I cannot for the life of me glimpse a Pokémon videogame without feeling strongly that someone is trying to sell me a whole lot of something. Look, there’s no significant period in my life when I haven’t been surrounded on at least one side by Poképeople. My earliest friends traded cards and owned massive encyclopedias containing every last scrap of available information, my little brother played its Nintendo DS entries and watched the anime during breakfast, and no matter where I went, somebody had to know what an Articuno was. Some of them would buy both versions of newly released games. My first real girlfriend had literally Caught Them All. I had to dress up as a Pokémon Trainer to complete a group cosplay at Boston Comic Con one year, during which I ran into one of my favorite cartoonists and had my portrait drawn in costume. Now I’ve been immortalized as a Pokéman (if you guys are reading this, I was happy to do it). A brief moment in 2016 proved that all known human religions paled in comparison to the universal power of the very idea of Pokémon existing in Real Life. God loves Pokémon. At least he didn’t pick, I dunno, Kingdom Hearts (or did he?).

Nobody thinks of Pokémon as a JRPG series because its reputation is untouchable. However sick of it I may be, I absolutely cannot deny the genius in its core concept (I mean, I don’t have much of a choice). Yes, anyone can tell you that Dragon Quest V and Shin Megami Tensei had done the whole “monster-recruiting” thing before Pokémon. Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna did it in 1987, and markedly better than anyone else would ever do it again (god, if only. Can you imagine that? Maybe then I’d be reviewing Wizardry IV right now…). Pokémon did it stronger by designing the entire setting around that one concept, playfully populating it with living capsule toy animals, and stripping out absolutely everything else. Its visual language is clean and understated — enter tall grass, and you’ll run into wild Pokémon. You can catch those. Cross another trainer’s line of sight, and they’ll reveal their brainlessness before hurling frogs at you one at a time. You can’t catch those. You’ve got an idiotic rival. Build your team, be sure to cover a good number of those elemental types, manage each Pokémon’s four move slots in a hyper-elegant RPG character-building system, and watch them evolve into crazy beasts. You already know all of this. Why wasn’t I playing it?

My girlfriend who had Caught Them All sent me Pokémon Alpha Sapphire as a present one year. I appreciated the gift, I was hoping this might be my opportunity to understand this series and relate to her and others who loved it. Unfortunately, that’s…not quite what happened. I played all the way through the entire game (and the post-game) with my eyes glazed all the way over. Try as I might, I couldn’t find much to love about it. Pokémon Alpha Sapphire just up and hands you several legendary Pokémon, an exp. share that extends to your whole party, and an entire Blaziken, and I could not conjure a reason on Earth not to use them at every given opportunity. Without the need to take responsibility for each decision made, I failed to find the real meat of the experience. It introduced cataclysmic story stakes and relentlessly buttered up my player character as the Absolute Best Chosen One Destiny Guy, which kinda flies in the face of what I perceive to be the series’ tonal appeal, being that fantastical things can happen in humble, relatable places. Whether or not it was misguided, it had a substantial effect on my point of view for a good while. I allowed my impression of this game to color my perspective of its series as well as the genre it belonged to. I’d given it a chance, and it wasn’t for me. In retrospect, I might’ve discovered Dragon Quest III a whole lot sooner if she’d suggested a certain other Pokémon remake instead…

(To Be Continued in the Pokémon FireRed Review...)

(Continued from the Pokémon FireRed Review...)

After a solid Pokémon FireRed experience, my Twilight Princess buddy and I decided to take on a game together. Knowing neither of us would’ve been satisfied with the then-recent offerings, we decided on Pokémon Crystal for the Game Boy Color via the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console. Crystal is perhaps the most lovingly crafted game in the series. Not that I’ve played the rest, I just can’t imagine it gets quite so thoughtful ever again (be sure to let me know if I’m wrong about that). As more thorough historians have pointed out, Pokémon’s second generation began development before the series exploded into a multi-bajillion dollar religion, and was the last to feature series creator Satoshi Tajiri as director. Judging by the nature of his two games compared to the stuff that followed, I have no choice but to conclude that I like this guy. His modest settings demonstrate a desire to simply provide his players a miniature, cutely idealistic neighborhood or countryside to get lost in. Where later sequels would achieve plastic doll house-ishness and Barbie-worthy Pokémon Center exterior architecture (even in FireRed), their earlier iterations were contained within charmingly ordinary little brick houses. Tajiri’s regions were places that looked like they might exist somewhere, only, they also happened to include Pokémon (Generation 2’s story even implies that its 100 new monsters just sorta…showed up all of the sudden). I hadn’t exactly been playing Pokémon according to Tajiri’s vision until this point, but that was about to change.

