My god this was the longest five and half hours of my gaming life. Why does my roommate have nostalgia for such absolute garbage. This is the platonic ideal of a Bad Game, so bad in so many ways that you can near feel the heat from the dumpster fire that must have been its development.

The anime box-art looks nothing like any asset in the game. The opening cutscene looks nothing like any asset in the game. The in-game drawings of ANYTHING look nothing like any 3D model in the game.

There is one good music track. It plays in the tutorial level. It also serves as the theme for the final boss fight.

There are multiple copy-pasted tower levels that have the same 1 minute loop of music on them. That doesn't even loop. They cross fade into themselves not even on a beat.

If you did not choose to have a magic user in your party, you're fucked. I played as a pirate, and without a long-range attack, there were multiple bosses that I could not reach. I have no idea how the game is supposed to be finishable with anyone who isn't a warlock.

My experience with this game was running around trying to whack things with my sword, and I never did learn where the hitbox on my swing was supposed to be. Sometimes things died in front of me, or to the side of me, or sometimes I'd be turned around and facing a direction I never input. But maybe I never killed anything at all, and it was all my roommate's bouncing balls of magic that would routinely clear a room off-screen before I got to wander over.

There's no run button, but walking for a set amount of time will transition you to running, which has no change in animation but does change movement speed. Multiple in-game traps were timed for my roommate's Warlock running speed and nothing else. Or were timed for nothing. So it was impossible to purposefully avoid them. Except that sometimes their damage hitboxes didn't work. Until you got used to it, in which case you'd get stun-locked from the same floor trap you'd walked over five times already looking for the one switch you missed in a room full of bullshit.

Speaking of, enemies come out of generators so fast that lizardmen would literally appear to die faster than my sword swing animation. It was literally impossible for me to kill things faster than they appeared. Until my roommate used some phoenix fire warlock blast and killed everything. I'm pretty sure my pirate's Final Smash equivalent did not have a hitbox.

No one was paying attention to this. There was no game design, no balancing. Assets were programmed and jumbled together onto a disc.

Multiple times we had to restart levels because I accidentally hit a switch to open a door - but the game only wanted Player 1 to hit switches to open doors. So the door wouldn't open.

Routinely got stuck on level geometry. Or nothing. Destroying enemy generators left debris that had hit detection boxes, which, with no jump button, turned every cleared room into aa maze should you need to back-track. Which you needed to do a lot.

I do not have enough gaming history knowledge to know what the "good" game of this genre is that so many people tried to make one like it. The Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games my roommate has made me play felt better than this one, but were still fundamentally terrible experiences. No impact for weapons interacting with enemies. No sound effects for feedback that anything is happening. Little alignment between hitboxes and animations. Just purely unpleasant lack of cohesion.

Whoever was translating this did not bother making sure what the narrator said matched what was on screen at all. Or maybe they did the "full" translation first, and then ran into character limits for the in-game text. The number of times I was asked to "go thru the teleport" on my way to hell was enough to stop being funny.

Ending each level gets the same "grandiose" music playing over a still generic fantasy image with a couple lines of text babbling on about nonsense that fails to stay consistent from one level to the next. Some white mages are mentioned that are never shown. The main villain is either a monster, or a dragon, or a dark mage, or a space flea, or something else - you kill him like five times. Each time with dialog like "Your mission: kill him forever" to be followed with "you slew the bad buy, but then he fled. He is weakened, but is growing stronger than ever!" I felt like I was being punked by a 5-year-old's level of storytelling.

Incidentally, this was the first game I ever played on the original Xbox, and boy howdy is that controller awful. What were they thinking with all those far and out of the way buttons? Everything is so mushy and the A / B button placement still feels like a sin.

I am so done. Why can treasure chests have rotten meat inside. Or half the gold of the cost of the key to open it. What is the point of the lives system. Why are they called credits. Was this a port of a Chinese arcade game??

F rank, no stars. My roommate was howling with laughter at my suffering for this god-awful experience. I am making him drive the van when I move.

--- meaningless [C]ode ---

When I struggle to understand my reaction to any story, I ask myself, “Where is the love?”

NieR: Automata got me for the longest time because it seemed like a story about love. The set-up is a no-brainer: a pair of war buddy androids learn to open up to each other during their deployment. Because they are androids, it feels natural for them to question, often out loud and to the camera, their potential for emotions, evolution, and finding life paths outside the conventions of their manufacture. All in service of literally saving humanity.

Watching too-cool-for-emotions bombshell 2B play off socially starved twinklord 9S started out cute! The premise was endearing! 2B has such a cool design, I wanted to love her. (I wanted her in Smash Bros. just so I could see that dress in bright blue, tbh.)

But even in their story’s best moments, something felt off.

Because their robot bodies meant they could die in each other’s arms a billion times. They could lose their memories of each other and suffer inhuman anguishes. They could get corrupted by mind-controlling computer viruses and kill each other again and again. At some point, their cute banter, their requests for cute nicknames - it didn’t justify or counterweight the dramatic visuals of maimed bodies, crying faces, bleeding out, dying cold and feeling alone.

NieR: Automata is not a game about love. Whoever creates its stories only understands “love” as a pretext for suffering. Which is fucking tragic. Because it meant instead of mining the setting for the depth it inspired me to imagine, this game was much more fascinated with how it could shove absurd misery in my face like a moral-less episode of the Twilight Zone.

With this lens in mind, it was kind of pathetic how easily I could predict every “twist” in the game. Not in a lore accurate explanation sense - god no. I vaguely know the series’ plot template at this point, but none of it matters. Because in this game, everyone dies and is miserable, the end. Does an NPC have a friend? A lover? An endearing character trait? Then someone dies. Just everyone. All the time. Every time.

This is the game people meme’d Elden Ring to be.

In retrospect, none of this really surprises me, either? Nier: Automata is a puree of every writing sin I’ve written about for previous DrakeNier entries.

Drakengard - Pointless pontifications on violence in a game that doesn’t allow you to engage with itself any other way.

NieR - obsessed with the idea of “what is a person?” while drowning in the shallowest possible puddles.

Drakengard 3 - obsessed with “twists” at the expense of anything else, confusing curiosity for investment.

NieR Re-in-carnation - episodic misery porn

So you want to know what is unique about NieR: Automata? What special flavor gives it its own special repugnant aftertaste?

The “twist” that 9S is an incel - and secretly the main character. Every reveal of every other character’s secret backstory or motivation reinforced that 9S was the specialist boy. Everything that happened to every other character in the story happened for his “development”, and what he developed into was repulsive Hot Anime Nonsense disguised as an art house film. He. Sucks. His character has nothing to say. Nothing that drives him besides wanting to fuck 2B. A thing the game explicitly tells me when someone hacked his brain. 9S is a ball of impotent malice disguised as a tumblr soft-boy that lives for satisfying an unchecked id of violence and objectifying desire.

To anyone who wants to argue that means anything in the context of the premise, plot, or execution of NieR: Automata: gross. I am uninterested. I am not denying the possibility. I just don’t care.


--- just getting [S]tarted ---


Because here is where I do my DrakeNier style “gotcha!” moment and reveal that I actually don’t care about the story of Nier: Automata at all, and that my previous points were all merely pretense and introduction for talking about my real feelings for the game - how it is the slickest character action game I have ever played; derogatory.

For how much I “hate” the story of Nier: Automata, its three main routes sure went down smoothly. None of what I complained about above really congealed as a thought while I was playing. My brain didn’t catch up with what I had been consuming until the final act went off the deep end - I could feel during the finale my attention slowly lumbering back to ask “wait, really? That’s what we’re doing here?” Now that I’ve written even vague strokes about the plot, I can feel my memories of this story leaving my brain forever to better match the nothing of an emotional experience I had with it all.

Which I find very interesting! Because I ripped into every other entry in this series based on their stories more than anything else!

You know what NieR: Automata’s legacy in my life is and will be? Battling a single optional side quest boss named Father Servo. I was maybe level 30 at most. He was level 60. My damage output was miniscule, but non-zero. So I fought him. Between my auto-heal and vampirism skills, I could dance around enough to passively heal every time that I slipped up and took a hit, (which would knock out like ⅔ of my health).

This took over an hour. And then when I finally bested him, he got up with a SECOND HEALTH BAR. And I had to repeat the EXACT SAME FIGHT AGAIN. No new moves, no new gimmicks. Sunk-cost fallacy is a bitch, so I listened to this song for like two and a half hours, except you need to overlay gatling gun noises rattling in your skull the whole time for the full experience.

Now this song plays in my head when I’m doing something mindless and monotonous that somehow still feels necessary. Toweling off after a shower. Looking at my shopping list in a grocery store. I finished this fight weeks ago and it’s still happening! It’s so ridiculous and dumb that I’m equal parts endeared and exasperated.

So why did I talk about the plot of this game for a couple pages first? Because I needed to establish the profundity of what I didn’t think about while I was playing this game. Like the fact that I didn’t blink seeing an optional boss that was twice my level. The thought “maybe I should do this later” didn’t cross my mind. And, it was possible! The game let me do it! It sucked, but it wasn’t “hard”... just tedious.

Isn’t that weird??? Like, shouldn’t I have been scared off? Later, when I was level 60, I was killing dudes so fast that they barely had time to blink. Was that Father Servo fight supposed to be a joke I ruined by rushing to the punchline? When was I supposed to fight that guy??

Right before I would have unlocked fast-travel in this game, I unwittingly did every side-quest there was for me to do. Including the entirety of the Father Servo questline. Because this game kept crashing on my PS5 if I went near this one spot on the map that was necessary for advancing the plot. But I only thought to google my problem after I ran out of other things to do. I probably could have saved myself a couple hours of running alone by advancing the main plot just that one extra bit. So why was I content to run back and forth across the same map so many times, getting bobbles and trinkets and gold that I never used or looked at?

Because this game is slick.


