Sweet VR rhythm game that's clearly inspired by the likes of Beat Saber, but the form of physical activity it asks you to participate in I found to be pretty remarkable.

While Beat Saber, from what I played, mostly involves palm and hand movement with occasional obstacles dodging, in Pistol Whip you have to constantly juggle aiming, shooting, reloading, bullets dodging, obstacles dodging and melee attacks (titular pistol whipping) which makes it the most sweaty and intensive acyclical aerobic game I played in VR. I also appreciate that the game doesn't neccesarily force you abide to the rhythm, but awards more points to shots aligning. This approach smoothes out difficulty and learning curve (as the game is quite intensive as it is) and prepares you for high score runs once you come to sport the base activity and ready to incorporate the rhythm in your gameplay.

It's only really held back by a short track list and pretty low variety of EDM genres represented, but devs has shown the willingness to add more content with updates.

Overall? Heck of a good time, and you come a bit healthier from it.

"Destroy the darkness of delusion with the brightness of wisdom. The world is truly dangerous and unstable, without any durability. My present attainment of Nirvana is like being rid of a malignant sickness. The body is a false name, drowning in the great ocean of birth, sickness, old age and death. How can one who is wise not be happy when he gets rid of it?" - Gautama Buddha

Rain World is not a game about living. It's not a game about dying. It's about samsara.

Why do so many yearn for annihilation, for silence? Why are we caught between quiet and din? What are we tied to? How do we remember the past? How permanent is history? What is it made out of? Is it in objects? Is it in something spiritual? Is it in technology? What are the driving forces of technology? Can technology be spiritual? Why do we make machines? Why do we make them look like us? Why do we make them look so different from us? What do they do when we are gone? How different is technology and nature? What is nature in the first place? Is nature cruel? Is nature kind? What does it mean to be cruel, to be kind? Is there such a thing as morality in an ecosystem? What is nature made out of? What is an animal? What is the life of an animal? What is the life of two animals? What is the life of a thousand animals? What is life at all? What does it mean, really, to be living? Why is it so painful? Why do we go on? What do we need? What do we want?

"Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still. All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." - Worstward Ho, Samuel Beckett

I am not, nor have I ever been, a spiritual person. I don't think I ever will be. But Rain World helps me understand why people become Buddhists. This game was a spiritual experience for me. I mean that. I hate it, I love it, I am endlessly fascinated by it. It is an utterly singular game. I don't think there has ever been or ever will be another game quite like Rain World.

One of the best games ever made. Beautiful, fascinating, haunting, terrifying. But it's hard to recommend. It's one of the hardest and most grueling games I've ever played. It's profoundly frustrating. But it's a masterpiece. Even without my unique connection to it, it is full of incredible ideas, beautiful art, and shocking design. It's a vast ecosystem full of wonder and terror. It's stunningly beautiful on almost every level. I feel it on a visceral level. It's constantly on my mind. I cannot escape it; it's inside me. It's one of the best games ever made.

what exactly is "friction"? the backloggd community frequently evokes this term to describe a wide array of moments and mechanics, yet without any sort of ontological basis to unify disparate uses of the term. I don't seek to define any axioms regarding the term, but I would like to take the opportunity of my completion of freedom unite's arduous village questline to ruminate on the uses of friction as an intentional and unintentional design technique. let's first establish friction at a high level:

Friction consists of gameplay elements that oppose player progression or elongate time spent on it.

this is a nice open-ended definition that gives us plenty of room to explore. possibly the most basic example of this is movement: the physical limitation of your avatar being unable to exist at all coordinates at once or being able to instantly teleport to any coordinate is within itself an act of friction. this spans a wide range of mechanics; consider tetris, where at high speeds the frame count behind a single lateral movement of the falling piece becomes a limitation against being able to place a given piece at the desired location before the piece lands, or games with areas that change the kinematics of a player's movement to become slower or faster than their base speed. for a walking simulator, the act of movement is the primary element separating their narratives and environments from less frictional genres such as interactive fiction and visual novels. of course, this above classification isn't necessarily useful for discussion given how wide-ranging it is, so I'll present a taxonomy to cover the most common types.

Immersive friction consists of frictional gameplay elements that seek to heighten the sense of existence in the game's environment.

a good example of the above would be plant growth mechanics, where seed items are planted and then can be harvested after a given amount of in-game time. while this poses a time restraint on the player in terms of obtaining the items, few would object to such a feature given that it simulates crop cultivation in reality. unless the player has no exposure to agriculture, they will be able to make a connection from reality to the in-game environment and integrate the mechanic into their understanding of how the world operates. this doesn't necessarily have to consist of elements that correspond to our reality, as I would suggest it also encompasses elements that exist to introduce the player to the particular quirks or "unrealistic" elements of the in-game world.

Oppositional friction consists of frictional gameplay elements that seek to heighten difficulty.

this design methodology is the reason that many of us find many 8-bit games unbearable; games that lean on oppositional friction too heavily can suffer from serious artificial difficulty. otherwise this is pretty bread-and-butter design fundamentals in order to present a proper challenge to players. damage balancing, enemy counts, time limits, and cooldown timers (among others) all fall under this umbrella, and often these values are the first to be tweaked in post-game updates in order to dial in the exact amount of challenge players need.

Unintentional friction consists of frictional gameplay elements resulting from oversights in the development process.

bugs, glitches, and their ilk all fall into this category. the shining example of this in my head is the sonic adventure duology: both of these games would likely be far better tolerated by the gaming community at large (who already are relatively forgiving of these games' failings) if they simply weren't riddled with countless collision issues, screwy camera sections, and physics goofs. of course, it's not always easy to tell whether a given mechanic falls into this category or one of the others given that specific design intentions are not always known. it's also certainly true that "unintentional smoothness" or something similar exists in many games, where development oversights actively reduce friction in other areas.

every game has frictional elements that fall into each of these categories, and identifying them within freedom unite (which I'll hereby refer to as mhfu) is easy. monster hunter games have retained a loyal fanbase that appreciates the dense internal logic of the series's world, all of which relies on immersive friction. weapons become dull with repeated use and must be frequently sharpened, materials must be gathered by hand or farmed over time, certain monster materials come from breaking or severing specific parts of the monster, and powerful items must be combined by hand. while understanding the intricacies will never come easily to a new player, the games do provide ample resources to those willing to learn, and the difficulty is balanced in such a way that new players won't have to leverage every mechanic in order to succeed during the early hours of the game.

