the villainous group of the game, the X-Nauts. While being held hostage by the group Peach comes into contact with the supercomputer TEC who asks her to teach him about the concept of love seeing as he knows nothing about it, these sections are short and sweet and often involve Peach doing some menial task for TEC but they all build to a climactic conclusion by the end of the game that actually really impressed me in terms of the feelings it stirred in me. Then there's the Bowser sections which were just really fun and enjoyable in their own right. Bowser's presence in the game's story is minimal and yet that's what makes it so great. Seeing as he is for once not the one behind Peach's kidnapping and not the one to set Mario on his grand quest Bowser is playing catch up the entire game, seemingly always one step behind the events of the story and hilariously clueless to the serious events that are unfolding. It's in this state that he kind of works really well as a comic relief, never really being a super big threat but trying so hard to be one in a place where he's just out of his depth. All three of the game's stories start coming together by the end of the game and without spoiling anything, the finale is a really interesting and climactic ending to the whole expereience. Through the game's engaging characters, sharp writing, and fun and outlandish ideas Paper Mario The Thosaund Year Door tells a great story that I will not soon forget.
Finally we get to the gameplay which is where the few gripes I have with the game lie. The strongest part of the gameplay I'd say would be the actual battle system, it's very well crafted and uses all the tropes of a traditional turn based system well and in unique ways to make battles just really fun to engage in. The action commands connected to the attacks are a great way to keep the player engaged while in the midst of turn based combat and while I never fully got the hang of the Guard and Superguards they're fun to go for as well and pulling one off with the right timing feels very satisfying. My only problem with this system is just how much is left up to pure RNG sometimes. There were several times during tense fights that the game decided to just do something to screw me over like having a shy guy get up and drop a light on my party causing damafe or having the stage lights fall and burn or freeze my party out of nowhere, while this also happens inversely to enemy parties as well it's just an element that doesn't feel completely fair at times and can really screw you over if you're not expecting it, which by merit of it being random you never will be. Outside of the battles you explore the overworld and this is the part of the gameplay I had the most problems with. While running around back and forth on an overworld is something common to all RPGs there are several things that make it feel just kinda boring in Thousand Year. For one Mario moves at what feels like a snails pace, having no run button and only moving across the screen at a light trot traversing screens in this game is just not that fun. There are however, light puzzles spread around the world and things that can only be accessed with Mario's abilities and these do a bit to make this whole process a little more interesting. The dungeons in the game are also really fun, placing you in different environments with lots of puzzles to solve and unique enemies to fight all of which is capped off with a pretty fun boss fight to get the crystal star of that location. And then there's the backtracking which is easily my biggest problem with the game. After you obtain a crytal star at the end of each chapter you have to go back to the Rougeport underground and traverse all the way back to the Thousand Year Door for it to be revealead where to got for the next crystal star. While not absolutely abhorrent, the trek back to the door every time to start a new chapter just feels a bit like padding to me and I can't help but wonder if there was no better way to do this. Overall though I did have a lot of fun with the game's battles and dungeons and while the slightly boring to traverse overworld and unnecessary backtracking drag it down a little bit they weren't enough to ruin the whole gameplay experience.
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is an endearing classic of a game and one that absolutely deserved the remake treatment it got after being ignored for so long. Having finally played the game I can deffinitly see why people hold this game in such high regard. While my issues with a few of it's aspects hold it back from masterpiece status in my eyes, I'm really happy for those who got to enjoy it for those who do love this game and I sincerely hope Nintendo will take a page out of this game's book for whatever they do next with the Paper Mario series.
Death Stranding
2019
If Backloggd was Letterboxd this would be in the first page of highest rated games instead of 3 versions of Bloodborne.
Not the second coming of Christ Kojima fans wanted but an extremely unique and experimental game well worth the prestige.
Not the second coming of Christ Kojima fans wanted but an extremely unique and experimental game well worth the prestige.
In Stars and Time
2023
(This is a rewrite of my first ever review on Backloggd! For posterity’s sake I’ll leave up that review here, but I don’t love it and I’m writing this review as an improvement on what I wanted to say back then.)
