A game so complex in thematic scope and so metered in both pacing and presentation that it can only be described as one of gaming's greatest narrative achievements.

No matter how you try to slice it, Pentiment is a lot of things in one artistic package. It's enough that I'm not even going to attempt to scratch away at it's thematic or narrative content here in any meaningful way. However, I do want to point out that Pentiment manages to accomplish a lot without many of the tools that the other greats of game writing do. Titles like Disco Elysium elevated the medium through tons of modern and post-modern technique, which is no easy feat...but it does make it immediately stylish and consumable to fanbases into art games and 'intelligent' criticism of hip topics such as capitalism. And I'd be lying if I wasn't one of those people who did (and still do) sing its praises as one of the greatest pieces of modern fiction and the crown jewel of games writing.

But what makes Pentiment so special is that it manages to meet that same herculean bar of narrative quality while shooting an incredibly straight and structured arrow. Instead of relying on many flashier stylistic tricks, it makes use of incredibly nuanced pacing, masterful repetition, and a heavy emphasis on causality over time, which all masterfully compliment the game's brilliant mechanical design.

Pentiment is a masterful work of art that allows players to truly get into the shoes of its characters and their world--an accomplishment made all the more impressive considering the historic and literal distance between the fictional Tassing and where I write this review. Unlike many games, it doesn't hyper fixate on extolling clear themes that 'define' it, and frankly, I think many players without a critical eye might view the title as not having any themes beyond something vague about "God and art."

Instead, Pentiment weaves a truly organic world with understandable characters and a compelling narrative. It allows us to get a better picture of the human condition that defined the Late Middle Ages while also letting us be skeptical of whether we truly understand anything beyond the memories, choices, and emotions we take away from the experience.

All in all, Pentiment is the spitting image of artistic nuance that I wish our industry and medium had more of. It sits alongside a very small pool of games that truly treat its players as adults without any reservations. Although I've just completed the game and have only begun to digest its thematic content, it will be staying with me for a very long time--which to me is the highest honor any work of art can achieve.

in my previous ace combat 2 review I briefly discussed control theory in the mechanical sense. every input to a system is manipulated and corrected upon to attempt to achieve a desired output, whether it's PID as mentioned in the previous post or LQR or some other more obscure variation. theoretically we can extrapolate these controllers and the actuators they drive to chains of controllers in sequence, all spitballing commands back and forth endlessly. my advisor once told me fighter jets are inherently unstable systems desperately wrangled to usability by their data synthesis routines. this "sensor fusion" complicates the matter; we control our fighter craft indirectly through another controller, obfuscating the point at which the command originates.

in a similar way, we interface with our craft through fingers gripped around the control column; a kind of cross-talk between physical device and flesh providing the controller of your mind and the controller of your plane with the illusion of direct communication. the yoke of a plane used to be directly tied to the craft's actuators, yet as time has gone on the scope of these vehicles has increased to the point where such direct leverage isn't feasible. now the control surface exposed inside the cockpit transmits signals via fly-by-wire to that central computer, which screens inputs and fuses together these signals with its own conceptions and assumptions; reinterpreting and redefining our input along the way. it provides only simulation and never true control; we always sit at its periphery, merely influencing lest our behavior yields catatrosphic results. so too does our body age, the actuators of our extremities atrophying and failing more and more to meaningfully turn our brain's desperate commands into action. organs slowing down in best cases or growing erratically in worst cases, the information and nutrients delivered in our blood finding it harder to squeeze through veins from atherosclerosis, and neurons dying, erasing our memories along with them. our consciousness begs for control the older we grow as it simultaneously loses the ability to assert its will.

where does the body end and the mind begin? at what interface in our aircraft does the body melt into the enclosure of the craft, where we begin perceiving the motions of the plane as motions of the self, inextricably linked? at what point can we transcend the limits of our being, sloughing off our skin into more powerful bodies? rena, trapped inside the prison of her body, restricted from ever tasting the kiss of sunlight, yearns for the embrace of her true self, the Night Raven. cynthia, with rationale never fully revealed to the player, seeks too to enjoin with the culmination of the human race within the electrosphere, removing the clunky interfaces of bodies to bodies in search of ethereal, unattainable connection. their stories are unquestionably entwined and offer repercussions on those around them, pulling everyone into the web of their desires. and through it all each one, whether as plain-spoken as keith or erich or idealistic as the former two, exist solely within the bounds of their aircraft. it is, after all, their only way with interfacing with world as conveyed through the game and its engine; the only place these characters can exert control and expression outside of prescribed and pre-recorded cutscenes. each interaction with these characters exists only through video streams in the electrosphere until the moment of takeoff, where finally they can interface with the world as it exists, within the bounds of these two discs.

thus it follows that abyssal dision, the christ of ouroboros, is the villain of this entry. having already unwillingly yielded himself to the pull of the electrosphere, he grapples with the truth that within the digital world the need for control dissipates. the only way to wield power remains externally in the physical dominion. thus he exerts his own will, now at one with his craft, having achieved everything rena and cynthia could ever dream of, clawing desperately for the ability to feel and live and want and fuck. and then you, nemo, the silent overseer of this, provide the antithesis to dision. the player, given the illusion of flesh within the bounds of an in-game aircraft, become the controller of life and death. the reaper. through your (admittedly binary) choices you shape the world in your image, with each path leading you to cutting off the evolutionary dead-end that is dision. once you're already committed to forgoing the physical limits of your body there simply is no going back!

control structures grow and propagate beyond the individual controller beings who make up this planet, elongating tendrils into the social structures of our kind. small communities expand into empires, into feudal fiefdoms of divinely-ordained control patterns, and eventually into mass financialization under capitalism. top-down hierarchies of CEOs and boards overseeing department leads down to individual managers and teams, whether silent and steady or as manically tempermental as the current gutting of twitter. in ac3 these expand into powers of their own - general resource and neucom - stateless, directionless entities going through the motions of imminent warfare without rhyme or reason. between them exists the UPEO, a supposedly neutral international body, financially affirming both sides while simultaneously being crushed between them, all while supporting a gormless mass of euro-asian countries barely referenced throughout the text. much like in real life, who provides the control asserted by the united nations? do our (in the US) implicitly anti-UN charter military actions somehow legitimize said institution by monopolizing violence on its behalf? this is what the mouthpieces on our side of the pond would have you believe, regardless of the tepid or non-existent objections from the first world or the aggrieved lashings of what remains of the second world. economic control through sanctions, institutional control through the UN Security Council and its prized rotating member seats, physical control through wage slavery, and mental control through the torrent of social media.

