GeneralMelon
2023
Since the success of Dark Souls many studios have tried to varying degrees of success to recreate what made it work, to the point that it's gotten a bit stale. Lies of P is one of the most transparent attempts at this, and probably the most "souls-like" the soulslike genre, if it's even broad enough to be considered a genre, has gotten. The core design obviously resembles the series to the letter, but also in terms of how they let its aesthetic influence changes to the fundamental formula in much the same way Bloodborne, the game in the series it clearly takes the most from, did back in 2015. It really feels like the developers though about what "Steampunk Bloodborne" would look like beyond the aesthetic, from the various arms with differing effects, to the mechanical grinder you use to repair weapons on the fly, to even being able to recharge your bizarre healing device.
That being said, my main issue, and I want to be clear that this isn't a huge one, is that I'm not sure these influences are entirely to the game's benefit. I think perhaps diverging even further from Souls could have made this game stronger, which is not me appealing some arbitrary standard of originality, but because I do feel some aspects of its design where its loyalty to its inspirations hold it back.
For example, the game is very much trying to tell a linear narrative. Unlike in Souls and Bloodborne, where the story has already happened in the past and what little plot there is remains pretty much inscrutable until you piece together the backstory on your own, Lies of P is something closer to a conventional narrative. At the very least, I wasn't exactly left confused as to who or what any particular character or boss's "deal" was supposed to be by the end. But this doesn't mean there aren't gaps in the narrative, things you have to fill in with item descriptions that are vague and hard to intuit. I'm still not entirely sure exactly why the perpetrator behind one of the game's inciting incidents, the "Puppet Frenzy", did what they did, for example. I'm sure I can find the answer, somewhere, but my purpose in bringing this up is that it made me ask a question - is the game actually more interesting for telling the story this way?
I think this aspect of the Souls series works better for its inherently inscrutable narrative. In those games, there's a degree of subjectivity to everything because all hope for an objective truth died out with the rest of the world. All you're left with is bad actors with their own agendas trying to steer you towards fulfilling their own ends, and only through vague scraps of the past can you determine who you're better off working with.
Conversely, I don't think there's much ambiguity to Lies of P's narrative. In fact, its morality is almost beaten over your head with its simplicity. One of the game's fundamental mechanics is that nearly every dialogue option is a choice between a truth or a lie. Your puppet's ability to lie separates them from other puppets, an indicator of some inner humanity despite being an artificial creation. So, the game treats every lie as the "right" choice, as something that brings you closer and closer to humanity. As far as I'm aware, lying never actually brings any negative consequences for your own character or anyone else. (As a tangent, this is another problem I have with the game, as there were a few times where I told a character the truth, expecting they would appreciate it more than a pathetic lie to spare their feelings, only to find out the game expected me to lie to create a better outcome for everyone)
So, with a story so simple to understand, why leave aspects of it unexplained and unanswered, so that someone with way too much time on their hands can dig through the lore to fill in the gaps? The answer is because Dark Souls and Bloodborne do it. Learning this additional information won't cause you to question the path you've been lead down, won't affect how you interact with the world, because as we've established, from the very beginning the game makes it clear what the "right" choice always is. Even the few times where there's a choice more complicated than truth or lie, there's almost always a "correct" answer you're primed for in advance. The few times I did dig through item descriptions, particularly for boss items, I never actually learned anything that affected my decisions going forwards, or made me question if I made the right choice when I looked back. We're left with a story where 90% of it can be easily understood, and 10% is arbitrarily cut out for the sake of having some actual new information for the item descriptions to present. I don't think it's more interesting that I don't know exactly why the Puppet Frenzy happened, even if I can connect it to that character's other actions to an extent, this just happened to be how the story was told for arbitrary reasons.
This general attempt at replicating the inscrutability of the Souls series carries over beyond just the narrative. The Souls series is known (and often criticized) for how difficult it is to actually understand what the various stats and menus actually mean. There is a staggering amount of information and none of it is explained to you. And since many choices are irreversible, this can often lean to you unintentionally creating consequences for yourself you had no way of anticipating and now have no way of undoing. A defense of this I've often heard is that it leans into the inherent incomprehensibility of the world. If the story isn't going to explain itself to you, why should the mechanics outside of a basic controls tutorial? I can get behind this for Dark Souls, but as we've established, Lies of P does not take place in that kind of world.
This world can be mostly understood even to a casual player, but if this were their first soulslike, they'd be utterly lost as to what they're actually doing on a gameplay level, not helped by some wonky translations in a few of the tutorials and menus. I barely understood how to engage with the systems of Dark Souls 3, the first of these games I ever played, so I can't imagine a different experience if I had somehow played this first. What makes this more frustrating is that last year's Elden Ring, a game actually made by the developers of the Souls series and one that is nearly as incomprehensible as its predecessors, actually goes further than this game does by having an option to explain almost every single statistic and option within every single menu of the game, which Lies of P fails to do, despite how much it shares with those menus. Perhaps this isn't a big deal, since this game's main audience is Souls veterans who won't struggle with these issues, but I couldn't help but think this game would have been better if there weren't some things I could only understand by remembering how they worked in Dark Souls.
On a game structure level, I think this game's relationship to Dark Souls is probably where it succeeds the best. The city of Krat, much like Bloodborne's Yharnam, just effortlessly lends itself to the compact, confusing, and interweaving level design of the Souls series, and it's done shockingly well here. But it is worth noting that this game is very linear, probably most comparable in structure to Dark Souls 3. You're pretty much always moving from one area to the next, one checkpoint to the next, with little need to have a wider understanding of the world beyond your immediate surroundings. This, on its own, despite many critics of Dark Souls 3's structure, is not bad. But I can't help but wonder if Lies of P really wanted to have this structure, or if they didn't have much of a choice.
Let me explain what I mean. As I mentioned earlier, Lies of P has a conventional, linear narrative. This means events actually unfold as you progress through the story, characters make active choices that have consequences on the narrative, and new information is actively revealed to the player and the other characters as these developments reach them. What this means is that there's very little wiggle room in terms of structure. They can't exactly have the player do most areas in a different order to what's intended, or else the continuity would fall apart. So the very idea of optional progression in the game world had to be ditched entirely. It's so linear that even the areas are all numbered in order on the fast travel menu.
This means that while there are side paths and secrets, yes, the only rewards you can expect are items. No new bosses, no secret ways of impacting the game's ending, nothing. I combed through every single area I played through thoroughly and the closest thing I found to substantial optional content were a few human minibosses that dropped cosmetic items. It's far more restrictive than even the "linear" Dark Souls 3, which had several major areas and bosses the player could miss entirely if they did not go looking for them. In Lies of P, you can find optional streets to go down, and various shortcuts that cause the level to loop back in on itself, but you will never come across a single moment where you actually feel like you explored something.
This begs the question, much like how I criticized the game's narrative, of if the game really should have borrowed this element of Dark Souls, even if one could argue it did this "right." Because, as I said, on a fundamental design level, the way these levels interconnect with each other in isolation is done fantastically, my criticism is not in the execution of their design, but whether or not this was the right game to do it in. Would that much have really changed if these levels were not dense mazes but instead more typical linear paths? Because there actually are some areas that function like this, such as the Moonlight Town/Cathedral section of the game, and I didn't really feel like I was getting a different experience. All the areas are structured the same when you get down to it, they just vary in how many times a shortcut will connect back to a previous checkpoint.
I feel like the maze-like design of Souls is beneficial when it forces you to consider the game world on a larger scale, and despite the similarities on a micro level, on the macro level, I don't think Lies of P quite succeeds in recreating that experience, because it simply isn't the same type of game. And maybe that's fine, this isn't really a flaw in and of itself. After all, being a different game from Dark Souls does not make it worse than Dark Souls. In this case, i just makes me wonder what it would look like if we had a version of this game that did go the extra mile and had its world interconnect and weave off into the unknown in the same way the games that inspired it did.
There is one other aspect where this game's desire to be like Souls hinders it, and it comes in even the more conventional aspects of the narrative. This game promotes itself as an adaptation of Pinocchio, and this is true... expect the times when it isn't. This isn't me complaining about the dark and gritty takes on various Pinocchio characters or whatever, I mean there are literally just large stretches of this game that, as far as I could tell, have nothing to do with the material it's based on. And I don't criticize this to make it seem as though the original collection of Pinocchio novels are some sacred text that must be respected in an adaptation, but it's weird how this game goes back and forth between the "grimdark Pinocchio" story it was promoted as, and some weird, other thing it's also trying to be.
Most people who play this probably already know what I'm referring to, but I'll try to leave it vague since I haven't exactly "spoiled" the game I'm referring to, but there is a significant group of antagonists who, as far as I can tell, cannot be connected to anything from Pinocchio. They do, technically, have a connection to Sophia, the "blue fairy" of this story, but her connection to them has very little to do with what their actual deal is. What this means is that a lot of bosses, enemies, and even narrative elements just feel somewhat out of place. These aspects of the story are all connected and interwoven on a literal plot level, but thematically, other than one of the game's main antagonists (a character who, as far as I can tell, is not even vaguely based on anyone from any version of the Pinocchio story) constantly repeating that he wants to "create a world without lies", there's a distinct lack of cohesion. And if the game's absolutely BONKERS post-credits scene is any indication, as much as I love the unashamed absurdity of what it implies, there's only going to be less cohesion in this developer's future projects.
So why are these things here? Well, they give the narrative the opportunity to do a bit more typical Souls storytelling. Fallen religious leaders, bizarre experiments, men who want to become gods, that kind of thing. It's clearly the developers trying their hand at telling these kinds of stories. And they're not bad, but I don't think they're as strong as what the game starts as. When this is a game about you fighting a bunch of robotic puppets to save Geppetto, everything fits together nicely. When you introduce these other elements, the waters get muddied. For what it's worth, this does give the game some more diversity in terms of enemies and visuals, so this choice isn't entirely without its benefit, as fighting mechanical puppets might have gotten boring if they were the only thing you fought over this surprisingly long game. I just wish they found a way to connect everything together in a way that felt more natural. The result, unfortunately is less than ideal.
The point of all of these complaints is not to say Lies of P is a bad soulslike, in fact I think it's deserving of all the praise it gets. But it does serve as an example of how you can't just make Dark Souls again to make a good soulslike. It's not the differences that cause this game to be flawed, it's that those differences are weighed down by the shackles of being faithful to the formula of other games. With more changes, more freedom to set itself apart, we could have gotten a version of Lies of P that was a better version of itself, even if it would have been a worse Bloodborne 2.
That being said, my main issue, and I want to be clear that this isn't a huge one, is that I'm not sure these influences are entirely to the game's benefit. I think perhaps diverging even further from Souls could have made this game stronger, which is not me appealing some arbitrary standard of originality, but because I do feel some aspects of its design where its loyalty to its inspirations hold it back.
For example, the game is very much trying to tell a linear narrative. Unlike in Souls and Bloodborne, where the story has already happened in the past and what little plot there is remains pretty much inscrutable until you piece together the backstory on your own, Lies of P is something closer to a conventional narrative. At the very least, I wasn't exactly left confused as to who or what any particular character or boss's "deal" was supposed to be by the end. But this doesn't mean there aren't gaps in the narrative, things you have to fill in with item descriptions that are vague and hard to intuit. I'm still not entirely sure exactly why the perpetrator behind one of the game's inciting incidents, the "Puppet Frenzy", did what they did, for example. I'm sure I can find the answer, somewhere, but my purpose in bringing this up is that it made me ask a question - is the game actually more interesting for telling the story this way?
I think this aspect of the Souls series works better for its inherently inscrutable narrative. In those games, there's a degree of subjectivity to everything because all hope for an objective truth died out with the rest of the world. All you're left with is bad actors with their own agendas trying to steer you towards fulfilling their own ends, and only through vague scraps of the past can you determine who you're better off working with.
Conversely, I don't think there's much ambiguity to Lies of P's narrative. In fact, its morality is almost beaten over your head with its simplicity. One of the game's fundamental mechanics is that nearly every dialogue option is a choice between a truth or a lie. Your puppet's ability to lie separates them from other puppets, an indicator of some inner humanity despite being an artificial creation. So, the game treats every lie as the "right" choice, as something that brings you closer and closer to humanity. As far as I'm aware, lying never actually brings any negative consequences for your own character or anyone else. (As a tangent, this is another problem I have with the game, as there were a few times where I told a character the truth, expecting they would appreciate it more than a pathetic lie to spare their feelings, only to find out the game expected me to lie to create a better outcome for everyone)
So, with a story so simple to understand, why leave aspects of it unexplained and unanswered, so that someone with way too much time on their hands can dig through the lore to fill in the gaps? The answer is because Dark Souls and Bloodborne do it. Learning this additional information won't cause you to question the path you've been lead down, won't affect how you interact with the world, because as we've established, from the very beginning the game makes it clear what the "right" choice always is. Even the few times where there's a choice more complicated than truth or lie, there's almost always a "correct" answer you're primed for in advance. The few times I did dig through item descriptions, particularly for boss items, I never actually learned anything that affected my decisions going forwards, or made me question if I made the right choice when I looked back. We're left with a story where 90% of it can be easily understood, and 10% is arbitrarily cut out for the sake of having some actual new information for the item descriptions to present. I don't think it's more interesting that I don't know exactly why the Puppet Frenzy happened, even if I can connect it to that character's other actions to an extent, this just happened to be how the story was told for arbitrary reasons.
This general attempt at replicating the inscrutability of the Souls series carries over beyond just the narrative. The Souls series is known (and often criticized) for how difficult it is to actually understand what the various stats and menus actually mean. There is a staggering amount of information and none of it is explained to you. And since many choices are irreversible, this can often lean to you unintentionally creating consequences for yourself you had no way of anticipating and now have no way of undoing. A defense of this I've often heard is that it leans into the inherent incomprehensibility of the world. If the story isn't going to explain itself to you, why should the mechanics outside of a basic controls tutorial? I can get behind this for Dark Souls, but as we've established, Lies of P does not take place in that kind of world.
