Nice game, if a bit on the uninspired and wonky side. It's aged great, though its aesthetic is a bit bland and isn't anything overtly amazing compared to other 16-bit platformers. What's here's good but could've benefitted from more variety and pizazz.

The level design and pacing can also be pretty funky, with enemy and obstacle types introduced without much breathing room and then dismissed without much fanfare. In some ways the game feels like a Mario Maker project. This style can feel rough initially, but it does have a distinct charm that sets it apart from other platformers.

Overall yeah, great game. Very glad I finally ran through this one.

Pokemon, for me, is at its best when it focuses on its conservation science and ecology theme, allowing their cast to feel like a part of their living world in ways more meaningful than random encounters materialising out of tall grass. With every mainline entry, it feels like they make the world map first and drizzle Pokemon on top like a complete afterthought, their inclusion almost never feels cognisant to the way the human inhabitants build their cities or live their lives - we're STILL fixated on collusiums. New Poke Snap takes advantage of this to charming extent and is the prettiest of the 3D games imo in part because of it. It's so nice to just passively glide by and be reminded that Pokemon can just vibe in a forest, any step away from constant tedious battles and cold hard stats is a step closer to primo.

Kind of weak as an actual photography game, though, but I've yet to find a game that has any idea how to gamify effective employments of elements of composition like the rule of thirds or whatever. You want one (1) pokemon in dead-centre of the frame, looking like an idiot, for max pointz.

Since this game is all about Looking, my most tedious complaint would probably that the human characters look fucking weird man. Bizarrely high quality clothing textures and soft plastic lighting on their faces making them look like uncanny Sylvanian Families dolls??? Cel shading is a dirty word these days I think, this weird toy rendering is all anyone does. Look, I just think Herdy Gerdy was on to something and we've been regressing ever since.

Anyway, this is fun! A little grindy, but this is a comfy game I'll be returning to for months to come.

My first exposure to Drakengard was watching a LP on youtube to catch up with the series in preparation for Nier Automata. I sat there fast forwarding the missions until the cutscenes came up, chuckling at the overacting done by the cardboard characters, and finding some brief amusement as the plot got progressively more fucked up, culminating in a "I get it" from me and moving on with my day. Turns out that, no, I didn't get it. Unless you actually sit down and go through with it, you have no idea how life draining and excrutiating this shit can get.

From the moment you first swing your sword at the endless spawning enemy soldiers in a wasteland of early ps2 environments and you feel how kinesthetically unpleasant it is to control Caim, you have at that point every reason in the world to shut off the game and never pick it up again. What follows from then on is one of the bitterest and most incisive condemnations of the videogame industry and its propensity for using violence as its main language. After spending 20 minutes boringly killing hundreds of enemies for no seemingly apparent reason, and having characters off screen constantly chastising and belitlling you in disgust, while a cacophony of classical symphony samples assault your ears, it honestly doesn't get any better.

You are then greeted by the most bizarre set of cutscenes that have the characters wallowing in self pity and agony, with a bird's eye view camera that never allows us any chance to sympathize or get comfortable with these muppets. The main character even has his ability to speak taken away, giving him no concrete way to express himself other than murder and gladly passing that torch to the player. As I finally completed the story by killing a giant possessed kid after a slog of grinding and repetitive sword slashing, I was more than happy to have my Drakengard experience over with. But 4 endings remain, the game taunts me.

Subjecting yourself to more of Drakengard, the story does indeed open up itself to reveal more. And what it reveals is even more despair and bloodshed. Searching for answers and a better resolution, what you get instead is your allies sharing the gruesome skeletons in their closets, the inescapeable truth of Caim's lust for violence, and the total annihilation of humanity in every shape or form possible. Shit, I'm playing Undertale before Undertale was even a thing.

These characters are forever trapped in this universe conceived purely for eternal war and death, it's no wonder that they are all mentally scarred and can only express themselves through senseless violence and the abuse of others, what can you expect them to do when these are the walls we devised for them? It's only fitting and brilliant then that at the end of it all the universe of Drakengard has no other way of resolving itself besides breaking through our own world to fight a ridiculously challenging final boss that in no way resembles any of the mechanics we spent the last 30 hours wrestling with, only to get annihilated by the people and machines that would have the capacity to create a game such as this one.

