There was no guarantee that it would turn out like this. After the one-two punch of the first two Ys games in 1987 and 1988, the series would take a number of perplexing turns through the late 80s and early 90s. Ys III, originally intended as a gaiden, was a side-scrolling platformer with only the barest hints of RPG elements. Then the two primary creative forces behind the first three Ys games, Tomoyoshi Miyazaki and Masaya Hashimoto, left to found Quintet before a proper sequel could be developed. Unable to deliver a full game on its own, Nihon Falcom provided a scenario and music for two versions of Ys IV, both released in 1993: Tonkin House’s abysmal Mask of the Sun for Super Famicom, and Hudon’s Dawn of Ys for PC Engine CD-ROM², a highly-polished follow-up to the superlative PC Engine CD-ROM² ports of the first two games. Both versions of Ys IV strive to recreate the gameplay and style of the first two Ys games, but neither has a clue about how to evolve Ys beyond the basic bump combat that was growing stale by 1993.

The real death blow to the series, though, was 1995’s Ys V: Lost Kefin, Kingdom of Sand, a late Super Famicom release developed by Falcom that makes the first real stab at defining the future of the series. Ditching bump combat in favor of dedicated attack and jump buttons, Ys V plays a lot like a Quintet game, except it lacks the elegant construction and polish of games such as Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma. While it's a memorable adventure with many of Falcom’s classic touches (the soundtrack whips), it’s clearly rushed. The difficulty is wildly uneven, the attempts at platforming fall flat, and technical issues such as loading times reveal Falcom’s lack of expertise working with the Super Famicom hardware. It’s not a bad action-RPG, but it’s not Ys.

The only signs of Ys’s continued survival as a series for the rest of the 90s were well-received remakes of Ys I and II. This is where the story could have ended. Ys could have gone the way of Hydlide or any number of the other influential Japanese role-playing series that couldn’t keep up with the times. Even Falcom itself, by this point reduced to subsisting primarily on low-budget Windows games, seemed headed for a similar fate as its 80s Japanese microcomputer contemporaries. But instead we got Ys VI, the beginning of a remarkable second life not just for Ys but for Falcom as a whole.

After being sucked into the Great Vortex, a thinly veiled version of the Bermuda Triangle, Adol finds himself on the Canaan Islands, a thinly veiled pastiche of a Caribbean island chain dominated by the tension between its native peoples (the Rehda) and largely European colonizers (the Eresians). While the overarching story itself is no great shakes, Falcom’s gift for applying the sweeping grandeur of mythological fantasy bullshit to small-scale settings shines through.

There are only two small towns and a handful of other NPCs, but every character has a name, a character portrait, a personality, and even their own ongoing arcs. The little dramas that play out, from the town drunk turning a new leaf to the two siblings running rival shops, lend the game its heart. Perhaps the strongest of these threads is how the Eresians, largely trapped on the islands by the Great Vortex against their will, have learned to live on the islands. Some have embraced their fate, while others are haunted by it.

Doubling down on Ys V’s more traditional action-RPG mechanics, Ys VI’s combat is built around attack and jump buttons along with a very basic magic system. While it adds some new twists such as leveling up your three elemental swords, it’s surprisingly close to a highly refined version of Ys V’s combat. Unlike Ys V though, Ys VI’s combat is blazingly fast and fluid. It’s closer to a beat ’em up than the stiff action-RPGs of the 16-bit era, with Adol bouncing around against hordes of enemies who occasionally bombard him with danmaku-esque projectile patterns. On normal difficulty, the curve is just right, encouraging a mix of grinding and dexterity, but never rising to frustration.

While there are only a handful of dungeons, they’re all intricate mazes that are deeply satisfying to explore, although nothing here matches the scope and ambition of Darm Tower or Solomon Shrine. The game is on the short side, but highly replayable, with multiple difficulty levels and an optional Catastrophe mode that removes healing items. As with the best of the earlier Ys games, it’s closer to a Metroidvania than a traditional RPG. There’s no overworld, and the two islands that comprise the vast majority of the game can be traversed end-to-end in just a few minutes.

Despite its many highs, Ys VI stumbles in a few places. Pacing is uneven, with an extended exposition drop at the end of the second act in particular killing the momentum for no real payoff. Platforming is unnecessarily fussy, with a counterintuitive long jump mechanic that’s sure to annoy. These flaws pull the game down from all-timer status, but this is still a must-play for fans of Ys and Falcom. A number of key players in the company’s ongoing renaissance, including future president Toshihiro Kondo, worked on the game, and it’s a joy to see them begin to figure out the future Falcom style here. That isn’t even getting into the superb artwork or the spectacular soundtrack, which blends the style of classic Ys music, Ryo Yonemitsu’s beloved Redbook audio arrangements from the PC Engine CD-ROM² games, and modern touches such as drum’n’bass breaks. I already can’t wait to pick this one up again for a Nightmare mode run.

