Ghost Trick was one of the first games I put in my Amazon wish list back when I made an account in 2017. I remember a Youtuber I liked, Nintendocaprisun, streamed the game and the little I watched from the stream looked really cool. It sat in that wishlist for ages, eventually skyrocketing in price. It wasn't until last year, that I decided to bite the bullet and buy the game physically off eBay. It was expensive but it was a game I wanted to own for a while now, and I figured playing it on the DS would have been awesome. By this time, I was already a big Ace Attorney Fan, and knowing that this was another Shu Takumi game..I was pretty excited to play it. While I personally still prefer AA1 and AA3 over this, this was still a great time overall.

This game makes great use of the touch-screen. So, the basic premise of the game without going into story details, you the main character have died. You are a ghost and find out you have the ability to go back to the past, four minutes before someone has died, and have the potential to save them. You also have the ability to move to different objects and control them. You do this by going into ghost mode and moving your little wisp icon from object to object. The catch is, you can only move it a specific distance away. If something is too far away, you have to figure out how to get there by possibly interacting with the object you're on. This is called "tricking" and it can vary depending on the section of the story you're on. Some can be very simple while others you need to time specific actions in the real world. It might seem a bit confusing with how I explained however, it's very easy to understand in game. Either way, this gameplay loop is really fun and is perfect for a DS game. Near the end of the game, it also throws another character at you with some different mechanics. And it even combines the two at once and it can lead to some really fun puzzles. The game was never that hard, I never even had to look up a guide, however I never found them super easy.

Story-wise, like I said the premise is you die at the start. You play as Sissel, someone we know nothing about, and not even he knows who he is. His main goal from the start is to figure out who he is and how he dies, but along the way he meets a colorful cast of characters, and the game gets more complicated from there. Overall, I enjoyed the story and cast of characters for sure. Like Ace Attorney, they're all very distinct and can be very goofy. The main cast is very good tho I have to say I didn't connect to them as much as I do with the main cast of Ace Attorney. Probably because this game is shorter than your average AA game, and I was able to connect to that game's cast through the span of three games! Either way, while I didn't love any character here, Sissel..Lynne..Jowd..Cabanela..Missile..the entire cast is memorable and entertaining. The story is also full of twists and turns throughout. The ending may be a little convoluted imo but I think it was executed well and I did not see it coming at all. While not mind-blowing overall, I can at least commend the story and overall concept of the game for being unique. Always love seeing really out there stories like this.

This may be weird to here, but I don't think the absolute best aspect of this game is the story or the gameplay. It's the visuals. Honestly, some of the best sprite-work I've ever seen in a game. Every animation is so buttery smooth and really gives the game a lot of character. The look of each character sprite too, idk how they did it, but it has this very distinct look to it. Since the game is very goofy at times, the characters animations are goofy as well. The art style on the portraits is very distinct too tho those aren't animated. They're nice but it would have been cool if they had little animations as well, like Ace Attorney. Along with the sprites being full of personality, so is the dialogue. If you played Ace Attorney before this, you'd be right at home here. It feels just like Ace Attorney. Goofy and witty when it wants to be, serious when it wants to be, and full of heart throughout. In this regard, it may be better than Ace Attorney because I didn't notice any spelling errors lol.

The OST is probably my biggest disappointment compared to Ace Attorney tbh, especially since the AA1 composer did this game. The first Ace Attorney's ost is now in my top 10 OSTS of all time. I just love it so much, so I might've hyped myself up too much with this game. That's not to say this game has a bad soundtrack, I just don't find it comparable to the Ace Attorney games personally. Maybe I just haven't listened to the OST enough, as I know this is probably a hot take and others will disagree. Still, there were songs I did like. Four Minutes Before Death probably being my favorite since it reminded me of Ace Attorney the most haha.

I do wish I ended up liking this a bit more, especially since this game is praised so much and has a 4.5 average, however in this case I can totally see why it is as this game is really great. I guess maybe it just comes down to my personal preferences. Or maybe I'll like this even more on replay, who knows. Either way, while it seems I do prefer the Ace Attorney series more (sorry I keep comparing them, it's just hard not to with the type of game this is), this is still must-play DS game imo and worth all the praise it gets.

to start off, i think i wouldn’t be doing my due diligence if i didn’t mention the fact that i do have some nostalgia for this game, specifically for the original N64 version. even though i was born after the original came out, it was still a formative part of my childhood. i have many memories playing OOT on the N64 at my grandparents’ house with my sister, and even though i never got very far at that time (i was bad), it was still very special to me. fast forward some years, and i did finally beat OOT on Wii Virtual Console with my sister. i've loved zelda games in general for basically my whole life. i was link for halloween twice. i have a vivid memory of when i whistled the song of storms at my sister’s baseball game and it actually started raining. i was like 8, and i had to convince myself i didn't have magic powers of some sort. needless to say, this game and this franchise is immensely important to me.

yeah, this game still fucks (original thought is dead!!! long live original thought!!!). to be fair, i have watched so many goddamn randomizers of the original game, so it’s not like i was returning to a world long forgotten by my little decrepit 20-something mind, but still. fucks.

obviously, the biggest points to make about this game come from what’s new and fresh in the remake. i would not classify myself as anywhere near being an fps snob, but 20 fps on the N64 version is a little distractingly low frequently. the 3DS runs this game at a stable 30 fps for basically the entirety of the game; i only noticed some slight performance issues when an extreme number of particles/ pickups were on screen. the visuals are updated, yet still feel pretty faithful to the overall style of the game. there’s some texture changes here and there, and some things look drastically different, such as adult link’s face, but it’s not a complete rewrite of the ‘look’ of OOT. the dual screen of the 3DS does some WORK for this game. you have the on-screen minimap up top still, but you can also see the world and dungeon map on the bottom screen while everything else is happening, which makes navigating dungeons so much more friendly. on N64, you’d normally only have 3 C-buttons to bind items to, but here you have the X and Y buttons, as well as two “I” and “II” buttons that you can also map items to. additionally, there's a dedicated ocarina button, essentially freeing up yet another slot due to how frequently it's used. even though it does still pause the action to interact with your equipment screen, getting in and out is sooo much more fluid than it ever was on N64. items can fit into any slot on the items screen, which is kinda nice so you can organize them how you want, but it also ends up becoming incredibly cluttered extremely fast, as you swap out items and they end up in different spots than you may have originally intended. personally, i would rather have discrete, locked, item slots in your inventory so you can just use muscle memory to tap and select, but this is an extremely minor nitpick. gyro controls are here, and man are they welcomed. usually it feels a little clunky to aim with just the stick on N64, but gyro lets you fine tune your aim that makes sections such as horseback bow+arrow so much more comfortable.

the ocarina has got to be one of the coolest items in any game i’ve played. yeah, it’s a neat idea to have a little instrument with magical properties that can do things from making it rain, to changing the time of day, to warping you across the world, but the implementation is absolutely ingenious. it’s actually absurd how Koji Kondo was able to write insanely iconic themes that are all limited to begin with the same selection of 6 notes you can play on the ocarina. i always get chills learning new songs. Zelda’s Lullaby, Saria’s Song, the Song of Time, Song of Storms, i could go on and on. they’re all so distinct and memorable. it would have been trivial to have the functionality of the ocarina be subjugated to selecting a song to play on a menu, but no, they make you play the notes yourself. granted, you’re not playing the full song, as that’s out of the range you’re given, but you are still the one playing the notes that launch into the performance. when i was younger, i even had a little 6-hole sweet potato Ocarina of Time that i would constantly play little tunes from the game on. it’s so fuckn neat, it’s only right that the game gets its name after it.