Nowadays, you can hurl your unwanted rat into the aether and even grab Super Duper Ultra Awesome Legendary goldfish online via special events, and while I’m not opposed to the inclusion of internet functionality, I do think (as the foremost authority on the subject) that this sort of thing does sort of go against the spirit of these games. Without another means of grabbing Alakazam, Gengar, or Golem, my friend got ahold of a Kadabra and a Haunter for me, and I trained him a Graveler. When we traded and unlocked their final evolutions, it felt like we’d broken the game. We progressed through Crystal in parallel, battling intermittently, swapping tips, and having a generally good time. Before long, my Lavos (Cyndaquil) had become a Typhlosion, and the end was nigh. Taking on the Elite Four and its Champion was quickly succeeded by the final battle against my true, real-world Rival. I still feel kinda bad about abusing Sleep Powder, though he insists it was totally fair game.

I knew there was a whole post-game section ahead of me, possibly the most memorable in the series’ long history, but after that experience, I was completely satisfied. Believe it or not, I continue to be. I’d finished Pokémon, gone out with a bang, and felt safe in the knowledge that I understood firsthand why the entire world holds Bulbasaur so close to its heart.

Just don’t ever ask me for anything ever again.

Who is “Gordon Freeman"? A messianic savior? A silent protagonist? A few letters of separation from a famous Hollywood actor? Half-Life would have you believe he’s an MIT graduate, just your run-of-the-mill theoretical physicist who’s late for work. The opening act of the game might just have you buying into that narrative, with its creeping, introspective atmosphere and minimal weaponry, but it isn’t long before our hero shows his hand.

He’s Doomguy in a pair of glasses.

I’m only half-joking with that one; the FPS genre was still operating under many of the same fundamental tools and techniques as its id Software fore-parent, and struggling to escape the whole “DOOM-clone” moniker. Between analogous loadouts, a similar enemy design philosophy, and a premise that’s practically identical between the two games, that comparison is tough to shake. But Half-Life did manage to escape that reputation in a pretty big way, and that comes down to the strength of its direction. The story evolves in first-person, alongside the gameplay, almost never withholding your control. The sound design, screenshake, and moody visual ambiance accentuate every earth-shattering moment of catastrophe, along with the quiet aftermath. That first act where a failed experiment causes an outpouring of monsters into our dimension is hardly an afterthought in DOOM’s manual, but Valve gives it time to breathe and play out in full, with the player thrust into the shoes of a firsthand participant. The facility crumbles all around you, your coworkers scramble for cover as alien creatures burst through glass dividers and doorframes, and you can’t help wondering if your character is directly at fault for this apocalyptic turn of events.

If there was ever any reason to assign Gordon the badge of “scientist,” that’s it. The “Opposing Force” and “Blue Shift” expansions would prove just how meaningless that distinction is on the actual playing of the game, you never do anything that only a theoretical physicist could do beyond this point, but the choice in preserving and even deepening Doomguy’s quiet stoicism was a savvy one. The HEV suit’s virtual assistant might not do much for me (“USER DEATH IMMINENT”), but the character’s stalwart silence gives our ability to underhandedly murder our dopey NPC friends some actual canonical credence. We decide just how far off the rails Gordon will go, and this first game doesn’t ever push back on a less savory interpretation of the character (on the other hand, just having the option to mess with NPCs makes a more stable Gordon seem even more patient and clear-headed than he might be without one). Personally, I prefer to think of the entirety of the game as one big “what-if” scenario. What if an MIT graduate with zero military training could out-class an entire platoon’s worth of men and monsters? Considering just how easily he goes down, Freeman’s a Deadman without the quicksave feature.

