There seems to be a prevalent expectation that as games evolved, they also became exponentially more approachable. Higher budgets resulted in smoother graphics and fewer bugs. More complex controls (adding left/right triggers, then adding one/two joysticks, then dabbling with motion inputs, etc) gave players a firmer grasp over their characters. AI became more predictable as their algorithms became more intricate to capture a wider range of responses. In a sense, as the technology expanded, the resulting products seemingly became more streamlined to better suit the player’s needs while more thoroughly capturing a developer’s vision.

Team Ico has never been about following tradition, however. If anything, the evolution of their titles embodies the regression of player control, choosing to instead utilize technological advancements not just to refine its premise via "design by subtraction" as chump has pointed out, but to deliver an entirely new experience altogether. Ico was a classic tale of boy meets girl; the girl had to be freed from her cage and pulled around the castle, as the boy protected her against everything in her way to prevent her demise. Shadow of the Colossus, however, was a story concerned with the struggle over control. The lone wanderer, in his quest to revive Mono, hunts down various several-story colossi capable of swatting him about like a fly. In the resulting desperate dance of death, he at first struggles to climb their hulking figures, hanging on for dear life until he discovers their weak points and stabs the colossi while they helplessly flail about. In other words, it's a game about trying to regain any semblance of control until you realize after the fact that the only shadow left was the literal shadow cast by Wander over their fallen corpse.

The Last Guardian then, can be thought of as the natural evolution of Team Ico titles, in that it melds previous design sensibilities and thrives off of disempowering the player throughout its entirety. Trico, the player’s companion and a cross between cat and bird, is essentially the analog to Wander’s horse in Shadow of the Colossus, Agro. Fumito Ueda designed Agro as a companion rather than just a vehicle, and had his team develop specific movement algorithms that would allow Agro to steer herself without the player’s explicit control, forcing players to put their trust in their steed during certain fights emphasizing bow aiming. Ueda and his new team at GenDesign iterated upon this idea, explicitly creating environments where the player was forced to rely upon Trico’s actions to progress and thus establish dependency between the boy and his companion.

While the game can be thought of as an inversion of Ico in this sense, its design influence upon The Last Guardian should not go overlooked, particularly in how the game captures Ico’s physicality. Ico’s key strength was establishing a sense of presence through minimalist puzzles that lacked overly gamey elements, namely in how Ico interacted with his surroundings. Players are subtly guided into climbing chains, pulling levers, sitting on stone sofas to save, and most importantly, holding down R1 to hold Yorda by the hand around the castle and pull her out of danger whenever captured. The Last Guardian innovates upon this by combining several of the traversable elements and the companion into one. To better navigate the vast ruins, the boy must guide Trico and utilize their tall body of climbable feathers in order to scale heights, while occasionally dragging around their large tail and dangling it over ledges to safely climb down. Most importantly, you get to pet Trico whenever you feel like it to comfort your friend in both their happiest and most emotionally taxing moments. In both Ico and The Last Guardian, the player’s constant contact with both the environment and their companion keeps them firmly rooted within its constructed sense of reality by regularly reminding them of their companion’s physical presence.

This physicality would not be as significant without the lessons learned from Shadow of the Colossus however, not just regarding AI behavior but also specifically in how it adapts the game’s sense of scale. Trico is large, and the boy is small. As mentioned previously, Trico can utilize their size to lean against walls and give the boy a step up, but they can also utilize their weight to hold down large chains and swipe away at imposing bodies of armor. Meanwhile, the boy is much more agile and can fit into otherwise inaccessible small spaces by Trico, squeezing through narrow tunnels and gaps in metal gates to pull switches and let his partner through. This obvious difference in size creates consistent room for contrast, not just in how the two characters differ in terms of functionality but also in terms of their scale when measured against the traversed liminal spaces of the ruins, constantly transforming from immense empty rooms to constrained and suffocating tunnels and corridors.

What is particularly interesting is not just The Last Guardian’s disempowerment or sense of scale, but rather what it manages to achieve with said elements and the resulting contrast to establish interdependency between the two characters and solidify their relationship. The combat, an almost complete inverse of Ico’s combat, is the most obvious example. Rather than defending Yorda by whacking shadow enemies with a stick, the roles have been reversed, in that the player must rely upon Trico to guard against scores of possessed armor as to avoid getting kidnapped himself. Even so, the game plays around with this idea of vulnerability, shifting the onus of responsibility about as the boy often finds himself in positions where he must actively support or protect Trico, such as disposing of glass eyes that scare his friend or scrambling to pull a nearby switch to lower a bridge and give Trico room to climb up to safety. The game is even willing to occasionally break its own rules to demonstrate how this sense of caring evolves past its defined guidelines. In almost any other game, this mechanical inconsistency would be regarded as a flaw, but it is this sense of doubt that creates room for the relationship to build from in the first place, and is perhaps the game’s most understated strength.

This is not to say that The Last Guardian was bereft of limitations regarding the execution of its ambitious scope. The most pressing challenge that Ueda and his team faced was how to balance its constructed sense of reality with regards to player expectations; that is, it had to find meaningful ways to commit to its vision of establishing the relationship between the boy and Trico while also acknowledging and appeasing players that would otherwise get lost or frustrated. Perhaps the most obvious downgrade from Ico is the presence of constant button prompts appearing on-screen to alert the players on how to better control the boy and instruct Trico; while the frequency of the prompts lessens over time, it is a slight disappointment that the game doesn’t simply force the players to experiment with inputs and commands as a more subtle and trusting substitute. This downfall however, is an anomaly amongst The Last Guardian’s other shortcomings, as it manages to successfully disguise many of its other concessions and limitations. There’s a classic “escape from the collapsing structure” sequence where all you do is hold forward and jump, but the game gets away with it because the player is used to being framed as a helpless participant. There’s occasional voice-over dialogue hints whenever the player has been stuck for a while in the same area, but it feels far less intrusive than Dormin’s repeated and booming hints in Shadow of the Colossus because the game has already established itself as a retrospective re-telling from the now grown boy’s point of view. Trico doesn’t respond immediately to the boy’s commands when being told where to go, but it makes sense that they wouldn’t function like clockwork and would need time to spot and process the situation from their own point of view, so the lag in response feels justified. It doesn’t matter that certain isolated elements of the game would crumble under scrutiny. What matters is that the situational context to allow players to suspend their disbelief is almost always present; in other words, the illusion holds up.

I’m still learning more about the game to this day. There are so many little details that I wouldn’t have spotted upon a first playthrough, and it’s an absolute joy finally getting to gush upon spotting them in replays. Of course it makes sense that you can’t just issue specific commands to Trico at the very start as a sequence-break despite not being taught by the game; after all, Trico hasn’t had time to observe you and mimic your actions to carry out such commands. Of course the hostile creatures that look exactly like your friend behave similarly; how can you then use your preconceived knowledge of their physiology to aid your friend in a fight against their copycat? I also can’t help but appreciate how GenDesign condensed so much learning within its introduction; in the first ten minutes alone, you’re hinted on how to later deal with the bodies of armor (the magical runes that appear before waking up are the exact same as the runes that appear when grabbed, and are dispelled in the same manner of furiously mashing buttons), you get to figure out how Trico’s eyes change colors depending upon whether they’re mesmerized or hostile, and it quickly establishes the premise of building up trust with a very wary creature that’s more than likely to misunderstand or ignore you at first. Combine all of these nuances with the game’s ability to destabilize and diversify playthroughs via Trico’s innate curiosity and semi-unpredictable instincts, and you get a game that becomes easier to appreciate the more the player familiarizes themselves with its inner workings.

I think a lot of criticism for The Last Guardian ultimately comes down to less of what we perceive the game is and more of what we perceive the game isn’t. It’s not a fully player-controlled puzzle-platforming game like Ico, it’s not a puzzle-combat game with spectacle like Shadow of the Colossus, and it’s certainly not a classic companion escort-quest game where you can just order Trico around like a robot and expect automatic results every time. Instead of focusing on the progression of more complex controls and puzzles, The Last Guardian is focused on the progression of a seemingly more complex relationship. I’m not going to pretend that everyone will get something out of this game, as it definitely requires a good deal of patience and player investment to meet the game halfway. It’s certainly more difficult to appreciate given its lack of influence unlike Ico or its lack of exhilarating boss encounters unlike Shadow of the Colossus. That said, it’s this element of danger in its ability to commit to its vision while alienating impatient players that makes it such a compelling title once it finally clicks. Many before me have pointed out how powerful the bond between the player and Trico felt upon learning from others that improperly caring for Trico results in your companion stubbornly ignoring the player’s commands; after all, volume swells cannot exist without contrast to provide room for growth. Perhaps this is why at the end of the day, I find myself transfixed by every word that Fumito Ueda has to offer. In an era where developers feel overly concerned with the best and brightest, he doesn’t seem concerned about what video games mean so much as what video games are. I can only hope that someday, he and GenDesign will return to bring us a new title that captures our imagination as thoroughly as many of his works already have for me.

In his video last year regarding context sensitivity, Matthewmatosis opens by describing Ghost Trick as entirely context-sensitive: the main action button ("trick") always performs a different action depending on the item possessed. However, he points this out as an exception to the trend of heavy context-sensitivity weighing down modern titles, because simply put, Ghost Trick uses context-sensitivity not as a crutch, but as its core. It never seems to suffer from fuzzy context: the game not only gives you plenty of safe time to experiment with set-pieces leading up to timed sequences (since untimed traversal to the victim is every bit a puzzle in itself), but also briefly describes the single "trick" of each object possessed to give players an idea of how to progress. Furthermore, Ghost Trick's difficulty hits a perfect sweet-spot: it doesn't feel free because traversal and manipulating objects to your advantage require a good degree of planning and experimentation, but failure also never feels too punishing because other characters and the environment are great at providing thoughtful feedback upon failure, so the player isn't just banging their head against a wall via quick restarts at built-in checkpoints.

Essentially, it's like playing the ancestor of Return of the Obra Dinn but with a time loop mechanic attached. The objective remains simple (travel back to four minutes before death to avert fate), but how to achieve said objective is always completely dictated by your surroundings. As a result, it naturally iterates upon its basic structure to create more unconventional scenarios: soon you're not just manipulating objects for traversal and foiling assassins, you're also solving locked room mysteries, or traveling to different environments to save victims from elsewhere, or diving into deaths within deaths to avert multiple fates at a time. Through all of this, Ghost Trick understands one of the key strengths of video games: creating virtual playgrounds of experimentation unsaddled by the limitations of time to reward players through the joy of discovery. The player is constantly surprised time and time again not only from unexpected object interactions, but also from how the narrative weaves in and out of death sequences to create suspenseful moments. It's a minor miracle in itself that the story never jumps the shark: the gameplay mechanics remain firmly consistent alongside its lore, and every plot thread is neatly wrapped up by the end of the game after a series of subtly foreshadowed twists. Combine this marrying of storytelling and gameplay with expressive animations, a colorful and very personable cast, an understated yet powerful soundtrack, and a great mix of humor and emotional moments, and you get what is perhaps the most cohesive title in the DS library.

It's rather poetic that a game which looked simple on the outside provided such an intricate exercise for Shu Takumi to prove that he was no one-trick pony. I'm grateful that Ghost Trick has finally been ported to modern systems for a whole new audience to lose their minds over this, for it's a masterpiece that everyone owes to themselves to check out. At the end of the day, nothing feels quite as cathartic as miraculously changing destiny in the face of inevitable death.

For all the survival horror that I've dabbled with over the past few years, this is the title that made me the most cognizant of the "survival" aspect. It’s this elaborate balancing act of juggling every limited resource at your disposal: ammo for bosses and enemies, kerosene to burn necessary corpses after downing zombies to secure routes, health items as fail safes, ink ribbons to save when deemed necessary, and most importantly, inventory space to minimize backtracking with the bare minimum (knowing what you’re likely to use up as you progress so you have enough room to forage). What’s key to all of this is that it’s often worthwhile not downing zombies at all to not only conserve ammo, but also prevent the possibility of a more dangerous Crimson Head when kerosene is not only limited but requires further planning for refueling and additional inventory slots (lighter + flask). It’s punishing, but in the best way possible; damage and death become instruments of observation to properly plan out backtracking and understanding exactly what goes where. Perhaps my favorite example of this in action was abusing the various doors in a room connecting the shed corridor with a safe room; by quickly going in and out of the entrances, I could not only reset a Hunter’s awareness and spawn, but also place myself in a position where I could immediately run at the Hunter to proc an attack and slip past every time. It certainly helps, regardless, that there’s plenty of leeway for careful experimentation, thanks to all of the scattered health items about the mansion (granted, often requiring careful planning to optimize grounded herbs in rooms and keeping enough inventory space open for trips). It’s also fairly firm at setting its boundaries by telegraphing enemy placement far in advance with rattling doors/windows to signify enemy shifts, background moaning when a zombie is present in the room, and even environmental noises like crunching fallen glass to make up for the lack of vision with fixed camera angles.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the horror has been neglected. If anything, I found this game far more unsettling beyond sudden surprises. It’s not so much the fear of the unexpected, but rather, the lingering fear of waiting for the other shoe to drop while you’re expecting the unexpected. They're scripted events, sure, but they're well disguised thanks to every room often acting as its own isolated microcosm without the presence of the protagonist (not to mention that it's pretty easy to get caught up in the middle of things and forget about each individual room, which makes it all the more viscerally shocking) and there's still a feeling of player control with careful planning and routing. This fits perfectly alongside its core philosophy of risk versus reward, the existential dread of having to backtrack through several zombie infested corridors when you realize you forgot an inventory key and having to constantly and deliberately throw yourself into tight situations just to save another trip across the map. It’s what makes this such an ideal speedrunning game: not necessarily because of satisfying movement or combat, but because Resident Evil is really a game about time management. Every second wasted tromping through another passageway is time that could contribute to a zombie reviving as a Crimson Head or another second spent replaying if you’re not willing to use that extra ink ribbon. The primal fear arising from guaranteed safety as a fleeting resource lends perfectly to the need for optimization; in that sense, pressuring players into constantly checking the map to avoid confrontations and getting lost goes hand in hand with spending as little time as possible, for nothing is more terrifying than having to rewind the simulations in your head for another go.

