Reggie Fils-Aimé famously said “if it’s not fun, why bother” during Nintendo’s E3 2017 showcase. For some, these have become words to die by. An easy phrase to parrot when the individual faces a system they can't come to terms with. Some see it as a harmless way of saying they don't enjoy what they're playing, but I have never appreciated its implications.

If your definition of “fun” equates to anything you like, this quote probably resonates with you. But I've rarely seen the word used that way, and instead, this obsession with fun’s necessity in games seems more damaging than anything.

“Fun” is fast, approachable, and easy to control. An immediate stoking of the attention span, constant engagement, or a light enjoyment lessened in friction. Some see Dark Souls as unfun due to its slow, heavy movement and methodical combat. Dark Souls 3 is “fun” because it's quicker and lighter; you can roll faster, further, and more often. Nothing is wrong with either approach, yet one is sometimes dismissed.

Not everyone defines the term this way, but I’ve seen it used to debase games with an unconventional design. Traditionally “unfun” foundations have a harder time finding their place in communities who won’t acknowledge its worth unless it’s immediately satisfying. I remember this phrase being used during Death Stranding. It was picked apart, labeled as “unfun” because it’s a package delivery walking simulator. Who wants to be a delivery man, right? Even “walking sim” has become dismissive, used to label things as lesser.

Regardless of Reggie’s intention in the full quote, which specifically emphasizes that games are also a journey, even inviting the player to “open their mind,” that snippet has shifted into a rallying cry for people to do anything but. If something must be “fun” to be worthwhile, and that definition of “fun” is remotely limited, it denies ideas that don't fit under a narrow bracket. It is a quote accompanied by frustrating ignorance.

Not everything needs to be fun. Other artforms aren't seen this way, so why are games different? Is it because they're interactive? Is interactivity meaningless without fun? Art is feeling, and there’s no single feeling a work has to evoke to be successful.

Playing Resident Evil reminded me of my stance on this.

It isn't fun. It's claustrophobic, stressful, and frustrating. No encounter, room, boss, or weapon is traditionally “fun.” It's an unforgiving, labyrinthian puzzle; a constant check of resources where memorizing rooms and locations is vital. Even saving the game is limited to a resource, one I often found myself without and had to make huge stretches of progress knowing one mistake could send me back an hour.

Bosses are a cold, calculated check of your mindfulness towards collecting and preserving as much ammo as possible. You enter a boss room, move only a little, and fire everything you have. They die and you move on. You wasted ammo, and that made progressing more difficult. No part of this balance between figuring out the path forward while wasting as few resources as possible was fun, alongside trying to figure out at what point the player should save.

Yet Resident Evil is enormously good and I’m enamored. I've reversed my tune on the Ink Ribbon system after years of avoiding it in other titles in the franchise. The fear that arises from knowing one mistake can ripple; your decision to not save means you're risking everything, or being too frugal by going nearly an hour without a save, brings rise to an unmatched tension.

Games don’t have to be fun to be worthwhile, successful, or good. Art is too complex, and limiting any medium in this way sucks. It’s not something to be afraid of, either. Fun absolutely rules, but I’m tired of people treating it as a necessity. I’m tired of being seen as lesser when expressing love for old, unconventional, or mechanically complex experiences. I’m tired of new things being inherently better because they’re faster, more fluid, and easier to control. No feeling is worthless and games can accomplish anything. Just keep an open mind, experience it, and vibe. Fun isn’t everything.

If you support that quote and think “that's not what fun is, it's just whether or not you like something,” then that's fine. We can disagree. But I’ve seen people use the requirement of “fun” to shit on non-traditional systems before. People shouldn’t be afraid to say something isn’t fun yet still love it. There's so much more to feel :)

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"Cowboy number one
A born-again poor man's son
On the air America
I modeled shirts by Van Heusen"

[ WAR IS HELL ]

The battlefield is a handpainting canvas for the pampered bourgeoise. Spilling the blood of innocents over the most frivolous and petty of quarrels, the commanding officers jest from the comfort of a barracks table, unconcerned but not oblivious to the mortality of their pawn-like subjects. AW is truer to the reality of war than most games in how cleverly it expresses its plot's conflict as a nothing more than a slap fight: A toy-like abstraction of genocide built on the backs of selfishness, greed and miscommunications.