one thing i absolutely adore about 3D zelda titles is how discrete their worlds and items are. while the following RPG mechanics are certainly not inherently bad qualities to have in a game, there’s no leveling up or XP or an excess of only slightly different weapons stats-wise. instead, there’s hard, discrete lines drawn in the sand of the game design. you don’t have 242 HP or something, you have an integer number of heart containers evenly divided into quarters. 4 heart pieces make a whole. there’s not 20 different pieces of armor, there’s three distinct tunics. same for swords. same for boots. you could say: hey, why would i not want more equipment in my game? to me, the answer is intentionality and milestones. when you get anything new, be it a dungeon item, or a heart container, or a new song, it feels significant. also, you immediately start thinking, oh shit, what else could i do with bombs? didn’t i see some cracked rocks in that one area? im about to blow type-shit, truly.

dungeon-talk speed round!!! (some spoilers for dungeons and bosses, my friend)
- inside the deku tree? yeah, i guess you could say i’m inside the deku tree. great intro dungeon that gets you accustomed to the structure of a 3D zelda dungeon without overwhelming you with ANY small keys or a complex dungeon map. Gohma is a spider that’s also shaped kinda like a hand, and i think i’ll cheers to that.
- dodongo’s cavern? boom. now we start getting more use out of the new dungeon item we’re graced with. king dodongo absolutely ate that shit.
- inside jabu-jabu’s belly? this place looks fucking disgusting, and also you have to carry a wet child-princess with you. i actually think it’s fine?? Barinade is honestly pretty neat and one of the most fun bosses in the game to me.
- forest temple? poe noe! those ghouls took the fucking flames on the elevator! however will we get to the boss now?
> the fairy bow:
phantom ganon is an aesthetically amazing fight, and i love the callback to deflecting orbs at Agahnim that gets intensified against the real ganondorf
- fire temple? rock guys in jail :(. hammmerrrr. gyro aim does some real work here because you can turn Volvagia into a pin cushion with the bow. unfortunately this strat does not work well on an airplane because usually they hate it when you turn in your seat and 3DS (verb) the face of the person next to you.
- ice cavern.
- water temple? THIS ONE IS MY FAVORITE /gen I LOVE WATER TEMPLE HOLY SHIT!!! it fucking chugs in the original N64 version, but here? we got better indications of the water levels post-lullaby. we got iron boots that aren’t on the gear screen, but are X,Y,I,II equippable. it’s actually sooo fun. i am a complete and utter FOOL for multi-state dungeons in zelda-like games. Morpha: water tentacle? poke him in the corner :). poke poke poke.
- bottom of the well.
- shadow temple? pretty fun and inventive uses for the lens of truth. also you can put on slippy shoes. I LOVE HAND-BASED BOSSES LIKE,, gosh and also he’s literally playing the bongo, and he name is the bongo, but two of them two of them.
- spirit temple,,, 🤤. pretty neat. Twinrova is honestly a super neat concept for the boss, but waiting for good rng on the final phase is bleh.
- gerudo training ground :O
- ganon’s castle? yeah so uhm,, you do a bunch of little ‘trials’ i think they’re called. wait a damn minute… trials? like,, like from MST aka medallions, stones, trials?? holy shit, that’s kinda a deep pull from Nintendo, referencing an extremely niche internet community. guess who got they goron tunic eated by a fucking like like in the shadow trial that then also voided out, causing the room to reload and the voracious garb gobbler to no longer possess their crimson vesture? twas i. and yes, this is the worst thing to ever happen to anyone. ganon’t.

while i don’t think this one has the best characters, nor story, nor dialogue, we have some quite fun inclusions. we got: evil maya fey, :3, sark, and this motherfucker is eating beans (!) ok but seriously Sheik is a banger character with a banger theme. so badass. Link’s sword flourishes also go hard. not as hard as they would later go in Twilight Princess, but OOT was ground zero for those sick moves of his.

it’s extremely nice that the map indicates whether or not you have all of the gold skulltulas in a region or dungeon, but i wish it was a little bit more specific sometimes. for example, the world map will display “Market” as one of the visitable locations, but the tracker for the gold skulltulas actually includes the path to hyrule castle as well. so, if you’re looking in hyrule castle town at night for gold skulltulas, your ass is looking in the wrong place!! also, even though the shard of agony is a very welcome inclusion that’s more accessible than the rumble-pak-requiring stone of agony on N64, it is still only helpful if you actually know where to walk around to look for grottos. also, i can understand wanting to not lock an item with utility behind the full 100 gold skulltulas, but ‘infinite money’ is really just not interesting. rupees are so useless–especially by that point in the game–that i would honestly rather just have a unique do-nothing item on the gear screen a-la Hestu’s gift.

there’s also a new ‘hint’ system of sorts through a Sheikah Stone outside of your house as a child and the temple of time, but i didn’t use it. hopefully it helps figure out some slightly more obscure parts of the game!

also new to the game is a “boss challenge” mode, which lets you refight any of the bosses up through Twinrova. it’s a cool addition, i suppose, but i don’t super care. there’s also a Gauntlet that you unlock after winning all the refights, which acts as a boss rush sorta mode where you can pick between two chests with some random items after each boss and have persistent health and ammo, but i didn’t find it to be too interesting either. still, i think it’s a fairly neat idea to include. some of the items that you can get from the chests are absolutely laughable though. like yeah thanks for giving me the giant’s knife, game. if you’re gonna have a time-attack boss rush mode, it’s a little annoying to also have to pray for good rng with your loot on top of Twinrova.

overall, i’m really glad that i replayed this game and finally got 100% completion. this is the longest review i’ve written for this website, and i’m afraid it’s a little bit messy and not friendly to read, but hey, we just be trying shit out. this is a real special game for a lot of people for a reason, and i’ve really gotta get around to playing majora’s mask all the way through one of these days. it’s unfortunate that the MM 3DS remake seems to make a lot of ‘unnecessary’ changes that i’m not well versed on, but i will trust the fans of the OG.

much like life, being trans is awful. having to live your life as a compromised version of yourself, not quite belonging anywhere, even among the people who love you most, and constantly struggling with the feeling that you can't do what you want to do because people won’t let you or won't understand. there is a sense of loneliness, of isolation, a sense that you're not ever going to be understood and that you'll always be just a little off, a little too clockable, a little too different. there is an incredible sadness to the whole experience.

as for the positive aspect? i'm still working that out. i'm not lucky enough to have a family that supports me. i live in a state of constant fear and apathy, knowing that no matter what i do, i'll never be the girl i've always had in my head.

the problem is, i'm a pretty miserable person, and i take it out on everyone around me. i hate my life, and i can't be happy being a man and i don't know what to do about it. but i do know that i hate this situation i'm in, and the idea that i can't escape it. it's like i have an anchor dragging me down, and i can't get out of the water.

i know there's a lot of trans people who are really happy, and i'm happy for them. for me, it's not been a good experience, and i'm not at all sure it's going to get better. but it has given me some perspective on life.

my perspective on gender has led me to have unfortunate habits of psychoanalyzing everyone i see, recognizing patterns and trying to understand why they do what they do. it has given me a sense of being misunderstood and that it's everyone else's fault. because of this, i'm very judgmental. it's like i've dissociated from all of society, there's no human connection or emotions behind the faces and words. it's almost like i'm a vampire. it's not exactly easy being this way, and i wish i had been born different, but at least i know that, at the end of the day, no one is ever going to be able to understand me completely.

my feelings are a complicated mess, and trying to explain them to people who don't understand gender dysphoria is difficult, so it's easier to go without trying, especially if it was easier for everyone to assume i'm cis than have me talk about my feelings. it's just easier to keep people at arms length, let them make their own assumptions and let them feel comfortable in their own bubble. but if i tried to interact with people, i'd just be putting them in an awkward position, trying to understand what i'm saying. it's easier for everyone to just assume.