What's disturbing is that you eventually learn to compromise with Drakengard. You quickly figure out that you can ignore 90% of the enemies and just dash for the actual targets and you fall into a senseless stupor of boredom that allows you to disengage from the grind. And maybe that's part of its point, but I do wish it was more excrutiating and near impossible to beat. Or maybe i'm just fucked up, who knows. It's one of the best examples I have seen of consolidating a message of anti-violence with the actual act of playing, a narrative that is only fully conveyed if you are the one actually behind the controller. I just don't want to ever play it again, and if you are to get anything out of this review, is that you shouldn't either. Watch a LP.

P.S.: The true horror of Drakengard is coming to the realization that somewhere out there is someone that truly enjoys the ground combat for what it is and isn't remotely aware of the message the game. I shudder at the thought of it.

------------------------LUNA-TERRA------------------------

Soaringly, defiantly, almost certainly the best prose I've ever seen in a Visual Novel. In what is so often an insular, overwritten form that constantly fails to leverage the advantages of, y'know, visuals in order to trim their ludicrously overwritten manuscripts (feel confident in saying Umineko's much-memed length could be halved if you cut out the explanations of things we can see with our eyes and repeating the same descriptions over and over again), the density and gravitational weight of HWBM's beautifully poetic prose shines like a star about to go supernova.

Each line says something important, something meaningful, and it's central metaphors are so perfectly pitched and utilized that the clarity of the text is never in question, even deep into an in-universe e-mail about the metaphysics of generating miniature black holes in the ruins of Side 3. I know not everyone gets on with the writing here, but for me, this was so frequently beautiful and impactful that it blows most traditional novels I've read in the past few years out of the water. The incredible music doesn't exactly hurt, either.

Weighty and important yet flippant and understated. As heady and political as it is emotional and introspective. It's everything I want to be able to write like.

------------------------PLUTO------------------------

As pointedly political as the best of Gundam and as nakedly personal as the highest highs of Evangelion, Heaven Will Be Mine is remarkable in its understanding of what Mecha means, an understanding that eclipses much of the work that so visibly inspires it.

Heaven Will Be Mine is about bodies, and takes a transhumanist perspective of our own bodies to discuss both broad, heady concepts of imperialism, as well as how we ourselves characterise, well, our selves.

Who am I? Am I these hands, these eyes, this flesh, or am I less, just the thoughts that exist behind my AT Field. Is everything else is just an endless layer of shells built to protect it? Or am I more than that, the words you read now, the voice I speak and the things I create? The reviews I write, edited and carefully constructed to present a meaning I want to present, the videos I make, a series of images that tell the narrative I want to tell, all of these things are as true a Me as exists. When I take a selfie, and edit it, erasing beard shadow and smoothing out the bags under my eyes, I'm not creating an inauthentic self, I'm showing you a truer me than a simple photo could, a picture that shows you what I value, what I want you to see and what I want you to Not See.

Is Earth the ground we walk on? Or is it everything we look up to and crave, the planets we've named, the stars we've numbered and categorized the heavens that we want to be ours? Our culture is an udurgh - a thing that contains many things - expanding beyond its borders imperceptibly, imperialism of thought and metaphysics that claims all that exists as territory that belongs to it or will belong to it.

Heaven Will Be Mine gets it. At almost every turn, it understands. It knows that mechs are guns. It knows that the Gundam is the White Devil. It knows that we could have made them look like anything, but we made them look like us. And it knows that we love them anyway.

There's a lot to think about, and a lot to say when it comes to this game. But more than anything else, Heaven Will Be Mine stands as absolute proof of the necessity of diverse voices telling diverse stories. Neither Tomino nor Anno could have told this story, and asking them to is ridiculous. It's a story we have to make for ourselves, using what the things they created told us to say something new.

Eternally glad there are other queers who think about Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack as much as I do.

