cannot say i am particularly enamored with the idea that we should frame this discussion in any way that pretends it is not ultimately a willful net loss for games preservation. the idea that in order to aggressively push hardware a development team was enlisted to resurrect a long forsaken ip, in the process fundamentally misunderstanding the majority of its artistic sensibilities (sometimes aggressively so) to showcase a console’s power rubs me the wrong way for several reasons. and there’s potent irony here because we must also remember that in essence sony is banking on from softwares death cult to launch a console cycle for the second time in a row now. recall the invective words of shuhei yoshida, 2009: 'This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game.' surely what is now a valuable ace in the sleeve for sonys financial strategy in the 9th generation of consoles onwards deserves more respect than this?

as an immediate contrast in the field of remakes, i’ll put forward that at the very least, ff7 is one of the most ubiquitous games of all time - to such a degree that altering its content and expanding on its themes in a rebuild-esque scenario is not only sensible, but appreciated. the same case is difficult to make for demon’s in my opinion.

perhaps bluepoints alterations, seldom rooted in any reverence for aesthetics but instead prioritizing largely perfunctory gameplay, are to your tastes. but they are not to mine. the original demon’s souls is an intensely difficult work to assess, litigate, and reconcile with, to be sure, but whatever your stance on it, it’s difficult to deny how exquisitely it worked with its limitations to fashion something that was entirely inspired and bold, yet quintessentially from software. none of that same evocative ethos is reflected here, and for these reasons i find bluepoint’s iteration extremely difficult to respect - doubly so because im in a position now of having twice been told to give bluepoint a chance on a remake, both times to personally and deeply unsatisfactory results. i only wish more folks had a convenient way of experiencing the original so they were free to pass their own judgments

i keep thinking about strangereal. strangereal is a terrific name for the world of ace combat. it aptly denotes the franchise’s mechanics, functions as a wry descriptor for the series’ daredevil aesthetic, and evokes a fantastical image. when it’s working effectively, the realism of strangereal is achieved by means of a kind of unconscious shorthand.

speaking anecdotally, a surprisingly significant number of people look at an ace combat title – the box art, the community, brief snippets of gameplay – and uncharitably make the assumption that it’s plane call of duty. given project aces’ reverence for realistic fighter jets, high altitudes contrails, and dogfighting dusk to dawn, this isn’t necessarily an unfair assumption to make. it’s sometimes uncommon for media to be so attentive to verisimilitude in the little details while simultaneously dabbling in the kind of magical realism that ace combat does. ace combat has top gun romanticism in its veins; it has more in common with afterburner than it does with microsoft flight sim. its primordial essence might as well have been scooped from galaga. but make no mistake, ace combat will imbue its systems with all the affectations of reality. you’ll learn a wealth of complex maneuvers to navigate three dimensional space, all the while stalling accidentally, evading the onslaught of enemy missiles from your periphery, and avoiding crashing into complex architectural spaces. the open air becomes your arena, cities and their edifices your escape shafts, ravines your trenches. it’s tempting – and very funny – to say this is a series about locking on to green squares and waiting for them to ding red, but the core gameplay loop finds its sense of pure excitement in all the minutiae, the calculations (yaw, roll, pitch, speed, missile trajectory) you have to make in order to synchronize with your jet and down a target. the moment you start becoming more comfortable using your regular outfitted machinegun in aerial engagements is the moment you ascend. it all comes down to your nerves. immelman turns, chandelles, cuban eights – cramped tunnel runs. you might call the experience holistically ‘strangereal’. but the most important thing is, of course, that this is a very highly attuned, enthralling natural drama that occurs in all the games – that of plane maneuverability.

ace combat’s strangereal setting is designed as simulacra over facsimile – where realities contend with abstraction. our history and theirs sometimes align, but only to invite comparison and perspective. the bleakness of electrosphere’s setting of strangereal seems callously exaggerated in its lack of regard for bodily autonomy, free will, and self-actualization, but its developers were only drawing upon influences readily understood unconsciously, enlisting production ig’s aid in setting the tone by way of formal shorthand. electrosphere, in depicting a world impoverished and emancipated by the whims of megacorporate warfare, grapples with the tenets of a large body of cyberpunk work depicting profound trepidation over technological revolution, with the venality and frank hostility of nations beset by late-stage capitalism, and draws upon a wealth of easily comprehensible mixed media – the advertising wars waged by microsoft and apple come to mind as a heady influence. this is deliberately reflected in electrospheres plane design. one dominant corporation, neucom, is sleek, futurist, impossibly glossy and curved; general resources, reflecting a down-to-brass-tacks utilitarian brand, serves as their stylistic inverse. this, too, is shorthand. it furthers the realism of strangereal while also exploring new ideas.

or take the strangereal of shattered skies for a comparatively more grounded approach. with terrain pockmark ridden at best (and irreversibly altered for the worst in many other instances) by a deluge of asteroid fragments following a global crisis, shattered skies immediately establishes political instability and humanity in crisis as the norm, which informs its setting and its depiction of warfare. this is a world picking up the straggling pieces after a semi-successful defense against a cataclysm of untold proportion, with these actions still inevitably leading to widespread devastation and the collapse of infrastructure. this is first introduced with the first lines spoken in ace combat 04:
“I was just a child when the stars fell from the skies. But I remember how they built a cannon to destroy them. And in turn how that cannon brought war upon us.”
the war in question is shattered skies’ continental war, which was triggered by loss of infrastructure, tensions with displaced refugees, and trade quotas. in brief summation, it involves the invasion of a nation with a railgun capable of destroying the ulysses asteroid, and repurposing it as an anti-aircraft weapon, and the fight to take it back. ace combat takes the struggles of reality – climate and extinction anxiety, humanitarian crises, warfare itself – and alters them through the lens of strangereal to convey its action. that, alongside the gameplay, is also a big appeal of the franchise.

