to disparage 3rd strike is often blasphemy in fighting game circles. for many, this is the ur-fighting game, a dizzying concoction of tight and expressionist mechanics, gorgeous spritework, and a dnb soundtrack that is absolutely fuego. it even has that little fundamental spice that all premier fighting games must aspire to possess: a disregard for balance. most modern titles would never dare nerf a character so significantly purely for thematic purposes, but then again, no modern title would ever think to include characters like twelve or chun-li (edit: this is a patent lie. tekken 7 season 3 had both leroy and fahkumram.)

still, what makes this game fascinating years on has little to do with any of its individual elements. fundamentally, it's the mood. it's a game that feels as though it was made on the verge of something great and unknown, and is one of those rare few titles i'll posit encapsulates a certain je ne sais quois, a snapshot of a particular zeitgeist heading into a new millennium. sure, you can point to the more overt references and stylings - strong WWF influence, character select rap, yang, yun, and q are maybe the most 90s characters ever designed, the illuminati as an antagonistic force and its seemingly benevolent villain - but more importantly, it's a composite of characters who are just wandering, trying to find themselves in some instances or seeking mastery in others. there's no pressing tournament to attend to, and even the machinations of the literal illuminati are vestigial, with its plotting mostly centered around biblical rivalry between tyrants. street fighter 3 was originally just about a new generation - itself neatly characterized as 'of its time' - but 3rd strike flips the script. 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. even though these ideas are reflected in little moments (chun-li teaching children to put up their dukes, elena reflecting on her journey and her future with a pen pal, alex losing to ryu but refusing to back down),even just aesthetically this theme is completely overpowering - its what imbues 3rd strike with a kind of melancholic ambience, but also what fuels the players' determination to prove themselves.

even better, to this day, this is still the only street fighter that is aesthetically unique to itself. street fighter 2 features worldly caricatures, alpha often feels like it lacks confidence or that it's missing something, 4 is nostalgic pageantry, and 5 is a slipshod mess of meaningless platitudes with no direction. this is the closest capcom ever got to imbuing their flagship franchise with unique stylings; it's something that actually has character and personality comparable to an SNK title. this, probably more than the joy of hitting a parry, setting up aegis reflectors, or getting in my opponent's head, is probably what keeps me coming back. fight for the future, so what's it gonna be, the third strike y'all it's street fighter 3

I think what makes this one stand out as even better than the already really good base game is the way it taps into the same primal mystique that motivates us to put characters into games they shouldn't be (be it official bonus modes or fan mods) and works that into both the game design and the story. Plague Knight is an outcast, both in a narrative sense where they're shunned by the local villagefolk and forced to live in an underground lab and in a mechanical sense where it is abundantly clear that the main campaign's levels were not made with them in mind. Sometimes it's in the sense of unintentional side effects of a character with drastically different attacks, movement physics, etc. like many such cases in Propeller Knight's stage and other times it's parts of levels hard coded to not work like they did in Shovel Knight's campaign such as the flying bushes in Specter Knight's stage and the rainbow bridges in Polar Knight's stage. However, while this might seem like something that only works to Plague Knight's detriment, it also leans the other way around. Plague Knight's sheer quantity of movement options allow them to cheese many platforming challenges that would have given the cerulean coward trouble and the increased range and spammability of their attacks makes cheesing bosses even easier. Controlling Plague Knight feels like controlling a character modded into a game they very much weren't supposed to be (ex. that Sonic Generations mod from a while back that allows you to play as Mario 64 Mario, complete with their very specific movement physics) and also playing the role of the cartoon mad scientist character that Plague Knight is clearly riffing on; never having a chance of winning if you play fair and square but instead getting success through being a cheating bastard. The world wasn't made with Plague Knight in mind but goddamnit if they aren't going to hang on by any means necessary.
Also, Plague Knight and Mona are yuri to me.

[Average Reading Time: 9 Minutes]

I don't deserve to eat this well.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is one of those games that I was fortunate enough to grow up with back when it was out on the GameCube. It wouldn't be for some number of years down the road that I would actually beat it (kid me didn't really know how to strategize and couldn't beat the final boss), and since then I had always had an itch to return to it.