--- an [O]asis of oil ---


Having played NieR, I was at first confused why people liked NieR: Automata so much better. Because structurally, it is the same. A barren “open world” made of a hub and spokes. The same respawning enemy placements. “Side quests” that are only ever visiting the same NPCs in the same locations and running between them. (NieR’s stories were far more interesting, and its enemy variety much more regional and profound!)

But what NieR: Automata has that NieR lacked was a satisfying run animation. Watching 2B’s thigh-high boots flash in the light while her short skirt swishes back and forth is fun to watch. Her gothic lace and katanas are inherently funny when she’s running up sand dunes or splashing through sewers.

More importantly, NieR: Automata has masterful conservation of momentum for other actions from a run. You jump farther with a running start. NieR: Automata has three different animations for mounting ladders depending on your movement speed: from a stand still, from a walk, or from a run. You can jump up the ladders. You have different animations for dismounting the top of a ladder depending on whether you were jumping and at what part of the jump animation you transitioned to a dismount animation. You have a different dismount animation if you jumped towards the top of the ladder part-way without climbing the top of it.

And all of these ladder clambering actions are smooth as hell. They’re effortless. How the characters in NieR: Automata vault over half-obstacles and bounce off walls show the first signs of all the stuff Square Enix lifted from this game when they made Kingdom Hearts III. 2B’s ladder descent animation is the kind of superb sexy fun that reminds you Bayonetta 2 just finished cooking down the hall. Running, vaulting, double jumping, hang-time glide falling - they all have a breathless weightlessness to them that makes environmental traversal thoughtless.

But the movement itself is only one part of three as to how this game feels so slick. Because the UI design is polished to a blinding sheen.

When you open the pause menu, the map is the first thing you see. Making the map take up the whole screen takes a single flick of the camera stick. Flicking the camera stick starts engaging the 3D map in some way, flipping or rotating it. I cannot overstate the genius of this. The actions of “map selection” and “map interaction” are merged. This means that even if the player is opening the map multiple times to check where they are and where they’re going, it minimizes the sensation that there’s a break in the action - they are still playing the game even as they’re reading and synthesizing information.

Both the main map and the mini-map have all available side-quests, including ones you haven’t started yet, indicated at all times. This means that if you take a wrong turn navigating the environment, if you’re close enough to something else of interest, the decision to change targets takes a short enough amount of time that it feels like it was always intentional.

Which will happen often, because the environment is filled with obstacles to jump over. You will miss jumps and end up on the wrong side of buildings. Because you will be running so fast and blindly all of the time, because why wouldn’t you be running all the time?

I normally develop a great mental map when playing video games, but I still got lost in Nier: Automata’s tiny hub world map through to the end of my playtime. Because the penalty for taking a wrong turn didn’t register as annoying enough for me to learn. Jumping from rooftop to rooftop the wrong way was as engaging as doing anything else. And then I got fast travel anyway, which eliminated the need further. I routinely got my fast travel points mixed up, too. And that also didn’t matter. Because zooming around was engaging and mindless.

Was it fun? I dunno. Maybe for a couple moments in the hours I ran around. But running felt better than waiting through the loading times of fast travel. It’s not like I was fighting anything during my zooming, anyway.

Which is where I get to the third pillar of this game’s slickness - the combat. And I want to linger on the confluence of slicknesses that stopped me from learning the map, and how that applies to combat.

Because the menu stays accessible during combat. You can chug potions at any time. You can change weapon load-outs and equipped skills at any time. And like, yeah, that feels awesome! Why wouldn’t I want to be able to access everything in the menus whenever I wanted? That feels so player-empowered!

But you know what else that stopped me from doing? Fucking dodging. Why would I bother paying attention to enemy attack patterns and my own movement if I could just drink health potions from a pause menu if it ever got dire? Each time I died in the early game was a genuine surprise, because my brain forgot that combat meant I was in danger.

So after something killed me a couple times and I figured I should rummage through the skill menu for the first time, I found I had an… auto-heal ability? If I could avoid taking damage for 6 seconds, then 2B would start getting health back for free. Awesome! Look at all the health potions I could save! (For context, a health potion costs like a dime. So this impulse to “save” on health potions is incredibly stupid.)

But now I had an incentive to not get hit. I started dodging all the time. And you know, that dodge animation is so slick. 2B glows in a highly abstracted way, time slows down, particle effects everywhere - in the drab world of NieR: Automata, dodging feels like the most importantly animated thing in the whole game. You can dodge out of most attack animations! You can dodge consecutively with very little consequence! And if you dodge at the right time, you can unleash a near-invincible counter-attack!

Now you might be thinking, “but you can’t beat a character action game just by dodging all the time,” and you would be correct. But NieR: Automata has something else in its combat to make you feel like you’re winning all the time, even when you objectively suck and are missing all your punches. A little flying robot companion who has an infinite ammo gatling gun. As long as you’re willing to hold down the fire button, he will shoot at anything you’re targeting. Is the damage a ton? Not to start. But non-zero damage is indeed damage. You can start shooting dudes before they’re in range of your sword! You can shoot flying enemies without having to jump up there!

Maybe astute readers can see how this came together to culminate in my Father Servo experience. That’s right, a good majority of the damage I did to him in that fight was from holding down the fire button on my robo buddy while running around trying not to get hit. Did I try to hit him with my sword? Of course I did! I had another skill where I got health back from dealing damage to enemies. But after so many dozens of minutes and so many close calls, it wasn’t worth it to try to do more than one or two swipes at a time and risk having to do the fight again later. Besides, I could just barely see his health bar going down, if I just held out a bit longer…!


--- all in the name of [L]ove ---


I want to stress that every individual design decision in NieR: Automata feels incredibly kind. Rarely have I felt so visibly cared for.

NieR: Automata has multiple sections where the camera zooms out and locks the player character into a 2D plane. Running up curved staircases, crossing long bridges, certain hub world areas - it makes a ton of sense! Navigating those kinds of environments is annoying in 3D with full character and camera control! By turning those same hallways into 2D spaces, you get some visual variety - seeing your character from a new angle, the camera now allowed to change its focus to capture a larger part of the environment. It’s such an elegant gesture that provides multiple boons at once.

I had multiple real-life friends talk this game up when they heard I was playing it. They loved it. Mind, these are the kind of people who play maybe half of one game a quarter on a busy gaming year. One of them even platinum’d the game. But when I asked them why NieR: Automata was “so good, dude”, everyone seemed to draw a blank. “Just play it man, you’ll see.”

Well I did.

I saw a game with really drab colors. Where the environments were rendered with enough loving detail to trick people into thinking it had an art direction. (Seriously, the androids, the robots, the realistic backgrounds, the surrealist liminal spaces - nothing goes together! Not even the player characters' combinations of gothic velvet, Japanese weaponry, and chibi robo companions make any visual sense!)

I saw a game with an incomprehensible story that seemed as unfocused and inconsequential as it did mean, nihilistic, and dumb.

I saw a game with lovingly flashy combat animations that made me think people really want to play Kingdom Hearts but with a “mature” aesthetic. Enough of a veneer that they’re playing a Real Game™ while being asked to do as little as possible to progress.

So hear me out.

Conceptually, NieR: Automata is not in the same wheelhouse as Bayonetta - it is a Kirby game.

Kirby Super Star has so much effort put into its 20 or so movesets. Each one is bursting with delightful animations and sparkles and sound effects that, in the SNES era, were straight damn opulent. Controlling Kirby is extremely satisfying, because all of his movements are fast and slick. By which I mean, the time between pressing a button and something loud and flashy and useful happening is measured in a miniscule amount of frames.

Yet all these crazy abilities can only be used on cutesy puffs of candy people whose concept of combat is, at best, the notion that maybe they should walk towards their adversary. They are moving targets, excuses to unleash all the fun and flashy spritework Kirby has at his disposal.

And you know what? You can just fly over all of it. Ignore it all.

You know how I usually die in Kirby Super Star? When I try to look really cool and style on a brainless enemy in such a way that I fall down a pit.

You know what the penalty is for doing so? Usually nothing, it’s a Kirby game lmao.

So let’s look at NieR: Automata.

2B can equip two weapons at a time, one for light attacks, one for heavy attacks. She can switch between load-outs of weapons mid-combat. Each combination of weapon types have different combos for attacking between the light and heavy attack buttons. You can upgrade weapons to extend their movesets. The world of NieR: Automata comes to life when you swing your sword, every stroke blazing with golden lights and particle effects.

2B can be equipped with myriad skills. Her aforementioned helper buddies have gatling guns, missiles, laser blasts, and use magic spells. All of these can be upgraded and customized. Not to mention that 9S fights alongside you, and you can tell him to specialize in one of many combat styles.

Yet all these crazy abilities can only be used on cutesy gumball head robots whose concept of combat is, at best, flailing their arms in the direction of their adversary. They are moving targets, excuses to unleash all the fun and flashy particle effects 2B has at her disposal.

And you know what? You can just run past all of it. Ignore it all.

You know how I died in NieR: Automata, when I could still die? When I was trying to look cool and style on brainless enemies with new weapons in such a way I forgot to heal.

You know what the penalty was for doing so? Running back to where I was. It’s a Kirby game.

Seriously, there’s no depth, no enemy or boss fight that made me unlearn my basic habits of “shoot gatling gun, run towards enemy, press light attack button until dead.” When my brain switched off, sometimes I’d forget to press an attack button, and just walk around picking up trinkets while my gatling gun sidekick friend killed everything for me. Which somehow was a viable strategy! There were some boss fights in the final act that started dying mid-diatribe from my auto-attack alone before I had time to find and walk towards them! And I never upgraded it once!

And that’s what’s at the heart of a Kirby game. They’re unbalanced in favor of the player in such a way that they are banking on the player button-mashing enough to not notice. You don’t need to get good at them. In fact, digging into whatever flashy abilities are most fun for you might make the game take longer than if you stuck to defaults.

