Part of that late stage 16-bit era where the distinction between Mega Drive and SNES games was getting harder to spot, Monster World IV's cutesy presentation and vibrant aesthetic is just what it needs to show off to sucker me in and make me dismiss most of its more glaring flaws. While the luring sprite work of the game and its creative dynamic between the main character and her pet give off a certain air of prestige and polish over the whole experience, there's always a whiff of unrealized potential and lack of ambition permeating in the background.

Consisting of 4 dungeons that represent the bulk of your playtime, with one small town inbetween, there's hardly a moment to take a breather and pace out progress before being thrown into the next set of challenges that can feel exhausting to tackle all at once, and while the platforming and puzzle solving done with the pet gimmick unique to this entry is engaging and fun enough, with a very nice payoff at the end, it feels like it could have have been taken to the next level and done more with.

Monster World IV has no qualms about its purpose and intent as a pleasant non risk taker platformer, straight up having its main character's desire for adventure be answered in the most non chalant and shrugging way possible and setting you off to save the world I guess, and maybe that's really all it needed to be. But considering how eclectic and genre defying some of its predecessors in the series are, its a shame Monster World IV didn't go the extra mile to cap off the franchise as its peak. Still, no reason why this game had to be stuck in Japan when it could have easily been a lot of people's fav childhood game.

The full commitment to a world map with the scale and scope of a WoW like MMO is what makes Xenoblade Chronicles stand out from its peers at the time of its release on the rinky dink Wii, still being impressive after all these years just how vast and expansive its environments are, as you walk around on top of two colossal titans frozen in combat, a wholly inspired setting for a fantasy tale. More so than FFXII, the ability to peruse the whole landscape ahead of you and all of its critters walking around, without being sucked into a pocket dimension for a turn based combat each time you take two steps, reinforces the thought that this is how every modern JRPG should strive to be.

It is unfortunate then that XC goes and spends a little too much time with its hand on the MMO cookie jar. As you inevitably start engaging with its side content, and you find yourself killing and collecting a list of seemingly irrelevant monsters and items, it's quickly understood that XC is not about to make an effort to make you care for these menial and meaningless tasks or the polygon people who ask you to do so. Being self aware of such shortcomings, XC even goes as far as completing most of your quests the moment you finish your grocery list, not even requiring you to deliver the goods to the NPCs who asked for them in the first place. Cause walking back would be too much of a hassle, no?

XC wants to be your mistress, making an effort to give you a pleasant, annoyance and stress free adventure without any of the hassle that plagues older entries in the genre. The consequence is that when you find yourself skipping every line of dialogue from NPCs because you can easily access their requests on a menu and have the map spell out the fetch quest's location, being invested in the world of XC and the plight of its people no longer becomes something the player is willing to put effort into. Everything is commodified in XC for the player's pleasure, from the enemies identified with their power level and items floating around in the world as blue orbs, to the ability to change time and fast travel at will or the personal moments between characters being just tokens on the map to tick off.

These problems are then exacerbated by a combat system that quickly loses it's lustre, as you realize you can brute force your way through the entire game by spamming every attack and waiting for their cooldown, turning every RPG menu system a nuisance to interact with, and a story so tropey and cliche, that if you have been playing games as long as I have, you have definitely seen numerous times before (and done better). I can definitely see how XC would inspire and impress a younger crowd if it was their first experience with the genre. But standing here now as a bitter old Gamer™, and rolling my eyes as a love triangle is solved by having the third wheel sacrificing himself, or the main character spewing out free will diatribes for the 100th time in the whole game, it's very hard to come out of Xenoblade Chronicles not feeling like I played something incredibly outdated. A game that ticks off all the checkboxes, to it's own detriment.

As time marches on forward, the selection of NES games that are truly worth your time in the present age progressively starts to dwindle, with the videogame canon inevitably continuing its expansion and the list of must play classics becoming impossible to keep up with. Castlevania has been one of such NES games that has maintained its prestige and must play status throughout its entire existence, still being a joy to experience and feeling surprisingly modern despite its old age.

Using the Universal Monsters filmography as its window dressing, Castlevania juxtaposes the horror aesthetic with a vibrant color palette and catchy tunes to an oddly successful effect, and in contrast to many of the protagonists of the era, instead of controlling a nimble high jumping and sprinting character that barrels through the level regardless of how many hits he takes from incoming enemies, Castlevania puts you in charge of SImon, a strutting, stiff, clunky, and inept athlete of a hero that has you commiting to an established jump arc and getting a very "generous" knockback each time an enemy attack registers on you.