mhfu is not a truly standalone product, as it is not only the culimination of the first two generations of monster hunter and an expansion of monster hunter freedom 2, but it is also at some level a retooled port of the ps2 title monster hunter 2 dos (or mh2). that game pushes the envelope on immersion past the first generation of entries by heavily expanding the single-player village scenario and introducing a cycle of seasons that solidified the game's setting. day and night alternate and change the map layouts, huntable monsters vary based on time of year, and the overall progression befits that of a living area that grew with the player day by day. players need to plan for seasons in advance; for example, beehives with vital honey deposits dry up in the cold seasons, forcing players to either stockpile in advance or lie low until the season passes over. every material carved or received post-hunt must fit in your limited pouch, and items in your box only stack to the point that they would in your regular inventory. all of this was carefully considered by the developers in order to create an enticing hunter/gatherer simulation that pushed difficult decision-making and world knowledge onto the player (for more information I highly recommend this rather lengthy retrospective of the game).

mhfu rolls back many of these changes in favor of streamlining the hunting experience. virtually all the mechanics I've listed above are absent: there is no seasonal system, day/night features are now simply part of the quest instead of cycling, item box space is nigh unlimited, and quest rewards teleport directly to your box. I want to stress that changing these isn't inherently a problem (something that the above video struggles to articulate). the monhun portable devs had decided to center the boss fight aspect of the series rather than the survival mechanics, and given the boost that mhfu gave the franchise, it seems like they successfully identified what enticed most players to begin with.

however, this absence of immersive friction seriously wounds the believability of the world. mhfu lacks the undergirding framework that made mh2 so interesting as a simulation of hunter-gathering lifestyle, and without that structure the cracks in the foundation begin to show. monsters here are endless scores of polygonal marionettes to be plopped into one of the many areas on a whim. they frequently walk in place, awkwardly jitter between moves, and refuse to interact with other monsters in their vicinity. stripped of the ecological backgrounds underpinning their mh2 appearances, these monsters can do nothing except serve as punching bags for the player to idly and repeatedly kill. later games would substitute back in more immersive elements that make these fights feel more dynamic and alive: the exhaustion system in the third generation slows down the monster and makes them feel as if they are legitimately expending energy battling you, and the fourth generation adds a significant amount of environmental interaction with the focus on verticality. mhfu sits at an awkward crossroads where it streamlines the mechanics to the point of killing some of the charm while simultaneously not possessing any innovations that make up for the lack of immersion.

simultaneously as the immersive friction is dialed back, the oppositional friction stings ever greater. the hitboxes are one of the most infamous examples from this entry (and prior ones); virtually every monster has an attack with a disjointed hitbox or a frame one activation that seriously strains depth perception and reaction time, especially for players new to the game. with the artifice of progression already so apparent here, these questionable design decisions scan more as cruel tricks to increase playtime and encourage reliance on multiplayer. the game seems as if it were self-aware, less truly a hunting game and more a endless boss rush that relies on compulsion to drive playtime. in response, the player begins to push back, bending the game even further away from a microcosm of elevated reality. why not just spam flash bombs if every monster can be repeatedly blinded by them? why bother exploring all the different quests when I can just look up key quests online? what's the point of fighting two monsters at once when I can wait for minutes on end in a different area waiting for them to split up? at this point the game begins to lose sight of the thrill of the hunt at all, and for every pound of pain it dishes out it receives a karmic retribution threatening its ability to convince me that its conceit has any basis to it at all.

so while its many weak points have been rectified in later entries and it performed incredibly well when released, from a design perspective I see mhfu as a cautionary tale in many ways. friction is not just a blunt weapon but a nuanced tool that requires care to truly apply properly. to that end: simply removing elements of friction from a game does not necessarily have a net positive effect on a game. removing key elements of immersive friction can in turn kill a player's desire to exist within the world the game creates. removing some elements of immersive friction may be for the best, but it may be equally or more pertinent to target elements of oppositional friction instead, especially if the goal is to streamline gameplay. finally, there are other ways to include immersive elements that are not necessarily frictional. including these can retain essential depth even when frictional elements are absent. I intend that none of these conclusions are dogmatic, but merely that they are my examinations of how this game feels slight compared to others in its series.

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gonna be upfront here: I didn't really finish the village quests. once I got to 9 star quests I did a quick tally of how many wyverns I had defeated and the number was probably around 60 or so, which is way under the 100 threshold you need to unlock the silverlos/goldian key quests. no way in hell I was going to needlessly grind when I already had 80+ hours and was desperately tired of this game, so I went ahead and set a goal to defeat rajang and call it quits. honest to god I was surprised I got that on the second try given how much of a pain it is... when enraged he could easily knock out 75% of my life bar if I got hit with the beam or some of his other attacks, especially since I was still using LR gravios armor (heavily upgraded of course).

nekoht's quests in general are probably the most abysmal key quest choices I've seen in the series up to now. for one: great forest is barely ever featured even though it's supposed to be the new map for the entry. it's a solid map but given that I've literally fought no one other than hypnocatrice and narga there I don't have super strong opinions on it either way. meanwhile you're pushed into a bunch of the shitty first gen maps... I read a gamefaqs thread stating that first gen desert is far superior to its dunes remake in fourth gen and I am perplexed about how anyone can hold that opinion. another place where the lack of other immersive friction fails: here is a map with two gigantic flat areas that I never get to explore organically at all and where I can be knocked into the adjacent areas off of virtually any border with no indication of where said border falls. the white monoblos fight here walled me for a bit and it was so infuriating. the basarios fight is bizarre since it takes place in old swamp and basarios literally never leaves a single area... the khezu fight is fine, even though having to run back and forth between the two separate cave areas isn't particularly fun. the double hypnocatrice refight is pointless (what a boring addition) and the rest of the 8 star rank keys are sort of here-or-there, just more hunt-a-thons.

except for yian garuga... what the fuck were they thinking. supposedly this Elegy of a Lone Wolf quest features the souped up scarred garuga variant and it hits like a truck with a cushy hp boost as well. I legitimately timed out on this fight using gunlance much to my absolute bafflement. my bit of hammer practice from mhgu recently came in handy here however, as I grinded out a nice iron hammer for HR and proceeded to crush the poor bird's skull in a truly cathartic 25 minute blast. this is truly the mhfu dichotomy: you feel like absolute shit when you do poorly and an absolute god when everything's going in your favor. just a year after starting my true monhun journey I finally felt like I accomplished one of the major elements of being a strong player, which is actually being able to switch weapons to counter a specific monster rather than leaning on a single weapon type for everything. it felt like such a natural fit too, as I was sussing out the safest quarter-turns to get fully charged standing shots on, nailing rolls through certain attacks, and watching my positioning to ensure I couldn't be caught by frame one moves at any point. that's some fucking monster hunter. same with the rajang fight; he's total bullshit but then it just clicks and suddenly I'm side-hopping through his punches and exploiting his janky beam hitbox.