I can’t help but feel that every detail of this game was thought down to the bone, even the original tank control scheme. That’s right, I’m actually defending tank controls for once in my life… how the turns have tabled. Dodging enemies can seem tougher, but most are conveniently placed near corners and more open areas to give you the room necessary to dodge with a backstep/quick burst to the side if you’re willing to wait and bait committal attacks. More importantly, using tank controls lets you maintain your direction and momentum while running through different camera angles of a room. With alternate controls, you most likely have to hold down the joystick to maintain velocity and upon a new camera angle, will have to quickly retap to keep the intended direction with each new angle. This becomes paramount in tighter chase sequences, where even slight moments of stagnation can lead to damage/death, as well as one timed puzzle where I had to press a button and then quickly run through several fixed angles to get into position to push a statue. In addition, I found it rather difficult to reliably walk (as opposed to running full-time) with alternate controls over tank controls, which can absolutely backfire during an end-game sequence where running for a prolonged period can trigger an explosion during nitro delivery. Therefore, the circumstances created by the environment not only are doable with tank controls, but in fact necessitate the usage of such controls.

Everything just comes together as this tightly designed package. Puzzles have fairly evident tells and can be figured out with careful observation of the surroundings while facilitating the inventory scramble that plays so heavily to the game’s survival elements. The lore never feels overbearing or excessive, and does a great job weaving in hints for crafting approaches and figuring out exactly what has to be accomplished. There’s never an explicit timer on screen outside of the final ending segment, yet the game is great at creating circumstances where you’re forced to make decisions on the fly from environmental stressors and considering the mansion not just on a per room basis, but as a sum of its parts. I genuinely don’t think I have any gripes; it was more than happy to beat me down, but understanding its parameters to scale up against its challenges was an incredibly fulfilling experience. I’d damn well say that REmake is the most focused and cohesive survival horror experience I’ve ever played. Not just a perfect remake, but perhaps a practically perfect game.

Well fuck. I'm not surprised that I liked Venba, but I am surprised I liked it this much.

It does feel a bit strange that it took this long for me to find a narrative-based cooking game; most of the cooking video games I've seen are either arcade-scoring style minigame collections (your Cooking Mamas), restaurant management titles like Cook, Serve, Delicious!, or sandboxes that felt so simple and structureless that they basically turned into meme simulators for me past the five minute mark. Conversely, Venba more closely resembles what I expect of my idealized cooking game: it emphasizes the puzzle-like qualities of cooking via mastering techniques at the right time (something that no other game I'm aware of has really capitalized upon) while also using cooking as a narrative vessel to impart past memories of learning/executing recipes and thoroughly exploring culture via the medium of the culinary arts. Granted, Venba's puzzles are easy enough to navigate but still aren't free, and that does wonders in aiding its lean towards storytelling: without spoiling too much, entire sections of recipes are often missing, and thus part of the fun is filling out the gaps as the player to "correct" the dishes. You won't get penalized unlike a restaurant sim though, and that's the fun of cooking! Sometimes, you just want to experiment a little and try out new techniques, and if you mess up, that's just kitchen learning in a nutshell.

What I wasn't expecting though, was just how deeply I resonated with the narrative. My immediate family and I are immigrants, and quite frankly, I've inquired a little here and there about what they've sacrificed to move to the US, but I clearly haven't asked enough. While I've never genuinely felt ashamed of my own culture, I've absolutely felt the pressure to "fit in" and in many cases, felt a bit of the old embarrassment rise up again from playing this game due to how disconnected I've often felt from my old home city versus having now lived in the states for a while. English isn't my first language, but it may as well have been now given my difficulties writing and sometimes speaking my old language, and losing my grasp of all these things that were once more familiar to me has always been a sore point in my life. This game is a reminder to me that even if I may have grown up in an entirely different world than my parents, they're still my family at the end of the day regardless of cultural differences and it's still my past; I might have had years slip by where I chose to remain intentionally apathetic to parts of my family's heritage, but that doesn't mean that I can't start catching up now to try and make up for lost ground.

The game is only about an hour long with just six recipes included (and a couple near the end are a bit too guided), but I'm willing to overlook its brevity because this experience is going to sit with me for a while: it almost feels like it was written for me at times. Definitely one of the best surprises to come out this year. Thank you for the meal, Venba. Think I'm gonna go call my parents now and tell them how much I've missed them.

More than anything, the last couple of months have been about learning to love video games again. As such, I’ve been revisiting some of my old ramblings, particularly that of the obstacle course 2D platformer. While I think the original Donkey Kong Country is a prime example of what I’m looking for, there’s always room for improvement, even if I don’t necessarily know what that improvement would look like. I think I might have finally found what I’ve been looking for though; call me basic or nostalgic, but Rayman Legends might just be the most polished and realized momentum-based crash course 2D platformer I've ever played, with easy to pick up but difficult to master character control potential and some of the most vibrant and engaging obstacle escalation in any platformer to date.

Rayman’s toolkit of a standard attack and jump with an extended hover while holding jump seems pretty simple at first, but there’s plenty to master too. Rayman’s dash attack gives an instant burst of speed, and jumping during the spin allows you to preserve horizontal momentum. Learning to minimize these moments of stagnation with break boosting and chaining well-timed spins and jumps with roll-jumping, air-kick cancelling to maintain aerial momentum, and ground-pounds to create hit boxes both above and below you while quickly diving allows for extremely tight platforming, alongside Rayman’s jump control (access to a short hop versus a full jump depending on how quickly jump is tapped) and standard chained attacks. Enemy placement lends well to this need for optimized movement too, since you’ll constantly need to balance throwing out hitboxes to knock out foes/barriers or jumping on enemy heads while finding the right times to maintain speed. The game even handles verticality well, thanks to a simple wall-running mechanic (that doesn’t even require you to build up momentum prior) with quick wall flip jumps as well as standard wall jumping outside of wall runs. Simply put, there is a lot of potential for movement optimization in this game, and it feels absolutely exhilarating pulling it off.

As for the levels themselves, take the design philosophy of the original Donkey Kong Country and turn it up to 11, and you’ve basically got one of the best modern translations of the formula in Rayman Legends while still managing to bring plenty of its own ideas to the table. There’s tons of moving parts and lurking dangers abound in the dreamy levels of the game to force Rayman and pals into action; vines, trampolines, water jets, wind currents, ziplines, swarms of bugs and flaming walls, you name it and they’ve got it. It’s a classic case of slowly introducing new concepts in the form of new movement tech, hazards, and set pieces while slowly interchanging the new with the old and ramping up the danger and tightening the execution until finally, you get to run your victory lap. The difference here between Donkey Kong Country and Rayman Legends is that Rayman Legends extends the obstacle course escalation to an entire world rather than just a single level, allowing the developers to really push their theming and various ideas to their fullest extent while providing more than enough time for players to adapt to the learning curve.

Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit provides the perfect example of this design philosophy in action, citing the fourth world of the game, 20,000 Lums Under the Sea. Let’s start with the core principle of the world; stealth mechanics in the form of the sentry beams that zap Rayman if he lingers too long in the searchlights. These forced stealth sections are first combined with underwater swimming levels, which I must admit is a such a damn clever combination; what better way to alleviate the painstaking nature of the slower swimming sections and the deliberate and calculated movement of forced stealth sections than to marry the two concepts? That’s just the first level of the world though; the second level is a grounded platforming stage where Rayman has to sneak around sentries with his companion Murphy, using Murphy to press buttons that both create barriers and block sentry searchlights while popping up walls and platforms to create paths forward. Then the third level turns this concept on its head again by starting levels lit-up with electric barriers, and then forcing you to replay the levels backward with the electric barriers replaced with sentry searchlights in stealth mode.

The fourth level, “Infiltration Station,” toys with the ideas of the previously mentioned second level by now replacing the buttons with movable objects; as a result, Rayman must now adapt to Murphy shifting the level by moving cover or even moving the sentries themselves. Then, the fifth level relegates the sentries as the backdrop hazards to a grand ol’ elevator defense, which Rayman must keep track of and avoid while picking off bungee shock gun frogmen straight out of a Mission Impossible movie. Again, it’s important to remember that these levels slowly introduce new level elements aside from the main gimmicks (invincible underwater worms, laser trip detectors, skull-marked naval mines, etc), but ultimately it is the synthesis and variation of the elements (i.e. inserting enemies in sentry-guarded zones, or using the mobile worms and stationary mines as mandatory cover against searchlights) that makes the difficulty so versatile. This all comes together in the sixth level, “There’s Always a Bigger Fish,” where every introduced obstacle in the arsenal is thrown at Rayman as he furiously paddles away from a snapping serpent in a frenzied auto-runner/chase sequence. Finally, after the penultimate level that serves as a boss fight against yet another hostile Frankensteined mechanical beast, you get to reap the rewards in a final musical obstacle course dubbed “Gloo Gloo,” where your platforming and swimming actions in-game are synced to the beats of a whimsical cover of “Woo-Hoo”. It’s such a pleasure mastering these playable music videos and knowing that your survival is the only thing keeping the music at full blast.

As you can probably guess from the musical endnotes of each world, Rayman Legends is absolutely no slouch at atmosphere and presentation. Theming in every world is extremely distinct and yet remains focused to where level elements never really feel out of place or excessively repetitive. You go from navigating these tight, booby trapped castles in Teensies in Trouble to carefully gliding and maneuvering massive beanstalks in Toad Story, to dodging cake eating centipedes and fending off scores of luchadores and mariachi skeletons in Fiesta de los Muertos. Every new world has its own unique focus on gameplay mechanics (swinging axe and ropes courses in Teensies in Trouble, windy, open air plant-infested levels in Toad Story similar to that of the bramble levels in Donkey Kong Country 2, and Murphy quite literally playing with his food to progress past hazards in Fiesta de los Muertos), and the dynamic comic book visuals of the UbiArt framework as well as the extensive orchestral + electronic mixes in the soundtrack really bring it all home. To top it all off, there’s just this joyous and infectious energy embedded in every detail of the game, from the punchy and expressive attacks and sound effects, to the backing “Ooooooh” track that plays every time you stumble upon a secret, to the Teensies themselves cheering and giggling like schoolchildren when you bump into them in the main gallery. I can’t help but grin and chuckle like a madman every time I pick up this game; it’s just dopamine in distilled video game form.

There have been a few complaints here and there that Rayman tends to lean towards the easier side, at least with regards to many of the main story levels. That’s where the invasion and challenge levels come in. The challenge levels are straightforward enough; compete against the world in a daily/weekly generated survival and/or speedrunning contest for glory, and lums/”Awesomeness points” for more cosmetic palette swaps if you want to change up your character model every now and then. More importantly, you’ll get an alert every now and then that goons from previous worlds have come to “invade” the dreams of previous stages, and be invited to partake in a timed invasion stage, where you must rush to the end against a new combination of foes in a different theme. This concept even gets its own twist when after beating the game, Shadow Rayman invasion levels are unlocked, where a dark copy of you follows in close pursuit and both keeps you moving while carefully planning out your route as so you don’t stumble into your duplicate while backtracking. These levels really force you to use every tool at your disposal to optimize your strategy and beat the clock, and it almost becomes that of a puzzle game but with extremely tight execution involved as well.

I love examples, so have another one on me just so I can illustrate how batshit crazy this gets. In the Shadow Rayman invasion variant of “Infiltration Station,” you have to pick off sequential droves of enemies in order to unlock the door to the next room and eventually free your Teensie friends at the end. From the starting position of the second room, you first have to take out the frog goon on the left while then immediately destroying the bones barrier below. Since there’s a Shadow Rayman copy following me, I dash attacked into the goon then immediately wall-jumped and slammed through the barrier, landing on an enemy that spawned directly below me and then bouncing and air kicking the newly spawned enemy to the right on the platform. From there, I hold down the right trigger and jump out to the ring and back on top to the platform previously above me, kicking the buff brawler in the face. Then, I full jump out towards the ring to avoid my shadow and hover for a second so another toad can finish spawning in and land on the ground, allowing me to slam to its side and end its misery. I immediately input a jump upon landing since there’s no enemy to bounce off of this time and air kick the last toad brawler on the platform, land on the platform, and break boost by immediately spin dashing to the left off the platform towards the door once obscured by a vine and make my exit. Here’s a quickly sketched schematic of my “optimized” route that takes about nine seconds when executed well, and if you think this is fast… the world record for the whole four room affair takes less than double the time it took for me to just finish the second room alone. Needless to say, the thrill of improving both my execution and pathing while directly competing against others on the leaderboard is definitely a crucial component that keeps me coming back for more.