This world can be mostly understood even to a casual player, but if this were their first soulslike, they'd be utterly lost as to what they're actually doing on a gameplay level, not helped by some wonky translations in a few of the tutorials and menus. I barely understood how to engage with the systems of Dark Souls 3, the first of these games I ever played, so I can't imagine a different experience if I had somehow played this first. What makes this more frustrating is that last year's Elden Ring, a game actually made by the developers of the Souls series and one that is nearly as incomprehensible as its predecessors, actually goes further than this game does by having an option to explain almost every single statistic and option within every single menu of the game, which Lies of P fails to do, despite how much it shares with those menus. Perhaps this isn't a big deal, since this game's main audience is Souls veterans who won't struggle with these issues, but I couldn't help but think this game would have been better if there weren't some things I could only understand by remembering how they worked in Dark Souls.
On a game structure level, I think this game's relationship to Dark Souls is probably where it succeeds the best. The city of Krat, much like Bloodborne's Yharnam, just effortlessly lends itself to the compact, confusing, and interweaving level design of the Souls series, and it's done shockingly well here. But it is worth noting that this game is very linear, probably most comparable in structure to Dark Souls 3. You're pretty much always moving from one area to the next, one checkpoint to the next, with little need to have a wider understanding of the world beyond your immediate surroundings. This, on its own, despite many critics of Dark Souls 3's structure, is not bad. But I can't help but wonder if Lies of P really wanted to have this structure, or if they didn't have much of a choice.
Let me explain what I mean. As I mentioned earlier, Lies of P has a conventional, linear narrative. This means events actually unfold as you progress through the story, characters make active choices that have consequences on the narrative, and new information is actively revealed to the player and the other characters as these developments reach them. What this means is that there's very little wiggle room in terms of structure. They can't exactly have the player do most areas in a different order to what's intended, or else the continuity would fall apart. So the very idea of optional progression in the game world had to be ditched entirely. It's so linear that even the areas are all numbered in order on the fast travel menu.
This means that while there are side paths and secrets, yes, the only rewards you can expect are items. No new bosses, no secret ways of impacting the game's ending, nothing. I combed through every single area I played through thoroughly and the closest thing I found to substantial optional content were a few human minibosses that dropped cosmetic items. It's far more restrictive than even the "linear" Dark Souls 3, which had several major areas and bosses the player could miss entirely if they did not go looking for them. In Lies of P, you can find optional streets to go down, and various shortcuts that cause the level to loop back in on itself, but you will never come across a single moment where you actually feel like you explored something.
This begs the question, much like how I criticized the game's narrative, of if the game really should have borrowed this element of Dark Souls, even if one could argue it did this "right." Because, as I said, on a fundamental design level, the way these levels interconnect with each other in isolation is done fantastically, my criticism is not in the execution of their design, but whether or not this was the right game to do it in. Would that much have really changed if these levels were not dense mazes but instead more typical linear paths? Because there actually are some areas that function like this, such as the Moonlight Town/Cathedral section of the game, and I didn't really feel like I was getting a different experience. All the areas are structured the same when you get down to it, they just vary in how many times a shortcut will connect back to a previous checkpoint.
I feel like the maze-like design of Souls is beneficial when it forces you to consider the game world on a larger scale, and despite the similarities on a micro level, on the macro level, I don't think Lies of P quite succeeds in recreating that experience, because it simply isn't the same type of game. And maybe that's fine, this isn't really a flaw in and of itself. After all, being a different game from Dark Souls does not make it worse than Dark Souls. In this case, i just makes me wonder what it would look like if we had a version of this game that did go the extra mile and had its world interconnect and weave off into the unknown in the same way the games that inspired it did.
There is one other aspect where this game's desire to be like Souls hinders it, and it comes in even the more conventional aspects of the narrative. This game promotes itself as an adaptation of Pinocchio, and this is true... expect the times when it isn't. This isn't me complaining about the dark and gritty takes on various Pinocchio characters or whatever, I mean there are literally just large stretches of this game that, as far as I could tell, have nothing to do with the material it's based on. And I don't criticize this to make it seem as though the original collection of Pinocchio novels are some sacred text that must be respected in an adaptation, but it's weird how this game goes back and forth between the "grimdark Pinocchio" story it was promoted as, and some weird, other thing it's also trying to be.
Most people who play this probably already know what I'm referring to, but I'll try to leave it vague since I haven't exactly "spoiled" the game I'm referring to, but there is a significant group of antagonists who, as far as I can tell, cannot be connected to anything from Pinocchio. They do, technically, have a connection to Sophia, the "blue fairy" of this story, but her connection to them has very little to do with what their actual deal is. What this means is that a lot of bosses, enemies, and even narrative elements just feel somewhat out of place. These aspects of the story are all connected and interwoven on a literal plot level, but thematically, other than one of the game's main antagonists (a character who, as far as I can tell, is not even vaguely based on anyone from any version of the Pinocchio story) constantly repeating that he wants to "create a world without lies", there's a distinct lack of cohesion. And if the game's absolutely BONKERS post-credits scene is any indication, as much as I love the unashamed absurdity of what it implies, there's only going to be less cohesion in this developer's future projects.
So why are these things here? Well, they give the narrative the opportunity to do a bit more typical Souls storytelling. Fallen religious leaders, bizarre experiments, men who want to become gods, that kind of thing. It's clearly the developers trying their hand at telling these kinds of stories. And they're not bad, but I don't think they're as strong as what the game starts as. When this is a game about you fighting a bunch of robotic puppets to save Geppetto, everything fits together nicely. When you introduce these other elements, the waters get muddied. For what it's worth, this does give the game some more diversity in terms of enemies and visuals, so this choice isn't entirely without its benefit, as fighting mechanical puppets might have gotten boring if they were the only thing you fought over this surprisingly long game. I just wish they found a way to connect everything together in a way that felt more natural. The result, unfortunately is less than ideal.
The point of all of these complaints is not to say Lies of P is a bad soulslike, in fact I think it's deserving of all the praise it gets. But it does serve as an example of how you can't just make Dark Souls again to make a good soulslike. It's not the differences that cause this game to be flawed, it's that those differences are weighed down by the shackles of being faithful to the formula of other games. With more changes, more freedom to set itself apart, we could have gotten a version of Lies of P that was a better version of itself, even if it would have been a worse Bloodborne 2.
2021
This review contains spoilers
There is something wrong with the world of Axiom Verge 2.
I'm not referring to any malevolent force within the game. In fact, there really isn't one. Sure, about halfway through a villain will start interfering, but this game is surprisingly... relaxed compared to a lot of Metroidvanias.
No, what's wrong is just that everything feels a bit... off. The first Axiom Verge is a phenomenal example of plunging you into an alien world, utterly unrecognizable from our own world. Nothing about the environment, the native species, the characters, or anything feels like Earth. The protagonist, Trace, a scientist from Earth, is the only grounding element to be able to follow along with what's happening at all.
In this second game, despite not taking place on Earth, all the environments are distinctly Earth-like. There are other human characters this time around, there are structures clearly built by the human researchers who inhabit this place, and there are even familiar vehicles like trucks and helicopters. At certain moments, you'll forget you're supposed to be in some bizarre alternate dimension.
Though you play as a human in this game, a CEO named Indra, it is you who will feel like the alien in this world. Because the world doesn't feel like it was designed for you. This is going to be complicated to explain, because I mean that last statement in both good in bad ways.
Unlike the first game, which revolved around shooter combat, this one is mainly interested in melee combat. And yet, the game weirdly doesn't seem suited to it. The most common enemy, the tiny drone, runs completely underneath your basic swing, requiring a crouch attack. Swing speed is so slow they can usually get a cheap hit or two in as well.
Tougher enemies aren't much better in this regard, as they aren't knocked back very easily and sport attacks that are almost impossible to dodge within the typical combat range. While you do have an additional ranged option in form of the boomerang, it's pretty slow and still doesn't have particularly impressive reach, especially when it comes to flying enemies.
The choice to revolve this game around close range combat isn't inherently bad, but the execution is bizarre. I wasn't necessarily dying constantly, but I was still taking damage a lot in ways that felt beyond my control. I couldn't help but feel like every single enemy I faced would be a much more manageable and fair challenge if instead of the melee weapons or the boomerang, I had Trace's gun and its staggering multitude of attack modes. Instead, I often resorted to cheesing combat by sending out my drone to deal with foes. But more on that later.
I'm not here to claim that the clunky combat of this game is somehow good, but it's strange how aware the game felt about how little Indra's combat fit into the world. Indeed, Indra feels strangely... out of place in Axiom Verge 2. Early obstacles like grates appear, surely teasing the fairly early teleport powerup from the first game. Certain spaces begin glitching in ways that could surely only be resolved by the signature Address Disruptor... right?
You do not get the ability to teleport in this game. In fact, the grates are the last possible obstacle to bypass through an ability that lets you turn into a cloud of nanomachines. The Address Disruptor also does not make an appearance, and the glitches in the environment are there moreso as a hint system for a completely different powerup to begin with.
Similarly, on a narrative level, Indra could not be any more different from Trace. Trace was a pretty typical everyman, and was written to ask pretty much all the questions you, the player, might have about the world you've been thrown into. It was pretty clear what was going through his head at every moment.
Indra, on the other hand, isn't as curious about the world. Though she's not devoid of questions about the world, almost all of her conversations are based on things the characters know, but you don't. And no one will stop to explain. Indra has a backstory, and to an extent a knowledge about what's going on in the world that you are not immediately keyed in to. And she has a motivation not immediately revealed to the player. Indra is as much a puzzle to you as the world and all of its strange history and secrets.
So much of this game exists in contrast to the original in a way that is fascinating. Where Axiom Verge 1 zigs, this game zags. That is, with one notable exception. Fairly early into the game, you'll find the one returning powerup from the first game: the Remote Drone. One of the first things you'll do with it is send it through a strange interdimensional portal. And once you cross this threshold, the wrongness begins to take hold.
Across the portal is an entire second world to explore, only accessible as the drone. This alternate dimension looks nothing like Earth. The visuals, the music, the enemies are all completely unlike the ones you've just been exploring. In a way that feels familiar. Though the drone still uses melee combat, this side of the game feels much closer to the experience of playing Axiom Verge 1, and yet it can never be explored as Indra. Only as the drone. Indra doesn't feel right... but the drone does.
And it's not just within this alternate dimension, known as the breach, that you'll be using the drone. You'll be using it to solve puzzles constantly in the main world as well. Not to mention, its faster movement and attack, along with its smaller hitbox makes combat much more manageable than as Indra. Indra begins to feel like the burden. The character you slug around so you can keep playing as the drone. So why is she even there?
This might seem like a criticism, but this feels... intentional, because of the way the game unfolds once this feeling begins creeping in. About midway through, the game's main ally tricks Indra and steals her body, trapping you within the Drone. You'll have recently unlocked the grappling hook powerup (something Indra could never access, even before this moment) so this hardly even feels like a downgrade. The drone has already become more capable of navigating the world than Indra.
And yet Indra, the character, doesn't want to be inside of this drone. Her goal from here on out is to get back to her original body. But you, as the player, are going to be having a lot of fun playing as the drone. You'll unlock tons of powerups during this phase of the game, such as a slingshot attack with the aforementioned grappling hook, hovering, and tons of powerups that improve navigating between the overworld and the Breach. The drone becomes more fun and versatile than Indra could ever hope to be.
It's during this section that the game really begins to feel... wrong. Why have I felt more at home navigating the alien world as the robot than as the human character who most of the initial mechanics centered around? I don't think it's a coincidence that it's during this phase of the game that the connections to the first game become clear.
Indeed, as you become more comfortable with the game, the world has become more familiar as well. It's not just a few reminiscent doorways anymore, familiar enemies, sights, and sounds begin to take hold. It becomes impossible to deny at this point. Somehow, some way, the world you've been navigating is connected to Sudra, the world of the first game. This strange, alien place is more of a comfort than the world that more closely resembles our own.
I'm going to be blunt here, I don't really understand the lore of these games with any sense of authority. I can only go off of my own experiences and what my own very limited understanding of the series' lore can reveal.
That being said, one of the most blatant themes the series has explored is knowledge and power at the cost of humanity. This can be seen in the first game, whose main antagonist is an evil version of Trace who became mad with power upon learning the secrets of the universe.
This theme continues through the second game. The people of this strange alien world were turned into sentient machines to fight a pointless war. Even a young child was forced into this process, with the thought that a child's mind would be more capable of controlling this technology.
This theme also applies with the player. Encountering familiar environments from the first game runs parallel to your increasing reliance on the drone. Your early time with the drone is when you'll first encounter vaguely familiar resemblances to Sudra within the Breach. Once you become trapped inside the drone, you travel to yet another alternate dimension that looks like Sudra was ripped straight out of the first game, albeit with a slightly higher resolution.
And then, late into the game, after being stuck inside of a drone for who knows how long, you finally gain the ability to transform back into a human - sort of. Even your new "human" form is now robotic, entirely composed of machinery. Now, rather than deploying the drone, you simply transform between Indra and the drone back and forth. The dynamic has flipped. Now you'll primarily be playing as the drone, only switching to Indra on the occasions when you need her abilities that the drone cannot access.
And it's during this portion of the game that you'll enter an area that will instantly throw you back to Axiom Verge 1. No longer are the familiar sights and sounds relegated to alternate dimensions. Now, even in the more familiar, Earth-like world, the alien architecture and devices of the first game have made their presence. And it's only now, even after several other visual callbacks to Axiom Verge 1, that you'll finally hear the familiar music of the first game.
This area is filled with a sense of unease. The world of the first game almost feels like it's infecting this one. Despite being a prequel to it, explaining how the technology and architecture of that game came to be, it feels wrong. Invasive. Like it's not supposed to be there. And yet, as you progress through this area, you'll learn about how all of this familiar technology from the first game came to be and what its original purpose was. The strangeness becomes natural, understandable. It's no longer alien.
But at the same time, another realization becomes clear. You've gotten so used to playing as the drone that you have to remind yourself you even still have a human form to change back into. Playing as this machine has become natural. It's a subtle sense of dread that I didn't even consciously realize it at first, but in hindsight, it became clear: I was no longer comfortable being human.