that nargacuga fight is the most telling of where the series was destined to go from this game on. narga might be using tigrex's skeleton (I think anyway) but its moveset is completely its own. it moves with grace, braces itself for attacks, and features unique windups for virtually everything in its arsenal. I've fought narga dozens of times in p3rd when grinding for his endgame weapon, so I never expected this fight to be tough, but it really did put into relief how clunky many of the other monsters are. the move pool for 1st gen monsters is absolutely barren; expect to see virtually every wyvern have a tail whip, a hip check, a basic bite, and a turn-around swipe, all with virtually identical animations. some of the skeleton reuses are particularly glaring as well, like what are the differences between diablos and monoblos really? is it just that diablos jumps further from the ground when reemerging and also has more hp? it's pretty cleared why they've phased sone of these out in more recent years... it's an absolute crime that gigginox hasn't replaced khezu though, that fight is miles more interesting.

really it comes down to how much information you have going in. I already knew the controls from p3rd so I wasn't too thrown off by not having little context icons to let me know how to gather in certain spots or climb ledges. I started farming armor and power seeds from day 1 as a cash crop, and I ended up having to extensively use them not only for demondrugs/armorskins but also to consume on their own; who knew that they give +10 to a stat and stack with your drugs? in many of the other games I could coast without really preparing for each monster, but here it's an absolute necessity. flash bombs for everyone, sonic bombs for diablos, tainted meat for tigrex, etc. etc. I needed to spare no expense just to get by here. without all that prior knowledge it would've been curtains for me with this game a lot faster I think, and I would absolutely not recommend this game at all to those who haven't played any of the other pre 5th-gen games at least. I'm soloing G4 stuff in mhgu without thinking twice and then getting my ass handed to me by high rank village in this game. rough.

one day I'd love to flex my assembly knowledge and maybe make an easy-type hack for this game, which seems potentially feasible given that FUComplete exists. my ideas:
+base value of 50 defense. this is what mh3u did, and it would hopefully dull the edge on some of the truly insane attack values in this game.
+dung bombs actually scaring off monsters. this works on khezu, so it may be possible to either expand this check for all monsters or hook in the code for it into other monster AI routines, wouldn't be easy though. would really make double monster quests far more bearable
+felyne chef auto-cooking. just always give me 50/50 please, stop making me look at the wiki for the various recipes
+high rank village harvest tours. what the hell were they thinking leaving these out??

anyway back to mhgu... I'm an agnaktor x set grind away from getting to enjoy that kickass ahtal-ka fight. I'll come back to this and do multiplayer sometime, I'm sure I'll get an itch eventually and hunstermonter is still very active. maybe then I'll finish off village... which btw I already fought akantor a bunch in p3rd so it's not like I'm missing that fight completely, and I skipped HR shen gaoren because that fight is easily the most boring siege I've ever played.

another quick note: sony rules so much for making their handheld save data easy to access and move. originally started this on my dad's vita, moved the save to ppsspp, then back to vita, then to my psp, then back to ppsspp. playing this with claw on psp actually feels pretty viable but it was starting to give me some arm pain so I decided to call it quits on real hardware. it looks so gorgeous on that screen though...

One of the purest expressions of the childlike understanding of Play imaginable. Picture it: a painstakingly constructed diorama, each piece crude and small on its own, but weaving together to create little places, little stories, some sad, some thoughtful, some funny, all very very silly and creative, that in turn each weave together to a larger picture, a larger statement of the world and the vision it constructed it.

And then you come in with a wrecking ball, yelling "NEEEOORRRMMMM" and destroy it all.

Katamari Damacy captures Play how I remember it, silly, crude, anarchic, bursting with imagination and reflective of the world around me whilst having a callous disregard for permanence, consequences, and sense, with a voice from on high always on the edge of hearing, waiting to call an end to playtime.

Keita Takahashi's directorial work tends to lean more towards the idea of games as toys rather than a more modern conception of them, utilizing family-friendly graphics and very simple mechanics with de-emphasized win and lose states to make games that emphasize play for the sake of play, without drivers such as plot, mastery, or levelling up. However, Katamari Damacy raises itself above Noby Noby Boy and Wattam because of the constraints on that play it offers, the timelimits and the extra modes about avoiding or collecting specific items, are frictional elements that contextualise the experience wonderfully, like a father figure setting arbitrary tasks or constraints that push back against the barriers of a child's imagination. As much as I would prefer to just roll a big ball around sucking things up, these elements provide a sprinkle of thematic salt on an experience it would otherwise be easy to breeze through without thinking about.

And then there's the final moments of the final level, which twice now have struck me as a strangely lonely, boring experience where all you have left to do is hoover up the last few things in a vast empty space, a chore that pulls back the curtain on the artifice and pointlessness of what you've been doing. Where the diorama pieces just look pieces, when the dolls just look like dolls, when your imagination bounces right off them. When it's not Fun anymore, what is it?

There's a lot of really good pieces out there discussing this game from a variety of angles, and I agree with a lot of them, particularly those looking at the depictions of father-son relationships in the King and the Prince, but they aren't why I love Katamari Damacy.

No, I love Katamari Damacy because it makes me feel like a kid again. For good and for ill.

undeniably, there was something lost during the transition from gen 1 to 2. you can even start to see it from red/blue to yellow. designs became less abstract, instead opting to ape the designs shown in the anime. the feeling of a JRPG monster game was traded in favor of eschewing a new genre, something a cross between that and a pet simulator. it's very fascinating for me to go back and see how distinctly unpokemon red/blue was, and gen 2 is really where you start to see a lot of the themes and tone come about.

on some level, i do prefer red/blue to this game. there's a greater "pick up and play" element to it for me, there's a staggering amount of content condensed into a relatively simple experience. something about the game design of red/blue evokes a "do another playthrough" desire out of me; it could be the relative minimalism by series standards or just the fact that it feels so video game-y in a way that pokemon's largely abandoned. charmander isn't a cute little salamander, it's a monster that's meant to grow into something greater than itself. and sure, some of the NPCs in the game do remark about how cute and adorable pokemon like jigglypuff and meowth are, but there's this implied understanding that, to be a superior pokemon trainer, you should be looking at stats and moves, not at designs.

