Taking notes from the Tokusatsu flavor of Japanese capeshit, Hideki Kamiya didn’t just want to blow the roof off of his last superhero game, he wanted to blast a hole in the ozone layer and cruise on the border the farthest reaches of the cosmos. He’s never been content with just shooting for the stars, but this title more than any other feels like the truest expression of what he’s wanted to achieve with his games. Having a massive team of action game legends and publisher money from Nintendo all but ensured that the final product would come out with a Platinum-like sheen of creative polish, but as far as I can tell, The Wonderful 101 still managed to impress almost anyone who gave it the time of day in a way nobody was really expecting. There’s a reason the game is still, generally speaking, regarded as one of the highlights of the Wii U. In 2020, it even managed to conjure over $1.5 million in an effort to port it to modern platforms, absolutely crushing the goals set by its Kickstarter.

Naturally, it crashed and burned on release.

The game bombed hard. I don’t envy the position of trying to market the damn thing to general consumers, but on top of the comparatively-niche appeal of the action genre and an aesthetic that repulsed many who laid eyes on it, The Wonderful 101 also didn’t make the experience of getting into it very easy. It wasn’t universally panned by critics or anything - in fact it reviewed pretty well considering how low its sales were - but it’s fair to say most people didn’t get it. Speaking personally, it took me multiple attempts on two different platforms to get past the on-ramp, and even beyond that point it took some time to really click with me.

It’s a real shame having so many of its players bounce off the experience before they can even experience a fraction of what it had to offer, but I almost don’t blame them, at least in retrospect. It's a title that gives out what you put in, possibly more than any other game I’ve ever played. Not everyone is gonna be willing to sit down and give something this mechanically-abrasive a chance, especially if it wears the façade of being nothing but a kid friendly Nintendo romp. Late-teens dudebros aren’t gonna give it their attention, and It probably isn’t a game for grandma either, I get it. Having said that, I don't want this piece to scare anyone off from the game, far from it. If you’ve read this far you surely care about or are interested in the game in some regard (or have played the game before, in which case this specific passage isn’t super important (or just like hearing reading what I have to say ❤)), so if you haven’t closed the tab yet, hear me out:

I don’t generally like picking my absolute favorite things, it's way easier to just provide a list of things I love than to comfortably settle down with one thing, but this is kinda the exception. Without question, if you asked me what my favorite game is, the answer would be an easy one. The Wonderful 101 has it all for me: a colorful cast of characters, a gameplay loop I can’t find anywhere else, indulgent yet tasteful callbacks to the history of the medium of games, a heartfelt story, a campaign that never loses its luster, and a finale I can only describe as legendary. It’s the complete package. Some games may do individual things better, but no game does it all with quite as much fanfare. I unabashedly love it, and I want as many people as possible to give it a fair chance (or two), just as I did. The best things in life don’t come without hardships, after all.

Video games, especially those in 3D spaces, have often struggled to consistently convey critical information to the player when it's most often needed, and it's easy to see why. How do you give the player enough time to react to something coming into frame in a fast paced platformer or a racer? How do you differentiate a hole in the ground from being a safe drop or an instant death trap? Many potential issues can be alleviated through smart signposting and subtle signals to the player, but it feels like action games in particular have struggled with cameras more than most genres. All too often it's extremely challenging to keep everything in focus with multiple enemies on your ass while grinding against the terrain to navigate the field, and that's before you take into account a camera that might not play nicely with the level geometry and act in unpredictable ways. Thankfully, this isn’t an unsolved issue in certain corners of the genre.

Kamiya has proven time and time again that he knows how to create encounters that feel simultaneously frantic yet completely fair, and while his most consistent quality in this regard is his ability to design a large pool of enemies with extremely clear audio and visual tells, he also employs subtle tricks in all of his games to hold the combat together. Devil May Cry makes the level geometry transparent if it obfuscates the player's view of the action, Viewtiful Joe simplifies the chaos by playing on a 2D plane like an old-school beat-em-up while still keeping the intricacies of a fully fleshed out action game, and Bayonetta prevents most enemies from being able to attack from beyond the camera's point of view. All of these systems go a long way towards addressing potential issues with focusing on everything at once, but for my money, no game has presented a solution as bold and creative as the one found in The Wonderful 101.

