Yoji Shinkawa's stately, elegant mecha designs pair so strangely with the hilaribad dorky writing/VA and give ZOEII such a campy, stylish flavor. Loads of exhilarating, thoughtful combat encounters and setpiece sequences that play with scope in ways that were rare back in the days of the PS2, and many still feel dramatic and impressive today. The whole soundtrack rules but the opening trip hop track and Ardjet are all-timers. I tried playing this in PSVR and it looked and felt amazing but sadly my entire body filled with vomit within 10 minutes

some of the environmental art direction here is the best in the series. I love so many individual elements in this game: the life cycle of the pilgrims, the graceful Pontiff Knights, the Cathedral of the Deep, Irithyll Dungeon, and the cataclysmic surrealism of the DLC. The Twin Princes are my favorite tragic bossfight since Astraea from Demon's Souls. It's sad that so much wonderful art design was paired with so many tedious lore callbacks and easter eggs that make DSIII feel more like a dwindling continuation of a cycle (lol hmm) held back by lorehead and fan expectations than its own dark fantasy universe. I thought this was the most difficult of any of the games and not in a good way: it has the same fast-paced combat speed as Bloodborne, but with none of the counter and mobility toolsets that made that freneticism work. I'm also not into the 8 phase bossfights with constant attack animation changes requiring a lot of rote memorization, but I've never really enjoyed this series for its challenge level like a lot of people seem to. I felt frustrated and overwhelmed a lot of the time, or like I was being pandered to as a DS1 superfan in ways that cheapened the experience.

I'm enthusiastic that fromsoft are exploring new universes with Sekiro (even though I had issues with that game too) and now Elden Ring, because I don't know how much more they can realistically mine from the Dark Souls license without robbing future titles of the surprise and uncompromising experimentation that made the series so great in the first place

peculiar and hysterical and barely holding itself together! Some serious Deadly Premonition vibes. I love how many sprawling role play dialogue options there are that let you be a child-bullying money-hungry lesbian megalomaniac cult member during this horrific incident of mass carnage and how literally none of your choices matter all that much! I wouldn't have it any other way--the absurdity in many of the "choices" you're presented with are a delight on their own, there's no follow through needed. love 2 be a misanthropic little troll fashionista and nonchalantly parade around in the rubble of millions of lives, negging everyone in my sushi chef apron/ten gallon hat/heart sunglasses power uniform while every NPC questline still somehow works out great for me and gets me EVERYTHING my pampered princess survivress heart desires <3 I also am a huge fan of games with an "I need to go peepee poopoo" status icon, especially ones like DR4 that use it as an empty threat--I made it a personal point NEVER to shit during my playthrough and if there were any negative repercussions for doing that they were way too miniscule for me to notice

The many-year development struggles this game went through are very apparent: barely any of the mechanics amount to anything or even exist beyond UI element suggestions, and the game jerkily alternates between somewhat successful moments of tiny human connection (exploring an interpersonal framing of Japan's very real earthquake trauma) and complete absurdist nonsense that feels like a zany Benny Hill skit. The overall effect is disorganized and busted and incredibly charming.

absolutely adored my bizarre time with Disaster Report 4: Miracle Water!!!!!!!!!

Tetsuo / Hellraiser-ass Japan-only SRPG I am now obsessed with!!! My Japanese reading ability is still way too perfunctory to really engage with the complex srpg systems here or make much headway but the imagery and attitude of this is SO cool and its criminal that Yasushi Nirasawa (RIP king) isn't up there in the more commonly celebrated pantheon of iconic concept artists alongside Kaneko / Amano / Shinkawa.

love having all these stunning older titles to benchmark language lurning progress with and I will definitely return to this in 200 years when I can coherently read a single paragraph of grown-up Nihongo without my head exploding!!!!!

really telling and pathetic that "hardcore gamers" signed petitions by the thousands to "rewrite/fix TLOU2" instead of campaigning to "force Yoko Kanno and Holly Herndon and Imogen Heap to co-compose the OST for an Ar Tonelico reboot directed by Yoko Taro at gunpoint"

here are a few OST highlights so you dont need to play through this dumb mess that once again sounds inexplicably incredible:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFdRhJpUKt0
https://youtu.be/w3WR-OiMhtc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8a4xBISGVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSUaKHRz44