When this remake was announced late last year, my jaw hit the floor. I froze. Couldn't move for 40 minutes. Here it was, my #11 favorite game of all time getting a beautiful remake, and I would get to play it! For years, Paper Mario fans have been dying for this game to escape the GameCube, and I believe that with this remake, it escaped elegantly!

The first thing I want to mention are the visuals. This remake goes above and beyond with how characters are presented to you. Not only do they look stunning in HD, but they're so much more lively now! There are new animations for everyone, allowing for them to further express emotions and let their personalities shine through.

It's not just the main cast, either! Almost every NPC has new poses that they enter as they speak, giving a lot more life to their interactions. It was always a joy talking to NPC's I've interacted with in the original and seeing them bursting with life as they tell me about things like how they're crushing on their coworker or how them and their sisters are travelling the world. Absolute eye candy with the characters here!

Of course, the world itself got a major visual overhaul, as well. They strived to aim for the more paper craft inspired style of the newer Paper Mario games here. Personally, I always enjoyed the visual direction of the newer games, despite their varying levels of quality as games as a whole. Seeing The Thousand-Year Door adopt these visuals was a welcome treat for me.

If I had one minor nitpick about it, though, it would be just how reflective surfaces are. Most floors in the game are super shiny, like someone just waxed them before Mario and co. came in and started running around. For some areas it's fine, but it's a little jarring in others. For example, the first chapter starts in a grassy field. Despite this, Mario has a reflection in the grass as he runs through it. Once again, it's nothing deal-breaking by any means. It's just weird.

Along with the visuals, the music and sounds also got some reworks! All of the songs from the original game have been recomposed and are fully orchestrated. As someone who enjoys revisiting older titles using modifications to replace the original soundtracks with orchestral rearrangements (read more about those here if you're interested!), hearing these new takes on older tracks was a treat! Of course, music is subjective, and some tracks may sound better to you than others, but personally I had no real complaints about the new score here. They also add in completely new tracks to spice up cutscenes, which I enjoyed greatly.

It also helps that they went above and beyond with the music by giving each chapter its own remixes of various themes heard throughout the game! As soon as I realized this was happening, I just said to myself "Oh man, they're so smart this is SO GOOD!" This includes battle music as well as music used in specific cutscenes. It made visiting each chapter even more exciting for me, since it meant I would be hearing more new arrangements of these songs I knew so well growing up!

It's also worth noting that if you miss the original score, there is a badge you can acquire early in the game very easily that will allow you to listen to the original soundtrack as you play. Personally, I didn't use it, but it is there for those of you that would rather hear the original soundtrack. Thankfully, you'll be able to hear the new tracks made specifically for this remake with this badge equipped, so you won't have to worry about missing out on any of the new content with it on!

When it comes to the sound effects, a lot has changed here. A number of sounds from the original have been replaced, and while I'll miss them, I'm not going to lose sleep over them being gone. They did retain the sounds Charles Martinet recorded for the original release, which is welcome. Speaking of character voices, every NPC has one now! It basically amounts to being Banjo-Kazooie style grunts as text pops up, but I think it's a fun addition. Some of the sounds are a little weird, but for the most part I think it did a great job making the characters you meet feel more alive, allowing for me to get a better idea of how they sound when speaking in my head (Grubba will always be Foghorn Leghorn to me, though).

Along with cosmetic changes, a number of things were done to improve the quality of the gameplay experience as a whole. First off, you can collect up to 9,999 coins instead of 999 now, which is a massive game-changer since you won't be worrying as much about making sure you aren't sitting on too many coins at any time, especially when you invest in somebody's business venture.

They also added a dedicated party member wheel button. Players of the original will remember having to hit a d-pad button to bring up the party screen and then having to scroll over to the party member they want out on the field. It was simple, but far from snappy. What they added here is basically a party member quick select menu that's super easy to use. This simple addition improves the pacing a lot, especially when you enter later areas that have you swapping out party members often to solve puzzles.

