Ninth bar.
"My, my, my", you say as you take a sip from your 300$ cup of Dom Pérignon, "what a misstep from a professional violinist that is..."
Little did you know that only a couple of minutes later you will get blown off orbit by Alfred Schnittke, inevitably staining your way-too-expansive-for-the-average-joe-huh costume.

For a (broad) genre that is so commonly associated with elitism and bourgeoisie, using atonality in classical music has always been a hell of a thing as it directly challenges orthodox forms of Western music but also goes against the conservatism way of seeing everything under the veil of """beauty""".

Most of the droning conversations surrounding Drakengard are about its janky (to say the least) gameplay and whether or not this was Yoko Taro's intent (as if meaning slipping away from the artist's hands would undermine all artistic value).
There's little to no room for discussion about these ear-scorching violins, making a soundtrack exclusively out of unapologetically aggressive sound collages in a world of grand melodramatic orchestras and nice subtle ambient tracks is a hell of a feast from Nobuyoshi Sano and Takayuki Aihara.

Heck, I'd even argue that it doesn't even serve as a mere companion piece for Drakengard, this is as much of an incredible exploration of the cycle of violence as the whole design use of detachment from death games usually provide, and both the soundtrack and the core game are much more effective at doing so than most works wearing their "so subversive" title up their sleeves I've experienced yet.

I want more abrasive and nightmarish soundscapes to drown in, this is pure hell through and through, I am crying, I am curled up in a ball, I feel like shit, I am gasping for air, I need more.

are you using your time to properly think and talk with art? are you listening? or do you plug your ears anytime it tries to talk with you, to challenge you and make you rethink what you're engaging with?

i don't think i have any common ground with most people who like videogames, actually. but i don't think this is just videogames anymore, this is endemic in all of the arts. people stopped being listeners, started being consumers. no long a plot twist will make your heart skip a beat, now it's the author "betraying" your trust. no longer can complicated concept be presented before your public, now you're "fumbling", "overdesigning" or whatever new word people will invent to use as analytical shortcuts. like, really, you spent 90h with this game and all you could get back from it was that it has "Ubisoft-like" design because it has towers? i don't care if you gave the game 4 or 5 stars or if that was a compliment, is it that hard to think more about it? am i setting the bar too high? probably.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is not a product, it's an art piece which you converse with (that's honestly 99.9% of games too btw). hefty admission price for sure, but it does not need to cater to you at any moment. it needs to be heard, seen, felt, I think running around the grasslands felt incredible and vibrant, i love how every map changes its whole design based on the chocobos, i love how sidequests have their own little songs to them with battle music included, i love how every character gets explored a whole ton more because now they have the time to do so, I love how Tifa can be herself instead of Cloud's past, I liked every change, I think this game is probably one of the most courageous games ever made and that will ever be made and people won't appreciate it enough, but that's fine because I will.

the more i think about it, the more i think about its last hours, the more i think how they handled -that moment- the more I like it. I like this and Remake for entirely different reasons, but Rebirth made me feel things I don't think i was even aware I could feel playing a game and I don't mean crying i cry for everything and i cried super hard at several moments in this game, it's something else, which i would only dare to explain if I had spoilered this text but i don't want to do so.

like i said i think i finally realized my lack of common ground is what makes it really hard to talk about videogames outside of my circle, people who only wear "videogames are art!!" as a mantle for feeling validated, but not really treating them much differently than the hamburger they'll buy for lunch. i don't mind if you didn't like the game but i only ask for something of substance, an interesting read, at the very least a personal perspective, not internet gaming buzzwords i can see in like 60 other reviews. i just want to think and challenge myself and i feel like i'm always going into a hivemind. but i guess that's fine i get to cherish good things when i see them at least.

i just need to remind myself of this

I imagine that anybody who follows me is long past the moment of “oh Mass Effect is actually extremely fucking wack, politically” so I’m not going to spend a lot of time here on how deeply evil this game is except shoutouts to Wrex you deserve better, anti-shoutouts to Garrus I know you’re everyone’s boyfriend but you’re one of the most evil people of all time, rest in piss Ashley, awful awful woman.

Instead I want to talk about the thing the game is actually ABOUT and what it struck me as being really about when taken in its totality. At first glance Mass Effect seems like it’s sticking pretty much beat for beat to the early Bioware formula: tutorial, three discrete levels in any order, fourth level with a context shaking twist, and a funnel level into an endgame scenario. But Mass Effect has something that none of the other Bioware games that follow this specific formula do: a shit ton of completely optional side content. And while I think you can certainly derive what I got out of this game if you ignore it, which mostly people do, because it is obviously unfinished and largely uncompelling in the way you want a story-driven RPG to be compelling, I think that engaging in every single bit of it really helped this game reveal itself to me.