A mario game that tries to reconstruct what is a mario game for better or worse

It's interesting to see that a sequel change the rules already what it's groundbreaking previous ancestor established.

Surface wise it's actually not so different. There is an hub world. There are levels to jump into and stars... No... Sunshines to collect to unlock next part of to adventure. But everything changes when you look at it more deeply.

Before explaining these changed mechanics and rules it's hard not to touch the subject that is this game's reputation. Because the things it changes make this game for some people one of the worst mario experiences has to offer, but for some it brings mario even further.

Which is right? In this case it's not so white and black. That's because both of them are right in their own way.

So, with playing this game which side of the discussion you choose, actually can deduct what is the most important things in a game for you. Or to be exact. What is the meaning of a GOOD game for you rather than everybody else. Also this discussion is a proof that why there will never be a perfect game for everybody. Everybody's values for a PERFECT game is different after all.

Anyway without broading the subject on hand too much, let's return to mario sunshine. What do I think? Where do I stand on this discussion?

I think it's my favorite mario game and think it's the one that resonates with me the most.

But there is a reason it's 4 stars. Not 5. Because this mario game... it's the most flawed one.

Now let's remember what mario 64 established beforehand.
-You go into other levels from the hub world with jumping into paintings in the castle
-Every level have their own atmosphere, own enemies and own stars to collect and even after selecting the objective from the level, let's you collect another star rather than your objective one if there are in the level
-Power ups works as a rule changers like changing mario's weight/invisibility/air time etc. And they are hidden in the levels and they are timed and mostly used for hard or impossible to get without the necessary power type of stars
-You are only required to get some number of stars to finish the game so most of the game is optional content.
-Other than some bullshit levels, most of the game's challenge is platforming and consistently goes up, also world stays consistent and even when levels teleport you somewhere else, it's somewhere with the similar atmosphere

But mario sunshine changes them into
-You go into levels from hub world with not jumping into paintings but using something in the overworld that carries you into the level. Be it a pipe, a mirror, a cannon, a ship etc. Not just that, most of the levels visible from the outset rather than be a painting or an image.
-Every level have a island/tropical atmosphere, have their own enemies and own stars to collect, but every selectable objective have only one star that can be obtained(aside from the 100 coin stars)
-Power ups not timed, also they work as a modifiers of sort that changes how the mario's water pumpers work. They are also used for sunshines that is hard or impossible to get without the necessary power type
-You are required to finish every level's 7 objectives no matter what, rest is optional.
-Most of the game's challenge is a gimmick related to that level's tropical concept be it diving deep in the water, be it cleaning hidden interactables, be it riding boats etc. Also difficulty stays consistent and stays similar throughout in the adventure until levels teleport you into a secret courses with completely different and a vague atmosphere and difficulty that is with focusing into pure platforming with taking your water pump away.

You see, with the somewhat detailed description I gave to you is enough to make you understand what makes mario sunshine different I assume.

It's acts more like an adventure game rather than focusing on being a platformer with incorporating level gimmicks more, also it's commitment to it's tropical atmosphere makes the world more immersive, in fact it goes even one step more and makes the obstacles a part of the world rather than making them a vague flying platforms or objects unlike every mario game did it before. Mario 64 or other mario games did this before yes but never to this degree.

Be it, being able to see other levels from the distance, or be it interacting with the levels gimmicks itself or be it having enemies that completely different looking than what mario games uses often or be it even going into the levels with using the hub world's own tools that uses that level's concept like a cannon for a level filled with cannon enemies, using a pipe for a cleaning level, cave entrance for a volcano level etc. It feels like an tropical journey throughout and that what I love about it.

But when it comes to platforming it's rarely fully used. Also It's not a good collectathon because number of level completion is required rather than the number of collectibles for main progression. Also it's sudden change of difficulty and atmosphere at the secret courses feels like a slap in the face also a big indication that is the game's unfinishedness with forcing player to go for them. Also being forced for those secret courses with breaking it's consistency is the reason why this game can't get a 5/5 stars for me.

But you see, like I said it's immersiveness, it's surprises and focus on world is enough to make it a superior game for me. I didn't even went into the movement that is joy to experience and super enjoyable to use with it's instantaneous input response even with it's questionable physics.

So even with it's shortcomings that's why it's my favorite in the franchise. It's because it's dedicated to one thing. Being a tropical vacation adventure and does that with pushing it's ideas to the max.

“Bayonetta? More like Mayonetta, ‘cause this shit spread me apart!” This joke was brought to you by the legendary @QuentTheSlayer.

The Bayonetta series! One of the most acclaimed franchises I’ve seen in general that nobody ever played. Yeah, can you believe that Bayonetta 2 barely cracked 1 million copies on Switch as of 2021? That's not terrible by any means, but you’d think it’d be a lot higher, since it was practically the Wii U’s only pride and joy, and 3/4ths of the series were heavily funded and promoted by Nintendo, plus almost every DMC game has sold like hotcakes, but no. Oh, sorry to any NES Remix 2 fans out there! Apparently, it wasn't a killer app for the failing Wii U console. Shocker. But, when Bayonetta 2 launched in 2014, they also ported Bayonetta 1 to Wii U, and a few years later, Xbox One, PS4, and the PC. The PC version is the definitive way to play the game, in my opinion. It can run up to 4K resolution, and usually maintains a stable 60fps, unlike a majority of the console versions, which don’t. A shame that Bayonetta 1 has only seen a PC release, because 2 and 3 will probably always be locked to Nintendo Switch and Wii U, as those 2 were Nintendo-funded, and also receive FPS issues, more so Bayonetta 3. But hey, emulation is always free, I suppose. And for the record, in these playthroughs, I will be emulating 2 and 3, just for the best experience possible. An almost locked 60FPS is crucial for almost any modern character action game nowadays, so I just bit the bullet. And for you rare few, I have my lawyers on speed dial if you want to contest this.