All the proof I had of the uselessness of the combat in NieR: Automata came when 9S, instead of a strong attack, had the ability to “hack” enemies. That is, to play a twin-stick shooter mini-game. This mini-game lasts between 2 and 15 seconds. It deals colossal damage. If it weren’t for the visually necessary screen transitions between combat and hacking minigame, it would be a no-brainer to be doing this all the time from a pure damage-per-second perspective.

But I rarely did this on purpose outside of mini-bosses because I wanted the satisfaction of hitting the light attack button and punching dudes. Even if my auto-attack robo-buddy was killing things just as fast as I was anyway. I at least wanted the pretense of involvement to be maintained.

And for some people, that is enough. NieR: Automata loves those people, and they feel loved by it. You can tinker with your build like a mechanic, forget everything in the couple weeks before you play the game again, and still feel like you’ve retained all your skills as a gamer as you mow down dudes.

The story is shocking, but is so cheap that you don’t have to remember anything that happened before. Just follow the quest marker, bro. The spectacle of the moment is all that matters. Sure there is lore and terms swirling around you, but if you can understand the moment-to-moment surprise and drama, then maybe it feels like you’ve been paying better attention than you thought.

And playing the game is frictionless. It never gets frustrating. It always feels like it has thought of you, and what you most want to do in this exact moment, and make it as smooth as possible.

It loves you.

Right?


--- no ghost, all [M]achine ---


NieR: Automata is flawless in a way that does not make it perfect. I struggle to say it’s even good, because the totality of my experience can be summed up as engaging without being fun. But it’s so engaging that even now I’m unsure if I’m correctly remembering the difference.

2B is very clearly the daughter of NieR and Bayonetta. She inherited all their “best” features. But where is her soul?

Combat in NieR was slow and stiff, both for Nier and the monsters he fought. It was as if underwater. But the enemies behaved in ways that forced you to think about them differently. Some danced around to your back. Some had armor that needed to be broken. Some shot volleys of beams that needed to be dispersed or evaded. Even if you changed the difficulty to Easy, you still needed to be aware of your surroundings, mindful of the timing of your button presses.

Bayonetta is built around dodging at the last second, but with intentionality. Whiff a dodge, and you need to wait a beat to try again. Maybe if I’d put in more time to be more skilled, I’d know Bayonetta has the best combat system of all time, but between how enemies act and the elaborateness of the combos you need to combat them, engaging with combat in Bayonetta is a full brain experience. And it is fun. Because Bayonetta is fun, and styling as Bayonetta looks fun, and styling as Bayonetta makes you feel like a 4D chess grandmaster.

In both of those games, you will die. You will get hurt. And you will learn. With the learning comes fulfillment, with the knowledge comes mastery, with the mastery comes fun. They are different types, and Bayonetta’s is much easier to explain the appeal of than NieR’s, but there is fun to be had there.

NieR: Automata is too kind to let me get hurt. So concerned with giving me options to feel powerful to ever let me feel weak.

Fundamentally, NieR: Automata’s problems cannot be solved by “turning up the difficulty, bro”. I killed Father Servo with a 30+ level deficit! How would cranking up the difficulty have changed that experience? Made it take four hours instead of two? For as much as I called Nier: Automata a Kirby game, even the last Kirby game I played ended with Baby’s First Bloodborne Boss, (which was wild to watch my 9-year-old-nephew absolutely smoke). The secret final boss of NieR: Automata is nothing that can’t be taken down with the tried and true strategy of “shoot gatling gun, run towards enemy, press light attack button until dead” - except maybe with the spice of chugging more potions than normal.

I see the potential for this to be the best game of all time. The set-up has such immaculate ludo-narrative harmony. For as much as the visuals clash, they make readability for gameplay impeccable. You had the backing of a publisher who would let storytellers get absolutely crazy with their biggest IPs working with a studio that had proven they could make a damn fine combat system.

But this? What actually exists? I dunno what to tell you, man.

This game is like eating at McDonalds in the heart of Tuscany.



--- secret [E]nding ---


Hey, you know why I played this whole DrakeNier franchise?

Because I had a crush on someone who said this was their favorite game of all time.

And I wanted to talk to them about it.

So I played the whole franchise.

The end.

I'm moving. I'm going through things. I'm scared.

I'm choosing what gets kept, what needs to go. I have so much to sell. I feel overwhelmed.

Today I gave away my Animal Crossing amiibo cards. I had a special binder I gave away, too. My friend and I, we couldn't help but paw through it.

Baabara was my first neighbor. Kevin was my first friend. I set his catchphrase to "bromeo," which pissed off my boyfriend to no end (and delighted me in equal measure.) I built a shrine of public works projects when Keaton left. I paid 17 million bells to a forum user for Eric. I wrote in my real world journal how much I wanted to cry when Annabelle left. She went to my sister's village - it wasn't the same.

The year I played Animal Crossing: New Leaf was the year I got and had depression the worst. I played 1,000+ hours of this game. I 100%'d it. There was not a square inch of my town that wasn't thoughtfully decorated. I had every piece of furniture, every holiday event item from every region, every piece of clothing. My house was immaculate, my museum a marvel. Places that I would legitimately enjoy spending time in. I stopped playing because I literally ran out of things to do.

I once spent 8 hours resetting my game because I was so particular about where Bianaca put her house and I refused to compromise. I didn't like the system of drawing my paths, so I covered them all with 4-leaf clover. I learned how to hack my 3DS because of this game. (Fuck you Isabelle, that bridge needs to be behind my house at an angle to get to the train station and like hell I care about your zoning laws. I OWN YOU!) Blue and gold roses, purple pansies, every square littered with opulences that made visitors describe my town of Merriam as a wonderland.

G3 B3 G4 G4 A4 G4(held) F4 E4 (rest) D4 E4 D4 C4

I spent so long writing that song and it still comes to mind so easily. (The first D4 is actually a wildcard in-game, but it’s a D4 when hummed correctly.) It worked so well as a chime entering a store. I remember how Pashmina always squeaked singing the first D4. It felt like such a wonderful anthem in so many ways for so many of its uses. I was always taken off guard when visiting another town with a different tune, and always felt so natural and at home whenever I came back to it.

Do you know how invested I was talking to that little hedgehog at the sewing machine until I became her friend? Knowing nothing about this franchise, not knowing that she was a series staple gimmick? I was ecstatic.

When Reese had a special on sharks I was at the island fishing sharks all day long.

The amount I loved these little animal critters is legitimately Fucked. Up.

Seriously.

It seemed so natural the stories that sprung up in my mind. Al and Ceaser were the weird gay couple that were ugly but happy. Cookie bullied Rhonda into moving, and then left herself when there was no one to control. Pashmina had her eye on Kevin, who only had his eye on the ball. Julian was the cool friend I didn't think I deserved to have, and Henry left because he felt the same way.

When they sang Happy Birthday to me I near bawled my eyes out. Because for as touching and heart-warming as it was to have these little spirits sharing love for me, spirits that I had loved so much, I was still, in the real world, alone and playing my 3DS on my birthday.

That's the real rub of the magic and terror of Animal Crossing. Magical because you feel real emotions. Terrifying because you can see the code. They're puppets. Dolls. Elaborate and adorable, but predictable - and you still love them all the same.

But they're kind. They're understanding. You can hurt their feelings, blow them off, mess up their yard - and they'll still write you letters when they live next door, give you presents, and stop by your house to see what you're up to. Maybe each individual interaction is annoying, or doesn't register as important. But in aggregate, those emotions stack up. Each time they give you that piece of fruit you were looking for. That rare piece of furniture that completes your set. Each time they change outfits into something so stupid or so cute that it sticks in your brain. You feel real little things. Imperfectly perfect little moments seeded in time enough to weave in with the passage of time in your real life.

When I had insomnia, Static stared at the moon with me. I remember naming my town at my sister's graduation party. I remember my parents watching the New Year's ball drop on the TV and then looking at the fireworks in Merriam. I remember sitting at the kitchen table when the town was covered in snow for the first time. I remember hunting for beetles at Tortimer Island while dying of summer heat at my uncle's place in Arizona.

I have memories. Good ones. Real places, real emotions of these happy little animal people. And yet these little animal people are not. fucking. real.

Somewhere on a back-up hard drive or a laptop I lost the charging cable to, I have the save data for the perfect date of Merriam. A day in May in a particular year. Where the hydrangeas are in bloom, and the weather is perfect, and everyone who is supposed to be there, is there.

Do you know how raw and cringe it is to talk about loving anything about this game? Like, if you don't understand the appeal of this series, GOOD. Be healthy. Have self-respect. Everyone over-shared about New Horizons because the pandemic ruined everyone's sense of shame. But loving this game is not good. It's not healthy.

At the same time.

That grammar is hiding a lot. Was loving this game healthy for me? No. But was I healthy? Would I have been healthy if I hadn’t been playing this game? Fuck no.

You need time to get invested in Animal Crossing. Real world time that you do not get back. Real world time that is, in fact, a valid currency for trying to make connections in the real world. The potential opportunity cost for getting "the most" out of Animal Crossing is wild.

I hated New Horizons because I could tell the villagers didn't want to be my friend. They wanted to be Instagram fodder. But maybe that is for the best. Because that recontextualizes the appeal of the game to being something that you show off to other humans. That the Animal Crossing aesthetic is there merely to facilitate a shared experience with other people of how you've played with your lego set.

I'm going to miss my friend. I'm putting my life into boxes. And now I get it, that once your life is in boxes, it's too late for anyone to change your mind, too late for your mind to even matter. You can't not go.

Going through those cards, reminiscing of which ones were my favorites, my sister's favorites, remembering the hours we spent cloning flowers - it made me realize how Animal Crossing gets its hooks in you. How the connection to the real world's time gets you invested, but there's no closure. You can always come back. Most of your villagers will still be there and know who you are. Your furniture will be just as you left it. So not playing means there's always the possibility of coming back, and things being a little different, but capable of being the same. But here, with these cards, I had a tangible thing to hold in my hands, in the real world. Unlocked memories. Recreating the paths I walked in that town for months. Something I could make peace with. Something I could give away. Something to pass off at the end of a season.