Artistically satisfying as it can be to witness this story developing in real time, spinning further and further into disaster with every passing moment, Half-Life hits a bit of a lull in its midsection, where it fully decides to trade in its “Alien” for the more explosive “Aliens.” It is a bizarrely long stretch before it satisfies its hunger for deathmatch arenas filled with army goons. Though I appreciated that almost every piece of equipment maintains utility for a pretty vast chunk of the experience, it doesn’t compete with DOOM on its home turf. The more it leaned into that angle, the more I began to lose interest. The enemy AI is shockingly competent, but it was hard not to feel like Half-Life was missing its own point by swapping its otherwise cerebral approach for high-octane madness. The cohesion and believability of the Black Mesa facility was remarkable almost the whole way through, but having to scrounge for the one conveniently-placed tunnel or passageway that’d invariably carry me out of each area and into the next began to feel more contrived the longer it droned on, and however long you think it is, I can almost guarantee you that Half-Life is longer. It’s at its best in its early hours, when resources are low, tension is high, and enemy arrangements require nigh Portal-esque cleverness to overcome (some bits of its structure are evocative of early 3D Zelda dungeons, which is funny to think about considering this game came out within only a couple days of Ocarina of Time).

The wonder at Half-Life's seemingly endless creativity eventually turns to boredom at its seeming endlessness. The late game isn’t nearly as bad as some like to claim, but I felt it did somewhat undermine the uniqueness and mystery of the setting to a degree I’m not sure I agree with. It’s a little rambling and a little broken (alright, maybe a LOT broken), and it kinda loses its grip, and no game should ever ship with ladders as repulsive as these, and it’s practically built around this dumpy quicksave system, but I wouldn’t dream of arguing with what Half-Life is going for…or at least, what I think it’s going for. Environmental storytelling, a confident and flowing narrative progression, visual consistency, drama that emerges naturally via the rules of the game and thoughtful direction, it has a lot of what I was just raving about with Prince of Persia, it just had to rein itself in a little and assess its own strengths. If Half-Life’s numbered sequel is any indication, though, Gabe Newell and I probably don’t agree on what those strengths are.

(Continued from the Pokémon Alpha Sapphire Review...)

Turns out, Pokémon FireRed is just flat-out what I’d wanted out of Alpha Sapphire. My Twilight Princess friend (see the Final Fantasy VII Review) implored me to try it several years after the Alpha Sapphire debacle (because there is truly no escape), and when I finally did (after much procrastination), I…actually became a temporary fan of this series. FireRed was less Absolutely Mortified that I might lose or get stuck and vow never to buy their patented Pikachu merchandise ever again, and more of a confident videogame. Later Pokémen would force the player to admit that they “love Pokémon” before even being allowed to choose a starter, as though swearing their undying allegience to the brand. FireRed let me make honest mistakes and decide that for myself. Turns out, real love takes work. I had to manage which of my Pokémon would receive exp. and at which times (even after nabbing the exp. share), I had to raise each of my ‘mons from the ground-up and spend some amount of brainpower deciding how I’d construct my party. It even had the courtesy to open up at certain junctures and let me decide the order in which I’d tackle its gyms. Finding a new Pokémon somewhere never failed to blast some Good Chemicals into my brain, as I’d quickly begin to wonder whether it had a place as part of the crew. Even if it didn’t, I’d have to consider whether I was equipped with an efficient way to take it down.

Pokémon FireRed is hardly a Herculean Challenge, but it didn’t need to be in order to succeed where Alpha Sapphire failed. The important thing is that it trusted its own systems and guided me using the language it had established. There are genuine discoveries to be made in FireRed, and some of them even feel like they could be the player’s own. Its simple rivalry, sparse story and quaint setting included everything I might’ve wanted, and nothing I didn’t. Here was a game I could thoroughly respect. To think that an empire had been built on the back of its original version on the GameBoy. To think it released after Final Fantasy VII internationally and still slaughtered the competition on the basis of its universally appealing game design. I thought maybe I’d already be bowing my head and succumbing to the scam artistry if the games had stayed this good. After another, I realized that this was not to be.

