nothing exists in the lands between without accounting for the player. every enemy's trained all their life to defeat self-proclaimed Souls Vets, clearly at the expense of their shitty kingdoms. everyone from the biggest bosses to the lowliest jobbers have been waiting for this moment: the one where you think you should roll, but ACTUALLY you shouldn't. everything exists more as reflection of from's relationship with the audience than an entity within an ostensible place or time. if folks were half as serious about lore as the funereal affect in their explanation videos suggested they'd stop talking about shit they read on a sword and start pondering the prevalence of this 4th wall bullshit, cos any inhabitants here clearly came from Shinjuku Front Tower

its escalation's self conscious, its default mode's Prank Fuck, and its arms race aspirations are the purest evidence that fromsoft's identity's morphed into a bandai namco marketing slogan, but man I enjoyed it anyway

call it bad praxis but we're never getting demon's souls back so I'm gonna keep playing the dumb ass cbt rhythm games if they keep putting stuff like the friendly flame, impaler, and goop horse in there and let me poke around bizarre geographies that screw and coil inward and downward and betweenward for a couple dozen hours. running a bit low on freak masks and cool scythes but I'll live; the microdungeon with the forge was sick, the world design's better than it's been since bloodborne, and they only threw in three prolapsed tree spirits instead of fifty so whatever man. they're learning

keep em coming. one of the best dark souls 3s yet

i'm a big fan of meta-puzzle games. you know, games there's a layer of brainteasers to solve that only reveals a deeper hidden layer of puzzles that are are not solved by items, but rather the knowledge of how the game works (i love them so much i even made a list of them, if you'd like to check it out). animal well is indeed one of these games, however i didn't feel as satisfied cracking out its myriad of mysteries as opposed to other games within the same genre. a good amount of its basic progression triggers feel like honest trial-and-error to figure out, or feel ridiculously hidden to the point where you're combing through a (usually very dark) screen looking for hidden spots where there might be a place for you to jump or a wall that might give in to one of your items. such pixel-hunting feels adequate for obscure, very hidden secrets, but in this game they're there by default.

i wouldn't be as harsh if the game respected your time more: it's a fairly short game but there's a sizable amount of backtracking that's clunky and tedious to do. its fast-travel system isn't as convenient enough, and while there's shortcuts by the dozen to unlock they hardly feel like they make navigating the terrain any easier. the game has the audacity to give you the ability to bypass most of its platforming hurdles at the very VERY lategame where you basically don't have any reason to traverse the map anymore.

speaking of, the items you unlock don't feel innovative enough to feel joy using them. there's some fun, non-explicit secrets and techniques that you can pull off with them but they feel limited by the game's scope and terrain. i can't help but compare it to last year's void stranger, where unlocking an item legit feels like a game-changer and a significant help in both navigating its map and solving its puzzles, unlike in this game. not only that but it's somewhat clunky to cycle through all the items you get: you can either press X to open the menu, navigate to the item, choose it then close the menu, or cycle through them with the shoulder buttons for "easier" access, which once you unlock more than 8 of them it feels like a slog going through them one-by-one just to use that one specific tool to clear an obstacle. this, coupled with a terrain that actively demands items to traverse at all times, only makes exploration that much more unbearable.

i might have come off as too critical of this game's flaws, especially considering this is mostly a solo project made by a debuting developer, but i'm being critical of it precisely because i wanted this game to be much more than what i got. without a good plot or at least fun gameplay to go along with it, i find it very hard to commit to uncover all of this game's secrets without it feeling like a chore.

(Edit)

I played a couple of hours again. Part of my reason for an original 5 is because of how much I played/enjoyed this back in the day (2015). The slow methodicalness of exploring Dark Souls 2's world literally got me to make a series of IRL "Let's Plays" of places like Trader Joe's or Chicago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZHtvog-1WA , or my Walk Souls series

It got me to start a art project called "Walk Geometry" for a bit, sorta about observing the shape of 3D spaces: https://www.hantani.com/walkgeometry.html .

I even did the "Walk Souls" series for a while, where I'd clear all the enemies out of a Dark Souls 2 level before recording a narrated playthrough of walking around it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWjBaqefgAE

In other words, you could say Dark Souls 2 may have led to my interest in 3D at all! At first it was used as a way to think about the creation of my 2016 platformer Even the Ocean's levels, and how their shapes matter. But that line very easily extends into what I value in games.

I feel like I was having a lot of fun in 2015, the same way I feel like I have recently. Maybe TOO much fun because Even the Ocean ended up flopping in 2016 (although I think it's really great personally!!)