Locking the camera to an isometric perspective is one of the game's many design decisions that not only keeps the action legible at all times amidst the madness, but threads every element of gameplay together seamlessly while calling into question many of the standards set by games made before and after it, though I'm getting a little ahead of myself. As I mentioned before, action games are quick to become tense scrambles where you can not only lose mental control of the field, but literally struggle to control the camera and your character in the heat of the moment. Even in Bayonetta, a game I adore for the way it handles enemies in relation to its camera system, it's still very possible for it to get caught on a random part of the level and disorient the player. Given the chaos on screen in 101, it could have been extremely easy for this issue to rear its ugly head again, but thanks to the camera this is almost never an issue. Since you don't have to put physical and mental attention on camera control, it frees up the body and mind to focus on every other part of the game at once, so long as you have the fortitude to get past the initial hurdle of learning the mechanics and understanding how to read the field (a task that doesn’t take an entire playthrough to accomplish like some may have have led on).

At an initial glance the game might be hard to read, but upon further inspection you’ll quickly realize that the bright colors and zany designs only exist to assist the readability of moment-to-moment encounters, everything stands out against each other and the environments so well that you’ll never find yourself wondering what's going on once you know what you’re looking at. What may first be perceived as an overly-busy aesthetic that only exists to appeal to a younger demographic quickly justifies itself as an essential part of the play experience. It's a very freeing feeling to have such a common issue in the medium disappear so elegantly here, and while I’m not saying all cameras need to copy The Wonderful 101, any mediocre camera system stands out to me way more now that I’ve seen what can happen if you play with conventions even just a little bit.

This would probably be nothing more than a cool quirk if the action didn’t keep you on your toes, so thankfully the amazing enemy design keeps the game from ever feeling too bland. Nearly every member of the game's massive roster of enemies and bosses plays with arena control in interesting ways and almost always asks the player to juggle multiple conflicting tasks at once, something I crave in games such as this. For instance, you may have your focus on a tank that goes down quickly to a slow, heavy weapon, but other enemies might be quick enough to get hits in while you’re trying to take down a massive threat (it sounds simple, but exemplary enemy design isn’t the standard in action games it really should be).The top-down view also gives some breathing room for the level designers to make the arenas themselves treacherous in creative ways, helping to create encounters where even fighting basic mobs can be a stressful task. Very few encounters lose their appeal for me as a result, and for a title that runs far longer than the average action game, that's no small feat.

These factors individually are more than enough to set the combat way beyond the quality of most action games, and there are plenty of tertiary elements to the experience that make the campaign one of the best in the entire medium (way more than what I could reasonably fit into the scope of this review), but in my eyes, the golden thread that truly unites every element together beautifully and morphs the game into a masterpiece of action game design for me is the Wonder Liner.

Weapon switching is one of those mechanics that is always appreciated in an action game, but seldom implemented in a way that does anything more than give the player more tools to fight with. That last point might sound like an odd criticism to make, especially since we’ve seen what can happen if action games don’t implement some form of instant weapon switching, but it’s generally not something that’s interesting to execute on its own. While I wouldn’t say it dumbs down action games that utilize this system - the skill required to play them usually falls on decision making more than executing the moves themselves after all - it’s just an element to the genre that hasn’t seen much questioning or evolution since it started to make its way into titles that necessitated it. The act of switching itself doesn’t add nuance to a game, ”...it simply prohibits one set of moves, and enables a different set of moves.”. Rather than just settling on a button to cycle weapons, 101 takes a more creative approach.

Your squad of 100 Wonderful Ones is not just flooding the screen to flex the technical ability of a game console that was outdated before it even hit shelves, but is a key element to combat. They aren't just there to facilitate your massive arsenal of weapons, they are your arsenal of weapons.

