Charlotte
115 Reviews liked by Charlotte
Quake
1996
Quake 1 is the greatest FPS of all time and it was made essentially on accident by a group of extremely skilled people who could not stand eachother anymore cobbling something together. Quake 1 is the Fleetwood Mac - Rumours of videogames
Black Mesa
2015
they 'fixed' the MP5 and shotgun so instead of needing to rely on a whole arsenal of explosives, traps and weirdo guns you can just handle every single fight with two guns
they 'fixed' the HECU marines so instead of erratic freaks they just kinda stand around and impose a health tax if you look around a corner
they 'fixed' xen by making it look like it was trending on art station and replacing all the weird cool levels with Half-Life 2 puzzles for some godforsaken reason
they 'fixed' the HECU marines so instead of erratic freaks they just kinda stand around and impose a health tax if you look around a corner
they 'fixed' xen by making it look like it was trending on art station and replacing all the weird cool levels with Half-Life 2 puzzles for some godforsaken reason
![NieR Re[in]carnation: The People and the World](https://images.igdb.com/igdb/image/upload/t_cover_big/co7zfb.jpg)
I had never played a gacha game before Nier Reincarnation, and I likely won't play one again - my experience with this thing, which I'm reluctant to even call a game, exists as a weird peek into a world I willfully don't understand and hopefully never will unless a couple of things go REALLY wrong in my life. I dropped back into Reincarnation after hearing it was being shut down, and they were giving you everything you needed to make it to the end of the story for free. I had an almost allergic reaction to it the first time I played, but I was grimly fascinated in what a game like this looks like in its dying days.
I really like Nier. I like its characters, its music, its strange approach to game genre, the measured barren minimalism of its 3d spaces - Nier Reincarnation takes all of the things I like about Nier and uses them in service of what amounts to a slot machine for perverts. The way in which Reincarnation wears the glamour of something loved and familiar in service of what's essentially gambling is almost grotesque - like a child snatched by a changeling, a monster wearing their skin.
If you're new to gacha games like I was, all the things the game does in service to cultivating a long term audience of whales seem completely insane. There is a colossal amount of math happening at all times, all in service of nothing - numbers get into the hundreds of thousands, yet the game must be frictionless enough at all times to be played via automation. Each story chapter consists of ten battles, but the game gives you the means to skip up to 100 encounters a day for free. There are fourteen discrete categories of upgrade material. The most expensive premium currency package on the in-game store was 150 dollars. To look into this game's community, a relatively small one by the standards of these kinds of games, is like looking into a parallel dimension where value is completely decoupled from time and reality. Upgrade mats, grinding for bookmarks, pity pulls - none of these words are in the Bible. There's a dark engine at the heart of Reincarnation, of almost genius construction, and its sole function is to obfuscate the fact there's absolutely nothing here. The game plays itself, and gives you tools to skip the playing. Nier Reincarnation is not a video game - it is a magician waving their hand while the other sneaks into your pocket.
There is, despite everything, something interesting and almost compelling inside Nier Reincarnation, separate from grim academic fascination with its genre - the art direction, soundtrack, sound design, and voice acting are all beautiful, better than any of this deserves. The writing, which takes the possible funniest parts of Nier - the pointlessly tragic weapon stories - and places them center stage, is mostly really dumb! In one of my favourite stories, a young soldier hunts down the guy who killed his parents, only to find out that the murderer was his biological dad and he'd been cradle snatched as a baby. The little girl who's ostensibly the main character of the story is part of an invented caste of peasants called "goat people". A son tries to kill himself to give his mother his heart for a transplant, yet she dies before he can bring himself to do it. I still mostly liked the pulpy melodrama, and the direction they go in this last chapter - finally linking Reincarnation to the previous two games in a meaningful way - is pretty cool! There's a lot of talent on display here, and in another version of reality present in The Cage, all these clearly very skilled people got to make a real video game instead.
At the end of the game they put up a "THANK YOU FOR PLAYING" screen and then change it to "THANK YOU FOR PRAYING". What the fuck is that, that's nothing
I really like Nier. I like its characters, its music, its strange approach to game genre, the measured barren minimalism of its 3d spaces - Nier Reincarnation takes all of the things I like about Nier and uses them in service of what amounts to a slot machine for perverts. The way in which Reincarnation wears the glamour of something loved and familiar in service of what's essentially gambling is almost grotesque - like a child snatched by a changeling, a monster wearing their skin.