------------------------SATURN------------------------

at the time of writing, well. it's a bad time to be writing. the uk's systemic pervasive transphobia has reached a fever pitch, and currently both the party in government and their supposed opposition trade in barely-concealed terf ideology designed to dehumanize trans people and make us inverse. in the part of the uk's earth where I live - ireland's terra, uk's earth - there is literally no hope for trans people, as we have exactly one gender clinic in the entire country, and they aren't taking consultations. it is impossible to transition right now without obscene wealth and stability that the vast majority of trans people do not possess.

and don't even get me fucking started on the wave of nakedly evil anti-trans legislation that is hitting the USA right now. fuck me.

we live eternally reminded of how much they hate us. how much they hate what we are, and what we want to be. and the few of us that do become accepted, that let themselves fall into the gravity well of their expectations, prostrating themselves before their culture, only highlights how inhuman they think of us.

and in art, in fiction, time and time again, they tell us about the way queer people should exist, hidden in the margins, their queerness incidental rather than defining, something that just exists.

the message is clear. either we be who we are on their terms, or we aren't allowed to be here at all.

Fuck. That.

they think we're not like them? that we're something else, something inverse, inhuman?

fine. let's be "inhuman". let's be new genders and pronouns and names. let's change into new angles, new shapes. let's be loud and obnoxious and screamingly gay.

let's find out just how inverse we can be.

------------------------TRUE-END------------------------

I cannot tell you how much I love this. But I tried my best. A new all-time favourite.

Praising its atmosphere while admonishing its unrefined gameplay is the obvious route to go for a review of Demon’s Souls. Some people aren’t drawn in by its dark tone, some can’t adjust to its weighty combat, this is the sort of analytical static that will probably surround it forever. However, there is one aspect to it that completely eclipses its successors which is a little less obvious, in the brilliant way it structures itself as an open-ended game. Just as Demon’s Souls has the endless static of “atmospheric but clunky”, all three Dark Souls games carry the criticism of “great when you don’t have to constantly warp between locations” to some extent. So, how did Demon’s Souls actually manage to get it right on the first try?

The best way to point out what makes it so good is to start with the counterpoint of Dark Souls in particular. After gaining the ability to warp between bonfires, the first of the four open-ended areas you tackle will probably be a decent challenge, but after that, your character will be so kitted out that the rest will be trivial. Not only that, but the quality of these areas varies dramatically, with Lost Izalith perhaps being the nadir of the entire series. Meanwhile, Demon’s Souls doesn’t just set you loose to tackle each of its zones in a linear fashion, it encourages you to mix it up by giving each area multiple layers of incentives. The most obvious is the supplies you can farm from each area: healing grass in Boletaria, upgrade materials in Stonefang, magic spice in Latria, souls in Shrine of Storms, and lotuses in Valley of Defilement. The next layer is with the titular souls themselves, which heavily incentivize players to challenge themselves for great rewards. Magic users don’t just run to a shop and buy the best abilities, they have to brave one of the most punishing areas of the game for a basic kit, then actually defeat bosses and use their souls for the best abilities. Similarly, miracles can provide great utility, but you have to actually go defeat some bosses and use their souls to earn that advantage. The last layer is the way that each of these incentives were intelligently balanced around which players would want to come there first. Strength-based warriors would want to go to Stonefang for its upgrade materials, but most of the enemies there are highly resistant to slashing damage. Mages want to go to Latria, but it’s filled with a mix of low-level enemies to waste your spell power alongside highly powerful spellcasters who can demolish low-HP builds in one shot.

A counterargument to all of this may, counterintuitively, arise from the biggest fans of the game. If you know where everything is, you probably only need to kill three or four bosses in total before your build is online. However, this is a case where you need to put yourself back in the mindset of a blind playthrough. This game was designed for people who had never seen anything like this before, and the designers worked hard to convey the information we can take for granted in a naturalistic way. Players can be counted on to try and find the most efficient path forward, so by mixing layers of incentives with a difficulty level that forces characters outside their comfort zone, players wordlessly get sucked into exploring every corner as a real adventurer. They make decisions about which areas are worth exploring right now, which to avoid, and which bosses might give the most useful spells, relevant weapons, or simply the highest amount of souls. Players poke at the defenses, make mental notes, explore, and learn while jumping from place to place and making progress one step at a time. This is the genius at the heart of the game’s nonlinearity: in breaking into distinct areas, it constructs a cohesive adventure. I think that’s a major factor of why the hostile atmosphere is a commonly discussed topic, since it’s such a perfect fit for a game that wants you to feel threatened and to be observant for any possible advantage. Really though, it’s not just the atmosphere, it’s the mechanics, difficulty, and even its story that harmoniously build upon its open structure to create one of the best adventure experiences in gaming. Other games may have refined its ideas, but none of them quite replicate the unique feel that Demon’s Souls achieved. If you haven’t played it, please give it a try, it’s been a longstanding member of my top ten for all these reasons and more.