Next, I want to bring up the changes they made to chapter shortcut pipes. In the original, you weren't able to access any chapter shortcuts until clearing chapter 3 at the earliest, and by the time you're at the endgame, you'll only have shortcuts to 4 out of the 7 major chapter locations in the game. All of this has changed in the remake. In the remake, you can access chapter shortcuts as early as after finishing chapter 1! Not only that, but there is now a shortcut to every major chapter location in the game. One pipe for each chapter up to chapter 7. This means no more having to run over to the blimp and taking that to access chapter 3's location, for example.

Also, all of these pipes are in one room and are properly labelled. This isn't even the best part. The best part is that now, you can access this room from a pipe that connects directly to the center square of Rogueport! Using shortcuts has never been simpler than it is here. This also helps immensely with a specific scenario in chapter 7 that now turns from a tedious nightmare into a simple task thanks to the addition of these pipes!

There is one last major quality of life change I want to mention. We need to talk about chapter 4's structure.

Chapter 4 of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is very infamous for the absurd amount of backtracking it asks of the player. You're constantly going from one end of the chapter to the other, over and over to progress the plot. Chapter 4's structure is easily one of the most complained about parts of that game, and it is a strong deterrent from those who think of replaying the game.

I am glad to say that they fixed chapter 4. At one point during the chapter, you gain access to a pipe that connects between both ends of the area. The way they did it makes perfect sense, too, as you unlock it at a point where there would be no major difference to how you approach the trip gameplay wise. My jaw dropped when I realized what they did, and I could not be happier about their decision here. One of the biggest issues with the original game is now completely gone, and now I can revisit this title without groaning about certain parts of it.

There are also some extra goodies hidden in here for explorative players. By finding all of the Shine Sprites (items that upgrade party members) in any given chapter, you unlock the ability to listen to the music from that chapter from the pause menu! You also get rewards for collecting all of the Star Pieces (items that can be traded for badges) in any chapter in the form of concept art! Playing this remake was the first time I went out of my way to collect all of the Star Pieces, and I am happy I did as the artwork you unlock is stunning, to say the least!

With all of these changes and additions out of the way, it's time to ask the real question: how does it play? When I realized this game would be running at half the framerate of the original back when we were getting more trailers, I was a little worried that it would have a strong negative effect on my muscle memory when it came to pulling off stylish moves and super guards.

Once the game started proper, I got into my first battle. My muscle memory kicked in. My super guards and stylish moves all went off perfectly. I was back.

Needless to say, my worries about the framerate were immediately put to rest. The game feels great to play as it is now! Of course, if this game gets an FPS boost on the Switch 2, that would be very welcome, but as it is now, it's more than playable, so if you were worried about the framerate, I can assure you that it's not a major issue that will hold you back!

As for how my playthrough went, I can say it went great! For this playthrough, I did something I never truly did before: I opted for a danger-focused build. I got a small taste of it back when I played Paper Mario: TTYD 64, a Paper Mario hack that you can read more about here. Since then, I wanted to see how well it would go if I focused a build solely around that, and boy, did it serve me well!

For those unaware, in the Paper Mario games, when Mario is at 5 HP, he enters a state that shows that he is in danger, prompting the player to consider healing him. However, there are badges that take advantage of this "danger" state. There's one that reduces the amount of damage you take while in this state, for example. There's also one that raises your evasion, causing enemies to miss their attacks more often.

There is one badge, however, that shines above the rest, known as Power Rush. This badge raises Mario's attack stat by 2 when he is in danger. Sounds pretty small on paper, right? Only 2 damage? Why is it a big deal? Well, there are two things about this badge that make it stand out. One is that it is relatively cheap to equip, only requiring one badge point. The other thing is that there is no limit on how many of this badge you can equip.

Let's do some math. There is a badge in this game that raises your attack stat by 1 at the cost of 6 badge points. If you instead equipped 6 Power Rush badges for the same point cost, you'd raise Mario's attack by 12! This is an absolute game changer, and a popular build for a reason. It's also helped by the fact that there's a character in the game that can reduce your max HP to be 5, allowing you to remain in a danger state permanently.

Doing this was an absolute thrill for me. I was facing some of the toughest enemies in the game and erasing them from existence with ease. This is easily the most powerful I have ever felt in any video game. I was able to do something I have never done before when playing this game, which is clear the Pit of 100 Trials, which is an optional dungeon with enemies tougher than anything you'll fight in the main game. I went in there with this build and emerged with barely a scratch on me. I felt so strong, and I loved it.

