Something that might surprise you is that I'm actually a rather big fan of the Xenoblade Chronicles games. The reason this may come as a surprise is, if you've followed my game reviews over the last few years, you won't find a lot of JRPGs. Nor, if you've seen my Letterboxd/Serializd, will you find a lot of anime reviews. So an anime-styled JRPG might not jump out as something that appeals to me.

Indeed, there are a few tropes often unfairly stereotyped against anime (even by me) that crop up in the Xenoblade series. Young female characters are often hilariously sexualized in ways that really just makes me embarrassed if anyone were to ever see me playing it, there's a lot of humor that probably doesn't land for me the same way it would for someone more familiar with the culture it came from, and due to the inherent challenges that come with localizing another piece of media into another language, a lot of dialogue can be written or performed in an awkward way. And yet, I love it. Even as the second game doubles down on all of these things.

And a lot of it comes down to Monolith Soft's unique and exceptional approach to worldbuilding. Even among people who ARE more into anime and JRPGs, this is the main praise you'll see of this series. And it certainly holds true. Before even diving into the specifics, it's important to compliment the environment design itself. Despite every Xenoblade game being on famously underpowered Xenoblade hardware, the worlds of these games are brought to life in stunning fashion, generating a whole series of unforgettable locales. And that's not even getting to the main thing Monolith Soft excels at: scale.

The world of the first Xenoblade game takes place on two massive titans who seemingly perished when they battle together long ago. The corpse of the Bionis slowly became overgrown, eventually becoming home to countless forms of organic life. Meanwhile, the wounded Mechonis remains as cold and artificial as ever. And the moment where you first step out onto the kneecap of the Bionis and look at the Mechonis looming over you, its blade still lodged into the side of the Bionis overhead, is unforgettable. That such a visual was pulled off on the hardware of the Wii (and later, even the 3DS somehow) is extraordinary.

But what makes it more impressive is the fact that this scale is not relegated to a specific view or cutscene. It's a constant presence throughout your gameplay. As you get further up the Bionis, you'll be able to look down onto its ankle and see the area you first started at, practically a dot by this point. Xenoblade 2 takes place on multiple smaller titans, each separated by far vaster distances, but you can still make out each of the titans in the background. Not to mention, in that game, your constant goal of the World Tree gets visibly closer or further depending on which Titan you're currently at. During the story, the Titans will even move, changing that viewpoint.

I could go on at length, but hopefully the point is clear. So, I should probably get to what this review is actually supposed to be about: Future Connected. This epilogue chapter serves as a direct continuation of the first game's story, and you better have it fresh on your memory, because there are plenty of things I was genuinely thrown off by despite it only having been two years since I last played the original game. But, as I've talked about the worlds of these games at length already, what I want to focus on here is how Future Connected follows up on the world of Xenoblade 1.

Of the three Xenoblade games released thusfar, the first game's world, characters, and story is by far my favorite. I could rant for hours about the Fallen Arm section of the game alone. Xenoblade 1 is hard to top, and I respect 2 for not trying to directly compete and instead going in its own direction. Xenoblade Chronicles X was also unique as an open world game, but personally, I wasn't as gripped by its world's design, as the focus on freedom of movement made it much more difficult to utilize scale effectively, as vertical traversal would be difficult to implement (even with your flying Skell). This may be part of why I dropped X fairly quickly, despite enjoying my brief time with it.

Xenoblade Chronicles: Future Connected takes place on the shoulder of the Bionis, a famous piece of cut content from Xenoblade Chronicles 1, being one of the largest areas in the game and yet somehow going completely unused. However, due to where the first game ended, with only part of the Bionis being restored after creating the new world, now existing as merely a static island, that sense of scale on a macro level is gone. You'll occasionally spot the head of the Bionis looming overhead, but it's really only visible from the edge of the map. And looking down doesn't have much to offer, either. I don't necessarily fault the developers, in fact, implementing the Bionis' Shoulder area like this probably alleviated any technical concerns due to the size of the playable area.

But this contributes to the wider feeling that, although serving as essentially a miniature sequel to the first game, this epilogue is completely disconnected from the main game. Despite only being available with the remaster of the first game, it uses separate files from the main game, with next to nothing carrying over other than cosmetics. This also means the progression track is entirely separate, beginning at level 60 and ending around 80.