If you're new to gacha games like I was, all the things the game does in service to cultivating a long term audience of whales seem completely insane. There is a colossal amount of math happening at all times, all in service of nothing - numbers get into the hundreds of thousands, yet the game must be frictionless enough at all times to be played via automation. Each story chapter consists of ten battles, but the game gives you the means to skip up to 100 encounters a day for free. There are fourteen discrete categories of upgrade material. The most expensive premium currency package on the in-game store was 150 dollars. To look into this game's community, a relatively small one by the standards of these kinds of games, is like looking into a parallel dimension where value is completely decoupled from time and reality. Upgrade mats, grinding for bookmarks, pity pulls - none of these words are in the Bible. There's a dark engine at the heart of Reincarnation, of almost genius construction, and its sole function is to obfuscate the fact there's absolutely nothing here. The game plays itself, and gives you tools to skip the playing. Nier Reincarnation is not a video game - it is a magician waving their hand while the other sneaks into your pocket.
There is, despite everything, something interesting and almost compelling inside Nier Reincarnation, separate from grim academic fascination with its genre - the art direction, soundtrack, sound design, and voice acting are all beautiful, better than any of this deserves. The writing, which takes the possible funniest parts of Nier - the pointlessly tragic weapon stories - and places them center stage, is mostly really dumb! In one of my favourite stories, a young soldier hunts down the guy who killed his parents, only to find out that the murderer was his biological dad and he'd been cradle snatched as a baby. The little girl who's ostensibly the main character of the story is part of an invented caste of peasants called "goat people". A son tries to kill himself to give his mother his heart for a transplant, yet she dies before he can bring himself to do it. I still mostly liked the pulpy melodrama, and the direction they go in this last chapter - finally linking Reincarnation to the previous two games in a meaningful way - is pretty cool! There's a lot of talent on display here, and in another version of reality present in The Cage, all these clearly very skilled people got to make a real video game instead.
At the end of the game they put up a "THANK YOU FOR PLAYING" screen and then change it to "THANK YOU FOR PRAYING". What the fuck is that, that's nothing
Fallout
1997
sometimes when you play a good game it makes you feel more charitable to other games in it's genre, Fallout 1 is so good though that it makes you feel less charitable; forces you to wonder why you'd ever want to play yet another RPG that confuses amount of writing for quality of writing
1. Awful as it is, I doubt I could have finished without the shutdown deadline. Xenoblade X took me 180 hours over two years - 30 with COVID in 2022, and 150 to get ahead of the shutdown in 2024. Maybe it was a good thing!!
2. I got really stuck in Chapter 10. I felt I had intuited combat, so I looked online for some advice. I realised I had absolutely no idea how the self-healing mechanic worked. It's easy to be annoyed when you have a moment like that, but I like it.
I don't understand why I win encounters, because the game doesn't want to tell me that. What I do understand is what to do to win, which is what the game actually taught me. Because I never managed to kill Xenoblade X, it feels more alive. Fights could always go either way, so I try my best to survive with the tools I have. I think that feeling is perfect for this game. I definitely think it's why I kept feeling tense in fights for 180 hours.
3. I was disappointed that after your mech starts flying about 120 hours in, the area themes all get replaced by a jaunty Sawano track. But I realise now that the Skell flying theme was actually a valiant, self-sacrificing hero, protecting the area themes from being zoned out by the player after 180 hours. Thank you, Monolith. Thank you, Sawano.
4. It's fascinating how good the side missions & affinity missions are. Xenoblade X's narrative is about a merc exploring a whole different planet, taking on the wildest sicko-inclined jobs, and spending time with their cool friends while nasty things happen to them. Xenoblade X is not about the main story, which is about 5% of the runtime. The moment you realise and appreciate that, you recognise how great it is to be engaging in X-Files nightmares through the cockpit of your giant mech.
5. Worth noting you only enter that cockpit after spending 60 hours on the ground earning your license. This is the true face of pinnacle.
2. I got really stuck in Chapter 10. I felt I had intuited combat, so I looked online for some advice. I realised I had absolutely no idea how the self-healing mechanic worked. It's easy to be annoyed when you have a moment like that, but I like it.
I don't understand why I win encounters, because the game doesn't want to tell me that. What I do understand is what to do to win, which is what the game actually taught me. Because I never managed to kill Xenoblade X, it feels more alive. Fights could always go either way, so I try my best to survive with the tools I have. I think that feeling is perfect for this game. I definitely think it's why I kept feeling tense in fights for 180 hours.