Using the right analog stick, you draw out commands that signal your team to morph into different massive weapons, whether it be a circle for a fist, a straight line for a sword, or a squiggly line for a whip. It's like if you did a QCF motion in Street Fighter but instead of throwing out a hadouken, Ryu pulled out a gun. They really get creative with your arsenal and I’d hate to spoil it all here, but every weapon manages to not only fill out an interesting tactical role in combat, but also feels completely different to use as a result of the drawing system. This is already a lot to wrap your head around on your first playthrough, and this is before you consider what implications every other mechanic has on this one. If the game had the exact same combat mechanics with a traditional camera system, it wouldn't really work without further disconnecting the liner from the game world in some way (drawing on the lens of the camera or specific flat parts of the environment are common ways of addressing drawing mechanics in other games). It’s possible another system could also work here, but what I love about the solution presented in The Wonderful 101 is that it ties these otherworldly mechanics directly into the game seamlessly. You aren't just issuing vague commands for your team to follow, you're literally drawing out the shapes with a chain made of your heroes.

Even past the surface level details that the game absolutely excels at, this has massive ramifications on the flow of combat. Because the liner is a literal object in the world of the game, it's possible for enemy encounters to directly challenge your ability to draw each shape with efficiency. In a vacuum you may be good at drawing guns and hammers, but can you do it quickly in the heat of the moment? Or if a spiked enemy is blocking your path, can you draw the whip consistently in a different direction to not lose your team members? In a game like Devil May Cry it can feel like action and evasion are totally separate pieces of the combat, as it’s way easier to take your turn and juggle an enemy into oblivion, but not here. Enemies and stage hazards aren't just obstacles in moments of defense while you catch your bearings, but also during offense while you frantically try to get out different weapons and keep your advantage. Launching and comboing a stunned enemy is also a pretty involved task here, requiring a special stun state and your own ability to swap around weapons quickly, so unless you have a really strong grasp of the game you probably won’t be in a spot where danger is more than just a few feet away. It’s some really brilliant stuff.

Understandably, this is where The Wonderful 101 lost a lot of players. It asks so much of the player at the start compared to its contemporaries, but speaking personally for a second, pushing past the hump and "getting it" was easily one of the most satisfying feelings I've had in any game. If you keep at it and don't let losses discourage you, eventually you'll reach a level of mastery where you don't even have to think about how you'll be able to get the shapes out. It's very similar to the learning experience of learning a fighting game character's moveset, different motions may feel alien at first, but give it some practice and it'll quickly become 2nd nature. That may be why I was willing to stick with the system and give the game a chance - I'm not exactly a stranger to fighting games - but I don't believe the genre is required reading to enjoy this game on any level. After all, it probably has the most forgiving continue system I've ever seen (arguably to a fault in some regards) so you'll never find yourself grazing up against an insurmountable challenge on your first playthrough like you might in a different action game. The story is also just an absolute blast, so even if you haven't found your sea legs yet with the controls, you'll surely forget about any bumps in the road after you slice through a skyscraper that's just been thrown at you with a sword made out of human beings, or picked up a giant [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] everything around you only to see a massive [REDACTED] open up in [REDACTED].

Now, in any game with ambitions as lofty as those found in The Wonderful 101, cracks are bound to show eventually. There are plenty of tiny criticisms I've accrued after two years of playing the game (A few that have jumped out to me being that it doesn’t mix as many enemy types in combat as I’d like, or how you aren’t able to utilize motion inputs like stinger and rising into multi-unite) but nothing that outright ruined the game for me. Having said that, the thing that leaves me scratching my head the most is the progression system.

A pervasive thought I see in discussion around the game is that your toolkit at the start feels extremely limited compared to other action protags. There’s a few reasons why this could be (not least of which being the need to gradually ease players into its systems at the start without overwhelming them too much) but I will concede that it makes starting a new save after unlocking everything a bit more frustrating than it needs to be. While I appreciate how insane it is that every single Wonderful One levels up individually while still contributing to one massive level up system, it takes far too long to unlock certain key abilities that would show off the combat's potential far more quickly. There's really no reason why you shouldn't be able to buy key moves like stinger, rising, and cyclone with O-Parts and Wonderful Credit Cards, or god forbid offer a cheat code to level up your squad to unlock other upgrades sooner on subsequent save files. It doesn't help that this bizarre progression system is tied to a game where every weapon is so limited on its own, relatively speaking. Even just compared to Kamiya's last big action game Bayonetta, dial combos have been completely removed leaving just one main combo and a few extra moves for each of the game's massive spread of weapons (the whole experience of the game justifies this I feel, but on paper it really does seem rather limiting).