Now I have to come clean up front and admit that I am simply an enormous pervert (mako enjoyer). I like how it controls, this gigantic, floaty, unwieldy thing that will swing sharply in whatever direction you indicate at even the lightest touch, that takes forever to start or stop but is always a moment’s notice away from flipping fully onto its back because you ran over a small rock, that unless a surface is literally like 90 degrees vertical you can p much scale it no probbo. But you can get good at it! There is consistency to its floatiness, there is art and skill to the propulsion you get from its jump and the ways you can manipulate your airborne angles with it if you’re positioned correctly. The Legendary Edition says they “improved” the mako but all they really did was make it heavier which may have made driving it immediately easier but ironically makes climbing mountains and getting out of harsh terrain much more difficult because you have more mass and can’t accelerate as much from a stop or a precarious angle.

And yet driving across infinite essentially identical planets brings me so much joy, one of my favorite feelings in all of video games. It’s amazing how much you can change the feel of a place by changing the dominant color scheme, or adding a second color, or putting a harsh filter over the screen, or putting a massive moon in the sky, or environmental hazards, or any combination of these things. These places don’t feel distinct but Mass Effect, contrary to popular opinion, is actually a beautiful game, one that made up for limited animations and less-than-cutting-edge graphics with an incredible command of color and filters and art design. That stuff all stands out even in its largely featureless wildernesses, where you only company will ever be one of four kinds of salvage operations, a random boss fight, or the planet’s designated side quest location, of which there are maybe seven unique maps divvied across like 30 planets?

These maps are enormous and truly empty. If they’re dotted with small scraps of stuff for you to loot it’s almost never shit you care about or even shit with a story to tell. There’s no music and no ambient dialogue from your companions and no sound of any kind other than the wind and the noise of your engine encroaching on the silence of a planet that does not care. Because this is what Mass Effect is ultimately about: that the world is big, bigger than we can understand and certainly bigger than we can master. That to think we can know it is arrogance and that to think we can tame it is suicide.

Everywhere you go in Mass Effect you find people who have overextended, who have fucked around and found out. Usually they’re long dead. Sometimes this is dramatic, like their ship went down and they were killed by a large worm monster but mostly it’s just that something went wrong with their ship and they crashed on one of the overwhelming majority of planets in even the charted galaxy where no one lives, and even with their distress beacon going they’re too far out for anyone to ever find them because they were brave enough to be out here for a reason that suddenly seems very small in the scope of the death the universe is about to hit them with. Even the little largely scientific descriptions of planets that you get when you first scan them are often filled with small stories of people who died there for whatever reason. Explorers, pirates, settlers, whatever. All kinds of planets. All kinds of reasons. Always dead.

But it’s more than just this. Mass Effect isn’t just about how Nature Is Scary and We Need To Respect it. I think it’s becoming evident that Mass Effect is about how no matter how times we’re warned about this, we just won’t learn this lesson. We refuse it, we reject it. It’s a game where literally every main plot scenario is driven by people who have Fucked Around And Found Out, re: some primordial phenomenon, usually natural. Liara investigates prothean ruins alone and messes with shit she, the known universe’s foremost prothean expert, doesn’t understand and gets caught in a deathtrap, saved entirely by happenstance. On Feros, Exogeni Corp. unearths the thorian, a singular and ancient life form so old and obtuse that it defies the classifications we’ve used for plants and animals for hundreds of years, and even when they realize that it’s dangerous, and killing people, and possibly irreversibly destroying their brains, they just let it happen for research, until things spiral further out of control. Binary Helix is doing almost the exact same shit on the Rachni, who very quickly massacre everyone at their remote research base in response to the abusive way they’ve been resurrected. Let’s not forget either that the Peak 15 research base is cut off from the outside world by the extremely hostile and untamed weather conditions of Noveria itself; part security feature for shady corporations, equal part menacing trap when something goes wrong.

The thing is though, this doesn’t just happen, right? None of these things are innate to the conception of personhood. Most of the people you meet in these games are not enthusiastically being evil scientists and frontiersmen, they’re normal exploited workers trying to eke out a living in a world that’s forcing them. These disasters are the logical endpoint of the hypercapitalistic world that every species has to buy into hard to participate in galactic society. Everyone’s doing it. It’s a huge focus of the game, how deep we are in the rot. The game doesn’t fully realize how bad this is; sure, corporations are often the villains but their place as the glue that runs society and holds it together, the idea that all news, all entertainment, all life is filtered through a corporate veneer even less veiled than our own real life one is taken for granted. A runoff of the game constantly trying to make you feel like your choices matter and it can see what you’re doing is that every news report you might overhear in an elevator is about corporate colonies you visit, every shop is selling weapons and armor and all gossip is about military outfits and their trevails against pirates and extrasolar robotic boogeymen. The military and the frontier and the private business are all the same thing and while this world is broadened somewhat in the sequels, in Mass Effect they’re near the ONLY thing.