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Before I played In Stars and Time in November of 2023, I played the proof-of-concept version, START AGAIN: a prologue a whole year and a half earlier, in April of 2022. I usually don’t play demos, especially not paid demos, but I’d been following this project based on the art style and I felt like it was something special. I liked the prologue well enough. It was charming and I was drawn to the characters. The prologue starts in medias res as the party prepare to defeat the “final boss”, the King, at the end of their JRPG journey. The catch is that the protagonist, Siffrin, is stuck in a time loop and nobody else in the party is aware. Despite this, Siffrin resolves to carry this burden alone, and to use this ability to defeat the King without worrying his allies.
My one big issue with this demo was that, although I liked him as a character, Siffrin’s decision to bottle up his feelings and keep the time loop a secret made no sense to me. It seemed contrived that he wouldn’t, even once, experiment with the time loop and tell his allies about what was going on. If it caused any issues, it wouldn’t matter – he could just loop back and START AGAIN. After the demo, I was a little disappointed but still hopeful the full release could turn my opinion around.
As the full release approached, I grew really excited. I’d been following the dev’s monthly dev logs on Steam up to release, and I bought the full game in the first week after it came out, a rare event for me. I finished it in 6 days, binging it between study sessions for my upcoming exams. I was hooked, and by the end of the game, In Stars and Time had fully recontextualized the demo.
Siffrin didn’t tell his party about the time loop because he loves them. He didn’t tell them because he refuses to be vulnerable.
When I played the demo I saw these characters from my omniscient point of view as the player, as little pawns to command in whatever way would progress the plot. Siffrin’s refusal to open up felt like an arbitrary obstacle put in place by the creator as if to say “but then we wouldn’t have a plot, would we?” But Siffrin isn’t the player, and he isn’t aware he exists in a video game. To him, the rest of the party aren’t pawns; they’re his allies. His friends. His family.
What’s more, Siffrin is incredibly repressed. He’s reserved, happy to nod along in the background because he believes that placing himself as the centre of attention will lead everyone to hate him as much as he hates himself. He sees himself as inherently less valuable than others, and takes the time loop to be his chance to martyr himself in service of his family.
I’m reminded of Jacob Geller’s video Time Loop Nihlism, wherein he talks about Deathloop and the way replaying a game desensitizes us. The more we play, the more we’re able to abstract NPCs from living, breathing people into gameplay systems. Our immersion fades with each repeat as cause and effect become predictable. This was the mindset I had playing the demo.
In Stars and Time actively subverts this idea. Siffrin refuses to allow nihilism to overtake him. Sure, if anything happened to a family member, he could reset the timeline and fix it. But in that moment, in that present moment, his family would suffer, and that suffering would be real. For the same reason we wouldn’t kill a person even though they’ll die sometime in the future anyways, Siffrin won’t let his family come to harm even though he can reset the harm they suffer. The time loop is his burden and his alone, and he will do everything in his power to allow his family to be happy for as long as he can.
In Stars and Time is repetitive. You will repeat the same dungeon over and over for the game’s entire runtime. You will fight the same enemies over and over. The same bosses. Siffrin’s family will repeat the same dialogue again and again. You will find the same items scattered throughout the dungeon. You will walk between the same rooms in the same layout looking for the same keys to progress. There are plenty of quality-of-life features to reduce frustration; you can loop to specific areas in the dungeon after dying, you can skip seen dialogue, and Siffrin retains levels between every loop while his family retain their levels at checkpoints within the dungeon. But, no matter what, you will repeat the same events over and over. You will be sent back and forth, and at several points you will progress to a certain point in the dungeon only to realize you had to do something in a now blocked-off area, forcing another reset. The ludonarrative is excellent and encourages the player to experience Siffrin’s frustrations alongside him.
This is why Siffrin’s character arc is so compelling. The whole game, he does his best to protect, long past the point the player has. Every so often he’ll make a major breakthrough, and his enthusiasm is extreme. This is it! He’s figured it out! That enthusiasm soon fades as his plans inevitably lead to more and more dead ends. Even Siffrin has his breaking point, and his growing disillusionment with the repetition, the monotony, makes him a fascinating tragic protagonist. I won’t say much because of spoilers, but the toll the time loop takes on his mental health, compounded with his poor self-esteem and inability to show vulnerability, make Siffrin an amazing and relatable protagonist.
