DustyVita
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No other Wrestling game has as great as a roster as this one, it's true! You got classics, like John Cena, Robert Conway, Steve Austin, Robert Conway, Dwayne The Johnson, Robert Conway, Jake the PSP Exclusive Roberts, Robert Conway, Kurt Angle, Robert Conway, and many, many, more! Also I like the schoolgirl match I wish they brought those back because honestly, I'd pay to see that as the main event of Wrestlemania 53 or whatever it is this year.
Bottom of the Ninth
1989
Every time I see an Angels highlight it's like “Mike Trout hit three homes runs and raised his average to .528 while Shohei Ohtani did something that hasn't been done since 'Tungsten Arm' O'Doyle of the 1921 Akron Groomsmen, as the Tigers defeated the Angels 8-3.
Baseball
1983
The interactive medium of video games have always struggled to gain a foothold of legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Being reliant on the TV never really let them shake the label of "casual entertainment", especially because their popularity came long before the Prestige Television boon that would occur in the 21st century. In trying to mimic real life games/sports they sought to have an in to the average homestead and prove their worth to the general public that games were a worthwhile pastime.
Of course I write this all to say that I can't believe they butchered the noble art of baseball with some shitty small ball simulator that lacks any of the charm of the sport itself. It's easy to call the game simple, or a proof of concept, but where does this leave us? To remove all intricacies of baseball and boil it down to hurl ball at different speeds and then hit said ball makes it an unimpressive toy. A game that won't let you steal bases, in the golden era of the stolen base?!? Ricky Henderson spits on your grave.
The Famicom was for all intents and purposes, a product. A toy for children that could hold their attention for a brief period of time while parents enjoyed a life independent of their chitlins. The fact that this became a medium of artistic expression seems almost impossible. Nintendo obviously started making more intricate and interesting games later, but there's still the idea of a world where nobody pushed the Famicom capabilities and it would be long forgotten toy of the 80s. A fad and nothing more.
Screw this game, baseball is cool.
Of course I write this all to say that I can't believe they butchered the noble art of baseball with some shitty small ball simulator that lacks any of the charm of the sport itself. It's easy to call the game simple, or a proof of concept, but where does this leave us? To remove all intricacies of baseball and boil it down to hurl ball at different speeds and then hit said ball makes it an unimpressive toy. A game that won't let you steal bases, in the golden era of the stolen base?!? Ricky Henderson spits on your grave.
The Famicom was for all intents and purposes, a product. A toy for children that could hold their attention for a brief period of time while parents enjoyed a life independent of their chitlins. The fact that this became a medium of artistic expression seems almost impossible. Nintendo obviously started making more intricate and interesting games later, but there's still the idea of a world where nobody pushed the Famicom capabilities and it would be long forgotten toy of the 80s. A fad and nothing more.
Screw this game, baseball is cool.
Wave Race 64 but for poopooheads.
Pikmin
2001
The most important games for me are ones that seem to pop in to my world at the exact time that I needed them, and Pikmin is a strong example of one of those cases. The moment I was living under my own roof, during the summer before I started college, I felt like a completely different person. I never knew what life was like without the every minor decision or daily bit of minutia being judged with a harsh eye, and subsequent fear, and my first apartment changed all of that. Living alone started as a party, I spent money and time in ways I previously never could, but as the high of freedom wore off, something took it's place, legitimate independence. Local transportation would allow me to effectively perform walkabout's in every area that interested me growing up, and despite growing up in a single parent household, as an only child, this solitude was something different, a vast world that began to teach me thing's. And it was about a year in to this unique solitude that I found Pikmin.
This silly gamecube launch title has valuable lessons about finding peace with death, discovering the logic behind a seemingly harsh world, and most importantly to me, how to deal with being left alone with your own thoughts. I remember sitting in my car in a massive parking structure, before a big event I was involved with, trying to squeeze in a few extra minutes with Captain Olimar and the Pikmin, knowing how important his journey's would feel parallel to mine.
At the end of the day, this is a neat tech demo about a tiny guy fighting monsters, but for someone attempting to finding their own voice; critically, profesionally, and personally, there could be no better companion than Olimar, and no better game than Pikmin.
This silly gamecube launch title has valuable lessons about finding peace with death, discovering the logic behind a seemingly harsh world, and most importantly to me, how to deal with being left alone with your own thoughts. I remember sitting in my car in a massive parking structure, before a big event I was involved with, trying to squeeze in a few extra minutes with Captain Olimar and the Pikmin, knowing how important his journey's would feel parallel to mine.
At the end of the day, this is a neat tech demo about a tiny guy fighting monsters, but for someone attempting to finding their own voice; critically, profesionally, and personally, there could be no better companion than Olimar, and no better game than Pikmin.
The Evil Within
2014
The Evil started rolling Within and I was like, hmm...
Some choice jokes/running references throughout my streaming of the game include:
-Supernatural Season 1 grey filter
-"Ethan" Sebastian "Within" Castellanos AKA: The Ethan Within
-Joseph's goofy lil saunter & unbelievable axe proficiency
-"Get a f*cking hobby" directed towards the safe room nurse
-GOOP
(This may be updated with more, later)
Some choice jokes/running references throughout my streaming of the game include:
-Supernatural Season 1 grey filter
-"Ethan" Sebastian "Within" Castellanos AKA: The Ethan Within
-Joseph's goofy lil saunter & unbelievable axe proficiency
-"Get a f*cking hobby" directed towards the safe room nurse
-GOOP
(This may be updated with more, later)
Persona 5 Royal
2019
This review contains spoilers
There’s this idea in human development and psychology called schema theory, assimilation, and accommodation. We all have different mental schema that hold different philosophies and information. More often than not, new information is simply assimilated into our existing understanding of the world. When the brain is shocked by new information, it has to make a new schema to understand the world. This is accommodation. This schema may conflict with one another and may require one schema to be destroyed and absorbed into the new schema. But this is the mental framework that our brains understand the world.
Some months ago, there was a post I saw about Disney’s Andor that I’ve been thinking about frequently. The post asserted that it's actually concerning that a corporation could make a show so fiercely anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist. It means they don’t consider those ideas a real threat. They consider it fantasy. When Glass Onion and The Menu came out, articles and other posts reverberating this point emerged. These movies are Bad Actually because they have become part of the status quo.
It has a bit more validity than I’d like to admit (and it's possible some weird mental defensiveness has made me view those posts more negatively than the poster intended). If every movie just has a general “rich bad” observation, without more nuance or call to action than that, I’m not sure what they add. There has to be something meatier on that bone.
But I guess that opens to a wider conversation on how powerful art can or cannot be.
There’s certain things a corporate product is just not going to do. It's not going to call for global revolution, it's not going to call to dismantle every institution we need to dismantle, it's not going to say we need to execute people in the square.
Do these corporate products, in varying degrees of tepid or otherwise, still have validity outside of that if people read more into it than intended? Where does meaning begin and end with these kinds of products? Where does it falter?
And where does Persona 5 succeed and fail in delivering Meaning?
Kamoshida’s Palace
Kamoshida’s Palace may be one of the most striking and investing opening segments of an rpg I’ve ever played. The beginning storyline is so immediately successful at dropping you into the horrible environment of a high school. Whispers everywhere you go, teachers glaring at you for showing up, classmates bluntly informing you that “it's a distraction” for you to try and study with everyone else in the library. Kamoshida as a villain is a high point that I don’t think the game reaches again for… basically the rest of the game. The stakes feel so intimately real and pointed, the abuse he weaponizes against others so constant and direct. It's a phenomenal way to introduce the basic gimmick of your story and invest in the successes of your protagonists.
When I have to pick how to spend my in-game afternoons, I’d often just teleport away from the school to wherever I needed to go. On one occasion, I chose to walk out of the school for once. Suddenly, I'm cornered by Kamoshida. I don’t know if that was added to Royal or if I just missed it in the original, but if you walk past him on the first floor, he’ll force you into a conversation so he can mock and torment you some more. He'll do this every single day. Most people probably missed this, but once you know it, a new tension emerges. Teleporting out of the school now feels more intentional than passive. This optional, incidental piece of dialogue suddenly made the very act of choosing to walk out of the school feel more like a choice. Teleporting or sneaking around him felt more like I was dodging his abuse. It's an incredible feeling. It adds another dose of tension to a section that was already rife with tension.
But then there’s Ann.
Ann's character starts amazing, just a powerful and passionate addition to the cast. Its where the game takes that character that falters.
The Watsonian perspective: Royal’s boss fight with Kamoshida adds a fake version of Shiho, the girl who attempted suicide, as one of his supporters. She’s dressed up in a bunny suit. The original game left it unclear if Kamoshida even remembered who Shiho was after her hospitalization, but this was to ensure his warped view couldn’t be mistaken.
The Doylist perspective: One of the options when you see a fake!Ann in a bunny suit is to go “damn that’s hot.” Ann’s phantom thief costume is made up like a big sexy outfit that we’re supposed to be excited by. There’s various bits of dialogue where Ann is ogled by the camera and the characters. And, as mentioned above, out of all the things they chose to add to the game, they added Shiho in the bunny suit. On one hand, as said above, it further cements just how depraved he is. But on the other hand, that topic seemed pretty well covered. Was it more powerful back when he never mentioned Shiho? When he seemingly forgot about her mere seconds after she dropped off a roof? I dunno. It's something I’m still mixed on. Does showing that exploitation become exploitation in itself?
Are Kamoshida’s actions forcing brains to recognize monsters and accommodate that information into new rebellious schema? Or does he let the audience find excuses? What if instead, Kamoshida’s actions are just assimilating into the kind of schema that labels some people “bad outsiders”?
Madarme, Kaneshiro, Futaba, and Okumuda
It's hard to claim that the following palaces reach the stakes of the first palace. Madarame’s story is a genuine tale of corruption and in many ways it feels like something the creative team did care a lot about. There’s personal history there, personal stories among devs about stolen work. But at the same time, they clearly had trouble explaining how plagiarism and theft hurt their careers. Explaining the daily grind of increasing failure and loss is a much harder image to depict. So they have to go bigger and involve some murder.
Kaneshiro almost reaches something. He’s funding various politicians and I’ll probably have more to say about the precise history of yakuza in politics in during Shido’s chapter. But his existence as a guy committing petty scams and an obvious criminal lifestyle kind of makes him feel more like a threat outside the social systems the thieves claim to hate. He’s easier to dismiss as an outlier to a corrupt system.
At the same time, the purpose of these palaces aren’t really built around these actual people. Futaba’s palace cement that these are much more about the development of our cast than about the villains. And that’s fine. I think Futaba’s Palace is actually the most valuable level in conveying an actual message: how a person’s mindset can get warped and distorted by their lives. But I can also understand how that can feel… insulting. Big ol’ magic heist to fix your noggin. Fix some gears, no more depression. It's the same way Psychonauts both does and doesn’t work, for the same complicated reasons.
Okumura’s Palace is bad, in ways that tie into other Palace Problems. The puzzle design in P5 isn’t very advanced. It's just short ways of delaying progress, extending out the game. The Palaces are already mostly fun, we don’t need to extend them even more. But Okumura’s Palace also feels like it gets back to the stakes of Kamoshida. This man has an active harm on society that the others can’t compare to. The corporate culture is horrifically violent, even if its dressed up in silly alien aesthetics to cover the faults.