If I really had to nitpick, then my only complaint is that some of the Back to Origins content (the forty returning stages from Rayman Origins) feel a bit out of place. While the main platforming stages still feel tightly constructed, with the classic escalation and variation of moving elements and hazards formula for mechanical depth aided by carefully hidden short side corridors for goodies and bonus rooms, there are unfortunately one too many horizontal shoot em up segments (both in the form of full Origins levels and bonus room challenges) thrown into the array that feel like abrupt breaks in the natural flow of things. To be fair, this is at least alleviated by two factors. Firstly, the Back to Origins content is not necessary at all to unlock the main stages of Legends (in fact, you can even just focus on Legends content exclusively and still have enough Teensies to unlock the 8-bit bonus music levels), and are randomly earned from scratching Lucky Tickets that come as their own reward for collecting enough Lums in main stages; thus, I always saw the Origins levels more as bonus content if anything. Secondly, even within the shmup segments themselves, there’s a fair bit of variety thanks to the wrinkles thrown in (namely through the ability to suck certain enemies/obstacles and shoot them back out to deal more damage, as well as the reflective surfaces that let you bounce shots off and levers/switches thrown into stages that present a less “harmful” but just as engaging obstacle to contend with) as well as the expressive theming that the game’s known for to mitigate any staleness. Nevertheless, even if I think this is a minor gripe considering that the final product is definitely more than the sum of its parts, I do acknowledge that the bonus content would have felt even more gratifying if they had cut the number of shmup sections in half and replaced them with the engaging platforming that Rayman Origins & Legends exemplify.

One last disclaimer for the road: a couple of years ago, the servers for Rayman Legends on PC were shut down, effectively closing leaderboards and barring players from accessing any challenge levels on PC copies. If global kudos and constantly generated online challenges are a defining draw for you, then you may want to consider picking up a console copy of Rayman Legends instead, where the servers are still up. That said, PC players can still mod the game offline to create their own challenges, and I have heard that some Rayman community discords have been running custom challenges themselves in spirit of the old system (though I haven’t been able to confirm), so perhaps not all hope is lost.

I suppose they don’t call it Rayman Legends for nothing; even while considering some minor design decisions that could have been improved, the overall game is one of the most cohesive and mechanically deep 2D platformers I’ve experienced to date that never fails to put a smile on my face. This really is one of the most replayable and fundamentally fulfilling platformers that I’ve ever played, and it absolutely deserves to be included in the conversation as one of the greatest 2D platformers of all time. It is a shame that as rich as the series has been (at least, in the two Rayman games I’ve played to date), that Rayman himself has seemingly fallen to the wayside while his creator, Michel Ancel, has been rather busy with the development hell of Beyond Good & Evil 2, until he left the project and Ubisoft altogether two years ago. Ubisoft’s been in a bit of an unsurprising rough patch since, having cancelled three unannounced games and “facing major challenges” in the form of underselling titles, so I’ll just say what’s on everyone’s mind: bring back Rayman, Ubisoft. It’s been eight years since Legends, and the boy deserves so much more. Don’t let these greats go out like this; we may still have the classics, but future generations ought to know that once upon a time, there was once (and perhaps still is) a platforming legend that reached the heights of Mario, Donkey Kong, and so many others while always remaining true to itself.

My first thought was that Bomb Rush Cyberfunk was just going to be a straight spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio Future (which would have been a letdown considering my three weeks of original Jet Set Radio prep), but I'm pleasantly surprised by the blend of mechanics presented! In reality, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk takes the overall structure and aesthetic from Future while borrowing more heavily from original Jet Set Radio's tight level design and intricate scoring mechanics, and dare I say, actually improves upon certain aspects. It does have a few underdeveloped features as a result of its experimentation, but overall, not a bad first attempt by Team Reptile!

One issue that apparently escaped my notice the first time around (I replayed Future recently just to confirm this) was that Future's extremely linear and stretched-out levels resulted in tons of backtracking upon missing objectives/falling off the stage, and led to fairly rigid approaches that really tried my patience upon additional loops. This is fortunately not the case with Bomb Rush Cyberfunk: levels are generally a lot more open with many more shortcuts and are spaced apart carefully to where traversal feels much more free-form. It more closely resembles original Jet Set Radio, especially when you consider how its momentum mechanics complement this design. Future made the speed fairly easy to obtain: jump onto a rail regardless of your momentum, then keep mashing trick to accelerate and never slow down. On the other hand, original Jet Set Radio became well-known for how slow your character would move about unless you actively utilized rails and grindable walls to speed up, and Bomb Rush Cyberfunk takes a modern twist: you need to maintain momentum by either rail grinding and leaning into corners for speed boosts, or by using grounded manuals combined with boost (refreshed from performing tricks) to retain speed.

The momentum mechanics go hand-in-hand with the game's combo system. After thoroughly exploring levels to spray graffiti spots for "rep" and completing subsequent score and movement-tech challenges from opposing crew members, your crew must finally confront opposing crews in a crew battle, outscoring them with trick combos in their own territory. The scoring and trick system improvises upon both original Jet Set Radio and Future: in both games, the safest way to score trick points was abusing infinite grind loops and repeating the same tricks/movement over and over. However, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk turns this on its head: you don't get tons of points for doing the same tricks ad-nauseam (since trick value decreases and eventually levels off when used more and more). Instead, the main key to getting points is increasing the multiplier by utilizing unique features of the stage: that is, leaning into tight corners on grindable rails, wall-riding billboards, and going up half-pipe ramps (which are improved over the original game since you can manual up ramps and then air boost off into manuals/rail and wall-grinds, so they can function as part of a combo). The key word is "unique," since utilizing the same set-piece in a held combo will not give additional multipliers, and the same goes for graffiti spots that can now also be resprayed as one-time trick bonuses during continuous combos. As a result, the trick and multiplier staling incentivizes players to fully explore and utilize every set-piece present upon the open stages to create massive combos, made easier thanks to the mid-air dash (which also lets you alter airborne momentum once) and the manual. The only downside here is that the game's circumstances never become difficult enough to necessitate this trick optimization; the story crew battles are pretty easy and I was leapfrogging them using the above strategy (i.e. while other crews were floundering around several hundred thousand, I was well beyond a couple million in score), so unless players are trying to crack the tougher post-game score barriers for optional characters/achievements, they may never need to lean on these strategies at all.

The lack of difficulty serves as a microcosm of this game's unfortunate trend: Bomb Rush Cyberfunk certainly innovates upon many features from the Jet Set Radio games, but I find a few to be undercooked or lacking in execution. The combat's one example: it's not a bad idea in theory (using tricks to both deal damage and maintain score/momentum) and in fact has been proposed before, but its implementation leaves something to be desired. Attacking enemies feels like it has little impact because of the muffled sound-effects, akin to slapping a wet sock on a table. Also, most enemies can be defeated with a single grounded attack into an immediate "corkscrew" jump and then spray-painted in the air. While this graffiti coup de grâce never gets old, it does feel quite difficult in practice comboing in and out of this linearizing technique (since you need to be standing and off your skates to execute, breaking any combo potential), so combat never really flows and the mandatory combat sections in-story feel somewhat superfluous.

Adjacent to this is the heat system, a spin on original Jet Set Radio's enemy escalation during story stages. As your character goes about spraying graffiti, police forces begin to spawn in tougher waves: for example, wave one consists of simple grounded officers with batons and pistols, wave two activates turrets that home-in on the player with chains and slow their movement, and wave three brings in armored forces that can block attacks. I found most of these enemies to be mere nuisances: you can easily skate around and dodge most attacks (except for the turrets, which can be easily disabled with a single attack + spray), and since enemies can't be easily comboed for points and will respawn continuously upon defeat anyways, it's best to just ignore them as is. Again, this is fairly similar to original Jet Set Radio's strategy of outmanuevering enemies since foes there were active time sinks, so this doesn't bother me greatly. Unfortunately, this creates friction with Bomb Rush Cyberfunk's exploration, and not just in the sense that enemies will impede progress. The game requires you to swap between the three different types of movestyle for their different abilities: skateboards can ride on extendable fire hydrants to extend them vertically and reach heights, inline skates can skid on glass to shatter specific ceilings, and bikes can open special garage doors. The only way to switch between characters/movestyles is to go to checkerboard tiles and dance, but the game prohibits switching when there's "too much heat." Thus, you have to de-escalate the heat gauge by entering orange porta-potties (unmarked on the map, so hopefully you remember their locations!). However, they also lock up after a single use, so players have to either outright leave the stages or find a different porta-potty elsewhere to reopen old porta-potties for enemy despawning. I think this could have easily been improved if the heat gauge slowly decreased over time from successful enemy evasion.

Even with my criticisms, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk was definitely worth the three year wait. The story isn't anything mindblowing, but it's got some nice twists that are conveyed via these surreal platforming sequences that are a cross between the time rifts from A Hat in Time and a Psychonauts fever dream. I'm pleasantly surprised by a good chunk of the soundtrack too: Hideki Naganuma's three contributions are the obvious highlights, but other tracks like 2Mello's I Wanna Kno and Sebastian Knight's Feel the Funk more than hold their own weight. It's a good mix of upbeat sampledelia hip-hop and chill ambient tunes, with my only real complaint being the lack of guitar-heavy rock tracks like Magical Girl or Statement of Intent... RIP Guitar Vader. Finally, I more than got my playtime's worth out of 100%ing the game, considering all the hidden areas and collectibles to find and just how much fun I had figuring out new ways to string together ridiculous combos. Despite the game's various areas of improvement, I find Bomb Rush Cyberfunk to be a fantastic fresh take upon a beloved franchise that isn't just a homage to Jet Set Radio, but a love letter to classic Y2K counter-culture and skating games as a whole. If you're not a prior fan of the franchise, this might not be the game to change your mind, but if you are, then I see no reason why you wouldn't find some enjoyment out of it. It's no surprise that fans absolutely ate this up, with excitement for the franchise reaching a new fever pitch. Your move, SEGA. Let's see if you guys still understand the concept of love.

At this point, I feel like I’ve been playing Journey for half of my life. I’ve played through underwater Journey, forest Journey, air Journey, space Journey, cat Journey, and even boring Journey. Yet upon my yearly ascent in the original Journey on New Year’s Day, I find myself just as floored as when I first picked it up years ago, in spite of clone after clone exhausting my goodwill. What exactly then, is present in the original’s realized game design philosophy that every other spiritual successor has found themselves bereft of?

To answer this question, I want you to imagine a world where Journey doesn’t exist. A world where the formula to indie developers meant something more than just mindlessly tilting up on the left joystick to walk towards the next checkpoint while some narrator waxed poetic in the background. Before Journey, before Flower even, the closest ancestor we had was Ico. Fumito Ueda described his game as an execution of “boy meets girl,” and what it boiled down to was a minimalist adventure game with some puzzles cleverly disguised as platforming and timing segments. Occasionally, you also whack a few shadows while protecting and pulling your female companion Yorda through vast and still castle ruins. It wasn’t a perfect game by any means; the combat was frankly tedious, Yorda lacked much of an identity outside of pointing at objects of interest/opening doors/getting kidnapped, and at the end of the day, there really wasn’t much in the way of a balanced and developed relationship when the player was calling all the shots, but it was still the start of something beautiful. It wasn’t mechanically complex or esoteric in any fashion, but it was different. It was different, and it felt dangerous.

This write-up is not intended to be a critique of Ico, nor is it meant to imply that games proceeding Team Ico's philosophy of “design by subtraction” have since been inferior. Rather, I bring up Ico in particular, because there seems to be this general perception that minimalism results in a crippling lack of mechanical depth. That is, many seem to believe that discarding and minimizing a game’s various elements results in a dearth of tangible mechanics or imagery to cling onto, and thus appears to result in an empty and vacuous experience with little to justify further replays or deeper dives. To me though, this line of thought fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of addition by subtraction. It was never about creating mechanically deep systems with limitless possibilities like an immersive sim or a sandbox. Rather, the philosophy aimed to remove excess layers that distracted from the game’s “more realistic feeling of presence”, such as removing optional bosses and landmarks in Shadow of the Colossus or reducing enemy types in Ico to just a single design. In fairness, the goal wasn't just to remove extraneous elements that made something feel overly “gamey,” but also to marry mechanics in a way where the invisible layer of intended design never made itself too apparent (i.e. hiding the user interface in Shadow of the Colossus outside of fights). It was not just addition by subtraction; it was also addition through illusion.