Again, this isn't necessarily "bad", I don't think they made the wrong choice here, logistically it'd be a nightmare to incorporate this as part of the main game. But every minute you're playing this epilogue, you're reminded of the fact that you're not taking one last dive into a universe you already know, but are instead in something entirely separated. Ordinarily, this would be a good thing. I am not fond of self-referential storytelling and nostalgia mining. But the problem is this is still set on the Bionis' Shoulder. And it's not just a case of reusing the assets, it's literally called as such.

So, while I've addressed that I completely understood the reasons why this expansion exists in the form that it does, it doesn't take away from the fact that it feels like it's trying to have it both ways. It wants to be a completely separate experience from the first game, but it also still has to incorporate as much from the first game as it can because designing a fully new game from scratch just for a few extra hours of story content would be impossible.

That's not to say everything that happens as a result of this is bad. I quite like the way the Shoulder is used narratively. It's sort of become this melting pot for all the various races encountered in the first game, and much of the conflict revolves around the way the scars of the war that the first game only shows the tail end of still linger in the present. Tensions are high, and it's up to Melia and Shulk to ease the tension and get everyone to cooperate and help take down the greater, existential threat they all face.

My only issue with this is that this is primarily told through the eyes of Melia. Granted, she's the logical choice for this kind of story. She's part High Entia and part Homs, meaning she is one of the few characters with a foot in two worlds. The problem is Melia was never that interesting of a character to me. Much of her story is revolved around her genetics, and I don't just mean that two worlds thing I was talking about earlier.

For those not in the know, or those who forgot because this plotline is convoluted: The High Entia as a race were conceived by the god of the Bionis, Zanza, to essentially be sleeper agents, who at his will could be transformed into monstrous creatures known as Telethia in order to absorb all life on Bionis and feed it back to Zanza, perpetuating his immortality. The High Entia, knowing that transforming into Telethia was a possibility, tried to essentially dilute their genes by intermingling with the Homs over several generations, most notably with the royal line in the case of Melia. The result was a small group of High Entia who would not be able to be transformed into Telethia.

Personally, and maybe this doesn't bother people as much as me, but these kinds of crazy genetic stories in fiction never captivate me. I'm not hugely into the idea of everything revolving around special genes that make some people have magic or whatever while others simply... don't, and the reaction is basically just "well, sucks for them, I guess, they don't get to be part of the inherent fantasy of this fantasy universe." For what it's worth, Melia's story is attempting to be an inversion of this. There's a lot of discrimination among the High Entia, as the "pure-blooded" ones view themselves as superior, only for a tragic twist of fate to reveal the "half-bloods" as the key to the High Entia's future. But, hopefully you can still kind of see the issue here. It doesn't refute the idea of special genes making you inherently superior, because by revealing the "pure-blood" gene to actually be responsible for turning people into deformed monsters, it just changes the dynamics of whose special genes are superior.

I harp on this not for its own sake, but because Future Connected does actually address this. It doesn't really solve my issue, but a minor antagonist in the main story (one whose fate is left completely unresolved if you don't discover a specific sidequest) is a sort of half-blood supremacist. He rejects the notion of trying to turn the Telethia back into High Entia, and believes half-bloods like himself and Melia are destined to rule over the new age. Again, it doesn't somehow fix that issue with the first game, but I do feel like this character's story was a case of Monlith Soft's narrative team looking back at the first game and seeing the same issue I did, so kudos for that.

I guess the last thing to address is that, for all I said about this epilogue feeling too disconnected from the main game for my liking, it's also narratively incomplete. You can really feel the cut corners in some areas. Again, one of the main story's antagonists, one who wasn't even operating under the orders of any grander villain, simply exits the story halfway through and is left completely unresolved if you don't talk to a random NPC in town just before the end of the game.

But that's not even the real elephant in the room. The main antagonist of this DLC is an entity referred only to as the Fog King. It's some sort of cloud creature that can only be harmed by concentrated forms of Ether, seemingly originating from some dimensional rift. That's it. That's all the explanation you're given. For a series so famous for its rich worldbuilding you'd expect a tiny bit more than that. Zanza's theme does play during the first phase of the final battle against the Fog King, implying some sort of connection to, if not Zanza, the power of creation he possessed. My best guess is that the Fog King and the interdimensional rift it came from was some kind of leftover from when Shulk remade the world at the end of the first game, a small remnant of what used to be struggling to take form in the new world.