P.S. I highly discourage playing any Pokémon game on "Shift" Mode. It outright removes a significant piece of the combat puzzle, and I don't think the game does nearly enough to express this. "Set" all the way (I can't begin to tell you how many times I've confused the two. C'mon Game Freak, just call "Set" the "Real Mode").

(To Be Continued in the Pokémon Crystal Review...)

Packs more thrills, spills, heartbreak and meaningful decision-making into five minutes than some games ever manage in fifty hours. Pac-Man Championship Edition is the smallest number of parts milked for maximum engagement, bringing out the best of the original while deftly dodging its googly-eyed ghost with newfound finesse. Threading through its shifting labyrinth, taking in the positions of dots and fruit and the movement patterns of each brightly-colored pursuer at all ends of the screen, one can’t help thinking that its titular “Championship” might be of a more cosmic variety…one which begins and ends…with Pac-Man.

Have you ever been playing DDR, watched an arrow zip down the screen to the beat of “I Ran” by A Flock of Seagulls and thought, “Alright. What really qualifies this particular note of this song as a right arrow instead of an up arrow?” I mean, it’s a test of rhythm, right? But rhythm is about pacing, timing, getting into a perfect groove by being able to clearly predict the sequence of actions. One may or may not conclude that, in a hypothetically “perfect” rhythm game, it should be completely possible to close your eyes and rely on audio alone to carry you through to the end (this is all down to preference, of course). For this to work, your inputs would have to correspond with particular sounds instead of arbitrarily selected visual cues. DDR’s input mapping of “I Ran” can conceivably chart two G major chords from different parts of the song onto two separate arrows, making this a tricky prospect (disclaimer: I have not checked to see if “I Ran” features the G major chord), and almost every game in the genre follows a similar model. But this is still a game. The goal is delivering a simplified, digestible, and curated version of the real experience; otherwise players can just go out, learn an instrument, and join a band instead. A functional game built for this sort of thing would ideally feature nothing but songs which have all been carefully designed for this level of sonic clarity (it’s not impossible to do this with licensed or “normal” songs instead, but they’d have to be peppered with additions for the sake of the gameplay, which probably wouldn’t be welcome), but what are the odds that anyone is actually going to go to the trouble of making something like that?

Leave it to the WarioWare folks. Rhythm Heaven Fever is charming as all heck, and I’ve had so many of its goofy little tunes rattling around in my brain for years (Packing Pests 2, Air Rally, Samurai Slice, etc.), but its greatest achievement is in its layering of musical rules which come together in endlessly surprising and creative ways. Every tune in the game is well-constructed and clever on its own, all of them introducing some sort of audio cue or two or three which get explored, and are then tossed into a pot and stirred with the rest of the lot to form even more challenging oddball conglomerates of melodic cleverness. And yeah, cute as it is, Rhythm Heaven Fever can get surprisingly tough. With only two inputs, the game has no reservations about tightening up its timing requirements and asking for near perfection, especially in its home stretch, but the pressure is lifted by the bizarre situations and characters designed to represent each song. The role you play in the audio is made hilariously clear through the visuals — you know you’ve missed a “flipper roll” in “Flipper Flop” if your little seal avatar is bumping into his fellow performers — and it’s in this way that a oneness between the song and the player’s agency within its soundscape is achieved. You press a button, and your character does (or attempts to do) the same thing every time. Sounds simple, but it’s a pretty rare find in a genre where you’ll most commonly be asked to press a string of disconnected buttons while watching a barely-related music video.

Anyone looking for more “expressive” or “nonlinear” mechanical systems isn’t likely to find it in this genre, and if we look at these games as sort of gamified metaphors for playing musical instruments, that could be seen as a bit a shame, but if you want a test of your raw rhythm prowess, I’ve yet to come across anything as pure and satisfying as Rhythm Heaven Fever. Screwing a robot’s head into its body, striking a pose in front of an adoring crowd, kicking a ball and slapping a spider out of the air all feel as viscerally enjoyable as they sound when applied to the backing track at just the right moment (which isn’t to say they all hit that same mark, but even the worst bits still enjoy the benefits of the rest of the game’s “vision-optional” philosophy). It keeps up that musical creatively for longer than you’d expect, and still lands the dismount without outstaying its welcome. If nothing else, “Remix 10” has earned its spot on my pantheon of final bosses. It does for high-fiving monkeys what DOOM did for shotgunning demons.