To that end, I firmly believe that Journey is the best Team Ico game that Fumito Ueda never directed. Journey’s design philosophy was not necessarily revolutionary for its time, considering its predecessors in the forms of Flower and Ico, nor was its ultimate goal of reaching a final destination via walking/jumping/flying mechanics particularly exemplary. What was exemplary was its level of care and precision in how it implemented said minimalist design philosophy. Every time I play through Journey, I pick up more subtle details through its fusion of audio-visual presentation and gameplay that seemed so clear and intuitive that I had taken their presence for granted. There are the obvious strengths, like how Journey wordlessly conveys your path forward by keeping the shining peak of the mountain visible at all times while outside, or how it uses consistent visual language through cloth creatures and strips to demarcate safe zones where the player can recharge their scarf. But there’s more beneath the surface; what about the game's sneaky introduction to the sand-sliding mechanic from the introductory dune so it’s no longer unfamiliar during the exhilarating and committal descent, or how there’s a section of the underground that’s filled with these scarf jellyfish tinted in blue allowing you to remain in flight that evokes the feeling of being underwater, foreshadowing the next section as a tower ascension where the player must continually breach the surface to “swim” and escape? Sure, everyone knows about how the bitter cold disempowers the player by slowing their movement and lowering the scarf’s energy gauge, but I usually don’t hear about how strong winds can chip away at the scarf’s capacity itself or how it reduces the volume and area of effect of your shouts, making it far more difficult to restore your energy gauge from the growing frostbite.

There’s also the overlooked audio aspect of Journey. Granted, everyone loves to discuss the soundtrack’s thematics, like how the final chord of Journey’s motif never resolves a single time in any track until the end of Apotheosis or for that matter, how all the instruments are never fully present until that final ascent, when the entire orchestra finally comes together as one only to slowly fall away as the player and the world fade away. Yet, the sound design regarding Journey’s implementation of said soundtrack often goes underappreciated. Again, there are plenty of clear strengths that have been widely discussed, such as the punctuated stillness of the desert dunes providing room for the piddle paddle of the player’s footsteps amongst the vast desert winds and eventually swelling into triumphant bursts of adventure. But again, there are little subtleties that speak to the soundtrack’s interactivity, like how the backing drum during the aforementioned underwater section gives the track the impression of being muted and seamlessly drops this filter once the player breaches the surface, or how the player’s shouts are always in the key of the backing track’s scale, meaning that the introduced notes remain within the game’s tonality. It’s these little things that further round out Journey’s experience; the music is so seamlessly woven in that it takes a discerning ear to pick out every specific detail, in such a way where it feels like the soundtrack is organically supplementing every memorable moment of the game.

Of course, it’s not enough to just handle the basics well, even if there’s a master’s touch present to carefully disguise these additions so silently. As I mentioned before, popular works need compelling hooks to draw in an audience, but they also need an element of danger to keep that audience engaged. In the case of Journey, Thatgamecompany tackles this through their stealth multiplayer. This is where Journey easily outclasses its successors and may in fact, even have one-upped Ico. If Ico’s main limitation was a lack of autonomy for any non-player characters, then Journey circumvents this problem entirely by replacing the AI with real players instead. The loose implementation adds a catch: nothing in the game aside from the final completion screen listing your companion(s)’ name(s) ever hints on this, and not once is the player given instructions or suggestions on how to interact with said players. The only obvious mechanical incentive from cooperating with other players is the ability to recharge one another’s scarves via proximity/shouts, and there’s no consequence to merely abandoning random players or quitting in the middle of a session. It’s what makes this multiplayer so compelling; many times you’ll find other players just wandering about by themselves, despawning, or quickly rushing ahead without care towards your presence. There’s no guarantee that they’ll cooperate… which makes that one instance where they do that much more memorable. In this sense, I think Jenova Chen and his team solved two problems at once: the aforementioned challenge of granting outside elements a degree of realism, and his own personal challenge of creating a minimalist environment where players had no incentives to act in bad faith despite never having any major incentives to cooperate either, resulting in seemingly organic interactions.

Perhaps it is cheating to state that this spontaneous element is what gives Journey a step-up over its peers, but I also can’t deny that this same feature is exactly what lends the game its identity. It’s hard to provide drastically different experiences for focused single player games after all; no matter how much Fumito Ueda may have insisted that he was inspired by emergent gameplay mechanics and player autonomy to allow for more diverse experiences, there remains an upper limit upon how far those experiences can unravel. However, Thatgamecompany’s take upon the “single-player odyssey” alongside the game’s cyclical nature and short runtime means that Journey is a far more replayable experience while remaining every bit as compelling as its competition. Even after multiple trips up the summit, I continue to be amazed by the thoughtfulness shown to me by other players. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fallen down the temple from being blown away by the wind, only for my companion to jump down with me, or how many trips through the blizzard were spent slowly trudging together mashing my shout, just like strangers on a cold winter’s night huddling together for warmth while shouting cries of encouragement to take one more step forward. In essence, Journey didn't need an intricate or elaborate story told with fanciful cutscenes and voice-acting; it simply needed to provide a backbone with no other contradicting elements, allowing players to form their own stories by experiencing the game on their own terms.

Journey isn’t mechanically rich or wildly innovative in terms of its scope, but it doesn’t have to be. Rather, it’s a deceptively simple yet meticulous and thoughtfully different approach upon a respected design philosophy, which aimed to further refine said formula by whittling down any elements that detracted from the game’s constructed sense of reality. Similarly, it doesn't feel the need to present a grandiose narrative, instead stripping away any specific contextual layers as to allow players to create memorable experiences with no conflicting moments in-between. I should be sick of this formula after tackling so many misguided copycats, and I can't deny that I was afraid to label yet another old favorite as propped up by nostalgia. Thankfully, my fears have been assuaged. I keep waiting for the day where I’ll finally be content putting this down forever… but that day has yet to come. I was not the first adventurer to embark upon this pilgrimage, nor will I be the last. Maybe I just need to get over my cynicism and accept that there was never anything to be cynical of to begin with. I’m sure more developers will continue to lazily carbon copy one of my favorites until the end of time, but that doesn’t mean the good times have to end.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Happy new year, and here’s to another journey around the sun.

I’ll confess: I’ve never beaten a single Zelda game in my life. Sure, I grew up a Nintendo kid playing almost nothing but Mario and Pokemon, but for some reason I never really felt enticed to give Nintendo’s most critically acclaimed series a serious shot. I’ve tried out the opening hours of Wind Waker (something that I desperately need to finish one of these days) and have played plenty of scattered hours of Ocarina of Time at a friend’s house, and yet it wasn’t enough considering the series has eluded me until now. So, it felt like a solid challenge to cap off 2023, given my recent run with time loop adventure games… and that poyfuh recommended the game to me over a year ago. It took a while to muster up the commitment, but I finally got there! Feel free to take my readings here with a grain of salt given my lack of nostalgia for Zelda, but hopefully I can bring something different to the table by focusing on what impact it had upon a relative newcomer.

For lack of better words, The Legend of Zelda is an adventure game series. Maybe the adventure game series. Quite a few good friends and users I closely follow have commented about how Zelda is really a mish-mosh of different genres, which in essence forms the adventure game. Innuendo Studios has defined this as “games that tell stories using puzzles,” though this is a very loose definition as both narratives and puzzles take many different forms. Essentially, the genre has become a blanket term that has come to incorporate many different types of games. Zelda, as the platonic encapsulation of adventure games, has as a result, come to include many different types of genre-specific gameplay in one cohesive product. To sum this up, here’s a bit that I’ve jokingly brought up with friends: every game is basically Zelda, because Zelda is basically every game.

What I’m trying to say here, is that Majora’s Mask, much like the rest of Zelda, is not so much about any one single game mechanic so much as the coalescence of them all. No one particular element is going to stand out as exceptional because many games before and after have surpassed them, but the whole is certainly greater than the sum of its parts. Much like how a classic adventure game is a fusion of different game mechanics, Majora’s Mask focuses on the intersection of different narratives and activities to evoke “the adventurer’s spirit.” It’s very easy to be critical of specific mechanics and ideas presented within the game in isolation (and I absolutely will be due to my point of reference), but they nevertheless come together to create a game unlike any other.

I suppose the easiest way to explain the premise of Majora’s Mask is to describe it as a cross between a metroidvania (item/ability gating) and a mystroidvania (knowledge gating). The time loop facilitates both of these aspects: as Link repeats the three-day cycle to gather information regarding Termina’s workings, he also gains new key items (both classic Zelda tools like the Hookshot and masks to wear/transform), learns new songs for his ocarina, and gains access to new areas and allies that can further aid his progress. The pressing issue then, is that Majora’s Mask doesn’t fully lean into the strengths of either genre.

Majora’s Mask feels underwhelming when compared to traditional metroidvanias, because key items feel underutilized. Much of this is due to the lock-and-key nature of the puzzles. Classic Zelda games focused on items with multiple facets via both dealing damage in fights and traversal/exploration: one classic example is the hookshot, which can let Link grapple up towards wooden surfaces/chests while also acting as a ranged weapon capable of pulling items and enemies towards him. However, Majora’s Mask focuses on the collection of masks as the vast majority of key items, and most are used for one exact situation (i.e. Don Gero’s mask lets you talk to frogs) and nothing else. Additionally, the masks aren’t very balanced in terms of utility, as some masks are useless once obtained (i.e. the Troupe Leader’s mask) while some are so conventionally strong that you’ll be constantly relying upon them (i.e. the Bunny Hood increases Link’s running speed and agility, so it’s a godsend for general traversal and boss fights).

On the other hand, Majora’s Mask also feels a little lacking as a mystroidvania, because there’s relatively little observation involved when compared to similar titles. The Bomber’s Notebook is your main tool is your main tool to keep track of everyone’s schedules across the three-day time loop, but it’s a bit limited in scope. There’s only twenty inhabitants recorded with schedules, and of those twenty, at least a fourth of them can be stamped as resolved by simply speaking to them once at the right time with the right item/mask. In fact, there’s only two side-questlines that force Link to commit to strict and specific time limits across the three-day cycle (Kafei and the main Romani Ranch quest). As a result, completing the Bomber’s Notebook is surprisingly straightforward, and usually doesn’t require more than one iteration of the time loop to follow and solve each case, given that Link has the appropriate items on hand when necessary.

That's not to say that the time loop is a net negative in the scope of Majora’s Mask, but rather that in comparison to other time loop games since then, it doesn’t capitalize as much in its execution. For example, there is very little usage of the time loop in regards to its four main dungeons. As Scamsley has pointed out, the presence of a time loop should lend naturally to speedrunning (via both knowledge gating to clear the dungeon faster with skips and ability-gating to use obtained items for shortcuts), but this is more or less made redundant by beating the dungeon’s boss, as the game is content giving you a direct teleport to refight dungeon bosses in subsequent resets instead. Additionally, almost all of the time-sensitive content is located within Clock Town; while it’s quite satisfying figuring out how schedules play out in the main hub, it feels like a squandered opportunity to not include enough specifically timed events elsewhere to fully utilize the three-day cycle. The presence of owl statues throughout the map sort of speaks to this; rather than have the player spend time traversing on foot and potentially stumble upon other time sensitive events, the developers would prefer for players to jump to whatever destinations they had in mind as to avoid wasting time in areas where these time-sensitive quests didn’t exist.

On top of all of this is a general clunkiness that exists between many of the game’s various systems. There’s just enough quality-of-life to where the game feels thoughtful for its time, but also plenty of wasted time here and there that made me wonder if the developers could have gone a little further. The sheer number of key items in the menu is a huge culprit; with only three key item slots accessible at any time (and the ocarina/three transformation masks constantly taking up slots), the player is constantly roaming through the four menu screens to select the appropriate item for each situation, and it’s made worse because most items are used once and then immediately replaced as a stream of inventory puzzles. There’s also a ton of downtime from having to watch the same cutscenes over and over even if you’ve seen them in previous loops, and from being subjected to the same non-skippable Song of Soaring animation every time you teleport to an owl statue. At the very least, you can skip the mask transformations once viewed for the first time. Parsing through the three-day cycle can also be a bit annoying; the Song of Double Time does at least let you skip a full twelve hours ahead to the start of each day/night cycle, but oftentimes the timed events in question begin at midnight or midday, meaning that you’ll have to wait around for a few in-game hours since the Song of Double Time plants you at 6 AM/PM. Finally, I think it’s an interesting idea resetting the player’s rupee and general ammo count (i.e. bombs, arrows, Deku Nuts, etc) with each new loop while allowing the player to farm pre-existing Rupee chests that have been opened in previous cycles. However, while there is a bank that allows the player to store Rupees between loops, there’s no item storage facility to stockpile ammo between loops, meaning that the player will likely spend a few minutes at the start of each loop whacking bushes and enemies for basic resources (or at least eat into the player’s account to buy supplies at shops, if they don’t spend time farming chests for the Rupees instead).

Honestly, this is just the tip of the iceberg when trying to judge Majora’s Mask against today’s standards of what we consider a “good” adventure game. I do have other scattered complaints, such as boss fights being generally underwhelming (I might have legitimately spent more time fighting dungeon mini-bosses than the four main masked bosses themselves), certain tedious side-games like the RNG-heavy Dampé grave digging or the Goron race with rubber-banding AI, a few overused mini-bosses such as having to fight Wizzrobe six different times, and how outside of the Stone Temple, mask abilities are never satisfyingly blended together in puzzles/quests. The cherry on top of all this is the presence of the Stone Mask, which I’d say is a bit too good since it lets you completely ignore most dungeon enemies. That in itself made me question the quality of that one forced stealth section in Great Bay; if the optimal solution is to wear a mask which lets you outright ignore the entire system, then should it even exist? Even from the perspective of someone who’s never cleared a Zelda game before, I find myself nodding in agreement when others claim that Majora’s Mask shows its age a bit more than Ocarina of Time.