More likely though, disappointingly, this is all just setup for the upcoming Xenoblade Chronicles 3. Without getting too specific for those who haven't been following the trailers (I myself have avoided most of them) there is evidence that certain threads from the first game, if not Future Connected specifically, are going to come into play. Exactly how this will happen and what form it will take is unclear, and the ending of Future Connected doesn't really serve to give you any sort of clue. They stop the Fog King and the Telethia somehow manage to seal the interdimensional rift it originated from, and then... the story's over. So it's sequel bait, but it's not even good sequel bait, as you're not really given the tools to guess at what larger narrative it's building up to. You're just left confused and underwhelmed.

All in all, I want to stress that I did enjoy my time with Future Connected, but it's definitely the kind of thing I'm never going to replay. I'm left lacking and confused as to why it exists other than as a selling point for the remaster or a rushed way of finally implementing the Bionis' Shoulder, or some combination of the two. As far as ways of justifying its existence, neither of those are particularly compelling to me. I'm hoping these are issues unique to Future Connected, as I'm still very much anticipating Xenoblade Chronicles 3's release this upcoming Friday. I don't know if anything in this series is ever going to top the first Xenoblade, but regardless of its actual quality, I think 3 is going to prove itself to be interesting. That alone, disappointingly, would provide a stark contrast to anything Future Connected has to offer.

The end credits sequence of Furi is a moment that, even years later, even knowing it was coming, still manages to floor me. All throughout the game, your character, a mysterious Stranger who was locked up in some bizarre space prison by 10 immortal guardians around Earth's orbit, has been told that they cannot be allowed to be freed because they pose some sort of unspecified and yet unstoppable danger to the planet.

And so, as you murder all of these guardians with the help of your self-interested companion who freed you, you begin to question who your protagonist is and what the danger they pose is. At first it seemed a matter of the guardians simply being scared of the Stranger's power. But one of them mentions a "corruption." And the final guardian, the youngest of them who was clearly left for last as a mercy, hoping that she would never be placed in the path of the Stranger, describes the threat your character poses as a more existential one.

And with her defeat, you finally set foot on the Earth, and the credits begin rolling. The land beneath your feet blackens as everything around you rapidly dies. Every step you take leads to more and more of the environment being consumed by whatever mysterious blight your character just seems to inherently spread. And, without words, you're left to simply grapple with the nature of your quest. Whether it was worth killing more people just to set foot on a planet you would kill just by existing. And there's a sadness to that too, as it carries the inherent implication that our Stranger is simply incompatible with the world.

And so, you're faced with one final choice, as it's finally revealed what exactly is going on here. Our Stranger is just one Rider of an alien fleet, who appear to be searching for other worlds to colonize, presumably after the destruction of their own. Evidently, the death and decay that spread from your character was no accident, this was part of the assimilation process. So, what will you do with this fact? Will you go through with the plan, or resist? Either way, you can never be a part of this world. All you can do is decide whether or not to fight for it.

What appears to be the final update for Metroid Dread has been released, this time adding a Boss Rush mode. As someone who's a big fan of boss rushes, I was anticipating this for a long time. Overall, this mode meets expectations.

While I appreciate the attempt to base the goal more around times, however, I found the inclusion of the ability to continue a bit confusing, seemingly going against the spirit of the boss rush. However, this is more than made up for by the Survival Rush, which does not include this feature. This mode sees you fighting all 12 bosses in the game with only 5 minutes on the clock. Each boss defeat adds a mere 30 seconds, with another 30 seconds gained for winning a fight without taking damage.

This turns each fight into a stressful game. Even playing as good as on a normal playthrough won't cut it, these bosses will now demand perfection. And through repeated attempts, you'll discover new strategies that essentially force you to become a speedrunner. Corpius' head moves in a predictable pattern, allowing you to still shoot it while it's invincible and cut out a ton of filler. A perfectly timed jump over Kraid's punch allows you to do the entire fight without losing any height. The ability to instantly charge a shot while spin jumping allows you to conserve missiles without losing much time in the Drogyga fight.