But the way the story goes, the game clearly doesn't want me to hate Okumura that much. I'm supposed to feel bad when he dies. "Even if he's evil, he doesn't deserve that" is the drum they pound on.
Haru, you’re my favorite character, but I kind of think your dad had it coming.
Confidants
The other aspects that falter after the first dungeon present themselves in the social links. Persona director Hashino allegedly said in an interview (that I can’t track down, don’t quote me) that he never had female friends. If that’s true, you can really tell.
jesus christ can you tell.
Ann’s sharp, serious character gets progressively lost to a “kind of a ditz” angle once she’s isolated into her social link. Ryuji starts the game as the most refreshing Persona Best Friend yet, but he displays all the same annoying traits before long too. Horny lad is horny. Nearly every main cast member gets worse in the social links and you kind of have to hope the main story will revive them to something reasonable, which is not guaranteed.
And then you get the social links with a teenager dating an older woman or the other creepy shit towards the women and there’s really no excuse for it. All those themes of commodification and exploitation are thrown to the wayside because “listen dude, this exploitation is like, really hot tho.”
This isn’t to say all the social links are bad. I have my favorites like anyone else. The underdog politician, the gun shop man, the doctor. But the game’s weird wink-wink-nudge-nudge “harmless” fanservice and misogyny, the inability to recognize the double standards, the insistence on maintaining some horndoggery. Its constant.
Assimilation or accommodation.
It's this part of the game that I can’t really muster any kind of defense for. It makes me uncomfortable. With the benefits you get from social links, someone trying to create the most beneficial playthrough is gonna need to date those women. Hire the maid teacher. You need those ethers, Joker. Entering a bizarre, uncomfortable, mess of a power dynamic is the only way.
Shinzo Abe
Masayoshi Shido. Political monster, sexual assault wielding asshole, man who destroyed any hope of opposition in the upcoming election.
To complete Shido’s palace, there’s several different miniboss shadows you need to track down. Each one represents one of Shido’s loyal cronies, someone that helps him in the real world. They’re unnamed and generally act as a catch-all to ideas of political corruption. But there’s several worth pointing out. The former noble, who’s family lost power after WWII. The yakuza muscle, who takes care of political opponents on Shido’s behalf. The TV exec, manipulating facts into Shido’s favor. And the general mass of right wing politicians these people tend to attract.
When Nobusuke Kishi was released from prison after WWII, after running various oppressive puppet states, he was immediately summoned to the Prime Minister’s house. He looked around the table at his old friends and war criminals, newly backed by the US. It was here that he infamously said “well, I guess we’re all democrats now.”
In his return to power, Kishi enacted a variety of notable moves. Through his connection with various yakuza organizations (supported by the US), the famed war criminal sabotaged left-leaning movements at every opportunity. Kishi’s inescapable grip on power only ended through the Anpo protests, where thousands upon thousands of people finally forced Kishi to resign in disgrace.
Throughout this period, Shinzo Abe was happily bouncing on his grandfather’s knee, buying into every word ol’ Pappy Kishi told him.
Abe inherited and maintained Kishi’s various political connections. He spent his entire career defending his grandfather’s war crimes and using right-wing rhetoric to make the world a worse place to live. He became a notable member of “Nippon Kage,” a fascist group pledging to bring back the monarchy, funded by various politicians, cults, and former nobles. Abe’s insistence on denying how so-called “comfort women” were exploited by his grandfather prior to the war is an internationally known fact. Abe also became embroiled in controversy for manipulating town halls and media events with paid actors, to make the government look more positive. His biographer Noriyuki Yamaguchi was a high-ranking journalist allied with various media think tanks, before the Me Too movement publicly exposed his history of assault.
Many of Persona 5’s references to historical figures tend to be clumsy or poorly thought out. Yuuki Mishima speaks to that just by existing. And one of the biggest misteps in handling Shido is that there's little to no interest in where he came from. There’s no mention of Shido having any connection to any previous war criminal. In fact, his past beyond his current political goals and the deaths he's orchestrated in Futaba's history are left vague and unclear. But the comparisons to Abe are pointed and direct. His rhetoric is populist and inflammatory. Campaign posters in his palace mirror Shinzo Abe’s real posters. It just says the quiet part out loud. Whatever else can be said about this game, it seems pretty evident to me that a large chunk of it involves pointing to Shinzo Abe and going “man, fuck that guy.” And I gotta respect that.
(On a related note, if you want to see Shinzo Abe get beat up by plastic monsters, watch Kamen Rider Black Sun. I know I'm building up to a thesis about "maybe looking for activism in fiction is poisoning my mind and I should stop hitching my internal morality to fiction" but that's a fucking great show.)
Rebellion
More than any scene in the game, of all things, I think about the starting party eating at a fancy diner. They’re trying to celebrate after defeating Kamoshida, feel some sense of success and joy after they’ve outed a predator. But these little sad moments keep happening. They speak a little too loud here, they spill something there, they lose track of their table, etc. They don’t know the social cues. They don’t belong in that rich society restaurant and everyone wants them gone. Their enthusiasm wanes bit by bit and you just get these sad kids who’s dream of a good time got crushed by the grim reality that they’re still outsiders.
And that’s when they start talking about becoming the Phantom Thieves full time.
It's a triumphant moment and the narrative knows it. This is their call to action, their decision to stand up for the little guy.
But there’s this unintentional (intentional?) subtext that these dumb teens just desperately want to be validated by their peers. It's rampant in Mishima’s storyline but it's always present if you look for it. So much of the game revolves around them seeking the approval of strangers online, to the point that being forgotten nearly destroys them. It's sad. It's so desperately sad.
After Okumura’s Palace, the cast wonder amongst themselves if they were truly fighting for justice or for vanity. It's partly just a typical “the heroes doubt themselves” story beat. But it ties into groundwork the game has set down before now.
Here’s the hard truth I’ve had to face as someone who loves history: any revolution will have unintentional victims. It's an inescapable fact, seen time and time again. So the essential question of revolution rests on a simple fact: is the violence inflicted by the existing corrupt state worse than the violence that will ensue in a revolution?
Much of the game wrestles with this, even if it doesn’t realize it. Is the violence of stealing a heart equal to the violence of these oppressive figures? I say no and I assume much of the audience shares that sentiment. Which is part of why I think the game’s final act rings so hollow for so many people. The final bosses of both versions of the game are provided as examples that the violence inherent in stealing a heart is too dangerous to hold onto long-term. “We can’t ethically hold onto this power. The public has to make these choices, not us.” That’s a fair message but the thing the game seems to somehow miss is that the characters are part of the public. They aren't above or outside it. Stepping away from their revolution because its getting too violent is... kind of bizarre. And sure, approaching this gets muddy when dealing with magical powers. But the public is being manipulated so they can’t make these choices. They’ve been provided the wrong information, on purpose, by political machines far beyond our scope. The messaging here falls flat.
The theme of “are we in danger of being baddies” also ends up pushing the heroes dangerously close to that “now that we beat the villains, let’s conform to the status quo again” storyline. We’ve seen this in Persona 4 and it was already bad there. And this is particularly aggravating with the changed ending for Royal. The original game lets you ride off into the sunset on a road trip with your friends. Royal? Not so much. Ryuji goes back to track, Ann goes back to being a model, the gang “grows up” past this rebellion. Just a childhood indulgence. Now they can join society and become Normal Good Workers. Maybe that’s not the meaning the designers intended to impart but it’s there.
Perhaps that’s the biggest issue with the game’s messaging. Intentionally or not, the information it gives you can be assimilated into existing ideas. It certainly points to dangerous targets. Sexual predators, plagiarists, short-staffing CEOs, malicious politicians. But its pledge to reshape society is more debatable. If the characters return to society in the Royal version, can we really say they’re truly still radicals? Can this game be a radical story? Did corporate demands water down the messaging? Or is it a more sinister thrall of moderate sentiments assimilating rebellion into acceptability? If the thing Royal mainly adds is more Ann perving, if that's their grand intention, what do they really have to say about anything that's worthwhile?
Assimilation or accommodation?
It's tough.
Apathy
The text of the game is that God has emerged to control the population, brainwash them to follow the status quo, and leave them resting in happy cages while he burns down the world. As with many of these rpgs, you gotta attack and dethrone god.
It's in the subtext and metaphor that I find this finale much more interesting.
The Phantom Thieves spend all their time warning the world about Shido. If they can make him confess, if they can just expose his crimes, they’re sure everything will work out. That’s what keeps them going.
Except, that’s not reality. Because the truth is, things are always more complicated than exposing/killing a few specific people.
The political machine that benefits from Shido won’t even let him confess. They cover it up, they use the media machine, and they prey on public fears. Shido has so effectively presented himself as a savior that the public cult of personality can’t grapple with the alternative. The system is so thoroughly rigged that the Phantom Thieves have no chance.
The Thieves panic and journey to the center of the collective subconscious. And that is where God exists, the physical manifestation of these systems. It keeps the public chained down, supported by their apathy and eagerness to hand their freedom over to an oppressive force. And when the Thieves are forced back into Shibuya, they’re confronted with a true look at the world. Everything around them, every building, streetlight, every street corner, is built of violence. The totality of existence is covered by the blood of the systems that built it.
And every passerby around them just ignores it. Violence and blood? Don’t be dramatic. It's just a normal street, a normal boring life. Any rebel that has pointed out these things is delusional or never existed in the first place. And this denial is so maddening that the few people that do see the evidence of violence around them feel crazy themselves.
To keep supporting these systems of violence, the history of its rebels are erased. The Thieves cease to exist. Locked away without a trace.
The only path of success left is to find the very soul of these apathetic systems, with all its Christian roots, and shoot it in the face.
Its this intentional? Fuck no. But its where my mind went playing it. I could try and justify my points by claiming some cultural aspect needs to be considered. Japan’s LDP has basically been in power for seventy years with only brief interruptions. The failure of the New Left movement in the 60s to 70s only compounded the party’s authority. I feel like that level of political stagnation and people’s willingness to put up with that bad status quo has to be considered when tied with the themes of the apathetic public.
But a white american claiming she “knows more” about a foreign country’s culture is cringe as fuck so, I do have to admit the theme just… works for me. It doesn’t have to work for you, would not force that on anyone. But… Desperately screaming against an apathetic society that won’t put in the effort to change, feeling bogged down by the fact that it’s just so much easier to fall into that same apathy than to keep screaming, and finally ending with shooting God in the face?
I can’t not think about it. The theme just works for me. Even if I start second-guessing myself with the same tired question.
Accommodation or assimilation?
But what’s left after all that? What’s left after all that 100 hour story? What’s waiting for you in this game?
Gameplay and Style
Fuck. Like. Fuck. Y’know? One of the main reasons its easy to enjoy this game is just how fucking fun the gameplay is. The speed of the combat, the flow of battle, the way all these systems blend into each other to be maximized and measured from beginning to end…. Fuck!