3. I was disappointed that after your mech starts flying about 120 hours in, the area themes all get replaced by a jaunty Sawano track. But I realise now that the Skell flying theme was actually a valiant, self-sacrificing hero, protecting the area themes from being zoned out by the player after 180 hours. Thank you, Monolith. Thank you, Sawano.
4. It's fascinating how good the side missions & affinity missions are. Xenoblade X's narrative is about a merc exploring a whole different planet, taking on the wildest sicko-inclined jobs, and spending time with their cool friends while nasty things happen to them. Xenoblade X is not about the main story, which is about 5% of the runtime. The moment you realise and appreciate that, you recognise how great it is to be engaging in X-Files nightmares through the cockpit of your giant mech.
5. Worth noting you only enter that cockpit after spending 60 hours on the ground earning your license. This is the true face of pinnacle.
Dragon's Dogma II
2024
In that primordial placeless origin, through the mist-veil of time, since man first airbrushed Merlin smoking a pipe on the side of a van, there, you can feel it in the noosphere, a moon-lit dream, The Dream, a call in the heart of the human soul. Some have seen some small part of this dream- The Legend of Zelda, The Elder Scrolls, Ultima, Dark Souls, Adventure, Dragon Quest, King's Field, Wizardry, among innumerable others, nameless here forevermore, all have failed to reach The Dream. Perhaps cruel circumstance chained them to Earthly bond, perhaps cowardice stayed their hand, perhaps they lacked the naivety and earnestness necessary to behold a waking dream. Whatever their individual situation, the results have always been, like Lion of Gripsholm Castle, a mutant, an aberration, at best a passing resemblance. Dragon's Dogma is The Dream, forged in the furnace of the heart, it is not visually plain- it is clean, it is not halfbaked- it is too goodly to exist totally in a world half-evil, it achieves the promise of videogames, and proves that creative endeavour above all else is the greatest goal humanity can strive for. it is the twinkle in the eye of Merlin smoking a pipe airbrushed on the side of a van.
Tsukihime
2000
Have you ever felt the saddening passion of loving someone, knowing that in but a few hours you’ll be parted forever?
There’s so much I could talk in-depth about with Tsukihime. The rough art style that detracts not at all from its characters’ iconic charm. The deep world it tries to immerse, sometimes drown you in. Story beats that knocked me off my chair as a kid in the late 2000s. The story of being a fan of this awkward, weighty fan-translated game. The unintentionally comical sex writing and the shocking, off-putting scenes of rape and violation that run through its trunk like fungus on a tree. But none of those explain the feeling I get when a random playlist in the background, gone unnoticed, picks a song from this game. What makes me stop what I’m doing and look up at the sky.
To me, Tsukihime is about impermanence. It is about knowing how easily we lose the things we cherish, and how we act when faced with that knowledge. Whether it’s facing those who’d do anything to avoid their own mortality, or realizing that even timeless figures bleed and hurt. Our protagonist, Shiki, lives an impermanent existence, his life uprooted, his health as fragile as glass, cursed to see the fault lines that live in all things, no matter how powerful they might seem. The thread of his life is intertwined with that of the women of this story, each powerful in their own way, each in some way scarred by a man’s inability to process impermanence. There is no immortality in Tsukihime. There is only false security bought by inflicting loss on others, becoming the thing you fear in the eyes of others. Everything goes away, including the ones you love.
Yet Tsukihime remains a story of love. In each of its routes there will come a time where crisis has drowned the story, where the foe seems unstoppable. There will be a scene where Shiki and his lover somehow snatch a sliver of precious safety amidst this deluge, sometimes no more than a few hours. At no point are they, or you, allowed to forget about the imminent danger. This is a temporary reprieve, coming after a narrow escape and before a doomed last stand with everything on the line. Neither expect to make it unscathed. Even if they do, there’s always something that’ll make their victory short-lived, whether it’s Shiki’s health or the tragedy of his lover or just the nature of the world, but whatever it is they know the face of the end they cannot avert.
In those moments they let their love for each other spill out. They spend their tiny moment of quiet on each other. The music is never joyful in these scenes, but it is gently, warmly sad, tender with anticipated loss. Love is made cruel by impermanence. It would be so much safer, so much more reasonable to keep your distance. But that very same thing makes love so powerful in the moment, allowing you to feel incomparable longing for someone even though they’re right here with you. To choose to feel that pain for a lifetime just to be with them with all your being for just a few more hours.