with ac3 there is the ability to choose sides, yet each wingman plaintively intones that there are no victors, and no allegiances. the compulsion of action is compulsion enough to drive one to fight for either side regardless of intrinsic motivation. even pledging fealty to ouroborous in a grasp at true revolutionary action devolves into killing one's idols. keith and fiona both serve and gain nothing, which shows complicity but at the same time a sort of tender sadness. it is an acceptance of no alternative, verbally impugning their controlling entity while being completely unable to actually affect change outside of its purview. this is unfortunate but honest to how we live; I see legions of my peers and students I've taught profess broadly leftist rhetoric and a desire to use their skills for good that end up desperately looking at chances to contribute to the public good while working for lockheed or raytheon or bloomberg or jane street or etc. etc. etc. the only "stable" alternative is to pursue a didactic profession as I have, and even then there's the perils of navigating away from amorphous sums of defense contracting research grants all while treading water as an adjunct or visiting lecturer for years. when I see erich desperately flailing in his position playing mercenary under the guise of peacekeeping, I see those I work with or used to work with, trapped in a superstructure without the perceived means to escape it.

within this framework, ac3 manages to weave actual threads of plot momentum through its missions, unlike the prior two ac entries which primarily barreled the player forward to military victory. rather than the driving top gun-style thrill of earlier games, ac3 prefers a more measured, dreary approach to its environments, scenario design, and sound. rushing through rain to exterminate another set of indecipherable targets as part of a bombing run is simply work, not a heroic endeavor. icy synth envelopes and jittery, fragmented percussion dominate the soundscape of these affairs. the tense canyon runs of prior games is transformed here into a foggy ravine where a river runs through, reflecting the entities above it not unlike the opening hour of panzer dragoon saga, which released a year before. here you trail a ghostly reconnaissance ship with rena to either a hidden laboratory shadowed by the cliffs or a dead end, both of which yield different follow-up missions (one where you earn rena's trust and assist her in locating her beloved night raven and one where you prevent a ship containing a biological weapon from colliding with towers in an industrial district). these small touches lend narrative cohesion to the experience, with ebbs and flows more suitable for a longer-form game.

unfortunately this also leads to the game's only notable problems: its repetition in mission layouts between routes and odd difficulty spikes. the first issue is inevitable given the structure, and easily ignorable if you space out each route a bit thanks to the different viewpoints you experience for each sortie and the variety of different specific objectives on each map (even if they just amount to hit X ground targets... but that's totally expected for psx ace combat). each route ending also features completely novel setpieces such as the XR-900 fleet hijacked at the end of general resource's campaign or the claustrophobic geofront invasion in the neucom ending. of these perhaps the only mission type repeated too often for its own good is the sphyrna battle, which occurs around five or six times and loses its luster quickly.

the difficulty spikes are more egregious, although there were only two main ones I personally struggled with: broken wings at the end of the UPEO route and self awareness at the end of ouroborous II. the former is simply a giant lopsided dogfight that will effectively wall the player if they don't understand the nature of the game's unique handling. the latter requires the player to assault a series of ground targets while the night raven is in pursuit. night raven often limits itself in fights (there are multiple fights against it where it will do little but evade you) but here it feels it necessary to blast you with a laser beam that has no warning beyond a small, untelegraphed sound effect. very frustrating mission that capped off my experience with the game rather poorly, but I can justify it by at least noting I was able to beat it through careful examination of its behavior (it struggles to accurately shoot when you are ascending, so moving in hill-like patterns will allow you to avoid its blasts up into high altitude and then careen back to earth faster than it can chase you as you swoop into to destroy a target).

in particular in comparison to ac2 this game requires a much more nuanced understanding of aircraft control. rolling the plane was the first difference that was apparent to me; where ac2 allows smooth and responsive rolling, ac3 includes an inertial element to the rotation that will cause more than a slight adjustment to apply significant torque, potentially overshooting your target angle. differences in aircraft are also more apparent, made particularly noticable for narrative reasons when demonstrating neucom's technological might in the high-power low-mobility remora craft in the mission power for life or when conducting a mission in the vacuum of space in, potentially the game's most well-known mission, zero gravity. planes overall turn wider, will gain much more noticable momentum when flying downward (hence the self awareness strategy), and stall more realistically, causing the engine to lose its energy transfer and create a wobbly descent rather than the abrupt free-fall in ac2. learning how to perform basic immelman turns and split Ss became imperative to remaining nimble in dogfights, and this eventually extended to true mobility in 3D space, where combinations of these "vertical" adjustments with lateral movements became bread-and-butter. ac2 never comes close to requiring this, and although the vast majority of missions in ac3 rarely approach anything more difficult than its predecessors, the late-game trials it assesses you with are satisfying.

this is on top of numerous quality of life changes and upgrades, such as enemy draw distance at nearly 8000 meters away instead of barely 3000, gorgeous cloud cover replacing flat skies, selectable weapons, and instant mission retries with no monetary penalty. of these the most notable is that updated HUD designed by mr. driller mainstay minoru sashida. ergonomically curved with tasteful sections dedicated to the radar and plane status, the altitude and speed readings are significantly more visible. the best addition of all is the orientation ring, which provides not only an immediate compass display but also an invaluable visual on how the plane is oriented: the cardinal directions rotate to reflect your perspective relative to the Z axis, and the overall ring detaches itself from surrounding the vehicle the further you alter the pitch. it's so intuitive and natural to the experience that it makes flying in the first-person mode seemingly a must.

with that it comes full circle: a further sense of realistic control enhancing the feeling of instability and obfuscated input. I have to imagine that the reason ac3 is the only ac to retain this flight model is for this reason... it directly impacts the ambiance of the game by reducing its grandiose trappings. death-defying maneuvers are the exception and not the rule. yet simultaneously it creates a sense of communion with your craft; rather than bending it to your will you must cooperate with it and its controller. from the brain to the fingers to the playstation controller to the engine to the flight modeling, each cooperating through different abstraction layers to provide the sensation of real control. not (entirely) compromised to simply entertain while still maintaining the player's sense of agency. all of this with the goal that via immersion you'll fuse in and become one. in effect, sublimation.

Posting isn't praxis, and people who have just discovered leftism need to work the notion that it is out of their system in less embarrassing ways than this.

It's way, way, way, way too many words to make the incredibly brave claim that capitalism is bad and influences the art that we make. No fucking shit. Literally any understanding of material reality would dictate that. The only way that you could believe this to be in any way a shocking, revelatory statement is if you are so simultaneously self-important and clueless that you think nobody else has caught on yet. Unfortunately for us, the developer of Tender Frog House fits neatly into both categories.

I always feel a little bad shitting on the people behind the game rather than the final piece itself, but this has earned the ire. What a complete waste of time. Why say in this many bland, empty, boring words what so many other, better pieces of art already have? Do you really, truly believe "comfy" games to be such a damnable, corrupting plague that you need to crusade against them? Are they honestly the true progenitors and perpetrators of the worst aspects of late capitalism, or are you just making broad gestures towards an easy target? Considering how Molochian the gaming space already is at corporate levels, with the constant, unresolved, evidenced accusations of sexual, mental, physical, and fiscal abuse, why make frog games the subject that needs to be tackled? I think most of what you'll see at any of those Comfy Game Showcases seem creatively bankrupt and boring, but to say that they're the agents of Mammon on par with the rest of the industry is silly. Go outside.

Anyway, the only actual proof provided for any of the claims in this game is when Sister Cow says that the only interesting thing about her is the fact that she's mentally ill, and then she immediately pulls a quote from Capitalist Realism.