And the whole game just drips with aesthetics. Every visual, every menu screen, every music track, all perfectly calculated to this moody, jazzy feeling. Fucking stellar. Put that shit on my homebrewed 3DS and I don’t regret it.
Royal goes further and adds some mechanical flourishes. The fusion system now has periodic “alarms” if you’ve been grinding through Mementos a lot. Those alarms mean you can get new results from fusing or itemizing persona. Now getting a character’s ultimate weapon requires planning and deliberation rather than just throwing cash into the fusion grinder.
Royal’s new location Kichijoji also holds some special mechanical additions. The darts minigame helps improve the effectiveness of “baton passing”, letting characters infinitely weaponize the weakness of enemies and keep smacking them down. The billiards minigame improves technical attacks, using status debuffs to launch critical attacks and make it easier to launch All Out Attacks on a foe. And the jazz club lets you give your party special new skills, allowing greater freedom and customization of your party line up. It adds so much to the existing system. I went from barely engaging with vanilla P5’s gameplay to going full completionist on the Persona Compendium. It's just rad as hell.
Royal’s New Content
Akechi fucking rules.
This poor kid, abandoned by his father, desperately missing his mother, has launched a complicated revenge scheme to take down Shido. Bring Shido to the top of the world, then expose Shido as a fraud and be there to watch him fall. He’s so embraced this dream, he kills and betrays anyone to see the journey through.
But what’s truly sad about Akechi is how doomed his plan was from the start. Shido always knew Akechi was his secret son and was always planning on killing Akechi once he lost his use. We see how the political machine defends Shido and that’s proof that this secret child revelation would get covered up and suppressed in minutes. Akechi’s plan was never going to work.
But Akechi can’t accept that until it's too late. Because despite his hatred, despite his fury, he just desperately wants his dad to love him.
Royal’s bonus section, the third semester, is… weird. It's a compelling morality play about happiness versus trauma. If you could erase the traumas of your past and integrate yourself back into “respectable” society, would you? As the Phantom Thieves realize, their gut instinct would be yes. Deep down, they’d love to live normal lives again. But that would be a disrespect to that pain they grew from. Denying it happened denies themselves. It's hard, but they’re stronger for accepting it.
Akechi’s storyline features Akechi dropping the mask and just relishing in being a nasty little crime boy. The voice actor delights in going over the top nefarious, howling PERSONA like he’s clinging onto the edges of sanity.
And by extension, by bringing Akechi back, the game gives the protagonist/Joker/Kirby Styles a specific personality and desire outside of player action.
Joker wants Akechi back and he wants him to be more unhinged. He wants the mask off, he wants the true Akechi, even if that man is an asshole.
Outside of player control, Joker Persona 5 loves Akechi.
The final villain of this semester, Dr. Maruki, is a deeply sad man. His denial of a broken past only hurts him in the long run. He has to convert other people into his ideology because it's the only thing he has left. If you accept Maruki’s deal, Maruki isolates himself into a role as a kindly messiah. When he shows up in the bad ending scenes, his character portrait vanishes. He’s not a person anymore. He’s lost any human connections keeping him stable. Even when Maruki wins, he loses. Failure is his only option and it's the only way his life can get better.
To save Maruki, you have to destroy his delusional dream. To give Akechi his freedom, you have to let him die. You have to let Akechi make his choice for himself, even if it sends him off to his demise.
Still, there’s weirdness to the section. The third semester might have been better as an AU story, DLC, or some kind of spin-off novel. It just doesn’t flow with the main game’s themes and ideas. It's hard to go from shooting God in the face to “a happy cult.” I enjoyed it, but it's hard to argue in favor of the game’s themes when this section provides even more tangible proof of its inconsistency.
Coupled with the changed ending mentioned in the Rebellion section, it's hard to say that the new story content benefits the game overall. The additional Ann perving, the cast returning to their status quos... any defense I can make of Royal crumbles with the knowledge of what the devs chose to add. This was their vision.
Anyway
I don’t think Persona 5 is a perfect or consistent text. I think it fails in a lot of its efforts, particularly in how it treats women and minorities. I often flip-flop on how generous I’m feeling towards its themes and meanings, as is probably obvious in this twelve page rambling. I’ve seen the Disco Elysium image about capital and critique. A capital product cannot, truly, be a meaningful message under the material conditions we’re stuck in.
But I still get excited by the sense of freedom and rebellion this game offers. Maybe that’s me falling for it. Maybe that’s me getting subsumed by capital, falling under the sway of apathy and false promises, instead of making the kind of direct action I need to. I’m not as ideologically steadfast in my beliefs as I want to be.
And what does that mean for me?
I think it means I need to log the fuck off.
This review reached twelve pages at one point and I got this truly strange anxiety writing it. This endless dithering and agonizing about being a bad leftist, about failing, about exposing myself as a moron who was still untangling some ingrained societal shit. And it just suddenly hit me at some point how… hollow this feeling was. What does this anxiety do for me? Do for anyone? Does worrying about what media I consume actually impact the wider activism efforts, or is it just getting in the way of me doing that activism? It's the constant pattern of online activism, something I find it too easy to fall into, worrying so much about performance that I don’t actually do the real work.
Maybe it doesn’t have to be that deep. Maybe it doesn’t have to be all those things I wish it was. Maybe I don’t need to obsess and worry over defending how I feel about something.
Maybe sometimes I just need to be okay with enjoying a dumb video game, flaws and all.
Some months ago, there was a post I saw about Disney’s Andor that I’ve been thinking about frequently. The post asserted that it's actually concerning that a corporation could make a show so fiercely anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist. It means they don’t consider those ideas a real threat. They consider it fantasy. When Glass Onion and The Menu came out, articles and other posts reverberating this point emerged. These movies are Bad Actually because they have become part of the status quo.
It has a bit more validity than I’d like to admit (and it's possible some weird mental defensiveness has made me view those posts more negatively than the poster intended). If every movie just has a general “rich bad” observation, without more nuance or call to action than that, I’m not sure what they add. There has to be something meatier on that bone.
But I guess that opens to a wider conversation on how powerful art can or cannot be.
There’s certain things a corporate product is just not going to do. It's not going to call for global revolution, it's not going to call to dismantle every institution we need to dismantle, it's not going to say we need to execute people in the square.
Do these corporate products, in varying degrees of tepid or otherwise, still have validity outside of that if people read more into it than intended? Where does meaning begin and end with these kinds of products? Where does it falter?
And where does Persona 5 succeed and fail in delivering Meaning?
Kamoshida’s Palace
Kamoshida’s Palace may be one of the most striking and investing opening segments of an rpg I’ve ever played. The beginning storyline is so immediately successful at dropping you into the horrible environment of a high school. Whispers everywhere you go, teachers glaring at you for showing up, classmates bluntly informing you that “it's a distraction” for you to try and study with everyone else in the library. Kamoshida as a villain is a high point that I don’t think the game reaches again for… basically the rest of the game. The stakes feel so intimately real and pointed, the abuse he weaponizes against others so constant and direct. It's a phenomenal way to introduce the basic gimmick of your story and invest in the successes of your protagonists.
When I have to pick how to spend my in-game afternoons, I’d often just teleport away from the school to wherever I needed to go. On one occasion, I chose to walk out of the school for once. Suddenly, I'm cornered by Kamoshida. I don’t know if that was added to Royal or if I just missed it in the original, but if you walk past him on the first floor, he’ll force you into a conversation so he can mock and torment you some more. He'll do this every single day. Most people probably missed this, but once you know it, a new tension emerges. Teleporting out of the school now feels more intentional than passive. This optional, incidental piece of dialogue suddenly made the very act of choosing to walk out of the school feel more like a choice. Teleporting or sneaking around him felt more like I was dodging his abuse. It's an incredible feeling. It adds another dose of tension to a section that was already rife with tension.
But then there’s Ann.
Ann's character starts amazing, just a powerful and passionate addition to the cast. Its where the game takes that character that falters.
The Watsonian perspective: Royal’s boss fight with Kamoshida adds a fake version of Shiho, the girl who attempted suicide, as one of his supporters. She’s dressed up in a bunny suit. The original game left it unclear if Kamoshida even remembered who Shiho was after her hospitalization, but this was to ensure his warped view couldn’t be mistaken.
The Doylist perspective: One of the options when you see a fake!Ann in a bunny suit is to go “damn that’s hot.” Ann’s phantom thief costume is made up like a big sexy outfit that we’re supposed to be excited by. There’s various bits of dialogue where Ann is ogled by the camera and the characters. And, as mentioned above, out of all the things they chose to add to the game, they added Shiho in the bunny suit. On one hand, as said above, it further cements just how depraved he is. But on the other hand, that topic seemed pretty well covered. Was it more powerful back when he never mentioned Shiho? When he seemingly forgot about her mere seconds after she dropped off a roof? I dunno. It's something I’m still mixed on. Does showing that exploitation become exploitation in itself?
Are Kamoshida’s actions forcing brains to recognize monsters and accommodate that information into new rebellious schema? Or does he let the audience find excuses? What if instead, Kamoshida’s actions are just assimilating into the kind of schema that labels some people “bad outsiders”?
Madarme, Kaneshiro, Futaba, and Okumuda
It's hard to claim that the following palaces reach the stakes of the first palace. Madarame’s story is a genuine tale of corruption and in many ways it feels like something the creative team did care a lot about. There’s personal history there, personal stories among devs about stolen work. But at the same time, they clearly had trouble explaining how plagiarism and theft hurt their careers. Explaining the daily grind of increasing failure and loss is a much harder image to depict. So they have to go bigger and involve some murder.
Kaneshiro almost reaches something. He’s funding various politicians and I’ll probably have more to say about the precise history of yakuza in politics in during Shido’s chapter. But his existence as a guy committing petty scams and an obvious criminal lifestyle kind of makes him feel more like a threat outside the social systems the thieves claim to hate. He’s easier to dismiss as an outlier to a corrupt system.
At the same time, the purpose of these palaces aren’t really built around these actual people. Futaba’s palace cement that these are much more about the development of our cast than about the villains. And that’s fine. I think Futaba’s Palace is actually the most valuable level in conveying an actual message: how a person’s mindset can get warped and distorted by their lives. But I can also understand how that can feel… insulting. Big ol’ magic heist to fix your noggin. Fix some gears, no more depression. It's the same way Psychonauts both does and doesn’t work, for the same complicated reasons.
Okumura’s Palace is bad, in ways that tie into other Palace Problems. The puzzle design in P5 isn’t very advanced. It's just short ways of delaying progress, extending out the game. The Palaces are already mostly fun, we don’t need to extend them even more. But Okumura’s Palace also feels like it gets back to the stakes of Kamoshida. This man has an active harm on society that the others can’t compare to. The corporate culture is horrifically violent, even if its dressed up in silly alien aesthetics to cover the faults.
But the way the story goes, the game clearly doesn't want me to hate Okumura that much. I'm supposed to feel bad when he dies. "Even if he's evil, he doesn't deserve that" is the drum they pound on.
Haru, you’re my favorite character, but I kind of think your dad had it coming.
Confidants
The other aspects that falter after the first dungeon present themselves in the social links. Persona director Hashino allegedly said in an interview (that I can’t track down, don’t quote me) that he never had female friends. If that’s true, you can really tell.
jesus christ can you tell.