Now, as much as I love this build, I highly implore those who have not played this game before to not think about such things as they play. Enjoy the game casually and do what feels right to you. Tune your build your own way and save the special builds like this one for later runs. As powerful as they are, the game kind of becomes a joke if you do it, so you lose out on a ton of the impact that certain boss fights can have on you when they appear before you.

Overall, I loved my time with this remake. It was everything I imagined it would be and more. Personally, I feel that this remake completely replaces the original for me, thanks mostly to all of the quality of life features they've added to make the game snappier. I cannot recommend this game enough. Whether you're new to Paper Mario or a series veteran, you'll find plenty to love in this game!

One of the worst insults you can throw at a video game is to call it an “asset swap.” To say that your work amounts to a fresh coat of paint over something that already existed is, essentially, to say you’ve done nothing. Almost as bad is to call something a “clone,” which implies that you may have done original work, but you’ve failed to iterate upon the inspiration you draw from. There are situations where these pejoratives are appropriate—the flood of “trash” releases on Steam certainly apply—but they’ve become overused to the point that they’ve lost their bite. In the wake of Suika Game’s surprise viral success, a number of games have taken its simple but genius premise (in brief: a sort of physics-based 2048 in which you combine matching objects until you can make the biggest one) and run in their own direction with it. Some are pale imitations with shoddy physics (like Big Watermelon Match), but even games that alter the calculus of gameplay by changing the shapes of the objects or the conditions of the fail state, like PuzzMiX, aren’t immune to being called cheap ripoffs. You would have a hard time criticizing Matsutake Game for being a low effort clone.

Let’s get the obvious thing out of the way: thematically, it’s absolutely nuts. The playing field appears to be a woven basket, and the objects you’re dropping into them are mushrooms; it’s as if you’re a mycology student collecting samples. You drop the adorable fungal friends, each dotted with a pair of beady eyeballs, and a squeak resembling a chew toy clenched between the jaws of a playful pup is heard. It doesn’t even take more than a couple of seconds to get annoying. The core concept is exactly the same as Suika Game, combining mushrooms until you make the titular matsutake—considered a delicacy in Japanese cuisine due to its partially endangered status. As you make your way up the chain of evolution, the name of each mushroom is announced by a cute Japanese voice. (Kikurage, shiitake, maitake, etc.) This also quickly gets overstimulating. The totality of the aesthetics are amusing, but they serve another important purpose: they’re disarming. It’s simply hard to be upset at a loss when lightning streaks across the screen, announcing “GAME OVER” in a fashion far too dramatic for a game about collecting mushrooms.

But it’s not just superficial differences that set Matsutake Game apart from Suika. The shapes of the mushrooms are irregular, in contrast to the perfectly round fruits. This makes their behavior less easy to predict, but more surprising. Chain reactions can come suddenly as pieces jostle around in ways you couldn’t possibly plan for. Most meaningfully, though, is the fact that Matsutake Game is the only Suika-like (that I’ve seen, anyway) that is actually in three dimensions. Pieces can fall behind your field of view or roll into positions you didn’t intend. You can use the extra volume to your advantage, too, filling as much space on the board as you can to set up future chains. It’s a brilliant remix of the formula, while still feeling familiar enough that there’s no sense of a learning curve. The z-axis of the playing field is so narrow that you can almost see everything, but wide enough that you feel the depth of the container.

Matsutake Game feels a world apart from Suika Game to me, though I can still imagine a casual observer saying it’s not different enough to justify existing. This is partially due to the fact that you can intuit so much from a physics game simply by looking at it; Suika-likes hide little from you, allowing you grasp the objective in only a couple of seconds. What you can’t glean from a cursory glance is how it feels. Suika Game is, itself, a clone of a Chinese mobile game called Synthetic Watermelon. It became a phenomenon because it refined the formula it copied, perfecting previously unreliable physics and wrapping it in an aesthetic that was far more pleasant to look at. Matsutake Game feels like a similarly significant leap. If you’ve only messed around in a Suika-like for a few minutes and gotten bored, they’re probably all the same to you—but if you’re really about it, there’s a whole new world to find inside that wicker basket.