It's always a strange feeling to have lived through a cultural moment and then try to look back on it with a more critical eye. I doubt many would be willing to argue the point that Hotline Miami is foundational not only for the many games that have followed in its wake, but for the industry as a whole; Devolver Digital as a company would never have gotten anywhere near as big as they did without this, and that means a lot of indie titles would have gone without a publisher. Games in 2022 would look a lot different if they were made in a world without Hotline Miami, for better and for worse.

Jonatan Söderström (aka Cactus) was far from an unknown factor by 2012, but I doubt that many in the wider gaming sphere knew who he was before he and Dennis Wedin put out Hotline Miami. Going through Cactus's back catalogue now helps to illustrate a lot of the punch and weirdness that really made Hotline Miami shine; titles such as Stallions in America and KEYBOARD DRUMSET FUCKING WEREWOLF (all caps mandatory) carry within them the chaotic threads of meaningless violence and frenetic gameplay that would shape Dennaton's debut title. Hotline Miami gives all of these present elements a bit more context and a bit more time to breathe, and that small willingness to just take a break every now and then is the denouement that I doubt anyone could have guessed these games needed to truly shine.

Hotline Miami is important, but you knew that. You've probably played it already, and you're reading through this to get some validation on a game that you loved playing ten years ago. That, or you're looking to get angry at the positive reviews because you hated it. Either way. The game has probably sold more copies than The Bible, and it's been pirated at least half as many times. It was featured as an easter egg in The Last of Us as one of the only surviving PS Vita games. It had an entire DLC tie-in campaign with PAYDAY 2. An entire publishing company exists at the scale it does now because of this one title. The game is as much of a cultural movement as it is fun, and it's really, really fun.

The movement is fast. The guns are loud. Explosions will blow your ears out both in the game and in real life. There are dozens of unique kills and death animations that you'll never manage to see all of in the span of a single playthrough. Thumping bass and twinkling synths guide you through these maze-like buildings, pushing you ever forward through a sea of pixellated gore and viscera. Even if you catch a stray bullet or take a baseball bat to the teeth, you're back up and trying again as fast as you can press the restart key. Hotline Miami guides you into a violent trance.

And then the tape rewinds, and the music stops, and you're left with nothing to take in but a dull drone and the bodies strewn about. Everything you could write about the first "GO TO CAR" moment has already been written and in more detail than you or I could hope to capture, but it's transcendent. It shoves all of your violence back in your face by making you quietly walk through it on the way to your not-DeLorean, and then you get to play pretend with your domestic little life as if you didn't finish massacring an entire building full of people an hour ago. A lot of games that have come out since have tried to pull this trick again, and none of them have ever managed to land the blow in the way that Dennaton could. It doesn't feel obvious here, and that makes the difference.

This isn't to say that Hotline Miami is subtle — Richard the Rooster may as well be looking to camera when he asks if "you like hurting other people"— but it's a game that's willing to trust that you understand the cause and effect of your own actions. Jacket is made a puppet of the phone operators, but he always has a chance to stop, or try to skip town. It's not as if he's trapped in a war zone and desperately trying to escape; he drives from his apartment every night, breaks open skulls with the nearest blunt object he can find, and then picks up a pizza or a movie on the way home. Jacket is shown not to be a complete monster, what with how he cares for Girlfriend and Beard, and (mostly) keeps his kills to Russian mobsters; this is a cold comfort when presented next to his ruthless brutality, and his willingness to shoot first and ask questions later. Innocents die in his crossfire. Jacket is not the kind of person you want to be around, and the mocking of the hero worship of him by fans in the sequel demonstrates that this was an intentional decision. It's a dumb enough game to let you have fun, and it's smart enough to challenge you on your enjoyment. The sequel also does this, but worse. The dichotomy is a lot more convincing here.

Ten years later, Hotline Miami feels as fresh as the day it released, which is something that can absolutely not be said of most of its contemporaries. The influence it's had on the industry thus far is probably going to continue rumbling long into the future, getting less and less obvious with every passing year. It deserves the attention. This right here is fucking video games.

it's really no exaggeration that Rhythm Heaven Fever is one of the best games, if not THE best game, on the Wii. not only is it one of the greatest and most accessible rhythm games of all time, but it's also really damn charming to boot. the art direction is superb and the difficulty is just right to hit that sweetspot between too difficult and too easy. even if the game is too challenging or too breezy for you, the visuals and music are bound to keep you entranced no matter what.

it's insane how much this game takes advantage of the Wii's superior output, compared to the meager handhelds its predecessors were locked to, in order to give Ko Takeuchi's art direction the visual shine it deserves. Everything about the look about this game is perfect, but everything about the
feel of the game is just as perfect, despite the control being limited to just the A and the B button. You'd be surprised how much creative freedom they're able to get away with despite you using only the two buttons to match the beat.

if you're even remotely interested in the Rhythm Heaven series I suggest you start here, I'm sure you'll be hooked instantly.

You couldn't make Sub Mission today.

The development history of this game is a weird one. This Polygon article goes into it in a lot more detail, but I'll do you the courtesy of giving a condensed version. Tom Snyder of Tom Snyder Productions (who would later go on to invent Squigglevision and put out shows like Dr. Katz and Home Movies) was a school teacher who made and programmed his own games to help out his students. One day, he decided it was time to make something for himself. He wanted a video game with real-world stakes. His first shot at chasing this thrill was to play Microsoft Flight Simulator and fire at German planes until he lost; if he got shot down three times, he would have to destroy his copy of the game.

He did, and then he did.

Tom Snyder took a pair of scissors to the floppy disc, cut it into some very expensive ribbons, and then that was that. Or it would have been, if that act of destruction hadn't sparked an idea. Surely, he couldn't have been the only one who wanted something like this. "Computer games" as a concept were evolving fast, and titles were coming out one after the other that were all pursuing something that nobody had attempted before. So, what if there was a game where the idea of permanently ruining your physical copy of it was given not just as a self-imposed challenge, but as a direct, mandatory consequence for losing?

After a lot of revisions, tweaking, and meddling from a shocked publisher who insisted on making it a little less brutal (in the worst case scenario, you could still fill out an included petition and buy a new copy for $7.00, instead of the requisite $40.00), Sub Mission: A Matter of Life and Death was unleashed on the public. Like you might expect of an Apple II game, it found an audience, but it didn't set the world on fire. The computer gaming market was a lot smaller in 1986, and the Cambrian explosion it's seen in recent years hasn't been especially kind to most games that came out before Windows 95. The fact that this review is the first time that anyone on Backloggd has ever interacted with this game in any way might help to illustrate how deep of a niche Sub Mission has fallen into with the passage of time. I don't even know where I heard about it. I found the Polygon article after I'd already decided to play it and was busy tracking down a .pdf of the manual so I could figure out how to move the submarine.

