A Link to the Past. A monolith of the Zelda franchise, alongside Ocarina of Time, that simultaneously solidified the series formula and set its subsequent sequels on a path that would take 26 years to break free from. Nowadays a divisive title between the fanbase, its reputation for turning the series into a restrictive, hand holding, linear affair is mostly undeserved and severly exagerated. While lacking the first screen statement of the original Legend of Zelda and guiding you through a small set of introductory dungeons with little deviation before opening itself up, ALttP still retains the exploration DNA from its predecessors.

Allowing for a surprising amount of choice in how you tackle its questline provides numerous fun guideless discoveries such as the Zora waterfall or the warp travel bird, and without the intrusive tutorialization and puzzle signalling that would later on plague the franchise, players are left to their own devices to figure out dungeon entry enigmas and solve meticulously puzzle box designed dungeons that do not hold any punches in their mental and physical challenge. In what I consider a brilliant decision, in order to be able to defeat the final boss after a gauntlet of the hardest rooms in the game, you need to have had completed a series of side quests that you would think were just optional content, a devious trick that would make the NES games proud.

Having said that, I unfortunately do tend to agree with most of the critical reevaluation that ALttP has recently gotten from its detractors. While the colorful and detailed Super Nintendo presentation lends a newly found personality to the series, it also ends up removing much of the alluring mystery and mystique of its more simple and abstract looking prequels. The more perceptible aesthetic is itself a double edged sword that easily signals what you are allowed to engage with and what is noise to be ignored, a harmless consequence of technology advancement that ironically ends up reducing the scope of ALttP's map, despite how much bigger it is than Zelda 1 and 2. It's true that ALttP allows room for the player to decide which path he wants to take, but that certainly becomes a harder decision to make when you can just open your map at any time and realize you are going the wrong way.

Make no mistake in assuming I am implying that A Link to the Past forever strayed the Zelda franchise away from its strength and potential, as that's not the point I'm trying to make. But it's hard to deny that the series philosophy took a turn here, in the same manner that something like DMC3 would forever rob the franchise of another DMC1 happening. And maybe it was for the best, as moments like finally being able to pick up the Master Sword in the middle of a shady forest represent some of the most awe-inspiring and affecting iconography the series offered. The true mark of A Link to the Past's success is in the ability of the franchise to ride on its coattails for almost 30 years.

Bar none the greatest strength of the Myst series was always its ability to convey the human mind's fascination with deciphering the unknown and making sense out of the alien and illogical. Myst's cold, empty and artifical island filled with misplaced familiarity beckoning you to interact with its clunky buttons and mechanical contraptions was all about finding meaning in its dreamlike language, which while a fruitful and inspiring endeavor as the series first step, was something that its sequel Riven managed to slightly iterate and expand upon to deliver something much more profoundly alluring.

Masterfully intertwining its worldbuilding with its puzzles, Riven presents a cohesive and tangible world filled with enigmas within enigmas, where understanding the solution means understanding the people, culture, rules and symbols that govern its world, and preceeding titles like The Witness or Fez, it offers a singular idea to the player that progresssively and beautifully flourishes into revelation with each new discovery of its meaning, exposing its crucial purpose and importance to every facet of Riven's existence.

A meticulously designed gameworld that perfectly parallels the antagonist's obssessive imperialistic dreams of divinity and supremacy over the world of Riven, and whose vision is ultimately and inevitably undone by the same reverence he bestows upon the devices and symbols he created in his tyranny. And just as his unsustainable dream crumbles apart, so too does the player's, as figuring out Riven means the destruction of its mystique, leaving nothing but a virtual space of beautiful static pre rendered backgrounds, and while the awe of enlightenment is something that I will never be able to experience ever again in Riven, the joyful smile I get while looking at my notebook filled with scribbles and doodles of its world is proof that I was truly there.

Refrain from resorting to a guide, click anything and everything, close and open every door, observe closely, and take a sip each time you have to endure a grueling slow animation, and I promise it will be worthwhile.