Ann’s sharp, serious character gets progressively lost to a “kind of a ditz” angle once she’s isolated into her social link. Ryuji starts the game as the most refreshing Persona Best Friend yet, but he displays all the same annoying traits before long too. Horny lad is horny. Nearly every main cast member gets worse in the social links and you kind of have to hope the main story will revive them to something reasonable, which is not guaranteed.
And then you get the social links with a teenager dating an older woman or the other creepy shit towards the women and there’s really no excuse for it. All those themes of commodification and exploitation are thrown to the wayside because “listen dude, this exploitation is like, really hot tho.”
This isn’t to say all the social links are bad. I have my favorites like anyone else. The underdog politician, the gun shop man, the doctor. But the game’s weird wink-wink-nudge-nudge “harmless” fanservice and misogyny, the inability to recognize the double standards, the insistence on maintaining some horndoggery. Its constant.
Assimilation or accommodation.
It's this part of the game that I can’t really muster any kind of defense for. It makes me uncomfortable. With the benefits you get from social links, someone trying to create the most beneficial playthrough is gonna need to date those women. Hire the maid teacher. You need those ethers, Joker. Entering a bizarre, uncomfortable, mess of a power dynamic is the only way.
Shinzo Abe
Masayoshi Shido. Political monster, sexual assault wielding asshole, man who destroyed any hope of opposition in the upcoming election.
To complete Shido’s palace, there’s several different miniboss shadows you need to track down. Each one represents one of Shido’s loyal cronies, someone that helps him in the real world. They’re unnamed and generally act as a catch-all to ideas of political corruption. But there’s several worth pointing out. The former noble, who’s family lost power after WWII. The yakuza muscle, who takes care of political opponents on Shido’s behalf. The TV exec, manipulating facts into Shido’s favor. And the general mass of right wing politicians these people tend to attract.
When Nobusuke Kishi was released from prison after WWII, after running various oppressive puppet states, he was immediately summoned to the Prime Minister’s house. He looked around the table at his old friends and war criminals, newly backed by the US. It was here that he infamously said “well, I guess we’re all democrats now.”
In his return to power, Kishi enacted a variety of notable moves. Through his connection with various yakuza organizations (supported by the US), the famed war criminal sabotaged left-leaning movements at every opportunity. Kishi’s inescapable grip on power only ended through the Anpo protests, where thousands upon thousands of people finally forced Kishi to resign in disgrace.
Throughout this period, Shinzo Abe was happily bouncing on his grandfather’s knee, buying into every word ol’ Pappy Kishi told him.
Abe inherited and maintained Kishi’s various political connections. He spent his entire career defending his grandfather’s war crimes and using right-wing rhetoric to make the world a worse place to live. He became a notable member of “Nippon Kage,” a fascist group pledging to bring back the monarchy, funded by various politicians, cults, and former nobles. Abe’s insistence on denying how so-called “comfort women” were exploited by his grandfather prior to the war is an internationally known fact. Abe also became embroiled in controversy for manipulating town halls and media events with paid actors, to make the government look more positive. His biographer Noriyuki Yamaguchi was a high-ranking journalist allied with various media think tanks, before the Me Too movement publicly exposed his history of assault.
Many of Persona 5’s references to historical figures tend to be clumsy or poorly thought out. Yuuki Mishima speaks to that just by existing. And one of the biggest misteps in handling Shido is that there's little to no interest in where he came from. There’s no mention of Shido having any connection to any previous war criminal. In fact, his past beyond his current political goals and the deaths he's orchestrated in Futaba's history are left vague and unclear. But the comparisons to Abe are pointed and direct. His rhetoric is populist and inflammatory. Campaign posters in his palace mirror Shinzo Abe’s real posters. It just says the quiet part out loud. Whatever else can be said about this game, it seems pretty evident to me that a large chunk of it involves pointing to Shinzo Abe and going “man, fuck that guy.” And I gotta respect that.
(On a related note, if you want to see Shinzo Abe get beat up by plastic monsters, watch Kamen Rider Black Sun. I know I'm building up to a thesis about "maybe looking for activism in fiction is poisoning my mind and I should stop hitching my internal morality to fiction" but that's a fucking great show.)
Rebellion
More than any scene in the game, of all things, I think about the starting party eating at a fancy diner. They’re trying to celebrate after defeating Kamoshida, feel some sense of success and joy after they’ve outed a predator. But these little sad moments keep happening. They speak a little too loud here, they spill something there, they lose track of their table, etc. They don’t know the social cues. They don’t belong in that rich society restaurant and everyone wants them gone. Their enthusiasm wanes bit by bit and you just get these sad kids who’s dream of a good time got crushed by the grim reality that they’re still outsiders.
And that’s when they start talking about becoming the Phantom Thieves full time.
It's a triumphant moment and the narrative knows it. This is their call to action, their decision to stand up for the little guy.
But there’s this unintentional (intentional?) subtext that these dumb teens just desperately want to be validated by their peers. It's rampant in Mishima’s storyline but it's always present if you look for it. So much of the game revolves around them seeking the approval of strangers online, to the point that being forgotten nearly destroys them. It's sad. It's so desperately sad.
After Okumura’s Palace, the cast wonder amongst themselves if they were truly fighting for justice or for vanity. It's partly just a typical “the heroes doubt themselves” story beat. But it ties into groundwork the game has set down before now.
Here’s the hard truth I’ve had to face as someone who loves history: any revolution will have unintentional victims. It's an inescapable fact, seen time and time again. So the essential question of revolution rests on a simple fact: is the violence inflicted by the existing corrupt state worse than the violence that will ensue in a revolution?
Much of the game wrestles with this, even if it doesn’t realize it. Is the violence of stealing a heart equal to the violence of these oppressive figures? I say no and I assume much of the audience shares that sentiment. Which is part of why I think the game’s final act rings so hollow for so many people. The final bosses of both versions of the game are provided as examples that the violence inherent in stealing a heart is too dangerous to hold onto long-term. “We can’t ethically hold onto this power. The public has to make these choices, not us.” That’s a fair message but the thing the game seems to somehow miss is that the characters are part of the public. They aren't above or outside it. Stepping away from their revolution because its getting too violent is... kind of bizarre. And sure, approaching this gets muddy when dealing with magical powers. But the public is being manipulated so they can’t make these choices. They’ve been provided the wrong information, on purpose, by political machines far beyond our scope. The messaging here falls flat.
The theme of “are we in danger of being baddies” also ends up pushing the heroes dangerously close to that “now that we beat the villains, let’s conform to the status quo again” storyline. We’ve seen this in Persona 4 and it was already bad there. And this is particularly aggravating with the changed ending for Royal. The original game lets you ride off into the sunset on a road trip with your friends. Royal? Not so much. Ryuji goes back to track, Ann goes back to being a model, the gang “grows up” past this rebellion. Just a childhood indulgence. Now they can join society and become Normal Good Workers. Maybe that’s not the meaning the designers intended to impart but it’s there.
Perhaps that’s the biggest issue with the game’s messaging. Intentionally or not, the information it gives you can be assimilated into existing ideas. It certainly points to dangerous targets. Sexual predators, plagiarists, short-staffing CEOs, malicious politicians. But its pledge to reshape society is more debatable. If the characters return to society in the Royal version, can we really say they’re truly still radicals? Can this game be a radical story? Did corporate demands water down the messaging? Or is it a more sinister thrall of moderate sentiments assimilating rebellion into acceptability? If the thing Royal mainly adds is more Ann perving, if that's their grand intention, what do they really have to say about anything that's worthwhile?
Assimilation or accommodation?
It's tough.
Apathy
The text of the game is that God has emerged to control the population, brainwash them to follow the status quo, and leave them resting in happy cages while he burns down the world. As with many of these rpgs, you gotta attack and dethrone god.
It's in the subtext and metaphor that I find this finale much more interesting.
The Phantom Thieves spend all their time warning the world about Shido. If they can make him confess, if they can just expose his crimes, they’re sure everything will work out. That’s what keeps them going.
Except, that’s not reality. Because the truth is, things are always more complicated than exposing/killing a few specific people.
The political machine that benefits from Shido won’t even let him confess. They cover it up, they use the media machine, and they prey on public fears. Shido has so effectively presented himself as a savior that the public cult of personality can’t grapple with the alternative. The system is so thoroughly rigged that the Phantom Thieves have no chance.
The Thieves panic and journey to the center of the collective subconscious. And that is where God exists, the physical manifestation of these systems. It keeps the public chained down, supported by their apathy and eagerness to hand their freedom over to an oppressive force. And when the Thieves are forced back into Shibuya, they’re confronted with a true look at the world. Everything around them, every building, streetlight, every street corner, is built of violence. The totality of existence is covered by the blood of the systems that built it.
And every passerby around them just ignores it. Violence and blood? Don’t be dramatic. It's just a normal street, a normal boring life. Any rebel that has pointed out these things is delusional or never existed in the first place. And this denial is so maddening that the few people that do see the evidence of violence around them feel crazy themselves.
To keep supporting these systems of violence, the history of its rebels are erased. The Thieves cease to exist. Locked away without a trace.
The only path of success left is to find the very soul of these apathetic systems, with all its Christian roots, and shoot it in the face.
Its this intentional? Fuck no. But its where my mind went playing it. I could try and justify my points by claiming some cultural aspect needs to be considered. Japan’s LDP has basically been in power for seventy years with only brief interruptions. The failure of the New Left movement in the 60s to 70s only compounded the party’s authority. I feel like that level of political stagnation and people’s willingness to put up with that bad status quo has to be considered when tied with the themes of the apathetic public.
But a white american claiming she “knows more” about a foreign country’s culture is cringe as fuck so, I do have to admit the theme just… works for me. It doesn’t have to work for you, would not force that on anyone. But… Desperately screaming against an apathetic society that won’t put in the effort to change, feeling bogged down by the fact that it’s just so much easier to fall into that same apathy than to keep screaming, and finally ending with shooting God in the face?
I can’t not think about it. The theme just works for me. Even if I start second-guessing myself with the same tired question.
Accommodation or assimilation?
But what’s left after all that? What’s left after all that 100 hour story? What’s waiting for you in this game?
Gameplay and Style
Fuck. Like. Fuck. Y’know? One of the main reasons its easy to enjoy this game is just how fucking fun the gameplay is. The speed of the combat, the flow of battle, the way all these systems blend into each other to be maximized and measured from beginning to end…. Fuck!
And the whole game just drips with aesthetics. Every visual, every menu screen, every music track, all perfectly calculated to this moody, jazzy feeling. Fucking stellar. Put that shit on my homebrewed 3DS and I don’t regret it.
Royal goes further and adds some mechanical flourishes. The fusion system now has periodic “alarms” if you’ve been grinding through Mementos a lot. Those alarms mean you can get new results from fusing or itemizing persona. Now getting a character’s ultimate weapon requires planning and deliberation rather than just throwing cash into the fusion grinder.