As I spoke with my friend, I let myself talk honestly about what these little dudes had meant to me for the first time aloud. Because I could trust him to understand what I had been going through. What it meant for me to be that invested. What I was really telling him with these silly nonsense stories. Because he had played New Horizons the same way. And he knew that when you can honestly describe how something made you feel, in a way that previously would have been so vulnerable, you've truly moved on. And I needed to know that I wasn't still the person who lost a year of his life and redirected it into Animal Crossing.

I had to take them back. He can keep the binder and Diva and the dozens of strangers who mean nothing to me. I needed to keep the cards of the villagers who were with me at the end. At the end of playing pretend. Of when I ran out of ways to play. I'm still missing Static and Zucker and Pierce.

Maybe there isn’t shame in using Animal Crossing for what it was. A bridge, a crutch, a reminder of what kindness and friendship looked like in a time where those were in short supply. Don’t we sometimes use real people the same way? Aren’t some real friendships just as shallow, but mean just as much? Few friendships last a lifetime, the same as few games are played forever.

I don't want to move. But I can't not move. I have to forgive myself for the people I used to be. I have to find grace in seeing what I learned from the experiences I would never wish on myself again. Including my ability to love Animal Crossing.

Staring at the login bonus screen realizing I have not engaged with any "gameplay" from this game for two weeks and have to admit to myself that I'm out. I was in the hospital. I have been sick. I have had no brain. I have been, in retrospect, in the perfect situation to get the most out of this game. It doesn't ask much of me, and I don't have much to give at the moment. A match made in heaven! But my behavior has shown that even when at my lowest, I would rather do literally anything else, and oftentimes nothing, than ever "play" this game again.

For additional context, I am at a hurdle in Chapter 10 that would require level grinding. Except, this game is getting discontinued, so I am awash with resources. "Level grinding" would take literally 2 minutes of me going into a menu and making some numbers go up while some consumables go down. I could make like 5 mistakes investing in the wrong stuff and it wouldn't matter. I could probably max out one dude and solo the story mode of this game. I could probably take 10 minutes to read how the combat system of this game actually works and trivialize it.

But thinking about doing any of that makes me seriously consider with recent experience if I would rather have an IV reinserted in my arm than ever touch this game again. Which is probably the clue I need that it's time to write this out of my system and move the fuck on with life.

I can't help but think of my review of DLC for the original NieR and how language gives substance to vapor in the realm of ideas. Here, NieR Re[in]carnation is NieR: The World of Recycled Vessel, but blown out in every dimension, wrapped around itself, an ouroborus eating the tail of its future child. It is such a profound perversion of gaming as an entity that I sound hyperbolic to accurately describe how incredibly awful it is. Because when a game concept gets a couple things right, there’s a handhold from which the pain of its existence feels novel, fixable. But when something is truly flawed at its core, in every structure of its being, is evil in its conception, execution, and existence, it becomes dreadfully dull.

I've played a couple mobile games now, and apart from some of the Netflix offerings, they've all been evil. But the ways they've been evil have been... mixed? Like they have a touch of humanity in them that got corrupted somehow. Like there could be a version of them that was capable of loving me. But NieR Re[in]carnation hates me in a multipronged attack that is simultaneously so inert I almost didn't recognize it as violence. I wish I had written about all of its follies and injustices when they were fresh, instead of writing about them now, after I've let them wash over me, let myself marinate, let hope turn my anger into indifference. It perfectly matches the pattern of an abuse victim becoming complacent as they learn to be helpless.

NieR Re[in]carnation game has a 3D world. You can walk around in it. It doesn't matter. It's a hallway. Like literally is only a hallway. No gameplay happens there. It has an "auto" button that has your character walk down the hallway by themself. Do you know for how many hours I resisted pressing that button? That I wanted to have some gameplay in my game? I clung so desperately to the hope that there would be a maze, something, anything to justify the existence of this fully realized HD world of hallways and my ability to control my movement in it. But no. Trying to play the game was only a waste of time. Not pressing the auto button was a waste of time.

So, wherefore art thou hallways?

When I wrote about Cats & Soup, I was jolted when I realized that the game world was not the cats, but the menus overlaid on the cats. That the cats were a pretense and the game was the menu. I could buy that the world of the hallways was the pretense of NieR Re[in]carnation, and in a way they are, but then where is the gameplay?

In truth, NieR Re[in]carnation is layers of pretense that never gets to anything.

I have to marvel at the ingeniousness of the triviality. At the same time, this is not the work of a human being. This is the inhuman efficiency of attention hacking only possible by multiple passes within an organization that has memetically learned from other organizations.

Let’s start at the surface. There are hallways. The hallways are a pretense to getting to “levels”. These “levels” have stories in them with light interactivity, very simple visual novel elements. The stories in the levels largely have nothing to do with the world in the hallways. Maybe they converge later than when I stopped playing, but I’m hours in and my god can I not care if I’m wrong. But all of these stories can be skipped, because there is combat. So all the storytelling is set dressing to the combat, itself a pretense.

I have to interject here that the stories are bad. They are vague, simple sketches, nothing more than premises and flavors. But separate from their vapidness, they are bad stories. They are mean, they are droll, they are dour, full of cruelty and irony and melancholy. There is no love. Relationships exist only to exert pain on others. It will say “these people loved each other” only so it can relish in someone’s death and maiming, in the survivor’s suffering and guilt. They are uniformly dreadful in tone, only broken up by the spice of convoluted incomprehensibility when sci-fi and magical elements are introduced. I could spend paragraphs tearing apart each and every one if I was live blogging my experience with them, but thankfully they have been culled from my memory banks. Imagining anyone sees these stories as “rewards”, or worse yet, “incentives”, to engage with this game - I can’t even imagine watching these on youtube without finding the autoplay ads more interesting.

Then we get to the combat, and realize how much the storytelling doesn’t matter, because whatever you fight is abstracted into black blob monsters that have no physical presence or reality to the story of the level. So you might think, ok, this is it. Everything else was a pretense for this combat system - until you see that this game is an autobattler. Combat can happen entirely without your input. In fact, you often get rewards for pressing an attack button ONCE during a battle. Because the game needs artificial incentivisation for you to engage with the only game-like gameplay the game has to offer. Even as it also has a fast forward button, and an auto-battle button. And if you get far enough into the game, you get things called “Skip Tickets”, that let you repeat a battle for experience points / rewards for leveling up your dudes without having to actually experience the battle again at all.

Early on in the game, when I was still in tutorial land, and hadn’t even gotten to the gacha system yet, the tutorial character said “Don’t worry, this game plays just like most others.” I at first thought that phrase was hilariously useless to me, trying out one of these gacha games for the first time - it told me jack shit! But the more I learned about this game, the more that phrase has just borrowed deeper and deeper into the pit of my gut, blossoming into a kind of disgust that would melt any business executive that came into contact with it.

Because the combat system itself is a pretense for - the gacha system. Spin a roulette wheel and get weapons and characters to use in combat. Some are shiny and have big numbers that make combat easier.

Now, I tried this game after the premium store was closed, because the game’s end is imminent. So I have no idea what the monetary value of any of this bullshit would be. Nobody tell me or I might become a terrorist. But. I just have to say.

The gacha pull animation is … kinda lame?

Abstract boxes turn into coffins that slam down and turn into .jpg’s of Ebon Spears and Emerald Bracers and everything about the colors and the environment and the music is just so… without gravitas, without playfulness, without anything that I can imagine incentivizing another pull. I have enough premium currency for like, 10 or more gacha pulls, and separate from the decision paralysis of there being a million events going on the for the game’s end, after my free daily pulls, it’s been such a boring experience that I’ve actively ex’d out of the summoning menu and often logged off of the game because its so dull. I cannot believe this is where the money is supposed to be made.

And that’s when I realized the gacha system itself is only a front for where the true addiction is supposed to lie - the character upgrade menus. You upgrade characters. You upgrade weapons. You upgrade skills. You upgrade teddybears. (That is not a joke.) You upgrade instances of characters. All that take varying amounts of money, experience, currencies, resources, and most importantly, time.

I thought I’d be mad that the gacha system has ridiculously low percentages for getting the good shit. I thought I’d be mad that getting a cool character is only the beginning - that you need to get their low drop rate multiple times to fully upgrade them. And like, yeah, that’s pretty evil, even without considering the compounding evil of charging real world money every time. I don’t want to underserve that. It is morally indefensible. Maybe I’m only less worked up because I have no idea how much any of it used to cost. But I can relate to the time. The insane amount of time that is required to fiddle with all these numbers to get past combat encounters to clear story episodes to walk down more hallways. All journey, no destination, but you’re not traveling with friends, and you’re not going to make any. This is a journey that can only be completed with misplaced investment into a beautifully drawn delusion.

I feel so incredibly dead inside thinking about how there are people who like this game. I read about this game’s existence and thought, “oh neat, I’ll get to play a gacha game without all the gacha elements hanging over the experience, and in the NieR series that I’ve been playing through!” And it had fans, and they loved it, and expressed so much concern for this game’s preservation. How there was so much art, so much story that needed to be preserved for the future. And a part of me really wanted to experience something magical about a shared experience with a piece of art that will never be possible again.

But after trying, sincerely trying, I’m just scared. Because this game fucking hates me. It hates you. It hates everyone. I can’t even tell how personally it hates people, because I don’t know how much it can even conceive of humans as people. It hates me for wanting to find an experience worth having within it, even as its loading screen begs me to appreciate the vistas of its hallways and listen to its soundtrack with headphones. Why does it do that? Why is it so desperate for me to think of it as art?