Asura's Wrath being the laughing stock of excessive QTE use during the 7th gen has become a bit of an unfair reputation, considering how little credit it tends to get for how successfully it actually manages to pull it off. Described as an "interactive anime" by the developers themselves, it is clear that the people behind this production knew what they were doing, using all the classic tropes and cliches that have turned shounen into such a successful venue for guys being dudes.

So well executed in fact, that soon you forget that you are for the most part just pressing button prompts as you watch long ass cutscenes of big muscle guy punching another big muscle guy. There is definitely an art to making visceral rage and violence this engaging and purposeful, emotions that the japanese have managed to perfect and capitalize on with animation for decades now, and Asura's Wrath pays tribute to that legacy in a grand display of revenge melodrama between gods that puts God of War to shame.

It's an escalation of every increasingly insurmountable odds that Asura inevitably bursts through with his fists, fury and will alone, surprassing the greatests of Platinum Games finales, and it's amazing what a few buttons can do to elevate a story that we have seen told countless times before to new heights of catharsis. The final boss (which is locked behind payed dlc, a decision that sits at the pantheon of bad Capcom ideas) gets his shit kicked in so hard that by that point you welcome those QTEs with open arms.

The bittersweet ending note of Asura's Wrath is wondering how much more amazing it would have been were it a real ass videogame.

Despite still being a much debated topic among gamers, I'm fairly certain that many here would agree with the notion that gameplay isn't necessarily the end all be all core of a videogame that validates it in the eyes of its critics, with many well renowned beloved classics owing a fair deal of their reputation and prestige to their presentation and art style, in some cases exclusively so. It's a fine line between the legwork a videogame's interactivity does and the heavy lifting its audiovisual design achieves, some works being so successful in that tug of war that they are able to ride on the coattails of their aesthetic alone. Does El Shaddai pull it off?

Sort of. It's an inspired visual kaleidoscope of arresting fantastical landscapes that reinterpret ancient hebrew religious text depicting the kingdom of the fallen angels who caused the Great Flood through cel shaded watercolored vignettes and bright vivid shades that still stand the test of time. My issues with El Shaddai however rest in its ability to use its biggest strength to communicate the imagery and themes of the source material it tries to interpret.

Putting aside the serviceable combat mechanics that are the bulk of the gameplay experience and reach their apex short of the halfway point, El Shaddai struggles with keeping the player invested in its storyline, hoping that its visual splendor suffices. The disparate tonal shifts, lackluster cast and off the wall liberties the game indulges on, while leading to some successful endeavours like the fantastic rendition of Azazel's domain in Chapter 6, more often than not end up with vacuous and dry shallow confrontations that fail to explore and engage with the text besides superficial tracing of it.

A videogame doesn't necessarily need gameplay, but it's not enough to just be beautiful. In contrast to Okami's reverence for the Shinto religion, El Shaddai is not able to convey the power, majesty and beauty of the imagery it apes from, despite how grandiose and colorful it wants you to see it as. Still, El Shaddai is a curious oddity that baffingly got greenlit during the 7th gen of consoles, and the acid trip is more than worth the price of admission. But you can sort of understand why it never turned into an ICO or a Rez in its proceeding years.

It isn't suprising to me that Ivalice has established itself as a recurring universe in the FF canon, considering how rich and elaborated its inception was with Final Fantasy Tactics. A far cry from the high fantasy grandiose storylines familiar to the main series, FFT presents instead a self serious political crown succession conflict with a vast number of morally ambiguous characters clashing their ideologies and inner struggles with honor and duty on a shakespearean stage. While not to say that these ideas haven't been explored in previous FF titles, it's clear that director Matsuno has a particular interest for real life history events that make his storytelling more akin to Game of Thrones than to The Lord of the Rings.

So much so, that the FF iconography present in Tactics is for the most part just superficial acknowledgement of the franchise, with the obligatory presence of chocobos, familiar spell names and screen filling summons. The biggest FF contribution in Tactics is however the class system, which allows a plethora of options and strategies in creating a deeply personalized party that feels constructed and earned by the player, giving the game a level freedom comparable to something like Symphony of the Night. But like Symphony of the Night, Tactics freedom is simultaneously its biggest strength and biggest flaw.