Royal’s new location Kichijoji also holds some special mechanical additions. The darts minigame helps improve the effectiveness of “baton passing”, letting characters infinitely weaponize the weakness of enemies and keep smacking them down. The billiards minigame improves technical attacks, using status debuffs to launch critical attacks and make it easier to launch All Out Attacks on a foe. And the jazz club lets you give your party special new skills, allowing greater freedom and customization of your party line up. It adds so much to the existing system. I went from barely engaging with vanilla P5’s gameplay to going full completionist on the Persona Compendium. It's just rad as hell.
Royal’s New Content
Akechi fucking rules.
This poor kid, abandoned by his father, desperately missing his mother, has launched a complicated revenge scheme to take down Shido. Bring Shido to the top of the world, then expose Shido as a fraud and be there to watch him fall. He’s so embraced this dream, he kills and betrays anyone to see the journey through.
But what’s truly sad about Akechi is how doomed his plan was from the start. Shido always knew Akechi was his secret son and was always planning on killing Akechi once he lost his use. We see how the political machine defends Shido and that’s proof that this secret child revelation would get covered up and suppressed in minutes. Akechi’s plan was never going to work.
But Akechi can’t accept that until it's too late. Because despite his hatred, despite his fury, he just desperately wants his dad to love him.
Royal’s bonus section, the third semester, is… weird. It's a compelling morality play about happiness versus trauma. If you could erase the traumas of your past and integrate yourself back into “respectable” society, would you? As the Phantom Thieves realize, their gut instinct would be yes. Deep down, they’d love to live normal lives again. But that would be a disrespect to that pain they grew from. Denying it happened denies themselves. It's hard, but they’re stronger for accepting it.
Akechi’s storyline features Akechi dropping the mask and just relishing in being a nasty little crime boy. The voice actor delights in going over the top nefarious, howling PERSONA like he’s clinging onto the edges of sanity.
And by extension, by bringing Akechi back, the game gives the protagonist/Joker/Kirby Styles a specific personality and desire outside of player action.
Joker wants Akechi back and he wants him to be more unhinged. He wants the mask off, he wants the true Akechi, even if that man is an asshole.
Outside of player control, Joker Persona 5 loves Akechi.
The final villain of this semester, Dr. Maruki, is a deeply sad man. His denial of a broken past only hurts him in the long run. He has to convert other people into his ideology because it's the only thing he has left. If you accept Maruki’s deal, Maruki isolates himself into a role as a kindly messiah. When he shows up in the bad ending scenes, his character portrait vanishes. He’s not a person anymore. He’s lost any human connections keeping him stable. Even when Maruki wins, he loses. Failure is his only option and it's the only way his life can get better.
To save Maruki, you have to destroy his delusional dream. To give Akechi his freedom, you have to let him die. You have to let Akechi make his choice for himself, even if it sends him off to his demise.
Still, there’s weirdness to the section. The third semester might have been better as an AU story, DLC, or some kind of spin-off novel. It just doesn’t flow with the main game’s themes and ideas. It's hard to go from shooting God in the face to “a happy cult.” I enjoyed it, but it's hard to argue in favor of the game’s themes when this section provides even more tangible proof of its inconsistency.
Coupled with the changed ending mentioned in the Rebellion section, it's hard to say that the new story content benefits the game overall. The additional Ann perving, the cast returning to their status quos... any defense I can make of Royal crumbles with the knowledge of what the devs chose to add. This was their vision.
Anyway
I don’t think Persona 5 is a perfect or consistent text. I think it fails in a lot of its efforts, particularly in how it treats women and minorities. I often flip-flop on how generous I’m feeling towards its themes and meanings, as is probably obvious in this twelve page rambling. I’ve seen the Disco Elysium image about capital and critique. A capital product cannot, truly, be a meaningful message under the material conditions we’re stuck in.
But I still get excited by the sense of freedom and rebellion this game offers. Maybe that’s me falling for it. Maybe that’s me getting subsumed by capital, falling under the sway of apathy and false promises, instead of making the kind of direct action I need to. I’m not as ideologically steadfast in my beliefs as I want to be.
And what does that mean for me?
I think it means I need to log the fuck off.
This review reached twelve pages at one point and I got this truly strange anxiety writing it. This endless dithering and agonizing about being a bad leftist, about failing, about exposing myself as a moron who was still untangling some ingrained societal shit. And it just suddenly hit me at some point how… hollow this feeling was. What does this anxiety do for me? Do for anyone? Does worrying about what media I consume actually impact the wider activism efforts, or is it just getting in the way of me doing that activism? It's the constant pattern of online activism, something I find it too easy to fall into, worrying so much about performance that I don’t actually do the real work.
Maybe it doesn’t have to be that deep. Maybe it doesn’t have to be all those things I wish it was. Maybe I don’t need to obsess and worry over defending how I feel about something.
Maybe sometimes I just need to be okay with enjoying a dumb video game, flaws and all.
I played Apex at launch for a handful of weeks, throughout "Season 0" and into the beginning of Season 1, and ever since then I had this itch in the back of my mind to go back to it because it's very fun and I really enjoy the cast of characters they've built. Finally, upon adding the goth trans mommy I decided that this character is laser targeted at me, specifically, and I had to jump back in. I played for a few days and had fun despite being terrible at it. And then one day I didn't play but I still felt this itch as I was getting ready for bed that night that maybe I should pop on real quick to check the dailies and that was when I knew I had to uninstall. It's just not how I want to engage with games - even ones that I really enjoy playing! I don't want to be thinking about daily quests and weeklies and what tier of the battle pass I'm at vs. what tier/rewards I want to get to. I've got enough Brain Problems going on, I don't need a video game to take advantage of me and make me feel worse. So, despite how much I do genuinely enjoy the movement and the gunplay and even the whole battle royale mode, I have to quit playing this because I can't stand the way the bits around the edge make me feel. Maybe if I were playing this with friends instead of solo and it had a more social element to it then I'd be willing to go back and play more. But I guess until then, I'm done with this game? Kind of a disappointing and depressing way to quit a game but I gotta do what's best for myself, y'know?
Catalyst is a 10/10 character tho, love her to death.
Catalyst is a 10/10 character tho, love her to death.
Egg
1998
2023, The Year of the Rabbit; a year of terrible significance. In the great country of Eggstonia, an undercooked scramble was beginning......
Orange Julius, the emperor walks up the stairs to the Curia of Poinpy as he hails his colleagues. A bearded eggish soothsayer approaches and speaks to Julius, "beware the ides of starch...."; they quickly leave much to Julius' confusion.
Suddenly, from behind Brutus and Cassius draw out their egg beaters and plunge them deep into the back of Julius' eggshell, yolk spills out onto the stairs as yellow becomes it's new coat of paint.
"Egg tu, Brute!?"
Orange Julius has been beaten to death. Chaos ensues, the country of Eggstonia now in political ruin; giant rolling siege weapons in the form of what would be the chicken become a common sight of what formerly was the peaceful sunny side of Eggstonia. Cities smashed underegg by these terrible Easter Sunday monoliths of death as warring empires look only to expand their territories without a worry for the common cackleberry.
"Omelette du fromage...." they sang in hopes that the goddess Midnerva would protect their battered shells from continued damage as the oval-shaped monstrosities roll over their once fair cities. Flattened, beaten, scrambled, fried; the once great country of Eggstonia now nothing but a destroyed mess of protein and healthy calories. Breakfast will be served, but not to anyone in Eggstonia....
camera tilts upwards revealing the narrator and true mastermind behind it all...
...Time to eat.
stabs the camera with fork
chews and swallows a bite and begins the real review
Not really my cup of tea, but if anything it does perfectly represent one of the many reasons why the PS1 has my favorite library of any system; experimentation hitting peak levels of bizarre. I thought about playing Power Shovel quick, but I think I gaslit Detchibe enough with the Game & Watch title a bit ago.
continues eating scrambled eggs
Orange Julius, the emperor walks up the stairs to the Curia of Poinpy as he hails his colleagues. A bearded eggish soothsayer approaches and speaks to Julius, "beware the ides of starch...."; they quickly leave much to Julius' confusion.
Suddenly, from behind Brutus and Cassius draw out their egg beaters and plunge them deep into the back of Julius' eggshell, yolk spills out onto the stairs as yellow becomes it's new coat of paint.
"Egg tu, Brute!?"
Orange Julius has been beaten to death. Chaos ensues, the country of Eggstonia now in political ruin; giant rolling siege weapons in the form of what would be the chicken become a common sight of what formerly was the peaceful sunny side of Eggstonia. Cities smashed underegg by these terrible Easter Sunday monoliths of death as warring empires look only to expand their territories without a worry for the common cackleberry.
"Omelette du fromage...." they sang in hopes that the goddess Midnerva would protect their battered shells from continued damage as the oval-shaped monstrosities roll over their once fair cities. Flattened, beaten, scrambled, fried; the once great country of Eggstonia now nothing but a destroyed mess of protein and healthy calories. Breakfast will be served, but not to anyone in Eggstonia....
camera tilts upwards revealing the narrator and true mastermind behind it all...
...Time to eat.
stabs the camera with fork
chews and swallows a bite and begins the real review
Not really my cup of tea, but if anything it does perfectly represent one of the many reasons why the PS1 has my favorite library of any system; experimentation hitting peak levels of bizarre. I thought about playing Power Shovel quick, but I think I gaslit Detchibe enough with the Game & Watch title a bit ago.
continues eating scrambled eggs
Asura's Wrath
2012
It's honestly fucking wild how hard I ended up falling in love with this game and what it was doing by the end when in the beginning it genuinely wasn't doing too much for me.
The over the top battle shounen vibes, which can work for me on occasion (Jujutsu Kaisen, recently got into Hunter x Hunter), don't generally hit for me. The story wasn't doing much for me, more man pain save the daughter god killing wasn't doing a ton for me.
But there's a point in this game where it finally just all clicked correctly into place. The way the game uses QTE's to better cement you within Asura's perspective. Every weighty punch and fluid blow landed or received absolutely felt by how much you hammer on those fuckin buttons.
The gusto and fucking aspirations towards making this shounen power trip about the angriest motherfucker alive doing his best to protect those he cares for. It just fuckin clicks. The setpieces get better and better. The QTE's become more personal and hard hitting. I was rooting for Asura and doing my best to help him. I wanted to get my synchronicity rating as perfect as I could because I felt the weight of every missed QTE.
It's corny to say but genuinely this game makes you FEEL like you are Asura. It makes you feel like you are throwing those punches, crunching your own hands to dust by mashing the fuck out of that circle button. And the intense varied ways a person can punch a dude are represented perfectly with the wonderfully expressive and beautiful art direction and animation. This is absolutely one of the better looking games of that gen while also being one of the better showcases I've seen of Unreal 3 on consoles. It looks fuckin excellent. The watercolor palette, the shimmer, the wonderful reds, greys and harsh black lines. It evokes every inch of its inspirations and then some.
The final boss (within the DLC) is genuinely one of the greatest uses of QTE's I think I've ever seen in my life. I'll go more into that in the review of the DLC specifically but holy fuck it's wild as hell.
I think what finally brought it into focus for me was thinking of it less as a character action game, because honestly while the combat is serviceable it's more a bridge to the setpieces than actually all that great, and more as a evolution of games like Dragon's Lair, Space Ace and Time Gal.