Because it is not. It just fucking isn’t. Artists worked on this, but this is not art. This is not even video game as product. This is not even video game mechanic as health insurance website design. This is a concentrated psychological attack. It has many beautiful elements to it wrapped up in an IP that begs you to think about the interestingness of its ideas more than its content, begging you to find value in what it has to offer as well. All a trick, a ruse, to get you nice and inoculated to being dead inside to get stuck in its number go up factory work.

I can see the thread for how investment happens. The visuals for walking through the hallways are interesting enough you want to keep going. The stories are delivered piece meal, so you might as well see what the next section looks like. The combat doesn’t require much mental effort, so you might as well grind for a bit. Any individual element sucks, like really sucks, but not in a way that hurts, that causes pain. So if you’re used to getting something out of one of the forms of engagement being teased here, you press on. And then you’ve made a habit, and then you’ve learned some of how the loop works, and then you get curious what kinds of side quests you could do, because you want some control over this experience again. And choosing to do a side quest over a main quest is really the most purposeful engagement you could hope to get out of this app. And then there are enough resources and numbers to manage with art that’s just pretty enough to look at that it keeps on happening.

I hated Cats & Soup and thought it was evil, but I could get it. I could have sympathy for the societal forces that could make one want to give that game some time. But this one? Naw. Playing this game, loving this game, you have been hacked. I want to give you hugs and milk and cookies and a 3DS and / or PS Vita so you know there are good things in life.

If anyone defends this game because it has Lore™ pertaining to the DrakeNieR universe I am going to implode.

Oh hey, I started out actually really liking this! And then it kept going.

Video game narratives exist in a weird realm where sometimes the writing doesn’t need a plot so much as a pretense. What would pass as thread-bare justification in passive mediums can exist as crucial context for hours of a game experience. Because invariably, whatever time spent in the plot is dwarfed by whatever buffoonery the player will engage in.

The previous Drakengard and NieR games have bounced off of me because their balance between pretense, plot, and presentation have been all over the place. They’ve been full of fun and crazy ideas interspersed with experiences that are bafflingly terrible. I’ve never known what I should be taking seriously and what I should be rolling with, what’s intentional and what’s coincidence.

So imagine my surprise when Drakengard 3 opens with the dumbest, most irreverent set-up yet almost immediately won me over. Our main character, Zero, is a goddess, on a mission with her pet dragon to kill all the other goddesses. Not for any noble reason. She’s just greedy. She wants to be the only goddess in the world. And so she’s gonna murder a million dudes until she gets what she wants.

There is something so refreshing about a concept so stupid that immediately elevates the stupidity of the anime cliches of all the one-dimensional supporting cast. We know how this game will flow from the word go - we’ll kill a bunch of goons and then have a boss fight and kill one of the sisters and then on to the next world. How can it matter how well written those characters are? What better way to make use of their screen time than to lean into their irrelevance to give the voice actors a chance to chew the scenery for a couple minutes and earn their paycheck?

If the whole game had just been Zero as a sexy anime lady version of Wario, I was ready to love this game.

Unfortunately, Drakengard 3 couldn’t leave well enough alone and started getting wrapped up in its own lore, quickly losing its core appeal and turning into everything I hated about NieR.

Where NieR started serious and then got absurd, Drakengard 3 started as farce and then tried to turn into drama. This Yoko Taro Team must be obsessed with the idea of the Grand Recontextualization™ - of having a twist so epic that it makes you think about the whole game differently and proves how smart and cool they are for being so clever.

I really think they should stop.

Because I thought they had finally learned that having a serious story was getting in the way of their strengths. They’re not good storytellers! They are pranksters and comedians!

In my notes from my first session with the game, I used the character Dito as a great example of why these characters haven't been working for me in previous games. Take Kaine from NieR: she’s supposed to be hiding markings on her body, but her outfit is a battle bakini with lace that does not conceal her ass crack. So every part of her body that she wants to hide she covers in bandages. It’s so stupid when she could just - wear long sleeved clothes like a normal person! It’d be one thing if her character was comedic, but everything about her backstory and functioning in the plot of that game is played straight and tragic. But the game and characters also can’t help but make pot-shots at how stupid her choice of clothing is.

Back to Dito. He’s a disciple of a sexy lady whose personality is that she has big boobs and loves sex. But the game goes the extra length to take that character dynamic to its conclusion - he’s her unwilling sex slave. Not implied, directly stated. He eventually kills her for it.

He should be traumatized. But he immediately turns around to be an inert sex pest against Zero. But then later its stated that he and Zero have definitely fucked. Once things are taken to their conclusion, they’re inverted again, because the whole point of everything is the joke. We’re working entirely in pretenses. He’s as dramatic or stupid as the moment needs him to be, and that never changes over the course of the game. But the characters believe it’s all real, keep marrying the joke, and thus it all works.

And everything in Drakengard 3 is like this. Of course Zero wouldn’t wear clothes to get warm in the snow level because ~ aesthetic ~. Of course the in-universe reason for why she doesn’t ride her dragon all the time and we don’t dragon blast everything is because she thinks the dragon smells bad - a reason that is funny regardless of whether it is 100% fixable or not.

What elevated the presentation to me was Drakengard 3’s intentional use of video game menus and structures to elevate this feeling of farce. Levels end in really anti-ciimactic ways. Horrible cutscenes with multiple characters dying get interrupted with the least satisfying Mission Complete screen. It’s hilarious! I laughed out loud when Zero and team get drowned in a snow drift, and the title of the game appears as if the credits will start playing. Then Zero punches her way out of the snow and back on screen. Her goal is stupid, her game is stupid, but they exist to play off each other and be fun.

I felt like this dude had finally hit his stride in realizing that having a serious story was getting in the way. If your interest is in anime bullshit, and you’re not dumb enough to give it to me unironically, then at least don’t ruin the fun by accidentally doing the serious parts of the story well. Drakengard 1? Too edgy without messaging, bite, humor, or point. Nier? Too good at getting me to buy in to its characters to enjoy the twists of what the developer thought was more fun and interesting, when I thought their interests were dumb and bad. Drakengard 3? No content, only filler, A+ love it.

And that’s where I WOULD have liked to end the review if there wasn’t MORE OF THAT SAME STUPID LORE DISEASE.

I thought as a prequel to everything else, Drakengard 3 would be safe - but no. There is a prequel novel. There is a prequel manga series. Hours of context not in the game that attempts to humanize or justify these charcoal sketches of anime tropes. To explain why there’s time travel and robots and magic and angels and dragons.

And without any of that, the second half of the game stops being fun! It goes full drama in ways that could only possibly be cathartic if I was invested in all that auxillary material that was never officially translated!

So, so, so disappointed, and that’s before getting to the ending.

I’m glad I found a video explaining to me how this final boss was supposed to be mean, separate from a character action game ending with an 8 minute rhythm mini game. Because knowing when something is fair makes a huge difference in my mental stamina for trying to win. This was not a duel, but a battle of spite. Of a devloper who turned the joke from the game taking itself seriously to the joke being that *I* was taking the game seriously enough to get all the weapons to see the final ending.

Like, what is the point of that.

I wrote in my review of Drakengard that some ideas lack nuance. That was in the context of subject matter, and how some forms of evil do not have enough depth to be mined for meaning. Here, I have to acknowledge that video games present a unique opportunity for creators to spite their audience. And I think with enough intentional malice, that same lack of potential nuance emerges.

I beat it. I hated it. It took hours. I screamed so loud when I won I made my roommate slip in the shower. I was shaking during the final credits. And the overwhelming emotion I felt was release, while my mind contined to chant “i hate this i hate this i hate this i hate this i hate this i hate this…”

But did I realize anything profound for having done so? No. My respect for this team went down again. But I have a theory as to why this series and this game and this ending can resonate with people.

Because games are such collaborative projects that it is really, really hard to feel like a human made them. To feel like you are in conversation with a creator who had anything to say. To make games functional to play requires meticulous sanding, and binding their myriad systems together results in many unintentional experiences. Think of how the menu layout of Ocarina of Time turned the water temple from a simple puzzle concept to an infamous example of tedium for the medium, because it took too many clicks to put on a pair of boots.

So when an experience like this can solidify behind a unified front, laser targeted at the player, and the message is a giant “Fuck You,” some people are going to be happy to be spoken to. The novelty of being reached out to is so highly valued that it eclipses the insult.

I cannot respect that. Good video games are in conversation with the player all the time. But good game design that isn’t abrasive is invisible. Because the possibilities of what an author can add to an experience by drawing attention to themselves are not many. You can make jokes, you can make metatextual commentary, or, as is the case here, stick your finger in the eye of your audience.

Well. I don’t think that’s very cool, and while I don’t know if its intentional or not, I think this guy is a hack.

I am growing concerned as to why people praised NieR: Automata so much since that is next on the docket, but maybe it was the rare case where someone grew the hell up.

3 stars, B rank, wish it had stayed as good as it started.

It's impossible to predict what games give you comfort in what ways. I thought I almost died this week, and on the other side of that, I can't help but think of my time with Bravely Default.

I devoured this game at a time where it felt like my life was ending. My 3DS activity log showed that I played it in chunks averaging 8+ hours a session. To say that I thoroughly replaced reality with this game is an understatement.

I needed to find meaning and beauty in the world, and in Bravely Default, I found enough to tide me over. The repetitive nature of filling out the bestiary, maxing out every job class, even the repetitive nature of the game itself. When it reused bosses, I didn't blink an eye. I dutifully went through the long way of beating this game without a single critical thought, of any of the ways that I could have cleverly ended the game sooner. I needed that structure. I needed to not think about the freeform mess of reality around it.

When you need to find beauty in something, you do. I think Bravely Default still has one of the best soundtracks of all time. When I first heard the theme of the Land of Radiant Flowers, I almost cried. Obviously I was in a vulnerable state of mind, and now I don't think its one of the strongest tracks in the game. But I think about that experience a lot.