Notorious for its lack of difficulty balance, it becomes extremely easy to accidentally build a team in Tactics that can decimate every late stage battle in a few turns. And while you could have the prior knowledge of how not to break the game, the infamous difficulty spikes permeated throughout FFT make it very hard to not do so. Getting save trapped in a sequence of battles with no opportunity to grind inbetween, just to find yourself against an opponent that can one hit kill you if you do not have a very specific set of abilities and stats, is hardly what I would consider fair. While I appreciate the unique challenge of FFT, I find that its chess like diorama battles felt more like fighting an AI calculating my stats and my exact moves instead of an equal battle of the minds.

Still, despite its shortcomings, FFT has maintained its status as a classic for good reasons. A representation of a time when Square owned the world and had free reign to experiment, Tactics remains a deeply engaging SRPG that also boasts one of the most compelling and well written storylines in the franchise, with Ramza and Delita's rivalry being a worthy take of the trope and the ambiguous ending successfully book ending the themes explored in the game. I reccommend going for the PSP port over the PS1 version, the overthought flowery dialogue is essencial to the Tactics aesthetic.

Might be difficult nowadays to perceive the Oddworld franchise as a well of artistic creativity and game design experimentation, considering that the series has been solely focused on remaking its 2D classics in dubious and unflattering manners for the last couple of years, but there was a point in time when it represented a promise of vastly different and unique takes on the Oddworld universe, Stranger's Wrath being one of them.

Stranger's Wrath immediately contrasts with Abe's stiff and do-or-die controls with its much more responsive manneuverability and offensive capabilities that provide the player a freeform style of gameplay that effectively showcase Stranger's stronger agency and command over his world. The unique blend of 3D platforming with tactical first person shooting gives Stranger's Wrath a dynamic and well paced set of skirmishes that has you stealthly and quickly dispatching enemies with a diverse choice of small critters that function as strategic trap weapons, and the character itself plays out the role of a bounty hunting anti-hero, threatening and brute forcing others to do his bidding, a far cry from Abe's weak and fragile status in his dystopic enslavement.

Despite this power dynamic difference between Stranger and Abe, the narrative and world explored in Stranger's Wrath still manage to engage in the environmental vs. industrial motif that defines the series, and while the Old West presentation might not make that case apparent in the initial hours of the game, the Westward expansion connotations become increasingly more obvious as Stranger gets ever more tangled up as the centerpiece of the story. However, I do think Stranger's Wrath trips up a bit over its message by conflating its themes of endangered ecosystems and species with the Stranger's arc of self acceptance and overcoming bigotry, ideas that while interesting on their own, do not mesh well together. You could say that Stranger learning to use the power inherent to him to change the status quo is the point, but I felt the game could have handled it better.

Additionally, my biggest criticism would have to be that Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath isn't odd enough. While it's a gorgeous game filled with Americana vistas and expansive landscapes, rarely does it ever feel alien, terrifying and fantastical in the same way its predecessors felt, and the cartoony enemy designs matched with the southern hillbilly voices make this more akin to something like Rayman 3 than Oddworld. Still, it's leagues better than what the Oddworld series has become.

It's easy to take a glance at Cruelty Squad's unpleasant artstyle and dismiss it for being obvious and unsubtle about its intent, when most of critical praise seemingly rests on its ability to create a playable shitpost deep fried meme that bluntly satirizes the sewer corporate modern age we live in and not much else inbetween. That however would be understating the talent and craft that is required to make such effective "heavy handed" art like Cruelty Squad.

Baffling to realize that this was Ville Kallio's first shot at videogames, because he displays such a strong understanding of the medium and utilizes so much of its strengths in ways that no other developers have really tapped into to create what I can only describe as a arthouse masterpiece of counter intuitive art and game design. Our infactuation with cyberpunk dystopia has created such pleasing worlds to look at in all of fiction that the only thing Cruelty Squad had to do was present the existential nightmare we already live in it its true colors. Making a house the most expensive item that gates you from the rest of the game's content might come across as portentous hassle for the player and an easy cheap jab at Capitalism™, but it doesn't make its statement any less truer and effective.