for some reason this is probably the only time a piece of media has ever made me feel "triggered" to the point of trembling white hot panic and rage and I'm very lucky to be able to say that because it was a fucking horrible experience and I hated it a lot!!! As someone who watches a lot of "transgressive" or politically indefensible genre media and has a complicated fragmentary interest in it I'm no stranger to sadist exploitation and the justification of horrific, perverse acts committed against women as a callous means to reinforce a fictional world's steely hopelessness but JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. The way this game doles out such repugnant torments to its one female character, a child (who was previously presented as a duplicitous saucy nubile cartoon temptress in a way that felt indefensibly racist and pedophilic), granting her zero dignity or humanity and utilizing her sexualized abuse as some cheap suggestion of a new "darkly-real, Kiefer Sutherland's war on terror" stylistic direction for this series.. is just... fucking grotesque and too ghoulish for me to even process. Kojima's misogyny was always something I had to internally justify or excuse up until this point--undeniably objectifying and ignorant but mostly absurd in a schlocky horny genre way I was personally able to overlook--and i think part of what I found so fraught about GZ was how intensely it laid bare how adjacent to abject misanthropy and callous hatred his views on female characters always were. I mean there are hints of this in MGS4 as well with the BnB's--the body oil moaning nymphoid war crime victim sequences that immediately transition into narrated monologues (not from them of course) about how these women had dealt with like the most lurid and sensationally violent trauma possible and you freed them via murder actually bc that was your job and right 2 do! That was disgusting to me at the time as well, but something about the treatment of Paz: an unrelenting violation of a character as a means of stylistic/thematic transition and an intended vehicle to generate hype (Metal Gear pulls no punches now this aint your momma's genre game we put Liveleak ISIS torture in it!) just utterly revolts me and makes me feel queasy 2 my core. The insult to injury was seeing this games attempt at some hateful cruel stylistic baptism for the series and then having Quiet's design revealed... Ground Zeroes isnt even an honest statement of intent for the series; Kojima isnt heralding in a new misanthropic world of mutilated dignity and constant desecration... he's simply incorporating that into his world where women are also sexy cartoon sidekicks with coo coo pulpy character designs... I think part of what upset me so much about this is envisioning the mental landscape of someone who is able to justify a narrative universe in which both of these ideas can non-schizophrenically coexist, let alone communicate anything valuable about geopolitics or war crimes. Utterly vile / fuck this piece of shit 4eva and tbh while I found so much of death stranding to be arresting and sprawling and deeply felt I also am unable to remove the stain of this fucking filthy worthless game from any of his other works! u marred your library forever u fucker I hate you!!!!!

I'm not convinced by the "color the world with fun~!" snake oil De Blob is selling me!!! You can paint this totally depersonalized metropolitan hellscape with as many garish colors as u want and it will still be a PANOPTIC BIOME OF CORPORATE SUBMISSION AND CONTROL!!!!!!!!!!! De Blob as the neoliberal compromise candidate in contrast 2 Jet Set Radio's radical reclamation of the urban landscape as a communal artspace 4 anticarceral revolt!!!!!!!!!!! more like de COP!!!! go open a frozen yogurt store in a disenfranchised community u slimy gentrifying FREAK!

The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by way of Noby Noby Boy and Banjo: Nuts and Bolts. I love a good industry polemic, and only Ice Pick Lodge (or like, Keita Takahashi/Yoko Taro) could deliver such a scathing satire of the market/cultural forces rendering Big Games™ into such braindead immediate gratification sludge with this much wit and eccentricity. The phantasmagoric grotesquerie of this visual universe is so peculiar; it's a scummy melange of Terry Gilliam, bootleg educational cgi kid's cartoon, and 90's faux-utopian "found art" park (think the St. Louis City museum or Austin's Cathedral of Junk). I love the headache-inducing maximalism and nails-on-a-chalkboard visual confrontation here, and the aesthetic is used to make some cutting points.

However, I cant fully get on board with this game because I feel like many of its most splenetic critiques come across as cynical, cruel, and directed at the wrong people. While the bitter bitch part of me DOES love the depiction of AAA game consumers as lobotomized crotchless potato babies, there's just a little too much "look at the piggie philistines eagerly slopping up garbage" energy in this, and I don't feel like its a particularly useful message coming from people who ostensibly believe in nurturing games as an expressive, mature medium (and have pushed the boundaries with their other titles in ways that eventually reached positive cult acclaim and reappraisal, changing some small semblance of the games community for the better IMO!). IPL are obviously a team that have been burned by financial struggle and frequent misinterpretation by games pundits/consumers, and I completely sympathize with their venomous attitude, but Cargo ends up a simplistic and inefficient critique--more of a troll than a thesis--because of it. It's a jaded dead end, uninterested in suggesting alternatives to this idiocy ouroboros or celebrating what more individuated, challenging games could be and do for people--it's all insult and no imagination, and the insults feel like hyperbolized projections that I don't buy as a reflection of the interiority of most gamers (even the DUMBEST ones that i HATE!!!). The fact that it exists is still cool as hell (A lot of my issues with Cargo are moreso that so few meaty self-reflexive games analyzing actual marketing and consumption exist to accompany/complement its very mean-spirited perspective) and I still prefer it as a piece of medium analysis over something like The Stanley Parable because it's eccentric and confounding and Slavic instead of droll and clinical and BRITISH!!!!!