And, maybe 'fun' is what leads to interesting thinking for games... anyways...

Replaying a bit of DS2 on PS3 nowadays, the density is still quite nice. I would say the worst part of the game is what the series consisted to insist on which isn't so much the dodge roll combat as it is the commitment to an arcade punishment structure that doesn't make much sense. a 30-60 second respawn, running back to where you died. In arcade games the design language for dodging and surviving is usually pretty clear, in these sorts of games you're almost incentivized to run past because engaging in combat means the possibility of doing everything over again - just because you wanted to try learning, but you die to some enemy's super combo while trying to learn how to dodge.

It's an intentional design philosophy to be sure, engineered to create a 'feeling of victory' when you do complete it, but to me it's extremely boring! I could say more to keep twisting a knife, but...

--
(Original, 5/5)

thinking abt this from the 2014 goty event.. while i appreciate recent fromsoft to various extents, I think this is their last work to really capture my imagination, for all sorts of reasons. (Not to say that their post-DS2 games don't have great moments of their own, but that's a matter for another time). I think the main reason is DS2 feels like the the turning point for their focus more towards a very specific sort of action which interests me less overall.

Dark Souls 2 is honestly a little fucked up! But that's what makes it good. There's more levels than there should be, stuff is stitched together nonsensically..

The game keeps going on for like 10-20 hours more than you'd expect with the dragon islands world, the shrine of amana, etc... each area feels like this dense zone that the creators wanted to share, even if it didn't perfectly fit. It kind of has this texture of madness to it and theming that feel so video gamey but manage to work as a coherent and memorizable world. idk. It honestly has that energy of those sprawling wild adventure platformers (think ecco, kid chameleon, dragon slayer 4..), that feeling of 'why NOT add a sick dark green poison cave with gigantic impossible to see giants'). But it's all kept so densely knit, just wild little idea after idea.

The thing is though, when I do pick it up it feels really hard to get into. I have a lot less patience for the whole 'die and run back and slowly try again' thing since i've already done that a lot in the past. i should just make a cheese build or play with save states or something

Extremely extremely delightful. I've been savoring these over the last few months, and I finally ran through the epic finale last night. I've been playing thecatamites's games for over a decade, so it's really awesome to see so much of his style synthesized into such a dense hilarious vision.

It's cathartic because I've actually often struggled to connect with his games. thecatamites's work is focused more than anything on strong texture, loved-on spaces, and funny lyrical writing. That's all great -- but I like games with strong emotional arcs, stories that take me on dramatically pointed and specific journeys. thecatamites's games (and his criticism for that matter) don't generally seem interested in drama at all. Anything resembling a dramatic moment in his games tends to feel playful and ironically detached. In many respects our critical lenses are almost exact opposites.

I had a really negative reaction to Magic Wand when it came out for this reason; I kept expecting it to have some kind of real rpg story, and it just doesn't. Space Funeral has a neat little meta theme at the end that really resonated with me, but it's more of a cute final note than a big climax. The games of his I've enjoyed the most with are the short comic ones like Murder Dog IV, where I can focus on enjoying the texture and jokes, and they're over before I can build any lofty narrative expectations in my head.

Anthology of the Killer meets me half-way. The grand joke of these games is that thecatamites is as good as literally anyone on itch at making Eerie Haunting Dream spaces in 3D, at setting up scares, at panicky chase sequences. He speaks the language of "Unity horror game" extremely fluently -- which makes it VERY funny when BB cracks a perfectly timed hilarious joke that sucks all the tension out of the scene. (Drool of the Killer's ending sticks out to me as a particularly great moment.)

The writing is SO funny, constantly, and pairing that sense of humor with the great horror language never stops being delightful. It's also possible he was always this funny, and I was just finally disarmed and willing to fully accept his sense of humor because he fit it into a game with the most perfect cast of blorbos imaginable (I cherish ZZ).

I haven't played all of thecatamites' ouevre, in part because I've sometimes come out of his games frustrated. I feel bad about never getting around to 50 Short Games or 10 Beautiful Postcards in particular; I really want to play those. Part of me wants to end this on something like "Anthology of the Killer is thecatamites at the height of his powers," but that doesn't feel quite right. It's more like, I'm thankful that he channeled his myriad artistic strengths into a package I could personally connect to, even as someone that doesn't share all his values as a creator and player.

God I'm tired... pretty good ending though. I can see how folks got pissed off back when it released, but I was already Very Mad at the end of ep 6 and 7 and pretty checked out. A lot of this ep surprised and delighted me in comparison. Once I'd found my solid ground (a character I like is on the literal precipice of an important choice) I could finally just roll with the story and enjoy it, I found the stakes and could enjoy the magic finally.