Once I looked at it more in that light, played much more aggressively with the combat and let the game take me onto it's wild ride it completely fucking hooked me. Some of the sequences, shots, compositions absolutely deserve to be immortalized in some fashion.
It couldn't really work the same at all within any other medium. While described as "interactive anime" I would say it's trying to pave its own footprint into cinematic gaming as a whole and changing the players relationship to QTE's themselves. It does its best to make you apart of the spectacle and it realized it's lofty ambitions with absolutely flying colors.
Asura's Wrath made me appreciate how systems we can take for granted as fairly basic in principle can be used to great effect when given more attention and focus and when working within the framework/narrative presented. MGR does similar but it don't hit in the same way this does with them. It's just so excellent.
I really gotta play more Cyberconnect2 games.
The over the top battle shounen vibes, which can work for me on occasion (Jujutsu Kaisen, recently got into Hunter x Hunter), don't generally hit for me. The story wasn't doing much for me, more man pain save the daughter god killing wasn't doing a ton for me.
But there's a point in this game where it finally just all clicked correctly into place. The way the game uses QTE's to better cement you within Asura's perspective. Every weighty punch and fluid blow landed or received absolutely felt by how much you hammer on those fuckin buttons.
The gusto and fucking aspirations towards making this shounen power trip about the angriest motherfucker alive doing his best to protect those he cares for. It just fuckin clicks. The setpieces get better and better. The QTE's become more personal and hard hitting. I was rooting for Asura and doing my best to help him. I wanted to get my synchronicity rating as perfect as I could because I felt the weight of every missed QTE.
It's corny to say but genuinely this game makes you FEEL like you are Asura. It makes you feel like you are throwing those punches, crunching your own hands to dust by mashing the fuck out of that circle button. And the intense varied ways a person can punch a dude are represented perfectly with the wonderfully expressive and beautiful art direction and animation. This is absolutely one of the better looking games of that gen while also being one of the better showcases I've seen of Unreal 3 on consoles. It looks fuckin excellent. The watercolor palette, the shimmer, the wonderful reds, greys and harsh black lines. It evokes every inch of its inspirations and then some.
The final boss (within the DLC) is genuinely one of the greatest uses of QTE's I think I've ever seen in my life. I'll go more into that in the review of the DLC specifically but holy fuck it's wild as hell.
I think what finally brought it into focus for me was thinking of it less as a character action game, because honestly while the combat is serviceable it's more a bridge to the setpieces than actually all that great, and more as a evolution of games like Dragon's Lair, Space Ace and Time Gal.
Once I looked at it more in that light, played much more aggressively with the combat and let the game take me onto it's wild ride it completely fucking hooked me. Some of the sequences, shots, compositions absolutely deserve to be immortalized in some fashion.
It couldn't really work the same at all within any other medium. While described as "interactive anime" I would say it's trying to pave its own footprint into cinematic gaming as a whole and changing the players relationship to QTE's themselves. It does its best to make you apart of the spectacle and it realized it's lofty ambitions with absolutely flying colors.
Asura's Wrath made me appreciate how systems we can take for granted as fairly basic in principle can be used to great effect when given more attention and focus and when working within the framework/narrative presented. MGR does similar but it don't hit in the same way this does with them. It's just so excellent.
I really gotta play more Cyberconnect2 games.
No More Heroes
2007
I think everything about No More Heroes is perfect except the part that involves playing the game
Your reward for completing the game is being able to play as EVERY character in it! Including the bosses and minor enemies!
10/10 for that ALONE, who gives a fuck if it has flaws. It had BALLS.
10/10 for that ALONE, who gives a fuck if it has flaws. It had BALLS.
Vampire Survivors
2021
not morally egregious per se but rather a depressing culmination of a decade's worth of design trickery and (d)evolving cultural/social tastes and otherwise exists as insipid twitchcore autoplaying bullshit that should come with a contractual agreement binding its devotees to never speak prejudicially about mobile games or musou ever again lest they face legally enforced financial restitution. just play nex machina man. or watch NFL. been a fun season for that. fuck the review man let's talk sports in the comments
fully automated gambling is a mainstay of digital entertainment, but whenever its presence is established in other titles i never once felt the need to participate. too much time, too little reward. i imagine most players feel the same given the achievement stats for new vegas, a title where hustling on the strip is the game’s core motif. and yet in spite of my disposition, i found myself spending an inordinate amount of time in red dead redemption II playing poker. when i wasn’t playing poker, i’d be hitting blackjack, and if i wasn’t betting against the dealer i’d be making my bones in dominoes. on paper, none of this served any real practical purpose. unlike the brisk pleasures of most computerized gambling, a round of poker in RDR2 takes much, much more time – your opponents need to shuffle the deck, lay out the cards, or place their chips on a bet. sometimes their decisions won’t be near instantaneous, and in all cases, the victor will smugly reap the spoils of their bet, dragging their hoard of chips inwards. as if the protracted length of gambling wasn’t enough, RDR2 axes the high-stakes poker variant from the original game, so even in the best-case scenario – a six player poker match, no player leaves early, and you rob everyone of their chips – you can only stand to net $25 dollars in profit. a handsome sum in 1899, but a pittance in contrast to RDR2’s other revenue streams, especially when you factor in the time investment. it’s all too likely you’ll end up losing money if you gamble poorly. why bother?
i still gambled a lot though. no matter the inconvenience of the supposed realism on offer, i wanted to fleece people. i wanted to stop and think about my decisions, and i wanted to withstand droughts of bad luck only to tap in when fortune was turning in my favour. and i guess uncle’s smug aura at camp made me want to rip him off all the more. the defining trait which enables this engagement is also RDR2’s greatest strength: the level of verisimilitude it aspires to. the slowing-down-of-affairs intrinsic to RDR2 is somewhat uncharacteristic of rockstar, but they’ve thrown their immense weight behind a kind of granularity not often observed even in comparable massive AAA productions. i honestly think it saved the game for me. i had to force myself through gritted teeth to finish the first red dead and GTA IV, and i’ll never finish GTA V at this rate, but conversely for close to three weeks straight i lost myself in rockstar’s portrait of the old, dying west, however illusory it was.
GTA is very much predicated on extreme player agency in real-world facsimile. the dedication the team committed to this vision creates this inherent friction where in the absence of real limitation, the world rarely feels alive but feels more akin to a little diorama or a quite literal playspace. the devil is always in the details with these titles, but i find the fetishism for the microscopic to be little more than framing at best and rote at worst. maybe if you walk the streets of san andreas in GTA V and get lost in a suburb, quietly observing the mundane (they need an umarell minigame in these games), a lived-in feeling really does exist, but this does not feel like genuine intent so much as it feels like supporting the foundation of american pantomime.
while the quotidian is nothing more than a byproduct in GTA, its function in RDR2 is the games essence. new to the series are various impositions which carefully stitch together simulation elements, asking for a stronger degree of investment from the player than past rockstar entries, both in a literal and abstracted sense. hunger and stamina have to be continually managed for both the player and their steed, money is harder to come by than prior rockstar games, and every activity (hunting, fishing, crafting, cooking, gambling, weapons maintenance, chores + camp support, horse grooming, even just simple travel given that fast travel isn’t immediately present) represents an innate time investment – gone is the sense of casual gratification, tightened ever so slightly more for the sake of a more cohesive world. naturally i’d be remiss to not point out they’re intrusive to only the mildest of degrees - it’s certainly the ‘fastest’ game ive ever played with a simulation bent - and rockstar’s aim here isn’t necessarily to rock the boat but instead one of vanity, to impress with their technological prowess and visual panache.
i understand that rockstar titles are now once-in-a-generation events subject to whatever epoch of games discourse they are releasing in but it is with great amusement that i look back to two strands of dominant conversation at the time of the game’s release: that it is too realistic for its own good, and that its mission design is archaic. both are conversational topics that, at least from my perspective, miss the forest for the trees with critical rdr2 discussion, and at least partially feel like people taking rockstar to task for GTA IV & V’s design after forgetting to do so the first time. firstly, everything addressed as cumbersome in rdr2 is polished to a mirror sheen; whatever truth might be found regarding rockstars digital fetishism impacting personal enjoyment loses a bit of edge when one considers that the inconveniences imposed on the player are essentially operating at a bare minimum. for every measure of sternness here there is a comical remedy. players might be expected to have attire fitting for the climate zone they travel in lest they suffer core drainage, but the reality is that preparation is easy, conducted through lenient menu selection, and at no point is the player strictly via the main narrative made to trudge through the underutilized snowy regions. even a snowy mission in the epilogue automatically equips you with a warm coat, negating the need for foresight. temperature penalties are easily negated for lengthy periods of time if you consume meals that fortify your cores. you don’t even really, honestly have to eat. the penalties associated with the ‘underweight’ class don’t obstruct players very much and individuals can forego the core system entirely just to rely on health cures and tonics alike, meaning it’s a survival/simulation system carefully planned out so certain kinds of players don’t actually have to engage with the systems at all. the most egregious offender for the audience, then, is time investment, for which my rebuttal is nothing so eloquent: just that it’s barely a significant one. there’s something genuinely fascinating about this undercurrent of somewhat strained response to an AAA production making the slightest of efforts to cultivate a stricter set of systems for immersion only to be met with the claim that it goes against the basic appeal of games, something which i at least find consistently prescriptive, contradictory, and totally self-interested. that breath of the wilds approach to open world design predates this is probably at least somewhat contributory - after all its priorities are to filter reality and freedom through more sharply accented and cohesive game design, far from the totalizing rigidity of rockstars work – but it’s not a case of one needing to mimic the other when it’s simpler to state that the contrasting titles just have different priorities. all this is to say that RDR2 is really missing something without some kind of hardcore mode, which would have probably increased my personal enjoyment exponentially and led to a tighter game.
secondly, the complaints regarding mission design are reductive and downplay a much, much broader foundational problem. there are a lot more missions that i actually liked compared to the usual rockstar fare this time, in part because character dialogue is mostly serviceable and not grating, but also because several of them are content to serve characterization or to convey some kind of tailored experience. all the best missions bring the combat to a halt rather than a crescendo. serve on a mission alongside hosea, for instance, and the odds are unlikely you’ll end up drawing your revolver. likewise certain missions are focused entirely on camaraderie, narrative, or some other kind of unique quality. this works really well in spite of the game’s tendency to anchor the proceedings to the mechanically dull yet market-proven gunslinging. it’s unfortunate to center so much of this game around combat when the shooting rarely, if ever, registers as more than serviceable; pulling the trigger feels great, but its repetition, lack of intimate level or encounter design, and oddly weighted aiming reticule underscore a game in need of some kind of revision. strangely enough there are many options for mixing melee approaches and gunslinging in a manner that feels close to appealing but is never leaned on because it’s just not efficient, paired nicely with level design, or geared towards survivability. likewise, the scores of ammunition types and combative crafting options feels redundant in the face of the simplicity of the ol’ reliable revolver and repeater, the lack of genuine ammunition limitation (you’re always able to stock more ammo than you could ever reasonably need) and every enemy’s total vulnerability to precise aim.