But that’s not really why we play Zelda games, right? Despite the clunkiness of some mechanics and the many areas of potential improvement, many of us are willing to sit through and accept these flaws because the general experience is the selling point. The obvious argument to be made is that while plenty of MM’s mechanics feel undercooked, the actual mechanism of gameplay is constantly shifting about to suit the specific context. In a sense, Majora’s Mask can be viewed as an antecedent to the modern possession game: the basic control scheme remains the same regardless of the mask worn, but the functionality of the basic control scheme differs. This allows the game to stick to a grounded and consistent formula even though Link’s toolkit is constantly evolving on the fly, and while there are occasional moments of jank from certain side-games, most are over in a flash and still contribute positively towards the final goal of gaining enough knowledge and utility to prevent the impending crisis.

Essentially, many of the previously mentioned shortcomings end up inverting in on themselves. While Majora’s Mask has plenty of rough edges due to its rushed development and heavy re-use of assets, it’s these rough edges that lend so much towards its personality. I love how absolutely absurd and deranged the writing becomes, and the adventure game structure lets Majora’s Mask take complete advantage of the situation. One minute you’re tracking down a circus performer so he can spill his life story about joining an animal troupe since humans are also animals, then the next minute you’re fending off these zombie lantern alien ghosts with searchlight eyes so they don’t kidnap your new friend and her cows before the sun rises. The seeming lack of focus with the constant barrage of minigames and side-quests keeps the player constantly guessing what the next twist of events will bring, and the game is more than happy to ask rather than answer questions.

The backing time loop connecting all of these events together is really what drives the message home. Even though it’s absolutely tedious having to watch the same cutscenes over and over again, nothing illustrates the plight of Termina more starkly than forcing players to endlessly relive the day’s events and realizing that they are the only chance this world stands at reaching a new timeline. The ending credits bring such a gratifying emotional rush because the game deliberately withholds any semblance of permanent catharsis until you finally break through. You can’t help everyone in a single time loop, and they will never be free of their troubles until the moon stops falling. Until then, they’ll be hopelessly repeating the same tasks three days at a time, waiting for the dawn of a new day that will never come.

At the end of the day, I could keep finding things to nitpick about Majora’s Mask, but I also can’t imagine the game without these shortcomings since they form an integral part of the game’s identity. The masks might be glorified gimmicks, but they’re fantastic symbolism that are forever carried with you upon your journey even as time is constantly erased, and ultimately strengthen the adventure game aspect by assigning you new tasks to peruse. The time loop might not be fully utilized outside of Clock Town and contain extended gaps of waiting to get to important events, but it’s the forced repetition of the three-day cycle’s events that enforces the gravity of the situation upon the player. Individual characters aside from Skull Kid might not have the fleshed-out backgrounds that I had hoped for, but it’s a non-issue when Majora’s Mask is ultimately the story of Termina itself, formed from the intersecting schedules of all the different characters and elements at play. Separately, I think all of these elements are easily picked apart, but meshed together, they contribute to this pervasive nightmare of abject misery where even in the face of imminent death, fleeting moments of joy and comfort are enough to humanize the fantastical elements of Termina and keep the player moving forward towards a better future.

The story of and surrounding Majora’s Mask fascinates me, especially when learning that director Eiji Aonuma has since expressed regrets regarding its development. I and many others, however, see nothing to be ashamed of with their final product. If anything, Majora’s Mask is classic Nintendo at its core: instead of making a product that was visibly better than its competition, the developers took a chance and sought out to make something that was visibly different. The Wii is often cited as the most prevalent example of this “blue ocean strategy," though I firmly believe that Majora’s Mask was Nintendo’s first notable crack at it. Having to follow-up a game considered by many as the greatest of all time with an even shorter development period was a daunting ask, but as far I’m concerned, they absolutely succeeded. It doesn’t matter that other time loop adventure games have since outclassed their grandfather; there’s simply nothing like Majora’s Mask, and I doubt there ever will be.

To me, Katamari Damacy is the margherita pizza of video games. It's one of the simplest yet most innately fulfilling concepts in the medium: roll up things with your ball to become big to roll up more things. While this description is accurate however, it doesn't do justice towards the game's underlying complexity. Committal tank controls combined with the seemingly strewn about yet carefully placed objects of varying sizes means that Katamari forces players to consider both the micro and macro design which the game effortlessly excels at. The player must weave in and out of clusters of increasingly large objects, building up their sphere while also mapping out the optimal paths (snagging relevant objects while factoring in how their shapes, once collected, will alter the roll) and keeping in mind how larger objects must be avoided at first and later consumed in the growing mass as the world appears to shrinks around you. For this reason, I think it's not just a simple power fantasy, and instead more closely resembles pure obstacle escalation. Katamari Damacy really drills in the sense of player progression from how the world unfolds from sense of scale (which is why it gets away with only three distinct stages) and even seemingly inverts its own concepts with side stages that force you to avoid smaller themed objects just to get your katamari to the perfect size for the ultimate outcome: the reward is made that much more gratifying with just a bit of restraint.

This all works seamlessly because Katamari is the king of player feedback. It can certainly feel frustrating at first, getting tossed around like fireworks by these moving objects that dwarf you, but the game knows exactly how to communicate your inherent progress. As your ball exponentially swells, these moving objects go from sending you flying, to lacking any significant impact upon contact, to eventually spotting the player and running away from the growing catastrophe. There's nothing more viscerally satisfying than coming back to mobile obstacles that were pushing you around and flattening them, hearing their cry as they too become stuck in the jumbled mess of rolling flotsam while the King of the Cosmos quips in the background. Simply put, the concept never outstays its welcome.

Going back to the opening metaphor, it requires much finesse to make all these different concepts sing together with little friction in a video game, this fusion of audio-visual presentation and player input. That said, to successfully disguise its intricate design and depth beneath its far-reaching artistic vision and simple yet realized gameplay mechanics takes a master's touch. Katamari Damacy does not try to explain why it works or how it succeeds, because it simply is, and it just does. Perhaps I've moved onto greater and grander things since that have built off of this, but I have to admit that sometimes, you just can't beat the basics in life. It's always worth going back for a slice or two every now and then, just to remind yourself that this is why video games exist in the first place: because underneath all this talk of focus and cohesion, video games are just goddamn fun.

Also, it's fantastic hangover food for you and your buddies after a long night, when they come calling you for content and suddenly it's 3 AM in a packed Discord call where everyone is wailing "YOU'REEEEE LONNEEELLLY ROLLING STARRRR" as this growing, screaming ball of flailing limbs bounces helplessly about for yet another awry creation. Let the good times roll.

I’m late to the party because it ended up taking me over a month to finish after getting distracted with real life, but I gotta say… if this is how Shinji Mikami chooses to go out, then what a way to go out indeed.

The easiest way for me to describe Hi-Fi Rush is that simply put, it just works. Melding rhythm game and character action game/spectacle fighter mechanics clicked right away for me due to the natural process of acclimating to the classic push and pull of combat; figuring out enemy behavior and deciding how to best exploit that is often linked to cycles after all, so why not pair that with choruses and motifs of classic song structure to turn the whole experience into a musical symphony? The level of detail that Tango Gameworks instills to immerse the player and keep them on beat is admirable; pulsing LED walls, bouncing hedges and trees, synced-up lasers and retractable platforms to keep the player accountable, even Chai’s audible footsteps when romping about or his idle animation of swaying and snapping his fingers to the beat are all there to make sure you never lose track of the flow of the gameplay.

The linkages between the main “chorus” engagements are a bit more of a mixed bag admittingly, not necessarily because they’re “bad” but rather because these sections feel quite simple when compared to the flashy combat. During the lowest points of this level traversal, Chai gets to wander about these mostly deserted linear corridors (sometimes with hidden offshoots for collectibles) and occasionally wack a couple of crates for health or gears. There’s also a good chunk of platforming involved, but it’s definitely a bit awkward at first and never quite fluid. Chai doesn’t have a lot of standard horizontal momentum but can very quickly double jump, so classic platforming feels a little more precarious than it needs to be and often requires the quick forward dash to snag that extra distance. The result is an interesting conundrum, in that it’s super easy to undershoot without the dash but also surprisingly easy to overshoot while using the dash, never quite hitting that sweet spot.

Fortunately, the difficulty does scale up as you progress further into the story, and it’s much more enjoyable once the designers get to let loose by inserting more and more specialized elements. Shoot a barrier here, smash a wall over there, grapple through a series of skyhooks or chain rocket jumps to the beat to gain height, and so on, so forth. This is all is more or less a series of scripted action sequences that could just be thought of as a more complex 3D version of Bit Trip Runner, so while I’m clearly nitpicking, I do feel like these sections could be spiced up by scattering in some overworld enemies as obstacles that could also serve as anchor points to quickly grapple towards for skilled players to retain momentum. Regardless, the best of these segments will keep you moving forward and actively tapping your foot to the beat like a playable music video, and who’s really going to complain when you get to zipline and dodge hanging containers to Inazawa Chainsaw?

If there’s any real complaints that I have, it’s that Hi-Fi Rush's combat almost feels a bit too straightforward. There are two main components to this, and I’ll be deferring to a few other reviews I’ve read because I am more or less a noob at character action games (though I did still clear story mode on Hard difficulty despite this being the first character action game that I have ever beat, whatever that might be worth) and I think their perspectives added a lot to what I think could be touched upon in future works.

Firstly, Hi-Fi Rush has a few too many fail-safes in my opinion. The easiest way to explain this one is that positioning is unfortunately not very important in the grand scheme of combat. I’m going to agree with GoufyGoggs here to some degree: because enemy attacks are tied to the beat, and parrying actually cancels any of Chai’s attacks regardless of animation length or exact timing during the animation length, it’s fairly doable for players to auto-pilot by mashing attacks to wail on enemies (since the game doesn’t really punish you for attacking off beat as is) and correctly parry in time according to the given audio/visual cues as hinted by the background tracks to avoid taking damage at all. If this isn’t up your avenue though, it’s also pretty easy to cheese combat. Since enemy attacks lock-on and are telegraphed with quite a generous window, it’s pretty simple to continually dodge attacks by mashing the fast and high double jump or dashing to the beat in a circle around enemies, and then spamming your buddies’ assists to soften up opponents/tear through their super armor gauge because as CheesyChip has brought up, there’s not much of a cooldown, even without using the relevant support cooldown chips. It then becomes pretty trivial to lock onto enemies to go for the kill, by using the quick Magnet Grab to close distance as long as Chai’s looking in the proper direction, or if they’re close enough, abusing the generous attack magnetism (as pointed out by ProudLittleSeal here) to segue into a combo. I think these gaps could have been somewhat closed up if your attacks were more committal and couldn’t instantly be cancelled by parry (at least making the first few frames of the animation non-cancellable), if more enemy attacks were homing/adjustable so you couldn’t dodge everything by just mashing jump and dash, and if the support character cooldown was lengthened just a tad. To sum this up, Hi-Fi Rush’s combat is very honest about what it is and what to expect, which is why streamlining the combat to this degree makes it that much more basic when you’re willing to actively break and exploit the systems.

Secondly, while Hi-Fi Rush certainly provides a lot of room for creativity regarding combo potential, I’m not sure if the circumstances necessitate experimentation or for that matter, really encourage it. There are a lot of purchasable flashy standard combos that can be quite helpful with all different types of range and animations, but you don’t really need most of these combos when the grapple and dash will help you close distances and chain most combos as is and your standard bread and butter combos will get you through anyways if you’re not actively chasing high scores; even Rhythm Master difficulty of dropping below a C with the rhythm gauge shouldn’t be an issue as long as you’re landing all your hits and parrying/dodging most attacks. As pointed out by CheesyChip, these purchases are often pretty pricey and those gears can instead be used to purchase permanent upgrades like increased life gauge capacity, a health tank to revive Chai if he runs out of health, or Reverb Gauge increases to allow for stronger Special Attacks (which also will rack up a pretty penny). The actual levels will give you just enough gears for the necessities or to swap/try out a few attacks, and you can sell unused attacks if you need money in a pinch, though optimal level scrounging usually won’t provide enough to tackle both causes at once and you can’t grind levels with replays during the first run of story mode. That said, this concern is at least alleviated if you clear challenges on the Rewards board for gears (and this was in fact my main income during the latter half of the game), though it’s rather annoying that you can’t check up on your task progress in-between levels without exiting to the main menu and loading back into the hideout before returning to checkpoints. I also freely admit that my money was most likely not well spent on upgrading the chips and buying additional chip slots, which I found rather underwhelming since most of the chip upgrades were simple 10%/20%/30% stat upgrades (depending on the level the chip was upgraded to and however many slots it took up) and it was often more fruitful trying out new special attacks or focusing on the other permanent upgrades.

Nevertheless, I found that these areas of improvement were ultimately minor blemishes during my overall time spent; while I’ve spent a good chunk of time nitpicking systems and sections that could be even better with some touchups here and there, the core concepts and general execution absolutely kept me hooked. Aside from a strange glitch where my dodges failed to register during specific defense sequences of the final boss (forcing me to have to complete the ending segment of the final boss on Normal mode, where the glitch was inexplicably missing), Hi-Fi Rush was a thrill ride that I didn’t want to get off. The vibrant cel-shaded visuals, the clean and easy to grasp combat alongside rocking tunes that are more than happy to reward you for paying attention to the underlying rhythm, and a colorful and focused cast of characters with plenty of dad jokes, jovial banter, and layers upon layers of development and personality… I could go on and on about why this was such a memorable experience for me. Kudos to Tango for having the balls to shadow drop the game within the first month of the year, because as I see it, most major releases of 2023 will have trouble matching up to this.