As mentioned earlier, it feels as though this world wasn't designed for you. In truth, it never was. The reason Trace, a human, was able to so easily navigate it, is because he was unique. Some entity known as a PatternMind, capable of manipulating the world to his will. He was special, he controlled the world, not the other way around.
Who is Indra, in comparison? She was one of the most powerful people on Earth, and yet here, wealth and status mean nothing. She was trying to swing an ice pick against alien robots beyond her understanding. It's only once she becomes irreversibly integrated with the technology of this world that she has any hope of truly navigating it.
Plenty of Metroidvanias give you tools that make you better capable of interacting with the world as you progress, but I've never seen a game start you at such a low point only to drastically increase your capabilities so much by the end. You're literally at your most capable of progressing through this world when you're not even the same character as the one you started as.
I'm not trying to defend the poor design of Indra. She is undeniably clunky to play as, even at the height of her abilities. Nor am I trying to treat that poor design as a work of genius. I can't exactly give this game a higher rating than I have precisely because there are several parts of this game I can't describe as "fun" in the traditional sense. That being said, I do still believe this contrast between Indra and the drone means something more than just the gameplay aspect of it.
The first trailer for this game begins with "You are not in control. You are not yourself. You belong to us now." It truly is the most accurate description of Indra's progression through this game. Indra, and indeed all the other humans in this game, are hopeless in trying to understand the full scope of what they're dealing with. Both the technology, and the alternate dimensions this series revolves around.
You, as a human, are insignificant to the scope of Axiom Verge. It is only as you slowly integrate yourself with technology you don't understand that you begin to see the wider truth. It is only as you become more machine than human that you begin to see into more and more of these other worlds.
The game ends with Indra accepting that she'll never truly be Indra again. She can never be with her daughter again. Not just because they are forever trapped in separate realities, but because Indra is no longer herself. That part of her died with her human body. She's someone else now. No longer is she an alien to this world, now she is part of it.
I'm not referring to any malevolent force within the game. In fact, there really isn't one. Sure, about halfway through a villain will start interfering, but this game is surprisingly... relaxed compared to a lot of Metroidvanias.
No, what's wrong is just that everything feels a bit... off. The first Axiom Verge is a phenomenal example of plunging you into an alien world, utterly unrecognizable from our own world. Nothing about the environment, the native species, the characters, or anything feels like Earth. The protagonist, Trace, a scientist from Earth, is the only grounding element to be able to follow along with what's happening at all.
In this second game, despite not taking place on Earth, all the environments are distinctly Earth-like. There are other human characters this time around, there are structures clearly built by the human researchers who inhabit this place, and there are even familiar vehicles like trucks and helicopters. At certain moments, you'll forget you're supposed to be in some bizarre alternate dimension.
Though you play as a human in this game, a CEO named Indra, it is you who will feel like the alien in this world. Because the world doesn't feel like it was designed for you. This is going to be complicated to explain, because I mean that last statement in both good in bad ways.
Unlike the first game, which revolved around shooter combat, this one is mainly interested in melee combat. And yet, the game weirdly doesn't seem suited to it. The most common enemy, the tiny drone, runs completely underneath your basic swing, requiring a crouch attack. Swing speed is so slow they can usually get a cheap hit or two in as well.
Tougher enemies aren't much better in this regard, as they aren't knocked back very easily and sport attacks that are almost impossible to dodge within the typical combat range. While you do have an additional ranged option in form of the boomerang, it's pretty slow and still doesn't have particularly impressive reach, especially when it comes to flying enemies.
The choice to revolve this game around close range combat isn't inherently bad, but the execution is bizarre. I wasn't necessarily dying constantly, but I was still taking damage a lot in ways that felt beyond my control. I couldn't help but feel like every single enemy I faced would be a much more manageable and fair challenge if instead of the melee weapons or the boomerang, I had Trace's gun and its staggering multitude of attack modes. Instead, I often resorted to cheesing combat by sending out my drone to deal with foes. But more on that later.
I'm not here to claim that the clunky combat of this game is somehow good, but it's strange how aware the game felt about how little Indra's combat fit into the world. Indeed, Indra feels strangely... out of place in Axiom Verge 2. Early obstacles like grates appear, surely teasing the fairly early teleport powerup from the first game. Certain spaces begin glitching in ways that could surely only be resolved by the signature Address Disruptor... right?
You do not get the ability to teleport in this game. In fact, the grates are the last possible obstacle to bypass through an ability that lets you turn into a cloud of nanomachines. The Address Disruptor also does not make an appearance, and the glitches in the environment are there moreso as a hint system for a completely different powerup to begin with.
Similarly, on a narrative level, Indra could not be any more different from Trace. Trace was a pretty typical everyman, and was written to ask pretty much all the questions you, the player, might have about the world you've been thrown into. It was pretty clear what was going through his head at every moment.
Indra, on the other hand, isn't as curious about the world. Though she's not devoid of questions about the world, almost all of her conversations are based on things the characters know, but you don't. And no one will stop to explain. Indra has a backstory, and to an extent a knowledge about what's going on in the world that you are not immediately keyed in to. And she has a motivation not immediately revealed to the player. Indra is as much a puzzle to you as the world and all of its strange history and secrets.
So much of this game exists in contrast to the original in a way that is fascinating. Where Axiom Verge 1 zigs, this game zags. That is, with one notable exception. Fairly early into the game, you'll find the one returning powerup from the first game: the Remote Drone. One of the first things you'll do with it is send it through a strange interdimensional portal. And once you cross this threshold, the wrongness begins to take hold.
Across the portal is an entire second world to explore, only accessible as the drone. This alternate dimension looks nothing like Earth. The visuals, the music, the enemies are all completely unlike the ones you've just been exploring. In a way that feels familiar. Though the drone still uses melee combat, this side of the game feels much closer to the experience of playing Axiom Verge 1, and yet it can never be explored as Indra. Only as the drone. Indra doesn't feel right... but the drone does.
And it's not just within this alternate dimension, known as the breach, that you'll be using the drone. You'll be using it to solve puzzles constantly in the main world as well. Not to mention, its faster movement and attack, along with its smaller hitbox makes combat much more manageable than as Indra. Indra begins to feel like the burden. The character you slug around so you can keep playing as the drone. So why is she even there?
This might seem like a criticism, but this feels... intentional, because of the way the game unfolds once this feeling begins creeping in. About midway through, the game's main ally tricks Indra and steals her body, trapping you within the Drone. You'll have recently unlocked the grappling hook powerup (something Indra could never access, even before this moment) so this hardly even feels like a downgrade. The drone has already become more capable of navigating the world than Indra.
And yet Indra, the character, doesn't want to be inside of this drone. Her goal from here on out is to get back to her original body. But you, as the player, are going to be having a lot of fun playing as the drone. You'll unlock tons of powerups during this phase of the game, such as a slingshot attack with the aforementioned grappling hook, hovering, and tons of powerups that improve navigating between the overworld and the Breach. The drone becomes more fun and versatile than Indra could ever hope to be.
It's during this section that the game really begins to feel... wrong. Why have I felt more at home navigating the alien world as the robot than as the human character who most of the initial mechanics centered around? I don't think it's a coincidence that it's during this phase of the game that the connections to the first game become clear.
Indeed, as you become more comfortable with the game, the world has become more familiar as well. It's not just a few reminiscent doorways anymore, familiar enemies, sights, and sounds begin to take hold. It becomes impossible to deny at this point. Somehow, some way, the world you've been navigating is connected to Sudra, the world of the first game. This strange, alien place is more of a comfort than the world that more closely resembles our own.
I'm going to be blunt here, I don't really understand the lore of these games with any sense of authority. I can only go off of my own experiences and what my own very limited understanding of the series' lore can reveal.
That being said, one of the most blatant themes the series has explored is knowledge and power at the cost of humanity. This can be seen in the first game, whose main antagonist is an evil version of Trace who became mad with power upon learning the secrets of the universe.
This theme continues through the second game. The people of this strange alien world were turned into sentient machines to fight a pointless war. Even a young child was forced into this process, with the thought that a child's mind would be more capable of controlling this technology.
This theme also applies with the player. Encountering familiar environments from the first game runs parallel to your increasing reliance on the drone. Your early time with the drone is when you'll first encounter vaguely familiar resemblances to Sudra within the Breach. Once you become trapped inside the drone, you travel to yet another alternate dimension that looks like Sudra was ripped straight out of the first game, albeit with a slightly higher resolution.
And then, late into the game, after being stuck inside of a drone for who knows how long, you finally gain the ability to transform back into a human - sort of. Even your new "human" form is now robotic, entirely composed of machinery. Now, rather than deploying the drone, you simply transform between Indra and the drone back and forth. The dynamic has flipped. Now you'll primarily be playing as the drone, only switching to Indra on the occasions when you need her abilities that the drone cannot access.
And it's during this portion of the game that you'll enter an area that will instantly throw you back to Axiom Verge 1. No longer are the familiar sights and sounds relegated to alternate dimensions. Now, even in the more familiar, Earth-like world, the alien architecture and devices of the first game have made their presence. And it's only now, even after several other visual callbacks to Axiom Verge 1, that you'll finally hear the familiar music of the first game.
This area is filled with a sense of unease. The world of the first game almost feels like it's infecting this one. Despite being a prequel to it, explaining how the technology and architecture of that game came to be, it feels wrong. Invasive. Like it's not supposed to be there. And yet, as you progress through this area, you'll learn about how all of this familiar technology from the first game came to be and what its original purpose was. The strangeness becomes natural, understandable. It's no longer alien.
But at the same time, another realization becomes clear. You've gotten so used to playing as the drone that you have to remind yourself you even still have a human form to change back into. Playing as this machine has become natural. It's a subtle sense of dread that I didn't even consciously realize it at first, but in hindsight, it became clear: I was no longer comfortable being human.
As mentioned earlier, it feels as though this world wasn't designed for you. In truth, it never was. The reason Trace, a human, was able to so easily navigate it, is because he was unique. Some entity known as a PatternMind, capable of manipulating the world to his will. He was special, he controlled the world, not the other way around.
Who is Indra, in comparison? She was one of the most powerful people on Earth, and yet here, wealth and status mean nothing. She was trying to swing an ice pick against alien robots beyond her understanding. It's only once she becomes irreversibly integrated with the technology of this world that she has any hope of truly navigating it.
Plenty of Metroidvanias give you tools that make you better capable of interacting with the world as you progress, but I've never seen a game start you at such a low point only to drastically increase your capabilities so much by the end. You're literally at your most capable of progressing through this world when you're not even the same character as the one you started as.
I'm not trying to defend the poor design of Indra. She is undeniably clunky to play as, even at the height of her abilities. Nor am I trying to treat that poor design as a work of genius. I can't exactly give this game a higher rating than I have precisely because there are several parts of this game I can't describe as "fun" in the traditional sense. That being said, I do still believe this contrast between Indra and the drone means something more than just the gameplay aspect of it.
The first trailer for this game begins with "You are not in control. You are not yourself. You belong to us now." It truly is the most accurate description of Indra's progression through this game. Indra, and indeed all the other humans in this game, are hopeless in trying to understand the full scope of what they're dealing with. Both the technology, and the alternate dimensions this series revolves around.
You, as a human, are insignificant to the scope of Axiom Verge. It is only as you slowly integrate yourself with technology you don't understand that you begin to see the wider truth. It is only as you become more machine than human that you begin to see into more and more of these other worlds.
The game ends with Indra accepting that she'll never truly be Indra again. She can never be with her daughter again. Not just because they are forever trapped in separate realities, but because Indra is no longer herself. That part of her died with her human body. She's someone else now. No longer is she an alien to this world, now she is part of it.
This review contains spoilers
There isn't really a whole lot to say about Spider-Man 2 because in reality, most of what you can say about the previous Insomniac Spider-Man games still holds true even now. Even story-wise, almost every beat is exactly what you'd expect based on both the comics they draw inspiration from and also just how they've written these games in the past. The symbiote storyline is so well-known and so hard to innovate upon that there really wasn't much Insomniac could do other than tell the same story again and hopefully be competent at it in the process. I think they succeeded, but there is one weird thing that happens towards the end, one that only seems to exist because this story happens to be told in the medium of video games.
I'm talking about the presence of the "Anti-Venom" suit, and it's something that got me thinking once again about a subject that's been on my mind for years but I've struggled to put into words. Because despite my issues with Anti-Venom that we'll get to in a moment, it's also fairly inconsequential. Anything and everything I say about it will inevitably be countered with "it's fun" and I wouldn't even disagree with that. This is not meant to be an "Anti-Venom makes the game bad" criticism, but rather it's a symptom of a larger problem I have with our collective understanding of game design, not just for Spider-Man games, but for almost all video games.
But before I get to those wider issues, let's talk about this one video game first. Spider-Man 2, among other things, is an adaptation of the fairly iconic "Black Suit" Spider-Man storyline, in which Spider-Man comes into contact with a mysterious black substance that turns into a new suit that gradually warps his mind until he isn't truly himself anymore, corrupted by the alien symbiote that is what he initially thought was just a fancy costume. Eventually, of course, he is able to reject the symbiote's influence and tear off the gooey "suit", leading the symbiote to seek out a new host and become the villainous Venom. If you've seen one version of this story, you've seen them all. Spider-Man 2 is doing nothing different in that regard.
Yuri Lowenthal, who plays Peter Parker in these games, recently did an interview where he likened his version of Peter being corrupted by the symbiote to addiction. At first the rush of power the symbiote gives Peter is great, but over time, he becomes more and more dependent on it, until he serves it rather than the other way around. I'm no expert on addiction here, but the analogy seems decent enough. And I think we can apply that to more than just his performance or even the writing, but to an extent, the game design.
After Peter finally dons the symbiote suit in Spider-Man 2, you'll instantly feel a change in the gameplay. For starters, you unlock the new Symbiote Surge ability, one that temporarily puts Peter into a state where he can utterly wallop most enemies in just a few attacks, essentially a "mash square to win" button. In addition, new symbiote powers replace abilities that previously utilized Peter's Iron Spider legs. And quite frankly, these symbiote abilities are far more useful than the Iron Spider ones ever were. In particular, the Symbiote Yank, which allows you to instantly grab a group of enemies in a surprisingly large area in front of you and then slam them down, taking every enemy affected by it out of commission for a moment while also doing heavy damage, is a life-saver on higher difficulties where large groups of enemies can feel like a death sentence.