all of these elements, depictions, and sensibilities coalesce to create a series that is continually compelling even at its messiest. shattered skies is the predecessor to the unsung war, and the franchise’s debut on the PS2. with that uncertain introduction, especially following the commercially unsuccessful yet wildly ambitious electrosphere, came a very solid, if unambitious title with a wide range of problems. the flow of its military campaigns made sense, its world was compelling and understated, its narrative quiet and melancholic yet taut, but it was sorely lacking in visual identity and mission variety. it returned to the traditional ace combat 2 military campaign structure of working towards an explicit goal through various missions, each sensibly placed one after the other. and the narrative emerging opposite this is one following the enemy aces who have no choice but to engage with you by the end, thus lending the proceeding battles weight through dramatic irony. it’s an unsettling moment when you kill one of yellow squadrons pilots for the first time and radio silence fills the airwaves, and it’s part of ace combat continuing in the footsteps of electrosphere: the necessary interrogation, however minor or subtle, of an arcade flight sim that feels great but derives influence from realism. this is something shattered skies nails (although electrosphere does it better) and to me it’s the crux of the series identity – it’s strangereal. it’s the feeling that this world could have been our own, but everything is affected by a layer of digital remove.

ace combat 5 finds this characteristic off-kilter reality in abeyance. the unsung war tips tips the formerly tightly wound balance (strange/real) far more towards the tonally ‘strange’, the magical realism. this isn’t the biggest problem ace combat 5 has, but it is absolutely the lynchpin of all my criticism because the approach undertaken by project aces in this game informs all the issues i have with it.

these changes, in my opinion, were seemingly made to ameliorate the problems people had with shattered skies. ace combat 04 is a dry but very candid and forthright title with a simple, but well-executed narrative. ace combat 5 has more personality from the get go and packs a bit more production value. the environments don’t look quite as dreary, the planes move a bit more responsively, and the cutscenes are 3D CG this time. on top of that there’s an actual cast of characters this time around and missions are usually set up with intrigue, so there’s a sense that something is happening to you rather than you being a lone agent in an ongoing overarching struggle. one mission starts from first person perspective as you remain in the cockpit, watching the bombs drop in your vicinity, before rushing to takeoff and defend the skies.

but this increased narrative focus carries with it several unique problems. i want to start with the first moment this became clear to me, because ace combat 5 opens decently enough that you might not notice the cracks in its seams, and with a charitable focus on the game one might not be so inclined to interrogate any potential mishaps or wrongdoings. seven missions into the game you’re pulled into a situation where you and your squad must lead a counter-assault against a submarine carrier; you had previously survived your last encounter with the submarine by the skin of your teeth. the submarines anti-aircraft weaponry consists of burst missiles which annihilate anything under an altitude of 5000 feet when it fires. you know this, your wingmen know this, the mission briefing specifies this – it won’t catch you off guard like it did the last time. on top of this you have now retrofitted a satellite with an orbital laser so that you have further means of dispatching the burst missiles.

the dilemma is this: lacking personnel with which to conduct the sortie, your commanding officers send your squadron and many cadets-in-training, affectionately named ‘nuggets’. despite their lack of dogfighting experience, they know enough that they’ll be able to hold their own against enemy ordinance, especially with full knowledge of what will be attacking them, no surprises.

wrong. all of the ‘nuggets’ died in the sortie because after three successful strikes, the orbital laser malfunctions. everyone realizes this and makes a big fuss over it, but rather than elevate aircrafts to an altitude of above 5000 feet within 30 seconds after the first warning from nagase (which, by the way, only takes three to four seconds to accomplish from a base altitude, if that) every single nugget perishes in burst missile range. this is because ace combat 5 is a game that for all intents and purposes begins favoring drama and wayward polemic at the expense of realism. it wasn’t a demanding altitude, a demanding time limit, or a demanding number of enemies and every cadet died to further the casualties suffered under war and to add to the cast’s understanding that War Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up To Be, We’re All Cogs™. while i haven’t tested it yet, it would not surprise me in the least if the AI for the nuggets climbed to an altitude just below 5000 feet, and then right before the safe zone, they stalled so as to perish in battle.

but the troubles don’t really end there. the increased focus on the narrative proceedings and on wingman banter has direct ramifications for gameplay as well. several of ace combat 5s missions are unnecessarily padded so your squadmates can speak, ordained by the script, before progressing to the next stage of the mission. i played on hard difficulty and even then i was stunned to see that because i had dispatched all enemies well before the mission dictates that i should have, the mission simply continues to respawn enemies on the ground and in the air so that you have something to do to fill out the dead time. not only is this obscenely artificial once you come to grips with what’s going on, but it also throws a significant wrench into preparing for a sortie. i accept the premise that a mission briefing could be wrong so as to further the stakes and to amplify the tension of the gameplay, but this is a case where all your mission briefings might be lying to you and you have no way of foreseeing it. a mission with 30 ground targets and 15 aerial targets could easily become a mission with twofold that amount, with one particularly egregious mission respawning enemy bunkers repeatedly after you had already dealt with them. complicating this is both the lack of resupply lines from ace combat 4 and targets with greater health pools than prior iterations of ace combat, meaning you waste more ammunition to deal with enemies that were not specified to be there and you have to micromanage your ammunition to counter this fact in what is supposed to be a replayable, score-based arcade title. missions are stuffed to the brim with this kind of dead time and overindulgence in enemy count. one mission has you follow a truck for five minutes with zero friction – you cant even target structures so as to stop the trucks path. at least the mission where you flew slowly at low altitude for ten minutes possessed a semblance of mild danger. your wingmen barely make a dent in any of this despite any of the tactical orders you might try to give them. if you don’t believe me, kindly look at my squadmates numbers by the end of the campaign.