Getting accustomed to Cruelty Squad vomit inducing textures ends up becoming an inevitability, and the game beneath it surprisingly reveals enough enticing complexity and kinesthetic gratification that will distract you from the uglyness of it all. DNA taken straight out of Quake make traversal in Cruelty Squad's industrial purgatory oddly satisfying and addicting to exploit as you discover there is fun in retrying missions to find new secrets in the open ended maze like levels and speedunning CEO and landlord assassinations, raking in the dough to invest and buy more expensive game changing implants that further blur the line between man and biomachine monstrosity. Sooner than expected, you end up forgetting the garish mismatched colors and low poly disorienting textures that assault your senses, and Cruelty Squad ends up becoming just another game to master like all the others that came before it.

Were this any other game, I would be taking down a couple of points for it losing its luster after the initial hours, but Cruelty Squad losing its repulsiveness over time just ends up reinforcing its message that much more. In the same way that Cruelty Squad visualizes what violent videogames must look like to our parents, it displays for a brief moment the reality and future humanity has devised for itself, as if putting on the They Live glasses for the first time. But eventually we get used to it. And we forget, we comply, we find pleasure in it. Luckily we get the chance once in a while to experience something like Cruelty Squad to remind us that we are all just meat sacks ticking up and down on a graph, selling ourselves short to the highest bidder.

PS: The easiest method I found out to make quick money in Cruelty Squad was to kill Elon Musk's personification over and over again and betting on the stock market right after. Something very poignant and cathartic about that. Don't tank my crypto next time, asshole.

Considering the shmup genre has effortlessly sustained its status over the decades as the ultimate statement on the purity of videogame difficulty, it's no wonder that it has so adamantly rejected interference on its beautiful juxtaposition of being an all destroying one man army and the cruel fragility of getting annihilated by one measly small orange bullet. After all, why would you even consider perfecting something that was already perfectly conceived?

ZeroRanger's success rests not only on its reverance for the giants upon whose shoulders it stands on with rose-tinted glasses, in a similar fashion to Shovel Knight, but also in its ability to shorten the gap between newcomer and veteran of the monolithic genre, while sticking to its brutally familiar and established winning formula. Through the use of clever motivational incentives and an intriguing narrative, ZeroRanger manages to keep players from shutting off the game after getting a game over in less than 5 minutes, and with a simple set of satisfying mechanics that allow for the opportunity to strategically express yourself, the feeling of improvement and progress is an ever compelling sentiment that will surely lead you to its demanding yet soul cleansing finale.

The gorgeous two colored aesthetic and vibrant genre fused soundtrack are not just external flourishes of the gameplay that give it its striking and unique presentation, but are instead core components of it that dictate the flow, tone and pace of the action, allowing for some of the greatest interactive setpieces of escalating tension and catharsis I have had the pleasure of experiencing on this planet. ZeroRanger consistently display an astounding level of craft and showmanship on par and beyond the library of greatest shmups, that it isn't until you reach the modest list of credits filled with endearing homages when you are reminded that this was a passion project conceived by just two very talented Finland dudes commited to one-up the their heroes.

Ultimately, the greatest achievement of ZeroRanger is its enthusiasm in kick opening the doors to a genre that many would think would be closed off to them. Difficulty is an art. And like all great art, there needs to be an engaging communication between both parties. And I think ZeroRanger accomplished it flawlessly.

Also, the fucking drill. It has that too.

Modern videogame design sensibilities dictate that a good videogame should always telegraph in advance the presence of traps, because trial and error is inherently a frustrating endeavor that doesn't give the player the opportunity to overcome the odds and be rewarded for it. It states that subjecting the player to long stretches of backtracking and being lost without knowing where to go is a sign of poor game structure, bad pacing and lazy level design that does not do enough to inform the player on how to play the game. It also suggests that required puzzle solving that gates progression should be easily understood as such and shouldn't be obtuse, elusive and hidden into the background in such a manner that in order to figure it out you must remember a hint you misinterpreted as flavor lore text 10 hours ago.