The game is very simple, despite all of the imposing, harshly-colored dials and view screens dotted all over the frame. In the middle of the game window sits a map of the bay you're floating in. Your objective is to find the Deep Mine before the AI-controlled overlord can. You do this by diving down, shooting lesser mines, and then seeing if the Deep Mine is somewhere in the blast radius. If it is, then you can patrol around for other lesser mines or drop up to five of your own to help triangulate it. When you've narrowed it down to a small patch of water, you blow your ballast vents, sink to the bottom, shoot the Deep Mine, and then win. You could probably remake the game's mechanics with a pen and a piece of grid paper. It's not bad, but it's — ironically — not very deep. It's heavy on the randomness, and mostly feels like a roll of the dice as to whether or not you'll luck into pinging the Deep Mine before the overlord can.

But the twist here is that your first game must be played with a robot on board. As the manual warns, there are two people you're in charge of rescuing named Sigourney and Peter, and they can and will both die if you fail too hard. Lose one, and you can never try to rescue them again. Lose both, and the game is bricked. Both Sigourney and Peter will chat with you while you're patrolling around in search of mines; they use a lot of proper nouns and speak vaguely about their history (Sigourney interrupted me lining up a shot to say that she once caught The Virus while in space, and then never spoke of it again), which makes it a little difficult to get attached. But they absolutely have character, and I didn't want to see them die. That would mean not only missing out on whatever weird non-sequiturs they were going to keep throwing at me, but also that my time with the game would be done and the floppy would be worthless.

It didn't take long to find out that I was bad at Sub Mission, and both Sigourney and Peter were dead.

I got greedy with my dives, running out of air and reserve power. I was impatient and followed bad leads. My brief time with the robot ended with me getting lucky in the tutorial, not me figuring the whole game out before I'd taken a human passenger. That was the end of Sub Mission. I had lost. The game was unplayable.

Unplayable-ish.

See, in 2022, getting around this is trivial. I could download a fresh copy of the game for free, pop it into my Apple II emulator, and try as many times as I wanted to. I could back my own copy up before playing. I could load save states. I could cheat. All of a sudden, the threat of being unable to play the game anymore ceases to exist. There isn't any actual danger, because there's nothing to really be lost. Just try again, as much as you need.

That's against the spirit of the game, though. I went into it intending to meet it on its own terms, and I'm not interested in subverting that. I think it'd feel cheap. I'm willing to live with the fact that I fucked up and got everyone killed in Sub Mission, because that's not a feeling I can get from pretty much any game released since.

Remember what I said in the very first sentence, about how you couldn't make it today? You couldn't, and I mean that. It would be too easy to get around on a technical level, and the audience absolutely wouldn't stand for it. Undertale's Genocide Route or Oneshot's true ending have tried to buck this problem of permanence by making edits to your system registry, but reverting those isn't hard. A game that relies on servers checking your connection to verify if it's you would be foiled by anyone with either a VPN or the know-how to punch a few /ipconfig commands into their terminal. Physical media with expiry dates like Flexplay's 48-hour self-destructing DVDs were such a massive fiscal failure that no publisher in their right mind would ever try to bring something similar back to market. Faster and faster internet connections have made mass piracy easier than ever, and the indie space (who would be the only ones still foolhardy enough to try this again) don't have the money for the DRM to block people from just downloading a new copy and trying again.

Before we get away from that part about audience complaints, I want to point at a recent example of something similar to Sub Mission. The game Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice threatens early on that dying too much will cause your save file to be permanently erased, forcing you to start from scratch. Some people thought this was interesting, and liked the feeling of paranoia that message imposed upon them; a lot of people were furious at the concept alone and vowed never to let their money touch the hands of the people responsible. Most notorious among the latter camp was John "Totalbiscuit" Bain, who did what historians would call "absolutely shitting his pants" over the matter. He came out swinging against the game, deriding it for being anti-consumer, mocking the developers, and rebuking that it was a decision made to support the game's tone with the statement that "maybe they're stupid". Of course, you should always take the opinion of just one guy with a grain of salt, but this was a very influential just one guy. The discourse surrounding Hellblade had been set, and while time has been a lot kinder to it, the initial reception was mired by a lot of people who were very angry at the prospect of losing their save files because they died too often. The thought of releasing Sub Mission today, to the same crowd, is unthinkable. Not only would you lose your save file, but you'd lose access to even having the opportunity to try again. It wouldn't happen. The only chance it would have at not being completely crucified on release would be if you put it out for free, but then we just lead right back into the point about it being technically infeasible to pull off the same gimmick, anyway.

Sub Mission is decent fun, but it's in the same way that taking a trip to the museum is fun. You're seeing a little slice of a neglected point in history, where something happened that modern conveniences could never permit to happen again today. It might not be a bad thing that we'll never get another game like Sub Mission, but the thought still makes me feel a little sad. The world has moved past it, and games like it. For the briefest, briefest period of time, the conditions were absolutely perfect to make it, and Tom Snyder delivered as best as he possibly could have. In a way, the past 36 years have been a refutation of the game's stated permanent consequences.

Nothing lasts forever.

I hate that I don't like this game. I wish I did. For the first thirty or so hours, I did. But then I finished it, and I thought about it, and I realized that I don't like Persona 5. Some things here are excellent, and some things here are atrocious, and they all blend together into something that's only ever able to peak at the heights of "okay".

The writing is my biggest problem, with the way the game handles its characters being the strongest flaw. The trauma these people face is treated as a punchline at their expense far too often. It's not an uncommon opinion that Ann gets it the worst of the lot; she's a survivor of sexual assault at the hands of a powerful teacher, and the game constantly takes time out to make her own party members leer at her and make her uncomfortable. Yusuke's "nude model" scene is talked about a lot, but it really isn't that bad, especially compared to later instances — one scene forces her and every other woman in the party into swimsuits to seduce a keycard out of some old rich lecher, and it's played as a joke until the guy grabs Ann, threatens her, and then turns into a big shadow monster who you kill and take the keycard from regardless, making the whole seduction plan pointless. Ryuji and Joker will try to stare up her skirt when she lays down on a couch, gawk at her thighs when she gets caught in the rain, and peer down her top when she's fanning herself in the desert. Ryuji may just be a dumbass who Ann can easily rebuke, but Joker is the leader of the group, and unquestionably holds power over her and the other Phantom Thieves. He doesn't treat any of the other characters this way, and he keeps doing it in cutscenes that you have no control over. Regardless of how the player treats Ann, your character won't stop creeping on her as soon as you give up control. It's weird. It's really fucking weird. Speaking of Ryuji, it's just as tasteless to have a character who was physically abused by that same teacher to the point of broken bones and ostracization be the butt of so many jokes where the punchline is him getting the shit kicked out of him. He's rewarded for both getting the track team back together in his confidant route and for saving every single member of the Phantom Thieves from a sinking ship with the exact same thing: the people he's going out of his way to protect punching him senseless until he's left in a crumpled, bruised, moaning heap on the ground. Ha ha. It's also implied in a scene that comes completely out of nowhere that he gets molested by two gay men in Shinjuku. All of this is played for laughs. It should be obvious to anyone reading this or playing the game for themselves that none of this is funny. It's fucking horrific. It's made worse that someone (or several someones) on the ATLUS writing team think that any of this is funny. I've heard that the localization team begged to be allowed to make script changes to address these issues, and were refused; whether or not this is true, the script that's here is the one that we've got, and the few changes made don't fix these core problems with the writing.