fastforward to gen 2, and you get an almost completely opposite message from the game. there's a greater emphasis on bonding with your pokemon, both in the addition of a friendship statistic and also in the form of friendship evolutions. baby pokemon are added despite serving no advantage in gameplay terms and being relatively useless. much more gimmick pokemon are added that seemingly lack real-world counterparts to add to the world, like shuckle and gligar. in large part, gen 2 is the point in the series when pokemon decided to stop being centered on imitating the real world with a JRPG lens and instead became its own, lived-in universe. pokemon have mythos and lore beyond pokedex entries now! you can breed pokemon and get powerful egg moves onto things, regardless of how sensible it may be (hello chikorita with ancientpower)! gen 2 is when we look at pokemon's world in greater detail instead of abstraction. on the one hand, i appreciate and miss the abstraction of gen 1. on the other, it's undeniable that gen 2's when the pokemon series really kicked into high gear and cultivated its iconography and gameplay systems beyond what many expected of a fad of the year series.

it's worth mentioning that this game does a lot of quality of life improvements as well as bug fixes and move effect retoolings from gen 1 that were sorely needed. i could spend what feels like days listing off everything improved, but it's staggering when you sit down and bullet-point out how much of gen 1 needed to be fixed by its sequels; moreso staggering that it was. it's very easy to go "the jump from gen 1 to gen 2 was big", but it doesn't feel quite as big until you play them both back to back. the art style alone is so different that the games feel as though they're not even related. pokemon red/blue was the blueprint, pokemon GSC was the reinvention.

the largest and probably most damning flaw of the game for me is that a large portion of the gen 2 pokemon are prohibitively difficult to obtain. some are locked away behind trade evolutions, some are only obtainable after beating the elite four, and some are just painfully rare encounters (see: dunsparce, teddiursa, and swarm pokemon like yanma + qwilfish). and literally half the gym leaders only use pokemon from gen 1. you're telling me that you introduced one new ghost type pokemon in misdreavus, and not a single fucking person in morty's gym uses it? and falkner is left by the wayside in only using pidgey and pidgeotto. sure, he's the first gym leader, but you really couldn't have at least given him something at least a little interesting like hoothoot or murkrow?

but i'm nitpicking. this game is considered a hallmark of the series, and, when you consider the context, it's easy to see why. as much fondness as you could have for digimon, you simply must admit that it lacks a pokemon GSC. it lacks a video game that dominated markets and cemented its series as a mainstay of pop culture. for what pokemon has become and what we all wish it could be, there was a time when it felt like it was truly breaking new ground, as though it were mapping uncharted territory. that was exciting. thrilling, even.

Can’t believe Dunkey really tricked nine million gamers into thinking The Last Guardian was this broken dumpster fire devoid of any fun or joy. Shaking my head. The gaming community really let me down with this one, maybe some other content creator a decade later will realize it was actually good when it’ll be +120$ on retro game store shelves.

Okay, being more rational here, I’ve always found the mixed reception of The Last Guardian to be rather puzzling. You’d think the third game from industry legend Fumito Ueda, the man behind ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, arguably two of the most influential PS2 games ever, would come out with more enthusiasm behind it after its infamously long nine-year development time, spanning a whole console generation. But quite literally the opposite happened. The game was so divisive on its release by critics and audiences it’s no surprise nobody wanted to be the guinea pig that invested their time and money into it. Many of its detractors claimed this was because Trico, the big animal companion and the main mechanic of the game, was unresponsive and unreliable too frequently, giving the player more lack of control than necessary and making playing the game more frustrating than it needed to be. Which I’ve always found that odd because I feel lack of control has always been a major theme in Ueda’s games?

In ICO, you play as a little boy trying to escape a big castle with a girl named Yorda who doesn’t speak the same language and can’t make the same jumps or climbs as you, yet is relied upon to open certain doors to progress your escape. You cannot progress without Yorda, you have to work around her limitations to solve puzzles and protect her from the occasional fight with these shadowy figures. If you go too many rooms too far away from her, you risk her getting captured which kills you. So you have to escort her a lot of the time by hand or yell for her to get her to come to you, which her AI has never really been the best to be honest? It was to the point where Team Ico moved development of the game from the PS1 to the PS2 so they can have more processing power to get her to work and it can still be a bit bumbly and finicky at times. In Shadow of the Colossus, you were this warrior who wandered into a forbidden land to make a deal with a deity to resurrect a girl named Mono from the dead by riding to and killing 16 Colossi, these impossibly towering creatures made of stone and fur. You had to climb on these things and find their weak spots to stab as you wrestle with the overwhelming forces of gravity of these massive creatures trying to shake you off, which oftentimes means you have to hang on for dear life for what seems minutes on end before you can keep climbing as you watch your stamina bar get lower and lower, creating more dread of falling off and having to get back on again. It’s not as if oppression by removing control from the player has never been in Ueda’s previous work before, and these are often aspects I’ve seen praised in these two games, myself included. However, I think these are often overlooked when talking about The Last Guardian because there’s always a sense that you have more kinds of control over your own actions in those games at the end of the day. That you are the one who can hold Yorda’s hand and take her where she needs to be most of the time, that you are the one who made the decision to climb upwards on the Colossi at the most inopportune time. Ueda’s games have always had this near-perfect balance of making the grand scenario more and more learnable while still grounding the player in the reality they’re really in.

This is why I feel The Last Guardian was a harder sell for many people. While I argue the journey itself is more tonally lighthearted than his previous work, The Last Guardian is by far Ueda’s most oppressive feeling game. The boy is not The Wanderer, he’s not even Ico, he’s just about as small and frail as Yorda and can only make the smallest of jumps, hang on the tiniest of ledges, and can push only certain objects around in terrain that scales from tower to tower in a journey that asks you to go higher and higher up the clouds. You more than ever have to rely on your partner Trico, this massive impossible mix of a cat and a bird probably the size of a small house. Only she can make you reach heights you otherwise can’t and make those impossible jumps from tower to tower. Trico is probably the most convincing animal in a video game I’ve ever played, but to some, that’s a burden they can’t deal with. Trico will get hungry so you have to look for barrels sometimes to feed her, Trico will get flustered when she attacks these strange inanimate stone guards so you have to pet her to calm her down, Trico gets scared of these glass windows with eye-shaped designs on them so you have to find a way to destroy them even if you have to do some insane parkour to get to them, Trico will sometimes just flat out ignore your yelling commands by design taking longer to do what the player may see as the simplest of jumps. While Trico is the most relied-on partner character ever in an Ueda game, the boy still has to escort and command this man-eating beast from place to place to solve puzzles or to platform around large jumps. In other words, it’s ICO again, but this time the roles are reversed.