This is an alright game. The lack of budget is noticeable (there's only about 6 different possible themes for each course, which means some racetracks look nearly identical to one another. This allows for heavy amounts of asset reuse), and I find it a bit weird that most characters you need to spend in-game currency to unlock. But it's actually pretty fun to race in - this game really emphasizes drifting and getting extra speed boosts in the process. I had a good time with the core gameplay, but this leaves a bit to be desired.

I really don't know where to start with this game. Gathering my thoughts on NeverDead is a difficult one... I think what it comes down to, when all is said and done, is that NeverDead has some interesting ideas, and it's willing to experiment with bold new things (primarily, a protagonist who cannot die - and said immortality is reflected in the gameplay itself)... but the execution does leave a lot to be desired. The combat is, perhaps serviceable - generally melee combat is going to be far more effective, so your guns feel like an afterthought. But after most types of damage that the protagonist Bryce takes, he literally falls to pieces, like Humpty Dumpty, and then as a severed head, you need to slowly roll around and gather up your limbs and torso to reattach yourself, so you can go back to peak fighting shape again.

It's weird... when you're not falling apart, it can be enjoyably silly, but when you fall apart, it suddenly becomes extremely irritating. It's like the punishment you get from taking damage in say, The Legend of the Mystical Ninja (where getting hurt causes you to lose both attack power/range, and movement speed), but amplified by a thousand. Gosh this is an infuriating game a lot of the time - I'm not surprised most people hate it.

Is it worth trying? Maybe? That'll depend on how much you can tolerate occasional bullshit being tossed your way.

not even done yet but jesus christ this is so miserable, i am literally only able to do the droll sidequesting msq content by turning my brain off for an hour or two at a time and skipping every line of dialog because if i invest any more thought than that into this game i feel like i might never want to play another video game in my life. it is insane how dragon quest 10's first version bodies everything arr sets out to do effortlessly when it came out a year earlier and also wasn't a second draft like a realm reborn is. if ff14 ends up being something like xenoblade 2 where it doesn't even get nearly good enough to make up for how much time you waste to get to the "good" part i am so sincerely never playing a game on suggestion of my friends again.

my au ra is cute at least though

I finally finished this one after putting a few hours into it a couple years back. It's an extremely well-crafted side-scrolling Dark Souls that everyone thinks is a Metroidvania.

The combat is excellent and a high point of the game. Later boss encounters in particular are some of the most satisfying times I've had with an action game in a while. Traversal is equally enjoyable after unlocking a few abilities and wonderfully fluid in the final quarter or so once you pick up the last big ones.

A few things brought this one down for me a little below where a lot of other folks place it. While the art style and aesthetics did frequently win me over, too much of the game is draped in drab color palettes and minimal musical accompaniment. Even more unfortunately, the duller areas in the game are mostly grouped towards the beginning, which is an interminable slog that put me off the game until I finally built up the willpower to break through. But I'm glad I finally did, because the back half has some fantastic bits.

I didn't do the vast majority of the optional content. It's possible that I might revisit it at some point and revise my rating if there's a lot of worthwhile stuff there. As things currently stand, it's a pretty dang good game, but I'm having a lot of trouble understanding why anyone would put this above SotN.

At once one of the worst and best games I've played in a while. I'm compelled enough to want to know what they're doing, but also the act of trying to figure out what they're doing is a fool's errand. Rebirth is exceptional when it's about hanging out. But it's weighed down so heavily by the worst case of ubisoft open world bloat I've ever put up with. Its combat system could be studied in universities for eons, it's obscenely, disgustingly, putridly brilliant. Boss fights in this game are some of the most fun and fascinating collaborations of systems and creative design I can recall, and I don't think they're getting nearly enough credit for just how intricate it is. But 95% of the fighting in this game is generic fodder enemies that turn it into a borderline-musou level of turn-off-brain-and-mash-square. The bulk of this game does disservice to everything it excels at. It bogs itself down with frivolous padding at every opportunity—every little action takes like a second and a half longer than you'd expect, making it feel sloppy and unresponsive in the hands when outside of combat, which is most of the time. The composition work on this score is some inconceivable galaxy brain stuff. We're talking minimum 200 IQ moves all over the place. I cannot wait for that big-ass CD box set, dude. That's my main takeaway from this game.