Because of this, because the Symbiote has empowered Peter so much, as you play it's hard to imagine going back to a world without them. Even the powerful electric abilities of the other Spider-Man, Miles Morales, don't feel as devastating as anything you can accomplish with the Symbiote's power. Like in the story, in gameplay you'll come to be dependent on the Symbiote's abilities more and more, especially as the "Hunter" enemies pose a far more significant challenge than the basic gangsters you fight at the start of the game.
So, when you reach a point in the story that the time finally comes for Peter to reject the Symbiote and take off that black suit once and for all, you immediately notice the difference. Those old Iron Spider abilities you're now forced back into using just don't pack the same punch, and the aforementioned Symbiote Surge is gone, not even replaced with some lesser alternative. You have been put into a feeling of withdrawl, perfectly capturing the toxic influence of the symbiote. Video games are an interactive medium, after all, and here they successfully managed to convey narrative through the gameplay itself.
And then a handful of story missions later, we find out Peter has a piece of the symbiote still lingering inside him which is then cured by Mister Negative's powers, giving him the white Anti-Venom suit, essentially a version of the symbiote that won't mess with his head. Which means all those powers you lost earlier in the story are back. Although two of the previous symbiote abilities are replaced with slightly less powerful variants, two of them return completely unaltered from their original versions. On top of this, the Symbiote Surge, which caused you to play as the brutal, highly aggressive madman the symbiote turns you into, also comes back completely unchanged. Even in the story, this is outright described as having all the power of the original symbiote with none of the consequences.
I don't need to go into too much detail about why I take issues with this, right? It immediately goes back on all the praise I just laid on the gameplay/story synergy they achieved with the symbiote. Of course, I know why this was done. The symbiote was fun! Why take that power away from the player forever? Why leave one Spider-Man with less combat options than the other? And I'm not here to say the game is ruined because of this or anything, but just because I understand the thought process here doesn't mean I agree with it.
This moment is, I think, a good encapsulation of an approach to game design I wish had become less normalized. As much as we all like the idea of gameplay and narrative both working in harmony to tell the same story, too often there is a tension between doing that and still prioritizing "fun" above all else. And this is where we run into trouble, because when I say that, it sounds like I'm saying games should be less fun, which is not the case. I'm generally a completionist when it comes to the games I play, so it's not as if I want that experience to be painful.
What I'm trying to say is that I think most people who play games want video games to be taken seriously as an art form. And I think to some extent, that idea has become vastly more popular now than it was, say, 10 years ago. But I still wouldn't consider it quite "mainstream" yet, and I think there are a few roadblocks to that, and part of that comes down to how we think about game design. Fundamentally, even though we still understand games as being able to tell stories, to communicate emotions, they're still seen as "lesser", something meant to be enjoyed in the same way as a toy moreso than any other narrative medium.
I'm talking about this with Spider-Man 2 not because I think it is the most important game to placed within this phenomenon. It's, obviously, a mainstream AAA game meant to drive up console sales. We were not robbed of some deep artistic experience because it made certain choices. But that whole Anti-Venom thing finally helped me put together these thoughts. Its inclusion, fundamentally, treats the game as a toy. And that's fine! Toys are fun! Again, my takeaway here is not to say that the game is bad because of this, or that it shouldn't exist in the form it does. But it's not as if it's the only game we're designing this way.
I think there's just a fear in game design, more than any other medium, of losing the player's interest. Games require the most money to buy into of almost any art form. For the price of a single AAA video game, you're paying the equivalent of more movie tickets than you can count on one hand, or a few months of a streaming service where you could find several shows you want to watch. So there's an expectation that, when you buy a game, you're going to get something worth the money you put into it. There's a reason AAA open world games have become so homogenized.
But this mindset isn't one that I think indie games are immune to either. I don't think most indie games are really trying for anything less, even if there is somewhat more variation in the types of games being made. But any indie that tries to, perhaps, experiment with our typical notion of "fun" in order to generate unique meaning through its interactivity, it's often ignored entirely or met with derision. The existence of the term "walking simulator" is perhaps the clearest example of this phenomenon.
But I think even games that are more conventional than, say, Gone Home, are able to perhaps subvert this "fun at all costs" mindset. For example, Undertale is a pretty typical turn-based RPG for the most part, albeit mixed with some bullet hell elements. However, it also features the infamous "genocide" route, which forces you to grind for what feels like hours in order to achieve it as a way of commenting on how what you're doing is senseless and pointless and is solely motivated by wanting to see what will happen at the end. It's not exactly "fun" outside of the few cool unique boss fights that exist seemingly just to generate word of mouth for this route and get people to try it, but the story it tells through the player's own interactions with it is incomparable.
The reason this all matters to me so much is, again, not because I think Spider-Man 2 is terrible or even unique to having these problems. But it's just one of those examples that gets you thinking about these sorts of things precisely because it actually gets these things right at first, only to trip over itself just before the finish line. Something I don't think I've talked about before is that game design is a field I am interested in working in one day, so I kind of can't help but think about the games I play this way. All of these questions of how we approach design are not just ones I'm asking others, but also ones I might have to ask myself one day if I'm put in the position of designing my own game.
So hopefully it's clear that this review isn't really about Spider-Man 2. It's about video games as a whole and how we think about them. And I still think I've really only scratched the surface on this topic of how we're designing games like toys, but talking any more about it felt like too much of a tangent. Again, this is something that's been on my mind for years, this game just happened to be the one that got me to start putting it into words. Video games are such an interesting medium for storytelling not just because of the way the player's actions can impact the narrative, but how the narrative can reflect those actions back at the player and make them question things about themselves. We can challenge people playing games on more levels than mechanical skill, we just have to try.
I'm talking about the presence of the "Anti-Venom" suit, and it's something that got me thinking once again about a subject that's been on my mind for years but I've struggled to put into words. Because despite my issues with Anti-Venom that we'll get to in a moment, it's also fairly inconsequential. Anything and everything I say about it will inevitably be countered with "it's fun" and I wouldn't even disagree with that. This is not meant to be an "Anti-Venom makes the game bad" criticism, but rather it's a symptom of a larger problem I have with our collective understanding of game design, not just for Spider-Man games, but for almost all video games.
But before I get to those wider issues, let's talk about this one video game first. Spider-Man 2, among other things, is an adaptation of the fairly iconic "Black Suit" Spider-Man storyline, in which Spider-Man comes into contact with a mysterious black substance that turns into a new suit that gradually warps his mind until he isn't truly himself anymore, corrupted by the alien symbiote that is what he initially thought was just a fancy costume. Eventually, of course, he is able to reject the symbiote's influence and tear off the gooey "suit", leading the symbiote to seek out a new host and become the villainous Venom. If you've seen one version of this story, you've seen them all. Spider-Man 2 is doing nothing different in that regard.
Yuri Lowenthal, who plays Peter Parker in these games, recently did an interview where he likened his version of Peter being corrupted by the symbiote to addiction. At first the rush of power the symbiote gives Peter is great, but over time, he becomes more and more dependent on it, until he serves it rather than the other way around. I'm no expert on addiction here, but the analogy seems decent enough. And I think we can apply that to more than just his performance or even the writing, but to an extent, the game design.
After Peter finally dons the symbiote suit in Spider-Man 2, you'll instantly feel a change in the gameplay. For starters, you unlock the new Symbiote Surge ability, one that temporarily puts Peter into a state where he can utterly wallop most enemies in just a few attacks, essentially a "mash square to win" button. In addition, new symbiote powers replace abilities that previously utilized Peter's Iron Spider legs. And quite frankly, these symbiote abilities are far more useful than the Iron Spider ones ever were. In particular, the Symbiote Yank, which allows you to instantly grab a group of enemies in a surprisingly large area in front of you and then slam them down, taking every enemy affected by it out of commission for a moment while also doing heavy damage, is a life-saver on higher difficulties where large groups of enemies can feel like a death sentence.
Because of this, because the Symbiote has empowered Peter so much, as you play it's hard to imagine going back to a world without them. Even the powerful electric abilities of the other Spider-Man, Miles Morales, don't feel as devastating as anything you can accomplish with the Symbiote's power. Like in the story, in gameplay you'll come to be dependent on the Symbiote's abilities more and more, especially as the "Hunter" enemies pose a far more significant challenge than the basic gangsters you fight at the start of the game.
So, when you reach a point in the story that the time finally comes for Peter to reject the Symbiote and take off that black suit once and for all, you immediately notice the difference. Those old Iron Spider abilities you're now forced back into using just don't pack the same punch, and the aforementioned Symbiote Surge is gone, not even replaced with some lesser alternative. You have been put into a feeling of withdrawl, perfectly capturing the toxic influence of the symbiote. Video games are an interactive medium, after all, and here they successfully managed to convey narrative through the gameplay itself.
And then a handful of story missions later, we find out Peter has a piece of the symbiote still lingering inside him which is then cured by Mister Negative's powers, giving him the white Anti-Venom suit, essentially a version of the symbiote that won't mess with his head. Which means all those powers you lost earlier in the story are back. Although two of the previous symbiote abilities are replaced with slightly less powerful variants, two of them return completely unaltered from their original versions. On top of this, the Symbiote Surge, which caused you to play as the brutal, highly aggressive madman the symbiote turns you into, also comes back completely unchanged. Even in the story, this is outright described as having all the power of the original symbiote with none of the consequences.
I don't need to go into too much detail about why I take issues with this, right? It immediately goes back on all the praise I just laid on the gameplay/story synergy they achieved with the symbiote. Of course, I know why this was done. The symbiote was fun! Why take that power away from the player forever? Why leave one Spider-Man with less combat options than the other? And I'm not here to say the game is ruined because of this or anything, but just because I understand the thought process here doesn't mean I agree with it.
This moment is, I think, a good encapsulation of an approach to game design I wish had become less normalized. As much as we all like the idea of gameplay and narrative both working in harmony to tell the same story, too often there is a tension between doing that and still prioritizing "fun" above all else. And this is where we run into trouble, because when I say that, it sounds like I'm saying games should be less fun, which is not the case. I'm generally a completionist when it comes to the games I play, so it's not as if I want that experience to be painful.
What I'm trying to say is that I think most people who play games want video games to be taken seriously as an art form. And I think to some extent, that idea has become vastly more popular now than it was, say, 10 years ago. But I still wouldn't consider it quite "mainstream" yet, and I think there are a few roadblocks to that, and part of that comes down to how we think about game design. Fundamentally, even though we still understand games as being able to tell stories, to communicate emotions, they're still seen as "lesser", something meant to be enjoyed in the same way as a toy moreso than any other narrative medium.
I'm talking about this with Spider-Man 2 not because I think it is the most important game to placed within this phenomenon. It's, obviously, a mainstream AAA game meant to drive up console sales. We were not robbed of some deep artistic experience because it made certain choices. But that whole Anti-Venom thing finally helped me put together these thoughts. Its inclusion, fundamentally, treats the game as a toy. And that's fine! Toys are fun! Again, my takeaway here is not to say that the game is bad because of this, or that it shouldn't exist in the form it does. But it's not as if it's the only game we're designing this way.
I think there's just a fear in game design, more than any other medium, of losing the player's interest. Games require the most money to buy into of almost any art form. For the price of a single AAA video game, you're paying the equivalent of more movie tickets than you can count on one hand, or a few months of a streaming service where you could find several shows you want to watch. So there's an expectation that, when you buy a game, you're going to get something worth the money you put into it. There's a reason AAA open world games have become so homogenized.
But this mindset isn't one that I think indie games are immune to either. I don't think most indie games are really trying for anything less, even if there is somewhat more variation in the types of games being made. But any indie that tries to, perhaps, experiment with our typical notion of "fun" in order to generate unique meaning through its interactivity, it's often ignored entirely or met with derision. The existence of the term "walking simulator" is perhaps the clearest example of this phenomenon.
But I think even games that are more conventional than, say, Gone Home, are able to perhaps subvert this "fun at all costs" mindset. For example, Undertale is a pretty typical turn-based RPG for the most part, albeit mixed with some bullet hell elements. However, it also features the infamous "genocide" route, which forces you to grind for what feels like hours in order to achieve it as a way of commenting on how what you're doing is senseless and pointless and is solely motivated by wanting to see what will happen at the end. It's not exactly "fun" outside of the few cool unique boss fights that exist seemingly just to generate word of mouth for this route and get people to try it, but the story it tells through the player's own interactions with it is incomparable.
The reason this all matters to me so much is, again, not because I think Spider-Man 2 is terrible or even unique to having these problems. But it's just one of those examples that gets you thinking about these sorts of things precisely because it actually gets these things right at first, only to trip over itself just before the finish line. Something I don't think I've talked about before is that game design is a field I am interested in working in one day, so I kind of can't help but think about the games I play this way. All of these questions of how we approach design are not just ones I'm asking others, but also ones I might have to ask myself one day if I'm put in the position of designing my own game.
So hopefully it's clear that this review isn't really about Spider-Man 2. It's about video games as a whole and how we think about them. And I still think I've really only scratched the surface on this topic of how we're designing games like toys, but talking any more about it felt like too much of a tangent. Again, this is something that's been on my mind for years, this game just happened to be the one that got me to start putting it into words. Video games are such an interesting medium for storytelling not just because of the way the player's actions can impact the narrative, but how the narrative can reflect those actions back at the player and make them question things about themselves. We can challenge people playing games on more levels than mechanical skill, we just have to try.
2012
This review contains spoilers
Up until last week, I had never played Final Fantasy VII. I'm not exactly much of a JRPG person. But one thing has fascinated for the last few years, and that was the discourse surrounding Final Fantasy VII Remake, namely rather than being a retelling of the original game's story, it introduced changes and new elements that turned it into more of a commentary on Final Fantasy VII and its impact. Anyone who's followed my reviews on here and other sites can probably guess that this kind of discourse immediately put the remake on my radar.