Of course the pitch of “you move an animal around that will act like an animal” was only going to appeal to the most committed to its premise, and it being Ueda’s longest game meant more people were going to fall off of it before they got a chance to see its conclusion. But I feel that aspect also overshadowed discussion of other issues the game has to be honest. You can practically feel its nine years of ambitious development time when the game starts to barely contain its targeted 30fps threshold. The environmental flourishes and details around Ueda’s legendarily creative architecture are jaw-droppingly gorgeous, and as you get higher and higher up the clouds you see more and more of what you maneuvered around down below, but sometimes I feel this hyper fixation on its details mixed with its advanced lighting system can obfuscate puzzle information more often than it needed to, and I feel Team Ico knew this, which is why the game relies on its tip systems too much. There are not only button prompts that appear frequently on the top right of the screen to give clues on what you can interact with, but narration from the boy's perspective will appear similar to Shadow of the Colossus if the game detects the player being on a puzzle for too long. It’s kind of a shame that Ueda’s games still feature these immersion-breaking UI elements present and criticized in Shadow of the Colossus for years with no real way of turning them off, but I feel the game would’ve only been more frustrating on a first time playthrough if they weren’t there. Then there are the occasional physics engine issues that the game will stumble upon, while I found the physics complied with me more than most Havok engine games do to be honest, I did have a moment in my playthrough where when Trico jumped the boy was suddenly teleported upwards which made me fall towards my impending doom, so it’s by no means perfect even if I had a better time with it. The camera is by far my biggest issue with the game. It’s this fickle mistress that only focuses on what it wants to. Sometimes it’ll autofocus on Trico, or the ledge you need to jump on, and sometimes you have to adjust it yourself. Sometimes the camera will get stuck in tight environments with you and Trico which will reset itself with this awkward cut to black which can repeat over and over again rather than just clipping out of bounds to give the player a better view from behind similar to God Hand. The Last Guardian's technical ambitions from its AI to its environments can be seen from a distance as impressive, but its lack of gracefullness at times can also be seen as its downfall, and it’s no wonder why the game had the hardest time sticking with players the most.

It… might be my favorite Ueda game?

It might be too early to tell as I’m writing this, but it just feels right to say. This game just did it all for me. While ICO and Shadow of the Colossus are up there as some of my personal favorite games, I feel The Last Guardian is the most successful in what it sets out to do: to bond the player with its partner character. I never really particularly cared for Yorda or Mono or even Agro as much as I wish I could despite those characters being the central emotional core of the story. While I appreciate the former for its wordless communication between Yorda and Ico along their journey, I can understand the criticisms against the latter. It’s hard to place the corpse of a woman you’ve never interacted with in front of the player and expect them to care, which is why I feel players connected with Agro the horse a lot more since it’s someone you used to venture around the place even if all you did was ride on it and commanded where to go. Trico is that but taken a step further. Yes, Trico acts like a big dumb animal, but somehow managing to get her around these dark tight corridors with traps or these sky-bound vistas feels like accomplishing little miracles one at a time. The game features Ueda’s most creative puzzle design yet, asking the player to constantly think with Trico in mind, and it’s where the rooms where you are alone without Trico are the most pulse-pounding anxiety-inducing. Without that protection from Trico, you are more in danger from other threats like the stone guards or extreme heights you can’t fall on Trico as a failsafe. About halfway through I looked at Trico less like an obstacle and started to look at Trico as the guardian she really is. And you know what I think?

It’s rad as hell! And it’s fun! Seriously! Every time you get Trico to do her earth-shattering cat pounce from one stone pillar to the next it feels like this major accomplishment that the two of you managed to pull off. Every moment you have to climb around Trico when she sees an eye-shaped glass window hung by a stone tower and then get there by doing some mind-bending platforming as you look down at the stomach-churning distance between you and the ground (no seriously, jesus christ lol) and having to jump all the way down on her back is so immensely intense but pulling it off to progress just works. Every time Trico saves you from an army of mysterious stone guards is the ultimate “sick ‘em fido” of video games, yet the game always reminds you to comfort Trico after with a few pets, and maybe pull out a few spears thrown at her body. It’s this dedication the game has with these moment-to-moment connections between you and Trico as you two help each other out closer and closer to the end that makes the later moments where she starts to break design conventions all the more convincing and powerful. The Last Guardian to me is a game of little accomplishments up to the grand finale.

The Last Guardian is not a perfect game, and it’s hardly one I can see the casual player really sticking with very long. Even I had moments where I wished Trico would comply with me more and wished the game’s framerate didn’t give me a headache, but the last three hours of this game to me are borderline perfect, climaxing to Ueda’s strongest story beats yet, somehow managing to top himself with his best ending yet (a man already known for crafting the best endings ever). All the coincidental frustration I had with The Last Guardian seemed fleeting and diminutive. By the end of it, I was more frustrated at being reminded of its dismissive reputation that caused me to hold it off this long. The Last Guardian should be a testament to Team Ico’s mastery of storytelling through game design, rather than be left in the shadows of its predecessor's legacies, but even if it stays within those shadows of obscurity forever, I’m happy to have stuck with the journey through The Nest, atop Trico’s feathery back.

The Last Guardian is a game of accomplishments, and much like ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, stands just as tall as those games do, as the achievement it undoubtedly is.