https://imgur.com/a/BfwCqNN

this is also the longest campaign in an ace combat title, topping out at 27 missions plus a victory lap. with the litany of scripted missions and gimmick missions that this title has, ace combat has never felt so much like an exhausting marathon. there are moments that it all works as a nice composite, but these moments are so few and far in between that the game is actively drowning in mud for most of it. it’s quite amusing to me that this entry in the franchise has the opposite problem of something like nier or drakengard – both of which are recipients of ace combat’s conceptual dna. in nier, the problem is the casts dialogue during battles, which are both narratively important and entertaining, but can easily be cut off by player input; in ace combat 5, the script, oftentimes for worse, obstructs player input in service of narrative. despite this, this can easily be interpreted in niers favour, which i won’t do for the sake of avoiding spoilers. ace combat 5 gets no such reprieve.

some of this might be excused if the unsung war had a good narrative, but it rather unfortunately registers to me as hisitronics. it’s bereft of the kind of nuance, humanity, or expressiveness of previous entries in the series in favour of aerial schmaltz. these characters are paper thin apex predators fighting against the machinations of war by doing hardly anything different from any other title in the series – indiscriminate slaughter. and far be it from me to reject something that has the potential to be subversive or satirical in intent, but nothing about the unsung war is even vaguely suggestive of this to me. it’s markedly less thoughtful than both electrosphere and shattered skies before it, without the comparative mechanical strengths of the relatively narrativeless ace combat 2. it sacrifices what works for an anti-war fairy tale that culminates in a squadron’s shared anti-war anthem, right before eviscerating the enemys offence entirely in a show of brute military strength. the whiplash is unreal to me. particularly so when the conspiratorial bent of the narrative seems like it will dismantle the kind of jingoist nationalism that fuels combative sentiment, but stops before even attempting to.

it takes a lot to pull me out of this kind of high octane schlock, but ace combat 5 represents the worst of both worlds. its lack of meaningful hooks renders its explosive highs destitute by the time you get there, and all the strengths it possesses as a mechanical ace combat title are negligible once you remember that they’re reflected better in the games before it. i much prefer the cowboy bebop-esque fatalism of something like shattered skies over the sluggish and preachy, constantly disconnected nature of ace combat 5. my argument here doesn’t intend to suggest that ace combat can’t be corny, but this tone should operate in tandem with the systems rather than disrupting them. and likewise, the mechanics should leverage the storytelling. because ultimately, project aces are right – in spite of the destruction they represent, planes are cool. they’re kinetic. they dance and joust in the skies. but so much of this game is repellant instead – it misses what makes ace combat work mechanically, and it misses what makes it work narratively. it aspires to the self-interrogation of games past, but instead opts for having your squadmate say ‘dogfights suck’ in the first mission of the game. its attempts to evoke reality are both underwritten and lacking in subtlety (yuktobania in this game is absolutely just russia; the antagonists in this game are cartoonishly committed to being evil). it ain’t strangereal, it’s just strange. and i can get similar, but more considered joys, somewhere else.

absolutely hates women and denies them any personhood at all but simultaneously tries to be a critique of impotent men who hate women and deny them their personhood

IT FAILS REAL BAD!!!

A real shame because some of the satoshi kon-esque psychological imagery can be fun and the puzzle gamplay is devious and interesting.

The transphobic stuff is just repulsive and sad. The fact that this game was branded as some dark and cerebral adult drama that analyzes relationship dynamics is a pathetic joke. There's less nuance here than a Two and a Half Men episode.

This isn’t even remotely as morbid a failure as it’s being made out to be (imo this is far from being the worst platformer of the year, let alone of all time), and they clearly responded to what criticism about the demo they could in the small window of time they had, but this is still a very disappointing release from someone of Yuji Naka’s pedigree. There are some real easily corrected choices here that totally perplex me: why do you need a key to unlock the costume pickups when these keys are, without fail, placed directly next to the box pickups and mindlessly accessible? Why are Balan’s Bouts dreary, maliciously unforgiving QTE sequences instead of cute little rhythm games that would enhance the game’s theatrical motifs? Why do you have to “stock” costumes instead of just being able to swap to them once encountered? Like almost everybody, I have LOTS of problems with the game, but it feels a little cruel and incurious to see people hammer so hard on BW for not being this conventionally engaging mechanically tight platformer (none of Yuji Naka’s games really are lol) when to me it seems like Balan’s priorities… clearly aren’t to be that? I agree that the game fails on its potential in a myriad of frustrating ways, but I’d much rather discuss those briefly glimmering unique elements that could have been pushed further rather than rail on it for feeling “dated” while simultaneously condemning it for not being kinesthetically identical to a legacy platformer series that’s pushing 40.