If you’ve lived through that, then you know what it feels like to wish you could put your entire being out with this person, to make every part of them feel precious in an uncaring world, one last time.
And if you haven’t, Tsukihime might be able to show you what it feels like. I can think of no higher praise than that.
There’s so much I could talk in-depth about with Tsukihime. The rough art style that detracts not at all from its characters’ iconic charm. The deep world it tries to immerse, sometimes drown you in. Story beats that knocked me off my chair as a kid in the late 2000s. The story of being a fan of this awkward, weighty fan-translated game. The unintentionally comical sex writing and the shocking, off-putting scenes of rape and violation that run through its trunk like fungus on a tree. But none of those explain the feeling I get when a random playlist in the background, gone unnoticed, picks a song from this game. What makes me stop what I’m doing and look up at the sky.
To me, Tsukihime is about impermanence. It is about knowing how easily we lose the things we cherish, and how we act when faced with that knowledge. Whether it’s facing those who’d do anything to avoid their own mortality, or realizing that even timeless figures bleed and hurt. Our protagonist, Shiki, lives an impermanent existence, his life uprooted, his health as fragile as glass, cursed to see the fault lines that live in all things, no matter how powerful they might seem. The thread of his life is intertwined with that of the women of this story, each powerful in their own way, each in some way scarred by a man’s inability to process impermanence. There is no immortality in Tsukihime. There is only false security bought by inflicting loss on others, becoming the thing you fear in the eyes of others. Everything goes away, including the ones you love.
Yet Tsukihime remains a story of love. In each of its routes there will come a time where crisis has drowned the story, where the foe seems unstoppable. There will be a scene where Shiki and his lover somehow snatch a sliver of precious safety amidst this deluge, sometimes no more than a few hours. At no point are they, or you, allowed to forget about the imminent danger. This is a temporary reprieve, coming after a narrow escape and before a doomed last stand with everything on the line. Neither expect to make it unscathed. Even if they do, there’s always something that’ll make their victory short-lived, whether it’s Shiki’s health or the tragedy of his lover or just the nature of the world, but whatever it is they know the face of the end they cannot avert.
In those moments they let their love for each other spill out. They spend their tiny moment of quiet on each other. The music is never joyful in these scenes, but it is gently, warmly sad, tender with anticipated loss. Love is made cruel by impermanence. It would be so much safer, so much more reasonable to keep your distance. But that very same thing makes love so powerful in the moment, allowing you to feel incomparable longing for someone even though they’re right here with you. To choose to feel that pain for a lifetime just to be with them with all your being for just a few more hours.
If you’ve lived through that, then you know what it feels like to wish you could put your entire being out with this person, to make every part of them feel precious in an uncaring world, one last time.
And if you haven’t, Tsukihime might be able to show you what it feels like. I can think of no higher praise than that.
Starfield
2023
probably the most interesting thing about this game is the spellbindingly libertarian dialogue - the future of humanity as imagined by rand paul smiling serenely in an airport bathroom.
colossal and generous, mushy and boring. filled to the brim with things in service of absolutely nothing.
colossal and generous, mushy and boring. filled to the brim with things in service of absolutely nothing.
Cyberpunk 2077
2020
Picked this up after hearing “Cyberpunk is good now” and hey, it is! It probably was always at least a little bit good, but the extra time in the oven has made it into something pretty special. Does the eventual arrival of a genuinely compelling piece of art retroactively correct the way the people responsible for creating this thing have been treated by their employers? Probably not! My ideal world for artists and technical staff is probably one where less games like this get made, but this is maybe the best case scenario for what a gigantic AAA game like this looks like. I’ve got nothing to really add that hasn’t been articulated better by someone else over the last three years, but my really complicated feelings about this thing and the way it was made have coalesced mostly into positivity.
I played this after falling off Starfield - a game which made me wonder if I just disliked big-huge immersive RPGs and they just weren’t for me anymore - and I ended up falling in love pretty much immediately. They’re very different beasts, but I really prefer the density and friction of Cyberpunk’s approach to this type of game compared to Starfield’s compartmentalised slippery procgen. Night City feels big, but most importantly, curated - even small encounters and sidequests feel imbued with intention. The microstories on offer can vary wildly in quality, but in each one you can feel the touch of a human’s fingerprints.