Hi-Fi Rush is a game that feels so alive, and it feels damn good to have been alive taking in this breath of fresh air. As usual, I look forward to Shinji Mikami’s future endeavors if this is the level of creativity and cohesion that can be expected from him simply producing. And even if there is no next time, here’s hoping that Hi-Fi Rush will encourage many more greats to come with its unabashed charm and unapologetic sincerity.

How do you follow up the likes of that which has never been seen before? Could you even hope to surpass the video game equivalent of lightning in a bottle? Keita Takahashi didn’t think so, but Namco saw the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and wanted more. So, he compromised. He agreed to direct the sequel after learning that Namco was willing to forge ahead, with or without him, and in exchange, the sequel became a metaphor for his mixed feelings regarding sequelitis and his eventual alienation from videogames as a whole. The result is We Love Katamari, a successor that tackled the subject of pandering to those around you while attempting to maintain the spirit of the original. The original Katamari Damacy was interpreted by many as an object of childlike wonder, railing against any form of cynicism while explaining absolutely nothing to preserve that joy. We Love Katamari on the other hand, turns the irreverence up to 11… and honestly, I’m all for it. As the Prince and the King of the Cosmos attempt to fulfill every fan’s request while repopulating the sky, they’re confronted with increasingly absurd situations. There’s a baby that outright tells you that he’s glad he was born to see the Prince of the Cosmos fulfill his lifelong dreams. Animals send requests a few times too, with some white dog telling you to roll around a zoo so he can attend a concert with more friends. To top this all off, the astronaut from the first game begs you to save the Earth from impending doom by rolling up countries of the world to stop an asteroid. The requests are all over the place and just as wild, if not wilder, than Katamari Damacy, and it’s fascinating how simultaneously off-the-rails the plot and worldbuilding have become even as the game remains one of Takahashi’s most intimate works, conveying his complicated feelings in this microcosm of cathartic destruction.

In terms of gameplay, We Love Katamari takes many of the logical steps in terms of progressing its simple yet realized formula. While the original game was content setting up its structure and letting players romp about in an expanding playground, We Love Katamari actively tests its limits of experimentation, challenging perceptions of what could be achieved with its level design while making players sweat with more complex goals and stricter time limits. Now granted, I concede that not everything in the sequel impresses me. The firefly level has a solid concept (roll up fireflies in a camping ground so a student has more light to study with) but doesn’t achieve much in terms of sense of scale or underlying complexity besides “roll up things quickly to get bright,” I could have done without three different variations of the Saturn levels where you just have to decide when you’re of the proper size, and I personally am not a huge fan of the underwater level where you have to handle floatier physics while dodging fishing hooks that put you out of commission for a bit. That said, the expansions that I did enjoy, I ended up really enjoying. There’s another campgrounds level where you control a burning Katamari and must carefully consider pathing on the fly to make sure that you never run out of fuel while avoiding any water sources that would snuff you out. Conversely, there’s another zoo level that sets a limit not on time, but on the things you’re allowed to roll up; as a result, it becomes an interesting exercise of restraint and sight-recognition, figuring out exactly the biggest things you can roll up at any time while outright avoiding anything else. Other favorite levels here include a racetrack where you “race” against a flurry of karts on a looping island road while barreling through anything in your way, and a sumo wrestling level where instead of rolling a Katamari, you roll the awkwardly-shaped sumo wrestler himself, and must prioritize foods as part of training him up to eventually KO his awaiting opponent. While some of the sequel's levels are content just playing with the established formula of “roll up things to get bigger to roll up more things,” the best levels here emphasize Katamari’s arcade and puzzle-like qualities by enforcing familiarization with the intricate object placement while accentuating the need for careful routing to avoid larger obstacles only to consume them whole later.

I must admit that despite my appreciation for what the sequel brings to the table, there’s a part of me that still prefers the original. There’s a sort of cohesion present in the original from repeating the same three levels but in slightly different ways and exploring them with different sizes that I think is missing in the sequel; rather, the sequel feels a bit more disconnected, with all the different fan-requests pulling from all different sides and a lot of the environments showing up for just a couple of stages or so. As a result, despite having more fleshed out execution of its base formula, I still feel as if the sequel could have more thoroughly explored certain levels in order to realize their full potential. In addition, I do find the sequel slightly more grindy than the original: not necessarily just because it’s harder (though I can’t rule out the possibility that this might be a factor), but because one of the final levels can’t be unlocked until you collect all the cousins (more or less just a cosmetic in the original), and multiple cousins are often present in the same level even though you’re only allowed to roll up and unlock one cousin per run. Finally, I must agree with everyone else in that I don’t think the extra Reverie levels from the remaster add much to the core experience, or at the very least didn’t wow me in the same way that many of the more experimental base game levels did. Rolling up clutter in a room as fast as possible and creating a variation of the racetrack level (just with the goal of snagging tires instead of overall size) doesn’t quite hit the same I suppose. Nevertheless, don’t let my personal gripes distract you from the fact that I absolutely recommend this. It's everything that a sequel could hope to be and more, providing a satisfying evolution to the series that stresses its understated design principles while serving as both a love-letter to the franchise and a send-off to Keita Takahashi’s most famous contributions to the medium. At the end of the day, we love Katamari, and while it may not be enough for Takahashi, it’s enough to matter for me.

I spent a lot of time editing this review with Pangburn and discussing the game's various aspects thoroughly with him. Thanks again for all the help!

I’ll get my major gripes out of the way first: many of them are due to potential areas of improvement in Yakuza 0’s combat. I admit that I’m not a huge fan of the Style System, which felt underwhelming to me because it usually results in spreading myself too thin while locking the best abilities until the very late game. Money is a bit harder to come by in the early game (unless you can consistently win against the roaming enemy Mr Shakedown, who can just as easily bankrupt you upon defeat if you aren’t prepared with the adequate combat upgrades), and each combat style is tuned to adapt for specific situations (i.e. Rush Style is agile and allows Kiryu to quickly slip behind single enemies and bog them down with attacks, while Beast Style is often better at handling multiple foes by picking up large objects and swinging them for effective crowd control). However, a lot of the valuable defining traits for specific styles (i.e. Iron Gut on Beast Style to guard against knife/gun attacks, or Quickstep Blow on Rush Style for quick evasion into powerful attacks) cost significantly more than previous steps (2 million yen for Rank 2 abilities to 30 million yen for the above Rank 3 abilities), so I felt incentivized to invest equally into the different styles instead of trying to specialize. As a result, my characters felt somewhat lacking through most of the game’s runtime, since I had to split my investments equally between the different styles to accommodate for different situations (and thus often lacking crucial abilities). Eventually, the three-style system becomes effectively superseded once your protagonists finish their main side-quest lines and unlock a “true” 4th style reminiscent of prior entries in the series that combines traits of the previous styles, which to me seems to only further highlight how insignificant progress within the style system can feel.

Enemy variety is also rather bland in the Yakuza games (most likely due to the beat-em-up structure), which in turn further homogenizes combat. Most enemies are simple grunts around your size that will charge at you with standard close range attacks. Some will try and stagger you with knives and swords, a few have tasers on hand, and near the late game, a couple of enemies will have guns. While tasers and guns can stunlock you and force you to mash to stand back up, you can just pay for the corresponding expensive upgrade in each style to nullify stuns altogether. As such, I ended up fighting every enemy as if they were functionally the same, and once I purchased the necessary unlocks, tearing through them like paper became a simple task. The only time I had to accommodate for a different enemy type occurred during specific story missions, where sometimes larger grunts with superarmor appear that actively require baiting and punishing. Otherwise, most non-boss combat starts to all blend together, and it never quite hits that sweet spot between mindlessly mashing to take out scores of enemies or getting tossed around like a salad by guns and tasers.

There’s also a weapons system involved in all this, but it feels rather extraneous. There’s never any real need for weapons given the functional homogeneity of most of the enemies. Moreover, many of the combat scenes in the game are placed in locations with plenty of breakable loose objects lying astray that often serve that exact purpose as is. Additionally, weapons have a durability counter, and to repair weapons, you either have to use Repair Kits (which are obtained randomly from Dream Machines) or trek to the local Dragon & Tiger. The actual fees involved are a trifle considering how much money you’ll end up earning, but having to waste tons of time farming Repair Kits from Dream Machines to fix your weapon in the middle of combat or spend time outside of combat walking back and forth from the Dragon & Tiger is a pain in the ass. As such, I basically never bothered with weapons in-game, save for the one quest with Simon where you have to purchase and farm weapons & materials/recipes from Dragon and Tiger (and that is a whole different time-consuming RNG endeavor altogether, though again, it never felt crucial due to how little I used weapons).

If there’s one silver lining to all this, it’s that the combat never truly felt like a significant barrier to me due to its simplicity. It becomes pretty straightforward to cheese and simplify combat once you figure out the easiest strategies for each protagonist. Majima’s Breaker style was fantastic at stunlocking enemies due to how many hitboxes got thrown out in each cycle, and later on, Slugger became my go-to because the extended X-X-X-Y-Y cartwheel combo broke every enemy’s stance and was actually positive on hit in every story fight I encountered on Normal difficulty. Meanwhile, Kiryu’s Beast style quickly became my mainstay; picking up large objects and batting away foes was a bit too overpowered most of the time. As mentioned previously, the quick crowd control options, alongside better defensive tools such as superarmor, provided Beast Style with most of the utility necessary to clear the majority of the game’s standard fights. Thus, even if combat was uninteresting most of the time, it was at least over quickly enough to where I could proceed with little stress, especially when utilizing stamina drink stockpiles for powering through damage.

I’ll give Yakuza 0 some credit though, as a few of the boss fights were engaging enough to leave a mark on me. The Kuze fights are a huge highlight here, considering that his first fight resulted in my first game-over, and it was extremely satisfying performing visibly better with each consecutive fight, especially since a few of these fights are no-frills 1v1 fights that forced me to rely upon more of my toolkit. In particular, I found Kuze and other bosses to be far more aggressive and willing to combo me for larger damage margins and chipping away at my health while I was knocked down. Defensively, they were more up to par too, with much more emphasis placed upon quick dodges and guards to nullify my lighter attacks. The final boss fight for Kiryu takes the cake for my favorite boss encounter overall given how the different phases mirror Kiryu’s own abilities, and it put a smile on my face when I realized that they were willing to pull the exact same stunts that I had also been abusing in combat. In particular, I couldn’t stop smirking during the second phase of the final boss, when my opponent began picking up tables and chairs to slam and hurl at me. It’s a very visceral yet humanizing way to top off the game, and I do wish that more of the other fights had enemies that were willing to resort to similar underhanded tactics to highlight just how dirty the crime world can get.

That said, you’re not really here for the mostly inoffensive combat: the real bulk of the game is everything else, more specifically the various interactions between every other system in the game including the different connecting narratives and side/substories. Perhaps that is the true strength behind the franchise: no one system stands out above the others, and as a result it becomes something much more than the sum of its parts. It may sound like a weakness, and it is a major weakness of many games that try to do everything at once, yet Yakuza 0 escapes this pitfall because everything is seamlessly and inexorably linked.

A lot of this is in part due to the centralization of progression systems within the game. Everything is linked to exorbitant amounts of money, which is not only thematically appropriate but also results in all grinding leading to the same collected pool. Money can be earned through fights, certain sidegames, and most importantly, Kiryu’s real estate and Majima’s cabaret club. In turn, money is used to upgrade your characters (and weapons) for fights, pay for entering certain sidegames as well as upgrading necessary materials for better performance, and paying for properties and staff in your respective side gigs. I was afraid at first that the existence of all these different activities would result in a million different systems that I’d have to memorize and optimize for different purposes, but since they all feed back into the same resource, everything you do ultimately results in some form of progress towards the same end goal, resulting in a much more focused experience than what I had first assumed on a surface level.

To expand upon the two main side stories, Kiryu and Majima must essentially fight rival head honchos of each section of Kamurocho/Sotenbori through the collection of landshare/influence. Kiryu can purchase certain properties in each area to later invest and gain dividends, while Majima can partner with properties to increase Club Sunshine’s fanbase and gain more notoriety during cabaret club nights. As the player gains more control over each sector, more of the background behind the opposing head honchos is revealed until inevitable confrontation occurs, usually in the form of a minigame/street fight for Kiryu and a “club battle” for Majima where Club Sunshine must outcompete its opposition while enduring enemy abilities. These side stories feed right into the overall progression system, since they provide a reliable source of income as well as an incentive to engage in outside activities and explore the two hub areas for staff and valuable resources. As mentioned previously, the definitive and more overpowered 4th fighting style unlocked from completion is a great cherry on top of this whole endeavor.

