Alien Soldier is the very definition of Sink Or Swim. It doesn't care who you are or where you came from, you're not going ANYWHERE until you blast this massive, writhing, cybernetic worm thing all the way to Hell. If Shadow of the Colossus can be called a “Boss Rush,” then Alien Soldier is a “Boss Stampede.” A “Boss Bullet Train.” A “Hyper Boss Fighter II Turbo: Fight for the Future.“ Why nobody’s been hollering loudly about Alien Soldier’s greatness for the last two decades is seriously beyond me, though it’s probably because they’re all too busy evangelizing Gunstar Heroes (or — checks notes — Minecraft). Then again, as of my writing this, Alien Soldier already has a higher average rating than Gunstar Heroes on Backloggd.com, though, let’s pretend I’m not preaching to the choir for just a moment.

Somewhere between Treasure’s previous run-and-gun ventures and Sin and Punishment, Alien Soldier achieves actual, No-Really relentlessness. Barreling through setpiece after setpiece, packed with wild battles so frantic that your real-world cool-headedness becomes an active game mechanic, its manufactured setting takes on an air of genuine ferocity. It’s so videogame-y that, in the heat of the moment, its game-y-ness folds back on itself and becomes believability. The drama that emerges from its extreme white-knuckle “VISUALSHOCK!!” action grinds the nonsense story on the title screen down to powder. Rather than getting kicked back to a level select, you progress until you win or die. And “winning” puts every twitch action reflex bone in your body to the test.

Remember how, right at the start, Gunstar Heroes made you choose whether or not you’d be able to move while shooting for the whole game? Alien Soldier laughs directly into the camera, says “THAT was dumb,” reels back, and hurls the car keys your way at mach five. It’s your responsibility to work out When to do What. Select any four of six possible weapons to cycle between. Press the jump button in mid-air to hover in place. You can walk on the ceiling. Parry bullets to turn them into health blobs. Reach max health, and your invulnerable dash becomes a Fiery Death Charge. Because this is a certifiably Great Videogame, this damages you slightly. Here, the rhythm of Alien Soldier’s dance comes into focus. Swap modes, cycle weapons, fire, dodge, cycle again, hover, parry bullets, dash, and you might just live to fight the next unholy abomination. You can breathe when it’s over.

It’s a dollar on Steam.

At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I swear that I did legitimately believe the moment I laid eyes on Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike: Fight for the Future (at the Redondo Fun Factory (RIP) in Southern California) in 2016 that if there were ever a game to convert me into a bona fide frame-counting, arcade stick-wielding, competitive freak-show, it would be the one. I knew it again, more powerfully in 2018 when it appeared before me at the Chinatown Fair Family Fun Center in New York, though neither time could I exactly articulate my belief beyond being enamored with its stunningly beautiful 2D character animation. Three years later, the prophesied freak-show has at last begun to emerge.

Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike: Fight for the Future is tactile, fast, heavy, tactical, dense, and intensely mechanically immersive. For the dedicated player, the depth of its fighting system sparks learning moments and microscopic improvements with every round fought. Win or lose, the growth is palpable, and is better earned here than in just about any game I can think of. Pick any of its masterfully rendered characters (Makoto), and feel as the pattern of their personality (and unique directional inputs) burns its way into your strategic rhythm. Learn the ins and outs of your opponents and their chosen avatars, slip headfirst into some accidental parries, then land one on purpose. It's a canvas for legends, delivered in an audiovisual package that remains nigh unmatched.

When I was young and foolish, I abandoned Chrono Trigger immediately after the first boss. I can explain — I was hoping to play it with my brother, since we'd long ago shared several Mario RPG experiences, but, despite Frog's best efforts, it succeeded only in boring him to apathetic tears. So mired was my mind in the stigma surrounding the Japanese Role-Playing genre that I submitted to his appraisal. It went back on the shelf. When I did finally progress beyond Yakra about a year later, flanked by a revolving door of spectators at a library, I resolved never to trust my brother's tears ever again. It spoke to me so strongly that, in the year post-Chrono Trigger, I went about chasing its tail.

I discovered that Final Fantasy IV had grandfathered Chrono Trigger's narrative pacing, Dragon Quest V's premise was at least as solid and perhaps even more beautiful, Final Fantasy VII succeeded its cinematic ambition to colossal effect, Dragon Quest III established the thematic foundation that courses through its veins, and Final Fantasy VI pioneered the core of its act structure. And yet, with each new drop of reverence gained for the JRPG and the visionaries that drove it forward, Chrono Trigger's lingering expectation hovered above, doing its step-siblings no favors.

Not to bemoan those relatives, which range from good to As Good As Chrono Trigger (I promise), but playing them more wholly reveals what it was that Yuji Horii and Hironobu Sakaguchi were trying to escape. In a genre derided for slow-going and number-crunching (both great, it turns out), here was a game that could move with enough genuine grace to make Super Metroid blush. Its meticulous staging and seamless battle transitions firmly ground its ever-breathing characters in the setting and drama of the moment. More so than even the dialogue, party members express themselves and their relationships through clean, action-inflected combat mechanics and colorful animations. Its many, tiny opportunities for narrative decisions add up alongside a multi-layered yet coherent story, and amount to a game that feels almost as directed by you, the player, as its creators. It's never afraid to end, whenever you may choose to end it.

Chrono Trigger is the nexus point at the center of its genre, the moment its progenitors decided to put aside their differences Just This Once and build something without any of the baggage of their respective series. It's almost heartbreaking to imagine them going their separate ways, returning home with lessons they couldn't keep. It was a glimpse into a possible future for videogames, but the die had already been cast, and the future refused to change.

Another entry from my List of the Thirty-Five Best Games I Played in 2023, now available à la carte:

On Chrono Cross (Or — "How I Developed a Palate for Poison")

My grandmother doesn’t live in Vermont anymore. A couple years ago, she and I went back there together and rented a place to relive those days. Naturally, the rental had some similarities to her old place. We drove around, taking in familiar sights, waiting for the rest of the family to join us. I fired up Chrono Cross for the first time one evening, and promptly came down with a case of water poisoning.

If I believed in omens, I’d take that as a bad one. I touched a game about a character who finds himself in an eerie facsimile of home, itself the strange and twisted sequel of a beloved favorite, and it left me hurling into a toilet. The water supply we’d been drawing from was unfit for human consumption. I spent the recovery period with Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest V on DS, beneath the more familiar ceiling of a family friend’s house. I’d later start writing a non-review about how I didn’t have to play Chrono Cross, eschewing the pretense of being some aspiring member of the Backloggd “videogame intelligentsia.” I don’t need “cred,” right??

Well.

I played Chrono Trigger again in 2023 at least twice, depending on how you define a “playthrough”. The first was because I’d just finished Final Fantasy X and wanted to make some unfair comparisons. The second was because I was three-fourths of the way through Chrono Cross and…wanted to make some unfair comparisons. Even in the thick of it, I was avoiding the inevitable.

So…About the Game

Cross makes every effort possible to be anything but a clean, obedient sequel to its father. And you know what? Good. Trigger’s development was predicated on originality, and should likewise be followed up with another adventurous convention-breaker. The “Chrono Trigger 2” advocated by the likes of Johnny Millennium doesn’t appeal to me; lightning doesn’t strike twice. Still, Cross is Trigger’s opposite even in ways it really shouldn’t be.

With the exception of its original PSX audiovisual presentation, some of the most colorful and lush I’ve ever experienced, just about every one of its ideas is noncommittal and indecisive. Monsters appear on the overworld again, but you won’t find anything as deliberately paced as Trigger’s level design to elevate this from the status of "mild convenience." The conceit of its combat system is worth exploring – characters deal physical damage to build spell charges — but the deluge of party members and fully customizable spell slots amounts to a game that would’ve been impossible to balance. Level-ups are only granted during boss fights, and the gains acquired in normal battles aren’t worth the effort, so the whole thing snaps in half not 50% of the way through. It isn’t measured to account for the fact that you can take down just about everything with an onslaught of physical attacks by the midgame.

Then again, if the combat had been as challenging as the story is bizarre, I don’t know that I would’ve stuck around all the way to the end. Maybe I wouldn’t have been as gung-ho about swapping party members around and collecting them like Pokémon. Amid its spectacle and ambition, the wonder of sailing the seas and crossing dimensions, I left most events unsure of what to think, positive or negative. It wasn’t ambivalence, exactly.

SPOILERS AHEAD

It’s like this: Fairly early on, you’re given an infamous decision. One of the major protagonists, Kid, is dying of a magically-inflicted illness, and the only antidote is Hydra Humour. If you agree to go after it, you’ll find that it can only be extracted from the Guardian of the Marshes, and its death would mean the deterioration of the ecosystem which relies upon it. The dwarves and all other life in this biome would be put at risk. I weighed my options. I decided to reload a save and refuse the quest. Kid wouldn’t want her life to come at the cost of hundreds, if not thousands of others. So I start down the opposite path…

…Only to find that, in this route, a squad of human soldiers kills the hydra anyway, leaving the dwarves to flee their uninhabitable home to lead a genocidal attack on the fairies’ island to claim it for themselves. Jesus. The dwarves’ manic strangeness did little to downplay how chilling the result of my little coin flip was.

After an effort to defend the few remaining fairies and keep the dwarves at bay — leaving the survivors to process the turmoil of their new reality — after all that…it turns out that Kid is fine. She got over the illness by herself, offscreen.

For as many words as it goes on to spew, no moment of my Chrono Cross playthrough spoke louder than this one. Chrono Trigger’s party was faced with a choice — allow Lavos to erupt from the planet and drive everything to the brink of extinction, or risk everything to prevent the apocalypse. It’s a thousand years away, these three characters can live out the rest of their days comfortably and never have to concern themselves with it. They’re shown an End of Time, proof that the universe won’t last regardless of what they do, and still decide to fight on behalf of the world. It’s worth trying, if only to preserve a few more precious seconds of life for their descendants and their home.

Chrono Cross (eventually) reveals that their meddling allowed Lavos to become an even more devastating monster. We can defeat it, but who can say that won’t result in an even more cataclysmic fate? Because he lives and breathes, Serge’s timeline is worse off. It’s hard to tell whether that’s lore nonsense, self-flagellation on the game’s part, or genuine philosophizing. It wouldn’t be alone in that. As a chronic “downer,” I can’t help wondering if there’s no way to survive in the modern world without directly or indirectly participating in human suffering.

Maybe Writer/Director Masato Kato couldn’t either. He seems bent on reminding the player that they are but a speck in a cosmic puzzle, and there’s no defiant “so what?” answer to that problem. Even the thing we’ve been led to accomplish isn’t revealed until seconds before the finale of this forty hour game (and that's NOT a joke). You can’t see the credits without recognizing that it’s an unfortunate victim of mismanagement and a little too much Evangelion, but that doesn’t mean it fails to resonate. I don't think there’s another game that so thoroughly captures the existential confusion of being alive.

When I wrote my Backloggd Review of EarthBound about a year ago, I tried to shave down my impressions and interpretations into something concise, digestible, and spoiler-free. I’m not going to do that with this one; I want to take this as an opportunity to speak freely and honestly about the MOTHER series and its genre cousins without worrying myself over the burden of design, if I can (already I’ve rewritten these three lines maybe six or seven times, but we’re loosening up). Let’s leave a little less on the cutting room floor this time, how ‘bout that. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, we’re goin’ all the way in.