Unionise your workplace!
I played this after falling off Starfield - a game which made me wonder if I just disliked big-huge immersive RPGs and they just weren’t for me anymore - and I ended up falling in love pretty much immediately. They’re very different beasts, but I really prefer the density and friction of Cyberpunk’s approach to this type of game compared to Starfield’s compartmentalised slippery procgen. Night City feels big, but most importantly, curated - even small encounters and sidequests feel imbued with intention. The microstories on offer can vary wildly in quality, but in each one you can feel the touch of a human’s fingerprints.
Unionise your workplace!
Since time immemorial, through the foggy shroud of that unknown place we call the past, since man first airbrushed Gandalf smoking a pipe on the side of a van, there has been, floating in the aetheric vapor of the noosphere, a dimly illuminated dream, The Dream, pinpricks of the sublime in the collective mind of humanity. Some have glimpsed a piece of this dream- The Legend of Zelda, The Elder Scrolls, Ultima, Dark Souls, Adventure, Dragon Quest, King's Field, Wizardry, and countless others, but each in turn have failed to capture The Dream. Perhaps they could not escape their worldly fetters and feared the purity and power of The Dream, perhaps they, like in the parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant, only beheld some small part of The Dream, perhaps they greedily sought to pass off The Dream as their own. Whatever the case may be, the results have always been, like Conrad Gessner's illustration of the Cameleopard, a grotesque, a parody, and an imitation. Dragon's Dogma is The Dream, carved in the fullest relief yet, and lit by warm radiance, it is not artistically generic- it is pure, it is not unfinished- it is too great to exist in totality on this fallen Earth, it is videogames: fulfilled, it is proof that the creative endeavors of humankind are not wasted, it is the twinkle in the eye of Gandalf smoking a pipe airbrushed on the side of a van.
The real video games.
Fromsoftware at last has atoned for their sin of codifying the "wait and press the i-frame button" action game. The proactive, aggressive movement and positioning action game, resurrected by the studio that killed it, nature is healing. (And in fairness they killed it by making really good defensive/reactive games that everyone blandly riffed on, you don't blame the GOAT for their herd)
This review contains spoilers
My first Armored Core game, and I definitely get it now. Demanding, dense, creative, relentless. As a Gunpla person, customising your little guy and making custom decals hit all the same good spots in my brain, and then actually putting your build through its paces and finding out the ways you like to play is another joyful process in itself. Storming through levels and dancing around bosses in an engine of death you’ve designed yourself gives you a sense of empowerment that other action games can only dream of - this is the product of a team at the peak of their craft. Every movement you make and attack you connect feels imbued with the perfect amount of weight, and it’s all in service of making you feel like the sickest cunt alive.
The rigour required from the player isn’t quite met by the game on all occasions - a few big encounters are a bit janky or feel inconsistent. In un-walled arenas, bosses will sometimes move out into areas outside of the combat zone where they can still act, while you’re left to wait around like a dipshit for them to come back so you can continue playing the video game. The camera will freak out a little bit in the more demanding fast paced encounters or against big foes, which is especially problematic if you’re playing with a close range build. After I took down the game’s first big skill check I needed to lay down because I was intensely motion sick - an experience I’ve only had playing Gravity Rush 2 in a darkened room. As such, few of the early bosses are maybe a little bit overtuned to require almost too much precision from the player - some definitely felt like they were designed to be tackled again with a late-game build for the S-Rank, and I honestly have no idea what the balancing solution for this is! It’s awesome to roll up on an old progress wall with a refined build and just completely melt them, but during my first run through the early game it often felt like every boss had way too much HP and meant you had to play the game with an athlete’s discipline to avoid a fuckup that would wipe out ten minutes of progress. Some of these early encounters where your vocabulary is a bit more limited than it will be later in the game sometimes felt like tests of patience rather than skill - you’re punished often maybe too harshly for sub-optimal play while you’re still learning the ropes. I also never really liked having to sell all my shit to afford a new toy to play with in the early chapters, as I feel the game truly shines when you have a couple of different ACs in the holster ready to tackle the unique demands of a new mission. The balance issues also skew wildly in the other direction from about the halfway point onwards, and a couple of fights that narratively should be push and pull battles are over before they can really show off what they’ve got to offer. There’s a few bosses and encounters in the closing chapters which absolutely rip and feel almost perfectly balanced - the final boss of the route I took was absolutely exhilarating even if it demanded a kind of mastery of camera control reserved only for true video game psychopaths.