I'm sure everyone has some stories of absolutely ridiculous shit they believed as a kid, or things that went over their head. One of mine is that we owned the NES version of Narc as a kid and I didn't know what heroin was so I just figured those guys in the second level were throwing little missiles that made you flash different colors for some reason. That makes no sense, but neither does anything in Mario, so why not?
I thought about this a lot while playing Earthbound for the first time in like 20 years. I'd always known it was kind of a goofy game with a lot of jokes. I even remembered some good ones. Most of them flew right over my head as a kid, though, because everything is so deadpan. Ness' dad talks about how his mom works too hard while literally never being at home. The rolling HP bar ties character incapacitation to the UI element of the HP number, rather than the actual attack. There's a guy who forces a free bike on you no matter what you say, but then you can essentially never ride it. Kids today don't get that one either, I've seen them complaining that the bike is useless online.
There was no reason to question the internal logic of a game back then, and I had not yet realized the value of not taking adults at their word. I did ask questions at times, but I mostly would accept the arbitrary rules imposed on me by the adults who ruled my life. I didn't know what value I could have outside of, say, good grades in school. Even so, the idea of a cool adventure where you save the world from an evil alien dude was a fun fantasy even for me.
So playing this as an adult, it's way funnier and I have a better tactical brain to understand how to win fights. It's breezier and more enjoyable overall, but my perspective is entirely different. I wouldn't say it's some big takedown of it's own concept. It enjoys RPGs plenty, and somebody has to save the world from the evil alien guy. The kids are out of their depth, though. It's hard to see at times because each of them gets around three sentences of dialogue, but it's there. The one time Ness himself gets any kind of attributed dialogue is in Lumina Hall, close to the end of the game, when his thoughts are written on the wall. "What's going to happen to us?" he wonders.
You unlock the secret powers of the mind. You give up your human flesh bodies with the knowledge that you might never get them back. You fight a literally incomprehensible monster: an alien who couldn't handle the gap between his childhood raised by humans and his origins as a space invader, so he essentially lobotimized himself instead of deal with it.
And then it ends. The ending seemed so cool and grand when I first played the game, but now I see how incredibly abrupt it is. It's done! You beat the boss! Poo goes right back home, Jeff stays with the father he has an incredibly strained relationship with after the most comically awkward goodbye ever written, and then you walk home. You're allowed to linger and talk to everyone again, but at some point you quit and wake up the next morning and go back to school. To the world where the adults rule you.
When I played Mother 3, it was the game in this series that I liked most because it dealt with tragedy head-on. It showed the characters being directly affected by death and loss, and there were even adult main characters! Now I've gone back around to these kids. When I was young, I envied them. As an adult I feel bad for them. Their quest let them touch the very edges of the strange, rough world of adults, and now it's over and nobody is ever going to help them reckon with it. There will at least be a lot of whatever you put in for your favorite food. Oh you wrote in ass? Well,

beyond incredible

still refreshingly playable, but also STILL ahead of its time. so much nuance baked into each facial expression and quip, an ocean of complexity buried in thousands of branching trees that you will only ever see a small portion of.

TokiMemo perfectly captures the constant worry of high school, in a constant environment of crazy-making conversations where you overthink every possible interaction in every way that it could go. you become the emergent gameplay, even when your character's words/actions betray how you actually feel.

the pain of being on a date with the girl you like and saying something to upset her is a spine-chilling dagger running through you, knowing that you COULD reload and have to relive the same few weeks to try again or you could let your initial choice lie and have to deal with the consequences. do you fulfill a promise you made earlier to your childhood friend you have a crush on who is CLEARLY emotionally struggling lately, or do you choose to spend time with the girl who loving is easy and carefree, who clearly likes you more, who is honest about her feelings toward you? you can only choose one, and the other will be upset. when the bombs start rolling in, you only have yourself to blame.

to play perfectly, you must become a pervert freak like Yoshio. to seek the Perfect Love, you must (in some small way) become a manipulator. to find the love you actually want, all you have to do is wait and consider how they want to feel, how to make them feel supported best, but also offer them new experiences that they might not have had without you.

this is only after my FIRST PLAYTHROUGH also!!!! Mio, i'm coming back for you....

(cw for a very brief mention of self-harm and depression)

It seems like a given for disaffectionate weeblings meandering through cyberspace to eventually run afoul of Vocaloid, the siren song of late-2000s otaku culture that refuses to die, and there's no clearer representative for the brand than the poster child of virtual idols, Hatsune Miku. Through over a decade of image reinvention, musical exploration, and incessant irritation, thousands of producers have used the aquamarine automaton as the mouthpiece for pieces ranging from the goofy to the grotesque, shifting and altering the image of the mascot in tune with the work they produce. In a sense, becoming attached to what is, at its most sincere form, an inanimate face for an audio production tool feels odd, strange, dare I say, cringe. Yet here I am, a terminal victim of the brain virus known as emotional bonding, reminded once again that one of the big moments in coming to terms with my identity was discovering Hatsune Miku.

Retracing my steps, the path is obvious: a teenage girl defined by her constant inconsistency, bound by little more than a modulated soundbank, singing songs of isolation, anxiety, self-loathing, intense misanthropy, undying love and occasional lesbianism. Emotionally torn asunder by a yet-unending depression spiral, yours truly could only break as she found someone who was, in no uncertain terms, just like me (for real for real). But tracking the exact point I realized a hyper-femme soundbank was something beyond a passing interest, instead being a key “being” that I find my self drawn to, something that influenced the art I consider worthwhile, something I find relatability in, is… difficult. Confusing.

… And as much as I want to just tie all of my experiences to sitting alone, listening to embarrassing vent pieces written by producers I really need to tell “it’ll be okay”, what stuck with me was always the games; late nights and early mornings spent playing Project Diva F 2nd with a former best friend, where Rolling Girl lead to me opening up to someone about my own history of self-harm; all-night sessions of Future Tone where the first time I came out as trans was backed by Envy Cat Walk, and outed myself to the dulcet tones of 2D Dream Fever. Inherently difficult times, now remembered with fondness, bitterness, regret.

I guess my experience with Vocaloid, and by association the Project Diva games, is less inherently about the gameplay or mechanics of the game (they’re kino, ludo, cracked, etc) and more the way I connect to the music, the characters, the personal recollection every song has with me. Of the 200 songs in Future Sound and Colorful Tone, the grand majority are dug into my mind, a part of my soul encapsulated into memories that refuse to fade despite my growing memory issues and fear of forgetting the past. The way I feel for the songs, the times attached to them, the irreplaceable history I have with Vocaloid and, almost directly, Hatsune Miku… it’s adoration in its clearest form. For all the regrets I have, of the person I am and the media I’m devoted to, I don’t regret how ingrained the funny computer singer woman has become in my life.

Writing this will never be as deep or as coherent as I want; as hyper-personal as I wish I could be with how Vocaloid has affected me and the course of my life, going into it will never not feel a little fake, a little disingenuous. I can only say that this game, this whole franchise, is a source of my fondest memories. It’s priceless to me, without comparison. I fucking love it.