I'm still kind of confused to see all of the "I hate JRPGs!" crowd (your Dunkeys, your Yahtzee Croshaws) circle the wagons around this game and talk about how Persona 5 broke the mold. Mechanically, it's Pokemon. There's nothing wrong with Pokemon. Pokemon can be fun. But the core combat loop is "fish for the enemy's weakness, use the element that they're weak to, win the encounter". It's every single-player Pokemon game. Sometimes, if the fight goes long enough, you can cast a debuff, or maybe even a party-wide buff if you're really feeling brave. Bosses and mini-bosses are completely immune to status effects like shock or sleep, so any foe that you can't kill on the first turn of combat boils down to a DPS race where you either have enough damage and healing to outlast them, or you don't. This is in stark contrast to other entries in the Shin Megami Tensei series where bosses can have mechanically interesting gimmicks or one-off skillsets with unholy good synergies, rather than just being walls of health and damage; the closest thing you get to a boss that challenges your conception of the mechanics in Persona 5 are Okumura and his waves of robots that need to be killed within one turn of each other, which are in a fight so ridiculously easy to brute force by just having enough AOE damage that it barely even qualifies as a challenge. Futaba's later support skills make the game completely trivial, with her Ultimate Support constantly being cast to full heal, buff, and revive every member of the party. I tried to kill myself on a boss by enabling rush mode and walking away, and it still took six and a half minutes before Joker actually went down and I got kicked to the death screen. The guns — while certainly a unique addition — are borderline useless in most encounters, serving only as a middling damage dump (or as a status applier, which only works on trash enemies that are more easily killed by hitting their weak element anyway) and are utterly outclassed by Persona elemental skills. Many Personas can even deal Gun-type damage, giving you almost no reason to ever use the actual guns.

I've seen it said that this game hates women. My gut instinct thinks that's an exaggeration, but it's unquestionable that the writing handles them like shit. Every female confidant in this game leads as smoothly as a car crash into a sexual relationship, with four (!!!) of them being adults pursuing our underage protagonist. There's not a single woman in this game that you can just be friends with without needing to turn down their advances or dodge making your own, first. The men, conversely, do not have this problem, as the only gay men in this game are the sexual predators who assault Ryuji. Lala Escargot, the owner of the Crossroads bar, is the only character who is both a) not a walking punchline and b) queer. The game never actually confirms if she's a drag queen or if she's transgender, but she's at the very least gender non-conforming. That's it. Nobody else. I realize that this may come off as me pounding my fists on the table and demanding token representation, but the way that the female confidants are treated is already token. Every single woman in Joker's life desires him sexually, because this is a shounen harem game masquerading as a serious adult thriller that explores serious adult themes. It's juvenile. The game likes to talk big about rebellion and putting down the system, man, but it's remarkably intolerant of anyone whose inclusion in any mainstream anime would attract death threats for being "too woke". The writing in Persona 5 doesn't put down the system, it is the system. It should not come as a surprise that a series that's based the past three games around the trappings of Jungian psychology is this achingly stupid when it comes to how it handles social issues.

It is endlessly frustrating that ATLUS has accrued as much money and prestige as they have — Joker got into fucking Smash Bros. — and this is still the best that they can do with all of it. Outright bad writing and middling RPG mechanics that feel like they've hardly evolved since 2006. What's left? The UI and the music? Both are great, but there's not a chance they can carry a game that insists on being this long. What missed potential. It's a shame I waited this long to get a chance to play it. I wish I hadn't bothered.

10 hours of a game pass trial is a very generous offer considering you need exactly 5 minutes hands-on to realize there's just not much to experience here. A street racing game that leans heavily into hip-hop culture would be a treat but instead it immediately commits Forza Horizon 5's cardinal sin of having a person constantly talk in your ears establishing how relatable and hip they are, while the painter tag SFX gimmick is exactly that — a gimmick, and could as well be a mutator in virtually anything else.

What's left? The most cookie cutter seventh gen open world racer you've seen. Doesn't feel good ripping it a new one considering the car handling is competent enough and there are at least glints of fresh appearance, but if you're a regular on this website you definitely played this game already.

Phenomenal. Feels like a compilation of good ideas from all the best shooters of the last three decades. After some control configuration, I was sliding beneath machine gun volleys and blasting cultists in the face, kicking thrown axes back to their wielders, setting traps with molotovs and no-scoping enemies from across the map with what can only be described as one of the most satisfying magnums in shooter history. The next moment I'd find myself wandering misty forests and eerie asylums in silence, the game effortlessly dancing back and forth between atmospheric horror and high-octane action with a finesse that makes FEAR look clumsy.

The blend of speed and punchiness in this game's combat loop is unlike anything I've felt from a shooter in years. The guns look good, sound good, and feel great. Like one of its biggest inspirations - Blood - the TNT and molotov throwables are the breakout stars of the game's weapon arsenal. The TNT alone offers you a multitude of options in combat - you can light and throw, split the bundle for a wider cluster of smaller explosions, or throw an unlit bundle and detonate it with weapons fire. If you flub a throw, you can kick the bundle towards the enemy. You can kick an enemy's TNT back at him. You can shoot the axes or dynamite he throws at you out of the air. If it sounds like a cool idea, Jason Smith probably put it in the game.

This wide array of verbs at your disposal encapsulates CULTIC's greatest strength - the flexibility of its combat system. There are so many ways to handle any given encounter, not only because so much of the level design allows you to tackle areas of any given map piecemeal, at your own pace, but also because your movement and attack options are so open-ended. While every tool has its purpose, at no point is player expression sacrificed for "hard counters" like some of the more restrictive shooters of this generation (looking at you, Doom Eternal.)

Enemy variety is diverse and interesting across the board, and unlike many throwback shooters their place in the world doesn't feel arbitrary - cultists are where you expect cultists to be, beasts and the undead where you would expect them, all feeling like they were doing something before your arrival, the inhabitants of the world leaving clues for you in the form of memos and notes peppered throughout. In this sense its setting and scenario bears a great resemblance to another of its clear inspirations - Resident Evil 4.

Despite a rather run-of-the-mill "cult in a small town's backwoods" plot, the game oozes atmosphere and personality - it's all in the presentation. The art direction looks fantastic, achieving a moody atmosphere with a really nice color palette (especially if the color filter is turned off, which I prefer) wider than many lesser throwback shooters, and the soundtrack is killer, ranging from mood-setting bassy ambience to thumping synth-backed action tracks. At one point an entire level of the former transformed into the latter as I entered the final room and was met with a massive shootout - the somber leitmotif that came before repeating itself in the combat version of the song, except that the moody piano melody had given way to a wailing synth keyboard. It was probably around this time that it clicked with me that this game was something special.

I sat through this game for about 7 hours, took a break to eat, and quickly realized I still wanted to play. I picked it back up and finished in another two hours, and immediately after doing so I was compelled to start the game again on a higher difficulty. I was hooked, and I'm still hooked.