but the fact that there are genuinely enjoyable missions that focus more on the game’s verisimilitude is indicative of my chief takeaway from RDR2: all of my favourite components of the game managed to make me finally understand the appeal of the rockstar portfolio, and all of my least favourite components reminded me that i was playing a rockstar game, with a formula and brand reputation that now serves as a millstone around the neck obstructing genuine innovation or risk. for one thing, it was absolutely lost on me until RDR2 that these are open world games which are concerned with a loose sense of role playing but don’t much care for the implementation of stats, skill trees, abilities, or what have you. because these systems are handled with more care than in the past, i found there to be genuine pleasure in this complete reprieve from the mechanical, with an emphasis towards simply just existing and being. without the admittedly illusory constraints of the core systems or the time investment required from its activities, i may not have stopped to have felt any of it – it would have been every bit as inconsequential as GTA. but RDR2 demands to be soaked in. its landscapes really are vast and gorgeous. the permutations of the weather can lead to some dazzling displays; tracking and hunting down the legendary wolf at the cotorra springs during a thunderstorm is imagery permanently seared into my brain even after dozens upon dozens of hours of play.
however well-intentioned it is though, this emphasis on simulation betrays a tendency towards excess that is profoundly damaging and saddles RDR2 with a lot of detritus where a sharper lens would have benefitted its approach to simulation. this is especially bad when considering that a good deal of these extraneous elements are where the crunch surrounding RDR2’s development is most inextricably felt. broader discourse often struggles to find a way to discuss bad labour practices without either treating it as a footnote in the history of an otherwise ‘good’ title (thereby excising its role in production completely) or only writing about it from a pro-labour critical stance, but RDR2 makes my work in reconciling these threads easy: it’s just too sweeping in scope for its own good, and it’s difficult to see how mismanagement and crunch resulted in a better game. after years of these scathing reports and discussions, it’s hard not to let out a grim chuckle when you reach the game’s epilogue, which opens up an entire state in RDR2, only to realize that all this landmass has zero main narrative context. new austin and the grizzlies are massive regions, perhaps not pointless in their inclusion per se, but the campaign has difficulties integrating them yet leaves them present in their totality. it’s a wealth of untamed land included for its own sake.
this is especially frustrating because the game’s structure is suggestive of, strangely enough, sly cooper. the van der linde gang moves further and further away from the west over the course of the game into new and uncharted territory and in each chapter, comes to grips with the surrounding locales trying to pinpoint where the next great score or heist may present itself. every time seems like a small reinvention. the atmosphere at camp changes, new dialogues present themselves, new opportunities, and the narrative is content to settle on one small pocket of the world rather than its sum. perhaps it’s not the rockstar modus operandi but when i realized this was the game’s impetus, i thought it would have been a fantastic way to try something different, for a change – to focus on a small number of higher density regions with a bit less sprawl. i think at least part of why i feel this way is because the narrative is not one bit committed to its stakes. they want you to feel like an outlaw on the run, the law at your heels, the world shrinking around you, and your freedoms slowly being siphoned away, and yet there’s no tangible consequence in RDR2’s worldstate for sticking around valentine, strawberry, or rhodes – three towns that you wreak significant havoc in – like there is for even daring to return to blackwater, the site of a massacre which kickstarts the events of the game proper. obviously the ability to return to blackwater would break the story on its hinges, which is treated as such, but it’s hard to say why any other town gets a free pass.
anyways i find it somewhat ironic that after a journey replete with as many peaks and valleys as the old west it's modeled on, it's the comparatively muted epilogue which is still holding my attention and adoration. the first game's epilogue was, similarly, a striking coda to a wildly uneven experience. after screeching to a halt for its final act, RDR1's culminating grace notes center around a hollow, self-gratifying act of vengeance which succinctly underscored the alienation & ennui of the world you were left stranded in. it was a weirdly audacious swing for rockstar to take in 2010 - to explicate the ever-present emptiness and artificiality of their worlds as part and parcel of RDR1's thematic intent – but in spite of my dislike of the rest of the title, i found that it resonated with me.
RDR2 has a somewhat similar ace up its sleeve. following the game's highest point of intensity, the player (now with john marston taking the reins instead of arthur morgan) is thrust into a narrative scenario ill at ease with the game's prior formal language, seemingly begging at all turns for the player to put up their guns. every triumph in the epilogue chapters won by means of gunslinging bravado is, as a result, sharply dissonant; the score is often explosive, almost mythic in the way that it recalls RDR1, but there's a sort of uncanniness present because, in leveraging its prequel status, one has total clarity as to where this path eventually leads. like in RDR1, the throughline here is still one of inevitability.
complimenting this is the epilogue's equal amount of focus afforded towards john struggling to acclimate to the simple pleasures of domesticity. a natural extension of john’s unexpectedly genius characterization in RDR2’s narrative up to this point as arthur’s perpetually irresponsible and imprudent little brother, this focus on smaller-scale character study allows for his character to be more fleshed-out than he ever was in RDR1. similarly, the missions present in the epilogue are afforded more variance than anywhere else in the main game, taking the title’s previously established simulation elements and bringing them to the forefront of the proceedings. taking your wife out for a nice day in the town is probably my favourite mission in the game - it felt tender in a way that i have never once come to expect from these titles.
it's a taut novella that honestly represents some of rockstars finest work, so naturally it's only accessible after some 40-70 hours of ho hum debauchery and mediocrity. no reason to waste more time on this so let’s carve through the more important bullet points quickly. arthur is a wonderful protagonist, likely the best rockstar has conceptualized for how he compliments the structure of these games. he’s someone who isn’t a lone wolf nor a second-in-command, but rather a mover and shaker who is third in the hierarchy and remains blinded by both loyalty, cynicism, and self-hatred. it’s a reasonable enough marriage between the game’s pressing narrative demands and the freedom to act that a rockstar title is built on, disregarding the horrid implementation of a trite morality system. all the little flourishes animating his character are excellent – the journal he writes in quickly became one of my favourite features of the game. roger clark’s performance alone is enough to carry the game’s writing when it sags, which it often does – clemens point and guarma are terrible chapters. side quests are also largely bad, save for a few that present themselves in the beaver hollow chapter - up until this point they are rife with the kind of desperate attempts at juvenile humour rockstar built their empire on. it’s less good that so much of arthur’s arc is connected to the game’s worst characters in dutch and micah. rockstar’s writers just do not have the capacity and talent to bring the vision of a charismatic leader to life in dutch – they want you to believe in the slow-brewing ruination of the gang and dutch’s descent into despotism but the reality is he starts the game off as an insecure, inept, and frayed captain and only gets much, much worse as the game chugs along. micah is just despicable and not in a compelling way, an active thorn in everyone’s side who no one likes and whose presence makes everything worse. reading about the van der linde gang’s initially noble exploits in-game and contrasting it with an early mission where micah kills almost everyone in a town to retrieve his revolvers is actively comical and it never really stops gnawing at one’s mind. just registers as a total impossibility that not one person in the gang considers this guy an active liability to continued survival. i think he’s someone who can be salvaged since he’s already an inverse to arthur and implicitly serves as a foil to john but not enough work was done to make these elements of the character grounded or believable. cartoon villain level depravity, dude sucks.
the rest of the characters range broadly from underused & underwritten to charming in a quaint way. arthur and john are the highlights, i liked charles and uncle, the rest...mixed bag of successes and failures. javier and bill are more well-realized than their RDR1 incarnations, but most of their character work is tucked away in optional & hidden scenes. sadie is one of the few other characters to be given narrative prominence towards the end, and she kind of really sucks. the list goes on. despite this, lingering in camp is so easily one of the game's strongest draws - wandering around and seeing hundreds upon hundreds of little randomized interactions is a delight, and there's no doubt in my mind that i still missed scores of them.
those more inclined to cynicism probably won't be able to reconcile any of this game's messy threads, and its strengths will likely be eclipsed by its tendencies towards waste as well as its tactless emulation of prestige drama, but for a time i found my own pleasure in the illusion of the west. i think i felt enthralled by it realizing that this was the closest to a great experience rockstar had in them, knowing that they're only likely to regress from here on. rockstar has an unfortunate habit of only being able to conceptualize one’s relationship to their environment if it’s predicated on danger, but at its best RDR2 is able to overcome this, however briefly it might last.
i still gambled a lot though. no matter the inconvenience of the supposed realism on offer, i wanted to fleece people. i wanted to stop and think about my decisions, and i wanted to withstand droughts of bad luck only to tap in when fortune was turning in my favour. and i guess uncle’s smug aura at camp made me want to rip him off all the more. the defining trait which enables this engagement is also RDR2’s greatest strength: the level of verisimilitude it aspires to. the slowing-down-of-affairs intrinsic to RDR2 is somewhat uncharacteristic of rockstar, but they’ve thrown their immense weight behind a kind of granularity not often observed even in comparable massive AAA productions. i honestly think it saved the game for me. i had to force myself through gritted teeth to finish the first red dead and GTA IV, and i’ll never finish GTA V at this rate, but conversely for close to three weeks straight i lost myself in rockstar’s portrait of the old, dying west, however illusory it was.
GTA is very much predicated on extreme player agency in real-world facsimile. the dedication the team committed to this vision creates this inherent friction where in the absence of real limitation, the world rarely feels alive but feels more akin to a little diorama or a quite literal playspace. the devil is always in the details with these titles, but i find the fetishism for the microscopic to be little more than framing at best and rote at worst. maybe if you walk the streets of san andreas in GTA V and get lost in a suburb, quietly observing the mundane (they need an umarell minigame in these games), a lived-in feeling really does exist, but this does not feel like genuine intent so much as it feels like supporting the foundation of american pantomime.
while the quotidian is nothing more than a byproduct in GTA, its function in RDR2 is the games essence. new to the series are various impositions which carefully stitch together simulation elements, asking for a stronger degree of investment from the player than past rockstar entries, both in a literal and abstracted sense. hunger and stamina have to be continually managed for both the player and their steed, money is harder to come by than prior rockstar games, and every activity (hunting, fishing, crafting, cooking, gambling, weapons maintenance, chores + camp support, horse grooming, even just simple travel given that fast travel isn’t immediately present) represents an innate time investment – gone is the sense of casual gratification, tightened ever so slightly more for the sake of a more cohesive world. naturally i’d be remiss to not point out they’re intrusive to only the mildest of degrees - it’s certainly the ‘fastest’ game ive ever played with a simulation bent - and rockstar’s aim here isn’t necessarily to rock the boat but instead one of vanity, to impress with their technological prowess and visual panache.