On MOTHER 3 (Or — "Ticket to Nowhere”)

If EarthBound feels like “hanging out” with a weird, kind, fascinating person, then MOTHER 3 is the story of her life. That’s the way it starts, anyway. It’s fantasized and spun out into a broader and heavier story than she ever intended, but it’s true to her lived experience nevertheless. She’s a liar, but only in the way my parents were liars when they told me that babies are made out of eggs and fish. MOTHER 3’s practical jokes are kinder, because its story and world are darker. She can still be funny about it, she still has excellent taste in music, but she has nothing to hide anymore. The end of our last conversation (EarthBound) saw her opening up about the sadness and trauma that lingers behind that smile, so there’s nothing left to give but the whole truth, and nothing but (and “truth” is not always synonymous with “fact”). We just had to wait twelve years before we were old enough to hear it.

We hunted for Melodies in MOTHER to sing to the ghost of our great-grandma (who babysat an alien) to fix her ghost amnesia. We acquired Melodies in MOTHER 2 as part of becoming a wiser, more thoughtful person. In MOTHER 3, the Melodies are people who die when we pull their needles. And we don’t pull all of them.

MOTHER wasn’t so much about Ninten himself as the lore surrounding his family and their association with extraterrestrial forces. There’s little reason to believe that Ninten is anything other than a vessel for the player’s personality, like his Dragon Quest forebears, and I think it’s as beautiful here as it is there. It isn’t visually a first-person perspective, but a first-person story stitched together through the player’s investigation, where Ninten is the player’s mind. It’s unique to videogames, and for a game whose world is already unique among videogames, I think it’s handled well. You are Ninten, plain and simple.

But MOTHER 2 plays around with that expectation; it’s very much about Ness’ relationship with the player. Yeah, Ness begins as maybe the most down to earth protagonist in the genre’s history — a silent avatar living in a modern suburb with his family — but he gradually develops and asserts his own identity as new experiences inspire deeper personal reflection. We first read flickers of his childhood memories in each Sanctuary location, then his thoughts written out in Lumine Hall, then his feelings and flashbacks visually represented in Magicant, until finally, he speaks. The game even seems to reinforce this initial link between Ness and the player by addressing him in the second person during both the Coffee and Tea Breaks. And all the while, it's chipping away at that connection by breaking the fourth wall, reaching out to the player and asking for their real name, and then pleading for their prayers at the end.

Unlike Ninten before him, Ness has a past separate from the player’s, and he remembers it. We’re simply here to guide him through that journey, give him strength, and share in that process of reflection and growth. In doing this, he loses the innocence he had at the start, and in the strangest way. As many do, he grew up believing that Evil was a corruptive force, separate from the world he knew. Evil radiated from Giygas, pulsed through the Mani-Mani statue, and swayed everyday objects and animals and people to violence. If there’s anything we learn about Ness in Magicant, it’s that he still views Pokey as a friend, even after everything they’ve been through. Surely, he’s just another one of Giygas’ innocent victims. Like Mr. Carpainter, like Monotoli, he’ll snap out of it as soon as Giygas is out of the picture. But Giygas dies, and Evil does not die with him. After the final battle, Pokey pops in to let us know that he hasn’t changed a bit, and winks off to spread his influence elsewhere, elsewhat. He even has the last word, after the credits have rolled. And so, Ness’ last discovery is that Evil is as human as Love. My favorite thing about EarthBound’s ending is that we still walk home together, with Paula, after learning this.

Lucas picks up where Ness left off. He discovers the dark side of humanity early on in life, and has no illusions about where it came from. We know that Lucas doesn’t blame the Dragos for his mother’s death. The only monsters in the UFOs circling over Tazmily village are people. We can put a face to Lucas’ absent father. We know why he’s gone all the time. We don’t call him for favors. Lucas speaks early on in the game, we see his reactions and his memories and his feelings all laid out in front of us. MOTHER 3’s “Shower Break” in Chapter 4 already addresses Lucas in the third person. We don’t even play as Lucas for an entire scene before switching over to another playable character. The game asks the player their name mere tens of minutes into the first chapter. The sight of the “Chapter 1” title card alone might already tell us all we need to know about the game’s structure and its priorities. It’s “Shigesato Itoi’s Dragon Quest IV” (just as MOTHER had been Itoi’s Dragon Quest II, and MOTHER 2 was analogous to DQIII). Right from the start, we aren’t invited to “live” in MOTHER 3 as we had in MOTHER 2, we’re invited to perform it. EarthBound was a mirror, a conversation. MOTHER 3 is a play. And what a production it is.

In plainer terms, what I’m saying here is that MOTHER 3 was and is the logical next step for this story. We can’t go back to what we had. We’ve already grown beyond our childhood, so Lucas doesn’t have one. Po(r)ky is knocking down his door, and this time, we’re all complicit. It no longer makes a secret of the fact that it knows we’re there, because it knows that we know that it knows we’re there. The question of which is the “better game” feels ugly to me, most of the changes to the series’ staples feel more like a result of the different intent of this game than linear “improvements” on the others, though they’re worth talking about anyway.

MOTHER 3 has far more animation, its art style smooths over EarthBound’s rougher edges, there’s a run button, full recovery stations are easier to come by, you can save and manage money with frogs, there’s a slot for key items, the menus have groovy music and so on and so forth, but more interesting to me are the considerations made to the battle system and enemy encounters. On the whole, enemies are more deliberately positioned and have more varied behaviors, so the ability to sneak up on them is easier to take advantage of. Duster acquires just about all of Jeff’s status-afflicting abilities immediately (alongside a few additions) and they occupy their own menu, meaning this game is more interested in battle turns as a resource than it is in inventory slots (one of the designers might’ve considered that, because you can only pick one per turn, and they don’t deal damage (progress toward victory), and you’re liable to take damage every turn, and most enemies are only susceptible to certain tools, the more interesting decision is simply the matter of using them, and deciding on the one for the job. Not a bad idea). Buffs and debuffs are more effective than ever, and there seems to have been a lot of attention given to the general turn order. Boney always going first (and having no special offensive or PSI abilities) means he’s best utilized as the “item guy,” Lucas’ status buffs and recovery spells have to be planned out in advance, since he’s usually going to go last. Kumatora's healing isn't quite as powerful as Lucas’, but she's much faster in a pinch. That’s important to take note of, because “Rolling Health” is given much more prominence in this one, it really comes into its own. Party members are afforded larger amounts of Hit Points to work with from the very start, and there’s a more gradual overall “roll” speed (it slows down to a crawl if you use the “defend” option, which is especially thoughtful), which, when coupled with the Rhythm Combo system, is nothing short of brilliant.

Rhythm Combos are perfect, and I want them in everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if Itoi wanted to put something like this in every MOTHER game, he probably tapped the ‘A’ button to the beat of Dragon Quest II’s battle theme in 1987 (it starts with this repetitive, percussive “boop,” so I can see it). It turns the music into an essential obstacle for the player; an active and skill-based, but not at all obtrusive addition to JRPG combat which strengthens the value of the standard physical “attack” option incredibly. It’s strict, but if you’re tuned all the way in and tap to the beat of the music, you can land more than double your normal damage. The songs themselves mess with this, having weirdo time signatures and skips to throw the player off and get them to choose their moments carefully. If your health is rolling down, you might still be tempted to squeeze in a few extra hits before the next turn, making for some excellent tension. It imbues so much personality into not just the enemies themselves, all of them having their own variants or entirely unique tracks, but the characters. When you get hit, a sound effect reflecting the enemy’s personality will play in sync with the backing track, but that goes for your party as well. It’s only fitting that a series so in love with music should allow the player to wield it. Master the rhythm battle system, and your crew becomes a band to rival the DCMC themselves (revealing that maybe every JRPG is far less about killing monsters than they are about people learning to work together). Funny though it may be to admit, it’s a key reason I’ve picked up the game as many times as I have, only to see it through to the end.

I always try to land a full sixteen hit combo as Claus at the beginning of the game, just to jam out to his sitar sound effect the only time you can.

But yes, that production. Replaying it now, after about a year away from it, I’m surprised all over again at how efficiently the game manages to convey this beautiful sense of community between the people of Tazmily. It isn’t long at all before it feels like it could be home, and it it isn’t long after that that it begins to fall apart. The careful attention to NPC placement and changing dialogue depending on the situation is nothing short of meticulous. I couldn’t help smiling at Mike’s “slightly unclean and not very tasty” cookies, Nichol’s “the Funshine Sorest is on tire!”, or Wess’ grumblings about how “nobody’s aware of how strong [he] really [is]” because he looks like an old, balding man (and he is). Everyone pitches in to help Flint out in some little way, and it’s devastating to watch — in the series’ most animated moment to this point — as he takes out the full force of his horrible grief on the people who care about him. This is one of those scenes everyone remembers and talks about when they talk about this game, and it’s a testament to the character writing that we feel it as much as we do. Flint himself is completely silent up until this point, but he never had to say anything for this moment to land. The game never has to tell us, in his words, why Lucas doesn’t want a Happy Box. It doesn’t have to tell us why Duster has a bum leg. We could control Flint before and now we can’t, because he can’t.

It’s incredible that the game never seems to let up in this regard, it’s as densely written at the beginning as the crushing finale, so rich and full of ideas that it has to provide designated pit stops between major sequences. It fills its presents with fireworks and reggae beats and spills over with sad beetles to whom we can offer dung in exchange for experience points, all in the name of encouraging us to smell the roses. And we should smell those roses while we can, because the world is changing. The people we love are changing. They’re coming to throw rocks at us, spit on us, and make our lives hell…or…is that the mushrooms talking…? The Nowhere Islands don’t give easy answers.

If MOTHER 2 is about a boy growing up and losing his innocence, 3 is about how a world can lose theirs. These are people who wanted so badly to return to a state of innocence after the End of the World that they had their memories trapped in an egg, and still they become corrupted by forces promising to bring them happiness and salvation from dangers they caused. Could the people of Tazmily have continued living peacefully in this Rousseauian society, or was it destined to come to an end? Porky seems to think that humanity will always fall victim to cruelty and evil, and though he's hardly the most trustworthy character in the story, he didn't invent any of the methods he's using against the Nowhere Islands. He's just taking them to their logical extreme. Not to absolve him of blame, of course, Porky is one of the most pitiful and terrifying characters in videogames. It’s quietly horrible to watch Isaac admit to Salsa in Chapter 3 that he just wants to see if happiness really is as easy as buying a Happy Box, too naive to recognize the happiness that’s available all around him. Because we’re duped all the time in that same way, riding the hype of new products and falling for advertisements, ever encouraged to wonder just how much happier we might be if only we had that one thing. If we’re lucky, those things come with genuine sincerity and authenticity. If we’re luckier, we can share them with people who love us. We’re rarely so lucky.

Not for nothin', but Dragon Quest V’s portrayal of slavery felt pretty toothless after MOTHER 3 made me push claymen around for a whole afternoon at the factory (I’m sorry Dragon Quest V, I still love you). It doesn’t take very long, but it feels humiliating and wrong to help the enemy in such a tedious exercise, knowing that some of the villagers do this all day, every day, for a pithy reward. Knowing that everyone in the village is being molded like these claymen. Some of them even become Pigmasks. To call out the absurdity of MOTHER 3 is to feel alienated by the absurdity of our everyday lives. If we’re already feeling that way, it’ll be an eerily validating experience.