There were jokes I laughed at in this game that are objectively lame. I took screenshots on MiiVerse to save for posterity (lol) that I failed to remember the significance of within a month.

But that has to speak to something in the strengths of this game that I could use it as the refuge I needed it to be.

I remember very little about what it was like to play this game, because for a long time I needed to forget everything about that period of my life. Including this game. But like the experience I was trying to avoid, Bravely Default became a part of me. I still say "grgrgrgr" in real life the way Edea does. I have had Victory's Chime as my default ringtone for over a decade at this point and forget where it came from.

I'd like to think that was a form of healing. That I used that vulnerability to slot in the potential for something beautiful when I was at a low point full of pain. Maybe Bravely Default was a vapid thing to latch onto, but it was harmless. And at that time, as evaluated by my future current self, it was exactly what I needed. Or, now it has to be what I needed. Because I still got so much beauty out of it.

On its own merits, Bravely Default is an S-tier soundtrack on a mediocre game. Solidly B-rank, hard to recommend playing much more than recommending listening to the soundtrack.

But maybe the real lesson I needed to learn, or the lesson I taught myself through Bravely Default, was finding how to love something imperfect when it felt like the world would not love an imperfect me.

Drakengard 3 is bizarre because it is 80% hot anime trash fun times and then randomly shifts gears to be something almost cool and compelling, and that 20% is often when One is on-screen. When combined, they bring each other down, but here, sectioned off into her own little pocket dimension, One and her story get to flaunt their own kind of appeal.

One's Prologue is what I had kind of expected and would have liked all the other DLC's to be - short stories that expand upon teases of characters and scenarios breezed past in the main game. One's Prologue also shows how that was kind of impossible for any character besides One and Zero, because sisters Two through Five existed as character designs for boss fights and nothing more. One even has two interesting characters to bring with her - her constructed brother, and a dragon!

But even done well, and with nothing interesting to complain about as for the other DLC's, there still isn't a ton here to justify its existence. Maybe these would have been cool to have worked into the base game somewhere, unconstrained by the 4 level length of these DLC episodes - we only needed one or two to learn everything interesting there is to learn.

If the story or lore mattered in this game at all, then this would be the one worth a YouTube watching.

God, is this the worst one of the first four DLCs? In some regards, maybe, but Five's is the trashiest and Three's is the most embarassing. Two's is just eye-rolling, even if it made me wonder about a better timeline.

Like all of these DLCs, these are excuses for trying out a new weapon that Zero can use in the base game once you complete the DLC's story. Unlike the other DLCs, Two's follows a self-contained plot that connects the four levels that actually answers a "mystery" from the base game: When Zero meets Two, why is Two a non-verbal shell of a person?

The answer is incredibly dumb in a way that gets worse the more I think about it.

Because this game and these DLC's aren't real stories. These aren't real characters. They're charades. Pretenses. The base game makes fun of the self-serious tropes it peddles. Five's DLC makes fun of its own trashy horniness. The writing is fully in service of getting to whatever type of fun the creator has in mind as fast as possible as shallowly as possible.

So, this DLC elects for psychological horror in the most trite, naked, embarrasing way I could imagine. and like, why tho.

Because it's not funny! It's not making fun of anything! There are no characters winking at the camera! Everything is just played straight, with these card-board character cut-outs that were meant to be garnish for Zero's storyline. They killed monsters and looked after orphans and were happy and in love. But then a mishap happens and they lose everything, leaving Two a husk.

I have to remind myself that the plot doesn't matter in this game because otherwise I would start nit-picking about how the mechanics of how they lose everything raise a billion unanswerable questions of how anything magic works in this universe. There are no rules, only repetition for ritual for gameplay purposes dressed up as rules. As soon as the developers want something else to happen, it's just magic again and it can do anything. Pah.

I'm just baffled at the range of weird badness in this DLC set. Why are some anime beach episode filler bullshit and others trying to be serious drama character studies? This is almost as jarring as Rosalina's storybook backstory in Super Mario Galaxy. Not what we're here for, sorry!

Ok, so all of these DLCs are bad, but at least they keep being bad in different ways that give me something to write about for each one. This one is bad in two unique flavors: its a gauntlet DLC, and the writing is a perfect distillation of bad chained writing.

The other two DLCs I played before this one at least had some spice in gameplay. Either some riding around on dragons, fighting giant, juicy crabs, genociding some sky pirate elves - this one has the gimmick of, "fight the same enemy multiple times, but sometimes it'll be a different speed / a different size / there will be more of them." Like, come on. Throwing around the term "copy + paste" content is often reductive, but yeah, that's what this is. It's embarrassing.

What's more bizarre is the writing, which sets out to "answer questions" in a way I don't know how people fall for. In the base game of Drakengard 3, we know that Three makes puppets, monsters, and chimeras, and her desciple leaves her for two reasons. (He says he is disturbed by her creations, but really is just sad she's grown bored of their sex life.) I'm not sure what needed to be expanded upon in this scenario!

And the game sure doesn't either, because we learn nothing new. At the point I'm in the base game, having beaten routes A and B with C and D remaining, there is no explanation for how magic works in this universe. I only know that every one of these sisters has a "song" that gives them the means to be a boss fight. So how does Three make her monsters? Is she good at a combination of magic and science? Is her magic good for more than summoning her boss fight mechanics? Do all of the sisters have the ability to use magic in a way that does more than make a boss fight? I mean, none of those answers really matter, but that seems like the kind of information I'd expect for how Three differs from how her other sisters are presented!

Alternatively, we could ignore the logistics and peer into the why she does this "bad stuff". All this DLC gives us is... because she's like that. She has a curious nature, so she does messed Frankensteining on animals, monsters, and humans alike. Not for any particular goal. No real attachment to what she creates.

These DLCs have been trying to be funny, and since Three is such a charisma vacuum, we get more dialog from the dragon Gabriella than the others. Who goes on rants about office style mysogony, and other topics that make absolutely no sense for the setting and world these characters inhabit. It this serie's shock-value style comedy at its most desperate, which is a real shame since I've been enjoying elements of it this go-around.

1 star, D rank, the writing is so bad that it starts losing its frame of reference. If you want to be irreverant and absurd, you still have to be intentional as to what you are joking about, and mindful of what the assumed frame of reference would be for your audience. Three's desciple, Octa, is the supposed butt of many jokes for being a horny old man. But in the text of this DLC, he wasn't hopelessly lusting as a sex pest, but bringing forward real greviences in a long-term relationship - only to be brushed aside without any communication from the other party. If anything, this makes his "jokes" less funny in the main game, in a way where I am convinced that was not intentional. Not because I have strong views on the subject matter, but because Three was such a nothing character that I would happily root for anyone slighted by her for any reason.

Also, her scissors sword for Zero to use in the base game super sucks yet again. Why are the most enduring parts of the DLCs the worst ones???

So after playing the first of these DLCs, I had my expectations appropriately lowered as to what kind of experiences I was in for. The "lore" I got from Five's Prologue was that Five chose her domain of The Land of Seas because she thought the ocean was pretty. Neat. Drakengard 3: Four's Prologue pleasantly surprised me by having some actual recontextualization for its titular sister.

Four's Prologue was the first time in Drakengard 3 that I felt I was playing anything at all resembling the original Drakengard. We hop on a dragon and do some ol' fashioned senseless genocide - while the dragon says how terrible we are for telling her to do the thing that she is not at all resisting doing. And you know, that works for me a lot better when the murderous psychopath enjoying the bloodbath is a wannabe animu waifu rather than a self-serious Western-styled strong and silent protagonist type. Because there's no depth to be had in shaming the player for engaging with a game in the only way the game's mechanics will let them progress. Trying to dress up that mean-spirited nonsense is a waste of time - I much prefer the game being in on the absurdity with me.

I almost caught myself writing about the plot, but it doesn't matter. What does matter is that more than Five's Prologue, Four's Prologe has coherence to the range of flavors that are in the base game of Drakengard 3. While Five's Prologue was hampered by having the most one note character to work with, Four's Prologue has just enough subversion to convey the same feeling, the same theming as the first game. Four pretends to be a good person because she likes the veneer of the moral high ground. She espouses valuing chastity only as a means of controlling her subordinate, who has developed a humiliation kink to compensate for the fact that, (and this is canon in the main game), he sucks at fucking and is insecure about it.

In the main game, the protagonist, Zero, makes fun of Four for being a virgin, as if that defines her personality. It's played for a joke because Zero is being insensitive and cruel, when Four seems like an earnest person who wants to avoid conflict. This DLC flips that on its head to prove that Zero was right, actually! Four's professed values are nonsense, and her getting flustered at Zero's prodding are not because she is shy, but because she doesn't want the facade to drop. A bit she's so comitted to she dies for it, a twist in contextual understanding that is so dumb and petty as to wrap around into being amazing.

But as DLC, as a real thing I had to pay money for, like, in no way, shape, or form was this worth it. (Her unlockable weapon for Zero sucks!) If a couple of the levels had been in the game proper, like, maybe that would have been neat! But for how much context there is to be stretched over four levels, with character dynamics so shallow they can't sustain more than one or two conversation patterns ... ugh.

Next!

For the love of all that is holy... I feel absolutely insane.

I've been playing Drakengard 3, and having a pretty good time! I've played Drakengard, and NieR, and have been told they intersect in some way, and that maybe there'll be Easter Eggs for NieR: Automata if I play through these games. So I'm trying to go through things in order. And there are many helpful guides and posts out there! People who love this series of series are very sincere in wanting to provide the best potential accomodations to new fans! They go out of their way to include fan translations of pamphlets, novels, chronological orders, release orders, suggested orders, thematic orders - all to say that I found my answer of when to play which of the DLCs in relation to the main game of Drakengard 3. Without spoilers! Super commendable! I felt very cared for.

And now having played this, I feel fucking lied to.

Because not once in any of the couple dozen posts or so that I consulted to make sure I was following a sense of consensus and not falling for the terribleness of Google's 2020's algorithm did anyone say how completely, utterly disposably garbage this is. That is true love right there.