La-Mulana's ability to repeatedly laugh and spit in the face of what the collective videogame machine has evolved into over the years is the game's ultimate defining characteristic and statement, and while clearly inspired by retro classics of old, its meticulous and labored world map combined with an insurmountable obsession with lateral thinking puzzle solving makes it stand out as a one of kind experience in the medium that is as new and fresh as playing Demon's Souls for the first time in 2009. Indifferent to whatever whims the common player might bring into it, stages are never truly beaten, simply becoming part of an ever increasing tapestry of interconnected threads left hanging until the very last moments of the credits, and as you quickly realize the importance of details and minutia you have been conditioned to ignore by years of gaming, La-Mulana gains a level of dimensionality to its deceptive sidescrolling origins that turn most 3D ventures into cardboard cut-out playgrounds in comparison.

La-Mulana is definitely unfair, but it is so by design. And that unfairness is easily appreciated when it constantly displays a clear labor of love and wonderment for the unique power of discovery and conquest videogames excel at, utilizing its cruelty to exploit comedy out of the player's expense and turning every small note taking, picture drawing and logical leap of faith into a victory for the unlimited human ingenuity and perseverance. Even if you find yourself abusing an online guide, it is worth taking the La-Mulana journey, if only to see how every dungeon feeds into each other and witness the absurd mental gymnastics the game requests of your wellbeing. When the final puzzle brough me all the way back to one of the first brain teasers in the game, I reached nirvana. And I'm not ashamed to say it, I soyfaced.

Completing La-Mulana without a guide must be akin to surviving a Vipassana meditation retreat, a life changing religious experience that fundamentally shifts the way you perceive the world around you. In order to do so, you just have to get past your biggest misgivings as a human being, learn to shut off the white noise in your brain, accept the uncomfortableness of your body and mind, and bash your head into a indecipherable stone mural with retractable spikes that knock you 2 meters back into a pit you have to climb back from again while you heavily breathe in and breath out.

One day, La-Mulana 2.

Despite being one of the more recognizable and prestigious flagship titles from Nintendo, Metroid has always struck me as being more of a niche franchise than what its historical legacy would suggest. In a similar fashion to what Link to the Past did for the Zelda series, Super Metroid polished and perfected the open ended design and progression concepts of its predecessors, eliminating much of their more frustrating aspects, and established a success formula that the franchise has religiously followed from then on. In doing so, Metroid has been the same game for more than two decades, and putting aside its 3D detours with the Prime series, it has been trapped in an ever increasingly enclosed bubble of self reference and iteration.

Metroid Dread wastes no time with introductions, and the moment you grab hold of Samus Aran, it feels like coming home again. Take away the new coat of paint, and you are back to the same old Metroid song and dance, rushing past grid like corridors of underground caves and industrial lab rooms filled with alien critters to waste away and locked doors that you will inevitably open once you get the next power up on the checklist. Ever the stimulating power trip that characterizes the series, Dread's biggest achievement is how it seamlessly paces itself and constantly rewards the player in quick succession as it twists and turns the map, demostrating a seasoned understanding of the Super Metroid formula that makes putting down the controller a very hard thing to do. After what felt like a deliberate eternity, getting the Morph Ball power up was a non spoken mutual understanding between game and players in the know.

Unfortunately, that's only what Dread ever is. While the E.M.M.I. cat and mouse chase segments are the most inspired Dread ever gets, they are restricted by a need to appease the fandom's rejection of inconvenience, and so are sectioned off into clearly identifiable areas where a death only amounts to setting the player back to the start of said area. A brief pesky light detour into survival horror before going back to business as usual. For a series so deified for its somber atmosphere and exploration of the unknown, Dread contents itself with regurgitating the same landscapes and biomes we have grown tired of seeing since Super that rarely give an excuse to trade the foreground for the background, and the story, apparently a passion project in the works for many years, hardly justifies its purpose other than continuining on the concepts and themes that previous entries have already expanded upon in a much more meaningful way. Metroid Dread does not earn its title. So I ask this question: how many more times must I expect to get the space jump near the end of the game? How many more instances of blowing up a glass tunnel with a power bomb will I be subjected to? How much longer must the Chozo be the center of the universe?