As a newcomer to the series, I found it extremely interesting that the game chose to show no human faces or bodies at all outside of marketing materials - this is definitely in keeping with the game’s view that capitalism is dehumanising by design, but my personal favourite moments in mecha anime have always been when there is a show of contrast between the human body and the weapons made in their image. With From’s newly honed skills since the last Armored Core at depicting brutal human violence, I expected moments like the cockpit of the Kampfer riddled with bullets and blood, Noa emptying a shotgun into the runaway TYPE-0, Guld’s body caving in against the weight of g-forces - but in the world of Fires of Rubicon, bodies are unimportant, even unnecessary. There is no moment of clarity where the true cost of the violence you enact is weighed in blood. The game is more interested cultivating a creeping realisation that death is this world is devoid of heroics or tragedy - it’s just busywork. It’s a strikingly minimalist approach to the subject matter when all other parts of the game are about spectacle, and I don’t think it really works all of the time because said busywork of corporate murder is really fun! Every time the game took a moment to remind me that the things I were doing were ethically dubious, I didn’t really give a shit because I looked like a total baller doing it - I dismantled V.VII Swinburne in like thirty seconds and I’d do it all over again even if the magic woman who lives in my head tries to make me feel weird about it!
The core story of Coral and its supernatural abilities is less narratively compelling than the real world costs of conflicts over resources, and the notes sketched in Rubicon’s margins - of a skeleton being picked clean long after the real meat is gone - is much more fertile ground for expressing the gameplay’s themes of alienation and powerlessness than what we actually textually get by the game’s conclusion. The huge swings and setpieces were awe-inspiring, but are often morally uncomplicated in the ways most of the game is not. If Fires of Rubicon is to get a For Answer or Verdict Day equivalent, I’d really like to see it focused on a hyper-regional quagmire conflict where the largely absent non-corporate forces present in the world are maybe given a bit more to do. The world on show here is compelling enough that I’d like to see some more visible contrast between those who have skin in the game and those who order the impersonal deaths of thousands - the Rubicon Liberation front don’t really have any ideology to speak of, and we don’t get much of an indication of what they’re actually fighting for other than an amorphous idea of freedom from the corporations on the planet. Any conversation about what it means to actually live in the game’s capitalist dystopia takes a backseat to the dilemma of what humanity should do with Coral, which I believe is less interesting than unpacking the material circumstances of existing in a failed state at the whims of corporate interests. “What if fossil fuels were people” is a weird wrinkle to add to a world that’s so focused on the inherent inhumanity of capital, and I’m not sure it really works with the game’s suggestions that the mere act of survival in this unending circus of death requires you to be basically without ideology. The choice offered to you at the end of the game - allow Coral to continue to exist and maybe become something more, or burn it all to the ground - feels like too huge a shift in the setting to be offered to the player when everything else about the game has constantly stressed that the manmade systems of the world are designed on purpose to be so labyrinthine and contradictory in order to alienate the worker from the real consequences of their labor. The idea that the fate of the setting depends on the beliefs of one individual just doesn’t really make sense to me in the world that they set up in the early chapters, where the actions of lone heroes are impotent and meaningless.
Basically perfect otherwise, wake da dawg up‼️🥵🔥
The rigour required from the player isn’t quite met by the game on all occasions - a few big encounters are a bit janky or feel inconsistent. In un-walled arenas, bosses will sometimes move out into areas outside of the combat zone where they can still act, while you’re left to wait around like a dipshit for them to come back so you can continue playing the video game. The camera will freak out a little bit in the more demanding fast paced encounters or against big foes, which is especially problematic if you’re playing with a close range build. After I took down the game’s first big skill check I needed to lay down because I was intensely motion sick - an experience I’ve only had playing Gravity Rush 2 in a darkened room. As such, few of the early bosses are maybe a little bit overtuned to require almost too much precision from the player - some definitely felt like they were designed to be tackled again with a late-game build for the S-Rank, and I honestly have no idea what the balancing solution for this is! It’s awesome to roll up on an old progress wall with a refined build and just completely melt them, but during my first run through the early game it often felt like every boss had way too much HP and meant you had to play the game with an athlete’s discipline to avoid a fuckup that would wipe out ten minutes of progress. Some of these early encounters where your vocabulary is a bit more limited than it will be later in the game sometimes felt like tests of patience rather than skill - you’re punished often maybe too harshly for sub-optimal play while you’re still learning the ropes. I also never really liked having to sell all my shit to afford a new toy to play with in the early chapters, as I feel the game truly shines when you have a couple of different ACs in the holster ready to tackle the unique demands of a new mission. The balance issues also skew wildly in the other direction from about the halfway point onwards, and a couple of fights that narratively should be push and pull battles are over before they can really show off what they’ve got to offer. There’s a few bosses and encounters in the closing chapters which absolutely rip and feel almost perfectly balanced - the final boss of the route I took was absolutely exhilarating even if it demanded a kind of mastery of camera control reserved only for true video game psychopaths.