But is it too much? Is it too heavy-handed? The MOTHER series had always been such an understated thing, and now we’re just saying the quiet parts out loud. But could it be any other way? Maybe I do have to listen to Samba de Combo while considering the ramifications of materialism on our fractured world and the meaning of happiness. Maybe I need to fire a pencil rocket at a bass guitar. It’s a game of so many paradoxes. It’s a game that loves being a game, yet is wary of its own place in the world. It has such a zest for life, but lingers on destruction. How are we supposed to feel about Wess, or Flint? The islands’ sworn protectors are selfless immortal nonbinary psychics who are frequently described as “strange,” but “good-natured,” and I’m frankly not one thousand percent sure how to feel about that portrayal. One of them betrays the rest and becomes an evil monkey-torturing mechanical chimera made out of brass instruments, but is still loved by a mouse. MOTHER 3 is two brothers wrestling friendly dinosaurs. It’s those same brothers breaking down in tears because everything they love is gone. I played this game for my brother once, performed it like a musical. He asked if I was crying during those final moments. I don’t remember if I was.

I always tell people to play MOTHER 3 on a DS Lite if they can (it’s two Happy Boxes for the price of one), or another portable console of their choice, because the game is designed to be the player’s companion. The plentiful save points and hot springs are part of that, but there’s something about having this world in your pocket, by your desk, on the train, in line at the airport, in your hands, which makes it feel so much more intimate. That’s ironic in its own way — the DS Lite was new when MOTHER 3 came out, a game that wanted us to think about the nature of technological progress, and now our “portable” consoles don’t even fit in our pockets anymore. Take it from me, you don’t want to play MOTHER 3 on your iPhone. The physicality of the buttons is necessary. The lack of notifications and other applications is especially necessary.

Both MOTHER 2 and 3 end by reaching out to the player. MOTHER 2 fills our screen with Giygas, so we’re face to face with the embodiment of Evil. MOTHER 3 fills our screen with Nothing, so we're face to face with our own reflection.

But why go to such pains to separate the Player and the Character? Why draw so much attention to us? Why did I waste so much breath emphasizing the importance of that growing divide throughout this series?

Because it doesn’t want us to think of this experience as an “escape.” It doesn't give us anywhere to run. It wants us to take it with us. It wants us to do something with these feelings and memories. These are games we play as ourselves, whoever we are.



...Wherever we are.

I don’t want to fold my laundry right now, so here’s a review of Half-Life 2.

I kinda miss those opening moments when the only discrepancy I cared about was my ability to huck physics objects halfway across a given room without being regarded as a psychopath by anxious bystanders. The state of the world is conveyed instantly, and we’re forced to live under the squalor of this totalitarian regime alongside everyone else. A lot of us probably stood there and listened to Breen’s entire self-serving speech before advancing past the first area, his face filling those massive screens and lording over the train station. It’s chilling. And then, the game remembers that it’s a sequel to a New York Times Bestseller, and it’s time for a family reunion. What’s that? The Combine are beating people in their homes? They’re rounding up the humans? Nonsense, we have headcrab merchandise to sell! Remember the HEV suit? Remember Barney from Blue Shift? Oh, don’t forget your trusty crowbar! We love you, Gordon Freeman!

THE LONG VERSION:

Half-Life was all about making the player feel like this horribly outmatched scientist hurled into an unmitigated disaster, to the point where I called the player’s success tantamount to a non-canon “what-if” scenario. The Gordon Freeman of Half-Life 2 is a monster. You know that dinky crowbar from the first game, the one you found lying around on the floor? It might as well be Excalibur. Stormtroopers fall by the dozen. I never found myself without a surplus of bullets. Why does everyone know who we are? Why does everyone have intimate knowledge of what we did in that top-secret government facility? Why are we suddenly so nostalgic for the alleged greatness of Black Mesa? Weren’t they up to some extremely questionable stuff back there, or was that just my imagination? Why do we suddenly have a fawning girlfriend, and why are we playing fetch with her robot dog? Aren’t we just some guy? Why aren’t we just some guy?

The game’s at it’s best when it’s treating you like just some guy. We enter Ravenholm, and it might as well have nothing to do with anything going on in the rest of the game. There’s a man facing off against a horde of zombified villagers, and there’s intrigue surrounding his identity, his sanity. Eventually, he tosses us a shotgun at an opportune moment, and we work together to drive back the beasts. We snake through the winding architecture of this ruined town, we activate physics traps which feel naturally integrated into the situation, we panic when a poisonous freak knocks us down to a single hit point. This was more “Half-Life” than anything we’d been doing, iconography be damned. I cared more about this one guy than any of the returning characters for his direct involvement and cooperation. I knew Valve had it in ‘em. Everyone else made me feel like I was in the Truman Show.

Characters act more like tour guides than residents of this world, even walking backwards to gently usher the player from place to place (and show off that facial animation, I guess). The push toward “realism” was only natural, but I didn’t anticipate just how far Valve would go in removing them from the context of the gameplay. Half-Life’s NPCs weren’t compelling because they were “believable,” but because they were as vulnerable as the player. Some of them could fend for themselves (somewhat), while others needed the player’s assistance. If you weren’t careful (and sometimes if you were), you might’ve found yourself responsible for the death of a fellow scientist. They wanted key characters and development this time, so that’s not gonna happen. Can’t jeopardize our award-winning plot. Not our precious Alyx. I know they were striving for emotional range here, and that’s a worthy cause, but I might’ve cared a whole lot more about these people if I was worried something might happen to them. Heck, I’d have cared more about them if I had to personally press the “interact” button while facing them to receive their dialogue.

Maybe it’s worth sifting through some thoughts about narrative design. This is sort of tangential, but why not — The best games in the JRPG genre use its gameplay conventions, its mechanical language, in ways which feel congruent with the story. “Talking” is a major verb, it’s only natural that some of that talking would be dramatic. Combat takes place in a separate mode of play, so there’s no expectation that everyone will be involved with it (and in many games, we don’t directly initiate fights in the first place). In that way, Dragon Quest’s mechanics feel congruent with its storytelling. I’d describe Half-Life 1 similarly. Its mechanics are mostly congruent with its story and characterization. The “plot” is happening all around the player in real-time, and all of that stuff has direct ramifications on their forward progress. Why give games like Zelda and Sekiro a pass? Maybe it’s simply that we choose to talk to NPCs, that’s our method of agency in that situation. The characters can respond to us, just not in every possible way (because Link and Wolf wouldn’t kill those people, but they would talk to them). In Half-Life 2, characters talk at us, and don’t acknowledge our agency in the setting. It pains me to say it, but many of Half-Life 2’s character interactions would work better as cutscenes. The benefit of the persistent game state is that the core mechanics are always or could always be relevant, but that’s rarely the case here. If I’m not in a mode of play where interactivity is expected, I suppose I don’t groan as hard when I have to sit through it. Something to consider.

Oy, talking about this game makes me feel like a petulant child (there’s so much attention to detail, but you can still look around when you’re dead). I can’t think of too many games which have outright disappointed me. I mean, if I don’t like it, I can just…do something else. Maybe refund the game. Who cares? Still, I can’t help feeling that Half-Life 2 represented such a fascinating opportunity. That first game is right on the cusp of something incredible. A bit sloppy, a bit janky, but with a clear vision for the future of experiential game narratives. I was hoping to see its Super Mario Bros. 3, a deeper and richer iteration on that original idea. This one doubles down on the first game’s contrivance-filled pathfinding. Half-Life wasn’t lacking in realistic physics puzzles or jet-ski sequences or monologuing holograms, but interesting risks and alternate paths and weightier character interactions. I’m glad that so many people found what they were looking for in Half-Life 2, though maybe I’m better off checking out Deus Ex than waiting another decade for that third installment. Something tells me Valve won’t be looking back.

When EarthBound arrived on Wii U in 2013, my oldest friend and I made a day of it. I mean we took the time to walk over to the local GameStop down by the bagel shop and pick up a physical download code. We'd both seen and heard references to EarthBound from time to time alluding to its weirdness, its hidden layers, and its mythical status, but redeeming the purchase revealed something else. We settled on the default names (though I can't say I recommend it), sat on the carpet in front of the TV, and spent all afternoon strolling through Onett and hanging out with its characters. There was something eerily comfortable about this little cartoon suburb, with its restaurants, hotels, and nonsense-spewing adults. What I now realize is that, despite there being psychic powers and talking alien bees, I'd never experienced a setting in a videogame, or possibly anywhere, with an atmosphere as earnest or authentic. We didn't so much as reach the Titanic Ant before my friend had to go home, resolving then to download the game for himself, but that first afternoon with the game had already burrowed deep inside my memory.

EarthBound's mundanity is as core to its identity as any of the wild idiosyncrasies it's known for. To wander its familiar towns, talk with weirdos and pick up friends and souvenirs and memories is to gaze into a heightened mirror of reality, exaggerated in its warmth and darkness. It somehow manages to achieve this while also being as playful and thorough an RPG adventure as any, packed with color and variety and laugh-out-loud surprises and genuine scares. With a hilarious sense of humor that manifests in quirky, sometimes endearingly inconvenient game mechanics, excellent taste in music, and an equal degree of world-wisdom, playing EarthBound always feels like hanging out with another person who's been places and seen things that you or I might only imagine. It's the only game I could believe might actually possess a living soul.

I was in middle school when I started EarthBound, and I wouldn't finish it until the summer before college (what can I say, time flies). I'd moved away from our neighborhood by the time I reached the endgame, and invited my oldest friend to join me. Sure enough, he did. We sat down on the couch in front of the TV. I don't remember if I exactly cried during the finale, but even now, after more replays than I care to admit, it resonates. I felt back then this burning realization that, in some cosmic way, EarthBound had probably understood me more than I did, all along. Maybe it still does.

—WARNING—
SNESSER

Videogames are for media perverts.

Really, is it not enough just watching a character perform an action from the comfort of the living room sofa? We’ve got the written word, the stage, the projector, illustration and sound, but for the weirdos among us, that doesn’t cut it. No, we just have to crawl into the screen and take up residence in their skin. We need to feel their digital knuckles scraping against the robo-flesh of their adversaries. We need to breathe the air of that post-apocalyptic wasteland and go fishing in the little streams that have formed between the cracks in the asphalt. In "A Play of Bodies," games researcher Brendan Keogh (the man responsible for my treatment of "videogame" as a single word) writes that video-gameplay creates a circuit between the player and the software. We enter the machine, and there is a “meshing of materially different bodies into an amalgam cyborg body through which the player both produces and perceives the play experience” (41).

It’s a little twisted, isn’t it? Just the slightest bit deranged?

I think about that whenever I consider recommending NieR: Automata to another person, because even if it didn't mean asking someone to take control of an android soldier inexplicably dressed as a blindfolded french maid in a billowy skirt and heels (“Taro just likes girls, man”), it still demands a degree of investment which isn’t remotely common in media. For games, it’s a high bar. I have to remind myself that even in 2023, the year when my Mom called in to rave about HBO’s The Last of Us, picking up a controller to actively involve oneself in a play experience of this kind is still a lot to ask. That show managed to reach an audience of people who had never considered conversion into one of Keogh’s cyborgs. If even one of them asked me which videogames to start with, Automata wouldn’t make the shortlist. You’ve already gotta be quite a ways down the rabbit hole. You have to love giving yourself over to and becoming entwined with these things for hours at a time. You have to be aware of their conventions. It’s one for the video-perverts.

Luckily, there are plenty of us to go around if you know where to look. Media literacy is an odd thing. I’m enough of a ridiculous videogame/media cyborg person that I might’ve written off Automata — of all things — as passé. A little too indulgent in some unfortunate tropes and well-trodden themes.