better sense of scale than the first regarding both its central mystery and its locales. for one, you're given much more room to stretch your legs, with the second half of the game taking place in an area roughly the size of the entire first game and the first half having a few beefy areas of its own. the multiple mysteries in this one indeed also expand beyond the big endgame twist, and more care has been taken to drop breadcrumbs of intrigue throughout the adventure rather than the meandering approach of curious village. at the same time, the larger cast of characters and tragic lover's bond at the heart of the narrative makes the lack of attention paid to their actual characterization more noticeable. an examination of the folly of a rich family mining the earth and bringing ruin on their workers becomes didactic quickly when it's conveyed entirely through history lessons and layton's personal observations, and the writers' preoccupation with preserving the shock of the primary mystery keeps the actual humans at the core of the conflict from expressing themselves until the final ten minutes. I've cooled off on curious village's twist in the couple of years since I played it, and even though this one is probably more interesting, it still feels like a sudden burst of passion at the end of another meandering 15 hour adventure. then again, more pretty backgrounds than last time, so it all comes out in the wash.

puzzles in general are now better integrated into the story; layton still lives in an alternate reality where everyone is obsessed with puzzles, but at least he's actually using his skill at solving them in practical ways to navigate the world and solve mysteries. I'll hesitatingly say that conceptual puzzles seem to be fewer in number compared to curious village, with more focus on various physical layout puzzles and some math ones here and there. conceptual puzzles have the strength of obfuscating a solution space and thus making the exercise feel more like a product of reasoning and less trial and error, but I do also appreciate the variety of layout puzzles here, especially when it comes to ones like chopping wood in the right place to make a square or placing lanterns to cover every path of a forest. tired of maze puzzles tho; really no mental leaps required for them beyond just following each path to the right place. those are really the other extreme compared to conceptual puzzles, where the whole solution space is there for you to look at and you just check off whatever path leads to the finish. the best conceptual puzzles come on the critical path at least, so you won't miss any of them.

there's also better scaffolding around the ADV parts of the experience to keep exploration fresh thanks to some new integrated minigames. there's a persistent puzzle with an exercising hamster you must lead around a grid in order to have him reach a step count, and by solving puzzles around the world you can win items with new properties for him to chase. the puzzle itself is cool, and having a variety of ways to reach the maximum step count goes a long way to making the puzzle feel less prescriptive. when that's reached, he'll pop up in the world to tell you where you can find hint coins, removing the pixel hunting component of the game completely. there's camera components you can find as well that, once assembled, can be used to take pictures of specific rooms in the game. this opens up a "find the differences" type game that will open up a bonus puzzle; another neat addition that complements the main draw nicely. the third is less interesting: you can win different tea ingredients to make people tea? in-game there's no benefit to doing this, although I have a feeling some of the post-game puzzles will unlock if you can serve all the different kinds of tea. problem is figuring out all of the different brews is complete trial-and-error, and although some NPCs will give you recipes, others are much more vague. would help if some NPCs who want tea didn't suddenly stop wanting tea if you fuck up their initial order, though considering that they randomly re-enable later I have a feeling this is just some scripting issue.

If you know the original game, or if you know M2, you don't really need to ask "is the game good" or "is the port good" - you know the game's good, and you know the port will be great.

Dai-Ou-Jou is one of those games shmup people talk about a lot, but for good reason - it's a genuine classic, and it's still just as good today. The core, elemental mechanics - a laser that slices through enemies and slows you down for precision dodging, a shot that lets you move fast while taking out small enemies - are common to a lot of shmups, but they're executed flawlessly here. Its signature mechanic, the hyper attack, is still just as satisfying. Playing well enough to earn the hyper lets you turn the tables to do incredible damage to enemies, taking out waves or bosses that feel impossible otherwise; the feeling of power after being under pressure feels great.

The new arrange pilots are great, and a lot of fun. I wasn't sure what to expect, but they change up the core gameplay in very interesting ways. They're also all easier than the core game, but they use the original game's enemy placement and bullet patterns; learning the arrange pilots is still learning the "real" arcade game. It's a fantastic bridge for intermediate players who want something more substantial than super easy mode, not to mention something I enjoy playing when I want to actually see more than 1-2 levels in a run. I'm not good enough to master the original arcade game yet, much as I'm working on it!

All three of the arrange pilots play with the original game's push and pull of safety in new ways. Arrange-L and Arrange-EX let you erase bullets from heavy enemies by training your laser on them long enough - build up a focus meter by keeping your laser on them, and every bullet of theirs that's still onscreen turns into point pickups. Not only does it make the game easier, it opens up some interesting new strategies. It starts to get tempting to let heavy enemies live a bit longer so they leave more bullets onscreen, giving you more points when you take them out. The brief moment of safety when those bullets turn into harmless score pickups is a breath of relief that this game doesn't offer much of, but it's the kind of push and pull of "accept risk to get a little extra reward" that I appreciate about my favourite Cave games, just like SDOJ Exa Label and Akai Katana Shin. Arrange-L and EX also have auto-bomb/hyper on by default, saving the skin of players who missed bombing at the right time to avoid death, which also helps extend runs a bit longer, and players are given extra lives for beating bosses so runs go longer.

If I have a single complaint, it's that most of the content is focused on the original "white label" arcade release. I do think the balance in Black Label is better, so I'm surprised it's treated like a bonus feature. That side, Black Label and the English Dodonpachi III have all the same extra features and presentation as white label, so it's not a huge deal, just an oddity.