Thanks to the flourishing of indie development of the last decade, the metroidvania genre has since seen a vast increase in experimentation that has given every kind of Metroid fan something to look forward to. I have made my peace a long time ago with the notion that the Metroid series now occupy a very specific set of qualities and standards meant to appeal to an audience that values the power fantasy of the franchise above everything else, and I can gladly say that Dread fits that bill perfectly with the most fun to control Samus and a plethora of movement and combat options that I'm sure will be exploited for years to come. If I want that old feeling of treading an alien and hostile environment by the skin of my teeth, I'll play Rain World. If I want to revel in indecipherable mystery and obtuse puzzle solving, I'll play La-Mulana. If I want to experience Metroid's atmosphere, I'll play Environmental Station Alpha. I just hoped that Metroid Dread could have once again been all those things for me.

Metroid Dread is good. It's great for most of it, even. But it's never exceptional. And as long as the franchise decides to live under Super Metroid's shadow, it will never be again.

There would be no better way to shoot yourself in the foot than making a sequel to a game so highly deified and demonized as Undertale, but Toby Fox somehow took the challenge head on and created, so far, a sequel worthy of its predecessor. Playing Chapter 1 for the first time back then, I wasn't expecting to be dazzled by its self assurance and showmanship, and I certainly wasn't ready for how masterfuly it weaponized its nostalgia in the same manner as only Mother 3 could. Beyond just being a spiritual sequel, it was certain that Deltarune would be a continuation of Undertale's message and concepts, and the note it ended on was prime bait I was fully willing to gobble up for the next chapter.

Now living in a 6 year old post Undertale world (!), the surprising brilliance of Chapter 2's subversion is how little of it there actually is. Contrasting with Undertale's looming shadow in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 does everything in its power to make you forget what sequel you are actually playing, taking instead a celebration tone that fully takes advantage of its enormous anticipation and that constantly throws at the screen sheer effort and confidence in its presentation. Establishing a "Monster of the Week" plot, Chapter 2 is a joyful non sequitur passage that expels the darkness bubbling beneath it all to put the spotlight on the main cast, and in the course of 4 hours, Toby Fox demonstrates a full understanding and grasp of Undertale's language that he flawlessly exploits at every turn to create some of the most well crafted comedic setups and pay-offs that could only be possible in videogames.

It's a finely and carefully laid out rug to pull from under us, because at its heart, it is still a story about the escapism and its double edged nature we constantly seek from outside our daily lives. The optional content is a stark reminder that we haven't escaped Undertale yet, and the nature of the Dark Fountains explored here more overtly comment on the artificiality of this universe and its roots. Yet, Chapter 2 just decides to revel in that escapism for a little while, wearing its videogame influences on its sleeve as it gives us the calm rollercoaster of a ride before the storm. Deltarune is without an ending already a much tighter, stronger and more cohesive experience than Undertale ever was, and I'm enjoying immensely the way Toby Fox and his team are setting up the pieces on the board to throw them to the floor further along the way.

From the moment those first notes play in Cyber City and all the way up to that ridiculous genre bending final boss, I was having the most fun with a videogame I have had in a very long time, and I am left once again eagerly and desperately waiting for more. Whether the completed Deltarune experience we perceive in our minds turns out to be a reality or not, I am content with it just being this full of life and joy.

Surface familiarity failing to capture the lightning in the bottle that was NMH1. Words I never expected to utter about a NMH game once again helmed by Suda, but this is the unfortunate reality. Retreaded old familiar ground and innumerous hollow callbacks fail to disguise the lack of purpose and intention in NMH3, giving us instead a sequel closer in tone to NMH2 than NMH1.