This mode is everything I could hope for out of a boss rush. And the most sadistic surprise is saved for the very end. If you missed the fine print, you might not realize that this is an endlessly looping boss rush. After achieving victory over Raven Beak, you're sent right back to Corpius, likely with very little time left on the clock. I ran out of time just before I could get the last few shots on Corpius and decided I had enough, but for those who are truly dedicated, I could see trying to get a high score in this mode providing endless fun.

I may still have issues with this game's story, but there's no denying it has perfected combat in the Metroid series. Give this boss rush mode a shot.

The Kirby series is always a joy to return to every few years because these games are just so unapologetically happy. It's hard not to have a smile on your face the entire time you're playing, because the gameplay, characters, and environments are all so cute and cozy. Kirby and the Forgotten Land is the series' biggest departure from its formula to date, but that core principle still remains intact.

When I first started the game, I was a bit disappointed, it seemed as though the already simple gameplay had been simplified even more. Each powerup essentially only has one or two attacks now due to the new 3D control scheme. But the new upgrade system adds a lot of depth to each of these abilities, and while your options are still more limited, it still feels true to the fundamental Kirby combat experience.

In classic Kirby fashion, while the game starts out with a fairly simple plot about Kirby trying to rescue his kidnapped friends in the strange new world he's arrived in, things go absolutely off the rails in the game's finale. It's insane how within the span of 10 minutes the game's plot goes from "save the Waddle Dees" to "An alien god with immense psychic and interdimensional power came to Earth thousands of years ago, threatened to wipe out all life on the planet, but was captured and then experimented on by humanity, giving them the power to traverse dimensions and leave Earth behind. The animals still on Earth eventually evolved and gained sapience, devoting themselves to that same alien god, who opened dimensional portals to enslave whatever extraterrestial life it could suck up so that it could eventually be reunited with its other half, become whole again, and finally be freed. Kirby must now stop this ancient alien god from crashing two planets into each other in a last ditch effort to defeat its foes."

In the classic Kirby experience, while the base game is extremely easy, the postgame does pose a decent challenge. And, as ever, it culminates in a final boss rush. Speaking as someone whose earliest gaming memories consist of trying for hours to beat Super Star Ultra's True Arena (notably its souped-up version of the final boss) I had gained an arrogance later in life that these Kirby boss rushes were never that hard and I just struggled because I was a literal child. In comes this latest game's final boss rush to snap me back to reality in the best way possible. I can't remember the last time a Kirby game nearly made me want to smash my controller with rage, but here we are, and I'm elated to say I finally conquered it and achieved 100% completion.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land is easily one of the best Kirby games, and if you're a longtime fan, it's a must-buy.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is a frustrating story in many respects because it's such a captivating world but there's so many missed opportunities.

On the one hand, you have the circumstances surrounding the game's apocalypse. The disappointingly believable mundanity of its cause being a billionaire who disregarded safety and ethics for profit, all of the effort that went into building the system that would save the Earth, and most importantly, the totality of it.

In most post-apocalypse stories, the end really isn't the end. That's the point of calling it the "post"-apocalypse genre. There are remnants that survived. But in the world of Horizon, there was a point in time where the Earth had truly died, and not a speck of life remained. And all the world's civilians were duped into fighting a losing war just to delay that day as long as possible so that a new world could be created.

And then on the other hand, you have the present day storyline. Somehow, they took the fascinating concept of the villains' motivation being "our God-King is dead and we want our holy city back, so we're turning to this ancient AI who we think is the devil figure from our mythology for aid in taking it back" and made it boring. There's absolutely no introspection from the game's main human antagonist about this outside of a few audio logs. The rest of the time he's just ranting about strength and how super cool and strong and epic he is. How do you underutilize a concept as dripping with potential as this?

This, I think, is at the heart of the main criticism of the game, which is that the present day storyline simply isn't as captivating as the backstory. And I think there's some truth to that. I just vented about the utter waste of its entire faction of main antagonists. But it ends up opening an interesting conversation about video game storytelling. Because I think we're beyond the question of whether or not games can have good stories, now the dilemma facing most AAA games is how to tell them.

The way Horizon's two major stories are conveyed to the player are just fundamentally different. The present day storyline is told the way pretty much every AAA open world game tells its story. You'll get most of the dialogue through interacting with NPCs, with plenty of dialogue choices that don't really define the narrative as much as allow you to project your own thoughts on the current events in the story. There are also, obviously, occasional cutscenes where dialogue alone just won't do. It's a very involved story, never cutting away with Aloy, always putting you in the middle of the most important events as they happen.