One of these days, I'll finally manage a 1CC of the main game, and I'll treasure every blissful death on the way. But in the meantime, I'm also working towards 1CCs of Arrange-L and Arrange-EX and loving every minute of it.

It's the laborer's code, an allegiance to classist logic hiding behind the veneer of a machine. Who's to say you can't pull these blocks other than the rules of the game? These walls and obstacles entrap you, make you feel the claustrophobia that comes with poverty and exploitation. Surrounding these microscopic tasks are naught but void—just the fraught acceptance of capitalism's encompassing reality. Here's a gallery of A-to-Z state machines one yearns to find freedom from, yet masks the possibilities of other, better worlds beyond the transactional paradigm. A purgatory wrapped in darkness, and the only clear way forward is toiling under this system for eternity.

Even then, the original Sokoban is more than it seems. One of the final puzzles tasks you with moving blocks in a seemingly impossible way. That is, until you accidentally push through a wall, destroying a piece of it which lets you finally manipulate the block stack without failure. All future official versions of the 1982 classic would ditch this element. After all, it sounds frustrating to need to discover or know this completely un-telegraphed mechanic, doesn't it? Kind of like how your boss refuses to explain the finer details of your job, or even how to complete a seemingly simple yet elusive task? I can only imagine how the warehouse keeper must feel, hopelessly exhausting every possibility except the most absurd, contradictory one that never worked before. And it doesn't feel like an accomplishment, or a stroke of genius. You either know because someone finally told you, or you accidentally fell into success instead.

Hiroyuki Imabayashi was a retail clerk at the time he got his first computer, a Sharp MZ borrowed from a friend. The games he subsequently played on his later PC-8001 and PC-88 units, as well as an imported Apple II, inspired him to make a little game of his own, reflecting what he saw in his environment. What possessed a well-read, movie-loving record store salesman to make one of the great early pro-labor digital puzzlers? I'd like to ask him myself, though I suspect he'll answer with something like "I never thought about it that deeply". We're all so ingrained in this system of the world that we can feel its pressure and imposition as we grow ("coming of age" indeed), even if we can't always articulate that sensation. Sokoban, with all its elementary yet convoluted mind-twisters, inspires what must have seemed like a revolution in video games as introspection.

It's no surprise to me that Imabayashi soon spent way more time writing and designing graphic text adventures, most often the kinds of pulpy mysteries he grew up with. He still relies on the perennial success of Sokoban's design concept for his livelihood, but in doing so has found time and space in life to just be. What he'd created from a working man's understanding of his favorite childhood card games had forever altered game design for a post-modern era. How does one surpass that? So he moved laterally, handing the reigns of commercial ambition to others at the studio he started in Takarazuka. And Thinking Rabbit certainly did experiment, yet the founder and his co-workers now work for Falcon Co., having sold their company and IPs to a former contractor following the Japan's economic and investment stagnation in the '90s. What keeps them going is, of course, a certain block-pushing Ship of Theseus most often starring some wide-eyed young man trying to buy a car or woo his love, among other bootstraps window dressing.

While Imabayashi's adventure games gained a notable following for years to come, his debut game has long since evolved beyond what he'd been able to match. Why work to reinvent that which will forever morph to other designers' wills, or just slot into myriads of other frameworks as shown by creations like Baba is You? Yet for all the appreciation Imabayashi's earned for his post-Sokoban legacy, the software which freed him has ironically trapped his image in amber. Block puzzles in video games are just too useful and universal—so the death of the author continues. I can go on my mobile app storefront of choice and find a seemingly endless number of Sokoban clones, many from first-time developers learning to code games. There's a whole cottage industry of bedroom coders building off what this once fanciful PC-8801 experiment started. And he knows all too well what it's done for him and shackled him to in the process.

I suppose this florid look at a generally self-explanatory media artifact isn't helping much. Then again, my lack of Japanese language skills makes it hard to dig into Thinking Rabbit's adventures without duress. Sokoban has become a staple of gaming across the world, spanning ages before and after its origins. We're as familiar with its principles, iterations, and insinuations as we are with backgammon or chess! And just as those pastimes silently teach lessons and etiquette pertaining to the social-economic structures birthing them, Sokoban too reflects its environment. This game ran on everything, in even more forms than Doom. It arguably had a predecessor in Nob Yoshigahara's Rush Hour puzzle, and even the lowliest of early digital handhelds like Epoch's Game Pocket Computer featured the block pusher. Ubiquity both made and destroyed Sokoban as an essential distillation of logic challenges previously fragmented across many arcade, computer, and board games the world over.