mom: we have bayonetta at home
bayonetta at home: https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/952971429485624132/38347DAB23A7862A21020B2C40B3C0E9A6AB494A/

this is pretty janky and unsure of itself in a lot of ways (is it a musou?? an arcade shooter?? a big setpiecey spell combat thing?? its mostly just empty and busted!) but the tacky B movie vibe is hysterical and does a lot of legwork. A few of the more surrealist levels rule (loved fighting a bunch of 5fps quadrupedal eyeballs atop a plane) and the baffling cutscenes keep things moving just well enough to milk some gonzo enjoyment out of the whole deal. At its best this feels like Earth Defense Force meets an Underworld movie. A lot of bizarre sound effects feel a bit knowing: the mutated zombie enemies that flail at you while making turkey gobbling noises are up there with the "DONT WANT 2 DIEEEE" zombies from dead prem and i adore them. It's honestly pretty sad there are so few semi-big publisher games that feel as peculiar, haphazard, and gleefully tacky as this nowadays. Alicia's rose spear spell is also literally the origin point for the Dark Execution sealed verse in Nier (Cavia clearly re-used a slightly reskinned version of the same animation and programming) so thats a fun little trivia thing I guess!!!!

-The power and futility of images
-The unreconcilable friction between self expression, documentation, and occupation
-The urgency and necessity of cultural perseverance and joy, even as bloody torrents surge through broken dams
-The act of bearing witness to the places and people whose glittering specificity will be dashed and diluted by apocryphal, self-absolving media narratives scrawled by the servants of those who erased them
-The film reel collectibles are TOO SMALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

so bored of this song and dance

the "so vague as to be inoffensive" aesthetic nod to First Nation Pacific Northwestern spiritual iconography feels less like taking sensitive/subtle creative influence and more like Giant Squid wanted to make a kewl myth but didn't really have anything to say and couldn't be bothered to work with an actual tribe to make something specific or meaningful! I fully understand the limitations of games as binaristic programmed creations driven by market genre demandz but am very bored of the way themes of reverence and prayer are so commonly reduced to dull glyph collecting, "casting out darkness", and spiritual development as marker of incremental progression (insert gate unlocked chime sound effect with added reverb to make it more mysticool here). At this point there are so many versions of these same sorts of exploratory systems and to see games continue to half-assedly wrestle with ideas as huge as ritual, miracle, and the way cultures survive through their symbols in these smug, claustrophobic, near-identical formal iterations without at least problematizing or raging against their own programmatic confines is frankly a lil disgusting!! Wish more of these developers extended the scope of their vision beyond mere aesthetic facades and approached programming as a potential form of boundless incantation in and of itself rather than a repulsive seratonin conveyor belt on a "digestible gameplay" assembly line

just an fyi that if this is your first exposure to FFX and you want to hop on the bandwagon of being a smug little brat about the supposedly "awful" voice acting (it's not, it's remarkably accomplished and effective considering the insane tech constraints the team was working under--the depth of performance these actors were able to achieve still blows more current games and their aggressively codified anime archetype voices out of the water! good luck finding protagonists with as specific and non-cliche intonations as Tidus/Yuna. Watching Hedy Buress' thoughtful interview featurette about playing Yuna literally makes me cry) you should know that you probably are feeling a weird friction between the voice/characters moreso because the hd remaster completely butchered so much of the animation and visual storytelling present in the faces of the original character models, which the english voice actors were directly responding to and taking influence from in their performances! OG Yuna had so much intimate detail written into her ps2-era features--her gentle, tired eyes, full of fatigue but never resignation. This new baby eyed smoothface Dissidia treatment has turned both our protags into puffy blowfish with hyper-saturated irises and deer in the headlights stares, and the pioneering facial animation from the og has all but been completely erased! literally you are seeing a vastly inferior treatment than 20 years ago. Devastating 2 observe this homunculus pantomime, truly can not bear it

also deriding the laughing scene for being cringe is so tedious, it IS cringe but in a beautiful and very real, well contextualized way and the reason the game contains this "cringe" scene is also the reason its literally the only convincing romance in like any videogame ever made !!!! sad how you've all forgotten how to love, i will be praying 4 u

FFX is an all timer for me and my connection to the mastery present in like every specific element of its original iteration have made playing this remaster completely impossible lol

maybe you will experience much less revulsion to the facial animation than me and i truly hope you do because this is one of the most holistically well considered and thematically cogent Final Fantasies and jrpgs in general. Just play the OG upscaled i literally just did and it looked infinitely more appealing than this

Headbone connected to the headphones
Headphones connected to the iPhone
iPhone connected to the internet
Connected to the Google
Connected to the government