This stripping of maneuverability tied with Simon's delayed and one directional default attack is the source of Castlevania's brilliant tension between the player and the game, demanding you to take not only the enemy's movement and attack patterns into account but also yours, as to not quickly fall into a situation of inevitable disaster and get stunlocked into a corner or fall into a death pit, and to make the most out of the power-up items at your disposal to take the upper hand.

Despite some few and far between "NES hard" moments, that can easily be alleviated with some cheeseing tactics, Castlevania rarely feels dated or unfair, with the onus mostly always being on the player and his own faults and flaws, and with its unique presentation and standout game design, its no wonder it cemented itself very quickly in the videogame pantheon, providing the blueprint for better things to come, inside and outside of the franchise.

4 years after the introduction of the franchise's unique time freeze premise, Mind Control Delete strives to deliver on the fanbase's general request for more Superhot content, to the point of making that request its ultimate statement. Considering the lack of levels presented in Superhot and the redundancy of its challenge mode, it's fitting that MCD decides to iterate on the endless mode of that game instead.

Turning Superhot into a roguelike, MCD shrugs off right from the start any complaints about the story campaign being too short. Now with an onslaught of randomly selected levels to complete and an infinite number of enemies to finish off before watching the credits roll, we have more than enough to chew on without feeling our investment wasn't compensated enough.

Playing into the genre's strengths, MCD answers the fans pleas for more of everything, providing enough enemy variety and a new selection of power-ups that immensely expand the versatility of the player's arsenal and the opportunity for unique and challenging engagement with his foes. Being able to do stuff like summon back your thrown sword, achieve invulnerability while engaging in melee combat, or ricocheting bullets from one headshot into another enemy, adds a new layer of creativity and expression that wasn't present in the original game.

Unfortunately, this impressive set of new features doesn't seem to be enough to takes us all the way through the end of the game. Like its predecessor, MCD carries itself with the same cynical meta tone, this time calling out the player's penchant for demanding more for their buck. And not unlike Superhot, MCD doesn't really do much with that premise besides calling attention to it. Its a game that is self aware about its shortcomings and diminishing returns, and as you start to notice how redundant the game gets towards the end, with a disappointing number of new weapons, useful power ups to play with, or interesting enemies and levels to deal with, you might feel inclined to oblige to the game's incenssant and obnoxious condescension and shut off the game for good.

Whatever apprehensions or concerns you might have had about the resurrection of one of the most recognizable franchises of the 90's Sega canon, 26 years after the last entry in the series, those quickly dissipate the moment you take hold of Alex's strut through the familiar goon infested alleyways of Streets of Rage 4, as you pummel thugs with a led pipe and knee thrust mohawk junkies to death to the sound of Yuzo Koshiro's synth dance music. I'm emboldened enough to say that this project revitalized the series with the same assurance and resolution as DMC5 did to its dead in the water legacy a year earlier, just by playing to the strengths of its predecessors and nothing more.

While it would have been perfectly acceptable if it simply regurgitated another Streets of Rage 2 that fans would just eat up and then toss aside as a cute nostalgia throwback for a day, Streets of Rage 4 instead takes the established formula and just adds on top of it with new mechanics that reinvent this pre historic and usually devoid of complexity genre. Taking a note from our friend Dante, you are now able to juggle enemies and all pretenses of realism are thrown out the 4th wall as you bounce them off the edges of the screen, allowing the player to combo pools of mooks in a single sequence of uppercuts and sommersaults with that oh so satisfying half second freeze frame that allows you to feel every impact of their meat sack bodies being flung all around the pavement.

Characters are now much more distinct between each other than they ever were in previous entries, incentivizing different approaches and strategies on how to maximize combo potential, and added to all that a bunch of other smaller tweeks and improvements, like being able to throw weapons and catch it mid bounce off of enemies and restoring lost health from a draining special move in a Bloodborne rally inspired mechanic that adds a layer of risk and reward, and you have provided the player enough depth and expression so he not only feels commited to finishing the game, but finishing it with style.

I wouldn't call the new comicbook artstyle a homerun, as it fails to capture the grimy and gritty punk vibe juxtaposed with the colorful beatiful pixel art that characterizes the series, but it more than does the job done by adding its own flair and a touch of added personality to its classic ensemble of heroes and foes, with the new opponents being a welcomed addition to the canon. And of course, we cannot discuss Streets of Rage without discussing the singular essence that ties it all together: the music.