Beyond the design of the base game itself, the remaster on modern systems has also seen some bizarre changes and frustrating bugs, but despite what a certain Nintendo-adjacent YouTuber who didn’t play more than 30 minutes of the game would tell you, these actually have nothing to do with the peripheral you use to control the game. Some genuinely great changes like further tutorializaion on your basic block and dodge are nearly canceled out by old standard moves requiring an unlock, specific enemy interactions not getting fixed from the original game or getting messed up in the new version, and a massive list of bugs and glitches that keeps growing by the patch with official support that feels deafeningly silent at the moment. I’d still recommend the remaster over the Wii U version for the boost in performance alone, but for the past two years it’s been exceedingly frustrating to tack a “but” to many of my statements while recommending it to certain people. Even though many of its biggest issues aren’t something a new player will experience on a first playthrough, it’s still something that’s hard for me to ignore when discussing the game.

But…

I don’t care. Despite every issue I’ve mentioned or omitted, despite how weird of a thing it is to get into, and despite knowing deep down in my greasy heart that this isn’t something that everyone will be able to latch onto, I just don’t care. I love this too much to care. Everything comes together to make an experience so impactful that those small hardships feel like they were never there to begin with. The mini-games act simultaneously as cute callbacks to other games as well as being genuinely fun little skill checks in their own right, it’s still one of the funniest games out there from the written jokes to the visual gags throughout the game, it has the greatest quick-time event of all time with no contest, even the story feels really sharp and thoughtful. It really is the ultimate “greater than the sum of its parts” affair to me. You have no idea how refreshing it is to play something as full of life as this when the actual world we’re currently living in just feels like a shithole nightmare that exclusively beats down on those forced to participate. It truly feels like this game has more love for the joys of life than any other. It feels like it actually loves itself. And that's what it’s all about, right?

If The Wonderful 101 has taught me anything, it’s that it takes teamwork and perseverance to push through hardships in life. You never know what will be thrown your way, how you’ll push through it, or who you’ll have to push through with. But with the combined forces of everyone’s strength, it genuinely feels like even the impossible is possible. It’s not just about closing your eyes to the darkness and looking back to your childhood where you could ignore the evils of the world, it’s about learning how to grow together and push beyond what holds us back, both collectively and individually. Sometimes it will be difficult, and it may be hard to want to keep going, but it’ll be worth it in the end. It’s all about seeing the good in life and lifting up those around us so they can do the same. Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded of that.

"Are you ready for the sexualising minors in your story lesson?"

Kazutaka Kodaka gulped.

Katsura Hashino nodded.

Nisio Isin blinked nervously.

"Yes, Gen Urobuchi" they said in unison.

Recommended by FernandTheFresh as part of this list.

[Content Warning: The Song of Saya (and by extension, what will be discussed in this review) contains content pertaining to sexual assault, gratuitous violence, and lolicon content. Read at your own discretion.]

An endless, twisting expanse of flesh and bone beneath a sky void of color and clouds. The sound of sinew creaking beneath footsteps as a wriggling mass of organs and eyeballs crawls past, speaking in tongues as endless mouths babble at you incessantly in a sickening farce resembling human speech. In this endless labyrinth of parodical biology, where every street looks like a Mandelbrot Fractal of bone and pus, every hallway the stifling intestine of some otherworldly leviathan, every room a humid mess of muscle and putrid, rotting skin, there is a girl, untarnished by this hell of red pulp and twitching tendons. Is she an oasis in this unrelenting terrorscape, or a sign of something far, far worse?