Okay, jokes aside, what the hell is a “Bayonetta”? Aside from her name being a clear nod to the weapon, the Bayonet, Bayonetta herself has become an icon within the hack n’ slash genre, and also the fighting game scene. Bayonetta was birthed from the absolute legend, Hideki Kamiya, who also directed the first Devil May Cry title. Rather than a male lead, Bayonetta was designed from the ground up, as a female witch who wielded four guns at a time. Although some shade was initially thrown at the beehive hairstyle, mimicking traditional witch hats, and lacked glasses initially, eventually, they came to a witch, with a heavy focus on the attractiveness of the character. Bayonetta, from the ground up, was designed to be attractive as all get-out, if you couldn’t tell from the box art. This girl just leaves it hanging out there like it’s nobody’s business! Hell, this even floods into gameplay a little bit. The infamous torture attacks have Bayonetta seductively execute her foes, the innuendos, “Climax”, yeah. Hideki Kamiya and crew knew what they were doing, and it shows. However, in spite of the less-than-modest presentation of Bayonetta herself, I’d actually go out on a limb to say that it empowers Bayonetta as a character. In the cutscenes, we see Bayonetta doing all of this wacky shit. She’s having fun! Flirting with her enemies, dancing around them, as she aims to secure the kill. It really makes Bayonetta out as an unstoppable badass, deliberately belittling her foes as she defeats them all promptly. I'm not a woman, so I don't really want to comment on if Bayonetta is necessarily sexist or not, but personally, I never really felt that way. The opening cutscene demonstrates this, with Bayonetta, ambushed by angels while working as a nun, decimating every single Angel in her way with style and grace. And when things get dire, as the angels barely miss her, slicing her nun attire in the products, she fully awakens to her power. And then, the ICONIC song HAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA, HAAAAA, AAAAAA, AAAAAAA, AAA, x6 FLYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY ME TO THE MOON AND LET ME PLAYYYYYYYY AMONG THE STAAAAAAAAAAARS begins at full volume. I love this fucking track. Bayonetta has a good ass soundtrack and if you contest that fact, you're subhuman. But, back to the story and character design itself, giving Bayonetta this massive reach over her enemies demonstrates to the player how powerful Bayonetta is, and how powerful the player CAN be, with the game’s COMBAT.

GOD, Bayonetta's combat makes me SWOON. Never have I ever been so addicted to the controls of a game alone. Each time I listen to Fly Me to the Moon (Infinite Climax), I just want to start Bayonetta all over again. Bayonetta’s combat is EXCELLENT. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Hell, I might even say I enjoy the gameplay loop a little more than Devil May Cry’s gameplay loop, although I’m not entirely sure. Bayonetta herself has a few simple attacks; a punch, kick, shooting, and dodging. You’ll primarily be fighting your foes face on, but that’s not to say your guns don’t get some decent use either. You have 4 guns; two on your hands, and two on your feet. By holding an attack button, you can shoot the guns to give a little extra damage out, corresponding to which attack you throw out. So, punch to shoot the hand guns, or kick to shoot the heel guns. Or, alternatively, you can shoot your hand guns on your own, if you don’t feel like punching enemies in the face. But believe me folks, it doesn’t end there. The combo system of Bayonetta goes far deeper than you may think. Bayonetta retains the delay-based systems of Devil May Cry, but given the choice of hands and guns, the combos become much, MUCH deeper than before. Your average Devil May Cry combo goes like this. Slash, slash, wait, slash, slash. Whereas an average Bayonetta combo goes like this; Punch, punch, kick, kick, wait, kick. It adds complexity, but still remains simple enough to master. Bayonetta’s other main stick is her Witch Time, and upon dodging a majority of attacks at the last second, Bayonetta will slow down time for every enemy, and yeah, it’s as satisfying as it sounds. Outside of looking and feeling really good to do, the obvious benefit of slowing down time also adds a score multiplier to each attack done in Witch Time. So there’s no real reason to not be in Witch Time as much as possible, even if you can’t land a few attacks in. It feels great to pull off each time, just getting to wail on your enemies each time feels immaculate to watch and play. Even more immaculate is the Climaxes and Executions, which have you executing enemies in just the cutest way possible, usually killing them in a single shot. So, all of this versatility sounds pretty overpowered, right? How does Bayon- Wait, I’ve already used this segway in my Repentance review. Shit.

Straight and to the point, Bayonetta is one of the most deviously difficult games that I’ve ever played. Goddamn, I wasn’t expecting to die THIS much when going in. I knew that it wouldn’t be an easy game, but FUCK the Witch Hunts, seriously. But if it isn’t one of the most consistently fair games that I’ve played, too. Every attack is cued to perfection. To avoid frustration, most attacks have a bright shine and sound cue to it. The attacks themselves hit incredibly hard, but if you can dodge them, you’ll be a master of Bayonetta. Guess which camp I fell in? I was planning on doing a no items run of Bayonetta, but at Chapter 9, I caved. The game was just too hard for me. But, that’s okay, because before that, I was only getting Stone ranks, and each use of an item counts as half of a death, so there really wasn’t much difference in my overall score. What DID have an effect on my score were the Quick Time Events, though.

God, these just need to go. Bayonetta is an amazing game and all that jazz, but MAN, these got on my nerves really quickly. My main problem is that a grand majority of them lead to an instant death for no good reason at all, and they quite literally show up out of nowhere. At the very least, at least make the failure state cause minor damage or make it repeatable, because an outright kill from something you couldn’t see coming is not fun game design. Imagine that you’re on the way to a Pure Platinum in Chapter 2. You haven’t got hit a single time, and when you finally kill the boss without damage, you set down the controller satisfyingly, only to forget the instant kill at the VERY end of the chapter. Come on, dude! Talk about cheap and frustrating design. This especially hurt as someone who has really good hand-eye coordination, and played the Steam release with a Switch Pro Controller, as the direction of buttons doesn’t line up with the prompts on screen, as inputting the wrong buttons very frequently leads to Bayonetta’s demise. And don’t input them TOO early, because that kills you, too! For some reason. Speaking of bosses, they were... somewhat of a mixed bag. None of them are outright terrible, but there’s definitely a fair share of hot air between them. Sometimes, there’s not a whole lot to do other than firing your guns at them. They also have QTEs, although most are optional, thankfully. And failing usually doesn’t kill you, thank the fucking lord. Also on the plus side, all of the Jeanne fights were AWESOME. She serves as a skill check; Witch Time and guns won’t work for a majority of attacks, and she’s among the most threatening bosses in the entire game, packing speed and some hella’ Wicked weaves. Each encounter is almost perfectly crafted, requiring the utmost mastery of skills. And that music, man. Every 10/10 game NEEDS a 10/10 soundtrack, too. It’s simply inseparable. Jeanne is essentially the Vergil of Bayonetta, and those DMC comparisons don’t stop there.

Like DMC, you can buy abilities in the shop, all of which are of great variety and utility. In fact, I’d go as far to say that Bayonetta has a greater variety of skills than a majority of Devil May Cry games (obviously disregarding DMC 2). Good GOD, the moves you can pull off are so distinctive from one another. The Beast Within moves are among the best in the entire game, the Breakdance is a great AOE attack, also useful for revealing those hidden halos and other items, man. It’s all so good! Sure, the heel stomp attack could be a little more useful, but for the most part, all of these abilities are awesome! Uhhhh. I’m out of good segways. Shit.