Takurazuka's greatest software creation gave players the illusion of control over time-space puzzles previously meant to eat quarters in game centers. It transferred the traditions of puzzle boxes and transfixing toys into binary. And from this black box of restrictions, revelations, and repetition comes the final realization: Sokoban invokes a wager of faith for or against capitalist reality. Those who succeed in unraveling or merely memorizing these menial tasks can feel at least a little vindicated. Those who fail will quickly realize the futility and fruitlessness of labor you give but can never keep, even if they eventually succeed under the circumstances. Everyone who's ever complained about "unfun" box pushing in a Zelda game could relate to this. All those who criticized and/or continue to lambast the likes of Papers, Please should consider the power of games as simple as this to provoke praxis in this festering world.

Maybe the most actionable thoughts Sokoban leads to now are playing a different, more fun and accessible game. We're so accustomed to what this PC-88 classic offers, and binds us to, that it's nothing worth investing time in. In this sense, Imabayashi's folly has become the kind of effortless un-game or anti-game others try too hard to sell us on. There's nothing glamorous, fantastic, or conventionally laudable about pure, unadorned Sokoban. It's too good at what it does, meaning its spiritual successors must imagine more creative, more engrossing variations on its themes. Hell, the whole idea of Baba is You can basically boil down to "what if we challenged the player to make a new Sokoban game in every single level?". Sokoban transcended its mere game-ness long ago; today it's both a platform and a bad example to follow. More than most "classic" games, this one has morphed into an idol of ludological dreams, nightmares, and ambitions subservient to the possible. Sisyphus would be proud.

For all the ramblings and minutiae I could go on about, I think you should try the original Sokoban and come to your own conclusions. The PC-88 game and its ports certainly show their age, but also how timeless they remain. Without factoring all of what Sokoban was, is, and will be into any discussion of Japanese PC software and beyond, any history of puzzle genres and tropes will be incomplete. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Soul Hackers 2 seems like it’s been the victim of a lot of negative sentiment. People calling it bland, saying it’s missing the heart of something like a Persona game (a criticism also levied against SMT V), and really criticising the hell out of the dungeon design. I can see why people might be dissatisfied with this game, even in those parts specifically, but I certainly don’t get why there’s such vitriol around a game that at worst these people are calling… bland?

For me though, this is anything but bland. It’s not as “loud” as a Persona game in tone or style, but why would it be? Persona games are about 15 year olds. The stories they tell are great and thematically deep, don’t get me wrong, but they’re stories starring children. Soul Hackers 2 stars adults. Adults who’re caught up in something between a gang war and a JRPG plot, who’ve internalized the hate and pain that conflict has brought, and mostly seem built out of coping mechanisms.

For example, you’ve got Arrow, my personal favorite of the main cast. He seems pretty standard for like, a game of this style, an everyman who doesn’t seem off-putting, and I get why that comes across as bland to people, but to me he just seems tired. Tired in a way that he doesn’t complain about, or even acknowledge, because it’s just part of life for him. They’re not drawn, but you can almost feel the bags under his eyes in the way he talks, the words he chooses. And that is infinitely more compelling as a character beat to me than anything from Persona 3-5.

The rest of the cast feels equally mature and understated, even the seemingly loud Saizo, who’s built himself out of noir stereotypes to cover up an unobtainable desire for peace and tranquility, and an idealism to rival any shounen protagonist. Those things don’t fly in the fairly grounded world of Soul Hackers though, lacking the adventuresome nature of Persona and (most of) the philosophical musings of SMT proper. So he builds walls of sarcasm and wittiness to protect himself.

It all feels pretty true to life I think, and the game takes itself rather seriously as well (outside of one joke character in the introduction). There’s a huge focus on not just the philosophical ideal of what it means to “be human”, but on people and the choices they’ve made, the compassion they’ve shown and to whom it was shown to.

Beyond that, I also really loved the dungeon crawling. I don’t think any game since Nocturne has really captured the old school maze-style of classic SMT in full 3D so well, nor has any made it so accessible. The couple of reused themes for dungeons are a little disappointing, but the themes themselves are just as understated-yet-vibey as the rest of the game. If you’ve played Tokyo Mirage Sessions, the dungeon crawling and combat here are heavily based that game, and I think this game is a much more successful use of those mechanics.

That’s pretty much what the whole game is. Just small character moments and dungeon crawling, and if you like the characters and the old-skool-ness of it all, I don’t think you’ll have any issues here at all. Just don’t forget about the side quests if you want the true ending, yeah? Though the non-true ending is really really good regardless, ending on a nice unresolved note (delivered via monologue) like a true noir film would.

Haven: Call of the King: technically, it is marvelously ahead of its time; aesthetically, it is painfully of its time; mechanically, it is dreadfully behind its contemporaries.