P.S. I haven’t played the remake or even seen much footage from it, so I can’t comment if it’s an adequate substitution. If a PS5 is all you have available, it would probably be fine, but when in doubt, I always lean towards the original.

Alongside the sudden shift to science-fantasy, Xenoblade Chronicles takes the grindy, mindless cooldown combat of MMORPGs and absorbs into it nearly every idea from the past no matter how developed. For this 80-hour trip, half of it is a fairly competent, well-crafted experience, the other half is the epitome of filler. It really checks off most boxes of what constitutes a quality JRPG (aside from the awkward writing), but beyond the premise, they fail to establish any sort of identity.

Wildly overrated, Xenoblade Chronicles encapsulates everything that went wrong with JRPGs since the PS2 era: Large empty spaces designed to show off console capabilities (that are a slog to traverse through), generic humanoid characters (their cast of FFX rejects) and an even more banal storyline littered with JRPG cliches; bombast for the sake of bombast, set after set of exaggerations that don't inspire awe but indifference and exhaustion instead.

The full commitment to a world map with the scale and scope of a WoW like MMO is what makes Xenoblade Chronicles stand out from its peers at the time of its release on the rinky dink Wii, still being impressive after all these years just how vast and expansive its environments are, as you walk around on top of two colossal titans frozen in combat, a wholly inspired setting for a fantasy tale. More so than FFXII, the ability to peruse the whole landscape ahead of you and all of its critters walking around, without being sucked into a pocket dimension for a turn based combat each time you take two steps, reinforces the thought that this is how every modern JRPG should strive to be.

It is unfortunate then that XC goes and spends a little too much time with its hand on the MMO cookie jar. As you inevitably start engaging with its side content, and you find yourself killing and collecting a list of seemingly irrelevant monsters and items, it's quickly understood that XC is not about to make an effort to make you care for these menial and meaningless tasks or the polygon people who ask you to do so. Being self aware of such shortcomings, XC even goes as far as completing most of your quests the moment you finish your grocery list, not even requiring you to deliver the goods to the NPCs who asked for them in the first place. Cause walking back would be too much of a hassle, no?

XC wants to be your mistress, making an effort to give you a pleasant, annoyance and stress free adventure without any of the hassle that plagues older entries in the genre. The consequence is that when you find yourself skipping every line of dialogue from NPCs because you can easily access their requests on a menu and have the map spell out the fetch quest's location, being invested in the world of XC and the plight of its people no longer becomes something the player is willing to put effort into. Everything is commodified in XC for the player's pleasure, from the enemies identified with their power level and items floating around in the world as blue orbs, to the ability to change time and fast travel at will or the personal moments between characters being just tokens on the map to tick off.

These problems are then exacerbated by a combat system that quickly loses it's lustre, as you realize you can brute force your way through the entire game by spamming every attack and waiting for their cooldown, turning every RPG menu system a nuisance to interact with, and a story so tropey and cliche, that if you have been playing games as long as I have, you have definitely seen numerous times before (and done better). I can definitely see how XC would inspire and impress a younger crowd if it was their first experience with the genre. But standing here now as a bitter old Gamer™, and rolling my eyes as a love triangle is solved by having the third wheel sacrificing himself, or the main character spewing out free will diatribes for the 100th time in the whole game, it's very hard to come out of Xenoblade Chronicles not feeling like I played something incredibly outdated. A game that ticks off all the checkboxes, to it's own detriment.

Dark Souls isn’t hard or unfair, you just need a whole playthrough before you have a decent character. Can’t believe all the times Seath wrecked me, how did I even manage to suck so much?

But that is not what I wanted to discuss here, there are already far too many dank memes about Dark Souls to just imitate other funny reviews joking about the learning curve of the game. What I wanted to focus on was what hooked me initially to the game and what I came to appreciate the most about the series as a whole (yeah, including Demon’s and Bloodborne): the storytelling.