Like I said earlier, though, I'm not much of a JRPG player. However, I knew that if I was going to play Final Fantasy VII Remake, I needed to play the original Final Fantasy VII first so I could appreciate it on its own before diving into the remake and trying to decipher what exactly its changes and additions meant. Which meant playing 30+ hours of one of my least favorite types of games: a turn-based RPG.
For what it's worth, Final Fantasy VII, despite being such a formative staple of the genre, actually uses a system that separates it from a typical turn-based RPG. The "active time battle" system means every individual character and enemy's turn is dictated by an individual timer rather than waiting until every single player on the field has acted. Which means that while you're busy choosing actions for one character, the enemy is already recovering and might attack you before you finish.
This system didn't really grip me at first, it seemed like a useless change that didn't solve my two issues when it comes to turn-based RPGs: my own impatience and the inability to truly react to your opponent. Impatience is self-explanatory, but by "inability to react" I am referring to the fact that when an enemy does an attack, you have no real way of intercepting or countering, you will simply get hit and there's nothing you can do about it unless there's a chance it misses or something. Of course, the player has the same advantage against enemies, but the "fairness" of the design doesn't change how frustrating it feels when an enemy just suddenly busts out a move that you couldn't have anticipated and ruins the fight for reasons that were basically out of your control because you couldn't have taken it into account on a previous turn.
Active time battle, again, isn't actually that much of a solution. There's still a lot of sitting through animations, so it's not as if battles are actually quicker than in a typical turn-based RPG. And for the most part, because the game pauses during certain animations, you're still not afforded the freedom to react. I pretty much hated the combat system for the entirety of Midgar, a 6-hour "prologue" of sorts. That is, until, I finally reached battles challenging enough where I was being asked to consider healing not just between fights, but during. In a regular turn-based RPG, when a character is low on health, although it's kind of scary, it's not truly a big deal, you just go into the menu and use a potion or have your healing character cast a spell. Your only worry is if you'll be able to heal enough to withstand the next attack, which usually isn't a problem.
In Final Fantasy VII, every frame you spend in a menu brings the enemy an inch closer to attacking again. So you don't just have to heal, you have to heal fast. Some battles got so frantic to the point where my optimal strategy genuinely came to be giving every single character a Restore Materia just to make sure I could not possibly miss a chance to heal. This worked to an extent, but once certain bosses started to whip out attacks that hit the whole party, even this lost its usefulness. The solution to this problem is where some aspects of the game's age began to show.
As with a lot of old games, sometimes the tutorializing is suboptimal. One flaw in Final Fantasy VII in this regard is how poorly it explains the Materia system, which essentially allows you to equip magic and various other abilities to characters. This is good on its own, but Materia's real power is meant to shine when you pair it with support Materia that augments it. But the actual text explaining what these support Materia items do is not always very clear. I genuinely did not consider that "All" Materia was referring to area-of-effect until the walkthrough I was using mentioned how useful it would be for an upcoming fight. It's almost essential that you have at least one character with a Restore Materia augmented by an All Materia or else you simply will not be able to prevent your party from getting wiped in some fights.
Once I realized this, of course, the game instantly became more fun. Suddenly I found myself rushing to queue up a party heal during an enemy's lengthy attack animation when I knew significant damage was coming up. It's the closest a turn-based RPG has ever come to emulating the feeling of an action game, and for that, I do have to respect the design at play, especially for a game from the 90s where I wouldn't have expected such deviation from the norm.
But enough about the gameplay. Although that certainly will be a point of comparison I have to consider when it comes to Final Fantasy VII Remake, obviously the main thing I'm here to compare is the story. So, what do I think of the story of Final Fantasy VII, one of the most highly regarded, iconic, and influential video game narratives of all time? Dear readers, I desperately wanted to have a hot take here, I cannot help but enjoy being a contrarian sometimes. But only when I'm honest about it. And here, my honest statement is - it's almost as good as people say. Not flawless, as we'll get to later, but it lives up to its reputation.
Final Fantasy VII is most well-known for its strong environmentalist themes, and that's evident almost immediately. Shinra, both a major corporation and the primary government of Final Fantasy VII's world, powers the world's technology through a substance known as "Mako", but the production of Mako is slowly killing the planet. Our protagonist, Cloud, finds himself in the fight against Shinra alongside two of our other main characters, Barret and Tifa, in the resistance group AVALANCHE just before the game begins. Although Cloud isn't much of a believer in the cause, AVALANCHE's goal is to stop Shinra from killing the planet by any means necessary. The first several hours take place entirely within the Shinra capital of Midgar as Cloud, Barret, and Tifa fight Shinra and attempt to protect their new friend Aeris who the Shinra are after.
Although I had not played Final Fantasy VII before, I did absorb a lot of discourse over the years. One criticism I've heard is that these those environmentalist themes sort of fall by the wayside after the group leaves Midgar, especially since towards the end of Midgar they lean more heavily into more traditional fantasy instead of the more sci-fi approach the early hours took. I think it is fair to say that the game certainly expands beyond that laser focus we see in the Midgar section, but I would argue everything those opening hours establishes still remains at the heart of the story for almost the entirety of the dozens of hours it takes to beat the game.
For one thing, Shinra's influence is still felt beyond Midgar. They are the government of almost the entire known world, after all, and will constantly interfere with our heroes along every step of their journey. Not to mention, their Mako reactors are everywhere. On top of that, even the more fantastical elements connect to Shinra. A crucial plot device to the world of Final Fantasy VII is the Lifestream, the combined sum of all the planet's life energy. All living things are born from the Lifestream, and everything that dies returns to the Lifestream. The reason the production of Mako causes such harm to the environment is because it essentially "uses up" the Lifestream's energy, leaving it unable to return to its source and disrupting that fundamental cycle.
And then we have the main antagonist, Sephiroth. Sephiroth himself is the product of a Shinra experiment, and now intends to destroy the world upon learning the truth of his nature. Although, he learns two different stories. The first being that he is the son of Jenova, one of the Ancients, also known as the Cetra. The Cetra were a nomadic people deeply in tune with the Planet and the Lifestream, but were wiped out in a catastrophe, abandoned to their fate by humans who chose the path of remaining in one place, destroying the environment and harming the Planet for the sake of building their cities. Sephiroth's reaction to this version of events is one of vengeance, wanting to punish humanity for their crimes against the Cetra and the Planet as a whole. Although most of this story ends up being untrue, it immediately justifies the pivot from Shinra as the primary antagonist to Sephiroth, as Sephiroth becomes more than just a singular figure, but this manifestation of all of humanity's sins coming back to haunt them.
However, the truth of the matter comes slightly later. "Jenova" is not a Cetra, nor is it Sephiroth's real mother. Rather, it's an alien entity that crashed down on the planet two thousand years ago, the "calamity from the skies" that brought about the aforementioned end of the Cetra before it was eventually defeated, leaving Aeris' family line the last remnant of her entire race. Sephiroth was created when his pregnant mother was injected with Jenova's cells by his father, Hojo, though Sephiroth does still seem to believe he is the direct offspring of Jenova. Regardless, he is aware of Jenova's true nature, and now seeks to finish what it started and kill the world, so that when the Lifestream attempts to "heal" the dying Planet, he can absorb its energy and rule the new world as God.
This new backstory and motvation does still have its merits. It makes Sephiroth an interesting parallel to our main protagonist. Cloud is a former soldier constantly looking up to others. First his hero Sephiroth, then his friend in some nebulous, undefined war, Zack, who would eventually die at the hands of Sephiroth. Cloud, though injected with Jenova's cells in an attempt to recreate Shinra's perfect soldier Sephiroth, never ended living up to his heights. He wasn't even as good as Zack. He was a failure destined to remain a nobody. So when he reunites with his friend Tifa a few years after the tragedy that destroyed his hometown and left him traumatized, he sort of tricks himself into believing Zack's feats were his own. Not maliciously, since he seems to believe the lie himself, but it's a lie nonetheless. Cloud is full of self-doubt, and he doesn't know who he is or who he wants to be, so it's easy for him to just want to be someone else.
Sephiroth, on the other hand, believes he knows exactly who he is. Sure, it's a momentary crisis when he learns he might be some kind of science experiment, but this only fills him with new drive, new purpose. Him being the product of an alien bent on destroying all life on the Planet doesn't give him pause, make him doubt what he's fighting for. Instead, it only makes him more sure of himself. Gives him a sense of destiny. He was brought into this world to become the God his "mother" never could, and he will stop at nothing until he achieves it. Such certainty is born from tremendous ego, literally exerting his will over that of the entire Planet.
Thus ends up being ironic in two ways. The first is that said ego gives him more in common with the Shinra and the humans he detests than he realizes, prioritizing his own ends over the good of all life on the Planet. The second is that as we learn, Jenova's cells exert subconscious influence over everyone who has them, slowly desiring to converge and resume Jenova's mission. Although I don't believe it's ever stated, there's no reason to believe Sephiroth is any exception. His entire sense of self is likely a myth. A puppet of Jenova's will, mistakenly believing his desires to be his own, much like Cloud did with his fallen friend Zack.
But as I alluded to a moment ago, I don't think this second version of Sephiroth's backstory is quite as tight and cohesive as the first one. I do think it is still, overall, the better choice for the story, I don't think they should have had the original version of events turn out to be the truth. Otherwise the game doesn't really have much more of interest to say than "humans are destroying the planet and that's bad." It's true, obviously, but what would fighting Sephiroth really represent other than saying that the entire human race doesn't deserve to be punished? That being said, there is something to be said about humanity's selfishness allowed them to turn a blind eye to the dying Planet, and how Sephiroth being a descendant of one of the Cetra, the people who wanted so desperately to protect it, turns him into more than an individual. How his evil is not born only from within, but from all the problems the world has been facing for the last two thousand years.
The truth of Jenova, this alien being from outside of the Planet, kind of undermines this. Jenova is a complete outsider. This is a very text-heavy game, so maybe I missed something, but it's not really explained what Jenova is, exactly, other than some sort of parasitic alien. I think this ambiguity is a strength, to be clear, but what does Jenova really represent in the context of the environmentalist themes? It's not born from the Planet, nor the abuse of the Lifestream by humanity. So for Sephiroth to be enacting Jenova's ends, either as a puppet or just trying to finish what it started, we sort of lose his connection to most of those environmentalist themes. Humanity's only real involvement in creating Sephiroth, in turning him into the man he is, is Hojo's experiments. The fault now rests entirely on individuals, rather than a broader societal failure.
This issue is compounded by the reveal of the way Sephiroth intends to end the world and remake it as God, a visual from the game so iconic it's part of the logo - Meteor. You would think at this point in the game, especially with Shinra being a presence, you'd want to find some way of tying these two threads back together. Shinra is killing the Planet through its actions, and now Sephiroth wants to kill the world so he can remake it in its last moments of life. What Shinra is doing accidentally (or rather, as a side effect of their actions that they're willing to ignore) Sephiroth intends to do with intent and malice. But it turns out, rather than killing the Planet through any of the means by which it's already dying, instead he's relying on some Cetra magic from thousands of years ago that also conveniently has planet-killing capabilities.
Obviously, I get why this happened. For one thing, going into the second half of the story, it certainly raises the stakes to have this singular impending event of destruction. And within the rules of the fiction, Sephiroth's method of destroying the world needs to preserve what energy remains in the Lifestream, which means if he destroyed the world with Mako reactors or a similar process, he wouldn't be able to become God, everything would just die forever.
But I think an answer was staring them in the face here. Perhaps this will get a bit fanfic-y, me suggesting a rewrite to a game that is nearly three decades old now. But at the same time, Square Enix and Tetsuya Nomura are clearly willing to spend millions and millions of dollars and most of the 2020s on essentially telling a high-budget fanfic rewrite of the original game, so I think I'm afforded that right in this review, too.
So, Sephiroth obviously can't just will something as powerful as Meteor into existence. As we learn shortly after the reveal of its existence, it requires a powerful catalyst known as Black Materia. In the world of Final Fantasy VII, Materia can be formed in two ways. The most common one is as one of many byproducts of Mako production, making Shinra the world's primary supplier of Materia. But also, rarely, the Lifestream's energy crystallizes on its own, which is how Materia was created and used before the time of Shinra. The oldest and most powerful of these Materia are the Black Materia and the White Materia. The White Materia is used to cast Holy, a powerful spell that essentially allows the Planet to do whatever it believes is necessary to protect the Lifestream. Black Materia, on the other hand, has the sole purpose of destruction, hence its use in summoning the world-ending Meteor.
But what if the Black Materia wasn't this ancient thing that had always existed? What if it was moreso a theoretical possibility, a thing the Planet warned about but did not come to be in the time of the Cetra? In the game, the Black Materia takes the form of an entire temple, but can be shrunk down into a usable size by completing various puzzles. This explanation is pulled almost entirely out of thin air. It's not clear how or why the Cetra built a temple out of Black Materia or how they were able to grow and shrink it like that. And I get it's magic, but this entire thing is basically born out of nowhere basically just to justify a single (admittedly important) character beat for Shinra double agent Cait Sith.
But let's say none of that happened, and once the characters learn about Black Materia, it doesn't turn out that they're already conveniently standing inside of it. Instead, it's a theoretical thing that they just know Sephiroth believes exists somewhere in the world. Where, or rather what, could the Black Materia be in this hypothetical alternate version of events? And how could it better tie into the Shinra story thread and its associated themes?
Well, all Materia is just the Lifestream's energy condensed, right? And Shinra is using the Lifestream's energy to create Mako. And here we're already telling an environmentalist story where the production of that energy is sucking the life out of the planet. What if, much like in our own world, some energy sources produce toxic waste that can cause ecological damage, Mako produces waste of its own? Spoiled energy from the Planet, unable to return to the Lifestream, left to fester on its own and, much like ordinary Materia, gradually crystalize? Rather than some random temple, this could be your Black Materia.
It's clear that the "Black" in the name isn't just referring to color, but a more metaphysical darkness or corruption. So it being born from Mako, itself a perversion of the Lifestream certainly seems logical to me. It just feels so much more impactful when I imagine that the catalyst that Sephiroth needs to end the world is something that is, once again, born from humanity's abuse of nature. Instead, it just isn't really explained why Black Materia (and the subsequent world-ending spell it casts) exists. It just does. A meaningless macguffin that the characters can toss around before it finally ends up in Sephiroth's hands once and for all, with absolutely no greater narrative significance.