I could praise everything about this game if I wanted to, but I chose to focus on Siffrin because his characterization is central to what makes In Stars and Time so engaging. I love its characters, its world-building, its music, its everything. Please, if what I’ve written above is at all interesting and you can stomach the repetition, you owe it to yourself to play In Stars and Time.
━━━━━━━━━
Before I played In Stars and Time in November of 2023, I played the proof-of-concept version, START AGAIN: a prologue a whole year and a half earlier, in April of 2022. I usually don’t play demos, especially not paid demos, but I’d been following this project based on the art style and I felt like it was something special. I liked the prologue well enough. It was charming and I was drawn to the characters. The prologue starts in medias res as the party prepare to defeat the “final boss”, the King, at the end of their JRPG journey. The catch is that the protagonist, Siffrin, is stuck in a time loop and nobody else in the party is aware. Despite this, Siffrin resolves to carry this burden alone, and to use this ability to defeat the King without worrying his allies.
My one big issue with this demo was that, although I liked him as a character, Siffrin’s decision to bottle up his feelings and keep the time loop a secret made no sense to me. It seemed contrived that he wouldn’t, even once, experiment with the time loop and tell his allies about what was going on. If it caused any issues, it wouldn’t matter – he could just loop back and START AGAIN. After the demo, I was a little disappointed but still hopeful the full release could turn my opinion around.
As the full release approached, I grew really excited. I’d been following the dev’s monthly dev logs on Steam up to release, and I bought the full game in the first week after it came out, a rare event for me. I finished it in 6 days, binging it between study sessions for my upcoming exams. I was hooked, and by the end of the game, In Stars and Time had fully recontextualized the demo.
Siffrin didn’t tell his party about the time loop because he loves them. He didn’t tell them because he refuses to be vulnerable.
When I played the demo I saw these characters from my omniscient point of view as the player, as little pawns to command in whatever way would progress the plot. Siffrin’s refusal to open up felt like an arbitrary obstacle put in place by the creator as if to say “but then we wouldn’t have a plot, would we?” But Siffrin isn’t the player, and he isn’t aware he exists in a video game. To him, the rest of the party aren’t pawns; they’re his allies. His friends. His family.
What’s more, Siffrin is incredibly repressed. He’s reserved, happy to nod along in the background because he believes that placing himself as the centre of attention will lead everyone to hate him as much as he hates himself. He sees himself as inherently less valuable than others, and takes the time loop to be his chance to martyr himself in service of his family.
I’m reminded of Jacob Geller’s video Time Loop Nihlism, wherein he talks about Deathloop and the way replaying a game desensitizes us. The more we play, the more we’re able to abstract NPCs from living, breathing people into gameplay systems. Our immersion fades with each repeat as cause and effect become predictable. This was the mindset I had playing the demo.
In Stars and Time actively subverts this idea. Siffrin refuses to allow nihilism to overtake him. Sure, if anything happened to a family member, he could reset the timeline and fix it. But in that moment, in that present moment, his family would suffer, and that suffering would be real. For the same reason we wouldn’t kill a person even though they’ll die sometime in the future anyways, Siffrin won’t let his family come to harm even though he can reset the harm they suffer. The time loop is his burden and his alone, and he will do everything in his power to allow his family to be happy for as long as he can.
In Stars and Time is repetitive. You will repeat the same dungeon over and over for the game’s entire runtime. You will fight the same enemies over and over. The same bosses. Siffrin’s family will repeat the same dialogue again and again. You will find the same items scattered throughout the dungeon. You will walk between the same rooms in the same layout looking for the same keys to progress. There are plenty of quality-of-life features to reduce frustration; you can loop to specific areas in the dungeon after dying, you can skip seen dialogue, and Siffrin retains levels between every loop while his family retain their levels at checkpoints within the dungeon. But, no matter what, you will repeat the same events over and over. You will be sent back and forth, and at several points you will progress to a certain point in the dungeon only to realize you had to do something in a now blocked-off area, forcing another reset. The ludonarrative is excellent and encourages the player to experience Siffrin’s frustrations alongside him.