(this ended up having little to do with the game… play Project Diva Future Tone…)

so much of it starts at the communal living room tv; ours was given to us by a roommate's estranged ex and promptly forgotten, and in some karmic retribution for never returning it we must hit the power button at least five times just to get it to finally boot. when not in the grips of hours of youtube -- we affectionally call it tooba, or scron, or other nonsense conjured in a weed-fueled haze -- there's always games splashed across the screen. sometimes it's gamepass oddities, sometimes it's whatever yawning ps4 epic I'm trudging through, but often it's a rhythm game. everyone I live with is caught up in some sort of rhythm game grind, whether it's ddr, iidx, taiko, or, of course, project diva. we all rotate through our selection, cheer each other on when someone ranks high, and discuss our strategies from song to song. without pd and how it captivated us I don't think we'd have this amazing shared hobby in the same way we do now!

back when I moved in, I had reached the end of my megamix grind and figured the new house wouldn't exactly be amenable to daily sessions. I'm already an atypical vocaloid fan: I never listened to any of the music back when it was most popular in my middle school years and I never ran in any social circles with fans of miku. I was already knee-deep in snobby rym elitism by the time I hit high school and I looked down on vocaloids as a gimmick; a fad corresponding with the rise of social media and video upload sites and not worth my time. it wasn't until I discovered the sega ties that I become interested at all, and my girlfriend's long adoration of the games from the import days on psp pushed me over the edge into full-on fandom. it hit at the perfect time after a year of reevaluating my music taste during lockdown and reinvigorating my desire for musical exploration and eclecticism, and I couldn't help but fall in love with the musical virtuosity of the numerous pseudonymous producers who shared their hobby with the world.

but I certainly didn't expect for my roommates to be as passionate, and after a few early sessions on the aforementioned living room tv I could tell it wasn't going to last. those watching would compliment my skill, but after a couple songs I could tell I was killing the vibe, and besides, you can't really hold a conversation while playing a rhythm game! so I shelved the game indefinitely and moved onto different games. yakuza was the complete opposite at the time: the cutscenes were engaging and easy to understand and the gameplay favored a leisurely pace where I could easily chat or leave in the middle of as session. project diva faded into the back of my mind.

after a couple months however, the fire was reignited. we began weekly jaunts to our local barcade to throw down on an ancient DDR Extreme cabinet; struggling to hear the backbeat over the rickety pinball machines and an unfortunately loud guitar hero 3 setup. the itch followed us home, and soon enough my roommates were inquiring about that "colorful game with the japanese girl" that I used to play. I shook off my rust and began playing again, pleased at how months of inactivity had given me a fresh perspective on the game. my roommates began dipping their toes in as well. much of this is due to project diva being one of the absolute best arcade rhythm games for controller play. many other games simply don't hit the same on a pad, whereas project diva's psp origins gave its arcade counterpart a leg up on transferring home. whereas the cabinet plays a bit like pop'n music with added holds and slides, the home ports incentivize smart left/right hand independence for complex note patterns as well as holding down buttons on one hand while playing the melody with the other. few other rhythm games can attest to such a smooth conversion to console play.

initial interest quickly ballooned into full-on fanaticism. my roommates were listening to the songs during their daily commutes and passing the controller back and forth for hours after work. they were sussing out songs I had never even heard of and introducing me to new favorites I continue to play up to now, in no small part thanks to my roommate purchasing future tone. though I have dozens of hours in pdft, I've actually never owned my own copy... I currently play my girlfriend's copy thanks to her having my ps4 as her "primary" console, and my first time getting to really sink my teeth into it was on my roommate's ps4. he quickly got me out of the comfort zone I was in and had me exploring all the songs unique to pdft's home port, and I would often come home to our subwoofer blaring and him grinding out songs on the couch. pdft encompasses nearly every song ever released for the arcade game when DLC is counted (this also includes the megamix exclusives), and moving outside the curated pdmm list reveals some interesting tidbits about the game's history. early charts from before the future tone overhaul are much rougher and often have more linear visual patterns, revealing a lack of confidence in the concept on the part of developers. higher-level songs are also subject to some blatantly confusing note spam that seems built to obfuscate the patterns rather; see saihate on extreme for instance. thankfully many of these songs received revision charts listed as "extra extreme", and some of the best charts in the game lie here. with added slides and more intuitive and interesting visual patterns, many of the older songs shine.

eventually our enthusiasm died down, and we moved on to different games. once I had a chance to do free play on the cabinet at magfest, it felt underwhelming returning to the pad and the limitations it imposes, and now that I have a iidx ps2 controller at my disposal my daily grind has shifted (as of this week I can finally do 7s!!). no matter what else we play, we'll always come back to diva once in a while just to remind ourselves of the fun we had. my roommate's girlfriend had just moved in with us when we began playing in earnest, and she herself has become truly infatuated with miku. during a difficult period in her life she took to therapeutically playing the game and embracing the nuanced mixture of joy and despair layered throughout the many tracks. their room is now adorned with miku figurines of all types, and she's gone as far as to get a mini arcade controller for the switch so she can grind between trips to our local round 1! it's a connection that I would not have imagined us having, and getting to introduce her to the older console games has been a blast too.

a few weekends ago my girlfriend informed me that pdft actually has master courses similar to iidx's kyu/dan system; I was completely shocked by this. I sat down and handily took out the 9.5* course (an unexpected full combo on envy catwalk had me feeling rather smug even given my lackluster performance on po pi po and saihate), and I gave my best shot at the 10* course too, though I'll likely never be able to clear intense voice on pad despite my best efforts. being able to even tackle these courses felt like a monument to how much effort I've put into learning these games over the last year, and a sense of finality hung over me as I worked through the courses. it gave me a second to reflect on my history with this game and how it gave me so many experiences I never would have experienced otherwise. I've never had another game connect me to the people I share space with in quite the same way, to the point where we have miku fridge magnets and stickers as decorations around our townhouse. I'm eagerly awaiting having a project diva cabinet in my city soon (within the next month... jubeat too!), but I know a few months from now I'll be drawn back into the fold on my ps4, perhaps I'll actually pick up the dlc and work on some of those harder charts I've never been able to try, maybe I'll finally get requiem for the phantasm exex since I always eat shit when I try it at the arcade, or try gothic and loneliness exex for the first time... so much still left to explore! this game truly does not stop, and soon enough I'll have to roll out the concert yet again and pump those tracks through our halls, even if just for a night.

Tunic is a much better Fez than Fez and a much worse Dark Souls than Dark Souls. The combat has its moments, but they're spread thin between frustrating fights with clashing systems and exacting technical demands. But the puzzles... oh, the puzzles are so good. I spent my first four hours of this game barely "playing" in the traditional sense, only making enough progress to get more text so I could decode its pervasive script.

I felt like a genius once I cracked it, but there was so much more to uncover. My discord full of pals and I bounced theories and ideas back and forth among ourselves, eventually uncovering a close enough approximation of all there is to uncover to leave us basking in puzzle euphoria. Everything fits together so cleanly, all part of an organic whole, with each a-ha moment shedding new light on everything you already know.

There's plenty of room to play this game how you want, but if you want my recommendation: find a few friends, hop in voice chat, and just disengage from the combat challenges by enabling no-fail mode.