The music is....unfortunately a mixed bag. While not being bad per se, and much of it is gonna depend on each player's tastes, a lot of the soundtrack does not reach the highs of the magnificent soundtrack of the first two games, oddly having some tracks paying more homage to 3's much maligned experimental techno tunes instead. But when it gets going, oh boy does it get Streets of Rage-y as fuck. When everything just clicks into place and you find yourself taking that classic elevator up to the top of the starry night cityscape as the music crescends into pure megadrive magic and you fend off every single lunging fist and jump thrown at you, a single blast processed tear might just manifest in your inner 16 bit child.

Suffice to say that there might not be much here for those without this formative arcade experience. If you never played many beat em ups in your life time, you probably will not find the dopamine release you expected coming here. But for those who want a taste of those old glory days, this might be just the right detour down unapolagetic videogame violence memory lane.

And MAN, is Blaze hotter than ever in this one.

As you can clearly tell just from looking at it, Eternal Castle's most appealing asset is its awestrucking MS-DOS inspired visual style that manages to capture what might have been the feeling of witnessing a fleeting burst of bright cyan and pink colors on the screen for the first time from a seemingly standard floppy disk in your parents newly bought home computer. Limitation and restrictiveness always brings about the best of artists, and it's impressive how much detail and personality the devs were able to squeeze out of its monochromatic and pixelized commitment.

Besides this clear visual inspiration, Eternal Castle is obviously paying homage to the old cinematic platforming genre established by Prince of Persia, and further iterated on by more artistically pursuing games like Another World and Flashback. Eternal Castle doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, nor does it seem to want to do that, utilizing instead the pre established formula of realistic running and jumping to focus on short moments of tension and action that define those games, while stripping away the more commonly maligned criticisms inherent to the genre like trial and error deaths, frustrating controls and obtuse puzzle solving.

Clocking at around 3 hours, Eternal Castle wastes no time getting into the action right after an exposition wall of text dump and a short and thrilling intro cutscene, allowing the gameplay to take the reins of the storytelling from that point on. The narrative, nature and motivations of the characters you encounter and the world you walk through is deliberately made obtuse and secretive, opting to let the imaginative dystopic backgrounds and action platforming setpieces do the talking. Taking note from Another World, Eternal Castle understands that the pure interactive act of wanting to surpass a challenge to see what's on the next screen is enough to keep the player invested, framing the core gameplay with its beautiful presentation and disguising what might be a very simple story with enough mystery and breadcrumbs to engage you on figuring it out for yourself, not unlike Hyper Light Drifter. And that's totally my jam.

The gimmicky marketing campaign that pretends this is a remaster of a forgotten 1987 game unfortunately amounts to little or nothing in the actual game itself, a trick reminiscent of Superhot. It's a clever way of signaling the nostalgia sector in your brain, even for those who never actually experienced said influences, that ends up being a disservice to the actual game, considering how much originality and identity it ends up having. Definitely an underrated one you should waste a couple hours on.

Titanfall 2's singleplayer campaign had no right being as fun as it is. I was supposed to slog my way through this and whine about the stagnant and sleep inducing state of blockbuster First Person Shooters, and not have to come here and tell you to play Titanfall 2 cause it's one of the handful of recent ones that is actually worth a damn.

Instead of having you excruciatingly peeking and ducking in and out of cover as your screen is filled with blood each time you get hit with a single bullet, Titanfall 2 forces you to get close and personal with enemies while you dash and jump around the walls like an annoying Looney Toon and waste away rows of enemies with a very generous slide that seems to go on until the cool points run off, complemented by the ability to turn invisible for a short period of time which incentivizes you to suicide yourself into the line of fire and keep the pace going.

Getting inside the titan would have felt like cutting the legs off the player, but Titanfall 2 prevents that from ever happening by contrasting the fragility of the pilot with the absurd military power the titan displays everytime you get inside it and just annihilate everything on sight, feeling which is further exponentiated by a surprisingly effective bond between the player and the talking giant anime robot.

Short and sweet and only sparing 6 hours, Titanfall 2 presents a core idea each mission only to discard it for something new the next one, like the one mission everyone already knows about where you have to shift between past and present every 5 seconds to sequence your way through, or the factory one where you have to parkour through a vast assembly line of moving platforms, never letting things get dull and uninteresting.

It's unfortunate then that Titanfall 2 is dragged down by its "westernisms" and doesn't achieve peak uncompromised unashamed dopamine release. The needless constant reloading greatly contrasts with the main appeal of the game, deflating every single offensive lunge every time you have to stop and wait for the gun to go back to game mode, and the weapons are all incredibly boring and safe, giving you around 4 assault rifles that I honestly couldn't tell you the difference between them right now. The story is a bunch of serious space marine nonsense, saved only by the banter between the pilot and the titan, and would have enormously benefited from a Platinum style plot.