This is the premise of The Song of Saya. After getting into a near-fatal car accident and receiving an experimental brain surgery, Fuminori Sakisaka gains an extreme form of agnosia where everything he sees looks like its made of flesh and organs, everyone he meets looks like they stepped out of John Carpenter's "The Thing", and everything he smells and tastes is like raw sewage. The only thing keeping Fuminori from ending his own life is a mysterious young girl named Saya, who is the sole thing in Fuminori's terrorscape that still looks human. Right out the gate, The Song of Saya has a strong central hook. The horror is visceral and palpable from minute zero, the soundtrack is blaring this horrific Noise Rock present in even the downtempo tracks, and the presence of Saya brings up a lot of questions for the reader to consider within the first 5 minutes: Why is she untouched? What is her importance to Fuminori? If she's the only thing that looks human, what do people who aren't Fuminori perceive her as? Anyways, right after she's introduced, Fuminori is shown plowing Saya the Cronenberg Loli in a poorly-written sex scene, and I turn the game off.

Yeah, it's one of those.

While I'm no stranger to the Visual Novel medium's fraught relationship with eroge content, The Song of Saya's sheer graphic gratuitousness and general unpleasantness is what keeps it from really being a stand-out horror story. Beyond the well-rendered visceral imagery and intriguing cosmic horror elements, the relationship between Fuminori and Saya that serves as the emotional core of the plot is actually quite compelling. We watch their twisted relationship bloom as Fuminori slowly loses his humanity and morals as he descends deeper in love with Saya, and likewise, Saya slowly gains humanity in both the best and worst ways possible. In most good horror, it's that human emotional core at the center that makes it all work. Unfortunately, The Song of Saya is no Cronenberg's "The Fly", and is more analogous to something like "Mai-chan's Daily Life", or "A Serbian Film." It's a story full of absolutely abhorrent material, not limited to Cannibalism, Rape and implicit Pedophilia. Even barring Fuminori's agnosia, why he's going on about the beauty of someone that looks like a child to him and having sex with a pile of pig guts that resembles a child in his eyes is something that is not only never questioned by the narrative, but is something deliberately played up for eroticism by the narrative in its many grotesque sex scenes (Author's Note: Some people online will tell you that you are missing out on the full experience by playing the censored version on Steam. These people are not to be trusted, and you should steer clear of them. The only thing the Steam release removes is all the unnecessary sex scenes that are largely meant for the player to find erotic, and you are missing literally nothing by playing without the 18+ Patch).

Even barring that (which is a lot to bar if I'm being honest with you here), there's also two rape scenes also played for eroticism, one also including the lolicon content. While they do move the plot forward in a sense, even with the edited Steam release you can tell that these scenes were paragraphs of erotica meant to primarily titillate, while any implicit horror or plot impact is a secondary concern, which is a different kind of disgusting from the cannibalism and Meat-O-Vision the reader is subjected to. All of this taints The Song of Saya's other strengths, such as its soundtrack, its art, and its genuine moments of horror both subtle and overt, making The Song of Saya an incredibly hard sell to all but those with the absolute highest tolerance for quote un-quote "weeb shit". If it wasn't for this list, I probably wouldn't have ever touched this game. Which is why it's honestly kind of a bummer that if you took the overtly exploitative content out of the equation, The Song of Saya would probably be the best introductory Visual Novel for newcomers to the Visual Novel medium: it's short, it's easily accessible, and it manages to show off a lot of the medium's strengths without being too much of a slog. It's just a shame that all these qualities are in service of The Song of Saya. There are better visual novels for getting into the medium, and there are better cosmic horror stories that won't get you put on a watchlist. Steer clear, because you're not missing much.

...The soundtrack is pretty good though, give that a listen.

A short while ago I read that article about Naughty Dog and how they literally suppress use of the word “fun” within the studio. I think it paints a picture of a company so up its own ass, so out of touch with the medium they’re working in, and I think it stands in stark contrast to a game like Tekken, which is so unabashedly a video game above all else. It’s combat is refined and technical, yet accessible enough that a new player can jump in and jazz up combos on the spot. It’s got a full roster with all my favourites from Tekken 3 back. It’s full of customization options, side modes like the arcade mode, Devil Within (which isn’t as good as Tekken 3’s Tekken Force, but it’s still a fun little bonus) and it even comes with the first three Tekken games. It’s so full of content, creativity and fun-loving character, and I love it.












It was also neat of them to give the final boss a move that straight up just wins him the round, fucking Jinpachi with your fuckass stun and your fireball.