I think, ideally, the game’s one-button input philosophy and limited level design are intended to create a hyper-accessible fanciful spree of cutesy quick changing aesthetics and encouragement--a sugary character randomizer musically shifting between different flavors of low-stakes whimsy--and thats a vibe outline I can definitely see merit in. Sometimes this almost kind of works: a lot of the costumes are goofy and adorable! It’s genuinely kind of fun to get a new suit and wonder what it can do! There are a few rare moments where the level design and powers are in great harmony and the whacko dancing npcs appear and seem to be cheering just 4 u--u go girl!!! Unfortunately, the levels and costumes rarely feel as exuberant and symbiotic as they should to make something like this work, and the game REALLY underestimated just how meaningful any ability that overwrites your jump function needs to be in order to not feel completely disempowering. It can feel patronizing and dull, but it’s absolutely not some utter atrocity of design; The game is internally consistent and it functions coherently within its own parameters, despite them being pretty mystifying and insipid at times--it’s not some Sonic 06 level technical failure in any regard. I was let down by the mechanics, sure, but my real problem is that the game is rarely as bold and engaging an aesthetic experience as something like Nights or Chu Chu Rocket. However, there are still some bits of genuinely quirky individuality I really enjoyed.

The musical theater aesthetic is a totally bonkers camp delight. Some of the scenarios leading to these redemptive dance numbers are hysterical and charming (I particularly love “girl and her dolphin friend had a falling out (???) and need to reconcile”) Seeing the motion-captured choreo kind of poorly translated onto all these wonky deviantart original character costumes has a synthetic but silly sort of jankiness that fully circled back into an earnest and endearing place for me. The cutscenes are genuinely lovely, and the craftworld sort of cgi stuff they do is great. I kind of love the enigmatic stupidity of the Tower O’ Tims and its ever-expanding marshmallow peep Rube Goldberg device that appears to do nothing but exist for its own sake--I couldnt help but laugh when I spent 10 minutes watching the dumb little critters revolve around in their weird merry go round in order to unlock a third “tim trampoline” i literally never saw any of them use. The soundtrack is unequivocally pretty excellent, although it definitely feels a bit slight on tracks.

I have to wonder what a kid playing this would feel like, someone with a looser outlook about what the genre should do, someone with a less claustrophobic understanding of competence/quality than me--someone who can play games and not even compartmentalize them into genre expectations at all! I’m not even sure those kids exist or would care about this game, but the kind of frustrating letdown experience of Balan was still memorable to me despite itself, and playing it had me thinking about my own processing and approaches to design when playing games. And hey, my partner and I have been swinging our little terrier around and belting the game’s wannabe Idina Menzel gibberish anthems to her for the past week so that’s gotta be worth something right!!!

The manipulative nature of the narrative and how it's told is entirely the point. Legacy as a manufactured curse. The player explores a symbolic mausoleum dedicated to the grief felt over generations, weaponized to induce and propagate the cycle of mental illness and the futility of that struggle. It's uncompromisingly pernicious, containing laser focus and wonderfully composed sequences of death played out through the lens of magical realism. I adore it for its relaxing if off-putting features even if it reeks with the stench of utter defeatism.

A rare breed of maximally-political video game that is seemingly unashamed to throw around terms like 'traditional conservative' and literally laugh in the face of anarchists, even if it isn't entirely sure of what these words mean or imply. Essentially the Metal Gear Solid 4 of the Ace Combat franchise - throws ideas up into the air and then scrambles desperately to pick them up whenever they create conveniently-epic but emotionally/politically-incoherent "moments", perhaps best embodied in a late-game cutscene where two preteen girls grab a glock and shoot up a hard drive of flight data based on a king-turned-pilot in order to preserve the dignified human memory of a monarch who ran bombing missions during the Strangereal World's equivalent of the Kosovo War. Moreso than other Ace Combats, 7 is adamant in siloing fighter jets away from the universe they exist in, licensing and lionising pilots as apolitical titans of the sky who are simply following vocational orders from higher powers - something the godless unmanned drones could never understand.

Another king has more or less sewn up this game's ideology, so I won't bore you with The Implications (if any) of what this game's story chaotically tries to talk about. Mission 16: Last Hope - wherein a global communications outage renders your IFF useless during a mission to save a defecting general - is a real tragedy, though: a mission that perfectly captures the tone of the franchise's overarching "we're all blind pawns on the world's stage" themes in its gameplay, but is then almost immediately nullified by an announcement an hour later that you've unlocked some United States Air Force emblems to plaster all over your fictional fighter jets. No other real-world nation is represented in the game, and coupled with the game's recent Top Gun: Maverick DLC, it's hard not to think the franchise has set a hard course in the opposite direction of highly-conscious predecessors like Electrosphere and The Belkan War. The great thing about these games, at least, is that they have played exactly the same for over 20 years - you can pick and choose the ones that suit your preferred interpretations of strangereality and be none the worse off for it.

When THATCHER'S TECHBASE accidentally landed me in a bunch of newspapers and magazines last year, one question came up in every interview - "Do you think politics belong in video games?". The smart-arse non-committal wise-guy pseud-response I gave people went something along the lines of: well, games are art and art is personal and the personal is a product of the environment and environment is a product of political decisions and therefore every video game is political on some level, blah blah blah, etc. etc. etc. A nice vague answer the stands safely beyond reproach, a politican's response to a question about politics. Ace Combat 7 kinda throws that question into inverted flight by showing us what happens when affairs of state are injected directly into the Unreal Engine, bypassing environmental and personal factors to create pure political product. Sure, Call of Duty and its alikes have pulled this trick before, but they didn't lay down explicit dogma; it was all just set-dressing to make the murder more satisfyingly "real"istic. Project Aces have actually dared to pull up a pulpit here, and throughout the game's latter half I desperately waited for a series-trademark rug-pull moment where we'd learn it was all just a lesson in the blinding effects of radical-technocratic nationalism or whatever political theory the game was mulling over in that particular moment... but it never came. At least the game ends with Reiko Nagase descending from Heaven to tell you how sick your post-stall maneuvers were. That's something I can really believe in.