Nonetheless, Titanfall 2 is awesome, and as usual the videogame zeitgeist disagrees with me cause this game sold like shit and you will play Call of Duty for the rest of your life because of it :^)

Oh, and there's also online multiplayer, i'm sure it's good or w/e.

It's difficult to pinpoint what Minecraft does so differently that other games, before or after its inception, can't seem to be able to remotely capture. Regardless of how many years have passed since its Alpha days, booting the game up and spending those first couple of hours building dirt houses and digging ridiculously autistic tunnel systems still represent some of the most magical and captivating moments I have experienced in a videogame. A maverick trail-blazer of game design, Minecraft disregards any previous notions of what makes or breaks a game, and instead plops you into an indifferent and artifical world without any seemingly narrative context and invites the player to fill it with life and personality by leaving his permanent mark on it, starting right off the bat by having you punch wood out of trees and that totally making sense.

Either a stroke of genius or just pure luck, the combination of cutesy and colorful lego like aesthetic with the occasional lonely and scary desolation nature gives Minecraft a surprisingly introspective atmosphere, making grand statements about human labor and wilderness conquest out of simple moments like finally finishing that perfect wooden balcony as you watch the square sun rising and "Wet Hands" starts to play. The tangible and real threat of Minecraft's permanent item loss and unwillingness to throw the player a bone or hold his hand, turns the mere idea of exploring the outskirts of your comfy man hole into a cautious adventure that has you feeling a sense of joy as you catch on your way back the familiarity of your ever evolving house on the horizon, and turns a simple detour that leaves you lost in the woods at night into a dreadful nightmare that has you frantically searching for a light source inbetween the trees as you dodge a horde of zombies and skellies.

While there is some truth to the criticism that "there's nothing to do" in Minecraft, which can be attributed to its low skill ceiling and diminishing returns as you run out of goals and ideas, the devs have been intelligent enough to not mess with the core appeal of the game with its inumerous updates over the years, and that's letting the player find his own fun, be that building a giant castle at the top of a mountain, building a minecart track that crosses a lava lake in the Nether, conquering The End and beating the Ender Dragon, or simply exploding enough TNT at once to crash the game.

I still can't decipher Minecraft after all these years. All I know is that I keep coming back, be it with a group of friends, or by myself. I still find its quiet and randomized world to be beautfiul and imaginative. I still love how the animals and enemies look and sound. I still can't get over how perfect and effective its oddly sad soundtrack is. I still get a stupid grin on my face when I manage to make the simplest of redstone mechanisms work. I still shit my pants every time I fall into a sense of safety around my home base and suddenly hear that dreaded hiss behind me as I watch my work explode. I dunno, it's a very good game.

Dauntless and insurmountable feat would it be to fill in Earthbound's ridiculously sized shoes, but nonetheless not only does Mother 3 achieve such task, it charts its own course through one of the most unique and thoughful experiences the medium has ever seen.

In contrast to Earthbound's freeform and loose storytelling, Mother 3 opts instead for a much more laser focused narrative that has its characters witnessing the corruption of their idyllic reality, which destabilizes their community and family bonds in the process. This change of narrative structure translates to a reduction in off the beaten path detours and non sequiturs that decorate much of the diverse and out there adventure found in Earthbound, but Mother 3 more than makes up for it by utilizing the pre-established and beloved tone of the series to subvert it and twist it just enough to frame a much more personal and intimate experience, while still maintaining the foundation that defines the franchise.

Without sacrificing any of the strengths and characteristics that make videogames unique in the storytelling artform, Mother 3 manages to create a surprisingly emotional and meaningful story that contemplates the disruptive nature of time and progress on stagnated unrealistic ideals, the folly of a lack of introspection and hindsight in day to day life relationships, or the need for growth and maturity during the moments life beats you down , without ever having to condescend to the player or step outside its fun, joyful and charismatic universe. It uses the power of nostalgia and childhood, inside and outside the game, to construct a strong connection between the player and the screen, while also acknowledging the danger of said sentiment and even weaponizing it against you, cementing its antagonist as one of the greatest villains in fiction in the process.

As you watch your home town transform during the course of the game just by the act of walking by it and speaking to its neighbours, Mother 3's seemingly surface level anti-capitalism theme opens up to reveal a much more empathetic and understanding examination of the mundane and human misgivings and mistakes we all end up falling into once in a while, never fully condemning the characters that inhabit its world, unlike much more blatant and obvious recent titles aspiring to some artistic merit.