If you’re just joining us, the premise is this — In the future, aliens have sent a mechanical army to conquer the Earth, forcing humanity to take refuge on the moon. We’ve constructed a squadron of android soldiers to take back the planet, resulting in an ongoing proxy war between the two robotic factions on the surface. You, the player, follow androids 2B and 9S in their righteous quest to drive back the alien menace and reclaim the world.

Incidentally, this is pretty much the plot of DoDonPachi DaiOuJou. You have the right to remain suspicious.

I’d played my share of JRPGs, done some hacking and slashing, wasn’t terribly impressed with 13 Sentinels, seen Evangelion, Lain and Ghost in the Shell. I’ve had Space Runaway Ideon: Be Invoked in my queue since that one Hazel video, alright. I wasn’t…pressed. I didn’t discount what I’d heard about its excellence and experimentation, but I was pretty sure I knew what I’d find. No matter how you slice it, the broad questions of existential philosophy can only have so many possible conclusions. Either everything is futile, or it’s not. To paraphrase Albert Camus, you either live for some reason, or you don’t. Viktor Frankl narrowed it down to three: one might live for a goal, for someone else, or to overcome suffering. Paring it further down, you either accept the beauty that you can find in whatever corner of this world you inhabit, or else rage against it and build a better one.

Really, I hoped it was hiding a perspective or a problem that would change my mind. I want to be wrong and I want to learn. My diagnosis of existentialism is so broad as to be useless. But Automata didn’t show me “The Gospel of the New Age,” it didn’t pretend it could arrive at unique conclusions about life and its meaning. Rather, it’s frustrated with the answers that have been given. It just doesn’t know how to escape from them.

SYSTEM MESSAGE
(It's gonna be a long one)

The opening says as much, states in no uncertain terms that we’re “perpetually trapped” in The Wheel of Samsara, and then drops us into a top-down arcade shoot ‘em up. I watched the rest of my squad get picked off one by one, and knew I was in the hands of a director. So let’s talk Taro. Yoko Taro, the all-but undisputed creative force behind NieR, has spoken loudly about his love for 2D shooters, and that inspiration isn’t limited to gameplay. It comes through in Automata’s premise, themes, and looping narrative. Shoot ‘em ups are about dying again and again, setting one’s own goals, finding meaning in their madness. They’re about lone pilots in their last stands to save already doomed worlds. Their characters never escape the five to seven manic stages that contain their stories. Yoko Taro may have wanted to make ZeroRanger (and if he had, it’d had said all he’d wanted to say), but given Square Enix’s requirement that it be an Action RPG, I think the team came to a solid compromise.

Automata’s control scheme is cleverly designed to seamlessly shift between 2D shooting and 3D action without twisting the fundamentals. Melee attacks, specials and evasion are all mapped to the same buttons no matter the perspective, and that’s a powerful gesture. NieR: Replicant was bent on shocking the player out of their comfort zone with shifts into text adventuring and fixed camera Resident Evil…ing, its parts as cobbled together as any of Automata’s machines (and make no mistake, I love it for that). Automata, meanwhile, is sleek. Its mechanical consistency more readily invites the player to slip into a state of cyborg-dom, even as the shape of the game morphs around them. Nowhere is this better felt than the final stretch of The Tower, and those who’ve played the game will know what I’m talking about. Whatever form it takes, whoever you are, your index finger is for shooting. Customizable chips inform your abilities and interface, and it does plenty to contextualize game elements as features of the android protagonists. Whether or not it measurably contains “zero unintended ludo-narrative dissonance,” Automata goes the distance.

But few players I know would accuse Automata of “consistency,” and for good reason. Its narrative structure is easily one of its strangest features. I wouldn’t call it subtle so much as…selectively cryptic? Curious. I wouldn’t say there’s anything presented in the critical path that doesn’t serve at least a thematic purpose, but events rarely build directly on top of each other throughout the A/B playthroughs, and only the barest threads actively cause the events of Routes C/D. Much of this is by design, seeing as the player is taking direct orders from their commanding officers as soldiers of YoRHa, simply doing as you’re told without the agency to decide your path, but I wouldn’t argue if someone found Automata “half-baked.”

I’m getting ahead of myself — I’ve seen it discussed that the mystery of the machines’ sentience is badly handled, that it’s too obvious and heavy-handed right from the get-go, but I think it’s clear that’s not the question being raised by the story. It’s not “do the machines really have emotions,” it’s “why are the androids so bent on deluding themselves into believing that the machines lack emotion?” What’s so qualitatively different about the two robot factions? What drives people to ignore the pleas of others and deny their personhood? We find them in distress in the desert, quite literally birthing two beings called Adam and Eve. It takes just three hours to encounter a village of machine pacifists, and, when he’s no longer able to deny their sentience, 9S just pulls out some lame excuse to maintain his worldview. This might be frustrating as a player, to be required to carry out actions you don’t believe in for the sake of progress through a story. You could call it stupid, maybe cruel, or you might appreciate that your doubts echo those of the characters.

But some cracks begin to show as you await each revelation.

_________________________________

After a climactic battle with a gargantuan mech results in the loss of your sidekick, you follow a trail of breadcrumbs to a rusted elevator in the depths of a dimly-lit cavern. You’re warned it may be a trap. Both you and your character shrug off the suggestion.

At the bottom of a long descent, you emerge beneath a subterranean sky, a void of white. Before you, an eerie facsimile of civilization. The architecture is reminiscent of a metropolis that once stood, but colorless and incomplete. One of the top three songs in the game starts up.

Pressing forward, you find the bodies of androids strewn about the scenery. Further and further, until you come face to face with the perpetrator. You have a dramatic rematch with Adam. Philosophy is spouted, combat ensues, and you kill him. You retrieve 9S.

You then…report back to the Resistance Camp and receive your next assignment.

The Copied City never becomes relevant again.

_________________________________

(Tangentially, Adam and Eve confront our heroes a total of three times, which doesn’t give them much room to interact beyond being born and dying. This is interesting on the face of it, but none of these interactions shake up the status quo. Killing Eve supposedly alters the machine network, but not in a way that interferes with its normal functioning. 9S then enters the machine network during the first ending, and little seems to come of it beyond perhaps the intermittent vignettes you receive before and after boss fights during Route B. Tragically, none of these vignettes seem to influence 9S’ thoughts or actions later on)

I’m not here to slap a “bad writing” stamp on NieR: Automata, despite what I'm about to say. Honest. All of this is kind of fascinating to me. The fact that Adam and Eve’s story doesn’t affect the characters as much as it should might speak to how little regard the androids afford machines in general. The fact that the status quo is not affected by any of these wild moments sort of makes sense when you consider the cyclical state of the setting. Maybe. But a certain thought cloud began to hang over me as I continued playing, and then it grew as the story revealed itself.

Any suspicions I had were confirmed by Taro’s 2014 GDC Talk where he lays bare his process. Before arriving at any character or premise, he whips up an emotional climax. He decides where he wants his audience to cry, and then works backward to create context for that moment. I’d like to be charitable, everyone expresses themselves differently, but it’s hard not to look at this and find some Hack Behavior. Taro does explore themes and questions and characters, but it’s obvious when a moment is crafted in isolation for the sake of shock value, and it doesn’t help that many of them lack long-standing consequences. Of course there are great, hard-hitting scenes (the intro to the game’s second half comes to mind), but I know when I’m being punked. And as it pulls this sort of thing again and again, it becomes easier to see the mirrors behind the smoke. Final Fantasy VI’s opera setpiece might be very obviously tossed in there, but the development that happens in and around it, before and after, makes it worthwhile.

And so is Automata, just not for the same reasons. I was convinced at one point that it had actually been about the conflict between A2 and 9S all along. Whatever inconsistencies there’d been or questions that had gone unanswered, everything had been built to explore how they’d end up as ideological opposites. But for that to be true, A2 herself would’ve needed more time. I’ve got just enough of a speedrunner’s brain that I enjoyed replaying the first third as 9S, especially for recontextualizing his role in the duo and containing late-game reveals only he was privy to. Likewise, we’d have needed to see what made A2 who she was at the beginning of the story. After ages of aimless rage and rebellion, it should have taken more than just one late-game subplot to alter her worldview (2B-pilled or not). It’s a testament to the music, pacing and performances that I was able to buy her character, but it would be a stretch to say that the story is squarely about her.

Maybe it’s become clearer as Taro has progressively dominated this write-up, but I don’t feel this is a game about its characters, but a mind at odds with itself. It won’t be obvious if you’re only reading this review without having played the game, but NieR is the story of a man grappling with existentialists, admitting that none of their perspectives have managed to convince him or offer a satisfactory route to purpose. Maybe he’s frustrated that none of them click. Whether you’re driven by fear or beauty or selfishness, spirituality or revenge, we’re all made of the same stuff, and we’re all going to the same place.

I don’t think it’s unfair to criticize Automata for failing to thoroughly explore those avenues of meaning. Fair or not, I’ll posit this dismissal comes from the honest place of a person who’s become lost and resentful toward structures built to fabricate meaning at the expense of others. Religion and love and community are all represented in unflattering extremes, and having one’s purpose stripped away is immediately met with violence against oneself and others. Even when I disagreed or wanted more in the way of nuance, I had to admit that I could sympathize with the author. I realize I’ve come to take God’s absence for granted, that meaning is self-made. Around the time I played Automata, a close someone told me that life would not be worth living without God. Happiness would be impossible. Only the involvement of an Eternal Being can give our existence weight.

Well, It’s a good thing He’s up there, then.



…

So we play as this torn mind, inhabiting both characters and driving them toward opposite objectives. These androids are only granted agency by the player, after all. Whichever of the two you gravitate toward, each must be defeated by the other. You must kill both of your selves.

It’s a bleak lens, and it’s not shy about that. Maybe it shouldn't be any sort of surprise that Automata’s ending invites its players to rebel against its worldview, unite and collectively destroy it. It wants us to demonstrate that we can find purpose in each other. As far as I can tell, Taro wants to be proven wrong. He wants to learn something. Of course, it could be that I only found what I wanted to see.

But that’s not what I saw in the moment. Ending E didn’t hit as hard as I’d wanted. I nodded in acknowledgment of the gesture, knew that it was a modern Shigesato Itoi finale. Automata contains some real sparks of bottled magic, but it rarely managed to pull me out of my own head, maybe because the mind behind it was made so painfully visible. It never brought me to tears (TieRs?). Despite the gorgeousness of its soundtrack, I felt more distant than I’d have liked to be. I became uncomfortably aware of myself in that desk chair, holding a plastic videogame controller, watching my screen flash with the light of real people who’d given up their save data to help me, someone they’d never meet.

It felt like getting caught in the act.

The first issue of Nintendo Power that I ever read (#231) included a segment titled “BEST OF THE BEST,” where Chris Slate and the gang ranked what they considered the twenty greatest games for every Nintendo console. As an eight year-old sitting in a seven-week summer camp where videogames were absolutely off-limits, this was a treasure trove. So much had already stoked my curiosity for my pastime’s past, Nintendo’s in particular, and this magazine was a whole gallon of kerosene on that tiny lil’ flickering spark. It’s here that the seeds of intrigue for the Legend of Zelda series were first planted in my brain, seeing as it always seemed to narrowly edge out the guy I was there to see (up until the dedicated Wii page, where Mario Galaxy reigned supreme), but in the small collection of those that stood up there with the Big Boys was a glaring anomaly. The GameCube was my introduction to the medium, emblematic of Mario Kart and Sonic Adventure, but here, it was host to the grungiest entry on the entire list. Scary, even, for a kid as timid as I was. That fiery screenshot, with its grotesque giant towering over a gun-toting action hero, branded itself onto the grooves of my gray matter. And right beneath it —

01 – RESIDENT EVIL 4

Somehow, the whimsy and imagination I so craved had lost out to the brutish violence I'd glimpsed in more “MATURE” content, and on its home turf, too…I might’ve been a bit put-off, but I had the whole rest of the summer to think it over. I knew that if even the staff of Nintendo Power had to hand the cup to Capcom (themselves acknowledging how rare it was for a “third-party game to top Nintendo on its own system”), there must’ve been something to it.