Stuff just happens in this game. You platform, you shoot in third and first person, you do rail shooting, jey pack flying, speedboating, driving, and so on. Most of it feels fine, it feels much better than literal shovelware would. Despite the connected environments and lack of loading screens, pretty much everything you do feels completely out of context. After the opening cutscene there is no dialogue for two full levels. You have a narrative goal, but if it weren't for the fact that your current objective is always displayed on the pause screen, you would have no idea what your next logical step for achieving that goal could possibly be.

There's too much mechanical variety introduced too early on, and while you are initially given some space to play with them your objective quickly becomes so narrowly focused that the range of abilities you have and stimuli you're expected to react to is overwhelming. You have a double jump, a shield, a slide, and a melee attack, and all of these moves can be combined in some way (and that's just the core platforming gameplay!), but few of these more advanced maneuvers are ever useful or satisfying. If you pick up a power-up like a gun or a flashlight, your melee attack becomes unusable until the power-up's time limit runs out.

There are roughly a dozen different types of barrel in the game, most of them are introduced within the first level or two. Some have items, some are covered in spikes and will damage you, some cannot be destroyed and will give you a weapon each time you hit them, some turn into turrets (all of these barrels are the same color). Some will explode when you hit them, some will explode when you get close to them, some contain a dragon that will follow you (but only when your shield is active!) and destroy the otherwise indestructible flaming barrels (all of these barrels are the same color).

Voice acting is shockingly sparse, with many characters' reactions to important events being limited to mugging the camera. Important story scenes have dialogue that is spoken so fast that I wonder how badly the different assets of the game were fighting for disc space. You'll walk into a new area and have a short cutscene that introduces a new character, and the next time you see that character (assuming they reappear at all!) you won't even have the option of talking to them. There is no text based dialogue in the entire game; the only text you will ever read is tutorials and hints. Half of the characters in the game talk in terrible overacted voices clearly imitating various racial stereotypes. Between the silly voices, the fast-talking, and the fact that the game has no subtitles, the story as told in game is almost incomprehensible.

The main collectable, like Mario's coins or Sonic's rings, are these little orbs that make a weird monkey noise when you touch them. I got several levels into them game without understanding what they are, and had to check the manual. Basically, you're poisoned, all the time. These items are an antidote that you need to constantly replenish to stay alive. You basically have two health bars, one that only goes down when you get hit, and one that you need to constantly fill with these orbs.

There's a car section where you're in this map, it's a desert area with some small trenches and two towers connected by a bridge. To progress, you need to destroy five tanks. To destroy the tanks, you need to chase and run over these little blue things that are running around in the sand; when you hit these blue things your car gets a blue aura, and you need to hit the tanks while you have this aura. There's other cars in the area that chase you around, and if they hit you, you lose the blue aura.

The second turrent section is, until that point, the absolute low point of the game. You're on a boat with two guns, one at the back, one at the front. At the very least, you don't actually need to manage the two guns at all, as enemies will only ever spawn on one side of the boat, and you only need to move to the other gun once the area is clear. You can't hold down the fire button for very long, for some reason this is seemingly the only area where your gun has a cooldown. To keep firing without overheating, you need to tap the fire button the entire time. The enemies constantly shoot projectiles, you have to shoot the projectiles in order to destroy them. These projectiles exist for the sole purpose of making sure that you spend most of the fight shooting at something that isn't the enemy, making the fight drag on and on, likely for more than a half an hour. If you die, you start over. You probably will die, and you probably won't even know why. Maybe you were walking between the guns and a stray missile hit the boat and made a massive hitbox, maybe you didn't realize that the shield meter acts as the boat's health meter for this segment. More than likely, this is the first time in the game that the player is stuck in the same place doing the same thing for so long that the poison meter actually starts to be a problem. The boss of the level has so much health that it's basically guaranteed that you will need to abandon your post in order to restock your antidote, and in the meantime your boat will be left defenseless. It's a delicate balancing act that goes on for way longer than it has any right to.

I don't know if it comes across in text, but it's almost impossible to talk about this game's mechanics in plain terms without slipping into a James Rolfe impression. That's what I mean when I say this game already would have felt dated in 2002. Mechanically, it operates on logic so obtuse that each individual part of this game's whole could have been an Atari 2600 game. Even so, even in its mechanics, it still almost feels ahead of its time simply because the "Freeformer" (TM) is basically the blueprint for the modern AAA game. Between Tim Rogers' idea of GTA as an "argument solver" or Nakey Jakey's justification of Naughty Dog's prestige titles, the critical glorification of games that are a jack of all trades and a master of none, I had to wonder if the ideal video game for the average gamer is anything more special than a high gloss Action 52. Here it is. Haven: Call of the King is that game.

However, Haven: Call of the King feels ahead of its time primarily because it is simply a technical marvel. This is a PlayStation 2 game, it has no load times. None. You load once when you boot the game up, it lasts barely 5 seconds. You will never see another loading screen again for the entire play session. It has seamless auto-save, it typically runs at 60 frames per second, it has so many particle effects on the screen that I would think even today's particles (which exist primarily to showcase the fine detail offered by 4K) would blush! It has an enormous consistent world consisting of multiple planets.