And this isn't a problem because I need magic to have an explanation inherently or anything, but rather, the obligatory nature of Black Materia's existence is sort of the final nail in the coffin in terms of how the game's Sephiroth and Shinra threads don't really tie together by the end, despite being so intrinsically linked from the start. Because without this, there is absolutely nothing about Sephiroth's entire goal that has anything to do with the ecological consequences of Shinra or humanity's lifestyle. Hojo would still be a mad scientist trying to create super soldiers with Jenova's cells no matter what, which would always inevitably lead to a Sephiroth trying to finish what Jenova started long before humanity turned their backs on the Planet.
So hopefully this overly long detour about a seemingly small and insignificant plot device like Black Materia made sense by the end. It's not that Black Materia is the only way they could have fixed the problem, but it certainly seems like the most obvious one. Sephiroth's destruction being born from humanity's mistakes would even enhance the ambiguous ending. The game literally cuts to credits at the climax of this clash between Holy, a spell born of the will of humanity fighting for the Planet's future, and Meteor. If Meteor worked a little bit more like I suggested, then it becomes this metaphorical collision of the best and worst of humanity, and you're left to decide for yourself which one the Planet deemed representative of the fate of the human race. (Though, while I haven't seen Advent Children, the very existence of a proper sequel narrative set before the game's epilogue seems to definitively answer this question.)
Hopefully amidst all my complaining, I don't come across like I dislike this story, or that it doesn't deserve the legacy it has. But not even the most iconic stories are beyond criticism. That the game presented such strong ideas and themes that I was even able to talk about it in this much detail should be a testament to just how much of a landmark this was for video game storytelling. It's not some bad story because it got a few things wrong, it's a great game because of just how much it got right. It raised the bar for a reason, and I'm only more curious to see what exactly such a drastic remake of this game looks like now.
Like I said earlier, though, I'm not much of a JRPG player. However, I knew that if I was going to play Final Fantasy VII Remake, I needed to play the original Final Fantasy VII first so I could appreciate it on its own before diving into the remake and trying to decipher what exactly its changes and additions meant. Which meant playing 30+ hours of one of my least favorite types of games: a turn-based RPG.
For what it's worth, Final Fantasy VII, despite being such a formative staple of the genre, actually uses a system that separates it from a typical turn-based RPG. The "active time battle" system means every individual character and enemy's turn is dictated by an individual timer rather than waiting until every single player on the field has acted. Which means that while you're busy choosing actions for one character, the enemy is already recovering and might attack you before you finish.
This system didn't really grip me at first, it seemed like a useless change that didn't solve my two issues when it comes to turn-based RPGs: my own impatience and the inability to truly react to your opponent. Impatience is self-explanatory, but by "inability to react" I am referring to the fact that when an enemy does an attack, you have no real way of intercepting or countering, you will simply get hit and there's nothing you can do about it unless there's a chance it misses or something. Of course, the player has the same advantage against enemies, but the "fairness" of the design doesn't change how frustrating it feels when an enemy just suddenly busts out a move that you couldn't have anticipated and ruins the fight for reasons that were basically out of your control because you couldn't have taken it into account on a previous turn.
Active time battle, again, isn't actually that much of a solution. There's still a lot of sitting through animations, so it's not as if battles are actually quicker than in a typical turn-based RPG. And for the most part, because the game pauses during certain animations, you're still not afforded the freedom to react. I pretty much hated the combat system for the entirety of Midgar, a 6-hour "prologue" of sorts. That is, until, I finally reached battles challenging enough where I was being asked to consider healing not just between fights, but during. In a regular turn-based RPG, when a character is low on health, although it's kind of scary, it's not truly a big deal, you just go into the menu and use a potion or have your healing character cast a spell. Your only worry is if you'll be able to heal enough to withstand the next attack, which usually isn't a problem.
In Final Fantasy VII, every frame you spend in a menu brings the enemy an inch closer to attacking again. So you don't just have to heal, you have to heal fast. Some battles got so frantic to the point where my optimal strategy genuinely came to be giving every single character a Restore Materia just to make sure I could not possibly miss a chance to heal. This worked to an extent, but once certain bosses started to whip out attacks that hit the whole party, even this lost its usefulness. The solution to this problem is where some aspects of the game's age began to show.
As with a lot of old games, sometimes the tutorializing is suboptimal. One flaw in Final Fantasy VII in this regard is how poorly it explains the Materia system, which essentially allows you to equip magic and various other abilities to characters. This is good on its own, but Materia's real power is meant to shine when you pair it with support Materia that augments it. But the actual text explaining what these support Materia items do is not always very clear. I genuinely did not consider that "All" Materia was referring to area-of-effect until the walkthrough I was using mentioned how useful it would be for an upcoming fight. It's almost essential that you have at least one character with a Restore Materia augmented by an All Materia or else you simply will not be able to prevent your party from getting wiped in some fights.
Once I realized this, of course, the game instantly became more fun. Suddenly I found myself rushing to queue up a party heal during an enemy's lengthy attack animation when I knew significant damage was coming up. It's the closest a turn-based RPG has ever come to emulating the feeling of an action game, and for that, I do have to respect the design at play, especially for a game from the 90s where I wouldn't have expected such deviation from the norm.
But enough about the gameplay. Although that certainly will be a point of comparison I have to consider when it comes to Final Fantasy VII Remake, obviously the main thing I'm here to compare is the story. So, what do I think of the story of Final Fantasy VII, one of the most highly regarded, iconic, and influential video game narratives of all time? Dear readers, I desperately wanted to have a hot take here, I cannot help but enjoy being a contrarian sometimes. But only when I'm honest about it. And here, my honest statement is - it's almost as good as people say. Not flawless, as we'll get to later, but it lives up to its reputation.
Final Fantasy VII is most well-known for its strong environmentalist themes, and that's evident almost immediately. Shinra, both a major corporation and the primary government of Final Fantasy VII's world, powers the world's technology through a substance known as "Mako", but the production of Mako is slowly killing the planet. Our protagonist, Cloud, finds himself in the fight against Shinra alongside two of our other main characters, Barret and Tifa, in the resistance group AVALANCHE just before the game begins. Although Cloud isn't much of a believer in the cause, AVALANCHE's goal is to stop Shinra from killing the planet by any means necessary. The first several hours take place entirely within the Shinra capital of Midgar as Cloud, Barret, and Tifa fight Shinra and attempt to protect their new friend Aeris who the Shinra are after.
Although I had not played Final Fantasy VII before, I did absorb a lot of discourse over the years. One criticism I've heard is that these those environmentalist themes sort of fall by the wayside after the group leaves Midgar, especially since towards the end of Midgar they lean more heavily into more traditional fantasy instead of the more sci-fi approach the early hours took. I think it is fair to say that the game certainly expands beyond that laser focus we see in the Midgar section, but I would argue everything those opening hours establishes still remains at the heart of the story for almost the entirety of the dozens of hours it takes to beat the game.
For one thing, Shinra's influence is still felt beyond Midgar. They are the government of almost the entire known world, after all, and will constantly interfere with our heroes along every step of their journey. Not to mention, their Mako reactors are everywhere. On top of that, even the more fantastical elements connect to Shinra. A crucial plot device to the world of Final Fantasy VII is the Lifestream, the combined sum of all the planet's life energy. All living things are born from the Lifestream, and everything that dies returns to the Lifestream. The reason the production of Mako causes such harm to the environment is because it essentially "uses up" the Lifestream's energy, leaving it unable to return to its source and disrupting that fundamental cycle.
And then we have the main antagonist, Sephiroth. Sephiroth himself is the product of a Shinra experiment, and now intends to destroy the world upon learning the truth of his nature. Although, he learns two different stories. The first being that he is the son of Jenova, one of the Ancients, also known as the Cetra. The Cetra were a nomadic people deeply in tune with the Planet and the Lifestream, but were wiped out in a catastrophe, abandoned to their fate by humans who chose the path of remaining in one place, destroying the environment and harming the Planet for the sake of building their cities. Sephiroth's reaction to this version of events is one of vengeance, wanting to punish humanity for their crimes against the Cetra and the Planet as a whole. Although most of this story ends up being untrue, it immediately justifies the pivot from Shinra as the primary antagonist to Sephiroth, as Sephiroth becomes more than just a singular figure, but this manifestation of all of humanity's sins coming back to haunt them.
However, the truth of the matter comes slightly later. "Jenova" is not a Cetra, nor is it Sephiroth's real mother. Rather, it's an alien entity that crashed down on the planet two thousand years ago, the "calamity from the skies" that brought about the aforementioned end of the Cetra before it was eventually defeated, leaving Aeris' family line the last remnant of her entire race. Sephiroth was created when his pregnant mother was injected with Jenova's cells by his father, Hojo, though Sephiroth does still seem to believe he is the direct offspring of Jenova. Regardless, he is aware of Jenova's true nature, and now seeks to finish what it started and kill the world, so that when the Lifestream attempts to "heal" the dying Planet, he can absorb its energy and rule the new world as God.
This new backstory and motvation does still have its merits. It makes Sephiroth an interesting parallel to our main protagonist. Cloud is a former soldier constantly looking up to others. First his hero Sephiroth, then his friend in some nebulous, undefined war, Zack, who would eventually die at the hands of Sephiroth. Cloud, though injected with Jenova's cells in an attempt to recreate Shinra's perfect soldier Sephiroth, never ended living up to his heights. He wasn't even as good as Zack. He was a failure destined to remain a nobody. So when he reunites with his friend Tifa a few years after the tragedy that destroyed his hometown and left him traumatized, he sort of tricks himself into believing Zack's feats were his own. Not maliciously, since he seems to believe the lie himself, but it's a lie nonetheless. Cloud is full of self-doubt, and he doesn't know who he is or who he wants to be, so it's easy for him to just want to be someone else.
Sephiroth, on the other hand, believes he knows exactly who he is. Sure, it's a momentary crisis when he learns he might be some kind of science experiment, but this only fills him with new drive, new purpose. Him being the product of an alien bent on destroying all life on the Planet doesn't give him pause, make him doubt what he's fighting for. Instead, it only makes him more sure of himself. Gives him a sense of destiny. He was brought into this world to become the God his "mother" never could, and he will stop at nothing until he achieves it. Such certainty is born from tremendous ego, literally exerting his will over that of the entire Planet.
Thus ends up being ironic in two ways. The first is that said ego gives him more in common with the Shinra and the humans he detests than he realizes, prioritizing his own ends over the good of all life on the Planet. The second is that as we learn, Jenova's cells exert subconscious influence over everyone who has them, slowly desiring to converge and resume Jenova's mission. Although I don't believe it's ever stated, there's no reason to believe Sephiroth is any exception. His entire sense of self is likely a myth. A puppet of Jenova's will, mistakenly believing his desires to be his own, much like Cloud did with his fallen friend Zack.
But as I alluded to a moment ago, I don't think this second version of Sephiroth's backstory is quite as tight and cohesive as the first one. I do think it is still, overall, the better choice for the story, I don't think they should have had the original version of events turn out to be the truth. Otherwise the game doesn't really have much more of interest to say than "humans are destroying the planet and that's bad." It's true, obviously, but what would fighting Sephiroth really represent other than saying that the entire human race doesn't deserve to be punished? That being said, there is something to be said about humanity's selfishness allowed them to turn a blind eye to the dying Planet, and how Sephiroth being a descendant of one of the Cetra, the people who wanted so desperately to protect it, turns him into more than an individual. How his evil is not born only from within, but from all the problems the world has been facing for the last two thousand years.
The truth of Jenova, this alien being from outside of the Planet, kind of undermines this. Jenova is a complete outsider. This is a very text-heavy game, so maybe I missed something, but it's not really explained what Jenova is, exactly, other than some sort of parasitic alien. I think this ambiguity is a strength, to be clear, but what does Jenova really represent in the context of the environmentalist themes? It's not born from the Planet, nor the abuse of the Lifestream by humanity. So for Sephiroth to be enacting Jenova's ends, either as a puppet or just trying to finish what it started, we sort of lose his connection to most of those environmentalist themes. Humanity's only real involvement in creating Sephiroth, in turning him into the man he is, is Hojo's experiments. The fault now rests entirely on individuals, rather than a broader societal failure.
This issue is compounded by the reveal of the way Sephiroth intends to end the world and remake it as God, a visual from the game so iconic it's part of the logo - Meteor. You would think at this point in the game, especially with Shinra being a presence, you'd want to find some way of tying these two threads back together. Shinra is killing the Planet through its actions, and now Sephiroth wants to kill the world so he can remake it in its last moments of life. What Shinra is doing accidentally (or rather, as a side effect of their actions that they're willing to ignore) Sephiroth intends to do with intent and malice. But it turns out, rather than killing the Planet through any of the means by which it's already dying, instead he's relying on some Cetra magic from thousands of years ago that also conveniently has planet-killing capabilities.
Obviously, I get why this happened. For one thing, going into the second half of the story, it certainly raises the stakes to have this singular impending event of destruction. And within the rules of the fiction, Sephiroth's method of destroying the world needs to preserve what energy remains in the Lifestream, which means if he destroyed the world with Mako reactors or a similar process, he wouldn't be able to become God, everything would just die forever.
But I think an answer was staring them in the face here. Perhaps this will get a bit fanfic-y, me suggesting a rewrite to a game that is nearly three decades old now. But at the same time, Square Enix and Tetsuya Nomura are clearly willing to spend millions and millions of dollars and most of the 2020s on essentially telling a high-budget fanfic rewrite of the original game, so I think I'm afforded that right in this review, too.
So, Sephiroth obviously can't just will something as powerful as Meteor into existence. As we learn shortly after the reveal of its existence, it requires a powerful catalyst known as Black Materia. In the world of Final Fantasy VII, Materia can be formed in two ways. The most common one is as one of many byproducts of Mako production, making Shinra the world's primary supplier of Materia. But also, rarely, the Lifestream's energy crystallizes on its own, which is how Materia was created and used before the time of Shinra. The oldest and most powerful of these Materia are the Black Materia and the White Materia. The White Materia is used to cast Holy, a powerful spell that essentially allows the Planet to do whatever it believes is necessary to protect the Lifestream. Black Materia, on the other hand, has the sole purpose of destruction, hence its use in summoning the world-ending Meteor.