The backstory, on the other hand, is just about the opposite as far as storytelling goes. It's told extremely indirectly. At best you'll get holograms of people from the past talking, but even then, it's very distant. With few exceptions, these are never even used as proper cutscenes, you can still move around as Aloy as they play out. And that's just the stuff you're required to see. Everything supplemental you'll have to go digging through text and audio logs for. Which means a lot of walking around generic purple bunkers constantly checking your compass to make sure you didn't miss anything, then scanning every individual log one by one.

And yet, despite these issues, the backstory ends up being more engaging somehow. Why? Well, although I think the backstory is just genuinely a great depiction of the apocalypse I could write a whole separate review about, I think there's a deeper problem here. I believe the answer is that despite trying to tell a more involved, cinematic story in the present, corners were cut. And it shows at almost every moment.

Voice direction for all but the most crucial NPCs was clearly poor, as if they only had one take. And if that's not enough, even for the performances that did manage to avoid this problem, you'll have to deal with the most awkward dialogue animations I've ever seen. Yes, hand-animating every interaction would have been a staggering amount of effort, but everyone's faces look like they're struggling in pain to say every word.

This ruins some of even the most important moments of the story. Much of the first half of the game revolves around Aloy chasing down a character named Olin, who served as a spy who gave up her location to the game's main villains, leading to a brutal massacre that wiped out a significant portion of her tribe along with her adoptive father. As she chases Olin down, Aloy learns he did it under the threat of his own family who were being held hostage by the villains.

And so, with these conflicting feelings about this man bubbling inside of her, what are we treated to when she finally pins down this man and confronts him? Animations so awkward and bad you'd be forgiven for thinking they were done by an amateur in an afternoon. All narrative momentum and emotional weight are gone before you even get to choose whether to kill or spare this man because it's impossible to take these animations seriously.

I don't mean to discredit any of the people working on this game. It's not a lack of talent or effort necessarily, but this was the developers' first open world game and was in development for 6 years. Eventually, you have to ship a product. I get where corners were cut. But it's hard not to empathize with people who didn't fall in love with the present day storyline when this is the result they ended up with.

I think it's important to say all of that because honestly, I think when you view it from a birds' eye perspective, the present day storyline is just as captivating as the backstory. There are precisely two moments of the game that stuck out to me as being far and away the best parts of the game, and each comes from a different one of the two "halves" of this game's story. The first was the revelation of the fact that the apocalypse of Horizon was a true, total apocalypse. That the entire world we've been seeing was the product of a terraforming system trying, and mostly succeeding, to bring life back.

The second was the game's genuinely impactful ending, in which Aloy finds the corpse of the closest thing she's had to a mother, the one she embarked on this whole quest to find, while a recording of this woman's interaction with the terraforming AI she designed plays in the background. The score, the dialogue, and for once even the animations all sell this moment perfectly. It's the perfect ending for this game's story. (Even if there's a pointless post-credits scene that kinda kills the mood)

But it's not just the ending that works about the present day storyline. The world it sets up is genuinely compelling. Due to some outside intervention by a man I hope secretly survived the apocalypse somehow so I could have the honor of making Aloy kill him myself, the terraforming system that rebuilt the biosphere and spawned a new generation of humans wasn't able to put its education system for those new humans to learn from into place. Pretty much all they received was an early childhood education, and a weirdly comprehensive knowledge of the English language.

So, eventually, when these humans are let out into the wider world, they all come to their own conclusions about the ruins of the old world left behind. Some of them remember the multiservitors that took care of them like mothers, and so revere motherhood. Some of them looked at old books about the Sun and devised an entire religion around it. Some of them looked at the animal-like terraforming machines roaming around, each glowing with the same blue energy, and formed their own beliefs about the world and life around that. And the list just goes on.

It's all genuinely captivating, and it's really a shame it all gets overshadowed because of the same repetitive discussion about how the backstory is more interesting than the present. Again, it's a fair criticism, but I feel like it ends up discouraging a lot of wider discussion about just how intricate the world this game has constructed is.