The pitch behind Metroid Fusion is electrifying. A powerless, more introspective Samus whose agency has been stripped away, an alien stalker who has appropriated her lost power, apocalyptic consequences for the events of a previous game, and a grand conspiracy bubbling beneath. The opening shots of Samus’ iconic power suit being dissected and replaced with something stranger and more vulnerable might as well be Fusion’s mission statement. Our protagonist may never be the same again, and what she was may not have been something to admire. I welcome this stuff with open arms. For a company like Nintendo to green-light an explicitly critical deconstruction of one of its own characters is pretty much unheard of. When are we getting the game where Link gets banished from Hyrule for plundering the homes of its citizens? Metroid Fusion was slated to examine the fundamental building blocks of its namesake and pull them inside out.

The severity of Fusion’s linear progression, delivered by an authoritarian AI, is emblematic of Samus’ new role as a pawn of the Federation. Thanks to this structure, the story unfolds as never before, dealing out swift twists, anticipating the player’s response, and substantially altering areas they've become familiar with. Samus reflects at various intervals on the last time she’d been required to take orders under a commanding officer, chipping away at her otherwise silent, mysterious shell. Most tragically, her robust and experimental moveset from the previous game has been torn to shreds. Welcome to the army. Do as you’re told. Get with the program.

Metroid Fusion isn’t subtle about its goals, but for all it does to lay the groundwork for a groundbreaking premise, I can’t say it reaches that potential. I’ve got a lotta notes, but let’s cut to the center of this thing. Even without the Federation doling out the orders, the level design is so superlatively guided and contained that I never feel even remotely at risk of going off-script. We always find ourselves where we need to be the way we need to be there. I know this sounds like I’m not getting it, just stick with me for a second. I do understand the nature of Fusion’s framing, but if I’m going to feel “restricted,” I have to feel that there’s something I’m being denied. I have to be able to press up against the bars of my prison cell and glimpse some glimmering sign of freedom. Without that, the tension between Samus and the Federation exists in name only. This is especially damning when the story attempts to emphasize Samus’ disobedience. If I could bomb jump to a high ledge and feel the AI actively working against my efforts to unveil the secrets of the BSL Station by, I dunno, closing shutters and vacuuming up my morph ball bombs (courtesy of Samus Returns), I’d be sold on that friction. Opportunities of this kind would have to start scarce and increase in frequency to retain that slow burn, and with effort, maybe the player would be able to make discoveries and break the sequence. But enough daydreaming; as it stands, we have a setting that feels more generic than stifling. Samus isn’t asserting her agency when she’s taking the only path available.

It’s also thanks to this problem that its bevy of increasingly dangerous twists, while well-paced in their escalation, lack bite. They rarely feel as monumental as they should because they don’t demand much thought from the player to navigate, and there isn’t enough diversity in Samus’ movement kit (or other problem-solving methods) to inspire mastery or personal responsibility. So while progression is plenty challenging and polished in its construction, those challenges aren’t particularly interesting. As well-realized as the X-Parasites are (and it pains me to say this), that criticism unfortunately extends to Samus’ SA-X dopplegänger as well, who rarely factors into the game as a fully-featured element. The few, scattered segments during which it appears are some of the most memorable in Fusion, with unfettered ruthlessness and sound design that just radiates presence, but for the vast majority of the game, it can be safely forgotten.

Put another way, its approach to control and level design lacks nuance, and overpowers its narrative framing.

As much as I may wish it had, Metroid Fusion doesn’t do enough to hammer its concept home. Whenever I return, renewed with the hope that it might’ve been better than I remembered, what I find is an above-average 2D action game garbed in an enticing mystique. But here’s the thing — what I see behind Metroid Fusion is not incompetence or misguided philosophy, it’s a strong team that bit off more than it could chew. When I catch myself ruminating on Fusion’s highs and the power of its premise (and I do on occasion), I know I’d have done the same. Maybe Sakamoto wasn’t exactly bluffing when he claimed that technology had prevented him from realizing Metroid Dread for a whole 19 years. If the Super Metroid people couldn’t complete Fusion, he had reason to believe that nobody could have. At least, not yet.