While there's a certain sadness in the inevitability of Itoi never again making a videogame, it is fitting that he would leave us on such a high note. Coming back to this series would in some way detract from the overall message these games have always strived to impart on the player, and trying to one up Mother 3 would be a massive mistake. As it stands, Mother 3 has the qualities of a great novel. You can pick apart its more obvious themes and messages and always find something else beneath it more interesting. I could go on about how engaging the rhythm combat is in contrast to other JRPGs. I could ramble on about the numerous NPCs that betray their 2D aesthetic with incredible one liners that destroy any pretentious triple A story driven shlock. I could fawn over the incredible execution of the final boss and how the game manages to poignantly break the 4th wall once again like its predecessor did.

But why bother? Discussing these aspects would be reducing the art, Mother 3 is meant to be played. Oh, wait. You can't play it. Add it to the ever increasing bucket of baffling and nonsensical Nintendo decisions.

The biggest stain on the integrity of videogame journalism and the the most beloved unplayed gem in every single gamer's backlog. Being what's probably the only direct translation of the beat 'em up genre into the 3D realm worth playing and talking about, God Hand is one of the most uncompromised and unique entries in the combo oriented pantheon of action games. Incredible that I'm saying this about the game that shutdown any chances of Mikami ever being able to fully go off ever again.

The stiff and constricted movement controls in God Hand force the player to be aware of every surrounding enemy and pick each fight wisely, while still allowing direct confrontation and proximity through a dynamic and anime as fuck dodge system that has you bobbing and weaving between flurry of punches before delivering an uppercut. Expanding on Resident Evil 4's dynamic difficulty, God Hand increases it's challenge the better you get at it, which while being a make or break for some folks out there, makes it stand out from the standard difficulty options from other games and provides immediate feedback to the player on how better he is getting at the game.

God Hand ditches out combo memorization in favor of an easy to understand set of options that reveal their complexity through their success on parrying, guard breaking, stunning or tripping the enemy, which varies depending on who you dealing with it at that moment, and instead let's players express themselves by allowing them to choose their own sequence of combos to perform from a vast list of Bruce Lee like moves that, if set up properly, will have your enemies all flying into a concrete wall at mach speed from one single twirling kick.

Framing all of this insane action is one of the most out there and bizarre universes ever seen. God Hand wears it's 80s/90s action anime influences on it's sleeve, but even if you have gotten familiar with Jojo's Bizarre Adventure these past years, you will still have a hard time making sense of the design and personalities of some of the enemies and bosses in here. God Hand takes the aesthetic of 2D beat 'em ups and just amps it up to 11, clearly having no interest or care for consistent and well thought out world building and presentation, and going for a humorous and visionless dumb as fuck story.

Which is awesome, because what other game has you fighting a wrestling Gorilla that chases bananas mid combat, sparring against a fat Elvis mexican impersonator, or spanking a succubus that turns you into a dog, all in the span of a few hours?

It's fitting that FPSs would be saved from the triple A machine that bogged down the genre for more than a decade by the same type of people who invented and cemented it, the indie scene. There's been in recent years a massive ressurgence of FPS games that pay homage to the 90s fast paced and movement focused titles like Doom and Quake, showing once more to people how fun the genre can actually be besides the standard fare of sluggish militaristic and realism focused FPSs. At the top of this renaissance of "boomer shooters", stands Dusk.

Dusk impresses immediately with it's pixelated inspired visual look and how much commitment it puts into recreating the experience of 90s computer gaming. The amount of speed you are given, after years of being conditioned to expecting regular human speed in the genre, feels like having the training wheels removed from a bike, letting you strafe at break neck speed and giving you a slide move that increases your maneuverability even further.

Having the benefit of hindsight, Dusk take into account the number of years that videogames have had since then to improve the genre in every conceivable way. Every single mission creates unique situations and challenges to be overcomed in some of the best level design ever produced in the genre, while also providing the player levels open enough to be tackled your own way and with numerous nooks and crannies to find out. All weapons have their own unique use and advantage, some even adding movement options to the player, like rocket jumping or mid air control, or defensive options, like sending projectiles back at the enemy with a melee weapon, and you are even allowed to dual wield pistols and shotguns for maximum cool points. It is filled with nudges and winks at FPS classics, while still being it's own beast, and in some sort of playful joke, it gives the player a dedicated "reload" button that just twirls your weapon, as if obliging the impulses of the player to reload every 5 secs.