It's easy to designate CULTIC as another in a sea of retro-inspired shooters at a time when the market is flooded, but in practice it feels like so much more than that. It carries with it the DNA of its inspirations - DOOM, Blood, Resident Evil, and more, but has a strong personality all its own. It's really difficult to overstate how refreshing this game truly is after I've found myself growing tired lately with shooters wearing the skin of the classics, but lacking their heart. CULTIC, on the other hand, has no shortage of heart - freshly harvested and still beating.

got to the 2nd island before i decided to pack it in. delighted that this is resonating for so many people but feel pretty confident in saying that i sadly won't be joining you. everything that i enjoy about sonic is absent here, individual ingredients of sonic play scattered haphazardly through an almost disarmingly ugly default unreal engine map, without context or pace or anything to give them life, a series of endlessly repeated chores that offer various flavors of coins that you feed into various flavors of vending machine that dispense cutscenes that, while a step above the standard of the past few games are still lightyears behind the heights of SA2 and Shadow. ian flynn evidently has an earnest fannish enthusiasm for these characters, which is refreshing, but from what i saw of the story (which is not much in fairness) his script very much struggles to keep it's head above water in terms of actual entertainment.

i feel this way not out of mean-spirited hate for sonic and his fandom, but out of love. i'm not the biggest sonic fan in the world but i do genuinely adore the series in the moments i fully resonate with it, and spent a big portion of my last youtube video waxing lyrical about one of the most derided sonic games. that's why the closing of my time on the first island, of following a map marker and feeding coins into amy rose so she could dispense another anonymous cutscene, over and over again, until it felt less like rolling around at the speed of sound and more like clocking into work, felt so genuinely heartbreaking. the sonic i love, his energy, his attitude, his world...none of that is here. all that remains is a hollow facsimile, dispensing flavorless sonic-brand protein paste. playing this genuinely made me feel sad. there's a moment, climbing the big floating tower on the first island, that the game actually felt like a sonic game, chaining together homing attacks and rail grinds and keeping momentum and speed against rapid challenges...and it was all underscored by the same completely utilitarian sad piano track that perpetually haunts the experience. if this was A Level in a sonic game, there would be one of the franchise's signature sick tunes punctuating my ascent, but the open world has taken even this from me...what are we doing here, when we lose even The Tunes to the open world zeitgeist? why should i keep playing when the only moments with any life are those that briefly come close to recapturing the normal experience of playing a level in the adventure-era games? why don't I just boot up an old SA2 level?

i'm just bummed. i really wanted to like this, but it honestly feels like a companion piece in desperation to the last game I reviewed, a final plea to the zeitgeist that the blue blur can still keep up, one that by most accounts is a success, but one that, for me, discards everything i find loveable about the series and replaces it with a frankenstein quilt of contemporary influences that never work together, one that will almost certainly define the direction of the franchise going forward. ultimately, detchibe is right: I love sonic for being new, bold, and weird. and this game is none of those things. it's stale, safe, and depressingly in line with every other game latching onto The Open World as if it is a universal panacea for franchise stagnation.

i should play spark the electric jester.

Third time's the charm, gamers. Now that I've properly beaten Sonic Frontiers - if only to justify the disgusting amount of money I paid for this game; I'd forgotten just how much $60 actually is - I think I have some more legitimate grounds to review this game on than a spite-fueled (but justified and honestly based) diatribe / retrospective on over twenty years of on-and-off disappointment at the hands of Sonic Team and their inconsistent little media darling. And guess what? I actually dislike the game even more now that the initial, impulsive surge of anger and disappointment has passed. I didn't just spend $60 on a bad game, I spent $60 on a soulless game masquerading as something soulful. It's so fucking bad, but it's bad in an... interesting and thought-provoking way compared to Sonic Forces' absolute nothingness.

Whereas Forces didn't even bother pretending that it had a heart of any kind, Frontiers actively plays a smoke-and-mirrors game with the player, cleverly waving its' superficially stimulating elements in front of your face like a thick helping of wool right over your eyes. Look! Open world! Ian Flynn! Hype boss battles! A cryptic and mysterious trailer! All of these things, dangled in front of the consumer like jangling, shiny keys, made Frontiers very initially compelling. People were finally interested in a Sonic game for the first time in a long time, and these surface-level elements added just enough intrigue to keep its' oft-battered fanbase hooked. After all, when you're a Sonic fan, you'll take anything other than table scraps if it means you might get a decent experience this time. Something is better than absolutely nothing, right? Even if it winds up being next to nothing?

All these promising, eye-catching elements wound up amounting to absolutely nothing all that special. Like... yeah, sure, there's an open world. An empty, barren, lifeless open world that regrettably - but predictably - prioritizes size & scope over substance. Sure, Ian Flynn's in charge of writing (supposedly), but the shockingly underwhelming and undercooked writing is simply not up to snuff this time around, not even close to the intricate, playful dialogue & characters he gave us in both the Archie & IDW universes. Sure, the boss battles have these screaming edgelord metal tracks in the background led by the Sleeping With Sirens guy of all people (Sonic is still relevant!!!!), but they're also a painfully easy collection of convoluted, on-rails button-mashers at best and a jarring, ill-fitting cluster of quick-time events at worst.

And honestly, for me, all of that intrigue and mystery that was hyped up by the trailers wound up going absolutely nowhere. The Starfall Islands wind up feeling like a less-effective rehash of all the Echinda Lore that Ian Flynn is no doubt very intimately familiar with: a once-powerful tribe that tries to harness the Chaos Emeralds and then get destroyed by a more powerful being... like, shit, stop me if that sounds familiar. (The ancient Kocos even look like Chaos in flashbacks!) Sonic and his friends don't interact with the lore or the world around them in any meaningful way beyond how it only faintly relates to them, in a way that makes them feel kinda selfish.

Amy witnesses this surprisingly tender, nonverbal scene of love between two Ancient Kocos in the middle of a terrible war (one of the only effective scenes in the whole game), and decides that she wants to spread love throughout the world. As if that's... different from what she was basically already doing? Tails decides that he's tired of following in Sonic's silhouette after witnessing a similar situation with an eager, young Koco, as if they didn't already have this exact arc more than twenty years ago in Sonic Adventure 1. The one exception to the rule is Knuckles, who does at least acknowledge that the islanders' situation is remarkably similar to his own people's... before virtually never bringing it up again after that singular scene. So when the lore isn't a vaguely-boring reprise of the Echidna stuff from the games and comics, the plot rapid-fire rushes its paper-thin characters through "character arcs" in scenes where they're like "I want to change in a way that doesn't actually change who I am" or "I've decided to rehash the same arc I literally already went through" and Sonic replies with a steadfast "mmk" each and every time.

The only genuinely intriguing throughline of the entire plot is the 'corruption' thing that happens to Sonic over the course of the game. Initially, I was liking how the story was only quietly addressing what was happening to him, and I thought the buildup to Sonic's full-on corruption was actually pretty great... until it got resolved in a single scene where the power of friendship randomly cures Sonic of the thing that had been ailing him throughout the entire plot. How... convenient.