Hey uh....Mr. Jinpachi, could you pretty pwease not use that move that wins the game? I think that'd be really nice of you...

"Okay."

stuns me in place for five hours and proceeds to shoot me in the face with a fireball

---

Imagine keeping a human-shaped natural disaster in your basement, that's what Heihachi did apparently. Then Heihachi fake died, and then his dad who's been dead gets resurrected by an unexplained devil that isn't actually anything related to the devil gene despite being addressed as "devil" constantly, at least according to Harada, because he ain't pushing Tekken 5 anymore. Feel bad for him, Jinpachi is the only unambiguously good Mishima family member, and in his debut game you have to put him down otherwise his bout of food poisoning will destroy civilization after it ascends past making a rad stage to fight him in.

He's not subtle or an emotional cinematic masterpiece in fighting game boss form like T2 Devil Kazuya, he's a seven foot tall slab of aged beef that has a literal "I win" move at his disposal. Perhaps it plays into his inner conflict with his Not Devil gene, where he's struggling to not use his "I win" move against you, because he actually wants to lose and not just hit you with his "I win" move and kill you with his fireball attack right afterwards. He could easily play to win, but that's against his wishes. A man of honor, until he isn't. A true being of chaos.....

I don't have much else to say about Tekken 5, but it's pretty cool they included the arcade versions of the first three games with the PS2 release, as well as the one and only re-release of the original arcade version of StarBlade in North America that isn't on a discontinued mobile platform or cut down to FMV form for early CD-based consoles, suffice to say I booted up Tekken 5 after playing StarBlade Alpha a while back just to compare. Strange how that ended up happening. A nice little way to celebrate a decade of Tekken two decades ago. adjusts bandages, because I'm actually an ancient mummy

Jinpachi loved StarBlade, that's why it was in here. RIP old man. Hopefully Tag 3 comes in 2033 so I can use you again.

I usually wait a few days before reviewing a game to let it settle in my mind and reach a more objective emotional distance, but this game has gotten me heated enough to where I had to capture it on paper. Specifically, it’s because this might be one of the worst designed games I’ve ever played.

Gnosia is a hybrid between a visual novel and a social deduction game, where you’re on a spaceship with 14 other people who may be sneaky aliens who want to kill everyone. A discussion happens each day, the humans decide who to put into cold sleep, the aliens decide who they want to kill, and the humans win when all the aliens are sleeping, or the aliens win when they’re at least 50% of the crew. It’s a well-tested design for a party game, but remember, this is a single-player experience. You’re playing against AI whose emotions you can’t read, and whose personalities only come out through a very small selection of dialog lines for each situation. Instead, the socializing that forms the core of the design is simulated by random skill checks: each AI character has a set of stats that are rolled whenever they tell lies, which are then rolled against perception stats. At the end of each round, you get XP to level up your own stats, and the game begins again. And again. And again. And again and again and again. To finish the game, it took me one-hundred and sixty-three rounds of playing the same game over… and over… and over again. The reason why is because you can only truly complete the game if you’ve seen all the character events, which randomly happen between nights depending on unspoken criteria like who’s alive, who has which roles, who trusts who, which events have happened previously, and so on. They’re usually just very short dialogues that give you new personal trivia, and don’t build into characterization you can use in the daily discussions.

So, let me recap the design of this game for you:
You’re playing an inherently social game against emotionless robots.
Your ability to deduce who’s lying is up to random chance.
Other characters believing you is random chance.
Being selected for cold sleep or elimination is random chance, which can prevent you from finishing events.
Events are based on criteria you’re never told of, and appear by random chance. Luckily, they’re only rarely affected by winning or losing, so your gameplay performance is of no consequence.
If you engage with the game by piping up and influencing discussion, you may be told your excessive talking is suspicious, and sent into cold sleep despite being correct. This is due to random chance.
If you stay quiet to avoid the aforementioned suspicion, it may be seen as, in itself, suspicious. This can happen by random chance.