Okay, time to talk about the final few chapters, and WOW, these aren’t all that great, unfortunately. Chapter 14 is mostly Space Harrier that just lasts far too long. At the end, there’s a Jeanne fight, though, which is my personal favorite of the Jeanne fights, because she has the best, most difficult attacks of them all. I kind of wonder why they didn’t just split the two chapters, though. Imagine fucking up the Platinum and then having to do Space Harrier all over again. Ugh. Chapter 15 is a... boss rush. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it’s just kind of... okay. Chapter 16, the final traditional misson, is just a boss fight, against Balder, and the fight would’ve been PERFECT, if it weren’t for the fucking camera. It’s like Jeanne; no Witch Time, no guns, just you and a fight to the death. The camera is just far too up close. But it's still a great send-off, into the EPILOUGE, of course. The FINAL final boss, Jubileus, is a solid little send off to the game, but I think it's just a bit too easy? First off though, Jubileus is fucking hot and you cannot say otherwise, but secondly, the boss herself hovers above you, slamming sword thingies down, and those shoot projectiles at you. Not too bad to dodge, you just Witch Time them, and bam. Beat their asses. She'll also end up changing the arena every now and then, one covered in lava, one in ice, and one in the middle of a tornado. You, once again, have to destroy the swords she plants down, and Witch Time is the key to success. Really, her fight is pretty straightforward. Most of her attacks are pretty slow and predictable, and the one that poses a threat is the Black Hole attack, which is a reset, but other than that… yeah. It's fun, but too easy in my opinion. But of course, this is capped off with the most awesome Climax. Bayonetta does an awesome 20 second long dance, summoning a massive hair demon with oddly feminine proportions (god this game is weird and I love it), and it beats the shit out Jubileus in one fell love tap, knocking Jubileus’s soul out of her body into the goddamn SUN. Yeah, talk about a fucking climax. Oh, you can control her soul as she falls? You know what? Fuck Jupiter, am I righ- I DIED??? …Okay, that makes sense. Anyways one dumb decision later, Jubileus’s body falls to the earth, brief lesbianism occurs, we destroy her body, Bayonetta dies, actually no, bisexualism occurs, Bayo winks, CREDIT ROLL!!!!

No hyperbole or anything, Bayonetta is one of my favorite games that I've played this year, and maybe one of my favorite games of all time. A must play for almost anybody. Sure, the game has it's low points (how the FUCK did i not mention Grace and Glory during this???), but overall, it's REALLY fucking fun, and serves as one of the best character action games ever made, andI'll for sure be returning for Hard Mode and afterwards, INFINITE CLIMAX (funny). Bayonetta is on Steam, PS4, and Xbox One for 10 bucks, and the game more than makes up for that price, I'd say. I'm not sure about Xbox 360 and PS3, but Bayonetta is also on Switch for $30, which is a bit of an eh deal, but hey, you get a $20 discount for Bayonetta 2 if you buy it. Speaking of Bayonetta 2, that's NOT up next, but rather Bayonetta: Bloody Fate. Yeah, for the first time in zeusdeegoose history, we have a cross-media review series (if you discount Isaac I guess). I'm still playing through Bayonetta 2, and it seems destined to be another banger, but hey, we'll see in the review. I don't know about Bayonetta 3 as I actually haven't even touched it, but from what I heard, there's some… opinions on it. But, once again we'll see. But, the moral of the story? Bayonetta is awesome and I like it. Go buy 15 copies of it right now, and I hope that you have an awesome day.

Is that Alucard with the contra spread gun?? A glorious return to form. After the hard to swallow pill that was Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, I am ecstatic that we are back to simple level by level platforming, with cool bossfights at the end.

Castlevania III is just the first Castlevania but bigger. The game plays exactly the same as the first, but is just 2-3 times longer. There is also branching levels meaning there is a lot of room for replayability.

The biggest difference and my favourite part about the game is the ability to find different playable characters that can be super helpful for some sections. You have a guy that can climb ceilings that has a permanent ranged weapon, or as previously mentioned Alucard that has a Contra spread gun and fucking kills those annoying bats with ease. He can also turn into a bat for a limited time and trivialise some platforming sections. Depending on how you play and which characters you choose to come along with you, there is some room for emergent gameplay which is something I never thought I'd see in a NES game.

The difficulty this time around, while still not perfect, is a little more balanced than the first game due to the fact that you have many different ways to approach a scenario. The game was still challenging, but I never got too frustrated while playing as I felt like I was never locked into a single solution if I was stuck at a problem.

This is probably the best of the three from the NES trilogy, considering there is so much content packed into this little game, and it plays the best. If Simon's Quest brought your spirits down, play this one and your hopes will come back up.

Caramba, esse jogo também conseguiu me surpreender. Após zerar ''Alan Wake Remastered'' e suas DLCS fui direto jogar o 2, porém acabei me deparando com esse jogo, perdido no meio das minhas pesquisas. Fui procurar saber sobre, achando que era outra DLC do primeiro jogo. Mas acabei me surpreendendo ao saber que era outro jogo individual, sobre a franquia. Fui logo jogar, ansioso e curioso para saber oque eu descobriria com ele. Jogando tive a mesma sensação que tive ao jogar o primeiro jogo, dúvida e curiosidade com a história e com os acontecimentos. Assim como os outros, conseguiu me confundir bastante, mas no final esclarecer tudo de uma forma inexplicável e muito interessante. O jogo possui gráficos surpreendentes de bons, gameplay ótima, personagens carismáticos e uma história incrível. Me diverti bastante do inicio ao fim, e mesmo ele sendo pouco conhecido eu acho que vale a experiencia!

Um clássico atemporal, enquanto jogava havia duas perspectivas sobre a obra, uma visão onde essa franquia já está consolidada e teve recentemente um revitalização, e a outra visão olhando a obra de forma separada sem consta suas continuações e o peso que elas tiveram, e nas duas perspectivas esse jogo se demonstra excelente, onde o hack n slash não entra apenas como gameplay mas como narrativa, um homem consumido pelo ódio e vingança, onde a sede por poder o consumiu, e ainda que o tenha consumido foi o que fez ele tomar o renome de Deus da Guerra, isso sempre abriu margem para uma continuação desse desenvolvimento perfeito de personagem, ainda que a primeira historia seja extremamente bem fechada, onde passamos por altos e baixo, entendemos motivações e os vilões e eh tudo tão perfeitamente encaixado durante a gameplay, que se esse jogo não tivesse se tornado uma franquia, ainda seria lembrado com tanto apreço, vcs DEVEM jogar God of War

There's an in-game bookstore in The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa which predictably sells books which Ringo can read. They all have slightly parodic, possibly copyright dodging titles but are all clearly based on existing words of literature e.g Odysseus - > Ulysses, Brothers -> Brothers Karamazov etc.

Reading each of them involves figuring out the slightly obtuse method of finding a bench and using the right shoulder button and letting the slow progress bar fill up. If you've read the speed reading books in the school library you can speed the process up but it will take a significant amount of ingame time to read through the longer novels like Ulysses and Anna Karenina. There is basically 0 mechanical benefit in doing so, negative, if you factor in opportunity cost. Well, there is one female friend of Ringo's who has unique dialogue if you've read any of the russian novels but other than that (and the achievement for reading them all I suppose) like in real life you basically have to read for shock horror its own sake.