(the following is a blurb I contributed for pangburn’s massive “sight & sound” project from earlier this year, preserved in this lone journal entry to please no one beyond myself. i thought it would be nice to have something on my page for my favorite traditional fighting game, and after seeing djscheddar do something similar for silent hill i thought it would be a good excuse to crib his style and finally post something small on third strike.)

Being a series that founded its core identity on timeless, generalized depictions of caricatured combat, it’s fascinating to me that Street Fighter tried to reinvent itself with the SFIII Series, seemingly to appeal to the masses and ultimately burning bridges with a large number of their fans in the process. I think that’s a large part of why it's so special to me though: this series of games (especially Third Strike) stands nowadays as a perfect time capsule of a bygone era laced in frivolous sass and a shared optimism for a new generation. Third Strike could easily be held up on the merits of its artistic tendencies even if it wasn’t strong mechanically, but this aesthetic isn’t just cheap set dressing - this drive for creativity and spunk is interwoven with every thread of its design. While mechanics like parrying and a brand new roster of bozos may not appeal to everyone who loved the simplicity of SFII, the confidence on display in every element to the identity of SFIII makes it a peerless monolith in one of the most colorful and creative genres in the medium. As the turn of the millennium draws near and the world resets at midnight, what's the harm in being the most honest and playful versions of ourselves in the meantime?

It doesn’t really need to be said that Prince was a living legend. The world renowned multi-instrumentalist maintained a career that spanned four decades, cut short only because of his untimely passing in 2016. There were sharp peaks and valleys in his popularity, like all great musicians, but he consistently managed to catapult himself back into the conversation due to his lightning quick adaptability. When The Revolution—the backing band that helped propel him into superstardom with Purple Rain—dissolved, he didn’t waste any time getting back into the studio by himself. He put together one of the best albums of his career, Sign "☮︎" the Times, while his personal and professional relationships were in a highly mercurial state. In fact, this period was so prolific that the label executives at Warner Bros. had to negotiate with Prince to cut down the length of the album; it ended up releasing “only” as a double LP instead of an absurd triple record affair.

Prince’s versatility wasn’t only limited to his musical talent. His headlong embrace of new technology was undoubtedly a major factor in his unprecedented ability to stave off irrelevancy. He was an early adopter of the Fairlight CMI, a synthesizer that few musicians could even afford in the mid 1980s. Prince’s vault where he hoarded his vast reserves of unreleased music had a DOS-based computer cataloging system on its frontend, affectionately called Mr. Vault Guy, that accounted for the contents of every tape, disc, and hard drive. He was also much earlier than most to the idea of internet distribution, stubbornly insisting on selling the Crystal Ball box set through his own website in 1998, to the detriment of sales.

Given his love for the bleeding edge of progress, it only makes sense that Prince would become interested in video games. In 1994, when Prince Interactive was released, it was yet another volatile period for the artist. To set the stage a little bit: his final album with Warner, Come, was set to release in two months. He purposely refused to promote the new project as a means of spiting the label, ending his contractual obligations by giving them as little profit as possible. He changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol the year before, forcing everyone to call him “The Artist Formerly Known As Prince.” The name of the game, technically, isn’t even Prince Interactive, but we have to call it something!

Cyan’s highly influential Myst released a year prior to Interactive, and the similarities are more than superficial. You find yourself in a fictionalized version of Prince’s home and recording studio Paisley Park, solving simple point-and-click puzzles. Broadly, the objective is to search the mansion and assemble the scattered pieces of the nameless musician’s eponymous symbol as if they’re fragments of the Triforce, though in practice this amounts to a flimsy excuse to poke around and uncover various Prince-related easter eggs. There are an abundance of music snippets, photos, and interviews with other musicians—in which they all heap praise on Prince—to be found. The game even kicks off with an exclusive song called “Interactive,” ostensibly a song about being a song in a video game. (He would pull a similar move years later with “Cybersingle,” a song about the fact that you could download it from the Internet.)