In my deep dive into classic Nintendo games, there has been one particularly crucial discovery I have made: I do not care for the NES catalog. I think the reason for this is that a lot of the games (FOR ME) seem to be a cross between the more fleshed out games that Nintendo would make in the next generation and the more arcadey games that were commonplace in the 80s. I don't really like any of the more fleshed-out games as much as Nintendo's SNES catalog and I think Namco had much much stronger arcade titles personally.

This game, on the other hand, I got the hype here. The first Super Mario (which I've played most of) is good but a very bare-bones platformer. Lost Levels is basically that game but funny due to how rage-inducing it is. And then Mario 2 is just.... not good lol. Mario 3 has a lot of really sticks out for the Mario franchise as distinctly Mario and just generally more surprising/challenging (Lost Levels excluded).

They can say the first Mario game started it all, but this feels like the game that gave us the Mario we know now. Probably not my favorite 2D Mario, but one I had a great time with and one that I respect very much as an NES game I actually felt like completing.

elden ring is from software arriving to save aaa gaming from itself yet again. as they did in the seventh gen with Dark Souls (to a lesser extent Demon's Souls as well but that game never reached the same status, but it does a lot of the same stuff. the gamble of console exclusives i suppose...), from has ripped away the comforts and the pablum from gaming at its most mainstream. this time focused with laser intent on stripping as much comfort from the open world action role playing computer games in many of the same ways that dark souls did the more linear action roleplaying game two generations before it. this is only barely exaggeration and the "new fromsoft game" jitters speaking here, i sincerely believe this game saved games from themselves once again.

open world games are in general excrutiatingly boring chore simulators that don't do much to excite any part of the brain besides the part that finds filling out lists fun. office drone twitter bluecheck freaks make these sorts of games for each other now game design's rules and laws are so firmly etched into our brains. hands must be held, stories must do thing a to subvert expectation b to reveal it's actually about (reader's choice: mental health, liberal politics, """""trauma""""). this isn't to say all open world games are this way, but one needs only look at what was supposed to be spring 22's big show pony horizon forbidden west to get a decent grip on what these games are. total ubisoftification to sell guaranteed x amount of copies to please y shareholders and guarantee z biyearly sequels that are each a little bit worse than the last one. (remember when far cry was good!?)

fromsoft has very little interest in doing anything related to that. there is no checklist of things to do, you either stumble onto the sidequests naturally or consult with the vast droves of online help and collaborate with others to solve these things. i don't want to get into spoilers but i'm glad from has continued the tradition of having a "true ending" that tells the journey you're player is going on to fuck off brought about by doing the absolute most to see how putrid the world the player inhabits is.

and this world is putrid. much like boletaria, lordran, drangleic, yharnam and sengoku(?) era japan before it, the world the player is given almost carte blanche to fuck about in is one just about nose-deep into the process of dying. whatever military or political powers inhabited it have no real control, they all seem to have fought every conceivable war they could come up with and have reached comfortably blocked-off stasis. in this state, the only thing left for anybody to do is die and then come back and then die and then come back until their killer loses interest. this is, as we all know, incredibly fucking raw. elden ring's world, the lands between, doubles down as the atmosphere and dread by pulling every one of fromsoft's trick and doing something new with it or iterating on it in a meaningful way.

to (lightly) spoil an early game area, the player is tasked with entering into and then killing the deity that ruled a school that sought forbidden knowledge regarding undeath where its scholars were driven mad or used for cruel experimentation (i think, item descriptions and reading the general air of the area as war machines and and mad sorcerers dot the area only tell me so much). this isn't really anything new for fromsoft, but it all still feels really fresh. partially because it's just a fucking raw idea and partially because it's paced pretty briskly, so you're only given the killer that might've ended up as filler if it were as long as a dark souls or sekiro stage is. ending with a puzzle boss was a no-brainer, but then turning that boss into a real fight that's pretty challenging and fun hits all the right notes here. it's nothing new, but it doesn't need to be when it's this good.

these legacy dungeons are amazing, but for the most part they are used to break up the exploration for the first two acts of the game. the real meat is the near infinite amount of things to find in the game. some of it doesn't add up to much, i've found abandoned fortresses that seemed to be going somewhere only to be quick excursions clocking in at under an hour. but some of it is huge. there are few moments in games that i can think of that took me by complete surprise as the underground portion of the map. at first it just seems to be a themed dungeon, but slowly it becomes almost an entire second open world, complete with its own subareas and dungeons. games rarely feel this deep, like you can kick over the cardboard standee and find something real behind it and not just dead air. i'm going to predict this moment is pivotal to a new generation of developer's understanding of world and level design, much like so much of dark souls was for its own generation (can't believe it's been 10 years...)

combat. it's good. souls combat rocks. i wish it was faster, as always. i liked how post-dark souls 2 a big goal for fromsoft seemed to be how fast they could pace the combat and have the player keep up. bloodborne and sekiro especially are constantly riding the edge of what is possibly too fast for the player to respond to, and elden ring follows a similar path. it's much closer to dark souls iii than sekiro or bloodborne, which i think everyone was expecting but maybe not everyone wanted. thankfully the game is firing on all cylinders and starts the boss difficulty around the prior game's midpoint and ratchets it up from there pretty quickly. while nothing quite hits the dizzying heights as clashing swords with isshin or nimbly moving through orphan of kos' infantile rage, a lot of bosses are on a similar level in their own ways. the final optional boss, one the game has used in a great deal of promotional material, feels like if artorias was upgraded and tweaked without feeling as masturbatory as gael was when it attempted similar things in the das3 dlc

it's nice that skills soft cap a little differently in this one, it was fun to have a melee oriented character that could dabble a little in faith and int with the freed up skill points. not much to add here but it also makes me excited to see the pvp meta even if i didnt touch it in this one.

most of the new stuff feels as tertiary as players want it to be. i didn't touch spirit ashes until endgame but when i did i liked what i saw. the one that just gives you a clone is sick, even if it's completely fucking broken. but breaking souls games is its own fun, so no harm done. can just not use it, obviously.

its crazy that fromsoft was able to move in a direction that feels appealing to diehard souls guys while still honestly feeling the most approachable a souls game has ever been. this whole game is the work of geniuses firing on all cylinders pumping out shit to put most everything released in the mainstream to shame, and i think it's going to be a pivotal moment in the whole history of gaming much like dark souls was. it's a panacea for the doldrums this gen is offering up so far, and it shows that games by committee aren't as infallible and foolproof as they'd like to think themselves as. this is going to sell 30 million copies, the tone is set. the stagnation is gone, the hollowing undone, the humanity restored and the grace returned.