It all begins with the simple fact that I am a huge fantasy fan when it comes to narrative, and Dark Souls does something that I have rarely seen in fantasy in my recent memory, especially eastern made: it does something original. We are all too accustomed to Tolkien and D&D’s pastiches to realize there is something more to fantasy than just adding alien species which still act and think like humans, sucking every sense of wonder from the experience of exploring a fantasy world. Orc, dwarves and elves are as familiar to us as dogs, cats and other house pets: sure, they are alien to us humans but we grew used to them being there and they don’t give us any sense of discovery or surprise.

Dark Souls subverts this by building a world devoid of species inspired by such mundane mythologies, or villains striving for world end or riches, and instead focuses on a far more attractive premise: the world was once empty, void, there was no life or death to speak of and the only living beings were immortal Dragons whose main occupation was to just chill around for all of the eternity. Until, that is, evolution happened, in the form of a flame which symbolizes disparity, and that disparity holds an immense power. Then came the Lords, the rising gods of this empty world, using the flame to challenge the Dragons and claim their role as sovereign of all creation. After a long, brutal war, the Gods came out victorious and built their reigns while still holding the power of the fire, nurturing it so that it shall never fade. That’s the intro of the game, and basically the only time the game will spoon-feed you with important informations. Not that anything more is needed because any major point is eventually subtlety conveyed to the player, but by talking to characters you will meet during the game and reading item descriptions (or by just simply exploring and being observant) you’ll receive much, much more: in depth details about where exactly are you, who the being surrounding you are, what are their goals and motives and what is your role in all these plays among Gods. It is a world as subtle and as mysterious as Nihei’s Blame was. The game director Miyazaki mastered the art and meaning of show-don’t-tell in this series, which in itself is amazing, but what made it so much more than it initially appears is the actual content.

What is the player’s role in all of this? The protagonist is just an unnamed, weak human, now undead, who just kind of arrives at the land of the Lords and wander around killing (or rather, being killed by) everything in sight, no much story to be told about him. Yet, while you’re slowly descending in a hell of decay and undead, crawling through ruins and slaying god-like beings, it is unavoidable to start wondering “Why is everything falling to pieces, and why a single strip of bacon such as myself is able to single-handedly stab a God until it dies?”. That is, my friend, because they are Gods no more. Playing through the game and meeting the right characters will let you realize that you are no more in the ancient era of the Gods, but millennia after, their powers are now fading and what was once luminated by the light of the fire will inevitably succumb to darkness once the fire ceases to shine. You are exploring through a lie, a deception the Gods created to protect themselves from the unavoidable. They have gone mad, once terrific beings now by comparison powerless, now scared to lose everything they created, to die and be no more as the Dragons they themselves slaughtered. Which bring us to the player role in all of this, what exactly do you have to accomplish? Basically, some sort of doom is imminent upon the world and all humans, something so jarring even Gods are unable to deal with it. Is there a way for you to salvage the situation and bring a happy ending?

No, there is not.

Because you are not the hero, you are not the knight rolling in town with a shining armour and master sword. Rather, you are the judge. Dark Souls is a trial, a trial where you are presented all the evidence of a case of mass murder, crime against humanity and hoax, with aggravations such as intentional deception, hubris, arrogance, cruelty, the list goes on. You are not slaying the Lords to correct the inequality and injustices in the world, in fact many of them you could just avoid to fight at all. You are being shown their crimes and have to bestow judgment upon them. By the ending, when you face the final boss, this is all the clearer as you think back on your journey and realize exactly what you are facing, and that’s where you have to decide based on what you’ve seen, what you’ve been fighting. Did you murder senselessly what was already dead? Did you bring castigation upon being undeserving any mercy? Or maybe you put them out of their misery? Or, as I did in many playthroughs, you left them where they are, silently condemning them but understanding why they acted that way and, in some way, respecting the gentle illusion they were trying to protect. The Gods in Dark Souls are flawed Gods, they built a world which wasn’t perfect or eternal, they believed they had the power it took to rise above ground and strike for the sun, just to burn and fall down on earth again. These are Paradise Lost’s Satan-like Gods, who are not faulty for what they attempted to do, for their pride and their ambitions, after all they are just as human as the beings they tried to corrupt.

Dark Souls is filled with the moral ambiguity this realization holds. It shows you the aftermath of a glory that once was and let you decide its worth.
I love this moral ambiguity.
Thus I love Dark Souls.