Beyond it's incredibly fun and engaging gameplay, Dusk boasts a badass horror aesthetic that has you starting in a rural farm ran by a bunch of KKK like cultists, entering a forbidden industrial city governed by crazed military armies and ending in a lovecraftian hellish city filled with demons. It manages to captivate the player and keep him on his toes as new threats are slowly presented and escalated, creating some genuinely scary and tense moments. The pacing, setup and payoff elevates what would otherwise be a simple and cliche story, and makes Dusk distinguish itself from the classic games it "rips off" from. The sound design and OST is fantastic and blood pumping, the enemies are all unique and varied, and the game is beautiful to look at in all it's retro pixelized glory.

First Person Shooters are gonna be ok, you guys. We are all gonna make it.

Playing Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus recently taught me an important lesson on the value of historical context in videogames. Exoddus was the first Oddworld game I played as a kid, and it fascinated me like no other videogame at the time. The creepy and oppressive industrial setting, the incredible sound design, the beautiful detailed pre rendered backgrounds, and the tense and frightning enemy encounters provided a unique immersive experience that wasn't available on the regular cheeerful and colorful games I was drawn to as a kid.

Eventually I did get around to trying out the first entry in the franchise, Abe's Oddysse, and quickly dropped it due to its lesser user friendly QoL features, like the lack of a quicksave or not being able to control more than one Mudokon at once. For years Exoddus was the game I kept in my mind as the superior game of the two, and it wasn't until very recently when I played both games again from beginning to end when that perception changed.

While Exoddus is the more "enjoyable" of the two, letting you quickave at will and polishing a bunch of mechanics that made Oddysee more frustrating, it doesn't manage to capture the tone, pacing, and atmosphere of the first game as best as it could. While Exoddus is more than eager to introduce a wide variety of new challenges, obstacles, enemies and puzzles, it isn't able to build on the strengths of Oddysee that made it a landmark of cinematic platformers, deciding instead to center its focus on providing a selection of new levels and ideas for the gameplay loop established previously.

Which isn't to say that Exoddus is a bad game. It's not. But the fact that it's described by it's team itself as a "bonus game", does indicate the nature of it's development. Exoddus is very much a "level pack" disguised as a sequel, moving the player from room to room in order to solve the next platforming puzzle, without the level of detail and thought that was put into the first game's presentation and storytelling. There's a vast number of repeated assets and entities that were simply plucked out from the first game in order to expedise the development process. And that's fine.

Exoddus is incredibly fun, pushing the player into solving increasingly more challenging problems that are built on top of simple to understand concepts and mechanics, making one feel very smart for overcoming said challenges. It has a firmer grasp on game design and it is a much more confident puzzle experience than Oddysee. Exoddus is also a much more humorous and cartoony sequel, going so far as to letting you control your own explosive farts, and lending the sequel a sense of levity that distinguishes it from the predecessor's more somber tone.

It's just that Exoddus came after Oddysee. And Oddysee managed to be wholly unique on it's first try, while Exoddus never had the chance to. The things I found to be so captivating and inspiring in Exoddus as a young kid, I now realize exist in Oddysee in a much more cohesive and impactful experience. Cool game tho.

It's hard to put into words what hearing "The Place I'll Return To Someday" as I booted Final Fantasy IX almost 20 years after I first played it made me feel. Whenever people bring up IX on the FF discourse, it's inevitable that it will be referenced as the "return to the roots" of the franchise, a celebration and throwback to the old FF style of the NES and SNES day. That would be however selling IX short, as it stands as a wholy unique and standout in the series, filled with a very specific magic and craft not found in the rest of the entries.

Coming at the tail end of the Playstation's life cycle, IX presents itself as the most confident and polished 32 bit FF without the awkwardness of VII's first steps into the 3D age or VIII's identity crisis. Framed as a Shakespearean tale, IX boasts the most lavished and outstanding pre-rendered backgrounds the system can offer, a fantastical believable world to explore drenched in personality, and arguably one of the best soundtracks in the whole franchise, all combining to create an impressive and engaging emotional roller-coaster.

Of course, what elevates IX even further is without a doubt its cast of characters. Moving away from the gloomy and teenager previous two entries, IX presents a group of charismatic misfits straight out of a drama play that have such wonderful interplay and banter between each other. From Zidane's playful flirtishious and carefree nature, to Steiner's obnoxious gallantry and prissiness, to Vivi's bashful inquisite and cowardly personality, it's incredibly easy to fall in love with the cast and care for each of them as the plot gets going.