In a depressing twist of fate, Eggman can't even salvage this plot. You could honestly write Eggman out of the plot entirely; he spends all of his time dicking around in the painfully-underexplored Cyber Space and just looking for a way out instead of doing anything of any merit. I'm honestly not sure why they even bothered, especially given that the one relevant thing about him in the entire story - the relationship between him and Sage - is, once again, pretty undercooked and underdeveloped in the grand scheme of things. Sage herself is... fine, I guess? A for effort. Her character growth is passable, if completely predictable, and the plot pulls a classic "she dies at the end but doesn't actually die" rabbit out of its hat as if that would impress anyone at all.

See, I've been using a lot of magic and illusory terms throughout this review - rabbit in a hat, smoke and mirrors, wool over eyes - because I think that sums up Frontiers perfectly. It pretends to have soul by borrowing elements from the games that people like. A plot and cast remarkably similar to Sonic Adventure 1, complete with a Big the Cat cameo? Check. Poorly-implemented 2D-3D hybrid sections similar to Sonic Generations, the only Boost Formula game that hasn't come under any particular flak? Check. A painful overreliance on Green Hill, Chemical Plant, and Sky Sanctuary, because obviously fans haven't gotten sick of seeing these exact same locales ad infinitum ad nauseum? Check. I even noticed a handful of Cyber Space levels that copied the level composition of Green Forest and Sky Rail from SA2. They went beyond copying the look of those stages and went as far as to just recreate the exact same levels (I believe it was 3-1 and 2-6 respectively). This is the trick the game pulls on the average player. It presents the illusion of depth without the commitment by either borrowing from games that people like (be it popular Sonic games or Breath of the Wild / Nier: Automata) or presenting bold-sounding ideas that would look great in a review blurb. (Open world!!!!!!!!!)

But it's all so... nothing. All of these discrete, separate ingredients half-heartedly combine together to make a frustratingly bland and shallow dish. Everything feels hollow. Combat is a trivial, button-mashing affair that only deserves credit for the fact that it's sliiiightly better than "boost to win". Running feels awful until you level it up to a properly 'fast' amount (having to level up your top speed feels like the punchline to a bad Sonic joke), and even then, there's no sense of momentum or weight to your actions whatsoever. The open world is a cluttered disaster of banal, samey-feeling activities with rails, springs, and random platforms placed so haphazardly and sloppily around the world that it starts feeling like a randomly-generated Forge / Unity map. And the amount of padding Frontiers managed to cram into its runtime is utterly nightmarish. Frontiers is secretly a four-hour game that painfully, laboriously stretches itself out to twelve-fifteen through the tried-and-true Ubisoft method of making you collect shit.

That's right, collect-a-thon fetch quests, everyone's favorite thing about Sonic. Just look at how much people liked the fetch quests in Shadow, or the medals in Unleashed! But Frontiers actually takes it three steps further than its' much-maligned predecessor by asking you to collect an absolutely insane amount of Tokens and artificially withholding the plot from you until you collect these Tokens. There are moments where you deadass cannot progress the story unless you cave in and Collect All The Things, and sometimes your reward for doing so is just a fucking cutscene that basically tells you to keep collecting. At the climax of the game you're expected to collect like over 200 of these fuckers, and lemme tell you, were it not for Big The Cat, I deadass think I would have been driven mad by sheer, unadulterated, tedium-induced boredom. The literal only reason I was able to complete this game in the (painfully long) twelve or so hours I spent playing it was thanks to the fishing minigame you can play with Big, an Animal Crossing-esque button prompt minigame where you can catch fish and then trade in the tokens you get from the fish for Plot Items, including the Tokens you desperately need to continue the story with. This cuts down on the grinding considerably, but it also just feels like a band-aid slapped onto the gaping wound that was the idea to make this game a collect-a-thon in the first place.

The funniest part about that fishing thing I just mentioned? It's unironically the best part of the game, and that's both incredibly sad and incredibly funny. There's something very... Zen about the fishing minigame. You just kick back and relax to easily the best song in the overloaded OST, press a couple buttons, and then smile or chuckle whenever Sonic catches a fish much larger than him or something silly like an alligator or an oversized tire. All of the frustration and tedium just melts away for a few minutes. I was honestly having more fun just relaxing and listening to some chill lo-fi music than I was playing the actual Sonic game I spent $60 for, and funnily enough, that's when it hit me that this game might be a 1 instead of a measly 1.5. I was actively - and repeatedly - playing this minigame in order to avoid having to play more of the janky collection of chores masquerading as a "game" that waited me outside of the peaceful, comforting rivers that Big calmly inhabits. Big makes it incredibly easy to just not engage with the rest of the game, and while I was frankly thankful for that, it also highlights just how trivial everything is. Who cares about exploring or unlocking other parts of the map when you can just put a marker down on the spots where Big is and just run back there whenever you need some Plot Tokens? It actually winds up being faster to do this since the game starts increasing the amount of Tokens you need over time while simultaneously giving you less and less them over time, a bullshit decision that artificially lengthens the game to infinity and dulled me into an upset, uncomfortable stupor.

In conclusion, this is why I'm honestly stunned that some people are so taken with Sonic Frontiers. I'm honestly wondering where all of the heart and soul that people seem to have found in this game actually... is. Frontiers is a boring, dead-eyed trot through an empty, unassuming world that cobbles together a blatantly-stolen BOTW-Genshin Impact aesthetic and a truly garish amount of reused assets/levels/fucking ideas along with capital-M Mandatory fetch quests and the usual game-breaking Sonic jank. When you aren't gormlessly running through a barren and colorless world marred with terrible pop-in and some alarmingly ugly assets just cluttering the skyline, you're making brief treks through old levels you've literally already played before or mindlessly collecting Things to make the artificially broken-up and thoroughly-unassuming Plot actually continue, like feeding coins into a soda machine so it gives you your fucking soda already. It's all so... lifeless, genuinely lacking the same color, zest, and enthusiasm that previous Sonic entries - even the bad ones - had in excess. Soullessness wearing the mask of something soulful. If you're enjoying this, then... good for you? But also, you don't need me or anyone else to hold your hand for you. Sometimes people will hate the shit you like, and sometimes, that's okay, because sometimes that shit is Sonic Frontiers. After five-plus years of waiting, this is what we were given.

So much for redemption.

On a cold Saturday night ten years ago, I bought the midnight e-shop release of Paper Mario: Sticker Star. This event would later come to be known as The First Betrayal.

I say without hesitation or exaggeration that everyone with a credit on this — including those who did no wrong of their own, such as the art and sound teams — should have been barred from ever working in the field of video games again. While this may sound harsh, this act would be one of kindness, not cruelty; these people do not deserve to feel the shame of knowing that their names are attached to an industry that allows something this unforgivably bad to ever be put on the market. The name "Alan Smithee" appears zero times in the credits, which marks one of several missed opportunities present in Sticker Star.