I've grown to hate the word "weird". Despite having often been referred to as someone who likes "weird" things, I bristle these days when it's slung around. When used in discussion about art, it typically flattens work down into a differential equation. Rather than the work being judged on its merits and meanings, it's framed against its contemporaries and whether it fits within their models of normalcy.

It pains me to say it, but killer7 is weird. Pretty much everything about it is weird. Mechanically, it's a blend of rail-shooter and survival horror. Solve puzzles. Shoot things. It's a little rigid and takes some getting used to, but it surprisingly works. Its narrative is utterly all over the place, too (I will elaborate later), and it's audiovisually singular. Even it's development seems to be an aberration. It's surprising that this game even exists.

killer7 is my first Grasshopper game. It won't be my last, I don't think. But I don't think I'm wrong in saying that this game was a lot of people's introduction to SUDA51 and his millieu. A lot of tonal and narrative flourishes are immediately noticeable: the punkish dialogue, the fragmented storytelling, the love of blood, the esoteric lore. While I think the story might implicitly be its most enduring legacy, it's also beloved for it's ~vibes~, and rightly so; this is simply one of the best looking and sounding games of its generation, steeped in style. But as the credits rolled, both as Garcian comes to his revelation, and as the explosions roared, I struggled to care much at all.

I want to be unambiguous here: I enjoy killer7. It looks and sounds incredible. I like the wild swings it takes both mechanically and narratively. I respect its ambition deeply. But the problem is that this game is in many ways inseparable from its massive cult status. So the question I keep finding myself returning to is: do the majority of these fans love killer7 for its cryptic political themes and psyschotropic theatrics? Or do they like it because they think it's "weird"?

I'm not saying killer7 is "weird for weird's sake". Far from it. It's clear that there's depth here. But stop: what is meant by depth? Never forget, as Samuel Beckett wrote, that "the danger is in the neatness of identification." This phrase haunts me still. We can identify what is occuring in the game, who is who, what is what, why is why, but this brings us no closer to interpretation. We can manage to figure out the lore of killer7 but that doesn't mean we understand it. Even identifying a symbolic framework, say, declaring Harman Smith to be God, and declaring Kun Lan to be the Devil, does not really bring us closer.

To stop myself from making an ass of myself, I looked to analyses and criticism of killer7 to see if they could shed any light on it. And frankly, I don't think they did. This at least assuaged my concerns that I'm just an idiot. Well, actually, I am an idiot sometimes, but not because I wasn't paying attention. This is not to dismiss anyone else's work as unimportant or bad. There was a lot of enlightening information. Rather, I mean to say that there seemed to be no puzzle pieces I had missing in my understanding of killer7 that would have shattered my overall opinion. Maybe I'll read Hand in Killer7 and feel differently. I would say the main thing I've seen laid out that I didn't pay as much attention to was the theme of government control and instruction. And that definitely is an important element of its story. This game has been analyzed to death and I doubt I can bring anything new to the table. If I wanted to speak broadly and succinctly, I would say killer7 is a game about nations, control, and violence. But there's so much to say! I could write about cameras, about televisions, about my disinterest in the game's psychological thriller elements, about violence in video games, about interpellations and ideology, and so on, and so on, and so on. But let me slow down.

My main takeaway from killer7's themes (particularly it's political ones) is as a piece about nationalism, democracy, and globalism, but most distinctly as a response to Fukuyama's "end of history". Fukuyama theorized that history had reached it's end, that events would still occur, but a grand narrative of societal evolution was over. He later ate his hat, and admitted that he was wrong. He pointed to Islamic extremism as something he underestimated. September 11th, 2001 might have been the rebirth of history for Fukuyama. Despite being set in the U.S., killer7 is very much a game about Japan, too. The future of Japan, the nationalist spirit, is at stake. In the game's alternate history, international conflict has supposedly ended, with nuclear warheads being detonated outside the atmosphere (this would totally work in the real life) being remembered as the symbol of everlasting peace. But then the Heaven Smile appear, an infectious virus that transforms humans into weapons. They throw themselves at you and blow themselves up. Sound familiar? Suicide bombings became a trend in the 2000s. Terrorism, I am told, tends to move in these trends: hostages, mailbombings, mass shootings. Horrible stuff. There's more. Election manipulation, human trafficking, cults, the list goes on. These are not harbingers of war, but rather the conflict itself. It's an endless state of disquiet; peace does not exist. Democracy is a facade. Our actions are interpellated. Nations are fragile. The violence continues. This isn't chaos. This is order. So says Kun Lan.

Suffice to say, I do think there is depth to killer7. Hopefully I've proven I'm not just a moron. It wears the mask of weirdness, but it does have things to say. Whether or not I agree with its propositions is a different conversation. Instead, what I question is whether or not the average killer7 enjoyer is even interested in that. Because it's not exactly easy to get to. When I first played Hotline Miami, a similarly "weird" game, one Goichi Suda apparently quite liked, the core themes passed straight over my head. Only years later, seeing others' criticism, did I begin to understand its critique of violence and media. For me, it was a frenetic stealth-action hybrid with a bumping soundtrack and animal masks. Surely, I wasn't the only one, and surely, there are people like this with killer7. Maybe if I had played it at the same time as when I played Hotline Miami or some other formative year (lord knows my parents would never have let me played it when it came out), it would have affected me the same way. Make no doubt about it, "weirdness" can be dazzling and enchanting, even if it is superficial.