This is why Siffrin’s character arc is so compelling. The whole game, he does his best to protect, long past the point the player has. Every so often he’ll make a major breakthrough, and his enthusiasm is extreme. This is it! He’s figured it out! That enthusiasm soon fades as his plans inevitably lead to more and more dead ends. Even Siffrin has his breaking point, and his growing disillusionment with the repetition, the monotony, makes him a fascinating tragic protagonist. I won’t say much because of spoilers, but the toll the time loop takes on his mental health, compounded with his poor self-esteem and inability to show vulnerability, make Siffrin an amazing and relatable protagonist.
I could praise everything about this game if I wanted to, but I chose to focus on Siffrin because his characterization is central to what makes In Stars and Time so engaging. I love its characters, its world-building, its music, its everything. Please, if what I’ve written above is at all interesting and you can stomach the repetition, you owe it to yourself to play In Stars and Time.
Persona 5 Royal
2019
This review contains spoilers
This is not a bad game. Gameplay is solid, if flawed, but it's the story that ruins this game for me. For a lot of people this game and its story will be a great experience, I think especially for younger people, but that's not to say it's good.
This is a "teenagers with powers" story. Basically, the silent main character and his gang get to enter a materialised version of bad people's minds to change their heart and turn them good, and he does this eight times throughout the game. This is what the plot revolves around, in what quickly becomes a monster-of-the-month kind of format.
The quality of these cycles varies. The first one is fantastic, the villain is perfectly written for a character you're meant to hate, the way the story handles him is fairly realistic, and nearly every named character is affected by his horseshit.
The next five are far less appealing. Most of them are just a shitty abusive person in a position of power, who's related to the new cast member the game is about to introduce to your party. It gets old.
In parallel to this, the game features an honestly very impressive daily life system, where you go to school, talk to people, and do things in your free time. The main draw here is the dating sim-like approach to developing your relationships with the game's many secondary characters, who include your party members as well as a number of interesting or notable people uninvolved with the main plot.
As you hang out with these characters, you go through a number of events that progress their plot line, which also unlocks certain gameplay bonuses. Reaching the end of these plot lines and maxing out your relationship with the character also means you've ran out of side content involving them, so the peak of your emotional investment with them coincides with the point at which you basically stop seeing them outside story events which include them. Which, I should say, are near non-existent for a lot of these characters.
As for the characters themselves, bearing in mind this is likely the most subjective part of my thoughts on the game as a whole, the writing here is quite mixed as well.
As you'd expect from a story where the main characters are teenagers, where the target demographic is also teenagers, the writing for much of the cast is full of tropes and pointless conflict. I was particularly bothered by the fan-favourite himbo party member, who spends the whole game in a screaming match a talking cat, and is central to the game's many unfunny anime pervert jokes we've all seen a thousand times.
The game's presentation is really good. The music is incredible and the stylised graphics look great for a game now two generations old, and the art-style is phenomenal when things are in-engine. The problem is that for some inexplicable reason the game also includes a number of cutscenes done as typical 2D animation, which look and sound awful.
The gameplay is good. Probably the most enjoyable turn-based JRPG system in any game I've played, though in fairness I haven't played a lot of them.
The problem is with the many exceptions to the system: much of the strategy involved in the core gameplay revolves around elemental weaknesses and comboing status effects with specific damage types, but a great majority of bosses and minibosses have no weaknesses and are inexplicably immune to status effects, becoming little more than damage sponges.
The game's difficulty plays into this as well, with regular combats being too easy and many boss fights being too hard. The space-themed boss at the end of the sixth dungeon in particular almost had me drop the game, as the worst example of this.
Spoilers ahead.
Persona 5 Royal adds an extra arc to the story, right after the end of the base game. The base game ends with you and your gang going after Japanse senator Armstrong, and then, as per JRPG custom, killing God. It's not a bad end to the story, honestly.