This need to not only study but to replicate and synthesize and weaponize the thorian, to recreate and subjugate the rachni, to create a bred army of mindless krogan slaves. The way the human government implants children with ever improving but ever-dangerous biotic amps with devastating lifelong side effects and abandoning them with no support as soon as the next generation of hardware comes along. Even simply the constant, omnipresent need to expand, to colonize new planets and dominate their ecosystems and strip them of everything valuable and force them into a state of habitability and relative comfort for the few species who exist in the realm of citadel space. What can these things be driven by but the demands of capital? Of eternal growth? Of wealth over humanity? Constantly in this game we’re punished for being this way but never does anyone figure it out.

Then there are, of course, the reapers. The ultimate expression of nature’s unknowability. Sovereign enters this story like a sledgehammer, and taken at face value (and without a reason not to do so), his words suggest the terrifying and infinite reality of our smallness in a world that rejects our attempts to reign it into our shitty and selfish frameworks. The protheans are ancient and mysterious? Sovereign is older, and killed them, seemingly and somehow. The rachni nearly wiped out everyone in the galaxy? Sovereign is so unconcerned with the might of the galaxy’s fleets that he doesn’t even acknowledge them in the game’s climax, he just moves through ships like they’re air, destroying them almost unknowingly, and it takes the combined might of literally everyone who is physically able to show up to kill him. He’s one reaper of untold numbers. The thorian was frightening because it defied classification and because it had brainwashing pheromones? Sovereign seems to warp perception simply by its presence. He is not only an AI like the geth but a truly living machine. He sort of explains stuff to you but it doesn’t even feel like he really cares all that much. He says scary stuff but it doesn’t feel like he’s trying to scare you; he’s just like this. “You exist because we allow it. You will end because we demand it.” What does he mean by this? It doesn’t matter. Understanding Sovereign isn't important. It might be to us, we WANT to understand, but he doesn't care if we do or not. We don’t matter. We can’t impose ourselves onto Sovereign. Even when we win the fight, how many other Sovereigns are on their way? Infinite, it seems. Living on a real Earth in 2022, as it begins to die more publicly than ever, and begins to turn on humanity in ways more and more obvious to the naked eye, and we continue to harvest it anyway, Sovereign hits me harder than before.

Where this reading stumbles, of course, is that Mass Effect itself doesn’t realize what a compelling case it’s made against its heroes and its world and every leadership body that populates it. Mass Effect is not a game that is saying on purpose to Drop The Meteor, that the Earth will be better off. The game ends, no matter how heroically or cruelly, with the defiant assertion of our right to conquer, our correctness in our way of life. It doesn’t realize how damned that sounds in the wake of how vile everyone in authority we meet is, how many victims we are. That in so valiantly preserving a status quo so rotten they are only digging a deeper reactionary hole.

I don’t think these feelings will be followed up on. I don’t recall Mass Effects 2 and 3 having the kind of relationship to the natural world that this game has, and obviously their narrative and thematic throughlines emerge strongly if discordantly from one another. Andromeda is deeply concerned with explicit colonialism in a way that only exists on the edges of Mass Effect 1. But as a stand alone experience I think Mass Effect hits. It is distracted by its vile politics and military aggrandizement but by insisting on staying out in the weeds in my stupid rover or pouring over planet descriptions for like 2/3rds of my time, that stuff fades in my memory just a little bit, even just a week out from finishing the game again. Much better to cruise across the plains and over the mountains, and feel small, and find nothing on the other side.

I considered strongly putting together a long-form critique of this game, but the most damning statement I could possibly make about Final Fantasy XVI is that I truly don't think it's worth it. The ways in which I think this game is bad are not unique or interesting: it is bad in the same way the vast majority of these prestige Sony single-player exclusives are. Its failures are common, predictable, and depressingly endemic. It is bad because it hates women, it is bad because it treats it's subject matter with an aggressive lack of care or interest, it is bad because it's imagination is as narrow and constrained as it's level design. But more than anything else, it is bad because it only wants to be Good.