It’s utterly baffling. This game should have choices and deduction, but every mechanic is oriented in a way that takes agency away from the player. You can’t participate in discussions until you’ve grinded stats, and even then, it's up to chance. You can’t choose a character who you want to learn about. You can’t decide how the story goes. It’s all random. The game just happens in front of you as you sit there powerlessly. I re-bound my controller to mash the A button so I could blast through the entirely irrelevant gameplay, which made me finish it 5 hours faster than the average completion time. That may seem like a weird thing to bring up for a visual novel, but again, there’s no story progression or development in the discussions which take up 95% of your time. If you put all the story moments together, they would probably be less than an hour in total, for a game which takes at least twelve hours to beat. If I had to give one begrudging compliment, it’s that some characters can be likable in their events, but when in the next iteration they may hate you because of random chance, I just can’t feel a kinship or build a relationship with them. It’s all so pointless. Even in a game as bad as Heavy Rain, I could at least tell what the point was, why someone would play it and what they were supposed to get out of it. Not with this one. I don’t even know how to conclude this review. The game has no thesis and no point and neither do I. I just hate it.

There's really no other way to put it. This game (and possibly franchise) is morally and creatively bankrupt. Between the shallow depictions of mental health whether there's dramatic zooms of the protagonist self harming or even going as far to have chapters end with you jumping off a building and the following interludes flash a suicide hotline message until the level loads or the awkward anime dub tier voice acting berate you with insults or commentary on your surroundings because Konami needs to remind you this is in a fact a serious game and they're afraid of leaving things to interpretation, I fail to see how the 2 hours I spent with this tech demo can leave me anticipation of the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake or "missing the point".

This whole experience ends up feeling like a parody of the thing it's trying to comment and I don't think that's the takeaway someone with diagnosed BPD should be feeling.

not morally egregious per se but rather a depressing culmination of a decade's worth of design trickery and (d)evolving cultural/social tastes and otherwise exists as insipid twitchcore autoplaying bullshit that should come with a contractual agreement binding its devotees to never speak prejudicially about mobile games or musou ever again lest they face legally enforced financial restitution. just play nex machina man. or watch NFL. been a fun season for that. fuck the review man let's talk sports in the comments

"𝙱𝚞𝚜𝚑𝚒𝚍ō" 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝙽𝚎𝚘𝚙𝚘𝚜𝚝𝚖𝚘𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚗𝚒𝚜𝚖 █

The Cyberpunk franchise is a litmus test of our time. This groundbreaking video game puts on full display the entire spectrum of American society, masterfully pointing out the greatest problems of the neomodern era. Cyberpunk 2077 was, in its own way, a generational manifesto on the affirmation of living life. The use of vivid light and colors, shaky gameplay, ubiquitous blood effects and pervasive crash-to-desktop testifies to the extraordinary self-awareness of the studio director, who once revealed in an interview how he "fucking loves it when hot chicks dissect the shit out of the bad guys." Perhaps no other concept more aptly describes the underlying societal ethos when this game was released.

Especially worthy of note is the repetition in cutscenes of the rockerboy motif, through which the protagonist reinterprets their engrammed reality. One example of this convention's flawless implementation appears in the quest "Disasterpiece": the scene in which the powerful Adam Smasher disembodies the arm of Johnny Silverhand - as played by the transcendently wooden Keanu Reeves - demonstrates in brilliant form the duality of the human and transhuman condition. On the one hand, Johnny loses his cybernetic prosthesis - a symbol of both his tragic past and the ongoing techno-ontological conflict within his psyche; on the other hand, it is precisely due to this dismemberment that Smasher is blown to bits of scrap by a sensational RTX explosion sequence.

And the final disintegration of the antagonist's body into a bloodspray of metallic gore... how should this be interpreted? It is a metaphorical cry of deeply rooted despair, a manifestation of the personal transgression. This fragmentation of body could likewise be interpreted as a fragmentation of the individual mind, thus provoking the question: Whose mind? Indeed, had everything the player seen of Johnny's struggle been, in fact, a personified, embodied fear? Had he not been embroiled in epic battle with a vile corporation, but rather only with himself? Could the entirety of Johnny-V's narrative have only been a manifestation of some cyberpsychotic dream-state?