P.S. I want to emphasize (and I've alluded to it here and there), the presentation of this game is its best-executed quality. It does a commendable job of dressing the set for each of its big events, its sound effects and visual theming are fantastic, and, at its best, the level design does a fine job of building suspense and thoughtfully foreshadowing later moments. Fusion frequently achieves a unique and potent atmosphere, and don't let it be said that I don't think it's worth a playthrough.

I finished Silent Hill 2 in October, and I had a dream in November that compelled me to write about it in March. However benign, edgy, or vague this may sound, I'm trying to communicate something I think might be true. Take this as an invitation to scrutinize.

—

When I think about “you”, my mind recedes into its own fog. I can’t help this ugly feeling that I’ll always be waiting to meet “you”. That I’m going to stay “here” between the walls of this empty room, knowing but never internalizing that “you” aren’t coming. And it’s such a stupid, agonizing quirk of my programming. I can stare hard into the flesh of my eyes and explain to the face in the bathroom that “you” exist in the moments between the moments I’ve felt loved by anything, but I won’t believe that. Do you?

And I’m afraid that I’ll never stop waiting. Even though I’m holding the key. Even though the handcuffs are on the floor. I miss you, even when I’m not alone.

And they tell me you’ll be here, any day now. The wallpaper is peeling and the halls are flooding and some sort of droning noise is sinking a knife into the meat of the air, and I’m sitting crossed-legged in the mold on the carpet. Any day now. And I’m trying not to burn a hole in the door.

Last year, my one and only sitting with Tokimeki Memorial: Forever With You on the Sega Saturn (Language Barrier Edition) presented me with the videogame equivalent of an absolutely madcap romantic comedy. My only being able to intuit what I could from tones of voice, facial expressions, and a minimal Japanese vocabulary led to what I can only describe as utter thirty two bit bedlam (or at least as bedlam as a football manager-style dating sim on the Saturn can manage to be). That bedlam somehow saw me slap-dashedly, unwittingly, Buster Keaton-ly landing smack-dab in the middle of a happy ending with the girl I'd been hoping for, and a bright future ahead. If there was anything I was nearly sure of after that experience, it's that a hypothetical revisit in my spoken language would be nothing short of a breeze. I was wrong.

My sixteen bit playthrough of Tokimeki Memorial (courtesy of a fantastic fan translation) reflected back some hard feelings, doubts, even truths that I'd faced every day, that I'd never seen made so uncompromisingly tangible. I know I'm indecisive, easily spread thin by the thought of pleasing everyone and fulfilling every perceived responsibility. Dating, or simply developing meaningful relationships in high school and college, felt like a layer I could barely afford to slot into my life without throwing everything else into disarray. I'm enormously lucky to be in the position I'm in and to have the opportunities I do, I know plenty of others who manage (or seem to manage) far better under even higher pressure, but somehow, I just don't know how to be the things everybody needs or wants me to be while also managing the many various roles I want for myself. I'm nowhere as close with my college friends as I might've liked, having recently graduated, and I don't think I would've done much better even without a global pandemic. It's easy for me to blame circumstance. I like to rationalize that there just wasn't any way things would've turned out any better than they did, due to any number of uncontrollable factors, but then comes Tokimeki Memorial, here to put its foot down and tell me "No."

Call it a "reality check" in virtual form. Here's a cold, numerical game system with myriad routes to some manner of "happy ending," wherein I so anxiously scrambled to be "liked" by everyone, to be accepted by my school and my peers while maintaining my health and grades, that I was loved by no one. I found no puppet master-like "power fantasy," not in an honest, straightforward, reset-less playthrough, only the crystalized sensation of what it's like to be caught in the middle. Whatever potentially troubling social implications the "bombing" mechanic and constant, frantic juggling of everyone's impressions might suggest as standalone game systems, I believe they're ultimately in service of a mentality that the game successfully pursues. With each year that goes by, the player accumulates and becomes increasingly torn between desires and responsibilities to themselves and other people. So I never had a rumor bomb go off and poison my reputation, but nobody ever really opened up to me either. After all, I had to manage my increasing "Stress" stat, my grades, the other girls who required my time and attention, my club participation, bouts of depression, a feral Panda at the Great Wall of China, and my appearance, among other, even more granular things. Given the circumstances, didn't I do as well as I could have? Didn't I end up as happy as was feasible for someone like me? The game's own premise, backed by my own naive past experience, disagrees.