I want to be perfectly clear: this did not make my enjoyment of Hotline Miami any less valid. Nor of killer7. And if you like killer7 despite being perplexed by it or not delving into its arcane mythology, that's valid, too. Guess what? I like it, too! Aesthetics and presentation are a part of art, and if you love something for that, and hell, even if you love something just because it's weird, fucking go for it. Love it all you want. Don't feel compelled to justify that affection with empty analysis and identification.

I will not give in to astonishment. I will not say, "well, it's weird, gotta hand it to 'em". I know I risk outing myself as a plebeian who doesn't get it, but I refuse to become Homer Simpson, nodding as he watches Twin Peaks saying, "Brilliant, heh heh! I have absolutely no idea what's going on." I suspect killer7 will be a game I like thinking about more than I liked playing. I look forward to thinking about it more; I already feel myself working into a shoot as I ponder it. This was only written in a flurry after finishing it then taking a nap. Who knows? Maybe I'll grow to love it. But in this moment, I will not accept my lack of "getting it" as an excuse to give into smiling along, because I do get it on some level. And I like it. It's just that I'm not as excited as everyone else. And that's okay.

fuck, croc, i was rooting for you. i really was. you deserved better.

the story goes that croc was originally pitched by argonaut games to nintendo as a yoshi game, as what would be the first ever 3D platformer: Yoshi Racing. miyamoto was apparently enthusiastic about the idea, but nintendo turned them down. argonaut had previously had a very close working relationship with nintendo. they helped make many of their first 3D games on the snes, including the original star fox. but things started to seem iffy when nintendo decided not to release star fox 2, which was already completed. when nintendo turned down argonaut on their yoshi project, argonaut forged forward with the idea and ended up making croc. and nintendo? well, whether or not they took the idea directly or not, they made super mario 64, a game with a similar premise and with a legacy that continues to endure, while croc has faded into obscurity and argonaut fizzled out in the 2000s. jez san, the founder of argonaut, said miyamoto himself apologized to him for how nintendo handled the situation, and that at least croc was doing well for them. but jez san felt that the bridge had already been burned a long time ago.

this firmly solidifies croc as an underdog, a scrappy and ambitious game who had its thunder stolen by one of the biggest gaming companies of all time. we all love an underdog story, i'm sure. but underdogs aren't always good at their job. and croc, frankly, isn't.

it's all so rote as to be asinine to describe: croc consists of running and jumping between FOUR COLORFUL WORLDS and collecting FLOATING ICOSAHEDRONS and saving these little fuzzy critters called "gobbos", which i can't take seriously at all, partially because its a silly name, but mostly because i once stumbled into some erotica about lesbians turning into goblins that was very intensely into body odor fetish and she referred to herself as a "gobbo" and that's all i can think about when i hear it now. the levels are trivially short if you don't go for the collectibles, which at least can make completing this game less painful. but i don't even like 3D platformers that much to begin with, and this game is maligned even among those fans.

i'm sure there a bunch of reviews on youtube or whatever that go into the particular design failures of croc. i don't really want to get into it too deep. but a note on tank controls: i think tank controls are fine. i like them. they do need to exist in a context, though. croc is a 3D platformer, which usually shouldn't have that, but i do genuinely think you could have a decent 3D platformer with tank controls. but this isn't it. controlling croc doesnt feel great, but it could be a lot worse, it's better than bubsy 3d. honestly the bigger issue is his tailwhip attack, where he yells "kersplat!!" or "kaboof!!" or "kapow!!" and pretty much never hits any enemy and dies because the hit detection in this game is terrible. for me the problem of game feel is exacerbated by everything else. it has this classic 3d platformer design, the same kind that underwhelmed me in spyro and crash, and in fact the extension of design in the mascot platformers of the previous era, a game of just "Stuff in Places". its far from the worst example of that design, collectibles are usually framed within some particular challenge or puzzle, but it’s just not enough. everything is forgettable. it instills this sense of meaninglessness to these objects and it doesn't help that along with that, moving croc around never feels great.