[ WAR IS DEGENERATE ]

AW's campaign maps are explicitly designed to leave you with worse odds than the opposition - fewer units, less favorable access to terrain and resources, compromised starting positions, and often worse CO abilities. With such stringent play limitations, war forces you to commit scumbag maneuvers: Exploiting AI, baiting enemies toward useless targets, blocking . What would ordinarily be tech relegated for high-level play becomes the backbone of your core strategy. This becomes part of the game's core appeal, but is equally as often a frustration.

[ WAR IS DISPOSABLE ]

There are no RPG staples in Advance Wars. You have a pre-assigned team for every mission (except one), and the actions of your previous encounters do nothing to affect your long-term proficiency. Your groundsmen and pilots? Unnamed nobodies. Letting weak units land fatal blows to get EXP? Not here, dude. Permadeath? Doesn't exist. Lose your strongest tank? Well, if you got a barracks lying around, spend some cash to replace it. And if you don't have a barracks? Uh, send in the infantry to capture and occupy new territory.

I should note though, that despite the disposability of your units on a macro level, you still have to exercise extreme caution over your movements. Each unit type has glaring strengths and weaknesses across its matchups, often totally unable to damage certain other unit types. Every member fills a unique role, and when one piece of the military puzzle gets killed off, you suddenly lose an integral part of your strategy. Imagine playing a fighting game where you lost your anti-airs or mixups if you played poor - that's Advance Wars' unit economy.

[ WAR IS ILLITERATE ]

Nothing is more American than tantalizing the impoverished youth to a comfortable lifestyle through military recruitment and propaganda. Such is the case with Nell, who couldn't be a worse source of education in this hellhole. The game's self-explanatory fundamentals are crammed into a multi-hour tutorial while simultaneously glossing over advanced tactics. And the game's hidden route system means you could realistically play the campaign without learning a new mechanic because you missed the mission where it's introduced to you. You always feel like the game is holding your hand while simultaneously overwhelming you with impossible odds.

And speaking of routes...

[ WAR IS CYCLICAL ]

The game's final battle against the kooky-spooky shadowy figure gives you a team of 3 armies, determined by the difficulty of the route you took - and no, they don't tell you there's multiple routes, you figure that out for yourself after it's already too late. Do the harder fights, and get a hand from previously-indomitable boss characters like Kanbei and Eagle. Wimp out, and the game leaves you with members whose specialties do fuck-all against Sturm's bulky caravan. If you happen to get stuck with, say, Sami and Grit, the map is almost unwinnable without googling an hour-long guide to learn exactly when and where to move certain units.

On my first try, I got stuck with Sami and Grit.

If this happens to you and you don't have the energy to brute-force the final boss, you have to re-do your old routes to unlock a better team. Thing is, you can't backtrack to older missions.

Long story short, I restarted my entire savefile because of this, and have shockingly learned this is a thing most people had to do too. That's... totally heinous and unacceptable for a 15+ hour long campaign.

Also, the best routes aren't labeled. None of the CO's are assigned to a diffiuclty level, and you just have to infer which one is hardest based on the map itself or plot surrounding it. Sometimes this is clever, like using Andy on the map that introduces Max so he can prove his independence, or using Sami against Green Earth because she and Eagle have the hots for each other. But without a clear game-to-player indicator, you basically need a guide to know which ones to pick.

[ WAR IS A HAZE ]

Also uh, Fog of War is fucking terrible and ruins this game, it sucks SHIT. It limits the map visibility but NOT for the CPU. These battles are where the game feels least like a tactics game and most like a trial-and-error puzzler: Constantly re-doing the same battles until you find the route. Even when following best practices with tree and reef defense, the AI WILL find ways to screw you over, forcing a hard reset.