It is perhaps silly, but The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa's particular roleplaying, simulation charm had such a grip on me on replay that I sat on a bench in the park on a sunday and would periodically pause reading The Brothers Karamazov to light up a cigarette and continue where I left of, then stopping to put it out. I can't even really put my finger on why, perhaps its because for all the maturity of the subject matter and perceived adult-ness (which is even addressed in one of the conversations with Ringo's bookworm friend declaring that Adults didnt watch anime) its the kind of thing that taps into that dormant desire to make up stories of our toys of childhood; when play and learning went hand in hand.

Its also because smoking in a game is as close as I'll hopefully ever get to it IRL after giving it up a few years ago. Reading whilst smoking brings a nostalgia for one of the worst years of my life when I was 18 and had just started university in a different country.

I don't smoke anymore, but I've been getting back into reading. Reading Rumble Fish recently it was hard not to notice the influence in Ringo's story, a tale of a troubled teen gang leader's deep existential emptiness and misplaced idealism about the "rules" of chivalry supposedly involved. Even the scene in RI of Goro staring off into the lit up city across the river wondering if there's anything greater out there, a naïve hope of escaping the ennui of their hometown into a mythical "other place" smacks of a particular chapter in Rumble Fish; seemingly the only time at which the main character is comfortable is when drunk and surrounded by the pretty lights and party atmosphere of the city, shortly before being mugged.

I'm currently reading through Winesburg Ohio, I suppose I could have waited until i read through all of the books to come back and replay Ringo and do some kind of overlong comparative analysis of the influences, but I can't be assed right now. Maybe I will do that in the future. In replaying Ringo there was the unfortunate realization that the combat is kinda shit compared to Fading Afternoon and a few bugs got a bit annoying, as well as the confirmation that the pacing of the final few weeks was as weird as I remembered it, but everything else about the game was stellar, and I think I enjoyed it even more than last time. Ringo is a bit like Paprika and other works I love to revisit in that it feels like you're finding something new every time. For as obtuse and even abrasive as the design philosphy of Yeo's games can be, they are equally mesmerising.

For example, I discovered upon replay that you can squat to recover health. I also learned that story events do not trigger if you have your gang with you, which is both useful in setting the terms of the progression but thematically appropriate: Ringo's friends are coming apart, him seemingly the last one to realize this, and his various activities calling upon him to be alone and not keeping the gang together accelerates the process. That ending still hits fucking hard man. God. Y'know what? Fuck it, for all its faults, this is a 5 star game for me now. I don't think it will be most people's cup of tea but I humbly ask for everyone to play it at some point, even if just for a few hours

“We are living in a crisis of heroism that reaches into every aspect of our social life… just as there are useless self-sacrifices in unjust wars, so too is there an ignoble heroics of whole societies...”

I first played Final Fantasy VII on the PSP, during the time in my life when games most took up an escapist, asocial place in my life. When I finished Mega Man Battle Network 6: Cybeast Gregar I felt a chill that no other piece of fiction had given me at that age, I realized as their stories came to a close that I was more emotionally invested in the futures of these few dozen representational pixels than I was those of most of the few dozen people that I knew in my real life. I played Half Minute Hero on the sidelines of an ice-skating rink, I played Locoroco and No Heroes Allowed at church events. A friend invited me to hang out with girls in the middle of the night and I spent most of that night playing FFVII, and I didn't even like it. I remember being in the car with my dad one evening, in the Starbucks drive-through, grinding in the Cosmo Canyon caves, and telling him that I wasn't sure if I actually liked playing video games at all, or if I only liked the story, the music, the graphics.

I first played Final Fantasy VII on the PSP, after watching Advent Children and beating Crisis Core. This playthrough of FFVII is the first that I've done in years, the first time I've gotten past Midgar in a about a decade, and the first time I've gotten past disc 1 since my first run. I played it the way that I played FFIX when I was in high school, on a CRT, original hardware, laying down with a blanket, little by little at the end of the day. I curled up with it like a book and treated it like a piece of literature. I played it having waited long enough to have forgotten most of what happens in Compilation, for the first time being more able to see the game in its own light.

The last time I played FFVIII I was disappointed by how much of Squall I still see in myself, the emotional defenses, preemptive social disengagement. In the time I've spend playing FFVII again, I'm disappointed by how much of my old self I still see in my new self. When playing through Ocarina of Time again, needing to confront how foundational it is to my understanding of fantasy tropes and aesthetic made it feel sort of banal. Realizing how fundamental FFVII is to the lens through which I see science-fantasy on the other hand has felt absolutely revelatory.

I first played Final Fantasy VII at a time in my life when I was only just beginning to realize that the state of the world was not unquestioned good. I played FFVII around the time that I first learned about the holocaust, around the time that I first watched Fullmetal Alchemist and the leader of Amestris being a "fuhrer" didn't immediately set off alarm bells. I played FFVII in a time when I couldn't imagine any reasonable number of people having a problem with the President of the United States being black. I played FFVII thinking Sephiroth was a cool guy with a spiffy outfit and a big sword. I played FFVII as a smaller part of experiencing an expanding multimedia universe. I played FFVII, at the time only the second Final Fantasy game that I had managed to see the credits of, and I did not think a single thought regarding what the game could possibly be "about" because it seemed obvious: it's about cool guys who hit each other with swords, and big spells where a dragon puts the bad guy on a rock and then blows up the rock with its laser breath.

I first played FFVII between the release of the final Harry Potter book and the final Harry Potter movie. I never read past book 5 and I never watched past the penultimate film, but I've heard enough about how it ends and how people feel about the author to know what's up. Harry Potter, frankly, like a great deal of western fiction feels incapable of questioning things as they are, the conditions which exist in the world and which lead to the conflicts which seem to form their central narratives. I went to a charter school that went on field trips to the local RNC headquarters to watch videos about Osama Bin Laden, I went to a public high school that required me to do volunteer work for a church run by that charter school's principal. I once told my science teacher at that charter school that I thought FFVII's Midgar seemed to me to be an ideal structure for a city, and they were mortified. I've been using the same username online since I was in middle school, it's a lyric from a song I wrote at that age, a song about 9/11 not dissimilar in tone to 3 Doors Down's Citizen/Soldier.

I didn't understand at the time, so utterly entrenched in the small town American Christian echo chamber, that the reason I found stories like Final Fantasy VII and Fullmetal Alchemist so interesting was that they were capable of critique of society in ways that most of the fiction I had been exposed to were not. Obviously there are pieces of western fiction which do make meaningful statements but you often have to dig for something that has a clear enough message that it can't be willfully misshapen by someone who wants it to fit within mainstream thought. To paraphrase a paraphrasing of who knows who said what, "Japan is a post-apocalyptic society". Obviously, in a real way, America is too, though the context of who created and benefitted from that apocalypse is sort of important to each country's culture. In less than 15 years between the release of Mega Man and Mega Man: NT Warrior, nuclear weapons went from being symbolized by Albert Wily as an obviously evil implementation of technology, to being portrayed literally, as a neutral implementation of technology which could only be misused by outside evildoers. Imagine what more than 200 years of more or less continuous order does to a motherfucker.