Oxymoronic a statement as it might appear, this is core to the game's failings to me. People who make games generally want to make good games, of course, but paired with that there is an intent, an interest, an idea that seeks to be communicated, that the eloquence with which it professes its aesthetic, thematic, or mechanical goals will produce the quality it seeks. Final Fantasy XVI may have such goals, but they are supplicant to its desire to be liked, and so, rather than plant a flag of its own, it stitches together one from fabric pillaged from the most immediate eikons of popularity and quality - A Song of Ice and Fire, God of War, Demon Slayer, Devil May Cry - desperately begging to be liked by cloaking itself in what many people already do, needing to be loved in the way those things are, without any of the work or vision of its influences, and without any charisma of its own. Much like the patch and DLC content for Final Fantasy XV, it's a reactionary and cloying work that contorts itself into a shape it thinks people will love, rather than finding a unique self to be.

From the aggressively self-serious tone that embraces wholeheartedly the aesthetics of Prestige Fantasy Television with all its fucks and shits and incest and Grim Darkness to let you know that This Isn't Your Daddy's Final Fantasy, without actually being anywhere near as genuinely Dark, sad, or depressing as something like XV, from combat that borrows the surface-level signifiers of Devil May Cry combat - stingers, devil bringers, enemy step - but without any actual opposition or reaction of that series' diverse and reactive enemy set and thoughtful level design, or the way there's a episode of television-worth of lectures from a character explaining troop movements and map markers that genuinely do not matter in any way in order to make you feel like you're experiencing a well thought-out and materially concerned political Serious Fantasy, Final Fantasy XVI is pure wafer-thin illusion; all the surface from it's myriad influences but none of the depth or nuance, a greatest hits album from a band with no voice to call their own, an algorithmically generated playlist of hits that tunelessly resound with nothing. It looks like Devil May Cry, but it isn't - Devil May Cry would ask more of you than dodging one attack at a time while you perform a particularly flashy MMO rotation. It looks like A Song of Ice and Fire, but it isn't - without Martin's careful historical eye and materialist concerns, the illusion that this comes even within striking distance of that flawed work shatters when you think about the setting for more than a moment.

In fairness, Final Fantasy XVI does bring more than just the surface level into its world: it also brings with it the nastiest and ugliest parts of those works into this one, replicated wholeheartedly as Aesthetic, bereft of whatever semblance of texture and critique may have once been there. Benedikta Harman might be the most disgustingly treated woman in a recent work of fiction, the seemingly uniform AAA Game misogyny of evil mothers and heroic, redeemable fathers is alive and well, 16's version of this now agonizingly tired cliche going farther even than games I've railed against for it in the past, which all culminates in a moment where three men tell the female lead to stay home while they go and fight (despite one of those men being a proven liability to himself and others when doing the same thing he is about to go and do again, while she is not), she immediately acquiesces, and dutifully remains in the proverbial kitchen. Something that thinks so little of women is self-evidently incapable of meaningfully tackling any real-world issue, something Final Fantasy XVI goes on to decisively prove, with its story of systemic evils defeated not with systemic criticism, but with Great, Powerful Men, a particularly tiresome kind of rugged bootstrap individualism that seeks to reduce real-world evils to shonen enemies for the Special Man with Special Powers to defeat on his lonesome. It's an attempt to discuss oppression and racism that would embarrass even the other shonen media it is clearly closer in spirit to than the dark fantasy political epic it wears the skin of. In a world where the power fantasy of the shonen superhero is sacrosanct over all other concerns, it leads to a conclusion as absurd and fundamentally unimaginative as shonen jump's weakest scripts: the only thing that can stop a Bad Guy with an Eikon is a Good Guy with an Eikon.

In borrowing the aesthetics of the dark fantasy - and Matsuno games - it seeks to emulate, but without the nuance, FF16 becomes a game where the perspective of the enslaved is almost completely absent (Clive's period as a slave might as well not have occurred for all it impacts his character), and the power of nobility is Good when it is wielded by Good Hands like Lord Rosfield, a slave owner who, despite owning the clearly abused character who serves as our introduction to the bearers, is eulogized completely uncritically by the script, until a final side quest has a character claim that he was planning to free the slaves all along...alongside a letter where Lord Rosfield discusses his desire to "put down the savages". I've never seen attempted slave owner apologia that didn't reveal its virulent underlying racism, and this is no exception. In fact, any time the game attempts to put on a facade of being about something other than The Shonen Hero battling other Kamen Riders for dominance, it crumbles nigh-immediately; when Final Fantasy 16 makes its overtures towards the Power of Friendship, it rings utterly false and hollow: Clive's friends are not his power. His power is his power.