There are two problems with this. The first is that the game is so linear that there is simply no opportunity to appreciate it. The second is that as a result the most positive impression that the game can leave on someone can be reached just by looking at the title screen for a few minutes; the title screen shows a zoom into the main planet from space, then soaring through various landscapes. Apparently, if you go through the tedious trial of collecting every optional collectable in the game, at the very end, you gain the ability to freely fly through the galaxy and find a handful of hidden levels throughout all the game's planets. Getting to that point (hell, even just getting to the end of the game without the collectables) is so tedious that I can't imagine any significant portion of the people who bothered to play this game at all have experienced it, nor should they feel obligated to.

On the other hand, the fact that the game is technically so well crafted makes it so uniquely playable. There are so many egregious instances of bullshit in this game that if dying carried the penalty of a 20 second reload, I would have dropped it so much earlier. But because there's so little downtime, because the loop of feedback and retrial is so fast, flaws that would usually be inexcusable become more tolerable. It's damn good thing you don't need to worry about lives either; most of the time when you respawn the actual game-state hasn't even changed, you just get moved back to the checkpoint, and sometimes you can even still see the thing that killed you in the exact same place it was before.

One of the other reviews on this site calls Haven a "Jak and Daxter rip-off" (and from various other sites this seems to be a common observation) and while the game isn't good enough to necessarily call this a "disservice", I do think it's inaccurate. Haven is very much of its time, but in a more complex way than ripping off a single game. The aesthetic is a combination of tacky 00's fashion and post-late-90's gross-out cartoon humor that could have easily manifested on its own. There are hints of Lord of the Rings, there's a lot of the Star Wars prequels, and C.S. Lewis (Narnia) was explicitly cited as an inspiration in interviews. It's a piece of media that very obviously comes from the perspective of contemporaneous Christianity; like a video game adaptation of Angel Wars.

The reason for this is that this, perhaps more than any other Traveler's Tales game, seems to be Jon Burton's baby; going by his credits, this appears to be one of the last games that he had a direct hand in programming. It has both a weird sort of heart and an off-putting uncanniness that I would usually only expect to see from outsider art, from random eccentric individuals online. Again, narratively inspired by C.S. Lewis, which "has a clear gospel allegory while still featuring proactive characters". Aesthetically, the concept art was done by one of the artists who did album covers for the supergroup Asia. Mechanically, it was inspired by ambitious Amiga games like Mercenary. The game was meant to be sort of deceptive about its own scope, to slowly open up and surprise the player.

Well, congratulations, we were deceived. Players were so utterly deceived that everyone thinks the game is a boring, linear, lifeless, empty action game, and frankly, they aren't even really wrong.

That final optional space-faring completionist journey is so interesting, because if that had been the game's core loop this could have been something truly groundbreaking. Haven was so damn close. Even if the game opening up had been a more gradual process, it would have made all the difference; for example, there's a moment where the player escapes a prison satellite and crash lands on an unfamiliar planet. If the player landed in a wilderness and had to organically search for civilization, that could have been interesting. Instead, Haven conveniently lands in the only place on the planet where he can find a ship to get back up into outer space.

The popular comparison is to No Man's Sky, another overly ambitious game about going to different planets, but in the actual playing of the game, this is not the experience I think most people will have. Here are a few comparisons that I think are more appropriate:

Imagine if all of Sonic Adventure's mechanics, the platforming, the flying, the pinball, the fishing. Imagine they were all just a little more polished. Imagine that the tradeoff is that half of the game's voice lines, most of your favorite songs, and ALL of the game's flavor text and NPC dialogue were completely removed.

Imagine if Bethesda made a game as big as Daggerfall, but literally every area that wasn't directly relevant to the main quest was completely empty. Imagine that if you managed to replay the entire game without taking damage, you could unlock half a dozen sidequests, and none of them were anything special.

Imagine if The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was ugly, and you didn't get a single new piece of equipment after Windfall Island.

Haven: Call of the King is not good, but it is interesting. Apparently, this game's failure is one of the main reasons that Traveler's Tales is where they are today; with this game flopping so hard, the team that would have worked on a sequel got assigned to a Lego: Knights Kingdom game that the studio would have otherwise turned down, a game that never materialized because Lego would quickly request a Star Wars tie-in in its stead.

Fun fact, if you do a bit of googling you can find out all kinds of things. I'm like 90% certain that the only reason Burton is making a Funko Pop game with his newly formed studio 10.10 Games is because Steve Jobs' widow wants his mansion, and if he's gonna have to move into a new one he'll probably need a few more million for his house-hunting budget. Not to mention Funko probably has about as much access to different IP's as Lego does, Funko is bigger right now than ever, and Burton's favorite game to work on was apparently that Lego Dimensions crossover game. Video games are stupid and I hate them. Our entire hobby really does just mutate to suit the whims of distant multi-millionaires. Very cool.