Fast-forward another fourteen years, and Resident Evil 4’s reputation has become impossible to ignore. Its third-person shooting is so legendarily perfect that it “killed” its own series, cutting off any and all future for fixed camera angles, but also never quite being succeeded by anything that managed to improve on its gameplay. There’s even been some renewed vitriol levied against RE4 in recent years now that the series has managed to finally recapture some amount of its success with something closer to an A-Horror aesthetic (at least among fans I know), but either way, the conversation has never seemed able to escape from the devouring whirlpool of that fourth entry. I still hadn’t gotten around to any of ‘em myself, having decided I wasn’t a horror guy or a shooting guy for most of my life, but that was changing as I was gradually broadening the scope of my personal taste. Eventually I figured that, if I was ever gonna get around to Resident Evil, I’d be one of those diehard fixed camera haunted house puzzle box fiends, decrying 4’s abandonment of all that is subtle, terrifying, and holy. It was too colorless, too vapid to catch the interest of one with taste as REFINED as myself. Right. As if.

No, I’m not too good for Resident Evil 4. Not even close, and I knew it within the first fifteen minutes. It takes no time at all before we’re fending off crowds of parasite-infected villagers as the most adorkable government operative this side of Solid Snake, and if the goofy “rEsiDeNt eeEEviLLL…fOOOUUuurRRR” on the title screen didn’t gear me up for a schlock-fest, Leon’s indelible “bingo” quip did the trick. Even as an MGS fan, I don’t know if I’d have guessed how well that balance between the tense, sometimes genuinely fear-inducing gameplay and the campy fun of the story would work for me. Metal Gear’s cartoonish stealth often straddles the same line between silly and serious as its cutscenes, but the shamelessly corny character interactions here were a relief, a chance to laugh before plunging back into atmospheric danger, and that made it much more endearing than I’d expected. I understand the pushback against some of the nonsense here, especially with such a strong opening area, but it was just too entertaining to ever strike me as some kind of tragic missed opportunity. I never thought I’d enjoy quicktime events, and escort missions are rarely done well, but the occasional button-mash and the presence of a companion both counterbalance the thrilling dread of the regular gameplay in all of the right ways (and RE4’s gameplay somehow manages to measure and expand on both ideas).

Despite the recent ubiquity of the genre, I hadn’t actually played a dedicated third-person shooter before this game (so my bewilderment over its greatness is probably not that far off from players of its day), but my impression of the sixth console generation had always been, when it came to the big names, an eschewing of tightness and gameplay depth in favor of breadth and spectacle. I was more wrong than I realized. Resident Evil 4 is almost, if not as dedicated to its core hook as the original Super Mario Bros., and its ability to take a minimalistic and intuitive system and spin it out into dozens of dynamic situations is about as well-documented too. The temptation to build a game around a narrative concept or theme can be strong, but RE4 is a textbook example of what happens when a designer picks one verb and rolls with it all the way, come hell or high water. You don’t need me rattling off every little nuance, but its handling of the interplay between ranged and melee combat is so sick that, even without a plot, the promise of getting to set up and execute the next head-smashing suplex would’ve been enough to carry me through the entire game both times.

Slim resources are a fine way to get the player to pick their shots carefully, but this added layer means they’re also weighing where and when to aim to get the most out of every bullet. Headshots open the door to sweeping roundhouse kicks which can topple an entire tide of lurching foes, but, unless I could afford to spend some shotgun ammo, I never wanted to be too close to the horde while I was at it. I found myself sizing up a situation, firing off some careful headshots from afar, and then closing the distance to cash in on that splash damage. Shooting below the knees is best when looking to take out an individual enemy with a spectacular skull slam. That simple decision makes it so much more than your typical “glory kill,” it always rewards the player for thinking several steps ahead. ‘Course, you’ve got more on hand than just a couple of guns and Leon’s ridiculous muscles, and RE4 rarely disappoints the desire to use the environment in creative ways. In one of the best moments in either of my playthroughs, I threw down a flash grenade while surrounded by goons, and quickly took advantage of the resulting stun effect to kick all of them, one by one, down a hole in the center of the room. Unless any other third-person shooter can offer anything nearly that good, I'm afraid I’ll have to kindly ask the genre to sit down. This game goes in so many directions with its core mechanics that I don’t even feel much of a need to play any of its successors, spiritual or otherwise.

If there is a downside to that insatiable exploration of concepts, though, it’s that it reveals just how narrow the range of RE4’s excellence really is. Its pacing is just about perfect almost all the way through, dialing the intensity up and down with tremendous care and drawing from a seemingly endless barrel of ideas (it can’t be understated that just about every encounter features a distinct spin of its own that makes the engagement unique), but somehow, it didn’t quite manage to wow me in the end. I’m talking about the very end here, just the final few setpieces. Maybe capping off such a crowd-focused game system on a more traditional one v. one final boss fight wasn’t quite the right move, perhaps the insanity of that second to last segment was just a little too messy (despite being succeeded by a pretty great little zone), maybe the game had already hit such a spiraling high just a little earlier that the final stretch couldn’t possibly have lived up, or maybe it really did need a bit more weight to its drama to make that ending sing. Whatever the reason, it’s hard to criticize RE4 for failing to “stick to its guns” when it does so fantastically over the course of the whole game, but it clearly does best in those explorable combat arenas, filled with ins and outs and enemy types to strategize around. When the conclusion finally did roll in, it seemed to have already exhausted just about every possible configuration of those parts it could dream up, but it’s a good thing it ends only a little after it stops playing to those very particular strengths. Surprised as eight year-old me might’ve been to hear this coming from himself, that just makes it all the more enticing to hop back over to the start and climb Resident Evil 4’s rollicking “Tower of Terror” over again.

I guess Chris Slate was just me all along...

By the time I'd finished Final Fantasy IV, there were still two months left before the Switch release of FFVII. I looked back over my shoulder at that Chrono Triggerian crossroads, pondering the genre’s founding fathers. I’d followed Hironobu Sakaguchi’s path, but Yuji Horii hadn’t forsaken me. Noting my glance, he turned, tinted glasses flashing against the sun, and offered a smile. I sheathed the Paladin’s Sword, set aside my hoard of crystals, and stepped forward. It wasn’t without a hint of embarrassment.

At the end of the previous summer I’d taken the opportunity to try a demo of the upcoming Dragon Quest XI, and expressed bewilderment over the boilerplate simplicity of its combat system. Certain other RPGs had conditioned my tastes toward “action commands,” and the classic format was a thing of the past. Still, I considered that EarthBound might not have been a fluke, and I’d given FF a fair enough shake. It would’ve been easy to give in to skepticism and back out of the whole prospect of entering yet another massive role-playing series, but before I could fully consider that, Dragon Quest V materialized from behind a glass display case at a local shop.

Clicking it into my Nintendo DS and entering a name came with a whiplash I now realize Japanese fans of Super Famicom role-playing games might’ve shared in 1992. Though gifted with some substantial foreknowledge of what the genre had in store, the recency of my Final Fantasy IV completion kept its audacious, free-wheeling style at the top of my brain. FFIV began with a fleet of airships soaring against a booming Star Warsian score. Dragon Quest V opens with a man pacing slowly and anxiously. The repetitive ticking of an echoing clock envelops the throne room. The chancellor urges his king to take a seat. He plods himself down, but darts up again. A messenger rushes in to deliver the news. The music begins as King Pankraz emerges upstairs to reunite with his wife and meet his newborn son. He’s eager to provide the child a name, and Queen Madalena suggests what we’ve chosen. Pankraz delivers us into the world of Dragon Quest V, the scene shifts, and the title descends from the heavens to a chorus of trumpets. Some years will pass before we return.

Already, Dragon Quest V has impressed us with its patient direction and emotional maturity. It impresses us further. I learned quickly to respect and enjoy its commitment to sharpened, gambling-flavored battle mechanics and strict resource management. I became engrossed in its humble writing and subtle humanity as the story and gameplay quietly intertwined. Though full of tenderness and joyful whimsy, the wisdom sleeping beneath its life-spanning story never fails to sober me, even today. Where Final Fantasy IV had fought hard to astonish, Dragon Quest V managed to bring tears to my eyes more than once using simple lines of text. If Sakaguchi were a fireworks engineer, we might call Horii a master of sleight of hand.

(This is a review I first published in 2021, elsewhere. Now it's here)

If you’re short on time or haven’t played it, here’s what I’ll say: 1991’s SquareSoft’s Final Fantasy IV is, in my opinion, best enjoyed by those who can appreciate a short, dense, no-frills, melodramatic JRPG. It’s an essential game in the genre and, for whatever my judgement is worth, good. If that sounds like your cup of tea and you don’t know anything else, then I’d recommend playing it and forming an opinion before reading (if you regret it, you can bug me later).

This is a retrospective of where I was when I first played Final Fantasy IV, and a rundown of where I'm at now. I'll try not to spoil too many other games in the process.

On Final Fantasy IV (Or — "Jumping the Lunar Shark”)

It was all Chrono Trigger’s fault. A series of coincidences had guided me toward that prolific blend of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, and I waltzed into 2019 wide-eyed and fascinated by a genre I'd once thought laughable. So now, having marveled at the results of their combined effort, it was time to pick a side for my next adventure. Yuji Horii beckoned to me from across the void, his latest Dragon Quest installment due on my game console that Fall, but Hironobu Sakaguchi leapt in with an ace up his sleeve. Not only would the ridiculously popular Final Fantasy VII release on Switch by March, but he’d recently converted a good friend of mine with its Steam version. So, in anticipation of that day, I began the new year with (let’s face it) the series’ foundation.

Dusk had settled over the city skyline, silhouettes of heavy coats retreated into apartments for blankets and coffee, and I was conjuring meteors to blow up an incarnation of living hatred. Final Fantasy IV had been my winter game, a boundless ongoing saga, and at last I’d arrived at the end. It should’ve been triumphant, the climactic conclusion to an epic quest spanning countries, realms, transcending even the planet itself. Finally I’d experienced a classic that meant so much to so many, that had contributed massively to the development of a genre and a generation of video game players. As Cecil and Rosa stood before their beloved crew of allies turned friends turned surrogate family members during their coronation, I felt a wave of relief as I realized it was finally…over with. I’d crossed Final Fantasy IV off of my bucket list.