As a newcomer to the series, I found it extremely interesting that the game chose to show no human faces or bodies at all outside of marketing materials - this is definitely in keeping with the game’s view that capitalism is dehumanising by design, but my personal favourite moments in mecha anime have always been when there is a show of contrast between the human body and the weapons made in their image. With From’s newly honed skills since the last Armored Core at depicting brutal human violence, I expected moments like the cockpit of the Kampfer riddled with bullets and blood, Noa emptying a shotgun into the runaway TYPE-0, Guld’s body caving in against the weight of g-forces - but in the world of Fires of Rubicon, bodies are unimportant, even unnecessary. There is no moment of clarity where the true cost of the violence you enact is weighed in blood. The game is more interested cultivating a creeping realisation that death is this world is devoid of heroics or tragedy - it’s just busywork. It’s a strikingly minimalist approach to the subject matter when all other parts of the game are about spectacle, and I don’t think it really works all of the time because said busywork of corporate murder is really fun! Every time the game took a moment to remind me that the things I were doing were ethically dubious, I didn’t really give a shit because I looked like a total baller doing it - I dismantled V.VII Swinburne in like thirty seconds and I’d do it all over again even if the magic woman who lives in my head tries to make me feel weird about it!
The core story of Coral and its supernatural abilities is less narratively compelling than the real world costs of conflicts over resources, and the notes sketched in Rubicon’s margins - of a skeleton being picked clean long after the real meat is gone - is much more fertile ground for expressing the gameplay’s themes of alienation and powerlessness than what we actually textually get by the game’s conclusion. The huge swings and setpieces were awe-inspiring, but are often morally uncomplicated in the ways most of the game is not. If Fires of Rubicon is to get a For Answer or Verdict Day equivalent, I’d really like to see it focused on a hyper-regional quagmire conflict where the largely absent non-corporate forces present in the world are maybe given a bit more to do. The world on show here is compelling enough that I’d like to see some more visible contrast between those who have skin in the game and those who order the impersonal deaths of thousands - the Rubicon Liberation front don’t really have any ideology to speak of, and we don’t get much of an indication of what they’re actually fighting for other than an amorphous idea of freedom from the corporations on the planet. Any conversation about what it means to actually live in the game’s capitalist dystopia takes a backseat to the dilemma of what humanity should do with Coral, which I believe is less interesting than unpacking the material circumstances of existing in a failed state at the whims of corporate interests. “What if fossil fuels were people” is a weird wrinkle to add to a world that’s so focused on the inherent inhumanity of capital, and I’m not sure it really works with the game’s suggestions that the mere act of survival in this unending circus of death requires you to be basically without ideology. The choice offered to you at the end of the game - allow Coral to continue to exist and maybe become something more, or burn it all to the ground - feels like too huge a shift in the setting to be offered to the player when everything else about the game has constantly stressed that the manmade systems of the world are designed on purpose to be so labyrinthine and contradictory in order to alienate the worker from the real consequences of their labor. The idea that the fate of the setting depends on the beliefs of one individual just doesn’t really make sense to me in the world that they set up in the early chapters, where the actions of lone heroes are impotent and meaningless.
Basically perfect otherwise, wake da dawg up‼️🥵🔥
sekiro's final battle is the greatest in any modern fromsoftware game, without question. cant believe something which beat me down and filtered me so hard has easily become my favorite fromsoftware title (at least out of this modern era)
There is a myth, circulated amongst gamers, that what they want is a fair and honest multiplayer game, that balance is the ultimate ideal from which fun will trickle down. Seeing this, I cast myself in the form of a gamer, as Zeus took the form of a hermit, and went out amongst them seeking one gamer who could define concepts like "honesty" and "scrubby", their mouths moved, but I cannot hear lies, the world was silent. The gamer knows not what it wants, it wants to get one over the other guy, to get schnasty, to rub dirt in it's opponents eyes. If the gamer held in their heart the values they profess with their mouth, 10,000 people would be playing Nidhogg at evo, people would be lining up around the block to 1v1 me in Quake 1 (honest liar that I am, I'm playing Quake 1 because the Quake 3 guys are too good and I want to rub dirt in some kid's eyes).