What ends up being most interesting about Interactive is not necessarily how it innovates, but how it’s indicative of its time. Functionally, it does little to stand out from contemporary adventure games like Myst, Beneath a Steel Sky, or Day of the Tentacle. (It’s not even unique as a piece of multimedia artist memorabilia; JUMP: The David Bowie Interactive CD-ROM released earlier the same year.) Historically, it acted as an important document for fans and scribes looking to document the inner workings of Prince’s operation; tours of Paisley Park weren’t permitted while he was alive, and despite all the fantastical embellishments of his Minnesota home, this was the only way to get a surprisingly accurate walkthrough of his studio. Thematically, it tells a story of Prince’s legacy as it stood in the mid ‘90s—full of references to his unassailable accomplishments, but also serving to build up hype for the second act of his career.

     'Those great, beautiful ships, rocking silently on the calm waters, with their idle and wistful sails, are they not telling us in a silent language — when will we depart for happiness?'
     – Charles Baudelaire, Fusées, VIII, 1887 (personal translation).

One of the most difficult issues in fantasy studies is to define its contours and, by extension, its relationship to reality. In her seminal study, Fantasy: The literature of subversion (1981), Rosemary Jackson points out that fantasy violates the conventions and rules of our reality and: 'threatens to subvert rules and conventions taken to be normative [and] disturb "rules" of artistic representation and literature’s reproduction of the "real"' [1]. The capacity for deviation that speculative fiction offers is both an opportunity and a danger. Jackson points out that this subversive potential does not mean that fantasy or the fantastic are genres that always aim for social progressivism. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the pulp tradition was steeped in racist, homophobic and misogynist tropes that exerted a lasting influence on fiction throughout the late twentieth century and to this day.

     The misogynist issue in Western-style fantasy

Many authors hide behind these historical precedents to conceal a conservative discourse. The existence of multiple races allows for the perpetuation of social oppression, and while female characters have generally become more active in recent decades, they continue to fit into old-fashioned stereotypes [2]. The Final Fantasy series is part of this dynamic and has always oscillated between these major themes of fantasy fiction, notably by offering a regular comparison between magic and technological modernity, nature and industry, good and evil, humanity and divinity. These dichotomies are relatively common and allow the story to touch on issues such as capitalist exploitation and the use of natural resources. However, the representation of other topics remains disastrous: Final Fantasy XIV (2010) is especially characterised by deep-seated racism and sexism, the latter partially masked by the presence of strong female characters in positions of power.

It is hard to say whether these precautions were taken to appeal to a particular audience, but it is clear that Final Fantasy XVI ignores all these concerns and plunges into the most outrageous archaism, piling on misogynistic scenes wherever possible, supposedly justified by the harshness of European medieval society. Excuses of this kind obscure the real issues. The player follows the story of Clive Rosfield, drawn into a quest for revenge after the Phoenix Gate incident, which spells the end of the Duchy of Rosaria. Miraculously reunited with his childhood friend Jill Warrick, he joins Cid's group, determined to change the situation of the Bearers – magic-capable individuals enslaved across the continent. Final Fantasy XVI is therefore a tale of free will and independence, pitting the dark nature of the world against the purity of Cid and Clive's ideals.

To create this atmosphere, as well as the division between good and evil, the title makes extensive use of violence, sex and sexual violence as narrative drivers. Lenise Prater explains that Fiona McIntosh's Percheron trilogy (2005) constructs: 'a series of juxtapositions between good and evil [...] through the representation of sexual violence' [3]. The same processes are at work in Final Fantasy XVI, from the very first narrative arc of the adventure, where Benedikta is cast as the archetypal femme fatale, ready to use her body to manipulate her rivals: the character is constantly brought back to her status as a woman, and it is the threat of sexual violence that cements her development – Annabella is constructed in a similar way. Final Fantasy XVI revels in the dichotomy between whores and innocent virgins. Despite the Western aesthetic of the title, Jill is no more than a yamato nadeshiko who is constantly sidelined by the game. She mostly serves as a narrative device to advance the plot, through her multiple visits to the infirmary or because she is kidnapped by Clive's enemies. The title denies her any agency, and her nuanced fragility is only hinted at in a few sentences before being brushed aside: it takes almost thirty hours of gameplay before Clive explicitly asks her how she is, despite her constant concern for the protagonist's anxieties.