i know people have nostalgia for these kinds of games, but there is a very good reason mascot platformers have died out. they were always banking on the likability of their funny animals, but there's only one mickey mouse. there are some great ones, sure. but do you like mr nutz, kao the kangaroo, donk the samurai duck? probably not, and if you do, you probably stan gex ironically. because when you're banking on the character, you're not really spending much time on everything else. i dont know what most of these enemies are supposed to be, the levels mostly look the same, couldn't hum you any of these songs. but that doesn't matter. just look at the funny animal, go through 8 levels in green grass forest place collecting MAGIC GEMERALDS and then 8 levels in the sewer and then 8 levels in ice world and then the end of the game. these games lack so much personality even though that's the exact thing they're trying to cash in on. croc, my friend, i'm trying to give you a chance, i'm listening to you when you say "kersplat!!", i want you to be the clumsy yet triumphant underdog, but theres so little to care about, i dont care about the secret jewels, and every single time i save one of these little gobbos all i can think about is that goblin lesbian porn i read. how did i even find it? i can't even remember, but it was about a virus that turns people into very stinky goblins and orcs. ive got no problem with the green lesbians, i respect and cherish them. but i have so many questions. why "gobbo"? is that seriously sexy? why was it so clearly a reference to covid-19? with quarantine measures and such? how would a virus even change your bone structure? maybe it can, im not a doctor. and why did it then frame the virus as something that would project into social standing? it constantly highlights prejudices and judgements cast on those who become smelly goblins. are there unanswered issues with racial politics within its fantasy? why was it also very deliberately using an epistolary style, as if on reddit? are cockney accents for goblins supposed to be sexy? why was the stinkiness so important? are goblins and orcs particularly stinky? they were always talking about the smell, i'm not even sure what smell i was supposed to imagine. i know that's a fetish but like why? is reading about the odor enough to illicit a response? i'm not even really disgusted by it i am just trying to process it. there are so many weird twists and turns with the interiority of the characters that we see, how they respond. stinky gobby girl and her big giant smelly orc gf. im happy for them but also what. is it supposed to be a metaphor for something specific? queerness, transness, disease, disability, racism, classism, something else entirely? who is all this even for? is it for me? did i like it? i don't THINK i liked it, but i definitely found it somehow, and i definitely read it to the end, and i definitely am still thinking about right now when i'm trying to play croc: legend of the gobbos and i’m definitely considering reading it again

There’s a story I heard from an excerpt of Béla Balázs’ Theory of the Film. The story goes that a Moscovian’s cousin was visiting from Siberia. It was the early days of cinema, and she had never seen a film before. They had taken her to the cinema to watch a burlesque movie.

“The Siberian cousin came home pale and grim. ‘Well, how did you like the film?’ the cousins asked her. She could scarcely be induced to answer, so overwhelmed was she by the sights she had seen. ‘Oh, it was horrible, horrible!! I can’t understand why they allow such dreadful things to be shown here in Moscow!’

‘What what was so horrible then?’

‘Human beings were torn to pieces and the heads thrown one way and the bodies the other and the hands somewhere else again.’”

She had never seen a montage before. The hand, the head, the bosom, disjointed by time in the image, the Siberian girl had seen them as disembodied. The ability to mentally situate the montage and its subjects in time and space is not an innate skill. To understand a montage, you have to learn to reassemble a body.

We are privy to something similar in Immortality. We reassemble a body of work, that of Marissa Marcel. We must do it through an understanding of the movements of cinema. The central movement in the game is the match cut, and it’s story is unveiled through the process of navigating a complex web of them. A cup, a stool, a cross, a kiss, a rose, wings, water, windows. Move through them. In a sense, the player becomes the editor, but without real control over it. These images are broadened, too. A cup may also be a bathtub, smoke may also be static. A similar thing is done in Sam Barlow’s other recent games. The Her Story system does something a lot like this, but with language. Enter a word into the search bar, it shows you five videos with that word, no matter the context. In a sense, these games are about understanding relationship between context and sign. In Immortality, however, we navigate through the image. This is why the game is made of match cuts.

When a film makes a match cut, there is typically something meant. Something is always meant with a cut, but the match cut often has its own specific meaning. With this magic trick, we signify a relation between the object and it’s corollary. In Immortality, these cuts are dense and the correlation is often superficial. A cup may be a bathtub because they both hold water, but not because “cup” means the same thing as “bathtub”. It is direct, and that is felt. You can line up every single picture of a rose, every single picture of a microphone, every single crucifix. Unmoored from context, grafted into the network of images. Metaphor melts away; through the network of cuts emerges a symbolic différance, crude and indistinct denotation. Meaning is transfigured and debased. Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

A more defensive approach would view this as decay in the visual language of cinema, but it is a strength of Immortality. A character in the game briefly speaks of cubism, saying that he finds it a shame to reduce a beautiful woman's body to a bunch of squares. Immortality is sort of a cubism of the cinema, splaying out its forms. The absence of the typical cinematographic structure, both in editing and in image, challenges the immediate response we have to the image. I’m not so sure the game is fully up to embrace that project, but maybe that’s more appropriate, since I don’t know how many people will take up that challenge. The narrative and the image of these games are dismembered like the burlesque show. There is a story here about many things. There are lots of things I could have written about instead of this: masks, religion, the frequent primacy of sex in cinema, lost media fascinations, the archetype of the Wandering Jew, the purpose of storytelling. Other stuff, I’m sure. That in and of itself will be a challenge, and now, anchored to the network of match cuts, we are challenged in the same way. You cannot avoid being a structuralist. Both in image and in text, Immortality asks you to engage meaningfully and directly with the act of making meaning. The Siberian girl must learn how to watch a montage, and then she must learn how to make one.

The comparisons are too easy to make. A narrative driven independent game with lush prose that dabbles in magical realism and science fiction as it confronts visions of both the future and past. It also happens to be set in a version of our world (in this case, the American South) that has been skewed, deals with themes of labor politics and the plight of the working class, and draws on and reinvents design philosophies from decades year old games. The comparisons make themselves. That’s why I am doing my damnedest not to say those games’ names, because to do so robs Norco of its own, distinct identity. It’s torture not to draw line after line between its constituent elements to its counterparts for the sake of preserving that identity, maybe especially because I think Norco is experiencing an identity crisis of its own.

Let me be unequivocal: Norco is a good game. I think it’s worth playing. There’s a part of me that feels bad for offering an emphasis on criticism, as if I’m kicking down a darling indie game. So I’m trying to be particularly explicit here: I think Norco is a good game. It’s filled with beautiful writing, unique characters, and potent themes of grief and politics. It has things to say. But I’m not sure Norco is quite sure what those things exactly are.