Bushido, the code of the sammerai, the iron clad laws of honor which bound men, ahistorical fascist mythologizing, the Samurai was the type of mfer to take a gun to a knife fight, Miyamoto Musashi showed up late to the most important duel of his long career, against Sasaki Kojiro, he did it on purpose to make sure Kojiro was good and mad so that the well rested Musashi, whose mind no doubt was like a placid lake, a sheet of liquid glass reflecting the world, could win more easily. Like Bushido, the fair and honest multiplayer game is a confabulation of gamer machismo, it doesn't even exist, the games I named several sentences ago are for nasty little freaks and I was just lying.
Samurai Shodown knows the lure of the myth, look how elegant it is, a single well timed sword stroke can win you the match if you read your opponent well and play with patience, no crazy combos will squeeze out extra damage from a love tap, no scrubby blockstrings to mix you up, none of that nonsense, at last you can prove your warrior's worth, a steely eye and a hard read in neutral and your opponent is lying on the floor in two pieces. Then the wuxia guy gets a health lead and spends the last 10 seconds of the match flying around the ceiling to force a time out for an easy win; Samurai Shodown also knows that when gamers get what they say they want they'll be bored in 15 minutes, and go back to screaming at other people to deflect for their own ineptitude in DotA 2.
There's two gauges that effect the strength of the wound your mighty sword stroke will inflict: "the sword gauge" and the "rage gauge" they fill and deplete in fickle increments, a coward might research the values that dictate them, a True Samurai will perform arcane rituals to appease them. If you are in doubt , hit the button labelled "special", it hops, it rolls, it dodges, it deflects, it meditates, whatever you want, it does; the longer you meditate, at the cost of you rage gauge, the longer and sooner you can go into slow-motion when you're at risk of losing, enabling you to steal an easy win from the guy who was trouncing you. This is the true historical Bushido, the way of the Samurai, what all warriors and e-warriors want, despite their claims to the contrary. Show up late, and bring a gun.
Bushido, the code of the sammerai, the iron clad laws of honor which bound men, ahistorical fascist mythologizing, the Samurai was the type of mfer to take a gun to a knife fight, Miyamoto Musashi showed up late to the most important duel of his long career, against Sasaki Kojiro, he did it on purpose to make sure Kojiro was good and mad so that the well rested Musashi, whose mind no doubt was like a placid lake, a sheet of liquid glass reflecting the world, could win more easily. Like Bushido, the fair and honest multiplayer game is a confabulation of gamer machismo, it doesn't even exist, the games I named several sentences ago are for nasty little freaks and I was just lying.
Samurai Shodown knows the lure of the myth, look how elegant it is, a single well timed sword stroke can win you the match if you read your opponent well and play with patience, no crazy combos will squeeze out extra damage from a love tap, no scrubby blockstrings to mix you up, none of that nonsense, at last you can prove your warrior's worth, a steely eye and a hard read in neutral and your opponent is lying on the floor in two pieces. Then the wuxia guy gets a health lead and spends the last 10 seconds of the match flying around the ceiling to force a time out for an easy win; Samurai Shodown also knows that when gamers get what they say they want they'll be bored in 15 minutes, and go back to screaming at other people to deflect for their own ineptitude in DotA 2.
There's two gauges that effect the strength of the wound your mighty sword stroke will inflict: "the sword gauge" and the "rage gauge" they fill and deplete in fickle increments, a coward might research the values that dictate them, a True Samurai will perform arcane rituals to appease them. If you are in doubt , hit the button labelled "special", it hops, it rolls, it dodges, it deflects, it meditates, whatever you want, it does; the longer you meditate, at the cost of you rage gauge, the longer and sooner you can go into slow-motion when you're at risk of losing, enabling you to steal an easy win from the guy who was trouncing you. This is the true historical Bushido, the way of the Samurai, what all warriors and e-warriors want, despite their claims to the contrary. Show up late, and bring a gun.