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Some have a tendency to reflexively assume that anyone at any age is personally failing society if they managed to exit the womb without a fully formed coherent notion of political reality, or at the very least managed to reach adulthood without someone having passed this knowledge onto them. Of course the truth is that a great deal of people pass through their formative years deliberately having been insulated from this by anyone with authority over them. The illusion broke for me in 2014 when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri and nobody around me seemed to think there was anything wrong, nobody around me thought for a second that the protests could possibly be justified. The heroes in our society aren't those that fight against injustice or oppression, the heroes in our society are the brave men and women who travel the world to kill in the name of oil, the heroes are the ones dispersing gas to clear mobs of the people they supposedly protect. In 2014 the Christian rock band Family Force 5 released a song called Let It Be Love, it contains the lyric "I've never seen a hurt get healed in a protest". If you check out the band's Billboard charts you can find that despite completely unremarkable sales figures, the song received more radio play than any of the band's actually popular material, and that this radio play is concentrated not around the song's release in May, but the latter half of the year. If you do a little more digging, you would find that the incident which inspired the song was actually Christians protesting a concert. The Genius annotation for this lyric currently contains a stock photo from either an Egyptian or Moroccan police crackdown.

A few weeks ago I went on a trip to St. Louis, Missouri to see a concert with some friends. It was the longest trip I’ve been on as an adult, the furthest I’ve ever been from home without a family member. It was the first concert I’d been to since the pandemic, it was the first concert I’ve been to that was without restriction or compromise an artist I’d actually wanted to see, rather than just “the coolest thing my parents would let me go to”.

Six hours either way is a long drive, long enough to have a lot of conversations, long enough to run out of things to talk about and spend a lot of time looking out the window in silence. It’s a long enough drive that you’ll need to make some stops to refuel both the vehicle and your own bodies. The friend who drove the car commented that they were glad the trip was more or less a straight shot. You don’t remember the miles on a trip like that, you remember the stops you made along the way, you remember the traffic, the situations that impeded your progress, you remember the turns you had to take once you reached the city. You remember rummaging through your friend’s purse to find her vape pen, you remember awkwardly not knowing where to wait for your order at an unfamiliar restaurant, or how nice or rude the strangers you briefly interacted with were.

That’s something that games have lost now, even before the doors were blown wide open world. The increased physicality and “realness” of virtual spaces, the fact that a place can simply be built means that space no longer has to be created. In my FFVIII review I touched on how the tricks these games can play with scale allow them to create a great implied space. By boiling down an entire planet’s worth of roads into nothing but turns, the people who made these games were able to make worlds that felt complete and total in a way that modern games, or even most of the last 4 generations of games at this point, cannot actually compete with. Removing the punctuation, removing the seams, has only resulted in new games largely having absolutely terrible pacing and hours of wasted time, a completely backwards signal-to-noise ratio.

“The automobile not only seals its occupants in a metal and glass cocoon, cutting them off from the outside world, but it has a way of actually decreasing the sense of movement through space. Loss of the sense of movement comes not only from insulation from road surfaces and noise but is visual as well. The driver on the freeway moves in a stream of traffic while visual detail at close distances is blurred by speed.”

When we first drove into St. Louis on the night of the concert, there was a terrible thunderstorm. The shape and scale of the city were completely obscured by dense fog, any fascination I might have had for the tangle of interchanges unlike anything I’d ever seen in person was overruled by the stress of the situation.

We arrived at the venue and I immediately recognized that they were playing Spiritualized over the PA system. Just before the main act took the stage, they played, back to back, a Slowdive song, and a My Bloody Valentine song (see, it all relates back to FFVII, this isn’t just an excuse to put a travel blog somewhere people might read it, I swear). As an artist I was sort of disgusted. Could you imagine being in that position? You’re about to take the stage and whoever is running the show has just invited comparison to the best to ever do it? As an audience member I felt like I was having keys dangled in my face.

The first act to play that night was a shoegaze group I hadn’t heard of until my friends invited me to the concert. This was the first time I had heard live shoegaze, despite making multiple albums in the genre myself, despite owning plenty of guitars, pedals, and rack mountable effects processors, I’ve never actually plugged any of them into an amplifier. The air in the room was strange, something was off. I felt like my feet had left the ground, the entire time they played I had that odd sensation you get when you walk out of the theater after a long movie. I got the sense that most of the crowd wasn’t as into it as I was. When the band stopped playing, one of my friends leaned in to snarkily ask if they had ever really started.

When the main act took the stage the energy shifted, and I realized just how out of my element I was. Whatever you wanna call this guy’s stuff, shoegaze, dream pop, hypnagogic pop, vaporwave, trip hop, whatever, I realized I had a completely different relationship to it from everyone else in this room. Yeah, maybe this is just me being stupid, or out of touch and getting older, or whatever. I stood there almost motionless, slowly feeling the proxemic field of the crowd push me further away from the stage. This music, which I had seriously contemplated, which I viewed as best experienced almost as a form of sensory deprivation, which I pored over to try and find how a particular sound was accomplished, which at one point had been described as some sort of critique of capitalist pop art’s stagnation and regurgitation of the same ideas, of false promised futures, music which had been compared to that Calvin and Hobbes strip where he plays easy-listening real quiet as a form of protest, had been party music the whole time. I found myself on the edge of a mosh pit feeling like a sleeper agent undercover cop, watching people disregard the clearly posted signs telling them not to smoke or vape, wondering how long my ears would hiss when this was over, wondering how my knees would feel in the morning. I looked at the Dragonball and Mobile Suit Gundam clips playing on the stacks of CRT televisions at either end of the stage and wondered about the logistics of this blatant copyright infringement, or how, as the meme goes, this serious story of human compassion in the face of the horrors of war was being robbed of it context and reduced to an image of a cool robot.

I didn’t think so much of the mecha genre when I first watched Gundam, mostly viewing it through the distorted lens of someone who still thinks Evangelion is a deconstruction of the genre rather than merely being a good show. But a lot of the symbols and themes which make Evangelion so powerful are already, implicitly if not explicitly, present in all mecha by the simple virtue of the idea of a large man, a machine with immense power, a tool of war, an immense full body mask. The robots do look cool, and they do fight, but that’s not the meat of what’s going on. In the same sense, watching the pseudo-realistic CGI anime heroes in the Compilation and Remake versions of the FFVII universe jump and fly and flail around like they’re in a shonen battle anime is just impossible to take at face value. In turn based combat, with low poly graphics, I can accept that the battle which takes place on screen is mere representation. It is not possible to take the Dyne fight seriously in real time HD combat. People got upset that a doorknob had too few triangles in Remake. I refuse to see the complaints of anyone who wanted a remake of this game as legitimate at all. If there is any single aspect of FFVII’s form that is absolutely essential to what the game is, it’s that the game is abstract by necessity, and if you take that away there is nothing left. It’s like the remake of Resident Evil 2, Rebirth might be a good game, but it is by no means at all the same game.