Royal also adds a couple of important new characters, Yoshizawa and Maruki. Yoshizawa is an underclassman of the MC, who befriends him early on. Maruki is a psychologist who provides counselling for the MC's school's students after everyone gets traumatised by the first dipshit whose mind you invade.
Maruki is a sweet, gentle, dorky, handsome, and deeply well-intentioned man. He's written to be very likeable as he cares for your party and the rest of the student body. If you hang out with him, his plot line revolves around conversations between him and the MC, as he tries to advance his research into healing people's emotional wounds.
He's also the game's final final boss. After you kill God, you go to bed, and wake up the next day to a changed world where everyone's lives are better. Characters' dead loved ones are alive, the talking cat becomes a handsome guy, and the miserable asshole teacher in school is instead happy and polite. No one but the MC realises anything's changed, reality effectively got retconned.
Turns out Maruki did really well with his research. He got magic bullshit powers just like the MC and his gang, and when God died he usurped his throne and rewrote reality to make everyone happy.
There is no twist. Maruki isn't mind-controlling the populace, or making clones and killing the spares, or purging undesirables. He doesn't even use his reality controlling abilities to get back with his amnesiac ex, because she lives a happy life now and he doesn't want to ruin that. He just acquired pseudo-omnipotence and used it to make everyone better off.
But the MC is pissed, so he goes and ruins it. He makes the party remember the old reality, as they realise they're not meant to have living parents, that their friends should've tried to kill themselves, and that their legs aren't meant to work, and they go fight Maruki to go back to the old world.
Why? Because it's escapism. To quote the stupid fucking talking cat verbatim: "[...] there probably are plenty of people who'd ultimately benefit from your reality. But what about the people who want to take on the world themselves? How's it right to rob them of their opportunities?"
Well, fleabag, how's it right for you and your gang of idiots to directly retcon previously-deseased-now-living people back into being dead? How about their opportunities, huh?
The story presents a flawless version of the classic experience machine thought experiment. Flawless in the sense that it's removed all valid reasons against it. And then the game forces you, the player, to fight him as he literally cries and begs you not to stop him.
The guy is a saint. There isn't the even a hint of malice in his heart. The main seven dungeons you go through in the vanilla game are all themed after one of the seven sins. Having run out of sins, the writers decided the theme of his dungeon would be sorrow. Sorrow. The sorrow of a man whose compassion for the suffering of others is so heartfelt he dedicates his whole life to it. And then the game has you fucking punch him in the face after you've destroyed his life's work and returned the world to the living hell it's always been.
This fucking garbage fire of a story took me 120 hours to get through, and introduced Maruki as a villain about 90 hours in. The sunk cost fallacy kicked in hard, and I couldn't justify just stopping when I realised what the game was asking me to do.
I could justify going for the "bad end" though, where you accept Maruki's reality. In this ending, everyone is happy, with working legs and living parents. Everyone, MC included, seems to have fully sunk into the new reality, and forgotten about the old one. The father figure you've been staying with for the duration of the game asks you to stay instead of how the true ending has you sent back to your neglectful parents in the countryside, away from all your loved ones. Maruki shows up briefly, with the implication that he's checking in on your gang, because he cares about all of you, even if none of them recognise him anymore.
I've been playing games my whole life. I've played plenty of games with serious narratives and heavy moral dilemmas. No game has ever made me do something so morally repulsive. The way the game presents the player character's despicable actions as unquestionably correct have left me feeling sick since I finished the game last night.
Knowing that you and I live in a world in which a story like this can be made into a huge commercial production, which is then enjoyed by millions of people as unquestioning as the idiot talking cat, is genuinely heartbreaking to me. My distaste for this story goes beyond the almost sensory displeasure of poor writing. It's philosophically harmful.
I fucking hate this game.
This is a "teenagers with powers" story. Basically, the silent main character and his gang get to enter a materialised version of bad people's minds to change their heart and turn them good, and he does this eight times throughout the game. This is what the plot revolves around, in what quickly becomes a monster-of-the-month kind of format.