i understand that rockstar titles are now once-in-a-generation events subject to whatever epoch of games discourse they are releasing in but it is with great amusement that i look back to two strands of dominant conversation at the time of the game’s release: that it is too realistic for its own good, and that its mission design is archaic. both are conversational topics that, at least from my perspective, miss the forest for the trees with critical rdr2 discussion, and at least partially feel like people taking rockstar to task for GTA IV & V’s design after forgetting to do so the first time. firstly, everything addressed as cumbersome in rdr2 is polished to a mirror sheen; whatever truth might be found regarding rockstars digital fetishism impacting personal enjoyment loses a bit of edge when one considers that the inconveniences imposed on the player are essentially operating at a bare minimum. for every measure of sternness here there is a comical remedy. players might be expected to have attire fitting for the climate zone they travel in lest they suffer core drainage, but the reality is that preparation is easy, conducted through lenient menu selection, and at no point is the player strictly via the main narrative made to trudge through the underutilized snowy regions. even a snowy mission in the epilogue automatically equips you with a warm coat, negating the need for foresight. temperature penalties are easily negated for lengthy periods of time if you consume meals that fortify your cores. you don’t even really, honestly have to eat. the penalties associated with the ‘underweight’ class don’t obstruct players very much and individuals can forego the core system entirely just to rely on health cures and tonics alike, meaning it’s a survival/simulation system carefully planned out so certain kinds of players don’t actually have to engage with the systems at all. the most egregious offender for the audience, then, is time investment, for which my rebuttal is nothing so eloquent: just that it’s barely a significant one. there’s something genuinely fascinating about this undercurrent of somewhat strained response to an AAA production making the slightest of efforts to cultivate a stricter set of systems for immersion only to be met with the claim that it goes against the basic appeal of games, something which i at least find consistently prescriptive, contradictory, and totally self-interested. that breath of the wilds approach to open world design predates this is probably at least somewhat contributory - after all its priorities are to filter reality and freedom through more sharply accented and cohesive game design, far from the totalizing rigidity of rockstars work – but it’s not a case of one needing to mimic the other when it’s simpler to state that the contrasting titles just have different priorities. all this is to say that RDR2 is really missing something without some kind of hardcore mode, which would have probably increased my personal enjoyment exponentially and led to a tighter game.
secondly, the complaints regarding mission design are reductive and downplay a much, much broader foundational problem. there are a lot more missions that i actually liked compared to the usual rockstar fare this time, in part because character dialogue is mostly serviceable and not grating, but also because several of them are content to serve characterization or to convey some kind of tailored experience. all the best missions bring the combat to a halt rather than a crescendo. serve on a mission alongside hosea, for instance, and the odds are unlikely you’ll end up drawing your revolver. likewise certain missions are focused entirely on camaraderie, narrative, or some other kind of unique quality. this works really well in spite of the game’s tendency to anchor the proceedings to the mechanically dull yet market-proven gunslinging. it’s unfortunate to center so much of this game around combat when the shooting rarely, if ever, registers as more than serviceable; pulling the trigger feels great, but its repetition, lack of intimate level or encounter design, and oddly weighted aiming reticule underscore a game in need of some kind of revision. strangely enough there are many options for mixing melee approaches and gunslinging in a manner that feels close to appealing but is never leaned on because it’s just not efficient, paired nicely with level design, or geared towards survivability. likewise, the scores of ammunition types and combative crafting options feels redundant in the face of the simplicity of the ol’ reliable revolver and repeater, the lack of genuine ammunition limitation (you’re always able to stock more ammo than you could ever reasonably need) and every enemy’s total vulnerability to precise aim.
but the fact that there are genuinely enjoyable missions that focus more on the game’s verisimilitude is indicative of my chief takeaway from RDR2: all of my favourite components of the game managed to make me finally understand the appeal of the rockstar portfolio, and all of my least favourite components reminded me that i was playing a rockstar game, with a formula and brand reputation that now serves as a millstone around the neck obstructing genuine innovation or risk. for one thing, it was absolutely lost on me until RDR2 that these are open world games which are concerned with a loose sense of role playing but don’t much care for the implementation of stats, skill trees, abilities, or what have you. because these systems are handled with more care than in the past, i found there to be genuine pleasure in this complete reprieve from the mechanical, with an emphasis towards simply just existing and being. without the admittedly illusory constraints of the core systems or the time investment required from its activities, i may not have stopped to have felt any of it – it would have been every bit as inconsequential as GTA. but RDR2 demands to be soaked in. its landscapes really are vast and gorgeous. the permutations of the weather can lead to some dazzling displays; tracking and hunting down the legendary wolf at the cotorra springs during a thunderstorm is imagery permanently seared into my brain even after dozens upon dozens of hours of play.
however well-intentioned it is though, this emphasis on simulation betrays a tendency towards excess that is profoundly damaging and saddles RDR2 with a lot of detritus where a sharper lens would have benefitted its approach to simulation. this is especially bad when considering that a good deal of these extraneous elements are where the crunch surrounding RDR2’s development is most inextricably felt. broader discourse often struggles to find a way to discuss bad labour practices without either treating it as a footnote in the history of an otherwise ‘good’ title (thereby excising its role in production completely) or only writing about it from a pro-labour critical stance, but RDR2 makes my work in reconciling these threads easy: it’s just too sweeping in scope for its own good, and it’s difficult to see how mismanagement and crunch resulted in a better game. after years of these scathing reports and discussions, it’s hard not to let out a grim chuckle when you reach the game’s epilogue, which opens up an entire state in RDR2, only to realize that all this landmass has zero main narrative context. new austin and the grizzlies are massive regions, perhaps not pointless in their inclusion per se, but the campaign has difficulties integrating them yet leaves them present in their totality. it’s a wealth of untamed land included for its own sake.
this is especially frustrating because the game’s structure is suggestive of, strangely enough, sly cooper. the van der linde gang moves further and further away from the west over the course of the game into new and uncharted territory and in each chapter, comes to grips with the surrounding locales trying to pinpoint where the next great score or heist may present itself. every time seems like a small reinvention. the atmosphere at camp changes, new dialogues present themselves, new opportunities, and the narrative is content to settle on one small pocket of the world rather than its sum. perhaps it’s not the rockstar modus operandi but when i realized this was the game’s impetus, i thought it would have been a fantastic way to try something different, for a change – to focus on a small number of higher density regions with a bit less sprawl. i think at least part of why i feel this way is because the narrative is not one bit committed to its stakes. they want you to feel like an outlaw on the run, the law at your heels, the world shrinking around you, and your freedoms slowly being siphoned away, and yet there’s no tangible consequence in RDR2’s worldstate for sticking around valentine, strawberry, or rhodes – three towns that you wreak significant havoc in – like there is for even daring to return to blackwater, the site of a massacre which kickstarts the events of the game proper. obviously the ability to return to blackwater would break the story on its hinges, which is treated as such, but it’s hard to say why any other town gets a free pass.
anyways i find it somewhat ironic that after a journey replete with as many peaks and valleys as the old west it's modeled on, it's the comparatively muted epilogue which is still holding my attention and adoration. the first game's epilogue was, similarly, a striking coda to a wildly uneven experience. after screeching to a halt for its final act, RDR1's culminating grace notes center around a hollow, self-gratifying act of vengeance which succinctly underscored the alienation & ennui of the world you were left stranded in. it was a weirdly audacious swing for rockstar to take in 2010 - to explicate the ever-present emptiness and artificiality of their worlds as part and parcel of RDR1's thematic intent – but in spite of my dislike of the rest of the title, i found that it resonated with me.
RDR2 has a somewhat similar ace up its sleeve. following the game's highest point of intensity, the player (now with john marston taking the reins instead of arthur morgan) is thrust into a narrative scenario ill at ease with the game's prior formal language, seemingly begging at all turns for the player to put up their guns. every triumph in the epilogue chapters won by means of gunslinging bravado is, as a result, sharply dissonant; the score is often explosive, almost mythic in the way that it recalls RDR1, but there's a sort of uncanniness present because, in leveraging its prequel status, one has total clarity as to where this path eventually leads. like in RDR1, the throughline here is still one of inevitability.
complimenting this is the epilogue's equal amount of focus afforded towards john struggling to acclimate to the simple pleasures of domesticity. a natural extension of john’s unexpectedly genius characterization in RDR2’s narrative up to this point as arthur’s perpetually irresponsible and imprudent little brother, this focus on smaller-scale character study allows for his character to be more fleshed-out than he ever was in RDR1. similarly, the missions present in the epilogue are afforded more variance than anywhere else in the main game, taking the title’s previously established simulation elements and bringing them to the forefront of the proceedings. taking your wife out for a nice day in the town is probably my favourite mission in the game - it felt tender in a way that i have never once come to expect from these titles.
it's a taut novella that honestly represents some of rockstars finest work, so naturally it's only accessible after some 40-70 hours of ho hum debauchery and mediocrity. no reason to waste more time on this so let’s carve through the more important bullet points quickly. arthur is a wonderful protagonist, likely the best rockstar has conceptualized for how he compliments the structure of these games. he’s someone who isn’t a lone wolf nor a second-in-command, but rather a mover and shaker who is third in the hierarchy and remains blinded by both loyalty, cynicism, and self-hatred. it’s a reasonable enough marriage between the game’s pressing narrative demands and the freedom to act that a rockstar title is built on, disregarding the horrid implementation of a trite morality system. all the little flourishes animating his character are excellent – the journal he writes in quickly became one of my favourite features of the game. roger clark’s performance alone is enough to carry the game’s writing when it sags, which it often does – clemens point and guarma are terrible chapters. side quests are also largely bad, save for a few that present themselves in the beaver hollow chapter - up until this point they are rife with the kind of desperate attempts at juvenile humour rockstar built their empire on. it’s less good that so much of arthur’s arc is connected to the game’s worst characters in dutch and micah. rockstar’s writers just do not have the capacity and talent to bring the vision of a charismatic leader to life in dutch – they want you to believe in the slow-brewing ruination of the gang and dutch’s descent into despotism but the reality is he starts the game off as an insecure, inept, and frayed captain and only gets much, much worse as the game chugs along. micah is just despicable and not in a compelling way, an active thorn in everyone’s side who no one likes and whose presence makes everything worse. reading about the van der linde gang’s initially noble exploits in-game and contrasting it with an early mission where micah kills almost everyone in a town to retrieve his revolvers is actively comical and it never really stops gnawing at one’s mind. just registers as a total impossibility that not one person in the gang considers this guy an active liability to continued survival. i think he’s someone who can be salvaged since he’s already an inverse to arthur and implicitly serves as a foil to john but not enough work was done to make these elements of the character grounded or believable. cartoon villain level depravity, dude sucks.
the rest of the characters range broadly from underused & underwritten to charming in a quaint way. arthur and john are the highlights, i liked charles and uncle, the rest...mixed bag of successes and failures. javier and bill are more well-realized than their RDR1 incarnations, but most of their character work is tucked away in optional & hidden scenes. sadie is one of the few other characters to be given narrative prominence towards the end, and she kind of really sucks. the list goes on. despite this, lingering in camp is so easily one of the game's strongest draws - wandering around and seeing hundreds upon hundreds of little randomized interactions is a delight, and there's no doubt in my mind that i still missed scores of them.
those more inclined to cynicism probably won't be able to reconcile any of this game's messy threads, and its strengths will likely be eclipsed by its tendencies towards waste as well as its tactless emulation of prestige drama, but for a time i found my own pleasure in the illusion of the west. i think i felt enthralled by it realizing that this was the closest to a great experience rockstar had in them, knowing that they're only likely to regress from here on. rockstar has an unfortunate habit of only being able to conceptualize one’s relationship to their environment if it’s predicated on danger, but at its best RDR2 is able to overcome this, however briefly it might last.
Yakuza 0
2015
i could smell kiryu's cologne mixed with cigarettes during the whole game i swear to you