But what if the Black Materia wasn't this ancient thing that had always existed? What if it was moreso a theoretical possibility, a thing the Planet warned about but did not come to be in the time of the Cetra? In the game, the Black Materia takes the form of an entire temple, but can be shrunk down into a usable size by completing various puzzles. This explanation is pulled almost entirely out of thin air. It's not clear how or why the Cetra built a temple out of Black Materia or how they were able to grow and shrink it like that. And I get it's magic, but this entire thing is basically born out of nowhere basically just to justify a single (admittedly important) character beat for Shinra double agent Cait Sith.
But let's say none of that happened, and once the characters learn about Black Materia, it doesn't turn out that they're already conveniently standing inside of it. Instead, it's a theoretical thing that they just know Sephiroth believes exists somewhere in the world. Where, or rather what, could the Black Materia be in this hypothetical alternate version of events? And how could it better tie into the Shinra story thread and its associated themes?
Well, all Materia is just the Lifestream's energy condensed, right? And Shinra is using the Lifestream's energy to create Mako. And here we're already telling an environmentalist story where the production of that energy is sucking the life out of the planet. What if, much like in our own world, some energy sources produce toxic waste that can cause ecological damage, Mako produces waste of its own? Spoiled energy from the Planet, unable to return to the Lifestream, left to fester on its own and, much like ordinary Materia, gradually crystalize? Rather than some random temple, this could be your Black Materia.
It's clear that the "Black" in the name isn't just referring to color, but a more metaphysical darkness or corruption. So it being born from Mako, itself a perversion of the Lifestream certainly seems logical to me. It just feels so much more impactful when I imagine that the catalyst that Sephiroth needs to end the world is something that is, once again, born from humanity's abuse of nature. Instead, it just isn't really explained why Black Materia (and the subsequent world-ending spell it casts) exists. It just does. A meaningless macguffin that the characters can toss around before it finally ends up in Sephiroth's hands once and for all, with absolutely no greater narrative significance.
And this isn't a problem because I need magic to have an explanation inherently or anything, but rather, the obligatory nature of Black Materia's existence is sort of the final nail in the coffin in terms of how the game's Sephiroth and Shinra threads don't really tie together by the end, despite being so intrinsically linked from the start. Because without this, there is absolutely nothing about Sephiroth's entire goal that has anything to do with the ecological consequences of Shinra or humanity's lifestyle. Hojo would still be a mad scientist trying to create super soldiers with Jenova's cells no matter what, which would always inevitably lead to a Sephiroth trying to finish what Jenova started long before humanity turned their backs on the Planet.
So hopefully this overly long detour about a seemingly small and insignificant plot device like Black Materia made sense by the end. It's not that Black Materia is the only way they could have fixed the problem, but it certainly seems like the most obvious one. Sephiroth's destruction being born from humanity's mistakes would even enhance the ambiguous ending. The game literally cuts to credits at the climax of this clash between Holy, a spell born of the will of humanity fighting for the Planet's future, and Meteor. If Meteor worked a little bit more like I suggested, then it becomes this metaphorical collision of the best and worst of humanity, and you're left to decide for yourself which one the Planet deemed representative of the fate of the human race. (Though, while I haven't seen Advent Children, the very existence of a proper sequel narrative set before the game's epilogue seems to definitively answer this question.)
Hopefully amidst all my complaining, I don't come across like I dislike this story, or that it doesn't deserve the legacy it has. But not even the most iconic stories are beyond criticism. That the game presented such strong ideas and themes that I was even able to talk about it in this much detail should be a testament to just how much of a landmark this was for video game storytelling. It's not some bad story because it got a few things wrong, it's a great game because of just how much it got right. It raised the bar for a reason, and I'm only more curious to see what exactly such a drastic remake of this game looks like now.
This review contains spoilers
thinking i'd have to kill rusty only for him to come back later and join my side (at least in the story path i chose, idk about the others) generated stronger genuine emotions out of me than many mainstream storylines written by people who are supposedly the best of the best
I cannot believe the plot of an actual God of War story is Kratos being tricked into going to therapy.
Not usually one to call games or expansions "too short" but it's wild to me that this DLC's main purpose seems to be introducing a difficulty spike from the base game and a ton of new accessories to help offset the extra challenge, but barely any time to actually use them other than one boss that's only really difficult because it has like 3 attacks that will annihilate half of your health bar. Might lead to more interesting things in the next DLC, at least.
This review contains spoilers
yeah the storyline is complete nonsense, but the ending is the edgiest man of all time coming to the realization that maybe the real chaos was the friends he made along the way so that inherently makes it way more enjoyable than most video game storylines
This review contains spoilers
So I'm not one to jump on the bandwagon a lot of people have when it comes to games journalists, but I do have to single out the IGN review of this game for a minute here. In the review, they point out how new companion Bode starts off generically but eventually gets fleshed out more and becomes more interesting and that is hilarious to me. Truly, I cannot imagine a deeper and more nuanced character arc than going from "I am generic dad character who will do anything to protect my daughter" to "I am generic dad character who will do anything to protect my daughter, but now I have a red lightsaber." What a bland, nonsensical heel turn that sent this game's story hurtling off of a cliff.
That being said, this game lets you use your blaster to parry enemies and essentially play Bloodborne in space, so it's impossible for me to hate it.
That being said, this game lets you use your blaster to parry enemies and essentially play Bloodborne in space, so it's impossible for me to hate it.
2007
shoutout to this game for being so good that the reward for 100% completion is being asked to get 100% completion again with only the slightest change to the level of challenge and that's actually a fun and satisfying reward because it's an excuse to play one of the best 3D platformers ever made a second time
2007
After over a decade I've finally completed the feat I never could as a child: Beating every Pit of 100 Trials. Why did such a cool idea for a challenge have to be put into a game with such mediocre combat?
2021
This review contains spoilers
Full spoilers for Undertale, Deltarune, and most importantly, the alternate route introduced with Chapter 2 of Deltarune. You may not even realize this route exists, but it tells a very different story so I highly recommend checking it out for yourself.
Deltarune is a rather strange game. I didn't really write a lengthy review of Chapter 2 because there wasn't really that much to say. This is, at its core, a very fun and silly game that, although not completely devoid of depth, simply isn't setting out to go to some of the same places as Undertale did. And this isn't a bad thing, I don't think we should expect creators of something really good and excellent to be able to be forced to create something that does the same things the original work did. This just let me with the feeling that I wasn't really expecting the overall story of this game to reach the heights of what Undertale was able to say, and I was okay with that.
And then I played the game's rather ill-fittingly named "Weird Route." Because to say this route is merely "weird" doesn't really get to the heart of what makes it interesting. This route completely changed my tune on the idea that Deltarune wasn't going to have as much to say as Undertale. I had heard and seen many out of context spoilers about this run beforehand, but believe me when I say nothing, can replace the experience of actually playing it. It contextualized all of the subtle implications that were already there in Chapters 1 and 2, and now I think I already know where this story is headed.
Before I really dive into this, I want to dive into the kinds of stories in game I tend to gravitate towards. Games are, fundamentally, a different medium from books, movies, television, etc. due to the inherent nature of interactivity. And yet so often, the temptation is to simply treat story as separate from gameplay. The story simply contexts the various sections of gameplay. And this is fine, I have liked plenty of game stories that follow this mold.
But the games that are truly special to me are the ones that truly engage with you, the person playing the game. That uses its mechanics and how you engage with them as a way of reflecting back on you. It might sound pretentious, but it's been done before. Undertale itself is so blatant about this that it actively characterizes the player as an extradimensional entity exerting influence over the world. In the Genocide route, the game actively calls you out for trying such a dark and twisted path through the game, both subtly by making it the least fun to play, and explicitly when Sans all but tells you this in his boss fight.
Other games are capable of this too. I talked about very similar subjects in my Katana Zero and Axiom Verge 2 reviews. These games actively manage to tell a story through their mechanics. They make engaging with the world, actually interacting with it on your own terms, part of the story. These games are less explicit about it an Undertale, but both of these games also have a narrative experience that simply cannot be replicated through watching a let's play on YouTube. Which brings us nicely to Deltarune's Weird Route.
To understand what makes the Weird Route so special, I'm going to do something weird and start at the very end of the ways in which the Weird Route will change the content you experience. After exiting Cyber World, you run into Noelle, a character you repeatedly threatened and manipulated within Cyber World in this route, who wants nothing more than to convince herself that all that transpired was nothing more than a dream, so she doesn't have to live with these events on her conscience.
When she questions if those events were real or not, you get a choice between two dialogue options: Say nothing, or tell her "It wasn't a dream." As a player, it should be blatantly obvious that saying the latter option would only serve to get under her skin even more. And yet, I think everyone who plays this route, myself included, will find themselves choosing this option, despite knowing how blatantly awful it is. So, the question becomes, why is that? How does this route condition you to want to say that to her?
To unpack that, now we can jump back to the beginning. Deltarune, from the very beginning of Chapter 1, beats you over the head with the idea that your choices don't matter. There may be small differences based on the choices you make, but the overall story is fundamentally the same. The choice to fight or spare enemies has less ramifications than in Undertale, basically only serving to slightly change the final confrontation of each chapter. Reducing an enemy's HP to zero simply has them run away.
Chapter 2 mostly continues this. If you play it normally, fighting or sparing enemies won't really affect much in the long run, other than whether or not the enemies you meet will hang out in your hub town or not. You still end up befriending the characters the game wants you to befriend. The story and cutscenes are all pretty much identical. The option of this alternate Weird Route is not communicated to you, the player, at all.
Compared to the Genocide Route, whose existence could at least theoretically be stumbled upon blindly if you happened to grind enough, this one almost feels designed so that you'll be doing it because you learned about it from the internet. Because there's a character you meet in this chapter with a new attack, that when used to lower an enemy's HP, will have a very different outcome.
Enter Noelle, a character who had a minor role in Chapter 1 as the easily frightened childhood friend of protagonist Kris. In Chapter 2, she and her annoying classmate Berdly get sucked into Cyber World along with our protagonists. After the rest of your party goes off on their own temporary adventure, you run into Noelle, who has no idea how to play the game of Deltarune. By this point, you're expected to kind of show her the ropes. But you have another option, which is to tell her to use her unique Ice Shock spell on the enemies you encounter.
If an enemy is defeated with this spell, a unique outcome occurs. The enemy will remain frozen in place after the battle has started, forever. Doing this to as many enemies as possible will quickly convince Noelle to stop seeing these creatures as anything more than enemies to fight. After all, you are Kris, her friend, who she trusts. Clearly you wouldn't be asking her to do this if she was actually doing anything wrong.
But as you progress further and further, the doubt slowly grows in her mind. Suddenly you're having her freeze a shopkeeper who holds an expensive ring that would increase her powers exponentially. You begin threatening her into using her ice powers to freeze over a puzzle. She might not pick up on it, and just thinks you're acting weird because you're trying to help her become stronger, but you, the person playing the game, know what you're doing.
As her power grows, enemies stop chasing you. Now they're running away. Noelle begins questioning things more as she eerily becomes more and more comfortable with the path you've set her on. You find the eccentric salesman Spamton from the normal route in a dumpster, and he agrees to sell you the most powerful ring for Noelle if you freeze every single enemy in the entire area. And you so you do, giving her a ring that begins hurting her. But it's in the name of making her even stronger, so she begrudgingly accepts.
This all comes to a head in the final thing you do with Noelle in this route. When you encounter Berdly, the other character who got sucked into Cyber World, ordinarily you have a pretty typical battle where you get him to back off, although in his arrogance he won't see it as a defeat. But, if you've done this route correctly, you can use that last ring to cast a new spell: SnowGrave.
Noelle initially resists, saying she doesn't even know the spell. You have to keep telling her to cast it, keep pressuring her into doing something she's not comfortable with, until eventually she just gives in and uses it, freezing her friend Berdly in a block of ice. Revolted with what she's done, Noelle leaves for most of the rest of the run. You are now locked into the Weird Route.
The key to what makes this route so special isn't just that you, the protagonist, are doing awful things. It's the unique emphasis on choice. This is a game where your choices supposedly don't matter. And yet, in every single battle, you have the choice to not let Noelle freeze an enemy. If you defeat an enemy normally, you'll lock yourself out of this run, in fact. When you're threatening her into freezing a shopkeeper or a puzzle, you're presented multiple times with an option between simply saying something simple like "Get it." and "Proceed." or something more sensible, reasonable, that doesn't involve manipulating your friend. Selecting any of the latter options will also invalidate this route.
Every time you select one of the former options, however, Noelle expresses hesitance. And you're offered a similar choice. Pressure her to continue down this path, or abandon whatever sick plot you have in mind for her. You have to keep on doing it until she relents. It makes you feel revolted with yourself. Why are you even doing this? Why are you forcing this character into doing things she doesn't want to do? Why are you willingly acting like a toxic person?
Much like the Genocide Route in Undertale, the answer is because you can. But Deltarune gets more specific than that. It says the reason you're doing it is because you have the option to. Because you know it's possible. Because you know there's a way of deviating from the "intended path." A way of letting your choices matter. And when framed like this, it almost seems understandable, an act of rebellion against a deterministic story. But this is where Deltarune finally shows some of the metatextual energy that permeates throughout Undertale.
Because you see, you are not Kris, the protagonist. You are... something else, controlling Kris' body like a puppet. By turning on this game at all, you have forcefully inserted yourself into Kris' life. You are experiencing Kris' story despite not being Kris themself. In the endings of both chapters, Kris will rip out their own soul in a desperate attempt to have some sort of agency from you, the person controlling them.
And so, in this Weird Route, the game is questioning you. It's questioning what right you even have to interact with this world at all. What right you have to interfere with Kris' life. And yet here you are, trying to prove you can do whatever you want. You can seemingly kill off one character and traumatize another, and the impact is... minimal. You get to have your cake and eat it, too. You get to exert influence over this world, you get to have that feeling of power you so desperately crave, but you don't have to face the consequences for it. At the end of the day, you still get to go back home and live someone else's life.