The quality of these cycles varies. The first one is fantastic, the villain is perfectly written for a character you're meant to hate, the way the story handles him is fairly realistic, and nearly every named character is affected by his horseshit.
The next five are far less appealing. Most of them are just a shitty abusive person in a position of power, who's related to the new cast member the game is about to introduce to your party. It gets old.
In parallel to this, the game features an honestly very impressive daily life system, where you go to school, talk to people, and do things in your free time. The main draw here is the dating sim-like approach to developing your relationships with the game's many secondary characters, who include your party members as well as a number of interesting or notable people uninvolved with the main plot.
As you hang out with these characters, you go through a number of events that progress their plot line, which also unlocks certain gameplay bonuses. Reaching the end of these plot lines and maxing out your relationship with the character also means you've ran out of side content involving them, so the peak of your emotional investment with them coincides with the point at which you basically stop seeing them outside story events which include them. Which, I should say, are near non-existent for a lot of these characters.
As for the characters themselves, bearing in mind this is likely the most subjective part of my thoughts on the game as a whole, the writing here is quite mixed as well.
As you'd expect from a story where the main characters are teenagers, where the target demographic is also teenagers, the writing for much of the cast is full of tropes and pointless conflict. I was particularly bothered by the fan-favourite himbo party member, who spends the whole game in a screaming match a talking cat, and is central to the game's many unfunny anime pervert jokes we've all seen a thousand times.
The game's presentation is really good. The music is incredible and the stylised graphics look great for a game now two generations old, and the art-style is phenomenal when things are in-engine. The problem is that for some inexplicable reason the game also includes a number of cutscenes done as typical 2D animation, which look and sound awful.
The gameplay is good. Probably the most enjoyable turn-based JRPG system in any game I've played, though in fairness I haven't played a lot of them.
The problem is with the many exceptions to the system: much of the strategy involved in the core gameplay revolves around elemental weaknesses and comboing status effects with specific damage types, but a great majority of bosses and minibosses have no weaknesses and are inexplicably immune to status effects, becoming little more than damage sponges.
The game's difficulty plays into this as well, with regular combats being too easy and many boss fights being too hard. The space-themed boss at the end of the sixth dungeon in particular almost had me drop the game, as the worst example of this.
Spoilers ahead.
Persona 5 Royal adds an extra arc to the story, right after the end of the base game. The base game ends with you and your gang going after Japanse senator Armstrong, and then, as per JRPG custom, killing God. It's not a bad end to the story, honestly.
Royal also adds a couple of important new characters, Yoshizawa and Maruki. Yoshizawa is an underclassman of the MC, who befriends him early on. Maruki is a psychologist who provides counselling for the MC's school's students after everyone gets traumatised by the first dipshit whose mind you invade.
Maruki is a sweet, gentle, dorky, handsome, and deeply well-intentioned man. He's written to be very likeable as he cares for your party and the rest of the student body. If you hang out with him, his plot line revolves around conversations between him and the MC, as he tries to advance his research into healing people's emotional wounds.
He's also the game's final final boss. After you kill God, you go to bed, and wake up the next day to a changed world where everyone's lives are better. Characters' dead loved ones are alive, the talking cat becomes a handsome guy, and the miserable asshole teacher in school is instead happy and polite. No one but the MC realises anything's changed, reality effectively got retconned.
Turns out Maruki did really well with his research. He got magic bullshit powers just like the MC and his gang, and when God died he usurped his throne and rewrote reality to make everyone happy.
There is no twist. Maruki isn't mind-controlling the populace, or making clones and killing the spares, or purging undesirables. He doesn't even use his reality controlling abilities to get back with his amnesiac ex, because she lives a happy life now and he doesn't want to ruin that. He just acquired pseudo-omnipotence and used it to make everyone better off.
But the MC is pissed, so he goes and ruins it. He makes the party remember the old reality, as they realise they're not meant to have living parents, that their friends should've tried to kill themselves, and that their legs aren't meant to work, and they go fight Maruki to go back to the old world.