Among all the depth and nuance that has defined this franchise since its inception, only one thing is truly certain - Cyberpunk 2077 has forever changed the world of video games.

the appeal of a convention stems from the yawning tide of people who embody it; a mass of the like-minded enveloping a space, to the extent that one could never meet or know every one at once. the homogeneity would not be pleasant if it permeated our entire lives, but to momentarily enter a crowd knowing that each person among it could understand your drive and passion is invigorating. when I come to these I tend to roam solo, poking my head into every room I find and silently people-watching from the sidelines. I greet friends of course, and I may strike up a conversation in line waiting for a cabinet, but I find my immersion into the atmosphere alone provides a mental balm before even socializing comes into play.

every year going to magfest I plan new ways to make the experience more comfortable: a well-rounded diet, planned breaks, and more consistent sleeping arrangements. this time my new innovation was a fanny pack, replacing the cumbersome backpack of previous trips with something less intrusive and throwing my misplaced sense of embarrassment at wearing one out the window. with this came a swap from my switch to the smaller form factor of my 3ds. I've come to really lean into my 3ds as of late, bringing it to long waits at the barber or when lazing around at a friend's house. at some point I realized that all my downtime wasted on scrolling twitter could be funneled into a marginally more meaningful hobby by using my 3ds instead. besides, the console is becoming a bit retro! recently a young child saw me with one and asked their mother about the strange two-screened phone I was holding, begging to peer over my shoulder while I played dragon quest.

bringing the 3ds to magfest also gave me the opportunity to try to shore up my puzzles on streetpass, which I had neglected for quite some time. the entire idea behind streetpass - every person's 3ds signalling out in an attempt for two to pass each other and exchange information - was an outgrowth of nintendo's attempts to turn the handhelds into tools for positive social reinforcement, originating at least as far back as the nascent pokemon exchanges on the original game boy. it turned the 3ds into something that continually engaged with the world while you did, giving you brief glimpses into the lives of those around you while you traveled. the most basic of these was puzzle swap, less of a game and more of a mass exercise in collecting pieces of various puzzles distributed by nintendo through occasional content updates. some pieces you could roll for using "play coins" collected while walking with the 3ds in your pocket, but some were exclusively gained through trading with others, and in general the most consistent way to locate certain pieces was by trading with as wide of a group of people as possible. of course, this collaborative effort operated best in a world of mass public transit and high population density, traits missing from the suburban american experience. my regular streetpass contacts were ones at my high school, and the minimal outside interaction led to an eventual disinterest in churning through the same puzzle collections day after day. the eventual death of the 3ds only cemented the end of my streetpassing days.

even just from waiting in the eye-watering badge pickup line at the con, snaked switchback style across an expo room before leaking out from one side of the building to the other, I had already matched with at least 10 people, showering me with new pieces and puzzles I had never gotten a chance to download. a feature past my time called "bonus chance" had kicked in, giving me many pieces from each individual I streetpassed instead of just one like the old days and letting me mop up my collection way quicker than I had anticipated. every break I took during the con seemed to have at least a couple more people trickle into my waiting queue, and by the end of the con I had collected every trade-only piece with less than 100 to go overall. there were people walking around with all of the pieces, people walking around with just a few, some who had scarcely updated their streetpass since the mid '10s, and others who seemed to have gotten in on the tail-end of the whole phenomenon, with lots of pieces for the last few puzzles and barely any for the early ones. for a weekend, this social game that had withered away over five years prior got the chance to bloom again.

these people who I previously just saw from afar, stood next to at adjacent cabinets, or sat behind at a panel now became little figments inside my 3ds. I had always perceived the con as a regional experience, but their data now told me there were those as far as the west coast or even alaska participating, perhaps expats who had moved close by, or former residents flying back to stay with friends. little tidbits such as their most recently played game gave me insight into their tastes, and many of them had included celebratory messages of excitement for the return of the con. their collections, their smiling avatars, their flairs, their messages; it humanized these many con attendees who I often had passed by and further strengthened that bond we shared of mutual attendance. after years of using an ugly caricature of mips from sm64 as my avatar, I finally changed it to one that reflected my face. it only seemed natural to give them the same clarity they gave me.