I cannot help but think how much this highlights the importance of art criticism for preservation purposes. I've heard this game is great on an emulator, but even then, how many people are going to go through the effort of experiencing this for themselves. What will be preserved of this experience are the cryptic, helpful messages of fans, saying that you'll "learn more about the personalities of the sisters" if you play these DLCs, or see them as list items in timelines that makes it seem like Something Important Happened within them. That's why I bought them! Because the PS3 store's days are numbered, and I didn't want to miss out!

Instead, Drakengard 3: Five's Prologue is none of those things. Look at the poster on this website. Do you see her boobs? Do you think her personality is "boobs?" Because you are right. Her personality is boobs. That's what her personality was in Drakengard 3. Did more screen time on her own "flesh her out"? No. It just reinforced exactly how much her personality is boobs.

This DLC is, in essence, a new weapon that you get to try out over the course of four (recycled) levels with some new voice work for boob lady and her twinky sex slave. Where we get to hear him complain about all the sex they have, and how annoying it is to carry around her extensive collection of clothes, delicacies, and sex toys. Where the "story", the pretense for getting to try out this new weapon, is boob lady keeps hearing about new food she wants to try and murders a bunch of dudes on her way there because she keeps getting duped into going to dangerous places.

I had similar thoughts when I played NieR's DLC, of how bizarre it is that art objects too obscure to procure casually come to live entirely by how other people talk about them. What're the chances I'm in the first 99% of humans who will ever experience this anime trash? What if my take-down of its exitence is the most in-depth look that ever survives of this 2010's gaming artifcat, when expectations for DLC were different, even if maybe they haven't changed all that much since then?

I feel slightly odd giving this DLC 1 star when I like Drakengard 3 a lot so far, and this is... well, more of that! The sense of humor is the same. What it's going for isn't really different. It's a crass project that exists in the same realm as the Kingsman movies, where it takes an implied joke so far as to make it uncomfortable and then funny again. Like, if a woman had Boob Lady Personality, with all the trills and coos of a poor voice actress trying to make eating crab sound sultry, then yeah, she probably would own a lot of sex toys! And if she was a goddess, she probably would have a boy toy around who'd get bored and resentful of it eventually! But also, in the base game, he murders her! So was he actually being harmed by their dynamic? Or is the absurdity that someone could be resentful of having regular sex with a literal sex goddess supposed to be the joke part? I'm not taking a position, and I don't really care, I'm just saying that I know the ballpark this game's energy is coming from.

But ultimately, Drakengard 3: Five's Prologue, and the other three prologues I played tonight, get 1 star because they are just complete wastes of time to experience. (I purchased the Japanese voice pack, and that apparently only works on the base game! So the incompleteness of the package already made my eye twitch from the word go!) Drakengard 3 gets away with many elements being stretched thin by having so many elements to juggle - taking a gag character with the shallowest of gimmicks and throwing them into gag situations places the onus entirely on the writing and the comedic timing, and there just isn't the budget or care to make anything work in a 2014 DLC episode's amount of time.

So for posterity, for the curious internet explorers of the future: NO YOU DON'T NEED TO PLAY THIS TO UNDERSTAND ANYTHING ABOUT DRAKENGARD OR NIER OR ANYTHING. JESUS TAP-DANCING CHRIST.

What is difficulty anymore. (Affectionate, ponderous.)

Games like Jusant and Cocoon feel like they are important links in the evolution of the medium. There is a rejection of modern game mechanics that grasps at something truer, purer than many games allow themselves to be. However, there are still enough vestiges to place where Jusant exists in the evolutionary timeline.

Jusant is simple. There are no unlockable abilities. There are no upgrades. You have one length of rope, three placeable climbing anchors, and a set amount of stamina throughout the entire game. As you cannot jump off ledges you cannot climb up to, you cannot die. The environment changes, but your basic gameplay mechanics are the same:

- Climb hand over hand between hand-holds
- Jump from a hand-hold to something else grabbable
- Place anchors
- Repel from or towards your last placed anchor
- Swing from an anchor to reach a space horizontally

Miss a hand-hold, and you fall to your last self-selected checkpoint, or otherwise attempt the climb again. Your stamina runs out the faster you climb and the more you jump; standing on solid ground resets it again. (Though honestly I don't remember what the penalty for running out of stamina is because I don't think it ever happened in my playthrough.)

It all sounds so simple and elegant, and the initial experience with the game is fastidious enough to feel unique. Each hand is controlled by the corresponding shoulder button. While one hand is gripping a ledge, the control stick moves the other hand in search of purchase. It’s a clunky introduction that gives the impression this will be a game that needs precision and careful thought.

But here is where my thoughts about difficulty come in. Once I got into the rhythm of alternating presses of the shoulder buttons, the uniqueness of selecting my next hand-hold felt trivial. The player character’s hands are so magnetic that their placement hardly ever mattered. Especially as the game tried introducing more environmental mechanics. When climbing a simple rock face filled with purchases, this mechanic had some weight to it. But when the game needed to convey more environmental / visual information, and thus constrict my hand-holds in linearity to accommodate, there no longer was any pretense of expression.

Ultimately, the slightly unorthodox controls are, in execution, more texture than anything else. There is no depth to this arrangement - for all that hand placement mattered, I might as well have been pressing one button instead of two. I am not sure this is a complaint. But it dovetails into my general thoughts about this game and difficulty.

Jusant is a game of very mild tension. I know that the lives system in games is archaic - conceptually, most games do not have a penalty for poor performance more creative than wasting some of the player’s time. The only question was whether that was watching a life counter tick down, or possibly starting over from an earlier level, or even the title screen. In a well designed game, making the player repeat content is not necessarily a bad thing, if the content being replayed reinforces skill proficiency that will be necessary at the previous point of failure. But many indie games, and even some modern big budget titles, have recognized that if you are not doing that, you are just wasting the players time.

So Jusant does not have a health system or a life system. Falling from any attempted climb has the very basic cause and effect of having to start over again from the bottom. And, I respect this. I really do. Jusant is not a game that needs those systems to be interesting - they add nothing to the other climbing systems that are in place. However, I had the experience of seeing success as an inevitability more than an aspiration - I just needed to persist.

I mentioned the controls first because my failures were rarely from a situation where I thought the game was demanding too much from me. Really, more often than not I just didn’t have the camera facing the right way to see the next objective and was sending myself on a mini fool’s errand. Moment to moment, technical execution did not feel like a threat. Minute to minute, failure did not feel like a threat. So level to level, the feeling of any kind of threat, and thus any kind of achievement from success, felt less and less like anything.

I think now of my experience with Celeste. Both are games “about climbing”, and both put you right back at the start should you fail a climb. However, Celeste frames each failure as death. You explode, the screen shakes. Celeste demanded more from me in technical execution, so much more so that there was incredible tension in repeated attempts, even if the game was overall kinder to my persistence than Jusant. In Jusant, you just fall. Celeste feels more visceral, but in reality, it lets me try again faster than Jusant, where my dude has to fall, pick himself back up, and walk back over to where he can try again. Not only that, the game was unprepared for the colossally stupid ways I found to fail. Multiple times in Jusant did I fail a jump, get my rope wound over some coral, and struggle to figure out how to repel myself back to the starting line. I wanted the option to cut my rope and “die” so badly, instead of figuring out what combination of anchoring, swinging and repelling would give me enough rope length back to start over.

At the same time, those challenges of happenstance were some of the most interesting puzzles I had to solve in the whole game.

I don’t think Jusant needs to be a difficult game. I don’t know how much it would have been improved by going full Death Stranding or Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. Maybe it would have been great, maybe it would have lost all interest because people only wanted a game with climbing aesthetic and mechanical “vibes” more than anything with technical challenges. Because I was not solving great puzzles in Jusant. It was not a challenge of physical execution.

At its core, I think Jusant is just a cozy vibes game. A game that invites imagining that it is doing things more interesting than it provides.

3 stars, B rank. I did not read a single word of the collectibles because my god why the hell does this game have trinket-itis for when you’re walking around and not climbing??? Like, I would have liked this game and most games a lot better if it had zero trinkets, but if it needed to have trinkets, why aren’t they obtained by engaging with the central game mechanics? Maybe it's unfair damnation by association, but the proximity made me feel as if the developers saw all of their somewhat interesting transversal mechanics as steps along an amusement park ride rather than worthy of being thought about in terms of joy of movement.

A solid first effort, would be highly interested in what direction a sequel or knock-off would attempt.

With this, I embrace that I am become hipster, destroyer of taste and my own sanity.

This game is a fucking disaster. One level crashed on me three times in a row. It’s an indie game! How many Cells of the mighty PS3 could its polygonal cel shading possibly be smoking? I thought the game developers had cleverly side-stepped needing to do in-depth object collision by having the player characters fly, but nope, escort-mission-esque bullshit of grounded characters is a central game mechanic!

Okabu is fastidious, tedious bullshit, and I love it.

Meant to be a co-op game, we were able to get a Dualshock 4 working for the demo, but not the full game proper. In that glimpse of what Okabu was meant to be, excellent. It is flawed and frictive, but great. Maybe after all the glossy flawless slop Nintendo’s put out over the last couple years (🥲) I’m hungry for something with some spice.

But maybe co-op games are where bad games are allowed to ascend. Where the fun is playing with another human through the bullshit, being in on the unfairness of it all.

Okabu is very well designed for a kind of immersive shared experience. For one, it looks like a joke. Blocky character models, NPC dialog that was obviously one white guy pretending to be a cartoon character, painfully obvious “go here” arrows painted every awful color of a 1960’s mathematics textbook (brown?????). But within that barrenness, that lack of excess and borderline ugly art direction, comes an extreme level of readability. I know what the game wants me to do, I know where the game wants me to go. Yet somehow trying to travel the equivalent distance from a kitchen to a dining room feels fucking impossible.