But something about it lingered, and still does. I think back to Final Fantasy IV all the time. When ruminating in quiet moments, I sometimes rewind and play back the burning of Mist, the bombing of Damcyan and the death of Anna, the raid on Fabul and Rydia's return, and I can appreciate how pieces of the narrative seem to hold more layers than its charmingly chunky sprites let on. It’s hard not to notice specks of its influence in nearly every successive game in the genre, to say nothing of the groundwork it laid for the future of its own series. Though I can pinpoint the precise moment when my fascination clambered its way up and into a fat chocobo, there’s a lot to admire, even love about its dizzying ambition. It’s evident from the moment Uematsu’s incredible John Williams-inflected Red Wings theme booms over its soaring intro. Here’s where it got its hooks in me:

An earth-shattering event in the opening hour of the game has the player guiding a condemned Cecil Harvey through a scorching desert, burdened by the weight of his armor and an unconscious orphan while fending off hordes of vicious monsters. Until now the player has only seen flashes of the Dark Knight’s festering conscience over the atrocities he’s committed, but now he becomes decisive. Despite injury and lack of direction, with nobody to hold him to a moral standard, Cecil takes his first steps toward redemption by taking responsibility for the last surviving member of a village he’s inadvertently incinerated. It’s a powerful and understated gesture, represented only through the player’s own desire to press on through the overworld map and clobber goblins in intermittent random battles (curiously, a blue-clad hero would usher a green-haired girl to a desert oasis following an act of terrorism a second time just two games later). Subtle pieces of characterization like this permeate the battle mechanics. Cecil’s special ability as the Dark Knight is to cut a fraction of his own health for the sake of unleashing a powerful attack, evocative of his self-hatred, which is countered by Rosa’s potent healing spells. It even develops when Cecil becomes a Paladin and, effectively, becomes more like her. This is one of the key elements which makes Final Fantasy IV and other games of its ilk so fascinating to me. Since the developers were working in a time of abstractions, they had to find ways to use the language of the genre to convey their intent. How do you make a character feel like a person in a role-playing game? Square took to the tools they’d developed over the three previous installments and rearranged them in the shape of a drama.

Where previous entries in the series (and the next) would be content to keep classes significant only for strategic purposes, Final Fantasy IV uses them for character development as well. Palom’s rambunctious attitude is evident when he’s casting devastating offensive spells as a black mage, and even though he has a rocky relationship with his sister Porom, their “Twincast” ability assured me that they could get along when necessary. Yang’s focused and calculated physical combat maneuvers are emblematic of his discipline, which take time to build, but pay off in spades. Rydia refuses to cast fire spells until Rosa can help her come to terms with the aforementioned arson of her village, and eventually matures to the point at which she’s willing to trade in her aptitude in white magic for greater proficiency in those offensive abilities. Kain's bouncing between both sides as he’s repeatedly mind-controlled by Zemus is reflected in his elongated disappearances during battle as a leaping Dragoon. I’m half-joking with that last one, but this stuff really is all over the place. You might say I’m giving it too much credit given the simplicity of the characters, most of them are little more than archetypes, but the handful of ways those archetypes are expressed (and in some cases developed) still leaves an impression when every battle becomes an opportunity to participate in characterization.

If the DS remake is any indication, with its cinematic cutscenes, voice acting and the like (which nuke the pace from orbit), the Square Enix of today doesn't value these techniques as I do, but this is precisely the sort of thing that makes classic RPGs so special, and particularly Final Fantasy IV. It takes advantage of its game-dom to find routes to the player’s empathy using interactive systems. I mentioned that Cecil’s metamorphosis was one of my favorite sequences, and it’s not just the implication for his character, but the execution which makes it so memorable.

The setup is fantastic. A lone, weary Cecil is left to take refuge in Mysidia (the very place he pillaged as captain of the Red Wings), and the villagers try to tear him apart until the elder advises him to take to Mount Ordeals. Only there can he be purified of his sins and become a holy Paladin.

On arrival, the shambling undead who stalk Mount Ordeals take minimal damage from Cecil’s sword, emphasizing his nature as an agent of evil, unable to stand against it. He has to rely on the support of his allies, twin mages Palom and Porom and the elderly sage Tellah, to help him find redemption. His dependence reaches its apex as they stand against one of the Four Elemental Dante’s Inferno references and resident spelling bee stumper “Scarmiglione” (or Milon, if you like being wrong) and kick him off of a bridge to the beat of The Dreadful Fight. At the summit, the group crosses a rift into a mysterious chamber, and just as Cecil receives the Paladin’s blade and transforms, a manifestation of his past wrongdoings, fully clad in the armor of the Dark Knight, emerges from his reflection to face him. No matter what the player tosses at their doppelgänger, it cannot be defeated. “A true paladin will sheath his sword,” a voice whispers into the text box at the top of the screen. Cecil’s evil half pummels him again and again, and it can easily kill the player if they aren’t careful. It’s only when they recognize the metaphorically and mechanically self-destructive nature of the Dark Knight that they hold back to defend and heal themselves with Cecil’s newfound power, and his shadow dies expending the last of its violent energy. The player wins by refusing to fight, rejecting self-destruction and embracing love, and they do it using Final Fantasy IV’s battle mechanics. He takes up the Paladin armor and he returns to level one, but quickly ascends beyond his previous limits. It’s awesome. It’s Final Fantasy IV at its best. Just seventeen hours to go.

So yeah, here comes the heel turn. If you want a gauntlet of battles that’ll put your RPG combat skills to the test in a world of exhilarating twists and turns, you’ll find what you’re looking for in Final Fantasy IV. Part of me loves that about it, that I can boot it up and know exactly what I’m getting myself into, that I won’t have to bother with character customization or stat manipulation and just get the dungeon-crawling monster-fightin’ show on the road. That strict attention to pacing, party composition and encounter design is a quality it shares with MOTHER 3, Dragon Quest V and Chrono Trigger, but it’s all about the execution. These games weave the story into progression in meaningful ways, carefully constructing both elements alongside one another to great effect. FFIV was slated to do exactly that.

But in one hilarious moment, it became all-too clear to me that Sakaguchi had no idea where this was going.

Co-writer and director Takashi Tokita would tell you that they were only able to cram one measly fourth of Final Fantasy IV’s sprawling, epic script into the original cartridge. As Patrick Roesle of socksmakepeoplesexy.net once said (in an excellent write-up on the topic), “even though Square Enix proclaims itself a shaper of unique multimedia interactive art experiences, the SquareSoft that created Final Fantasy IV in 1991 made video games.” Which is to say, “bull[crap].” You can’t tell me that Sakaguchi had carefully and painstakingly deliberated over the implications of a man leaping off of an airship and strapping himself to a bomb to “seal the entrance” of a colossal chasm in the Earth and surviving. “JUST THROW IT, YOU MORON,” I howled (telepathically) at the screen. This guy had a daughter at home.

Final Fantasy IV began as a tale of self-reflection, revolt and redemption, and it is that for a good while. Cecil travels the world, proves himself to those he’s failed, and recruits a group of companions from across a variety of cultures and kingdoms, all to stand against the corruption of his homeland. Then they return to Baron, and so begins the slow descent into the Twilight Zone. I made a face when the evil king was revealed to be Cagnazzo all along, having killed and supplanted the real king. But wait, wasn’t that real king still the guy responsible for raising Cecil as a Dark Knight? Maybe Golbez had a hand in that, he seems to know what he’s doing. I thought the revelation that Kain had been mind-controlled the entire time was silly, but it was nice having him back in the party. Then, after a fierce fight with Barbariccia (Valvalis sounds cooler) and a thrilling escape to…Cecil’s room(?)…Kain’s gotta break the news. Golbez only has four crystals. Only? Whaddaya mean, isn’t that four outta four? Cid drops this gem of a quote, “So the legends are true after all!” (“Legends,” to which not one character has even tangentially referred over the course of this entire game), and this could’ve been anything. Instead, there are four more crystals underground. But, ya know…They’re dark crystals. They're darker.

Tellah died and took the story with him.

That was my first impression as a recently-converted Chrono Trigger shill in 2019, but even that wasn’t entirely fair. All of this plotting, this attention to the staging of events with animated characters and personalities whose crisscrossing actions and motivations contextualized the adventure, was completely unheard of. Dragon Quests I through IV were less “narratively-driven” and instead centered around exploring worlds whose goals and scenarios provided players the thread to weave their own experiential stories. Nobody does it like Yuji Horii, and if Final Fantasy had stayed its course, it’d have remained an awkward, lesser Dragon Quest. And so, Sakaguchi sought out and studied under Shonen Jump editor Kazuhiko Torishima in an effort to distinguish Final Fantasy from that philosophy. Tokita leapt at the chance to lend his theatrical expertise, and the result speaks for itself. The story may have commitment issues, but its manga-like attention to escalation and efficient characterization can’t be denied. In no previous JRPG did the party sit around a campfire mid-dungeon to discuss their worries, hopes, and doubts. Rarely did the player’s units bicker amongst themselves, turn against each other, or change their minds. Everyone is given their own animated identity, especially impressive given how few overworld sprites there are. It’s just unfortunate that the game’s chosen structural devices are horribly, goofily brittle.

I didn’t feel the need to mention the crystals up until now because…what’s there to say? Cecil just needed something precious to steal from the Mysidians. Baron needed justification for conquest aside from “just cuz”. They gave our heroes an urgent, tangible reason to seek out and protect other countries and people. Now you can forget about that whole theme of agency and redemption because it’s crystal time. It’s far less graceful about swapping party members around (now they all die (except not really)), Kain gets mind-controlled a second time, they recruit an edgy ninja named Edge whose parents have been turned into monsters by a mad scientist, they go inside a giant robot (and hear the best song in the game), we find out that Golbez was also mind-controlled so he’s a good guy and he’s Cecil’s brother and their dad was an alien, and one of the aliens has been behind everything from the very beginning so they take a spaceship to the moon to kill him (if you squint, you might notice that almost all of these points made their way into Final Fantasy VII in some form or another).

The tonal whiplash of fighting aliens with Cecil, the man who burned down a village, rescued an orphan, and spent the first quarter of Final Fantasy IV paying recompense for war crimes and becoming a holy knight, never left me. In fact, the sheer strangeness of later events got me to start poking holes in earlier bits of the story. What’s the point of Rydia’s mother’s soul being connected to the Mist Dragon? Cecil incinerated the entire village, I could’ve believed that she’d burned to death. How did Rosa reach Kaipo on foot? Couldn’t Cid have just taken her there on an airship? How did Edward end up all the way in Troia if he drowned in the ocean? Why does Leviathan attack the party if he’s actually a sapient, moral being? Why does Cecil sleep in his armor? How did Yang get captured and mind-controlled if he drowned in the ocean? I'm being deliberately facetious here, but the point stands. The magic began to evaporate as soon as I realized that SquareSoft had no interest in developing the premise that got me invested.

But in its place, something different bubbled into being. In spite of all I’ve said, I’ll admit that the longer I spent with Final Fantasy IV, the more appreciation and affection I developed for its bizarre, freewheeling narrative approach. It may not hold together on a literary level, but, strange as it might sound, there’s something endearing about that. The way its theatrical setup and dramatic cast dissolves further and further into incoherent chaos brings to mind a late-night tabletop campaign gone horribly wrong in all the right ways. The Dark Crystals exist because you and your buddies are having too much fun, the contrived reveals and sacrifices and even the fake-outs feel epic when the group is coming up with them on the fly around an empty pizza box, and, even as I was picking it apart with a scalpel, I couldn’t deny that familiar energy. While one half of me was laughing at the stupid alien spaceship, the other was laughing with it. Make no mistake, Final Fantasy IV is a videogame. It’s a digital monument to the joys of role-playing. If the first Final Fantasy is the manual, the fourth is the first to demonstrate its potential. There’s a reason why nearly all subsequent entries (in the entire genre) look to it for inspiration — it represents the unfiltered imaginative spirit of a team wading into their first generational leap. Final Fantasy IV is absolutely bursting with ideas, and it’s easy to get swept up in the fun of its exquisite corpse of an adventure.