It's a good ending to a different visual novel. I think he figured out too late what his story was REALLY about and couldn't go back to edit the earlier eps 'cause they were already released. Umi feels at war with itself on the mystery/truth stuff, I just don't think it's all the way there. But like, I ended eps 6 and 7 really pissed off and thinking this whole thing was a disaster, "not all the way there" is a big upgrade from that.

I thought ep 8 would reveal once and for all that the mystery box was empty, that the story really didn't have a heart; instead it did the opposite. I'm glad I stuck it out and read the last two eps. If you're willing to do a lot of the work yourself (too much IMO) and fill in the gaps I can see being really moved by it.

Ultimately still too little too late for me, sorry. I hate getting jerked around and umi Jerks You Around. And christ alive why is it 120 hours long. "In retrospect that holds together in a pretty neat way" isn't what I want out of an eight book series -- I want to fully enjoy it as I'm actually reading it, like I did with ryukishi's previous series.

It's never gonna be one of my faves but I can understand and appreciate why friends adore it now. If you tell people to skip higurashi and read umineko first then we're Eternal Enemies though.

In terms of the intensity and depth of the emotional response it engendered in me, Seabed compares neatly with The House in Fata Morgana. It takes a completely different, much quieter and subtler path to get there, obviously. Fata Morgana gets there with the most hard hitting melodrama possible. Seabed gets there through countless quiet moments, all working in concert to slowly weave a spell over you without you even realizing.

As a text game dev, I deeply appreciate the presentation. The whole story is told through VA-less NVL-mode walls of text, borrowed royalty-free music, as few VN presentation tricks as humanly possible, and a combo of blurred photo and cheap blender backgrounds. The only major points of aesthetic interest are the beautiful character illustrations by hide38 (who also wrote the script).

And the story still hits like a truck. When you make your characters and their longings feel this real in the reader's heart, you don't need voice acting or a bunch of expensive one-off assets. Seabed does exactly what it needs to with the presentation to support the writing, then gets out of the way and lets the story speak for itself. I think that's really admirable, and speaks to a confidence that a lot of devs would benefit from.

If all this sounds back-handed, it shouldn't. Some of the most well-loved VNs in history are doujin games like Higurashi or Tsukihime, which used similar aesthetic shortcuts. I cherish many VNs with super-loved-on presentation. But my favorites will always be the ones that make me believe in their stories, and you get there first and foremost with strong writing.

Seabed is as affecting a story as any visual novel I've read. I don't have much to say beyond that that wouldn't spoil the shape of the story (hence why I spent three paragraphs soapboxing about VN direction). If you're up for the slowest of slow burns, and you appreciate VNs with grown-up theming that don't talk down to you, give this one a read.

A estas alturas no le descubro a nadie nada si le digo que Detroit: Become Human es, como cualquier otra obra de Quantic Dream, una idea profundamente fallida que se desploma por su propio peso, y que cualquier virtud que puedas hallar a las horas echadas para diseñar este monstruo (el impresionante árbol de decisiones, la calidad singular de algunas escenas e incluso, por difícil que cueste creer, la fuerza de algunas partes del guion) se va a ver menoscabada por multitud de pequeños detalles molestos que dejan del trabajo de Quantic Dream una impresión antipática. Pero lo que no he visto comentar mucho es que, detrás de todas sus ínfulas de "película interactiva", lo que los trabajos del estudio francés me recuerdan sobre todo es al boom de la aventura gráfica europea de los 2000. Detroit: Become Human no merece ser burlado por no lograr, pese a todo el dinero invertido, acercarse a Blade Runner o a Yo, Robot; merece ser burlado por no acercarse a la calidad de Post Mortem y Still Life.

Sinceramente, me da más lástima que otra cosa a estas alturas.

--------------------------------

At this point I'm not telling anything new if I say Detroit: Become Human is, like any previous Quantic Dream work, a deeply flawed idea work collapses under its own weight, or that any virtue that you may find within, like the choice tree, the quality of some maps and even, as hard as it is to believe, the strength of some aspects of the script, will be undermined by many annoying little details that leave a heavily unpleasant experience. But what I haven't seen being talked about that much is that, behind all its "interactive movie" pretensions, this French studio's work sits closely to the European graphic adventures of the 2000s than anything else. Detroit: Become Human doesn't deserve to be mocked for failing to look like Blade Runner or I, Robot. It deserves to be mocked for reaching the quality of Post Mortem and Still Life.