It's understandable that some might look at IX as the "childish" entry in the PS1 trilogy, since it's presentation and script give a great vibe of fairytale adventuring, but it's within those expectations and constraints that IX shines the most. As the story develops, our protagonists find themselves at numerous crossroads and conflits that speak to their struggles and desires, and the game presents surprisingly poignant and mature subject matters, like confronting one's own mortality, that turn IX into an incredible personal and profound experience.

As our heroes come apart at the end of the first act when things start going south and they reunite back at the start of the third act, it becomes evident to see that IX has a firm grasp on the power of storytelling and uses it to its fullest advantage. Zidane and Garnet's natural relationship development propels the narrative forward beautifully, and the members that progressively get added to your team only end up enriching it, and by the end when IX uses the power of its medium to deliver the "Your're Not Alone" setpiece to answer the age old question of why you should strive to be good, you will know you will carry these characters with you beyond the game.

IX doesnt have the best combat nor the best graphics in the series. It doesnt have the history and influence titles like VI or VII have. The third act isnt as tightly constructed as the previous two, and Amarant gets into the team a little to late for the player to care for him. It's not perfect. But it doesnt have to be. IX is the quintessencial example of "bigger than the sum of its parts", and you will be hard pressed to not feel a tingle of joy mixed with sadness as those credits roll. It was nice to revist Final Fantasy IX, the game that first showed me that there was more to videogames than just levels to be completed. Goodbye, the place I'll return to someday.

Galaxy diferenciates itself from the previous more open world-ish and sandbox-y entries in the series by being much more focused on tight and polished level design and linear platforming. While 64 and Sunshine stages, for the most part, were built as playgrounds with different and diverse obstacles, objectives and the occasional platforming challenge to approach as you saw fit, Galaxy instead takes the more linear and abstracted moments of those games, like Tick Tock Clock in 64 or the no F.L.U.U.D. stages in Sunshine and creates a whole game around pushing the player forward through meticulous and straightforward platforming, not unlike the 2D entries.

This change in design philosophy that removes a certain level of choice and expression from the player, and the initial realization that Mario's moveset is drastically taken down a notch from the previous two games might cause disappointment at first, but the platforming layout and creativty at display in Galaxy more than makes up for those shortcomings. The pace of every single stage is perfectly constructed, moving the player from one gimmick to the next one, never wearing out their welcome, and providing a set of challenges to overcome much more well crafted and tied into a cohesive thematic idea than what 64 or Sunshine ever had. Additionally, Galaxy makes good use of it's motion controls, giving a good sense of kinesthetics and never feeling out of the player's control.

What elevates however Galaxy to the upper echelons of the Mario canon is without a doubt its presentation. The space theme provides some of the most unique and mesmerizing stages in the franchise, having Mario twirling around small planetoids, being affected by gravity pulls, being launched into flight from a moon to another, and traversing expansive windy blue skies on a dandelion, all while beautiful orchestrated renditions are played in the background, providing the whole experience a great sentiment of videogame magic and wonder. Super Mario Galaxy is a classic, for sure.

After 80+ hours of Red Dead Redemption 2, a question pops up in one’s mind:
In the process of making a game that examines the fall of the American frontier and the decline of the Wild West, did the irony register at all with Rockstar that they were also making a game about the end of the triple A design structure that has plagued the medium ever since the birth of the 7th gen?

Regardless of what pre-established biases one might come into RDR2 about the value of graphical fidelity and closeness to real life and focus on cinematic design and film language in games, it’s impossible not to be impressed by Rockstar’s commitment to the simulation of realism. Your character will meticulously grab each item he loots and place it in his satchel, craft each new tonic or bullet one at a time with detailed animations, remove and place his weapons on his horse whenever you switch them up, shuffle dominoes and grab each piece one by one in every game, and skin every hunted animal with gruesome detail and carry them on his back to his horse every single time. NPCs all have their per-determined schedules that happen regardless of your presence or not, wild animals behave accordingly to their nature and even hunt other species, and every mundane action, be it taking a shower, mounting a camp, cleaning your guns, or brushing your horse, carry a level of detail and weight never before seen in a blockbuster game. It also boasts one of the most beautiful environments to walk around, filled with detail and big expansive nature landmarks, frequently creating moments of awe as you ride around the mountains and landscape.