Grasshopper fails to effectively manage its visibly low budget, hurting the expressiveness and animation found in previous entries, hastily sidelining the promise of TSA’s cast, and glaringly omitting the presence of traditional pre-boss stages. This last point in particular being the biggest misstep of NMH3, especially when taking into consideration NMH1’s understanding of how illusive the videogame structure is, and how brilliantly it destroys it. Without it, NMH3 has no foundation on which to stand itself on and not even its admittedly entertaining combat can make the uncontextualized arenas feel like anything other than a very impressive tech demo.

Having sat with it for a while now, my conflicting thoughts have a very hard time reconciling with NMH3 and the reasons for its existence. At first glance, NMH3 seems intent on setting aside much of the unorthodox and incisive writing that characterizes NMH1 and TSA in favor of creating a no frills over the top action game built on its own terms and without the constraints and expectations of normal videogame production, that funnels its creativity and passion into much of the aesthetic and presentation that goes above and beyond anything ever seen in a videogame. Watching Travis and Bishop rave on about Takashi Miike, as any two ordinary college roommates would on any given Friday night about their favorite movie, it almost become easy to forgive NMH3’s more immediate failures and appreciate the personality and labor of love behind the development of such a disjointed mess of a game.

On the other hand, while I don’t entirely subscribe to the cynical interpretations of NMH3’s MCU framing of the plot and the social media and streaming services allusions, there is an underlying sense that permeates much of the experience of disinterest, bitterness and alienation in bringing Travis into a world that has long abandoned him. NMH3 is drenched in nostalgic infatuation with the old and the past in a way the previous entries weren’t, almost defiantly so, while also allowing itself to conform to this new reality of media consumption in a shrugging and indifferent manner. This contradiction is best exemplified with Travis trying to reconnect with an old retro game of his childhood, remastered for the modern age, in search of answers that are ultimately never given to him and soon reject his now unfamiliar presence. Travis’ senseless bloodlust is ultimately the same as it ever was, just upgraded and updated accordingly.

In a way, NMH3 represents a sort of alternate finale to the Kill the Past saga, frequently referencing characters and concepts from previous Suda works only to immediately discard them at the expense of the players in the know and closing the door with a plethora of unanswered questions, trapping Travis forever inside No More Heroes, now destined to relive in perpetuity the same bloody uncathartic plot, once a tragedy, now a farse, foolishly hanging on to a static past. It’s hard not to think of MGS4 when playing NMH3, but while it’s understandable why Kojima injected it with so much hostility and resentment towards the player, I fail to decipher why Suda would follow up on TSA’s optimistic catharsis with such a retread for Travis and the series in general. In contrast to MGS4’s tying of all the needless knots, NMH3 instead destroys the series by way of implosion, eating itself from inside out and leaving the remains for whoever is next.

And yet, in its finest hour, I’m left amazed and grinning at how NMH3 manages to bring all its messiness together at the end beautifully in a final showdown that simultaneously acts as a defying FU indictment against the industry that brought it into existence and as a sincere gratitude to the fans who allowed it to happen, one of the most uplifting punk statements worthy of the Grasshopper brand. Regardless of my thoughts here, I ultimately do not think Suda had the intention of pervading NMH3 with such negative emotions, and I do believe he genuinely wanted to make NMH3. The final product however leaves much to be desired, and its meta textual narrative does not make up for the lack of engagement I felt during the story and combat of NMH3. It’s a baffling and contradictory epilogue to TSA, and a weird janky victory lap for the series that has an endearing quaintness to it that makes it hard to hate on.

One thing I can say for certain tho, and that is this is the hardest in the mf paint a NMH soundtrack has ever gone, and you gonna be looking real silly arguing otherwise in the NMH3 discourse to come.

This shouldnt work at all, but somehow mixing the two best falling block puzzle games of all time makes for a very compelling thought experiment on the numerous ways humans can fuck everything up in a matter of seconds, be it geometrically or colorfully so.

Wouldnt say this sequel warrants its existence, as the additions to the first game feel far too little or rarely ever game changing, and the adventure mode severely lacks in the charm from previous entries that manages to contextualize the absurdity of the premise of competitive falling blocks with the Puyo Puyo cast banter.