Why? Because it's escapism. To quote the stupid fucking talking cat verbatim: "[...] there probably are plenty of people who'd ultimately benefit from your reality. But what about the people who want to take on the world themselves? How's it right to rob them of their opportunities?"
Well, fleabag, how's it right for you and your gang of idiots to directly retcon previously-deseased-now-living people back into being dead? How about their opportunities, huh?
The story presents a flawless version of the classic experience machine thought experiment. Flawless in the sense that it's removed all valid reasons against it. And then the game forces you, the player, to fight him as he literally cries and begs you not to stop him.
The guy is a saint. There isn't the even a hint of malice in his heart. The main seven dungeons you go through in the vanilla game are all themed after one of the seven sins. Having run out of sins, the writers decided the theme of his dungeon would be sorrow. Sorrow. The sorrow of a man whose compassion for the suffering of others is so heartfelt he dedicates his whole life to it. And then the game has you fucking punch him in the face after you've destroyed his life's work and returned the world to the living hell it's always been.
This fucking garbage fire of a story took me 120 hours to get through, and introduced Maruki as a villain about 90 hours in. The sunk cost fallacy kicked in hard, and I couldn't justify just stopping when I realised what the game was asking me to do.
I could justify going for the "bad end" though, where you accept Maruki's reality. In this ending, everyone is happy, with working legs and living parents. Everyone, MC included, seems to have fully sunk into the new reality, and forgotten about the old one. The father figure you've been staying with for the duration of the game asks you to stay instead of how the true ending has you sent back to your neglectful parents in the countryside, away from all your loved ones. Maruki shows up briefly, with the implication that he's checking in on your gang, because he cares about all of you, even if none of them recognise him anymore.
I've been playing games my whole life. I've played plenty of games with serious narratives and heavy moral dilemmas. No game has ever made me do something so morally repulsive. The way the game presents the player character's despicable actions as unquestionably correct have left me feeling sick since I finished the game last night.
Knowing that you and I live in a world in which a story like this can be made into a huge commercial production, which is then enjoyed by millions of people as unquestioning as the idiot talking cat, is genuinely heartbreaking to me. My distaste for this story goes beyond the almost sensory displeasure of poor writing. It's philosophically harmful.
I fucking hate this game.
Ufouria: The Saga 2
2024
Ufouria 2 is a genre of game that needs its own name. It's a real hollow nothing bullshit kind of game and I don't mean that derogatorily. The game has such a wonderful cast of characters and a beautifully simple aesthetic and all I want is to have a good time with that core appeal. It's what drew me into playing it in the first place. While mechanically the game is shallow, it is very modern philosophically. The different zones are randomly generated on entry which makes them fresh on revisits, which as a metroidvania, happens frequently. Upgrades are dished out at well calculated intervals. It makes me FEEL like I'm progressing. I don't need to master mechanical complexity in every game I play. Sometimes I just want to enjoy an aesthetic, exist in a world, play a role. But doubly, I dont want to be bored by the game. So while these tricks with the progression and level design may seem cheap (and they admittedly are) they serve the ultimate appeal of the game, which is it's charming aesthetic, and they provide the exact amount of satisfaction and engagement (for my monkey brain at least) necessary to make the short run time fulfilling from beginning to end. The newer Yoshi games could learn a lot from this game.
Fortnite
2017
I had played this years ago and found it to be a decent shooter with distinct kid friendly visuals and an interesting building mechanic. Not really something I was willing to invest time in but something I could understand kids flocking towards to, specially since it was free.
Recently, some friends invited me to their weekly fortnite hangout so I found myself playing it in it's modern state. I have to say: This is a nightmarishly bad game.
When you log in you are met with a netflix styled wall of low quality slop, full of the worst side games you should never play. Every genre and every succesfully percieved market idea blended into this rancid buffet that refuses to let you do anything other than constantly consume. Just a torrent of bad.
We played some of these abominations, all unpolished and vapid. Some not working. We then went on to "normal fortnite" as for my suggestion and I was met with a stange aberation from what I remembered, the building mechanics completely stripped now all that was left was a slow paced limp shooter in this now more popular mode of "normal fortnite".