I have biases, and two in particular that I arrive at here: I care disproportionately about endings, and I care greatly about “aboutness”. Norco’s ending fell flat for me, and I struggle to know for sure what it’s truly about. These are my biases. As I’ve just said, there are so many reasons to love this game. That’s not what I’m going to write about here. I’m going to write about what keeps me from truly loving Norco.

I think I disproportionately weight endings in narratives because they are what stories leave you with. When you walk out of the theater, the thing that is mostly immediately carried with you is the last frames before the credits rolled. Games, historically, do not have great endings. I don’t mean mechanically; there are lots of games with great final bosses and all that. But the narrative ending, the last moments, these are usually unnoteworthy, and it’s usually brushed off. With narrative driven work, however, this is a little harder to forgive. Of course, everyone likes different kinds of endings. I am picky with my endings, I’ll admit, but I try to have a nuanced understanding of what does and doesn’t work with me in an ending. Enter Norco.

Norco’s ending, by which I mean the exact final moments before the credits roll, feel rushed and incomplete. It is in desperate need of a denouement. It’s ironic, because the climax of this game is flanked, quite literally, with two beautiful moments on the left on the right, one of which is perhaps the game’s most beautiful sequence. I will not spoil it, but it is an ethereal, melancholy, and haunting image of memories and home. I almost wish moment was positioned as the Norco’s last moments, because this potency is immediately undercut by the climax, which felt bereft of catharsis. And I think the reason this climax fell so flat for me is because it relied on the motives of the main character, whose identity and desires are opaque and indistinct.

Kay, the protagonist, never feels like she is given the opportunity to become a character of her own. Blake, her brother, almost feels like one, but is mostly off screen. The companions you encounter feel like characters. They have motives, interiority, likes and dislikes, quirks. Catherine, Kay’s deceased mother, who you play as in flashbacks, gets to be a character, too. This is welcome; rather than just being a grief object for the protagonist, Catherine gets to be a person. So rarely are stories about grief as much centered on who we lose as how we lose them. But what about Kay? What are Kay’s feelings? What does Kay want, need? What does she like or dislike? I’m not sure I could tell you anything about her, despite having spent hours in her shoes. I felt more empathetic and understanding of its side characters by the end. All I know about Kay for sure is that she is detached.

A detached character is obviously not a bad thing, and detachment serves an important role here. Kay’s detachment, as I read it, is representative of a response to what feels to many young people like the slow march into a catastrophe by modern industrial society. It is very intentional, and the rare moments where Kay’s detachment is overtly characterized, it is felt strongly. But when a game builds up to a climax which centers on the characters goals, motives, and desires, her own specific relations and history, all of which are deliberately muted and blurred… I struggle to be moved by that climax and its ever brief ending.

Kay is neither a cipher nor a character you roleplay as. I don’t know what she’s supposed to be. She’s not me, but who is she? I can neither imagine myself as her or imagine her as someone else. Like the game itself, the player is in a crisis of identity.

Norco is kind of a mess, both narratively and mechanically. It’s modeled after classic adventure games, but the puzzle design is a far cry from that old school style -- which is not something I’m exactly mourning. Those puzzles were notoriously arcane and absurd, an ethos that has aged in quite a way, and it wouldn’t have worked here. Norco’s puzzles are relatively straight forward and signposted heavily, and you can ask for advice. But Norco also has a combat system. And it has mini-games. A lot of them. Most of these mini-game puzzles are fine. Nothing exceptional, but nothing horrible. There is one bit I did think was excellent and well executed, which I won’t get into again for spoilers, but involves a boat. But I truly have no idea why this game has combat. It’s not fun and just feels silly. And this lack of cohesion is also seen in its thematic underpinnings.

The themes are easy enough to identify: the struggles of the working class, religion’s social role, messianic myth, the desire to find meaning under late capitalism, ironic middle class hipsterism, the ever-extravagant machinations of the bourgeoisie, and so on. But these themes are neither explored on their own fronts nor are they unified by any central theme. The “Mind Map”, which is an interior display of the lore and relationships in Kay’s life (again, trying not to make the comparison here) is dense with connections but not with cohesion. There is some fascinating world-building and cool ideas in here. But where do they lead to?

Obviously I don’t think it’s necessary that a “message” be had in art, but when you neither pose questions nor offer answers, it can begin to feel more like these themes are props. Norco mostly acknowledges and maybe comments on its phenomena. Again, that’s not intrinsically bad, but I have my preferences, and the absence of direction doesn’t work for me here. All of it is cool, sure. But I don’t know what to make of it, and not in a way that fills me with giddy curiosity. I didn’t leave Norco with any questions, for either its world or for my own.

Again, I feel guilt, “damning with faint praise”, but I seem to be in the minority here, which is nice, I guess. It makes me feel a little more comfortable offering criticism. After all, I can find plenty of ecstatic analyses of Norco, but not as much where I’m coming from. I see why others have fallen in love with it. But I never got that far. Maybe I’ll grow more fond after reading criticism and other’s feelings. But this was my initial response, and that counts for something.

Norco, at its core, ends up as a collage, so scattered as to almost resemble a pastiche of itself. It’s soup full of scoopfuls of ideas that have been lightly emulsified. Collages can be good. And Norco is good. Its lack of thematic and structural direction does not nullify all the beauty therein, but it is why I don’t think I’ll ever get goosebumps when I think about it.