     A case for centrism and laissez-faire

This conservative portrayal is echoed in the discourse on the Bearers. The game is moderately critical of slavery on the continent and fails to make it a structural issue for Clive, who always remains somewhat detached from the problem. This issue is structurally embedded in the way the player interacts with the world, as they are extremely passive in relation to the events portrayed in the story. While the player is aware of the political manipulations taking place in Storm, they cannot act on them directly; Clive is blindly thrown into the fray and the situation is simply resolved in a battle that depoliticises the social stakes. Similarly, the Seals donated by certain NPCs guarantee Clive's reputation in the community in a highly artificial way, removing any roughness from the interactions. Clive fights to free the Bearers because he inherits this mission from his father and Cid, but this task seems disembodied throughout the game.

Beyond the main quest, the side quests are particularly lacklustre and do little to deepen the world-building. Because they can be accessed at any point in the game, Final Fantasy XVI chooses to exclude companions from them. They simply disappear from the cutscenes and thus have no chance to react to the world around them. Since the intention is to establish Clive as an ideologically good, open and self-governing character, all side quests are resolved by Clive's ideological concessions or miraculous unifications in the face of artificially created danger, without the slightest contradiction from any of the other main characters. Only in the final stretch does someone point out Clive's hypocrisy and domineering power over Jill, but the scene is quickly swept away by the return of Gav, the comic relief of the group.

Final Fantasy XVI is more concerned with shocking, melodramatic or cathartic platitudes than with radical denunciations of inequality and oppression. Worse, these shocking scenes do not even make the world dynamic, so poor is the structure of the narrative. Two problems stand out. Firstly, the interweaving of high-intensity sequences with slower passages: instead of building up the world through genuine slice-of-life sequences, the game multiplies banalities that the player has already understood for several dozen hours. The temporality of the story is also incoherent. Clive seems to cross the continent in a matter of hours, while his rivals remain completely passive. The confrontation between the Sanbreque Empire and the Dhalmekian Republic is characterised by irrational stagnation and passivity, allowing Clive to strike unhindered. The Twins always remain static, despite long ellipses in time.

     A hollow and meaningless experience

Perhaps Final Fantasy XVI should not be taken so literally, but rather accepted as the nekketsu it becomes in the second half of the game. Such an interpretation would be acceptable if the game did not take itself so seriously. However, as in Final Fantasy XIV, the writing wallows in a very uncomfortable theatrical heaviness – which the actors generally manage to save from disaster – as if clumsily mimicking the drama of Shakespeare's historical plays. However, Clive's disillusioned, self-deprecating, borderline comic character breaks up this fiction. Some characters work well, playing up their theatrical nature, such as Cid or Lord Byron, but they are quickly relegated to the background or an essentially comic role.

The shifts in tone and pacing detract from the development of the narrative, which cannot be saved by a few flashes of brilliance. The aetheric floods seem to have been imagined as a reflection of nuclear risks, highlighting the danger of Japan's post-Fukushima energy crutch, but in the end they are only used as a narrative expedient to create danger where the plot needs it. The pinnacle of dishonesty and disrespect for a title that centres its discourse on human free will lies in the choice of names for the NPC fillers. In the pure tradition of Final Fantasy XIV, they include puns and comical alliterations ('Broom-Bearer') that strip them of all substance and reduce them to ridicule. In the second half of the game, a little girl is introduced as a character of some narrative importance, but the title does not even bother to give her a name or address her living conditions.

Meanwhile, the action sequences prove to be particularly hollow. The choreography in the first few hours is quite ingenious, highlighting Clive's agility with complex movements and rather creative camera angles. As the title progresses, this aspect is abandoned in favour of fights that drag on and resort to nekketsu clichés. The duel against Titan lasts forty minutes and is a miserable succession of attacks around the stone tentacles. Final Fantasy XVI even has the audacity to end the battle not with the obvious cinematic climax, but with a dull and particularly unpleasant aerial sequence. Subsequent encounters also drag on for no apparent reason other than to demonstrate a genuine – if futile – mastery of the lightning engine.