This is what happens when a good story is told badly. For all the praise I just heaped on the game, you're basically looking at this wide world with its new range of diverse cultures through a keyhole. The game really only explores the culture of two major tribes and lets the others be window dressing. And one of those tribes really only gets explored via a rogue faction who serve as the villains of the game, who as I described at the start of this review, are bland and lacking in any introspection. And the other is explained very thoroughly in the first half and then utterly shafted in the second half minus one main quest.

The answer, I think, to all of these problems comes in the game's Frozen Wilds DLC, which I think might be one of the most impressive expansions I've seen in a game for just how willing it was to tackle almost every single issue the base game had. Although it doesn't go back and fix any of the old story content, the new story content easily makes it worthwhile.

For starters, right off the gate, every single new dialogue animation is vastly improved. No more of the same shot, reverse shot animations with pained expressions. The facial animations themselves are better, and characters actually move around and talk with their hands as they speak to you. On rare occasions, it's a little much, but I can tell you I skipped through a lot less dialogue in Frozen Wilds than I did in the base game, so the pros vastly outweigh the cons.

But this is not the only way the presentation has improved. The backstory is, admittedly, told pretty much identically. In the new region of the game you'll still be going through a lot of audio logs, more than usual as there are only a few holograms. But the present day story is made far more compelling.

The present day story is focused around one, central, focused idea: The Banuk Tribe and how they interpret two AIs fighting for control of a volcanic facility. The entire central conflict revolves around Aloy helping a Banuk shaman try to gain access to the facility because the shaman believes an AI she's become a friend to over the last five years is some sort of machine spirit, and that spirit is now being held captive by a "Daemon". Unsurprisingly, this Daemon is just another AI trying to wrest control of the facility.

I'm not going to get into too many more specifics here because this review has gone on long enough. But this DLC has a much more central focus on the people of Horizon's world and how they interpret the events surrounding them. What the main game only glanced past becomes the centerpiece. It's no masterpiece, but it's probably the best story this game has to tell.

I hope the game's sequel, which seems to heavily revolve around Aloy teaching her companions all of the discoveries she's made about the true nature of the world and how everything they know came to be, can expand on this further. The people at Guerilla clearly showed an understanding of their flaws and a willingness to learn from them, which makes me very optimistic for how much further they can push this story further and really make the case for why the Horizon world is genuinely captivating sci-fi.

There have been plenty of games with some ludicrously tough postgame challenge that tests your skills before. If I enjoy the game, I will almost always attempt these challenges.

On some occasions, the challenge proves too much for me, someone who ENJOYS playing video games at the highest level of challenge I can achieve. On these occasions, I will usually abandon the game for a while, and return. Upon returning, I will keep attempting this challenge until I either beat it or I give up entirely and never return.

Hades, however, did something that's never happened before: I had multiple times where I thought I had given up on the game's 32 heat challenge for good. And yet, every few months, I found myself coming back all the same. It did not hit me how unique this was for how I play games until yesterday.

Yesterday, I attempted the game on the highest officially endorsed level of difficulty (the game uses a sort of difficulty points system called "heat") of 32. It can go much higher than that, but even I'm not enough of a sadist to attempt that just yet. And something happened to me.

This was the "perfect" run. My build had everything I wanted it to. I could easy reflect any projectiles, I could place down laser beam crystals, I could weaken enemies with the mere throw of my shield, and I could go invincible once I charged up my special meter enough.

Then, in the final boss fight, which lasted nearly 10 minutes of pure intensity with my current build, I lost just before the end of the last phase. If this were Dark Souls or the like, I'd be seething with rage. And here I am, in a roguelike of all genres, where death means redoing long stretches of gameplay all over again, and I felt... good. Exhilirated, even.

In all honesty, it's not exactly "good" to get enraged at a game, however difficulty, however unfair the death is. I've never had any extreme reactions, but all the same, the feeling of anger at a video game is always the worst part of playing a challenging video game. So I find it relieving and fascinating that a game inspired such a vastly different reaction from me.

It could be easy to ascribe this to a matter of "fairness." Hades is a remarkably fair level of challenge. The controls are tight, there's no glitches, every attack has a telegraph, and it's very easy to make everything out despite all the visual noise. And many other games known for their challenge can't claim to do the same. The Dark Souls series is notorious for is awkward camera controls and lock-on system.

But I wouldn't say that's the issue. I've played plenty of other "hard" games where the challenge was also fair and still found myself getting upset, even other roguelikes. I think what Hades does that no other game that prides itself on its challenge manages to pull off is a matter of simply what the game expects you to enjoy about it.