Honestly, I pity these games more than anything else by now.

nothing embodies this experience better than the 1-2 punch of the loopy arthouse perfume commercial intro followed almost directly by the mcdonalds ass "595839122 deaths served worldwide" advert in majula

on one hand we got a game with the foresight of a haruspex that envisions the ever-escalating arms race the series would find itself in and tries to preempt it with radical mechanical changes, and on the other we got a game that thinks Rat With a Mohawk is a really sick idea for a boss

this thing is the living end; the result of a wild disregard for anything fans consider sacred and a critical eye that found dark souls' core pillars wanting. given the chance to do a remix/remaster they chose to ignore all feedback, double down on all the bullshit, and name it SCHOLAR OF THE FIRST SIN like it's a terrence malick movie. the haters never had a prayer against this kind of power

oscillates between achingly beautiful and sandy petersen's work on doom II. presents characters as haunting as vendrick and lucatiel then goes and reskins dark souls' most emotionally resonant encounter as ripper roo. both modern fromsoft's most melancholic, human game, and the only one where you're forced to play as an absolute mutant

I'm at the point where I'm glad the lighting got downgraded before it came out. it should be fucked, it needs to feel sickly and eroded and wrong. iron keep has to be something you can't understand, and the transition from shaded woods to drangleic castle has to be as disorienting as possible. every time you question the earthen peak elevator I only grow stronger and more insufferable

this is the response to a call no one made. it's gotchas behind gotchas behind gotchas, noble failures, bandai namco PTDE marketing quotes, and fromsoft's most indulgently experimental design since demon's souls. it's the bondage gimp door, the gender swap coffin, npc invaders modeled after the most dickhead player behaviour possible, and the cumulative psychic damage of the frigid outskirts

it's fighting the rotten four times to skip half the game, becoming drangleic's next top model, and having NAMELESS CHAD kill you while you idle in iron keep. it's backstep iframes, powerstancing demon hammers, unbelievably good pvp, and yui tanimura's masterful turn as director of the dlc trilogy

talk all the shit you want:

a lie will remain a lie

Loved this to bits -- it's solid and excellent, in a subtle way. A few notes:

- This isn't Final Fantasy VII -- dungeons are numerous, mazey, long, and chock-full of random encounters. Multiple times the main story pauses until you go to two or three dungeons (in any order) to get the required plot tokens. This is bad if you see rpg dungeons as an unpleasant obstacle in the way of progressing the rpg story. But I loved the combat system, and I was in the mood for a classic, dungeon-y, meat-and-potatoes jrpg, so I had a really fun time.

- Small cast sizes are good! There are only six playable characters, and they all get plenty of time to shine throughout the story. I semi-recently played FF9 and Xenogears for the first time; both those games have much bigger casts, and both drop the ball with many of their characters. There are no Ricos or Freyas here, characters with a couple good scenes early on that have nothing to do otherwise. The skits, added in the PSX remake, obviously go a long way in helping me further connect with the characters. Their ending resolutions, and the extended pre-final dungeon scene in Early, cemented them in my heart as an all-time favorite rpg cast. (The excellent, playful writing in the Phantasian Productions patch also definitely helped.)

- The main villain is introduced in the first seconds of the game, and he stays the main villain for the entire story. There's no bait-and-switch, no big twist. There are two main act break setpieces, one about three hours in and one about twenty hours in, that each further establish the villain and develop your relationship with him. When I got to the finale and the full arc of his story was revealed to me, I was really moved. A big part of that is that they didn't pull a new villain out of their ass for the final boss -- this is Dhaos's story from start to finish as much as it is Cress and co.'s, and that's a rare feat for an RPG story.

The only other Tales game I've played is Vesperia, and it frustrated me because of its extremely long, sloppy story full of dropped threads and its very easy fighting. Phantasia was the perfect antidote -- it's more tightly focused, and the dramatic fights kicked my ass. I have a lot of friends that adore Tales; I'm really happy I found the right game to invite me into the series.

somehow they did the impossible and made me tear up a bit with adol

being the latest in the chronology, it makes sense the game felt like an absolute payoff to the series up to date. not only when it comes to making your overall investment in previous games worth it narrative-wise (something i never thought i'd say about Ys), but also as an emotional climax for our adventure, specially for all the games with a deeper character-focus story as it has been with all the party-system games from Seven onwards.

it's not the perfect Ys however, there's a lot of stuff that bothered me when it comes to combat complexity, the repetitive nature of the scenario and the enemies/bosses, and as usual with those games even if i really like them a lot, i rarely ever LOVE them.