This level of realism is further elevated in the gang’s camp, where you have a group of misfits you can deal with daily and who all have their respective quirks, goals and actions. Rarely will you hear the same line of dialogue from these characters in the course of 80 hours, and the impressive amount of scenes and conversations that occur not only between your character and them, but also between themselves, means that you will finish the game without experiencing half of the camp scenes that happen dynamically and without feeling like scripted events. When you find yourself around a campfire with your gang after a well succeeded mission, being able to join in the singing and festivities with them, suddenly all the effort in creating a realistic world comes together and for a few seconds the immersion is achieved and one feels like he is a part of a fully realized world and that these characters are tangible and real.

It’s unfortunate then that each time you get into a story mission, that effort is collapsed and you are thrown back into the videogame. What was once acceptable in RDR1 now feels incredibly dated and restrictive, with the usual design structure of having you ride to the mission on horseback and having a chat with an NPC while you follow a yellow line, following every single instruction the game tells you without any chance to deviate from it, waiting for something to inevitably go wrong, and then shooting a comical number of enemies that spawn out of nowhere like a NES game until everyone is dead. Rinse, and repeat. The level of realism found in the open world aspects of RDR2 only serves to call attention to how detached and out of touch the story missions are, leading to incredibly absurd scenes where the main character chastises a crew member for killing too many people during a story cutscene, when you the player yourself have been forced to kill 50 people during a house robbery just the previous mission.

What ends up happening is that most of the stuff you will be doing in the open world won’t matter at all because that would be stepping on the story’s toes. Regardless of how much money you have or how much you have contributed to the camp and NPCs, nothing will have effect on how the story will progress, with the exception of a very simplistic and outdated Honor system. This in turn inevitably leads to the open world map feeling like just a bunch of lines between check marks to fill, with the occasional scripted event to deviate you, but not much!, from the beaten path, and the rare exploration quest that happens when the game decides you should. Even the act of hunting an animal in the wilderness is affected by Rockstar’s grip on your hand, having a highlighted line on the ground that flashes and leads perfectly to your prey. The simulation aspects end up being surface level mechanics used to visually impress the player, not really influencing in any meaningful way either the gameplay or the story. It’s all shallow spectacle.

Which is a shame, because RDR2 has one of the most compelling videogame characters ever created. Arthur Morgan’s story takes a very contemplative and introspective direction in it’s final act, as he finds out he doesnt have much time left in this world, and it leads to some of the most interesting and emotional moments that Rockstar has ever created. Arthur’s effort in making something out of the few life he has left ends up influencing the player’s action outside of the story, and in one of the most poignant and humane moments in the whole game, you are forced to lay down your controller for a few secs, as Arthur requests a moment from you so he can catch his breath, something that makes the player care and empathize with a bunch of polygons much more than any cutting edge cutscene in the whole game could. Even the act of playing the last stretch of the game mimics Arthur’s new perspective, the missions feeling like a slog to go through, Dutch becoming increasingly frustrating, repetitive and annoying to be around, and the creativity being lesser and lesser, which would have been an interesting and insightful direction, had that actually been the intention by Rockstar. But RDR2 is adamant in separating the story from the gameplay, even bafflingly inserting black bars on top and bottom of the screen each time control is removed from the player, as if to signal that it’s now movie time and no time for interactivity. Regardless of all the issues with the story and gameplay, Arthur’s story is enough to carry the whole game on it’s back, and any player invested in his tale will have a hard time not getting emotional at the gut-wretching ending.

But then the game continues. For 5 more hours. And it’s at this point that the dam breaks and the flaws of the game become full center and aren’t easy to ignore anymore. The epilogue, which lacks any self awareness as it presents itself as a two parter, drags it’s way into a fan pandering ending, filled with needless shooting, redundant subplots, and characters that completely undermine the impact of the actual ending of the game. We can’t have a simple mission about just herding some sheeps, shopping with a friend, or fly a hot air ballon. No, every mission has to have a bloody battle with a body count that would make Stalin jealous, because Rockstar cannot bear the idea that some players might be bored if there isnt anything to shoot at. During an exchange between Morgan and an NPC the screen fades to black as they start talking about their lives, as if to spare the player from all those “boring details”, instead leading straight to the action once more. Rockstar can’t bear the thought of giving more opportunities for normal interactions between the player and the NPCs, while I sit here thinking about how one of my favorite missions was when I crossed the whole map to see a character I was fond of, only to get a kiss and that being the end of the mission.

RDR2 is a bloated game that can’t read a room on when’s it’s time to bow down and stop the show, deciding instead to outstay it’s welcome for an absurd amount of time, like an old frail man clawing at the last moments before his time to move on. And maybe it’s also time for Rockstar to move on, and let ideas of cinematic grandeur and realism in videogames finally lay rest once and for all.