In most action games, the formula is fairly simple. You are presented with a challenge, and you must use your abilities in skillful manner to overcome that challenge, and are then rewarded for your victory. Hades follows this formula as well, but I think where most other games fail is that few steps of that process are consistently rewarding. The emphasis is placed on the victory. If you fail, then there is no satisfaction in the experience.

I don't mean to keep invoking the name of Dark Souls, the dead horse of video game comparisons, but I think it is genuinely relevant to this conversation. This isn't about comparing their mechanics, but rather in comparing them in the context of wider difficulty discourse. Because Dark Souls has a series of, shall we say, passionate fans who are radically opposed to the concept of having any sort of difficulty or accessibility options.

The argument against adding any sort of options to better manage the challenge usually boils down to supposedly compromising the vision of From Software, the company who develops the games. This is somewhat true, From Software has stated multiple times that the vision for their games is to face players with an overwhelming challenge so make victory all the more satisfying.

However, while I do respect that as a vision and I'm not trying to say anyone did anything "wrong" here, I think Dark Souls' influence has consequences on how we perceive difficulty in video games generally. Because so much emphasis is placed on the victory, defeat is seen as weakness, and victory as the only sign of strength. This makes it easy to wear each victory as a badge of honor. And there's nothing inherently wrong with being proud of any accomplishment in a video game, but like many things, it's possible to be taken to an unhealthy extreme.

There is a not-inconsiderable amount of these people who are so obsessed with their own victories in this game that it causes them to look down on others for not being able to do the same. Some fans even debate whether using features Dark Souls already has to make things easier, like summons or grinding, truly count as skillful play. A game that is meant to be collaborative through many of its multiplayer mechanics has a very competitive discourse surrounding it.

And yet it misses the point of why it's so hard for people to get into From Software's games. It's impossible to truly appreciate all of their strengths when the core gameplay loop is inherently centered around victory at all costs. Death is not treated merely as failure, but as a black mark upon you for not daring to be capable of beating that boss that can kill you in two hits on the fist try. The game itself may not directly punish this (other than losing all of your souls) but the social pressure is very much there.

This may sound like a criticism of Dark Souls' design, but it's really not. I enjoy those games, but I think the impact their community has had on difficulty bleeds into how we talk about other games too. Dark Souls, after all, is one of the most influential games of the 2010s. And with that influences also carries over how we talk about difficulty.

It's very easy to look at failure, in life as well as video games, and to feel like something was taken away from you. I am not trying to blame this phenomenon on a video game, but rather, that I think how we talk about difficulty exacerbates this phenomenon.

Nothing material is "lost" by losing in a video game, other than perhaps your time. But when you're encouraged to tie some sort of social status to your victory in a video game, well, then it DOES start to feel like something was taken from you in losing. That, subconsciously, is part of why I think it's so easy to get upset at even video games that aren't some competitive multiplayer game where you're given a ranking that denotes your skill.



So, how does Hades fix this problem? I think, fundamentally, it's one of the few games where losing just feels like part of the experience. Other than reaching the end of the story, the incentive to "win" is actually minimal. Even after finishing the story, the game simply turns your various escapes from the Underworld into your character's official job in the universe.

Your goal is to push back against the obstacles in your way as hard as you can, yes, but there's not really meant to be an "end" to this. Other roguelikes, in their inherently replayable nature, can also claim to do this this, but this is one of the few where it was integrated on a narrative level in way that was framed as a positive. This is not some tragic curse or cycle, you're genuinely helping out all of the lovable characters you've met along the way.

Losing is baked into the mechanics on a fundamental level as well. The game's equivalent to an "easy" mode makes you stronger every time you lose. With that comes the inherent expectation that you lose, and the game pretty blatantly reinforcing that losing is okay.

There's also the Mirror of Night, the game's permanent upgrade system. Your character starts out pretty weak, but by spending the currency you've unlocked over your escape attempts, you can become stronger. This kind of mechanic is in many roguelikes, but Hades basically makes it blatant to you that it's next to impossible to beat the game without these perks. Therefore, you're going to have to lose... a lot.