Still, it's Puyo Puyo + Tetris, and the amount of ways the game finds to make you feel like a complete idiot as the screen fills up with your past mistakes while you helplessly and uselessly shift the piece that will bring forth your demise is still a fun existential interactive nightmare.

Also, please bring back the old Puyo Puyo aesthetic, i'm so tired of the Fever one.

While it is pretty obnoxious how the videogame zeitgeist has overblown Kojima's input on Boktai's development, in the same manner people credit him for the ZOE series, it is undeniable how much of his DNA flows through this game. Besides the obvious rudimentary Metal Gear stealth mechanics that have you dodging the enemy's limited field of vision cone and knocking on walls to attract zombie minded enemies, alongside some recognizable sound effects from that franchise, the solar sensor that defines the Boktai series is undoubtedly Kojima to a tee.

Now, full disclosure: no, I did not play this on a Gameboy Advance with an official cartridge that has the solar sensor. However, being the committed Gamer that I am, I played a hacked version that lets me adjust the solar power at will on a portable device, only changing it according to the weather and time of day. Yes, I am that guy. While it might seem gimmicky at first glance, the solar sensor imbues Boktai with the same proficiency to blur the line between player and game that the Psycho Mantis and back of the box radio frequency 4th wall breaks had in MGS1, and the dependency on real life circumstances to be able to charge your weapon works wonderfully with the stealth angle of Boktai, forcing you to shift play styles at the sun's will.

Kojima stated once that he regrets not having been more active in Boktai's production, as the team proved to lack "power and wisdom", which unfortunately is a sentiment I agree with. The opportunities where Boktai utilizes the solar sensor to provide unique challenges and puzzles that are the most engaging and entertaining parts of the game are few and far between, and while the core gameplay is fun enough, it proves to be a bit stale and repetitive towards the end as you start to realize how much more punishing the solar dependency could and should have been.

These days, wanting more Kojima in your game might make you do a double take, but if that would imply the cartridges having breathalyzers so kids could kill vampires with their garlic breath, as he intented, then sign me up. Having to deliberately wake up at 5 am to catch the sunrise in order to dispel a curse in the game might not sound like something you would want to subject your player in a standard fare videogame, but it is something worth writing about. And yeah, that did happen. And I wanted more of that.

Also, I have to mention the badass post boss segment of each dungeon where you are forced to drag their coffin all the way back to beginning of the stage in order to exterminate it, in some odd Death Strandish precursor way. It's really fucking cool.

I'll be honest in admitting that the mental damage I endured over the years from purposefuly subjecting myself to the clutches of the internet had made me apprehensive and cynical of Disco Elysium's preceeding reputation, but having gone through its rollercoaster of drugs, alcohol and communism, I am truly glad to be able to add this one to the list of all time great CRPGs that continue to be undisputed as the smartest videogame experiences you can have.

Having the confidence that even Planescape: Torment lacked, Disco Elysium ditches the combat completely and takes the biggest strength of the genre to immerse the player in his own perceived virtuousity and egotistic idealization, dice rolling from a caricature of extreme ideology to the next, only to have such deified facade shattered and mocked as the cracks start to reveal what is behind the constructed mask. Dystopic and endlessly ravaged, Revachol opens up its angry chasm to reveal an unflincing sad mirror in its politically charged inhabitants that reflects back to us a vast ocean filled with boats blindly passing by each other in the mist blasting Sad FM.

Immensely thought provocking, always hilarious, and with some of the best interconnected writing I have seen in the genre, Disco Elysium has definitely cemented itself as a modern age classic that will make even the biggest game bro go "yes, please, keep politics in my game!". An unabashedly leftist game that manages to avoid falling into the usual misgivings of being obnoxious, obvious and self centered as its contemporaries often do, and that beautifully exposes our innate ability to project our deepest grudges and hangups into unreachable dreams and expectations that further disconnect us from the acceptance and understanding we so demand from others. In the end, everything is escapism. But we can never truly escape, can we? Whatever I end up saying about Disco Elysium says more about my view of the world than the game itself, but I think that's what makes it such a great piece of art.

You did look fucking cool smoking that cigarette, Kim. And you knew it.