for me, this was an absolute improvement coming from Lacrimosa of Dana. i understand why most people will prefer VIII, but the changes for me weren't a detriment, i think they actually makes the experience more enjoyable - a deeper focus on what they expect from you as player, and less filler territory to explore. for once, i'm glad an Ys game was less about the land you explored, and more about the place you live in.

just a casual update on this. prior to the game's newly implemented master rate update - which introduced ELO as a separate, zero-sum figure which factored into matchmaking and more clearly delineated skill in players - a charitable interpretation of the game's ranking system would be as an extension of the game's thesis, the idea that the journey for strength is never-ending. and there was certainly an appeal to that: now that you've reached master rank, you'll have to duke it out with every other person who put in the time and managed to make it to the top.

on a mechanical level, though, this felt tangential at best, and over time would likely only result in an increasingly lopsided system where most players had managed to get into master rank just by playing the game over a long enough stretch of time. having master rate now lends each and every battle this genuine tension & palpable weight. after all, nobody wants to be at the bottom of that leaderboard. nakayama's team designed sf6 with the notion that the versus mode is philosophically endgame content, a mode that, for absolute newcomers, should best be reserved until after the completion of world tour and some additional reps in practice. with this in mind, master rate goes beyond just 'endgame' content - it feels like a high level expansion where you're invited to prove your salt.

for my part, i've enjoyed two brief stints in the top 25 north american dhalsims, although as it turns out the mantle is hard to keep (as of writing: #45). is it impressive? i dunno, i feel like i have a lot more to learn and my character is underplayed by a margin of almost 200,000 players (as of august 14, there were around 221824 ken users. this is to be contrasted against a paltry 29183 dhalsim users). im not actually really a competitor in the FGC, but id like to keep growing stronger and keep fighting strong opponents. so i dunno, we'll see where this goes.

it's a significant motivator, then, that this is probably my favourite street fighter at this point, as well as probably my favourite fighting game. not to say that this is without fault - i appreciate world tour's inclusion immensely but it's half-cooked, the in-game economy leaves something to be desired, battle passes suck and the devs need to do more to encourage casual retention (further costumes is one thing but what about alternative winscreens, a functional music player, further customization of titles and versus screens, etc), matchmaking needs to be further expanded to utilize the game's strong netcode (why am i somewhat region locked), and no, you're not imagining things, the game's input register really is kind of wacky.

but i think a lot of other complaints at the moment stem from the amplification of certain voices on social media - as well as the fact that these people are also vying for a million dollars in the capcom pro tour and need things to resolve in their favour. so if we can learn to accept third strike as one of the apexes of this genre, a game constructed around problems with no clear, safe answers, a game where half of the normals kind of feel like shit, a game where chun li and yun and ken and all manners of bullshit are allowed to run rampant and free, then we can accept sf6 as a similar work in progress too. an evolving slate, one in which we have to learn - with time - to deal with strong characters and strong universal systems and strong offensive options.

this game really hits this absolute sweet spot of accessibility and depth of systems without presenting straightforward or clear solutions in a way that gets my brow furrowed in concentration and my brain eager to keep playing. i come from a samurai shodown background so everything to do with this central notion of not going on autopilot and guarding against the tendencies of players, in a sense moreso than worrying about the characters they inhabit, strikes a resonant chord with me. im really excited to see where it goes, and of course it goes without saying EVO top 8 this year belongs in the pantheon of fighting game tournaments. just a total gem. thank you capcom for giving me aki on my birthday

addendum: KB0 third strike review, november 2020:
"rather than establishing new legends, this game is about characters unsure about what the future entails, about what their next move should be, about what it even means to continue fighting - they waver, they fail, they practice, they move on. "

what a joy, then, that this is the overarching idea that propels world tour! street fighter has never really had traditionally good narratives, but when it chooses to it has pretty good vignettes and pretty good character writing, both of which world tour thankfully has in spades. very smart to organize a narrative around each character kind of just doing their own thing instead of trying to wrap them all into a sweeping narrative ala SFV.

A miserable slog to play, 20+ hours of running around boring fields doing busywork to collect a billion different progression tokens. When it was announced I joked it looked like they dropped sonic in an unreal demo, and then that's exactly what it feels like. I like a lot of the character writing and if the story had fully landed for me I'd probably like the game anyway, but then the climax is a big wet fart. The "final boss fight" is a joke; it's very transparent that the devs played NieR Automata, thought they could pull off something similar, and did NOT have the story chops for it. Please just go play one of the many good platinum games (or sonic adventure 1+2 which are miles better than this).