You see, the fun of a roguelike isn't winning or losing. When you boil it down to the bare essentials, the core appeal is just how ridiculous you can make your build. Again, this may not be a unique trait to Hades, but this game runs with that idea and turns it up to 11. You will start out every run with a few basic attacks and a dash and by the end of a run you will be causing lightning strikes all over the arena, reflecting projectiles back at their sender, racking up insane combos, and just generally filling the arena with so many particle effects it's a miracle you can see anything at all through the chaos.

Hades has so much variety in the abilities you can get and the weapons you can use that the bosses are less obstacles to overcome, and just targets you can use your ludicrous new abilities against. When your build all comes together, it feels like you've outsmarted the game, even though your synergies were all carefully crafted by the designers. The challenge is not meant to merely give you satisfaction in overcoming it, but in the fight itself. In both you and your opponent giving the fight your all. Thus, the outcome becomes almost irrelevant.

It's also worth noting how all of this is integrated on a character level. I think Zagreus might genuinely be the most genius roguelike protagonist I've encountered. Roguelikes are generally light on story, but even the few that try to have one never really go out of their way to conceptualize a character who truly fits the genre. Even Returnal, a roguelike I enjoy almost as much as this, doesn't ever quite define why its protagonist keeps on trying again and again as well as Hades does.

Zagreus, at his core, is incredibly stubborn. To a fault, perhaps. But the story, in its thousands of lines of dialogue, doesn't really portray this as a proper character flaw. All the characters you encounter are very stuck in their ways, completely certain that nothing can be done to improve their own eternity. But Zagreus' own stubbornness proves the necessary force of change needed to improve all of their lives.

It's in this way that Zagreus' stubbornness isn't treated as a shallow character trait, but as an integral part of the narrative. This even makes itself visible through the Death Defiance system, a sort of extra lives mechanic. This itself is explained as Zagreus just being too stubborn to die. His sheer force of will makes it almost impossible not to give it your all in turn.

For reasons that should be obvious, this is perfect for a roguelike. This is a genre that's punishing, repetitive, defined by its steep difficulty and large consequences for every mistake. Having a protagonist that is as determined to achieve his goals as you are means you can't help but project yourself onto Zagreus. Stubbornness is not defined by success or failure, but rather the will to keep going. Your player character's personality is built around the idea that although victory is the goal, it's not the point. The point is simply to never give up.



Stubbornness does have its drawbacks, however. In my own stubbornness, I refused to engage with the Mirror of Night for a large portion of my early playthroughs. I only unlocked a handful of abilities that I thought would not radically tip the scales in my favor.

I did eventually beat the game with every weapon and every aspect this way, but it wasn't really satisfying. It just felt... obligatory. This was entirely self-imposed, by some arbitrary feeling that permanent upgrades go against the "true" roguelike experience.

It was not until I kept attempting the 32 heat challenge that it became clear just how much the game was built around using the Mirror of Night and permanently upgrading Zagreus' abilities. Doing so not only made victory satisfying, but the game itself more satisfying. The game feels much more expressive and strategic with each of these abilities. The game's mechanics only truly come alive when you see how well they synergize with each of the Mirror of Night's abilities.

And so, on that perfect run, when I got to that final fight, and whittled Lord Hades himself all the way down to his third phase, and died, I felt good. I had fun the whole way through. That fight was a delightfully intense experiences. For several minutes straight, without a second to breathe, I was frantically darting around the arena, trying to pile on as much damage as I could while trying to dodge attacks that felt like they were coming from all sides.

This is where I think how we talk about boss design in video games is especially relevant. There's much discussion over whether a boss is "fair" or "well-designed", but I feel like the discussion has become less and less about whether it's straight up fun to fight them. How does the fight actually encourage you to play? This game is one of a rare few that I think genuinely asks that question, and it's so much stronger for it.

Now that I've finally beaten the game on 32 heat today, the day following the run that inspired this review, I'm technically "done". There's a few more things I can unlock, but to be honest, those incentives are meaningless to me. The sheer fun of this game makes me want to come back. Even without changing my weapon or its aspect at all, there's so many other builds I want to try out. There's so much potential with these mechanics that I don't know that this is a game I'll ever truly "stop" playing, which is something no roguelike has never achieved for me.

Roguelikes still have some sort of "end", some final challenge to overcome, and after that, there's not really much incentive left to keep playing. But with this game, it truly feels like it's about the journey and not the destination.