And yet, it was just as easy for me to become detached from its increasingly preposterous twists and turns, and my inability to reconcile these two perspectives on my initial playthrough became exhausting. Time and reflection and revisits have tempered my judgement, but even if I never found it in my heart to forgive Cid’s idiotic sacrifice, I’d have more than enough reason to see it through.

Because I kept at it anyway, all the way to the end. I even decided to complete a handful of optional side-quests to add Odin, Leviathan and Asura to Rydia’s summons. I conquered the PSP’s Cave of Trials to get Yang, Palom, Porom, and Cid back up to speed (c’mon, I couldn’t keep Edge in the party). I had a rough go of it too, this was my first Final Fantasy. I did a frustrating amount of grinding before the Tower of Zot, a whole lot more before I could survive encounters on the moon, and had yet another sprawling session before I could give Zeromus so much as a sidelong glance without instant annihilation. Definitely a far cry from Chrono Trigger, where a rearrangement of equipment and a bit of tactical reconsideration was preparation enough, but something kept me going. Maybe it was a feeling of obligation, maybe it was the awesome ludo-narrative characterization, or maybe I’d come to appreciate the dissonant story in all of its Silver Age comic book-ish glory. I’d like to say it was the music, and I’ll get to that, but Uematsu couldn’t have done it alone. No, I think it was because, despite it all, Sakaguchi and co. had succeeded at making exactly what they’d envisioned. The game was kicking my ass, but settings and level designs were varied, enemy strategies kept me on my toes, I always felt like I had to discover and conquer whatever came next, no matter how stupid the narrative justification. I wanted to find treasure, see what was on the other side of that door, explore dungeons and vanquish monsters. Something clicked.

This wasn’t technically my first brush with Hirouki Ito’s Active Time Battle system, but it was dramatically different from the one I’d become used to. My first thought was that I preferred Chrono Trigger’s iteration of the concept, with its dynamically wandering enemies and tech system, but there is something to be said for this heavier, more direct style. You know how it goes, you’ve gotta think fast or you’ll get clobbered. Some enemies and bosses make use of it by requiring the player to bolt in during a rare opening in their defenses or wait until they let their guard down to avoid a massive counterattack. In one weird, memorable battle, a demonic wall (with a Xenomorph stuck inside?) creeps closer to the party in real time in an attempt to crush them. If it closes in, it’ll annihilate all five party members at once. Yeah, five.

This remains the only RPG I’ve played to use a five character setup, and if the ATB didn’t make things tense enough, managing five different characters at once took a bit of getting used to for a novice like me (especially after Chrono Trigger’s three character format). Still, I insisted on using “active” mode instead of “wait,” which essentially pauses the game while the player cycles through spell books and darts through their inventory, because I really came to enjoy the momentum it brought. You’d think that five characters would make things easier, but battles can get pretty frantic. If your experience was anything like mine, you found that the FFIV crew isn’t a particularly durable bunch. There’s not much the player can do to shape them, so they’ve gotta learn to deal with each character’s weaknesses by figuring out how to juggle their skills in the heat of the moment. Powerful abilities take time to perform, adding another layer of strategy to their use, and retaining the weaker abilities’ utility. Learning when and how to arrange characters in either the front or back row (and knowing who to select to strike which enemies, who abide by a similar system) according to their strengths is essential to minimizing damage taken and maximizing output (the dreaded “back attacks” made that all too clear). 

With time, my appreciation for FFIV’s combat design has deepened. It may not be as solid as Dragon Quest, but they certainly hit on something here. It's energetic and nerve-wracking, patient and explosive in equal measure. FFIV is still absorbing on replays, still able to generate a brand of momentum that effortlessly carries me through its various setpieces, dungeons, and boss encounters. With better planning and more decisive strategy, I’ve never had to spend as much time grinding levels as I did on that first attempt. It’s edging toward that prolific marriage of action game design and RPG mechanics that Chrono Trigger would eventually master, and what’s here is still blood-pumping when all of its ingredients gel. No doubt Uematsu’s contributions have more than a little to do with that.

I’ve made no secret of my love for Final Fantasy IV’s soundtrack, and it’d be criminal not to dedicate even a small paragraph to it. When I emerged onto the overworld for the first time and heard the Main Theme of Final Fantasy IV, I was still for at least a minute. I’d already been exposed to Nobuo Uematsu’s work intermittently throughout Chrono Trigger and had heard some of his stuff out of context (the classic victory fanfare, Final Fantasy VII’s battle and boss themes, etc.), but not until playing FFIV had I been hit with the full force of his talent. Final Fantasy IV’s overworld track might just be my favorite in the series, maybe because of that staggering first impression, and it continues to impress me now. Like a rising shepherd tone, it’s a melody that only seems to ascend with every loop. When I finally did move, that classic bass line (the very best in video games) ushered me into Fight 1, and I was blown away all over again.

Where most RPGs use their battle themes to heighten the dread of combat and the threat of the enemy (and the boss themes certainly accomplish that), Final Fantasy IV’s always sounded to me like an expression of hope that the heroes will overcome this trial and prevail against any obstacle. The airship theme lasts only twenty two seconds, but beautifully elicits the feeling of soaring through the mode seven skies, an exclamation of joy for the party’s newly-earned freedom. Even when I was rolling my eyes as the story reached the peak of its lunacy, I couldn’t deny the power of The Lunar Whale. Without voice acting, Uematsu’s music serves as something of a narrator for the adventure, managing to make even the story’s worst contrivances sound incredible. That the last dungeon features the triple whammy of Fight 2 during every enemy encounter, Within the Giant, and The Final Battle almost makes up for everything I’d groaned about.

Notice the past tense.

My first playthrough of Final Fantasy IV left me torn and unsure how to feel about the game as a whole, but time has been kind to it. On every revisit, especially since becoming more seasoned in the conventions of the genre, I find more to love. FFIV is a daring game, and even where it fails, it fails with passion. It’s easy to sneer at the fake-out sacrifices (and god knows I do) but I feel that the consequence of each sacrifice, whether the character lives or not, belies a little something about the game’s philosophy. That so many of the character deaths are fake-outs draws attention to the party members who truly die. The one who does.

Tellah destroys himself failing to avenge his daughter Anna, a moment during which he’s completely overcome with hatred. Palom, Porom, Yang, and Cid all survive (and succeed) in their sacrifices because all of them are concerned with keeping others alive. Edward lives after Leviathan’s attack because he was able to grow beyond his cowardice, honoring Anna’s memory by helping those in need. Rydia has to overcome her fear of fire because, tragically, she can’t do anything about those she’s lost, and that frightening power can still be leveraged for the benefit of humankind. FFIV spends its entirety teaching the player the same lesson Cecil had to learn in that chamber on the peak of Mount Ordeals: one should not fight for the purpose of bringing death, but to nurture and cherish those whom we can still protect. Maybe the team picked up this idea as they went along, but Sakaguchi ’n pals would spend the rest of their careers zeroing in on and more deeply exploring this concept.

I have to admit, wild though it was, I did feel something triumphant when Edward revealed that all of those dead party members were still alive. However idiotic the instruments of their demise, they all deserved to live.

On release, Wonder was quickly crowned the new king of the 2D Mario series by legions of folks who’d been burned deeply by the New Super Mario Bros. tetrology's hollow aesthetic. I was there. I’ve played all of these games. 2D Mario games are important enough to me that I will play them on a TV, even if it means passers-by can look in and clearly tell that I’m not filing my tax returns. I finished Wonder with 100% completion on the weekend of October 20th, 2023 (unless you count the standees. I don’t). I’ve replayed all of its levels at least twice, with and without grabbing each Wonder Flower. You know I like this game a heck of a lot. Nevertheless, I’ve got a lot to say, not all of it good. This is gonna sound a bit dry.

On Super Mario Bros. Wonder (OR — "No Country for New Super Mario Bros.")

Visually, Wonder is closer to my Dream Mario than any other this side of Yoshi’s Island, and I do hope the next one commits even harder to the cartoonishness of this aesthetic. My first impression was that it had the best control of any game in the 2D series, and in most respects, I do still believe that. The “New” games carried with them this lumbering heaviness that I’m glad we’ve shed away. The Elephant power-up is a bit undercooked, but the other two additions appropriately shake up the player's relationship with enemies and the environment. Just being able to jump into enemies from below while at a full sprint makes the Drill a treat, even without considering its burrowing ability. The removal of a flight-based power was likely due to multiplayer, but in principle, it helps the game stay centered squarely on running and jumping, and encourages creative use of the Bubble Flower (which, yes, is more or less a retooled Bubble Yoshi from off of NSMBU). The Demon’s Souls online feature is welcome; I didn’t see myself playing as a guardian angel in a Mario game, but here we are. Badges are a solid addition too, especially for newcomers. I can play as Daisy. Awesome stuff. Promising. Shame that, to my taste, there’s a lot left on the table here.

Every stage of this game locks its enemies and visuals and stage gimmicks down almost completely; you’re not likely to see much crossover. There’s one rolla-koopa stage, one hoppycat stage, one condart stage. These guys are stuck in their zones. It results in an impressive level of variety, but also prevents the game from meaningfully building on concepts from stage to stage. You don’t get that blending of flavors you’ll find in the series’ earliest entries. In this respect, it’s arguably even more formulaic than the games it’s trying to subvert. Each level’s gimmicks undergo a similar arc before being put away, each of them with a Wonder Flower to find which activates a minigame or setpiece. Nothing so plain as the well-documented and scientifically-proven "Four Step Level Design" of New Super Mario Bros., they just remembered to add the sugar. Would people still be talking about Mario 3's Angry Sun if you had to pop a regularly-mandated Wonder Flower to activate it? I don’t think it helps that these stages are threaded together as loosely as they are.

Playing into its save feature, Super Mario World invited its players to revisit levels for alternate exits and hidden secrets. Wonder doubles down on that attitude, with a wide-open map and only a single file per user. You’re meant to dig around in these levels and scour the world, but there isn’t really a whole lot to find. Yes, there are large coins to collect, tops of flagpoles to grab, but – and I hate to grumble – these pale in comparison to the discovery of warp zones, unique power-ups, and routes which alter the trajectory of a playthrough. I think they’d have been better off hiding badges within full stages than keeping them in shops or bespoke levels on the overworld. I’m of the opinion that collectibles should feel immediately tangible and exciting. Wonder sidesteps the checklist school of design for the most part, but I’d like to see it drop outta these games completely.

Here's what I'm getting at – I don’t think Wonder is adept at curating its adventure, and I don’t get the impression that its developers made that a priority. There’s a sort of halfhearted effort to add a single story beat to each world, and it's unconvincing. Possible plants just don't tend to pay off. The talking flowers never do. Stages are clustered together with respect to difficulty and theming, but any pretense of a “flow” between them, that levels together form an arc, is rarely suggested. A level is an island unto itself. It’s because the game isn’t concerned with its own replayability, actively obfuscating the option to start a New Game. It’s because Wonder isn’t all that interested in blending ideas between stages. It’s because the “Wonder” gimmick, ironically, requires each level to follow the same general beats.

I came for an album, and what I got was a collection of singles. They’re good, even great singles, but I don’t think it comes together as a whole game in the same way each of the old classics did. I hope Wonder is a sign that Nintendo is open to getting even more experimental with the conventions of this series (maybe cut out the world map next time, have one continuous game of back-to-back platforming levels), and I’m glad it was well received. You can feel those seasoned designers stretching their legs with this one — it beats out the New Super Marios on charm factor alone — and I squeezed every last drop I could out of it. I believe greater heights are within reach for this series, but if this is the last for a while, I'll still be more than appreciative that Wonder got its moment in the spotlight.