At the mercy of a fixed but always moving camera, the playable cloud whales get stuck on everything. Stupid robots shoot missiles from off screen, buddies get left behind, chickens need to be herded, and did my goat run off a cliff again??? Where did the fisherman with the plunger go, I need him! It’s all so stupid! What do you mean I failed the target time to get the time medal, I thought I was doing really good this round!

(I absolutely adore the implication that every goat, chicken, bull, and elf yells “FUCK!” (!#?!) when their garbage pathing has them run into an obstacle, like a rock 1 dm too high or a wall that bent too aggressively near their personal bubble.)

Because in a game being cute, and asking so little of my brain, and yet being so hard to execute what I KNOW I want to do, there’s room for real fun, real magic. Not the kind of “tee hee someone at Nintendo snuck in their Luigi Inflation fetish into Wonder,” but incomprehensible lines like “why is there sand on my anthropologist”

I’m being completely serious here. A game being slightly broken makes everything you do in it incredibly dumb. It could crash at any moment. Maybe the sound will cut out. But in this game, if everything worked smoothly - if the controls didn’t wildly vary between stiff and overly sensitive, if there was a shred of quality of life programmed in between some of the most on / off animations, maybe it’d be cute and playable - but maybe also it’d be boring as fuck! Where would be the drama of trying to control a barrel in a whirlpool? That sense of camaraderie from fighting not against your own belief in yourself, but the foe of the world itself?

Maybe that’s it! A level of meta unobtainable in normal games! Fighting against the game’s objectives is one thing, but feeling confident in being able to grasp the meta of the game and having to fight against the reality of the game, but not in a way where the game wants to do that. The game wants to be easy! It’s on your side! But its so bad at being on your side that it wraps around into being a passive enemy! Which creates a beautiful irony against the reality of what you must face!

But then I had to play the rest of the game single player and my god did that magic run out by the end.

So here I am left with a completely unsolvable quandary of what kind of score reflects the reality of Okabu. Like, if I were anyone who wrote for Metacritic, it has way too many glitches and crashes far too often to ever get a 7/10. And a good portion of my time with the game included a lot of bullshit. But after playing the demo multiplayer, I could see the philosophy this game was designed around. I could see that everywhere in how every level worked. Every level always needed two things to be done at once, which, in multiplayer, gives everyone a job and keeps everyone busy. The chaos of the camera trying to compromise between your zooming characters as you both get distracted by collectibles and blindsighted by enemies and trying to pick up whatever you just dropped and forgetting where you set it down - it’s wonderful.

But in single player, that gets turned into trying to get through a series of tasks that has you constantly switching between people in a micro-manage-y way for a game that is chugging. Without that spark, that glimpse into what Okabu was supposed to be, there is no way that I would have had the interest to get as good at this stupid game as I did to start seeing the potential for fun in becoming a speedrunning efficiency machine.

So do I rate Okabu - on it’s demo, that was good? On my imagining of that demo being even better for a full game length of co-op, which is hypothetical? On its technical performance, which is indefensibly baffling? On my enjoyment, which was irrational?

Because I know for a fact I bought this game to be a hipster. I panicked when I heard the PS3 store was closing and the only game I had played on my friend’s system was Metal Gear Solid 2 HD, which turned out to become my favorite game of all time. So what else was on this system I had previously skipped out on??? Was it flooded with gems that no one had ever heard of, that were soon to be lost to time?

So then I dropped way more money into my account than was wise or needed and probably maybe single-handledly got Sony to decide not to close the PS3 PSN store after all.

Okabu was the perfect example of what I imagined I was after. Something overlooked, stuck on the PS3 system, weird, and maybe amazing. I have imagined loving this game for years. But my friend wants his PS3 back this year and we never got around to buying another Sixaxis controller so I had to actually play this idea of a game.

Maybe I’ve crazied myself into thinking its music is spectacular. Who knows anymore! Not me! But look at this, the official bandcamp of the game studio never released the soundtrack - this random guy ripped the game like two years ago and the credited artists don’t even acknowledge ever having worked on or with video games at all! How dare they be ashamed of this project that I have decided to stake my hipster status on???

Because isn’t that the foundation of all love? The realization that something is fleeting, will be lost forever, and wanting to cherish and remember it while it's here? I think a lot of the art in Okabu is kinda trash, but my heart breaks that something so interesting will be lost forever with only incomplete collectible guides on dead forums as proof it ever existed.

I love Okabu. I decided to love Okabu before I played Okabu, and I found my way to loving the Okabu that existed for me to love.

---





And then I tried getting all the trophies so it’d be preserved in my PSN profile forever and they want me to collect 20,000 CLOUDBERRIES???? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING M-

Nearly flawless. I have played games that made me feel smart, and games that I thought were smart, but this is perhaps the first time solving a puzzle felt cool. Cocoon is sick, slick, and everything I want games to be by being nothing I hate about how games are.

There is no language. There is no tutorializing. There is one action button. The pause menu is beautifully vacant. There are only puzzles, set in increasingly lavish environments, that breeze by concepts that could by themselves sustain entire game-lengths of reconfigurations.

Cocoon has mechanics, but writing about them feels nonsensical in a uniquely video-game way, (complementary). I put Cocoon in the same realm as Thumper or Pac Man, where the elements that form the game's world and interactivity do not need to be explained or understood outside of how the player interacts with them. I will shoot anyone who says that Cocoon has Lore™ and write the word ~Aesthetic~ in bullets across their chest.

Know that my first instinct is to stop writing here, because the game is short, and wonderful, and you should just play it instead of having anyone else try to describe it. It exists in a world without words, and words will ruin it. But I want to say more nice things about a good game since I rarely like anything this much - we're only a week into 2024 and I already like it better than anything I played in 2023, recency bias be damned.

Every level can be contained in a marble. You can jump into a marble and explore its world. You can take a marble and bring it into another marble. Carrying a marble grants one extra ability with the press of the action button. This at once turns every marble into a game map, a lock, a key, a power-up, a parking lot, and luggage.

There is a unique feeling of zen and oneness as you become familiar with the ways all these relationships fit together. One that was confirmed for me when this game's "level select" screen, available upon the game's completion, described your position in the game by what percentage through your journey any instance represented. Although levels have "backtracking", returning to a marble always means seeing more than you were able to encounter before, and the nature of Cocoon's design eliminates ambiguity of where you should be. Everything is connected in a way that gives Cocoon such amazing thematic coherence while also being often unintelligible to describe.

Normally I hate collectibles, and the extra hallways they coax developers to create to house them. In Cocoon, the sparse and easily missable alternate paths make sense to me as ways to keep your mind looking for alternate interpretations of your environment. Even though Cocoon is a delightfully linear progression, there is enough renegotiation of how spaces fit together that I welcome the mere suggestion that the straight way forward is not the only way to think.
The boss battles felt a little out of place, but I still enjoyed them. Each one used a new marble ability never used again elsewhere in the game, little bite sized reflex-based puzzles to punctuate the end of a world. With no health system and no life system, even a failed attempt made me laugh, as getting bested by a boss meant being thrown out of that marble's world altogether. Sometimes presentation is everything for effecting your mindset.

Without its surrealist cosmic bug theming, Cocoon could have functionally been the same, but wouldn't have the same soul. There is something inherently fun about a small worker bug carrying a world carrying worlds on its back. I love his playful and jaunty gait, the way he bounces under the weight of his load. His wings vibrating when he can interact with contextual switches, their size making it easy to read which way he's facing - it's all such good game character design.

4.5 stars at A+ rank is rare for me, and even I question what is holding me back from giving it full marks. Once it was firing on all cylinders, pulling twists and inversions that surprised and delighted, I simultaneously wanted more while becoming aware how the game was straining to end with grace. Maybe I'll change my score with more time to let the game settle. Absolutely phenomenal, I'll play any mediocre clone I can get my hands on.

I love it. Contains the best joke about breaking pots in video games of all time. I want to frame it on my wall. I just might.

Hohokum is a game about the novelty of movement in the medium. It is what would happen if Mario made a WarioWare game - taking a gimmick so far as to invert it back into a bonafide mechanic. All you can do is move. Everything else is contextual. You can hold one button to move faster, and another to move slower, but the entire game can be easily finished without touching anything besides the joy stick.

While a lesser game might be content with the bare minimum, Hohokum has three different control styles. Press the shoulder buttons to turn the player snake relative to their heading. Drag your finger along the touchpad to move faster and sharper than sticks or buttons allow. Having options makes however you play feel like an active choice, even when you'll likely forget the less favored schemes even exist.

This near-invisible dedication is necessary, because minimalist graphic art styles only work with consistent careful thought put into them. Lose momentum for even a second, and the audience will quickly discern when restraint is being used as a mask for lack of ability. Goofy art styles are even trickier, because their strength is to make the aburd approachable and the familiar foreign. Fail in the balance of either, and you will be relegated to the junkyard of hacks.

It is then with great confidence that Hohokum barely explains its nonsense objectives. It trusts the player's curiosity to find the fun in the concepts the developers dreamed up. Sometimes a level can be an entire theme park. Sometimes a level can contain an entire theme park completely unrelated to anything you have to do to progress the level! Sometimes a transition screen consists of nothing more than dandelion puffs to puff. I respect when a game includes more without trying to overstate its importance.

Maybe all I did was wiggle a control stick around for a few hours, but that's not what I remember doing. I filled a constellation with stars, I poisoned an octopus until it turned into an anchor, I threw monkeys throwing bananas until an elephant kicked off a king's hat. Maybe growing eggplants felt like a total drag, and I was disappointed by the obligatory dark cave level, but overall I have great fondness for the love and silliness.

3 stars, B rank. I want more just like it. In an era where even indie games are suffering from feature creep and seek to emulate video game product bloat, it's nice to play something so dedicated to an experience so simple. Relaxing and quirky not because it was trying to be "cozy", but was trying to be fun.