And things brings us to that dialogue option I started off talking about. Noelle, who is naturally a bit messed up from all those times you gaslit her and the way you got her to possibly murder her friend, begins to realize that something is very wrong with Kris. She mentions that Kris speaks in a completely different voice, calling direct attention to the fact that the player and Kris are separate entities. And yet, some part of her still tries to brush it off, that everything that happened was just a dream.
And then you tell her it wasn't a dream. Why? Well, because you want to see how she'll react. You want to see how far you can take this. And it's right here, when that thought consciously enters your brain, that the alarm bells should start ringing. In that moment, it becomes clear what this route was actually setting out to do. The game has actively conditioned you into acting like a toxic person. Throughout all those runs, throughout all those times you selected "Proceed." you have been slowly silencing your own conscience. The part of you that feels guilty over the actions you undertake, even though it's only a video game.
And that is fundamentally what Deltarune is setting out to do. It's asking you to treat the lives of these characters like a game. Yes, technically speaking, it's not real, but it is still able to say a lot about just how easily you can trick yourself into a similar mindset. It asks you how far you're willing to go. How much you're willing to tamper with other people's lives. When do you start viewing this cast of colorful, memorable characters, as the video game NPCs they are? When do you stop playing as the character you've been inserted into the life of, and when do you start playing however you choose to?
The idea of "choice" stops being an expression of agency. And it starts becoming an expression of power. What does "choice" really mean when you're living someone else's life to begin with? Someone who doesn't even seem to want you there, no less. Your choices take away the choices of others. Maybe you should just listen to the game, stop trying to have a meaningful impact, and start following the story it's trying to tell, rather than twisting it into whatever you want. But let's face it, you've already come this far. Can you really tell yourself you're gonna stop? No, you want to see how this goes. You want to see where it ends.
It's for this reason I feel rather guilty that I swapped over to the Switch version of the game to play this route. I don't trust Toby Fox to not manipulate the game saves to warp the ending like how the Genocide Route in Undertale twists the Pacifist ending. And now, after playing this route, I understand I've done exactly what the game is trying to tell me I'm doing. I did awful things in this game because I wanted to, and now because it's separate from my PC saves, there won't even be any consequences for that choice.
This is why I think Undertale and Deltarune are games that are simultaneously so easy and so disastrous to spoil. They actively reach out and almost demand you to analyze the deeper meaning of it all, because these games speak to you through the way you interact with them. Thusly, it becomes difficult not to talk about it online. And yet, because of that, a lot of people get spoiled on the experience. They lose out on that ability to have those same experiences, irreparably.
I do think, even if you've read all of this without playing the Weird Route, that it's worth playing. But don't do it like I did. Don't try to escape the consequences in a desperate attempt to outsmart the game. See where your choices lead for yourself. Maybe it'll amount to something in the end, or maybe your choices really don't matter. There's only one way to find out.
Deltarune is a rather strange game. I didn't really write a lengthy review of Chapter 2 because there wasn't really that much to say. This is, at its core, a very fun and silly game that, although not completely devoid of depth, simply isn't setting out to go to some of the same places as Undertale did. And this isn't a bad thing, I don't think we should expect creators of something really good and excellent to be able to be forced to create something that does the same things the original work did. This just let me with the feeling that I wasn't really expecting the overall story of this game to reach the heights of what Undertale was able to say, and I was okay with that.
And then I played the game's rather ill-fittingly named "Weird Route." Because to say this route is merely "weird" doesn't really get to the heart of what makes it interesting. This route completely changed my tune on the idea that Deltarune wasn't going to have as much to say as Undertale. I had heard and seen many out of context spoilers about this run beforehand, but believe me when I say nothing, can replace the experience of actually playing it. It contextualized all of the subtle implications that were already there in Chapters 1 and 2, and now I think I already know where this story is headed.
Before I really dive into this, I want to dive into the kinds of stories in game I tend to gravitate towards. Games are, fundamentally, a different medium from books, movies, television, etc. due to the inherent nature of interactivity. And yet so often, the temptation is to simply treat story as separate from gameplay. The story simply contexts the various sections of gameplay. And this is fine, I have liked plenty of game stories that follow this mold.
But the games that are truly special to me are the ones that truly engage with you, the person playing the game. That uses its mechanics and how you engage with them as a way of reflecting back on you. It might sound pretentious, but it's been done before. Undertale itself is so blatant about this that it actively characterizes the player as an extradimensional entity exerting influence over the world. In the Genocide route, the game actively calls you out for trying such a dark and twisted path through the game, both subtly by making it the least fun to play, and explicitly when Sans all but tells you this in his boss fight.
Other games are capable of this too. I talked about very similar subjects in my Katana Zero and Axiom Verge 2 reviews. These games actively manage to tell a story through their mechanics. They make engaging with the world, actually interacting with it on your own terms, part of the story. These games are less explicit about it an Undertale, but both of these games also have a narrative experience that simply cannot be replicated through watching a let's play on YouTube. Which brings us nicely to Deltarune's Weird Route.
To understand what makes the Weird Route so special, I'm going to do something weird and start at the very end of the ways in which the Weird Route will change the content you experience. After exiting Cyber World, you run into Noelle, a character you repeatedly threatened and manipulated within Cyber World in this route, who wants nothing more than to convince herself that all that transpired was nothing more than a dream, so she doesn't have to live with these events on her conscience.
When she questions if those events were real or not, you get a choice between two dialogue options: Say nothing, or tell her "It wasn't a dream." As a player, it should be blatantly obvious that saying the latter option would only serve to get under her skin even more. And yet, I think everyone who plays this route, myself included, will find themselves choosing this option, despite knowing how blatantly awful it is. So, the question becomes, why is that? How does this route condition you to want to say that to her?
To unpack that, now we can jump back to the beginning. Deltarune, from the very beginning of Chapter 1, beats you over the head with the idea that your choices don't matter. There may be small differences based on the choices you make, but the overall story is fundamentally the same. The choice to fight or spare enemies has less ramifications than in Undertale, basically only serving to slightly change the final confrontation of each chapter. Reducing an enemy's HP to zero simply has them run away.
Chapter 2 mostly continues this. If you play it normally, fighting or sparing enemies won't really affect much in the long run, other than whether or not the enemies you meet will hang out in your hub town or not. You still end up befriending the characters the game wants you to befriend. The story and cutscenes are all pretty much identical. The option of this alternate Weird Route is not communicated to you, the player, at all.
Compared to the Genocide Route, whose existence could at least theoretically be stumbled upon blindly if you happened to grind enough, this one almost feels designed so that you'll be doing it because you learned about it from the internet. Because there's a character you meet in this chapter with a new attack, that when used to lower an enemy's HP, will have a very different outcome.
Enter Noelle, a character who had a minor role in Chapter 1 as the easily frightened childhood friend of protagonist Kris. In Chapter 2, she and her annoying classmate Berdly get sucked into Cyber World along with our protagonists. After the rest of your party goes off on their own temporary adventure, you run into Noelle, who has no idea how to play the game of Deltarune. By this point, you're expected to kind of show her the ropes. But you have another option, which is to tell her to use her unique Ice Shock spell on the enemies you encounter.
If an enemy is defeated with this spell, a unique outcome occurs. The enemy will remain frozen in place after the battle has started, forever. Doing this to as many enemies as possible will quickly convince Noelle to stop seeing these creatures as anything more than enemies to fight. After all, you are Kris, her friend, who she trusts. Clearly you wouldn't be asking her to do this if she was actually doing anything wrong.
But as you progress further and further, the doubt slowly grows in her mind. Suddenly you're having her freeze a shopkeeper who holds an expensive ring that would increase her powers exponentially. You begin threatening her into using her ice powers to freeze over a puzzle. She might not pick up on it, and just thinks you're acting weird because you're trying to help her become stronger, but you, the person playing the game, know what you're doing.
As her power grows, enemies stop chasing you. Now they're running away. Noelle begins questioning things more as she eerily becomes more and more comfortable with the path you've set her on. You find the eccentric salesman Spamton from the normal route in a dumpster, and he agrees to sell you the most powerful ring for Noelle if you freeze every single enemy in the entire area. And you so you do, giving her a ring that begins hurting her. But it's in the name of making her even stronger, so she begrudgingly accepts.
This all comes to a head in the final thing you do with Noelle in this route. When you encounter Berdly, the other character who got sucked into Cyber World, ordinarily you have a pretty typical battle where you get him to back off, although in his arrogance he won't see it as a defeat. But, if you've done this route correctly, you can use that last ring to cast a new spell: SnowGrave.
Noelle initially resists, saying she doesn't even know the spell. You have to keep telling her to cast it, keep pressuring her into doing something she's not comfortable with, until eventually she just gives in and uses it, freezing her friend Berdly in a block of ice. Revolted with what she's done, Noelle leaves for most of the rest of the run. You are now locked into the Weird Route.
The key to what makes this route so special isn't just that you, the protagonist, are doing awful things. It's the unique emphasis on choice. This is a game where your choices supposedly don't matter. And yet, in every single battle, you have the choice to not let Noelle freeze an enemy. If you defeat an enemy normally, you'll lock yourself out of this run, in fact. When you're threatening her into freezing a shopkeeper or a puzzle, you're presented multiple times with an option between simply saying something simple like "Get it." and "Proceed." or something more sensible, reasonable, that doesn't involve manipulating your friend. Selecting any of the latter options will also invalidate this route.
Every time you select one of the former options, however, Noelle expresses hesitance. And you're offered a similar choice. Pressure her to continue down this path, or abandon whatever sick plot you have in mind for her. You have to keep on doing it until she relents. It makes you feel revolted with yourself. Why are you even doing this? Why are you forcing this character into doing things she doesn't want to do? Why are you willingly acting like a toxic person?
Much like the Genocide Route in Undertale, the answer is because you can. But Deltarune gets more specific than that. It says the reason you're doing it is because you have the option to. Because you know it's possible. Because you know there's a way of deviating from the "intended path." A way of letting your choices matter. And when framed like this, it almost seems understandable, an act of rebellion against a deterministic story. But this is where Deltarune finally shows some of the metatextual energy that permeates throughout Undertale.
Because you see, you are not Kris, the protagonist. You are... something else, controlling Kris' body like a puppet. By turning on this game at all, you have forcefully inserted yourself into Kris' life. You are experiencing Kris' story despite not being Kris themself. In the endings of both chapters, Kris will rip out their own soul in a desperate attempt to have some sort of agency from you, the person controlling them.
And so, in this Weird Route, the game is questioning you. It's questioning what right you even have to interact with this world at all. What right you have to interfere with Kris' life. And yet here you are, trying to prove you can do whatever you want. You can seemingly kill off one character and traumatize another, and the impact is... minimal. You get to have your cake and eat it, too. You get to exert influence over this world, you get to have that feeling of power you so desperately crave, but you don't have to face the consequences for it. At the end of the day, you still get to go back home and live someone else's life.
And things brings us to that dialogue option I started off talking about. Noelle, who is naturally a bit messed up from all those times you gaslit her and the way you got her to possibly murder her friend, begins to realize that something is very wrong with Kris. She mentions that Kris speaks in a completely different voice, calling direct attention to the fact that the player and Kris are separate entities. And yet, some part of her still tries to brush it off, that everything that happened was just a dream.
And then you tell her it wasn't a dream. Why? Well, because you want to see how she'll react. You want to see how far you can take this. And it's right here, when that thought consciously enters your brain, that the alarm bells should start ringing. In that moment, it becomes clear what this route was actually setting out to do. The game has actively conditioned you into acting like a toxic person. Throughout all those runs, throughout all those times you selected "Proceed." you have been slowly silencing your own conscience. The part of you that feels guilty over the actions you undertake, even though it's only a video game.
And that is fundamentally what Deltarune is setting out to do. It's asking you to treat the lives of these characters like a game. Yes, technically speaking, it's not real, but it is still able to say a lot about just how easily you can trick yourself into a similar mindset. It asks you how far you're willing to go. How much you're willing to tamper with other people's lives. When do you start viewing this cast of colorful, memorable characters, as the video game NPCs they are? When do you stop playing as the character you've been inserted into the life of, and when do you start playing however you choose to?
The idea of "choice" stops being an expression of agency. And it starts becoming an expression of power. What does "choice" really mean when you're living someone else's life to begin with? Someone who doesn't even seem to want you there, no less. Your choices take away the choices of others. Maybe you should just listen to the game, stop trying to have a meaningful impact, and start following the story it's trying to tell, rather than twisting it into whatever you want. But let's face it, you've already come this far. Can you really tell yourself you're gonna stop? No, you want to see how this goes. You want to see where it ends.
It's for this reason I feel rather guilty that I swapped over to the Switch version of the game to play this route. I don't trust Toby Fox to not manipulate the game saves to warp the ending like how the Genocide Route in Undertale twists the Pacifist ending. And now, after playing this route, I understand I've done exactly what the game is trying to tell me I'm doing. I did awful things in this game because I wanted to, and now because it's separate from my PC saves, there won't even be any consequences for that choice.
This is why I think Undertale and Deltarune are games that are simultaneously so easy and so disastrous to spoil. They actively reach out and almost demand you to analyze the deeper meaning of it all, because these games speak to you through the way you interact with them. Thusly, it becomes difficult not to talk about it online. And yet, because of that, a lot of people get spoiled on the experience. They lose out on that ability to have those same experiences, irreparably.
I do think, even if you've read all of this without playing the Weird Route, that it's worth playing. But don't do it like I did. Don't try to escape the consequences in a desperate attempt to outsmart the game. See where your choices lead for yourself. Maybe it'll amount to something in the end, or maybe your choices really don't matter. There's only one way to find out.
2023
when the least interesting part of the narrative is the sick kaiju fights against gods of darkness then you know they were COOKING
nintendo, making breath of the wild: "wanna see me make the greatest game of all time?"
nintendo, making tears of the kingdom: "wanna see me do it again?"
nintendo, making tears of the kingdom: "wanna see me do it again?"
yeah i guess this game is still pretty okay