We then proceeded to play two 15 minute matches of the least moment to moment interesting videogaming I've ever experienced.
Unrelated. My dog died this weekend. I had to carry her half dead body to a vet with tears in my eyes and the fleeting hope that maybe when I rushed in some sort of miracle could bring this 11 year long friend back into my dialy rythms, but today I awoke to a house with no barks, no playful furry friends and one less little member of my family.
Playing fornite for 2 hours somehow tries to rival the unpleasent almost sickly feeling I get as I write and compare these memories of this past weekend. The weekend was already bad but this, somehow, made it feel even worse.
tldr: May be the worst game I've ever played.
Recently, some friends invited me to their weekly fortnite hangout so I found myself playing it in it's modern state. I have to say: This is a nightmarishly bad game.
When you log in you are met with a netflix styled wall of low quality slop, full of the worst side games you should never play. Every genre and every succesfully percieved market idea blended into this rancid buffet that refuses to let you do anything other than constantly consume. Just a torrent of bad.
We played some of these abominations, all unpolished and vapid. Some not working. We then went on to "normal fortnite" as for my suggestion and I was met with a stange aberation from what I remembered, the building mechanics completely stripped now all that was left was a slow paced limp shooter in this now more popular mode of "normal fortnite".
We then proceeded to play two 15 minute matches of the least moment to moment interesting videogaming I've ever experienced.
Unrelated. My dog died this weekend. I had to carry her half dead body to a vet with tears in my eyes and the fleeting hope that maybe when I rushed in some sort of miracle could bring this 11 year long friend back into my dialy rythms, but today I awoke to a house with no barks, no playful furry friends and one less little member of my family.
Playing fornite for 2 hours somehow tries to rival the unpleasent almost sickly feeling I get as I write and compare these memories of this past weekend. The weekend was already bad but this, somehow, made it feel even worse.
tldr: May be the worst game I've ever played.
Palworld
2024
Are we so gullible? Do we as an audience not demand anything from our art? There's no story, no new mechanics, no real characters, no interesting or enjoyable visuals, no compelling gameplay, no original ideas at all in fact. Is a faceless strawman to antagonise really enough to get millions of people to play an Unreal Engine asset flip made as artlessly as possible? Is no one else actively disturbed by how blatantly and gracelessly this rips mechanics from every popular game of the last 2 decades, without integrating any of them together whatsoever? Has art ever felt this cynical before?
Feel free to discount my opinion. I am a 'salty Pokemon fanboy' after all, and I only gave this game an hour or so of my not particularly highly valued time. I personally just prefer the art I engage with to care for the art form it sits within, even a little bit. Palworld hates video games. It sees nothing more within them than a collection of things to do and hopes that by shovelling a flaccid farcical version of as many of them as possible into your mouth it will somehow constitute a 'video game' when all is said and done. It doesn't. I'm deeply saddened that so many gamers think so lowly of our art form that they genuinely think this is acceptable.
Feel free to discount my opinion. I am a 'salty Pokemon fanboy' after all, and I only gave this game an hour or so of my not particularly highly valued time. I personally just prefer the art I engage with to care for the art form it sits within, even a little bit. Palworld hates video games. It sees nothing more within them than a collection of things to do and hopes that by shovelling a flaccid farcical version of as many of them as possible into your mouth it will somehow constitute a 'video game' when all is said and done. It doesn't. I'm deeply saddened that so many gamers think so lowly of our art form that they genuinely think this is acceptable.
Clone Hero
2022
This game is fucking great for when my Guitar Hero obsession hits once every 3 years
Satisfied with being a linear improvement to one of the most unique games of the past decade, which is sad. It's prequel felt like a brave leap forward into greatness, something that can't be replicated knowingly.
A mechanical improvement from Breath of the Wild, no matter how small, is still an excellent game. However, this is a reminder that game design history isn't a linear set of improvements and that even if future titles improve and iterate on older works something is always left behind.
A mechanical improvement from Breath of the Wild, no matter how small, is still an excellent game. However, this is a reminder that game design history isn't a linear set of improvements and that even if future titles improve and iterate on older works something is always left behind.