+expansive world with gorgeous, varied environment design. great sense of scale as you climb each titan
+great overall concept, the titans that the characters live on are intricately tied to the plot and feel natural to explore
+excellent character design in terms of the synergy between their abilities and which roles they can adapt to in team builds
+excellent character design otherwise too lol, very likable
+I personally have a soft spot for the voice actors entirely coming from the commonwealth... gives the games a unique identity over here
+I have not played the original, but it seems like many quality-of-life elements have been added, specifically for quest tracking
+this has been controversial but I prefer the heavy anime-influenced of this version over the ps2-level realism of the original. considering that the original engine has been reused, I think switching to a style that favors lower-poly is appropriate
+the general xeno-series mixture of organic and mechanical elements is great as usual, especially in how its integrated in the duality between bionis and mechonis

-combat is really lacking in terms of variation from battle to battle. topplelock is an interesting mechanic but when every battle is just topplelocking, it's not very interesting
-level has too much sway in the outcome of battles, where raw stats seem to be more decisive than team-building in many cases
-the first half of the story lacks much driving force, which is a ridiculous amount of time in a game that can easily last ~90 hours
-much of the story is opaque in the first half and beyond, partially contributing to the above. I didn't feel like I had a good idea of what was going on until maybe 60-70 hours in
-I don't know quite how long I spent on side content but I have a feeling it was at least 15 hours. in that time I didn't feel like I got much useful out of doing side missions or leveling up affinity for how boring it was to perform
-side quests are very bland, a lot of kill x enemy, pick up x item, save x person, etc. missions with irrelevant, flimsy justifications
-overstuffed with systems, many of which don't feel immediately useful or feel superfluous. I distinctly remember xc2 having this issue as well
-I'm reasonably sure this is running on the xc2 engine, but that engine had some graphical flaws and so does this game. you will notice that many assets are lacking or even from the wii original, and the framerate / resolution dip in heated situations, especially when in handheld mode
-considering the most interesting part of this game is the team-building and mastering each character's playstyle, it feels like much of the design doesn't really encourage experimentation outside of a couple of endgame encounters (specifically DL)

as much as I want to like this game, it frankly felt like a chore pretty quickly and never let up, even when the final twenty hours or so shed light on many of the mysteries wrapped up in the story. for the time investment involved, I'm just not sure it's worth the slog for a dozen hours of interesting twists at the end

“An American tragedy. An odyssey of debt, of grief, of broken promises, of hope. A painful, melancholic fable composed of fables and more fables, spreading out and weaving in and out of itself. A dream ebbing back and forth between memory and fantasy. A plea for you to care about something.”

...This was my original review for Kentucky Route Zero. I still think it’s a good description. But on consideration, I feel as though I need to be bold and say it: Kentucky Route Zero is not only one of my favorite games, but one of my favorite things ever made.

This is not an assessment of quality. I am not telling you what to feel. I am telling you how I feel. And Kentucky Route Zero makes me feel a way.

I specifically say “Favorite Thing”, because Kentucky Route Zero doesn’t affect me like a game. When I think about many of my favorite games, I often think of them as games. They are full of mechanics, of challenges, of systems. That’s certainly not all games are, and games can be many things, but in the capacity that they affect me, enchant me, or fascinate me, it is often within this vague category of “game”. But Kentucky Route Zero is different. To call it “my favorite game” and leave it at that misses something. It’s certainly a game, but it doesn’t make me feel the way games usually make me feel. First and foremost, Kentucky Route Zero is a story. It’s unlike most. The main body of this story is a game, but it’s also a multimedia saga. There’s something quintessential permeating my experience of Kentucky Route Zero that transcends that category.

It is a hauntological melancholy. It conjures a world more like a memory than a reality. Kentucky Route Zero tells the story of people who seem familiar but you’ve never met, with jobs that were never really secure, in situations that could never happen, in a version of Kentucky that has never existed. Magical realism constructs a vision not of reality, but of memory, of a sensate fabric that you swear could have been but never was. Americana is a mythic entity made visible, standing in front of me within Kentucky Route Zero, and it’s on its last breaths.

It’s a hopeful story. That doesn’t mean it’s happy. The world around you is a wasteland. Everyone is dying. Everyone is suffering. Everything is weighed down by debt, pulled deep down into pools of darkness. To live is to work, work, and die. But there are other ways to live. There always have been. Should we move on? I think the answer is clear. But that doesn’t make the pain go away. We have to be willing to feel both grief and hope in the same breath.