We went to downtown St. Louis the next day. The weather had cleared up and the skyline was revealed. We passed disused industrial structures, motionless trains, the smallest hotel on the edge of the city was bigger than the largest building in our hometown. There is no better shorthand for what this city looks like than “the opening movie of Final Fantasy VII: Remake”, that dustier daytime portrayal of Midgar is a near exact match. We seemingly happened to visit St. Louis the weekend of their city marathon, and an absurd number of roads were closed to keep people on (and cars off of) the route. We walked around this cordoned off area of the city, nearly every block occupied by a single massive building with some recognizable corporations name on it, any walkways lined with neatly trimmed grass and shimmering sculpture, each attended by uniformed maintenance men, groundskeepers, or workers of some kind walking around.

I wouldn’t be caught dead in a Hooters so I wound up exploring the city on my own for a while. I asked my phone to point me towards the nearest convenience store. Despite it being only two blocks away I needed to take a pretzel shaped path to avoid all the road and sidewalk closures. I walked under a concrete path attached to one of the buildings, past emergency exits covered in graffiti, wads of shit, towels and tupperware tucked into corners. I crossed such a thin line, a single block closer to Ferguson, and I felt like I had stepped decades into the past, into a completely different place altogether from the slick corporate image of the city. I saw more traffic cones and barricades and I gave up and started walking back to the car. A bird landed right by my feet and made no attempt to flee, my presence didn’t startle it at all, its feathers an almost lime green, a creature I had never seen before, behaving in a way I had never seen before. I started to lean down towards it, only to see in the corner of my eye a pack of marathoners heading my way. An old man asked me if I knew which way the finish line was, and I had to admit I wasn’t from here, I had no idea this event was even happening.

I got the sense that I had peered backstage, that I had wandered off the “race track” in a retail store and wound up in a stockroom by mistake. St. Louis was not the largest city I had ever visited, but I now realized that entering Chicago by train had probably allowed me to dodge the underbelly of the city completely, that I may as well have spent that entire trip inside of a shopping mall. So much of our society is built on keeping some pretense of appearances. Today’s not the day I spill all my guts, but I’ve been in the belly of the beast for a while. When the first Christmas passed I was still only a temporary employee, I was called to the office and told that because I got them out of the hole I was getting a bonus anyway. Part of my bonus was a generous number of video games and paraphernalia thereof. I have still not played the copy of The Last Guardian that I received that day, but how many people can say that they were given a free Team Ico video game by their employer? I realize now that I had basically been given an opportunity to rummage through a warehouse’s trash, and I had merely by some twist of fate happened to be the person for whom this resembled treasure. I realize now that my coworker wouldn’t wear a For Honor or Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands t-shirt out of pride or fandom, it was just a shirt they could wear to work and not worry about dirtying up. I realize now that the God of War and FIFA posters were just too high up to be worth the effort of taking them down.

Midgar is only the most obviously stratified physical structure in FFVII, though far from the only one. Kalm seems at first like a departure, a safe haven, something outside of the world of Midgar, a normal JRPG town, but consider the subtle detail that the shops tower above the rest of the buildings and can only be reached by stairs. Junon lies beneath a cannon, symbolizing Shinra’s military might. The Golden Saucer flies above a prison work camp. Mako reactors, functional or otherwise, pepper the world and loom over the land they sap from. Cosmo Canyon looks to the stars for a higher power. People live in the shadow of the Shinra 26 rocket, a future that failed to take off. Jenova’s crater sits at the top of the world.

Consider that in 1997 virtually everyone played FFVII on the same machine, sending the same type of video signal to the same type of television. People looked at the cutscenes and asked why the whole game couldn’t look like that. From the minute that Remake released on PS4 the experience was fractured by the existence of the PS4 Pro. If FFVII made people wish for a “real” or “definitive” version, Remake fails to provide it with the compromises that must be made when choosing between performance and quality, it fails to provide it with the promise of inevitable PC ports of each part, it fails to provide it with the sheer disparity in what different people’s hardware will be capable of.

In my Ocarina of Time review I described it as an “all ages power fantasy”, a commentary on escapism where child players are able to immediately grow up and solve all the worlds problems, where adult players are able to re-enter that childish mindset, but everyone ultimately has to come back to reality when Ganon is defeated. While Ocarina of Time deals primarily with issues which affect a person in an immediate sense, natural disasters, political turmoil, racial tensions, and offers a world where these problems have simple solutions, FFVII cuts to the worm at the core. Final Fantasy VII deals directly with heroic simulation itself.

Sephiroth, the man, is dead. You are fighting against Sephiroth, the concept. You are fighting his immortal cult of personality, against the people who aspire to become him. You are fighting against the idea that Shinra, that capitalism, can produce a “hero”. Your enemy is a contradiction, a contradiction which exists within Cloud. The rocket standing erect and the pumping cannon are nothing in the face of extraterrestrial demise. The children of Hojo and Lucrecia, Gast and Ifalna, wage spiritual conflicts having already been devoured by Kronos. Sephiroth and Aerith are already dead, meteor and holy have already been cast. The planet will decide for itself what happens now. It doesn’t matter if you found Yuffie, went to Wutai, and learned more about the world before Shinra. It doesn’t matter if you found Vincent or the logs in the snow village and learned more about the origins of Sephiroth. It doesn’t matter if you defeat all the Weapons or unlock everyone’s highest level limit breaks. In this Final Fantasy game it doesn’t even matter if you found the crystals, in fact the wide variety of gameplay sequences related to obtaining them come across as if the developers wanted you to fail, even teasing you if you enter the rocket’s passcode correctly on the first try. Multiple times in the game, progress is blocked by the game just sort of vaguely telling you “go find something”. You could view this as a deliberate waste of time to pad out the game’s length, you could view this as “Nintendo Power” style guide-mongering, but I think the game is trying to encourage the player to go off the beaten path, explore, find your own fun. Go out into the world and figure out what you want to do, what you’re fighting for. If you don’t come back to fight Sephiroth, what are you actually missing, what are you actually changing? I said in my Ocarina of Time review that a game like this not saving game completion, not even returning to the menu after the credits without a reset, turns beating the game, even if it is ostensibly the end goal, into a sort of mechanical side quest, and I think defeating Sephiroth in this game fits this description even more closely. Whatever you do, do it because it’s what you want, not because you think it will save the world.

For the past month or so I have felt more like a fake, a failure, and an outsider than I have in a long while. Working a job where I have the misfortune of caring, of being overeducated on the subject at hand, being more than skilled enough to do what’s expected of me but having no worthwhile credentials or experience with which to barter for something better, working exclusively with people who don’t give a shit, don’t want to learn, and don’t want to try any harder. Stumbling into family gatherings to temporarily pose as middle class while in reality I resemble more and more my impoverished coworkers every day. Trying to find the time to spend with friends, the energy to spend on hobbies. Spending time in strange places with strange people where I really don’t belong. Making music or games or writing or a website thinking that this could possibly be considered a worthwhile skill, but I don’t know how to play guitar or piano, I know how to play my songs. I don’t know how to produce audio or video, I know how to make specific things the way that I want them. I don’t know computer programming beyond what I need to know to make the specific games I’m able to make right now, I don’t know web design beyond what my website can do right now. Being able to make a singular work has zero value, being able to do anything, every day is the minimum requirement. Being able to make a meal for yourself and being able to make a meal for every customer who walks through the door just aren’t the same thing. It’s not enough for Square to make another game like Final Fantasy VII, you need to just give people FFVII again, but bigger and better this time. It needs to periodically come back, like the McRib.