This game has the worst battle mechanics of any RPG to have ever been released. I will not provide modifiers to this statement to lessen the blow. Any RPG. There is no experience or leveling up, your party members are gone, your attacks are now limited-use consumables, and getting more of them requires finding them in the overworld or buying them from shops. Enemies do not drop enough coins to pay back the cost of the stickers it takes to defeat them, making the only viable strategy to avoid every single random encounter and run from every battle that you're able to. Some bosses, such as Big Cheep Cheep, are immune to all attacks. The only thing that can defeat them is if you find a Thing (proper noun) hidden somewhere in the world, pick it up, backtrack to a shop to convert it into a sticker, and then use the Thing Sticker (proper noun) to insta-kill the previously-invincible boss. To say that this is bad design is an understatement. This should not have been allowed to be released.

Sticker Star may have some of the thinnest writing ever released by a major publisher, and this includes early NES RPGs that only had a maximum of 512kb of data to work with. How in the hell did this game have twelve writers? Without irony, there is more of a plot present in the instruction manual of the original Super Mario Bros. than there is in the entirety of Sticker Star. Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario — sixteen and twelve years Sticker Star's senior, respectively — do not suffer this problem. It cannot be claimed that this was a technical limitation. Shigeru Miyamoto is on the record stating that "It's fine without a story, so do we really need one?", and barring Intelligent Systems from making new characters or developing in any way on old ones; his insistence that the Paper Mario franchise be brought to heel — stripped of its gameplay mechanics, writing, and character design — should stand as a monument to the man's inability to lead. Sticker Star is the statue of Ozymandias, swallowed and weathered by the sands. Look upon this work and despair.

I find it hard to type out everything that is wrong with Sticker Star, because everything is wrong with Sticker Star. There is nothing that it does right. It is a complete, abject failure of a game. In a just world, it would have been dragged out from the Nintendo Kyoto Research Center by its heels and shot. Miyamoto should have been quietly shuffled away to a small, distant corner of the company where he could placidly collect his salary and not damage any further reputations by involving himself. This is a game for nobody. I have tried with everything I have to come up with reasons why someone might like this, and I have nothing. It is not often that this happens. I'm usually able to come up with some sort of redeeming factor, but there is nothing here. Sticker Star is a black hole from which no fun can escape. It's sad. It's just sad. May no meddling manager ever do to another game what Shigeru Miyamoto did to this.

This is a pretty harsh review, maybe one that is not reflective of how I felt about the game for a significant portion of its runtime, but I'm angry at how many things about this game legitimately infuriated me, and how only a few people are willing to talk about them.

There's definitely good stuff here. The cast is charismatic and likeable, the "Essence Of" animations are very funny, and the game has a lot of charm in how it interprets the conventions of classic JRPGs into the modern Yakuza universe. The soundtrack bangs harder than it has any right to, almost certainly the best of the Yakuza games I've played. Yakuza: Like a Dragon wears a shit-eating grin and an attitude you can't help be swept up by, but as the hours drag on and on, the charm wears thin, and the flaws stick out more and more, until I had grown to resent and even, to a certain extent, hate a game I once loved.

The plot is a complete mess that changes gears completely every three chapters or so, leaving me with a near-constant state of narrative and thematic whiplash, which would maybe be forgivable if this was a 30 hour game, but it's far closer to 60, 70, even up to 100 hours long. At least it's fun for that length, right? Well...

I'm a big fan of JRPGs. They're probably my favourite genre. And I love turn-based combat...when done well. When I heard that Like A Dragon would be a turn-based RPG, my excitement couldn't be contained. It felt like they were making a game I had dreamed about for years. So trust me when I say that the battle system of Like A Dragon is the worst I've experienced in a big JRPG in years. Progression is thoughtless and on-rails, with the only choice being which one of the game's jobs you want to be grinding at a specific moment. Moment to moment, the combat offers no interesting choices, almost every encounter playing out the exact same way: big AOE attacks if enemies are clustered together, or big single-target attacks if they aren't. Boss design is routinely awful, with the game almost always simply resorting to having the boss be a big tough guy with loads of health and resistances that does a fuck-ton of damage, without any other mechanics to make them feel distinct or memorable or fun. Artificial difficulty abounds in the final third, with both the Chapter 12 and Chapter 15 bosses literally having the game tell you to grind out about 10 levels before facing them, OHKO attacks that can hit your main character with little warning and give you an instant game over, wiping out all your progress through these overlong boss encounters, and dungeons as a whole containing almost no save points. Do you have a life you'd like to get back to anytime soon? Tough luck, buddy! Stick it out or do that shitty final dungeon where you run into the same room and fight the same enemies about a dozen times all over again.

And all of this would be bad enough, if not for the fact that the battle system is the vehicle by which the game delivers the truly unpleasant politics it has beneath it's surface-level charm and empathy. Through the cutscenes, the game affects a facade of being caring and empathetic towards sex workers (though that in and of itself is fairly lacking in nuance) but the former sex worker in your party, Saeko, is reduced to a caricature of feminine stereotypes when she's in battle, having a set of "female exclusive" jobs with abilities like "Sexy Pose" and weapons that are handbags. The game earnestly tries to convince you that it really cares about the plight of Japan's homeless, up until the point the game's "metal slime" equivalents are revealed: largely defenceless homeless men who you are encouraged to seek out and kill as fast as possible for an enormous EXP bonus. The initially charming and funny way battles are framed, as the overactive imagination of a central character raised on a diet of Dragon Quest, eventually left a bad taste in my mouth as Ichiban kept imagining deeply offensive caricatures of black men and trans people for him to beat up with his baseball bat.

As with the year's other big disappointment, Doom Eternal, the awful attitudes this game has beneath the surface have gone almost completely undiscussed by the wider gaming press, with only Dia Lacina's piece (which I initially thought was harsh but now reads as almost startlingly on-the-point) and a few people on discord and twitter acknowleging it. When the game asked me to grind out levels in a boring-as-fuck sewer dungeon right before the final boss, where it had me beat up trans caricatures that made me a bit sick to look at, I found myself getting really angry that I wasn't warned that this was waiting for me.

If you watched "YAKUZA: LIKE A DRAGON: FULL MOVIE 1080p 60fps" on youtube, or played the first four or five chapters exclusively, you might be forgiven for thinking that this game really is an empathetic portrayal of people on society's bottom rung rising up to reclaim their lives. But the actual game doesn't bear up to that scrutiny. It pretends to care about subaltern, and does a good job of pretending, but it doesn't. Not really. Not when it comes time to make shitty jokes at their expense.

When I loved Like A Dragon, I really loved it. There's truly moving scenes and moments, all the way up to the end. But when I hated it, I really hated it. And over time, the latter emotion won out over the former. In many ways, it is the true sequel to Persona 5. A game I was incredibly excited for, played obsessively through it's obscenely overlong length, and felt my enthusiasm sap out of me in real time over the course of it, until I watched it chicken out of landing it's themes home time and time again, until it's conservative attitudes bubbled to the surface, until my memories of the game, once positive and warm, turned cold and resentful in my hands.

The most I've been disappointed in a game in a long time.