Aiding all of this are the numerous substories scattered throughout the two main hubs. No side quests are marked immediately on the map with markers when you first start new chapters; instead, you have to unlock them by stumbling into the correct section of Kamurocho/Sotenbori or by engaging in certain activities long enough. Once you do unlock these side quests, actually fulfilling them is simple enough, since blue question box markers will appear on the map showing you where to head next to progress. The result is that exploration in the overworld opens up fairly organically; the player is incentivized to wander about naturally without any pressure to eliminate all the lit up checkpoints on the map from the start. Additionally, side quests often are completed in spurts, and players often have to travel outside of a given quest’s area to activate its next section on the map, meaning that they have a choice of whether or not they want to continue seeing the quest through at that very moment or spend time elsewhere and return to that sidequest later. Finally, completing sidequests can lead to unlocking other related side quests as well as gaining aforementioned helpful staff, properties, and useful items (such as an encounter finder, to track down street fights more easily). Yet, there’s no single substory that feels so important in terms of personal or monetary gain that players have to go out of their way to fulfill all necessary conditions for it. By doing this, Yakuza 0 never imposes and merely suggests; players can complete and explore as much as they wish with little negative externalities if they choose not to go all the way.

To add on the above, the actual activities themselves are designed in a way where there’s just enough depth to allow for significant improvement if players choose to dedicate more time to their favorite pastimes, but again, not too much depth to where it takes an eternity and a half to master certain activities. For instance, consider the bowling minigame. It’s quite simple to pick up: you can adjust your ball’s weight, starting position, trajectory, and power, with the obvious caveat that heavier balls are tougher to aim but better at retaining momentum. You don’t necessarily need to keep close track of every option to succeed and best your buddies in three-frame sets, but there are nice little side rewards in the form of completion points (CP) (which can be used at shrines to unlock unnecessary yet helpful little abilities such as longer dashing times and more Nouveau Riche encounters to fight for more cash) for bowling ten strikes. Further plays also increase friendship with the attendant there, which will result in a sidequest that allows you to recruit a chicken as staff for your real estate firm once you bowl a turkey. There’s also a separate side mode called Split Game where you have to more carefully aim your ball across special split pin arrangements that allows you to earn more cash and a potential CP. Again, there’s plenty of optional rewards that are great for upgrading your character and systems if you choose to invest a bit of time here and there, but even then, more grindy minigames are optional to the point where they become unobtrusive; as such, you can switch between a multitude of different activities with little consequence whenever your current focus starts to wear you down.

The story can also be thought of as another of the game’s smaller systems, thanks to how it never feels particularly intrusive. After clearing the first chain of events in Chapter 1 as well as the associated tutorials, the main introductions take a step back and you can begin messing around with the aforementioned sidequests and minigames. The game is very good at telegraphing exactly when the player needs to be committed to the story and when they are free to meander about; at no point does the game ever feel like it is forcing you to put down what you are doing at that exact moment in time to return to the main storyline. At the same time, progressing through the story events is greatly streamlined whenever the player needs to do so. Therefore, despite the main storyline’s linearity, the game manages to retain a visage of non-linearity; the wide variety of activities available at any given time allow you to swap between the story and optional content effortlessly at your heart’s content.

Just as there’s a balance between story progression and player-driven exploration, there’s a certain balance struck in the game’s tone that’s present throughout each narrative thread weaving into one another that exemplifies an undercurrent of sincerity. The central plotline jumps back and forth between Kiryu’s struggles escaping the Dojima family after being framed for murder, and Majima’s struggles serving as a blackmailed affiliate of his old yakuza family while seeking release from his gilded cage. Both are constantly caught in increasingly absurd scenarios by old friends and random strangers alike, and play fantastic straight men juxtaposed to the sticky situations that they must resolve. Alongside this, RGG Studio balances frenzied street brawls between topless yakuza members with dramatic scenes of characters pouring their hearts out. Even the substories carefully walk this tightrope between cheesiness and earnestness: one of my personal favorites has to be Stadium Jumper Strut, where you have to escort a guy whose dream is to walk across Iwao Bridge. He begs for Majima’s assistance, for every time he tries, he is beaten up by thugs because he refuses to take off his stajun jacket that’s riling them up. It’s an absolutely ridiculous premise, yet even I had to admit that sealing the deal with the life lesson of “pursuing dreams regardless of what others think” put a smile on my face. Camp meets candor time and time again, and as a result, Yakuza 0 never feels too sarcastic or too overbearing; it’s a cozy and compelling mix that kept me hooked during every story beat throughout.

There’s so much more I could say regarding Yakuza’s imperfections thanks to its many ambitions. There’s a forced stealth section that feels a bit clumsy since you have to guide and protect an escort at the same time. To do so, you must hide amongst crowds to avoid detection by patrolling foes, and this becomes a bit awkward since enemies can spot you from far away and enter/leaving crowds has a noticeably long animation with a forced delay between entering and leaving, so staying out of these optional fights is much more tricky in practice. Majima’s cabaret management progression feels not quite as well-integrated, since it’s actually possible to keep gaining fans by playing the club minigame over and over without purchasing properties, and the final stretch requires a bit more grinding as preparation to avoid your hostesses losing all their HP from the opposing club’s special ability. Finally, special moves can be taught by mentors through their respective side missions, and while Majima’s mentor missions are fantastic (Fei Hu’s lessons are a thrill, having to adapt against his quick Kali Sticks and Nunchakus), Kiryu’s mentor missions feel a bit squandered and too by-the-books. My favorite mentor missions there would have to be Miss Tatsu’s training, which involves puzzles where you have to destroy crates for money while eliminating mannequins with guns. It’s a bit more clunky than expected, since you often don’t have enough time to react and throw/dodge when picking up boxes to attack these targets, but it’s definitely an interesting thought exercise of what could have been and it helps that it’s accompanied by a track that quite frankly puts the main Beast Style theme to shame.

Yet at the end of the day, I have to wonder how much these nitpicks matter in the overall scheme of things. I came into Yakuza 0 wanting to fight Kuze and experience a change in pace, and I left feeling quite emotionally invested and fulfilled considering how much time I wasted cheering to x3 Shine and flaunting my new disco moves to Let’s Dance I Wanna Take You Home. While I have to admit that I can’t see myself 100%ing the game anytime soon, and I’m not quite ready to dive into the rest of the series lest the experience begins to outstay its welcome, I’m more than content leaving everything as it stands. It’s obviously doing something right if I’ve managed to spend over 70 hours messing around with everything that even mildly interested me without any single aspect feeling too disjointed or particularly irritating. My fears that Yakuza 0’s wide appeal was an indicator of numerous hours of padding and shallow interaction between systems appear to have been unfounded, and needless to say, I can wholeheartedly recommend Yakuza 0 despite the rough patches. I’m looking forward to the inevitable YaKuze spinoff where we get to play as the old man in the profession where men tend to die young.

Ah. That’s more like it.

As the one person I know who likes Donkey Kong Country, Drill Dozer, and that one burrowing escape sequence from Ori and the Will of the Wisps, I knew Pepper Grinder was going to be right up my alley. What impressed me though, was just how precisely the game melded its influences into something that felt simultaneously fresh yet familiar. The level design is classic obstacle escalation (introduce a concept, scale it up, throw in a twist, and then run the player through a final exam into their victory lap) with DKC inspired secrets with skull coin collectibles for unlocking secret levels. Many of the usual formula beats are present as well to force execution tests, from the usual moving parts in the forms of cannons, rope swings, and grappling points, to constantly present sources of danger like the freezing ocean or the temporary dirt patches created from cooling lava. What sets Pepper Grinder apart however, is that the terrain itself is the main obstacle. It feels like such a natural pairing to seamlessly mesh environmental navigation with the course’s very foundation, and the best moments of the game lean into funneling the player through various layers of shifting and isolated terrain while tearing through all that may stand in their way.

That said, I think to really understand the nuances of Pepper Grinder, one has to readily commit to its time attack mode. I could have been sold on the game-feel alone as an amalgam of Donkey Kong Country’s momentum physics and Drill Dozer’s force feedback, but playing under circumstances that force you to squeeze every possible second out of the timer gives the player a better appreciation of its movement mechanics. Pepper is not very fast on foot, nor can she naturally jump very far. Therefore, you’d think that most speed comes from tunneling through terrain, but it’s not quite that either. Rather, the player has to maintain momentum through the interplay of drilling and jumping by exiting terrain via the drill run (boosting right as you’re about to leave a patch of dirt), which commits the player to the projected arc leaving the terrain but with the reward of significantly more speed. The result is some of the weightiest and most satisfying movement I have ever experienced in any platformer. I was constantly figuring out new ways to save seconds by timing by boosts both within terrain and right before exiting terrain (since you can’t just spam boost and using it too early can lock you out from getting the necessary boost jump out of terrain), skipping certain obstacles entirely with well-placed drill runs, and figuring out how to manage my health to bypass unfavorable cycles and damage boost past mines and thorns. Some of those gold time attack medals were tight ordeals, but I absolutely savored every moment of the grind.

Bosses as a whole are a significant improvement from the usual quality of those in Donkey Kong Country. You’re not safe just waiting above ground, and burrowing to dodge attacks forces you to at least dash-dance underground since drilling means you can’t stay in one place. As a result, the player is constantly on the move, and you’re incentivized to do so anyways given that most of the bosses require multiple hits to defeat and aren’t the usual “invincible until they’re done attacking” crop from DKC. The biggest complaint I can levy here is that boss hit/hurtboxes can feel imprecise; I’ve heard that many players have had difficulty figuring out how to correctly drill into the beetle boss’s underbelly, and while I had no issues there, I did die a few times from the skeleton king’s heel hitbox where there was no visible attack in its vicinity. Still, I much prefer these boss fights over many of its peers, and figuring out when and how to best aim drill runs from the ground to speedrun bosses was just as much of a pleasure as speedrunning the courses themselves.

There are a few questionable design choices that could be touched upon here. Firstly, there’s a shop system present where you can purchase optional stickers from a gacha machine as well as temporary health boosts. The former is mostly forgivable given that they don’t impact the gameplay otherwise and can be cleared in about three minutes of purchasing and opening capsules. That said, I feel as if the latter could be removed entirely given that I never felt pressured to purchase insurance for courses and bosses, especially because I was often taking hits anyways to skip past obstacles and because you’re not going to regain the extra health capacity in-level once it’s gone. Secondly, bosses in time-attack mode force you to watch their opening unskippable cutscenes before getting to the action, and this gets extremely irritating when you’re constantly restarting fights to get better times. Finally, Pepper Grinder has a few gimmick areas in the forms of a couple of robot platforming segments, two snowmobile sections where you just hold forward on the control stick, and a couple of run-and-gun levels with little drilling involved. I can look past most of these given that they don’t take up much time and that I enjoyed all the minecart levels from DKC as is, though I do wish that they spaced the gimmicks apart a bit more given that levels 4-3 and 4-4 both have significant run and gun segments sending each course off.

If I did have any lasting complaints, it would be that I just want more of this game. Most players will finish adventure mode in under four hours. That said, even despite a lack of polish here and there, I absolutely adore Pepper Grinder. At this time of writing, I’ve 100%ed the game and even gone back to a few time trials after snagging all the gold medals just to further polish my records. It’s often difficult for me to pin down what makes a game feel good to play, but in this case, I just know. Pepper Grinder feels like an adrenaline rush made just for me, and though its execution barriers and short length will likely make this a tough sell for many, it is undoubtably some of the most fun I have had with a game this year. If you’re curious or enjoy anything that I’ve discussed in this write-up, please give the demo a shot. They don’t make 2D platformers like this anymore, and Pepper Grinder’s existence leaves me wondering why when they absolutely killed it on their first try.

For the longest time, I thought that the prevalent issue weighing down roguelites/likes was excessive RNG. Later on, I slightly adjusted my stance: RNG was okay, but a lack of player control to combat any unexpected changes as a result of RNG was not. In one fell swoop, Mosa Lina has neatly proven both of those issues to be mere symptoms of the root cause: modern roguelites/likes overemphasize the macro over the micro.

This problem I think, stems from the genre's overreliance upon meta-progression and run investment. While these would at first appear to be opposite ends of the spectrum (after all, meta-progression often relies upon you throwing away successive runs to gain some kind of advantage/pass certain checks), they both point to the same core issue of ultimately not respecting the player's time. In the former case, the moment-to-moment gameplay often isn't interesting enough to sustain a run. In the latter, the player either succeeds with the "god-run" and has to chase the high through more grinding all over again, or throws it all away due to mistakes/RNG and feels like absolute shit, lamenting what could have been with their hours spent, just inches away from the finish line.

Mosa Lina doesn't fall victim to this, because it was never about winning in the first place. There's no end to the game: the core concept infinitely loops and you'll never hit the credits roll unless you decide to manually mash through them in the pause menu. There's a scoring system in place, but the descriptions themselves often mock how points are handed out arbitrarily. On top of this, there's no meta-progression whatsoever because practically everything is unlocked and randomized from the start: you've got three randomized toys to play with out of a pool of nine randomly selected for the particular loop out of 21 possible toys, and if nothing works (which the game outright warns you will happen), just reroll until something sticks.