     Ergonomics, gameplay and fluidity

While Final Fantasy XVI boasts detailed environments at first glance, the facade quickly cracks. The early areas are indeed highly detailed, to the point of drowning the player in detail – navigating through the thick vegetation is quite difficult, forcing the player to use Torgal to progress – but the quality deteriorates as the game progresses. The dense environments disappear in favour of vast open areas that struggle to convey the majesty of the world. Although the cities visible on the horizon are beautiful backdrops, they fail to radiate materially onto their surroundings, which then become mere abstractions. Moreover, Clive's movement is extremely sluggish: even getting on his chocobo is an unpleasant task that constantly interrupts the fluidity of the action, while the player is condemned to an extraordinary passivity in order to get from one place to another.

In the Hideaway, this impression is reinforced by Clive's inability to sprint: in the second half of the game, getting to the backyard is a gruelling chore. The magic of this cocoon quickly vanishes, as the various characters keep repeating themselves and are only mediocrely animated. Despite the detailed scenery, the game borrows all its animations from Final Fantasy XIV, giving a very artificial tone to the discussions. The Hideaway is less a place where the player can comfortably catch up with their favourite NPCs, and more a burdensome obligation to access NPCs, side quests and the hunt board – requiring the player to physically go there to see the location of elite monsters, a design mistake that even Final Fantasy XIV avoided.

The enjoyment of the combat system is left to the player and their experience of other character-action games, but it is absurd that the player has to wait at least twenty hours to finally be given a modicum of flexibility in their attack options: Final Fantasy XVI justifies its unique protagonist with a deep combat system that encourages the creation of diverse builds, but this philosophy is only appropriate in a New Game+ where all powers are unlocked from the start. In a first playthrough, the player must suffer from an impressive slowness, to the point where the Story Mode becomes an obvious option. The title here echoes the recent problem of Shadowbringers (2019) and especially Endwalker (2021), which first designs its battles with the Extreme and Savage versions, before cutting out the most difficult sections for the Normal versions – the result is a sense of incompleteness that is particularly damaging when combined with the very slowly evolving combat system.

It is difficult to place Final Fantasy XVI in the landscape of modern Japanese video games, so awkward is it in every way. With the title still in its cycle of artificial marketing in preparation for the DLCs, one can only speculate as to the reasons for these failings. Perhaps the lack of coherence can be explained by the fractured development team working on two major games, and the highly eclectic nature of the directors brought together by Naoki Yoshida. His design philosophy is particularly well suited to an MMO, but Final Fantasy XVI suffers greatly from it: the endless succession of side quests involving the Hideaway characters just before the final battle is incomprehensible, as if the game had remembered that it needed to conclude. Hiroshi Takai and Kazutoyo Maehiro's narrative vision is a series of shocking, empty, meaningless scenes: players of Heavensward (2015) had the opportunity to suffer from Ysayle's portrayal, and it is surprising that Final Fantasy XVI does even worse, a standard-bearer for passive misogyny in modern fantasy. That Jill's theme becomes 'My Star' and denies her any agency in the game's final moments is particularly painful and aptly sums up the title.

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[1] Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The literature of subversion, Routledge, London, 2005 [1981], p. 14.
[2] On the topic, see for example Peter Bebergal (ed.), Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots Of Dungeons & Dragons, Strange Attractor Press, London, 2021. In the afterword, Ann VanderMeer discusses the conservative roots of pulp fantasy and of the historical TTRPG.
[3] Lenise Prater, 'Monstrous Fantasies: Reinforcing Rape Culture in Fiona McIntosh's Fantasy Novels', in Hecate, vol. 39, no. 1-2, 2014.

people keep wanting to dig deeper and deeper into undertale, its metatextuality becomes an all-consuming force in which all themes of undertale have to be about undertale because undertale is about undertale, but no!!!! the game has things to say about stuff other than itself and i’d argue that its only interested in itself as a metaphor for much more material themes. it juxtaposes treating the game as a lived in world full of characters versus treating the game as pile of content not to say “treating games as piles of content is bad” but as a metaphor about why living out our, like, actual lives as strictly instrumental is bad.

readings of it being exclusively or even primarily about fandom or the way we interact with games are so limiting. It's such a loving and emotionally honest game and reducing it to a snake eating its own tail makes me sad.