The story is so flimsy and skeletal that it's hard to truly glean any thematic substance from it at all, but if I were to try, I would focus mostly in the juxtaposition between the Golden Voice and whatever the hell that magic rock was called. Basically, they are functionally identical objects, each made to facilitate a cry for help. One exists to summon the fictional world's Messiah figure, the other for asking Haven to aid Chess, the game's damsel in distress who ultimately betrays him. If only Haven had simply done what all true Christians do, ignore a friend in need. Only then could Athellion have saved humanity.

Anyway, Haven is so out of touch, out of time, that I'm not sure if it's a wicked artifact of a darker alternate timeline, a shining example of what video games could be if developers cared more about optimization and minimizing bloat, or a caricature of exactly what the AAA industry aspires to at this very moment. Whatever.

NOTE: Will not discuss spoilers, but will offer my take on the overall game with very broad references to the narrative.

So, I love Xenoblade. Xenoblade Chronicles is an incredible JRPG that combines fantasy and sci-fi excellently. I bounced off of X, its first sequel, because it took too long to get going (though I want to try again). I love Xenoblade Chronicles 2 so much, even more than the first. It's weird and messy, but I adore its cast of characters and it was a blast to explore.

3 is...weird. I'll start with the good though -- the setting is amazing and devastating and sad, enabling a gripping story and some moments of beauty when love and courage find a way despite harrowing circumstances. Some of the story beats here are series highlights -- I will spoil none of them.

A couple other positive notes. One, it's Xenoblade, so there's --- as expected -- an extremely compelling grind and fun position-based MMO JRPG battling. There are also big scary Level 80 monkeys and some fun vistas to explore. ALSO, compared to 2, everything looks better and runs better on Switch. Looks real pretty on my OLED.

Now the other shoe: This game is sloppy. Really sloppy. Like, sloppy even compared to XC2. Across the board. Monolith Soft tried very hard to smooth out the user experience of 2 by making menus straightforward and including detailed tutorials that explain how each bit of the game works, but they overcorrected.

The tutorials in the first 10-15 hours are out of control, leaving you on rails like you're in Pokemon Sun and Moon. The tutorials feel a bit wasted too, because once you have a good party makeup of 3 healers, 2 defenders, and 2 attackers, you can more or less button mash and strategically activate chain attacks for maximum EXP. This is the same as 2 in some ways, but having seven characters on the screen with different roles and classes makes it a chore to keep track of everyone at all times. I hoped the battle system would have been smoothed out from 2, but it honestly feels even more bloated, with too many equips and too much micromanaging asked of you for what ultimately turns into a mess of pixels on screen.

Next, the leveling. The EXP is handed out like candy on Halloween, and unless you make significant personal modifications to the difficulty (like choosing hard mode/turning off overkill/not using rest stops), it is incredibly easy to overlevel. Once I hit chapter 2, I didn't hit a main story enemy at a higher level than me until the final boss, and I basically mainlined this game with 5 hours of hero quests and a couple diversions.

A side effect of this poor balance is that once you get way overleveled, going back to explore the map can get boring due to slow walking, environments that retread previous Xeno games, and swaths of enemies in new areas that are far weaker than you.

In Chapter 5, I actually changed the difficulty to hard for a bit, but all it did was slow down a battle system I didn't really love engaging with in the first place. I went back to Normal.

Lastly, the story. I said a lot of kind words about the story that I mean, but it is also, once again, sloppy. Cutscenes are strung together a la Metal Gear Solid 4 regularly, including a sequence that may have taken as long as MGS4's ending. I don't remember previous XBC games going this ham with it.

The pacing also gets wacky, as the game gives you extremely interesting plot developments and then chases it with a non-optional fetch quest or diversion that feels like padding/bloat. This is done regularly.

The main cast of characters is quite good (better than 1, worse than 2 maybe) though with the villains, the more the curtain gets revealed the more everything gets messy and obtuse. I don't know if I'm bad at story comprehension or if the truth of this world was confusing. I found myself zoning out in certain late game cutscenes due to verbose dialogue that just goes on and on with wording that feels unnecessarily strange. Moments of the game's script feel like a poor localization, though this is Nintendo so I don't know.

The themes also feel under-baked to me. Two or three times in the story, the game changes or clarifies what it is trying to communicate to you in ways that feel more scatterbrained than thoughtful. Again, no spoilers.

There are a lot of powerful, emotional moments here that made me choke up, but aforementioned issues put a small damper on these parts. I'm not a Tales fan per say, but I played Tales of Arise (which is quite similar to XBC3 in multiple ways) this year and enjoyed it more than XBC3 overall.

As I play (or don't play) more of this, my thoughts may change.