Firstly I'm openly reflecting upon this game so that people know that if you care about LGBT aubiographical trauma games (ie. No One Can Ever Know, Madotsuki's Closet, etc.) this is a very significant one to get to. My guess is that if you follow LGBT people, including me, youre going to see this on a lot of 'end of year' lists.

Now one thing I want to point out that is interesting is that due to how emotionally affecting this is, most people have gone on to speak about how it made them cry or reflect their own experiences. Even from people on here actually known for usually writing more erudite reflections. This speak to the power of its performance, but I'll be the one to highlight how.

Once you run the game on browser it blows up to fill your whole browser windows as large as possible, regals you the controls and then allows you to walk. Then, once you move to the edge of the screen 2 things happen:

Would you like to see trigger warnings? (Yes, No)

And then the first line of self narration from Ann: "The problem with talking about this is: I don't know how people will react"

One of the narrative vulnerabilities that segments this from other games of this type is that it will absolutely ask you as a player to think about your intentions in play. Pretty immediately, Ann covers both the fact that sex-work is often lionized and that this is fine by trans people as a narrative of independency. And also that, not simply just the 'text' but the main autobiographical narrator does NOT want this game to be used as a weapon to scold sex workers. What makes this great is that she effectively pulls this off without resorting to second person phrasing saying 'you might think' etc.

Ann is deeply unjudgemental in a general sense but also correctly figures out through her own internalizations that she doesn't really know yet who is reading that, that who could be anybody.

Ann as a character is very timid, flat, and introspective allowing for her lines to travel to the player directly and without flourish. Lines flow out of Ann completely naturalistically like "I couldn't really hear anything" rather than trying to describe it in some detail or another. This enhances the fact that its utilizing the smaller text box design of game boy games. Comprehension and clarity never become an issue during play.

The story is about how Sugaring made Ann less connected to her sense of self-worth and identity as a woman, which may explain why her avatar is a ghost rather than any attempt at depicting herself as a trans woman who just came out recently. It works as another fracture to remind the player that this is just a representation of the events reinterpreted by an older developer who views it as trauma.

Even outside of that the visual design and compositions are absolutely masterful. For example you end up seeing her crush sally from every angle in 2D space during close up scenes, when you move from walking to full on portraits. All of them are gorgeous but here's 2 examples from early on. Even for people who may not personally get much from the story itself, the mastery of the art design is to die for, especially if you're a fan of Game Boy Color games.

I'll join everyone else quickly on the more personal reflection here I admit this part is a bit TMI so skip it if you don't care:

I have always personally had a unstable relationship with the prospect of sex work, due to my own economic conditions and general dysphoria I haven't even felt close enough to the state I want to be in in order to really consider it. Hell the best camera I have for online sex work is a web camera that had its hinge broken off because a friend smacked a fly. So I have actually engaged in and desired the idea of sex work as somewhat of a liberatory function, mostly for online because I always saw irl stuff as both much more seedy and much more anxiety inducing. The matter of fact is I'm a bit of an agoraphobe in general because I can't control how im seen, not just a fear of transphobia but a functionally Weirder fear that I might be only beautiful from a specific angle and the fact I dont have a camera that shows people that angle makes me miserable. As such I tend to also imbue sex work with this mystic sensibility that anybody doing that probably feels visually just perfect, a 2nd order jealousy and dysphoria justified. To a large degree I think this is probably just my own brainrot due to dysphoria, but the reason I'm giving so much depth on this set of cognitive interactions and desires is that while Ann is not critical against embellishing sex work outright, she does show that its not all fun and games for Sally and that Sally feels sort of like she needs to put up a 'sociopathic' identity in order to detach. Even if you are stunning and beautiful, and even if you can utilize it to get independence through others. The fact of the matter is a large part of the game is about being desired yet trying not to let yourself 'know' the other person too much.

On a larger point this is not the only occupational ability given this degree of fixation as a liberation tool in Transfemme spaces. The Blackpaper by Nyx Land is a now slightly dated manifesto that makes a dramatic argument that Transwomen and coding are intertwined, using a quite conspiratorial logic via connecting the word UNIX to biblical references. Seeing this as a 'high IQ' form of liberation, a lot of trans women also imbue coding with this sort of liberatory function, and I feel I should stress that it's actually mostly harmless. While the Blackpaper is weird it imbues a lot of transwomen with a faith and narrative to move on. The reality is just that just as Ann shows an inability to endure to the standards of her field the other reality is that even though its a coping mechanism, we shouldn't actually expect queer people to individually 'be' good at something. For one, it takes a lot of time to get to where you want to be anyway, being a good coder or a good sex worker is not that much different a skill than, say, being good at makeup. In the same way its not ok to push transwomen to be better at makeup or tell them they haven't tried hard enough so to does it reflect here. On top of that for non-transfemme people the sentiments we are good at Hoi4, Fighting Games, Coding, Game Development, are all culturally accurate on a large level but still stereotypes. I'm not good at any of this stuff and a result can mean that people often ignore what I am good at or want to be good at. There are a lot of people out there that fail to meet any of these abilities and are seen as unexceptional, the irony is that Ann or more to the fact the author, Taylor, is 'good at Game Design' (or maybe more art design) but that's not core to the narrative at all. She just wants to exist and this happened a decade ago. So when trans people (of any gender) tell you they just want to exist in peace this is more what we mean! We shouldn't have to find a skill that makes us separated from transphobia, wherein the leisure time to improve in these lionized skills is usually dramatically truncated in comparison to a cis person anyway. The desire to 'overcome' is inherent in anybody looking to escape the chains of capitalist exploitation but we are creatures first, not workers. And as such the narrative of overcoming implies by its own design that others didn't overcome, and until we listen to what they are saying and help them, things aren't going to get better.