The only part of the game that truly spoke to me was the widely-derided side-quests, which offer a peek into a more compelling story: the story of a man doing the work to build and maintain a community, contributing to both the material and emotional needs of a commune that attempts to exist outside the violence of society. As tedious as these sidequests are - and as agonizing as their pacing so often is - it's the only part of this game where it felt like I was engaging with an idea. But ultimately, even this is annihilated by the game's bootstrap nonsense - that being that the hideaway is funded and maintained by the wealthy and influential across the world, the direct beneficiaries and embodiments of the status quo funding what their involvement reveals to be an utterly illusionary attempt to escape it, rendering what could be an effective exploration of what building a new idea of a community practically looks like into something that could be good neighbors with Galt's Gulch.

In a series that is routinely deeply rewarding for me to consider, FF16 stands as perhaps its most shallow, underwritten, and vacuous entry in decades. All games are ultimately illusions, of course: we're all just moving data around spreadsheets, at the end of the day. But - as is the modern AAA mode de jour - 16 is the result of the careful subtraction of texture from the experience of a game, the removal of any potential frictions and frustrations, but further even than that, it is the removal of personality, of difference, it is the attempt to make make the smoothest, most likable affect possible to the widest number of people possible. And, just like with its AAA brethren, it has almost nothing to offer me. It is the affect of Devil May Cry without its texture, the affect of Game of Thrones without even its nuance, and the affect of Final Fantasy without its soul.

Final Fantasy XVI is ultimately a success. It sought out to be Good, in the way a PS5 game like this is Good, and succeeded. And in so doing, it closed off any possibility that it would ever reach me.

It doesn’t really surprise me that each positive sentiment I have seen on Final Fantasy XVI is followed by an exclamation of derision over the series’ recent past. Whether the point of betrayal and failure was in XV, or with XIII, or even as far back as VIII, the rhetorical move is well and truly that Final Fantasy has been Bad, and with XVI, it is good again. Unfortunately, as someone who thought Final Fantasy has Been Good, consistently, throughout essentially the entire span of it's existence, I find myself on the other side of this one.

Final Fantasy XV convinced me that I could still love video games when I thought, for a moment, that I might not. That it was still possible to make games on this scale that were idiosyncratic, personal, and deeply human, even in the awful place the video game industry is in.

Final Fantasy XVI convinced me that it isn't.

A kitten lives in a cardboard box next to the shrine in Yamanose. One night, a speeding car takes the life of its mother. As quiet snow comes gingerly down from the sky to hug the fading warmth of the mother’s body, the kitten cries. These cries score the night’s wallowing blackness to an audience of one; a young schoolgirl. That schoolgirl brings the kitten to the shrine in Yamanose and houses it in a cardboard box. It stays in this box every hour of every day, calling out to any footsteps that happen to pass by. Whose footsteps they are does not matter; the kitten is cold, it’s hungry, and most importantly it’s lonely in a way it has never known before. To the kitten, any company is better than no company.

A young man lives in a house next to the shrine in Yamanose. One night, a cartel assassin takes the life of his father. As quiet snow comes gingerly down from the sky, pressing gently against the windows of the dojo where the young man holds his father’s body, the young man makes a wordless promise to himself. He spends every hour of every day chasing that promise through the streets and buildings of many places. The young man consults strangers and acquaintances alike for countless favors; who the favors come from does not matter, just that it brings him closer to his goal. Though just as quick as the young man approaches others for favors, he’s similarly quick to leave them, if not quicker. To the young man, company would only get in the way.

The schoolgirl’s classmates and friends all come every day to the cardboard box next to the shrine in Yamanose. They take turns caring for the kitten and making sure she is warm, fed, and loved. Before too long, the kitten recovers enough both physically and emotionally to start walking around outside of the box. The children provide for the kitten all the love and the care a mother would have given multiple times over. That’s what the kitten needs, so that’s what they do.

The young man’s caretakers, his best friends, and the girl who loves him constantly attempt to be a part of his life. They ask how he’s doing, where he’s been, what he’s been up to - the young man insists on being left alone. Before too long, they grow concerned and start wondering why he’s been staying out so late, if he’s doing anything dangerous, offering help if he needs it - again, the young man insists on being left alone. After enough insisting, the young man’s caretakers, his best friends, and the girl who loves him decide to start keeping their distance. That’s what the young man needs, so that’s what they do.

One day, the cardboard box vanishes from the shrine in Yamanose, and the kitten is nowhere to be found. Thanks to the kindness and the love of the schoolgirl and her friends, the kitten is fully recovered and ready to take on the world by herself. There is no doubt in my mind that the kitten will live a full and happy life. I have no worries about the kitten at all. The young man, however… I worry deeply about that young man.