And maybe Fog of War would be tolerable if it were treated as a side mission style - y'know, something alternative to mix things up. But depending on the route you take, you could end up playing 7 or more of these missions back-to-back. I felt like at least 35-45% of battles had Fog of War. This was soul-crushing and miserable.

[ WAR IS FINALITY ]

Advance Wars is killer on mechanics and aesthetics, but its ambition in campaign design becomes its own worst enemy when it completely fails to give the player reasonable opportunities to learn its arcane rules. The abundance of gimmick-driven missions constantly tears away the player's ability to learn mandatory fundamentals and appropriate opening moves. It's unmatched at its highest moments and couldn't be a better satire of American-cartoonish military culture, though that also seeps into is playability and frustration scale. I have no idea if this is just a rocky first attempt after moving away from the challenge mode-esque structure of the NES/SNES originals, or if this is just the identity they've chosen for themselves. Either way, I'm addicted to this, and I'll find out soon whenever I play the sequels.

"Here is a reminder of what the air attack warning sounds like
This is the sound"

The grandaddy of 3D anime area fighters, and a surprisingly robust, polished, and fun experience even in 2024.

This is still a “Only Die Hards Need Apply” type of game but, honest to god, I bet even a non-Naruto fan could have fun. The combos are nonexistent (except in a simple, FFXV way with directional inputs altering a single string), but there’s a fun mind game element of blocking, dodging, ninjutsus, substitutions, item usage, and so forth.

The same two minigames can get grating and the two (2) giant boss battles are slow—not to mention the terribly slow menus and mention structure—but the sheer spectacle of an Ultimate Ninjutsu melts away any harsher critiques I could throw at it.

The Storm series may’ve died off in a pathetic, greedy whimper, but we still have 4 extremely fun games to play around with. What a strong start.

Sometimes it's hard to believe that life once gifted a short precious period of childhood where you had so much free time in your hands that you didn't know what to do with, a sentiment that fills me up with a melancholic nostalgia for a fragile memory of fleeting formative wasted hours that were the stillest Time ever had the decency to be for me. It's a painful little trick Nature does, storing the happiest days of your life at the back of your head like a time capsule devised to torment you for all eternity, and it's within that ungraspable longing that Boku no Natsuyasumi 3 truly excels at.

Not overwhelming the player with a forceful list of quests and things to do, Natsuyasumi 3 finds instead meaning in the little mundane joys, discoveries and curiosities that occur inbetween the dead hours of the time you spend in its little farm house, taking pleasure in the beauty of nature present in its gorgeous pre-rendered painted backgrounds and distant fixed camera angles that let you breath in the open wilderness buzzing with birds and insects. A day is not entirely wasted, if you manage to skip a rock over the water a few times more and you come home at dusk to be greeted by a table with your favorite food.

There's definitely something foreign and alien about japan's ability to find the sacred within the ritualization of daily life, even something so seemingly carefree as a child's summer vacation, which probably had a huge part in barring this series from the west. But those small differences in culture equally expose how universal childhood and the awe of doing nothing for a whole day without a single drop of remorse or sadness are. A lot is definitely lost by not being able to understand japanese, and having your translating phone constantly pointed at the screen is definitely not the experience you wanna be having (seriously, how is it that we still dont have the tv technology to auto translate videogames?).

But the summer trip provided by Boku no Natsuyasumi 3's introspective and nostalgic take on childhood is an achievement that surpasses any language barrier. The unique and anxious experience of being away from the comfort of your family and home for the first time, the excitement of finding like minded summer pals that easily forget yesterday's awkwardness, or the pleasant welcomed tiredness that comes from a day fully lived. It seems like it will last forever, until it's suddenly over.

"If I could have it back, all the time that we wasted, I'd only waste it again"