(...if you'd like to see where this falls on my list of the Thirty-Five Best Games I Played in 2023, you can check it out here. Thanks for reading!)

When I rummage back through the depths of my earliest memories, I sometimes graze the edge of a small spacecraft careening through the stars. It barrels around clusters of asteroids on Johnny’s CRT television on a sunny afternoon, powered by a grey oblong rectangle and stored inside of another…smaller rectangle. It sure didn’t look like a GameCube, yet here it was: proof that videogames had existed before me (I can recall a time before I knew what it meant that there had been a year called “1997”).

‘Course, I wouldn’t end up playing Star Fox 64 consciously for another fifteen or sixteen years at least. Though the release of its 2011 remake tapped at that far, hazy corner of my mind, it came during a time when I was becoming deeply entrenched in the Zelda series, and I would stay there a while. Only much later would I find myself inexplicably compelled to try Star Fox 64 at that same private library where Chrono Trigger had become a permanent fixture of my heart, maybe to finally satisfy a quiet curiosity that had been bubbling since the before-times. Star Fox 64 had patiently lingered as the first-ever game on my “backlog;” I thought I’d do myself a favor and knock it down. Instead, something else happened.

The first time I played Star Fox 64 for real, I sucked hard. I failed to protect Fortuna’s Defense Post from Star Wolf, let Slippy get slapped over to Titania, and exploded on Bolse. The game’s true personality was far more tactile and unforgiving than I’d come to expect from the “barrel roll” game on the Nintendo 64, and I was astonished by the level of respect it showed by tossing me into the deep end. That on its own recalled a brand of mechanical confidence I didn’t expect in the post-SNES era, but the thing that stood out to me most was that it let me fail these objectives and continue regardless, just down a different route than I would’ve taken otherwise. Where had this been all my life?

In the time I’d spent playing and talking about these things, I’d imagined my personal ideal videogame as one with narrative events that would speak not through dialogue, but the language of action game mechanics. I wanted a game whose branching story decisions were made using performance. I’d already found some examples of this (definitely play Papers, Please) and, upon honing what might be my “critical eye,” I found it wasn’t necessarily uncommon for games to use mechanics to demonstrate and heighten their story concepts (though the narrative told through the gameplay was sometimes at odds with the writing), but even the best of them weren’t quite doing exactly what I’d dreamt up. Neither was Star Fox 64, but man if it doesn’t have its moments.

Not every branching path comes with a contextually sensical reason, but they all emerge directly from the player’s activities throughout each stage, using the same verbs as every other interaction. Show off with some fancy flying, and Falco will one-up you by leading the group to a hidden zone. Save his squadron, and Bill might just show up in a later area to offer his assistance. That giant robot won’t be able to swipe Slippy into next week if you manage to blast it apart quickly enough. Further contributing to this cohesion are the mechanical roles each of your team members play during regular gameplay. All three assist during crucial battles and provide necessary banter hinting toward the various hidden exits, but you’ll have to be mindful to protect them if you want their help. Notably, bosses' health bars doesn’t show up at all if Slippy’s been downed, which may seem like a small thing, but you might be surprised at how far that little scrap of information can go in aiding your in-the-moment decision-making. It’s all done so flowingly, so effortlessly here that, in 2019, I was taken aback that I’d barely, if ever encountered a game that managed to achieve such a marriage of characterization and action gameplay that felt as consequential to an overall playthrough. I wouldn’t have guessed I'd have found it coming from Nintendo, and in 1997’s Star Fox 64, of all places.

For some players and future Star Fox developers, the potential of the series’ charismatic cast was the key takeaway, but I can’t say I was hugely invested in the possibility for their development. The crew is more "Jaws" than "Blade Runner," more "Ghostbusters" than "Ghost in the Shell." They're not here to grow and change, they're here to solve a problem. No, it was the potential of the game’s format that inspired my imagination.

Rhythm aside, there may be no genre that provides the developer such control over the timing of each setpiece, challenge, transition, and twist as the rail shooter. It seems obvious in retrospect, but I hadn’t given it a whole lot of thought until playing this game, likely thanks to their limited mechanical vocabulary and reputation for simplicity. Star Fox 64 is a developing interactive adventure story, and a more successful one than Half-Life, I think, for managing to give real consequences to the player’s decisions, and even their failures to successfully make decisions, by actively altering their progression (all while hitting that slick feature-length playtime). Time marches on, your enemies aren’t going to wait until you’re ready to engage them, and (with the exception of the game’s “All-Range” segments) every decisive action has to be performed at the correct moment in the script in order to succeed. “Cinematic” as this can feel, it never betrays the roots of the genre, still lending itself perfectly to the score-based joys of an arcade experience.

It’s hard not to feel that, of Miyamoto’s productions, Star Fox is easily the most Sega. A cast of talking animals, an arcade premise, an oddly technical control scheme which always takes a second longer to settle back into than you might expect, but Sega was already way ahead of me in recognizing what rail shooters were capable of. Star Fox 64 isn’t diminished by the presence of Panzer Dragoon Zwei or Treasure’s Sin and Punishment, though. In fact, it’s a testament to the ingenuity of these developers working within a fairly similar framework (and perhaps the deceptive flexibility of said framework) that none of these games manage to overshadow one another in any way. It just happens that, somehow, Nintendo’s take on the rail shooter remains the most structurally experimental of them all.

This Review is an excerpt from my recently-published List of the Thirty-Five Best Games I Played in 2023, so if this strikes a chord, there's more where that came from!

Now...On with the Show!!

As the sort of guy who spends his nights mulling over weird Pasts and Bad Futures, Sonic CD’s gameplay fantasia is a gift. The dream of loop-de-looping into ancient history, nipping the seeds of evil in the bud, and returning to find a kinder, more harmonious world…that’s something I think we all deserve to have at least once in our lives.

The Past

I’ve heard it said that those who played Sonic the Hedgehog games as children, because of their lack of money and therefore choice, persevered past their learning curves. They, unlike so many detractors, didn’t write them off for their quirks, didn’t fling them back in the bin for failing to immediately satisfy their need for speed. Well, not me. The “classic” Sonic games were some of my first, thanks to the Mega Collection on GameCube. I fell for every beginner’s trap, failed every skill check, ran out of lives and went back to Lego Star Wars. They did not survive the purge.

But I’ll give Sonic credit, he’s more patient than his idle animation would suggest. Waited the decade it took for Mania to teach me how it’s done. You can’t enjoy a Sonic the way you might a Mario. These aren’t games about charging forward through obstacles – asserting your presence with power-ups and projectiles – but going with the flow, allowing the geometry to carry you where it will, dexterously reacting to keep the ride going. The challenge of harmonizing with progressively jagged, unfriendly zones is not just the point, it’s the joy. After that, Sonic 3 & Knuckles became my favorite, and I figured that was just about the end of that. In 2017, I concluded that the highs of Sonic’s dynamic movement are fantastic, but it’s dependent on the strength of its level design, and those lows are just distracting enough to take it down a peg. An ideal Sonic playthrough occurs as a single unbroken thought, and a big enough blunder can compromise the current.

Fans will tell you that 3 and Mania represent the series’ most successful “balance” of forward momentum and exploration. I bought that; it’s the reason I prioritized those games. Here’s the thing. Why burden either one of these goals with the needs of the other? If the issue is that these level designs become unfocused, draw themselves out, fail to wholly satisfy either inclination…well, why not have one built entirely around speed, and another based on explor– OH WAIT THEY DID??

The Present

Last year, I called Mario World a great alternative sequel to Super Mario Bros. 3. Today, I’m crowning Sonic 2 its true successor. I play Mario 3 for the action, for its perfect jump and P-speed antics, and Sonic 2 takes that premise even further – a character whose movement is determined by his relationship to the environment. Even conceptually, Sonic's mechanical direction is inspired. Where 1 didn’t have the know-how to play to its strengths, and my previous favorites interrupted themselves with major gimmicks and a needless mess of boss fights, Sonic 2 is confident in the power of its physics – rolling through concise multi-tiered stages, darting from start to finish without a moment wasted. It's endlessly responsive to experimentation, filled with hidden shortcuts and dynamic skips. I spent ages fiddling around with a loop near the end of Chemical Plant Act 1, being sure to keep Sonic on his feet to better control his trajectory, taking off at just the right angle, through a one-way gate, to finish the stage in under twenty-five seconds. The thrill of tearing through the high route in Aquatic Ruin and Mystic Cave, of picking up speed shoes to launch high above Wing Fortress, bouncing off of a suspended monitor and landing DIRECTLY in front of the boss, is priceless. Emerald Hill Zone’s opening riff doesn’t get enough love, it’s up there with DaiOuJou in its ability to hook me in from frame one. Appropriately, it's as close to an OutRun-like physics platformer as we’ve ever had. It's one of the greats because every frame of its forty-five minute run fizzles with potential energy. Ignore the Emeralds and go.

But friends, I had played Sonic the Hedgehog 2 before the year 2023. My love for it has grown to ridiculous size (Thanks in no small part to Sonic 2 Absolute), but I've respected it for some time. Even finished it. This is not a review of Sonic 2.

How ‘bout I take you down to Quartz Quadrant.

The Good Future

Sonic CD shares 2’s place at the top of the heap. Given its reputation, I could not believe how well it clicked. Overly wide, exploratory level design in action games isn’t my thing, but here, it’s less a matter of “exploring” for a number of key objects, and more about enjoying the breadth of what Sonic’s physics are capable of – shooting through massive cascading loops and rebounding up and around towering, dreamlike worlds. Coming off the heels of the first game, with an entirely separate team from Sonic 2, it’s ridiculously forward-thinking. CD preempts the conceit of Mario 64’s 3D game design by a whole three years during an age when every year played host to wild innovation across the medium. It celebrates Sonic's unique movement mechanics like nothing before or since.

I called a perfect Sonic playthrough “unbroken,” but I didn’t say “fast.” Whether you’re flying high or barreling through badniks, movement is its own reward. And while that would’ve been enough for me to give it the thumbs-up, CD does not rest on those laurels. Hit a signpost and maintain top speed, and you’ll time travel between any of three eras of the same stage. Must be the best take on Mario 3’s P-Meter there’s ever been. Smash a robot generator in the past, and you’ve earned a wonderland of a future. Hunting generators is the way the game is designed to be played, and I refuse to ever run the game without them. Beyond the fact that they encourage the intended playstyle, the consequence for failure is too tangible, too well-executed to ignore.

I have to wonder if there was a kid in 1993 whose immediate inclination was to hurl Sonic into the future. When this child finally managed to do this, the coolest thing they could possibly imagine being able to accomplish in any game – Making Sonic the Hedgehog Time Travel into The Future – they wound up in an apocalyptic hellscape. The Bad Future so starkly different, so loud and raucous, that it almost feels like a joke. The stakes are clear; Sega put in the work to make you want to care about the world you're trying to save, if only to find out how great the Good Future's music must be. It'd be sick enough to have this two years ahead of Chrono Trigger, but even now, I can't think of another action platformer that attempts anything like this.

And don’t believe what they tell you, there are no bad Zones (Wacky Workbench is fun, I promise). I could swear the Japanese Soundtrack makes its already vibrant colors even more evocative. It’s exactly as complex as any game in this series should be. Its opening cutscene is everything to which Sonic should ever have aspired.

The Bad Future

Another 2D Sonic game released in 2023. We don’t have to talk about that one.