As a result, the game solves two problems at once: the aforementioned issue of filling up a player's time with weak moment-to-moment gameplay, and the classic issue of "lock-and-key" solutions creating linear puzzles that lack replayability. Although the game characterizes itself as "a hostile interpretation of the immersive sim," I find it to be more indifferent if anything. It doesn't guide you towards solutions, it never provides any incentives for finding solutions, and it never even bothers to explain its underlying mechanics aside from listing the control scheme and being forthright with its unpredictability. Yet by doing so, it sets itself up as the perfect player-driven sandbox. The difficulty and learning curve is entirely up to you; sure the types of tools are randomized, but half of the battle is figuring out what to do with the tool combinations given and exploiting the game's floaty gravity and set pieces with your heavy character and tight jump. If you can't succeed, a refresh is just seconds away!

I don't think I've yelled so much at a video game since my high school days of grinding Dota 2 (a very dark period in my life, I'm aware). However, these were not yells of frustration or exasperation in the slightest. No, this was me shouting in excitement every time something batshit crazy happened on screen (read: pretty damn often). Sometimes the game really does ask for the seemingly impossible with huge gaps to cross/jump and absolutely garbage or ill-fitting tools that I can't even say feel balanced at times; I swear the fish have been useless in 80% of their appearances. That's what makes it so damn enthralling though: savoring the thrill of discovery when I learned how to bomb-jump in mid-air by properly timing my placements, or somehow finagling a solution by pushing and juggling around some crazy contraptions made of dead frogs, some wire, and a ladder. The possibilities felt endless, and while I do have some critique for the initially unintuitive aiming (you shoot upwards/downwards at a 75 degree angle from the horizontal and can't fine-tune your trajectory any further), this game really is the full and realized package it claims to be despite (or perhaps as a result of!) its lack of excessive streamlining. With Level Editor updates on the way, I can 100% see myself returning to mess around more in the future. I'm nothing but pleased as punch that a game which wasn't even on my radar has sufficiently blown me away: in a year of flashy major releases and tired conventions, Mosa Lina pulls back the curtain to reveal that the basics are all you need for a good show after all.

The following write-up can be considered both an addendum to my spoiler-heavy thoughts upon last year’s replay of Shadow of the Colossus as well as an expansion of my blurb from Pangburn’s “Sight and Sound” Backloggd-canon project. I can’t give him enough credit for his work and giving me the opportunity to contribute in my own little way.

If someone were to ask me what I’d consider to be the greatest game of all time, Shadow of the Colossus would most likely not be my first answer. I’d probably point you to a few candidates that not only elevated the medium, but were also titles that I’d consider practically perfect with no major blemishes: perhaps something like Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger, or most recently, the original Resident Evil remake. That said, Shadow of the Colossus stands above all of these games in my heart, because despite any gripes, I would argue that practically all of these potential “weaknesses” contribute to the final artistic vision. Somehow, it transcends my definition of a perfect video game, and becomes something much more.

It'd be easy to characterize Shadow of the Colossus as a boss-rush with puzzle elements, but I find that this description misses the point. Trying to classify Shadow of the Colossus as “yet another boss-rush” would be like trying to classify Ico as “yet another puzzle-platformer;” perhaps it would be more accurate to describe both as cases where gameplay, as the vessel for storytelling, happens to be a series of boss fights for Shadow of the Colossus or a series of puzzle-platforming segments for Ico. Fumito Ueda himself claims that “They're not bosses… they’re more like inverted Zelda dungeons.” Labeling the colossi as nothing more than bosses would be doing a disservice to the layers of history that these colossi represent, these storied and often majestic creatures rudely awakened by a complete outsider. Moreover, transforming traversable dungeons into responsive boss encounters breathes life into the experience. You’re not just traversing this static, emotionless backdrop; you’re scaling this moving, living being that knows you’re trying to snuff out its existence, an end to justify the means of cruelty. The colossi serve more than just checkpoints at the end of sequences: they become the sequences, their identities firmly embedded within the few minutes spent observing, climbing, and slaying them up-close as they struggle to persist in the inevitability of the ritual. It lends this whole ordeal a layer of intimacy that simply wasn’t found in many action-adventure games of the time.

For this reason, I also think that trying to compare Shadow of the Colossus’ limited controls to other action-adventure titles of the time is ultimately a fool’s errand. This is not your typical power fantasy by any means; this is the classic tale of David vs Goliath, told sixteen times with various degrees of ambiguity. Despite the fantastical nature of your surroundings, Ueda sought to preserve a strong degree of realism to better capture the gravity of the player's actions. Wander is no glorious action superstar: his quest to slay the colossi regardless of whatever price must be paid reeks of desperation. It’s why his movement speed and jump feel so constrained, and why his sword thrusts feel sluggish at times. There’s a certain weight behind all his actions despite any pullback, and it fits perfectly alongside the sheer size and awe of the colossi. Their ability to swat Wander about like a flea, or send him flying just from a simple stomp, or even how Wander is bucked to and fro from simply trying to stay standing atop shaking colossi conveys fragility better than any spoken or written language ever could. Even the pain experienced by the player from tightly gripping upon the controller, just as Wander tightly clasps onto the colossi’s fur for dear life, plays right into the sheer tension of the encounter: it’s one of the purest expressions of controls as the extension of the body, just taken in the traditionally opposite direction to lend a sense of commitment behind every action taken in the moment.

What I think stumps traditional audiences, is that Shadow of the Colossus is a game that often makes you doubt yourself. It’s easy to lose faith against this hulking behemoth staring you right in the face that could sneeze on you and send you careening several feet away. Couple that with the thumping drums and clashing chords of tracks like Grotesque Figures and Liberated Guardian alongside overcast and dismal settings, and it’s no wonder that the player often feels disempowered. But that doesn’t mean you can’t turn the tides of battle. In fact, Shadow of the Colossus is a game that doesn’t simply coax adaptation, but rather, demands it through emergent solutions. When making mistakes can end up chipping away half your health bar or falling off the colossi entirely to restart preparation and climbing sequences that can take valuable minutes, every decision matters that much more. With Wander’s limited set of controls and tools (jump, climb, a dodge-roll, Agro, and your sword + bow and arrow), every factor in the environment must be considered… and Team Ico pulls this off effortlessly because not a single detail goes to waste. Anything even remotely distinct within the vicinity, including the bodies of the colossi themselves, are most likely a piece of the puzzle required to scale and discover any weaknesses. Moreover, the game keeps you on your feet despite maintaining its core design principles by varying practically every aspect of the colossi designs (including size, which affects their speed) as well as their respective environments, with few discernable patterns in the overall sequence, forcing players to reexamine their surroundings with every new encounter. In that sense, combat is laborious, but calculated: observation is often required to coax interactions that can get Wander into favorable positions, as the colossi AI follow sensible patterns that must be proc’d with specific player responses (i.e. shooting a colossi with an arrow will immediately draw their attention). The other half of the battle is maintaining patience and not losing your composure in the heat of the moment. As the frame rate buckles from the colossi consuming your screen space and the camera flies wildly about, conveying your character’s sheer difference in size so innately, you have to make quick judgement calls on how to preserve what little remains of your dwindling grip gauge through careful positioning (via plants and figuring out the best times & locations to let go and stand still) while never losing sight of your target. Through player perseverance, the fight reaches its climax with valuable player feedback in the form of impactful sword stabs and the triumphant horns of Revived Power. While some would complain that the game never lets you linger in celebration and in fact often leaves you exhausted, I would argue that experiencing that complex, emotional rush is a reward in itself. It is a game that is more than happy to beat you down and leave you feeling insignificant, yet never makes the task outright impossible, and its ability to evoke a variety of emotions while consistently challenging your perceptions is perhaps its most understated strength.

Speaking of challenging perceptions, one frequent complaint is that Shadow of the Colossus’ overworld is empty, with limited meaningful interaction. I reject this assertation that this feature is a weakness, because scattering collectibles and side-quests about the world would defeat the intended purpose of creating a “more realistic feeling of presence.” I also see a lot of players calling it an “open-world” title, and I think this descriptor is slightly misleading; the overworld simply exists to create time and space between each of the intense colossi encounters, and better convey the game’s sense of scale, rather than function as a simulated environment that lets players approach different objectives as they wish. Emptying the overworld of features outside of save shrines and the rare blue-tailed lizard/fruit while silencing the soundtrack (leaving only environmental noises and your horse’s gallop) allows Team ICO to centralize on the act of traversal itself as a form of meditative self-reflection while carefully zooming out and panning the camera to fully display the vastness of the forbidden land, further emphasizing the enormity of this alien world and situation that the wanderer cannot even begin to understand. As an extension of Ico’s core design philosophy of “design by subtraction,” Team Ico sought to remove any element that would distract from the central focus, such as “optional” colossi and excess NPCs. The latter was instead replaced with the sword’s light-beam locator, lending the lighting duality as both a contributing factor of ambience and a gameplay mechanic. As a result, I never did really understand why these long riding sections were often written off by so many; these segments provide a necessary catharsis for players to soak in the subtlety of everything happening around them while discreetly serving as a reminder that there was no place for them on this forsaken earth.

To be fair, it is slightly misleading referring to the player character as a lone wanderer when Ueda heavily stresses the relationship between Wander and his horse, Agro, a detail that often gets overlooked when players bring up the “poor horse controls.” An important distinction that must be made here is that you are not controlling Agro; you are controlling Wander, who is controlling Agro. Realism is again the focus: there’s a natural response time between Wander manipulating the reins and Agro’s subsequent shift in speed. Additionally, this more firmly establishes Agro’s distinct identity within the game, as she has her own AI-movement enabled algorithms that will allow her to proactively avoid danger and return to Wander even without the usual stimulus of Wander calling out. Want further proof of this in action? Try riding Agro over one of the land-bridges or through one of the world’s many forests, and take your thumb off of the left joystick; Agro will naturally steer herself forward and avoid any obstacle or ledge in the way whenever possible. As a result, players have to learn to trust Agro during more-involved riding sections, because attempting to exert too much control will lead to the player fighting the natural horse steering and getting more frequently stuck on geometry; as Ueda himself pointed out, this scheme was based off of the idea that a horse was both a “friend” and a “self-supporting vehicle.” This becomes especially paramount during certain fights where the player must aim and fire the bow and arrow while riding Agro to dodge attacks; these two actions both use the left joystick, and simultaneously juggling the two activities would become nigh on impossible if the player refused to lend Agro any agency during these encounters.

Finally, I’d like to address potential gripes that others may have regarding the storytelling of Shadow of the Colossus. Mind you, I’m not referring to the actual storyline or any particular interpretation of the narrative: I instead want to focus on the act of the storytelling itself. While I’ve heard from friends that the lengthy cutscenes setting up and closing out the game are not ideal, I personally do not believe that these interfere with the game’s pacing in any fashion. Not only do they serve as bookends that do not impact the core experience of switching between riding and scaling colossi, the ending cutscene also serves as a fantastic emotional denouement (during the credits, no less) tying all of your actions together as a nostalgic send-off to further reflect upon your time spent. The short cutscenes in-between the action, on the other hand, keep the player anticipating their next encounter while painting over the deaths of the colossi with the moral ambiguity that would come to characterize Shadow of the Colossus, all with practically no dialogue outside of these moments. It’s also important to note at this time that player control is not completely missing during these segments, because you can still manipulate the camera to some degree during cutscenes to maintain the impression of controllability. This seems to align with Ueda’s beliefs regarding interactivity, for with regards to possible interpretations of the story, Ueda had this to say: “I want them to direct the story themselves.” In this sense, Shadow of the Colossus’ limited storytelling and ambiguous themes make perfect sense, for rather than being a game constructed around a story, it is a story constructed around a game.

To close this off, I want to reiterate that Shadow of the Colossus is by no means flawless. Certain colossi fights take a bit more patience than others due to occasionally stubborn behaviors, rare but sudden frame rate drops in the overworld feel quite unwelcome, and I do have to admit that the fruits and blue-tailed lizards could be eliminated altogether with little consequence to the player. Regardless, many of Shadow of the Colossus’ foibles lend the overall experience a stronger sense of identity in how they meld emergent gameplay with understated storytelling, and are at worse, fairly understandable given how the game was so markedly ahead of its time. Having now completed my third playthrough, I do not believe that Shadow of the Colossus is in any way worthy of the descriptors “aged” or “outdated.” While it does require me to meet it on its own terms, its various innovations and design choices make complete sense once given the context of its scope, and its ability to "tackle any obstacles to building that empathy" remains practically unmatched. Shadow of the Colossus was exactly what it needed to be and accomplished exactly what it sought out to do in the time it was made, and to this day, remains a triumph for the medium with its ambitious yet realized integration of visuals and interaction.

If my thoughts seem somewhat pointed, I promise that this was not written with such intentions. I absolutely understand why others may become alienated or be afraid of everything that it represents; by its very nature, Shadow of the Colossus is a game that doesn’t have something for everyone. Perhaps that is what makes it so compelling to me: because there’s a real element of danger involved. It still feels like a miracle that something so blindingly unconventional yet so realized and unmistakably human and empathetic ever came to fruition in the first place, further challenging contemporary conventions in an era where well-known game developers had already pushed so far in their experimentation. Regardless of whether or not I’ve reached you, my message remains the same: throw away your expectations, and see for yourself what Fumito Ueda created all these years ago. Don’t worry if it’s not your thing; while it genuinely gives me no pleasure to see others struggle with my favorite game, I’ll still be proud that you gave it a fair shot. I only wish that everyone could see what I see in Shadow of the Colossus.