All of its blemishes are dismissable. Fleeting problems with UI, incidentally clunky writing, weird mechanical tangents, overwhelming scope, these melt away when I take a moment to remember what Kentucky Route Zero is and feel the frisson travel up and down my skin. I'm trying to not be too longwinded here, but it's hard. I can't get into specifics. So I wax poetic instead. I could write thousands of words on every minute I spent with Kentucky Route Zero and still feel like I was forgetting to say something. It is a multitudinous masterpiece, refracting and reflecting endlessly, timelessly, quietly.

Kentucky Route Zero is one of my favorite things.

This is currently my favorite game of all time, so making this review was an inevitability, but I found it hard to word myself for the longest time. This entire review will most definitely contain elements of spoilers.

I would I guess, like to preface that it isn't perfect. Much of the known Genocide Route and Pacifist Route is a rough draft in terms of narrative design, pacing is kind of thrown to the road in both of them in terms of how events are revealed, specifically the tapes in the True Lab come to mind, or how it unceremoniously saves all of the genuine good storytelling in Genocide to the latter bits.

It's also quite limiting on a gameplay front, to an extent. I think the bullet hell combat is genuinely good, and by nature of how it's designed, better than most other rpgs. Dancing between bullet patterns as they combine on top of other enemies is a core part of any decent bullet hell philosophy, and seamlessly tying that to its rpg core and narrative is something to be praised and serves far more an execution test than most rpg's knowledge test design where ultimately optimal strategy is a once and done affair for most encounters. It is still limiting however, since only about 1/3 of the encounters actually make use of patterns building atop of each other, and the game saves its strongest bullet hell tests to the Genocide run, and the hard mode is literally an intentional joke.

That being said, and god that last paragraph wasn't even too negative, I'd say UNDERTALE is absolutely brilliant. It's the finest execution of the ensuing theme of "determination" I've ever seen in a work of art, surpassing general examples like Gurren Lagann by supplying its theme at an individual character level and wrapping it around an excellent metanarrative to boot (that you don't even have to be aware of to enjoy).

UNDERTALE works off clear character ideas, humanizing its characters around the world it sets up in extremely well written ways. Alphys is my leading example, which is weird that it's people's least favorite. She's built up as a stingy incredibly annoying type, a character who is increasingly irritating to deal with. She stops you at every point, wanting attention, to be something like the shows and remnants of otaku cultures she was able to consume. She ultimately gets betrayed by her own work, and ends up pushing back her own war crimes she's committed. She's not a justified person in what she's done, but she is sympathetic to understand. Her actions are communicated exceptionally for people to understand what kind of person she is, and the arc she gets is fitting and she learns what it really means to be determined and what she actually needs to do to be loved.

This reflects on every character not just her, and on top of this, is how flawed each of these characters are as people really works back to how honest they truly feel, and they’re all fleshed out personality wise to a point where tobyfox can publish them talking about whatever topic and I could hear their fonts come off the page and imagine them emoting in real time. They're very humanized people.

I'd also like to talk about how UNDERTALE ties its metanarrative elements well. The game in short, is a living breathing game world that operates on world mechanics riffed from a general audience understanding of how rpgs work, using a morality system that is defined on a character to character level rather than strict moral good/bad. You're allowed to kill in self defense, you're encouraged to be pacifist but the game doesn't vilify you for kills, it asks you to reflect on them. The monsters' world is as much a world to them as your own world is to you. And the only basis to understand them is to take them as living people where act of murder or self defense is a last resort. Especially when you yourself have the power to save and reload, so death is never truly an end for you, so death until you SPARE them is a legitimate option that only costs you time.

Even if you don't care for the meta elements, even if the characters aren't someone you jive with, even if the gameplay isn't particularly your own thing, it still has its own comedic writing to back on, and one of the best vidya soundtracks I've had the pleasure to listen to. It's also an excellently paced journey, gameplay and narrative-wise. But I would still be surprised personally, if there wasn't a single character or emotional moment that resonated with you.

I think UNDERTALE stands above all other games I've played in my lifetime so far, and it certainly has had a huge impact on my life going forward that I can't give it any less than my 10/10.