Anyway, I straight up don't trust anybody who gave this a 1 out of 10, and I'm summarily blocking all those fuckers in advance. A natural memoir about transphobia and trauma and you give it a 1? Get the fuck out of here with that. A 3-5/10 I can understand, but a 1 is just showing transphobic ass in a way that's 'subtle' enough not to get reported. If you're reading this and you did that, fuck you, I don't want anything to do with you. Scumfuck bastard.

Edit: Franz mentioned to me that these people have a history of doing this. I knew I was onto something. Keep an eye out on these dudes..

Great game play and and absolutely gorgeous world. However, it suffers from being too big and too repetitive. Each new area feels like a slog after a while as it gives you the same things to do over and over again. Also, the quest design is poor even for an Assassin's Creed game. I can't list the number of times you come across an event or quest and the only direction they give you is "Oh, he went that way" and the NPC doesn't do anything to indicate any direction whatsoever.

This game had an amazing concept that became bogged down in the mire that is Ubisoft's lust for GaaS money.

I choose to believe that Swery's intentions were good with this game, and I'm glad it seems to have genuinely helped some people, but I'm so tired of trans stories being portrayed just through the struggles of dysphoria rather than through the growing confidence and happiness that transitioning can lead to, through the pain wrought upon trans people by society rather than through found family and the comfort of finding others who understand you. The overwhelmingly vast majority of the game's runtime is spent deep in a mire of sadness (that read to me as almost comically over-the-top edgy at its worst points), and for a story that claimed to be about regeneration I wish there was more joy to be found here.

It also honestly just feels egregious to me that the primary gameplay mechanic of a story about a trans woman revolves around solving puzzles by choosing to amputate, immolate or just generally tear your body to pieces. This is problematic both because of how eerily reminiscent it feels of various TERF talking points (how they refer to gender-affirming surgeries as "mutilation"), and also because I don't want to be forced to hear our trans protagonist's leg bones crunch apart for the fiftieth time in the game. Trans people shouldn't be forced through the level of extreme pain this game asks of its protagonist just to be allowed to opportunity to finally heal, grow and be happy.

reasons this is the best zelda game:
- stamp collecting side-quest where you get to do the stamping yourself
- absolutely KILLER soundtrack
- when you go on your little train the soundtrack syncs to the rhythm of your engine
- rabbits :)
- zelda is one of the best companion characters the series has ever had. i love having her by my side
- you can make your train go choo-choo, an experience no other zelda game offers
- the final battle slaps
- i first played it when i was 9

Omega Force has never made a Musou with grittiness of the first Drakengard game, but this is the closest they’ve ever come atmospherically even if it still doesn’t come anywhere near the taboo subject matter that Drakengard is known for, and that’s saying something when they’ve also made a Berserk game. Plenty of storylines have a dull melancholy to them, far earthier than the more theatrical, romanticized presentation of tragedy in Samurai Warriors 4. This makes the first Samurai Warriors so fascinating in hindsight, when the series hadn’t found the voice it currently has but the one it has before is in some ways, even more interesting.

The roster is small and carefully selected, where every character is a solo agent and doesn’t walk the same path as anybody else (except for Kunoichi, who was created to be Yukimura Sanada’s cheerleader… I don’t like how she was handled in this installment). It breaks from the kingdom-divided Dynasty Warriors roster and results in this isolating feeling; despite having several allies in each battle, nobody is guaranteed to follow them in their ambitions. As much as I dislike the castle stages gameplay-wise for breaking away from the large, active battlefields that are a huge part of Musou’s appeal, they do work thematically to enhance that dark, lonely experience in the dim corridors.

Two of my favorite characters in this installment are Noh and Oichi, Nobunaga Oda’s wife and sister respectively. Noh has a twisted attraction to Oda, clearly loving him very much in a sensual way but also feeling possessive to the point that she wants to be the one to kill him. So, when Mitsuhide Akechi rebels against Oda in Honnoji, Noh is forced to choose between her bloodlust in getting the first drop on Oda, or her sexual lust and believing there’s still a way out for both of them. Noh has been one of my favorite SW characters for a while, but I was pleasantly surprised by this darker, more sadistic version of her that still felt human. Oichi is portrayed as a teenage girl who fights with a kendama, which sounds like it would be at odds with how I describe the tone, but a lot of her story is forcing her to acknowledge the harshness of war, with one of my favorite stages being Oichi’s Battle of Anegawa: her brother Oda and her husband Nagamasa Azai are now at war, as she wanders the battlefield alone trying to find a way to stop the fighting as everyone tells her to grow up, potentially culminating in a showdown with Noh. Female characters in Dynasty/Samurai Warriors are so interesting because there usually isn’t as much recorded about them, and Noh/Oichi’s depiction in this game show how to creatively give them their own arcs and inner conflicts while meaningfully acknowledging their relationships with historically famous men.

I doubt anybody who isn’t as sucked into Musou as I am is really going to care for these nuances in presentation, it’s still a PS2-era Musou game with all the faults that usually entails, but the more you’ve played, the more you can appreciate that Omega Force came out the gate swinging boldly with a different artistic vision for what would become the sister series to Dynasty Warriors.

"Loosely based on the Arabian folktales of One Thousand and One Nights"?

(pushes glasses up his nose)

Um excuse me, it's actually loosely based on the ancient Persian epic poem The Shahnameh