Yes, what I'm confessing here is that I'm "bad at Tokimeki Memorial," and that being "bad at Tokimeki Memorial" seemed to reflect back on my handling of real relationships. It seemed clear now that I'd all but failed to commit to any of my recent friendships, be present, or balance priorities with my own well-being — all things I must’ve understood, but had never seen so vividly, so bluntly represented. Maybe that’s not fair to myself, and I hope it doesn’t sound as though I’m criticizing anyone else whom I’ve connected with over the years, but, to at least some degree, I really felt that this silly old game about talking to fictional girls was somehow right about me. Depending on who you are, such an experience might start you down the path to unraveling every possible ending, but, to my future self, I hope this encouraged and helped you to better identify the changes that have to be made to develop stronger relationships in the places you find yourself. If all else fails, move to a country where English isn't the dominant language and roll the dice.

It’s easy to point to the late 90s and early 2000s as the collective “moment” when videogames truly began harboring cinematic ambitions. That third dimension brought with it a whole new bag of tricks, and no one was shy about dumping them out. We might be tempted to blame that generation for some modern triple-A trends, but of course, this desire is about as old as videogames themselves. Even if we don’t count the evocative text adventures of the 70s and 80s, the parser-based adventure games pioneered by Sierra and the then-titled “LucasFilm Games,” early CRPGs, game adaptations of movie scenes like The Empire Strikes Back on Atari, and ventures like the barely interactive Dragon’s Lair all sought to marry the theatrical qualities of more prestigious media with games’ unique ability to put you in the driver’s seat. Some of these efforts paid off in fulfilling their own respective goals, but what they couldn’t and often still rarely accomplish is a cinematic cadence and consistency. Playing The Secret of Monkey Island, it’s impossible to truly feel that everything happening at all times carries real dramatic weight. Action games are almost always predicated on a fundamental asymmetry between the player character and everything else — goombas can’t interact with fire flowers — or otherwise bespoke elements whose rules don’t apply to the rest of the game world — Ocarina of Time’s eye switches are only affected by arrows, and cannot interfere or be interfered with by any other means. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this kind of design, I’ve singled out a couple of the greats to make that as clear as possible, but it’s this general lack of internal consistency across the medium which makes 1989’s Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia stand out.

Whether or not you feel that developing a “dramatic game system” is a reasonable or misguided goal, or if “verisimilitude” and “internal consistency” are necessary in achieving it, there’s a level of cohesion to the game’s storytelling and mechanics which I can only describe in these terms. Prince of Persia doesn’t have an incredibly substantive plot (escape the dungeon and save the princess), but the confidence with which it (mostly) wordlessly conveys and provokes the player to experience that story still impresses. It’s in the way the game doesn’t waver in its visual perspective, always presenting the world in profile even during cutscenes, never showing anything which doesn’t have direct gameplay implications. The consistency of its visual language in and outside of playable moments gives weight and narrative credibility to the time spent playing, there is no strict divide between “story” and “gameplay” moments. There are only two truly notable caveats to Prince of Persia’s otherwise spotless coherence, but both are purposeful and arguably necessary for the game to function (respawning after death, and switching between the modes of general movement and combat). Its more widely lauded successor, Eric Chahi’s Another World, though great, is stitched out of setpieces whose solutions have no bearing on the rest of the game, but Prince of Persia never introduces any rule that won’t become relevant or useful ever again. Each space is a system of interlocking parts, where the drama emerges directly from the fact that you’re given almost perfect information about the consequences of engaging with those parts.

Sounds like a pretty clear-cut platforming videogame, but there are some important distinctions to keep in mind. In the shoes of our rotoscoped hero, even the simplest geometric level design must be approached as though it were a real space. if you want to descend a platform, you must step carefully to the edge so as to avoid falling off, turn around, lower yourself down using your hands, and let go of the ledge to drop to your feet. If you want to leap further than the width of a single tile, you’re gonna need a running start to do it. Spike traps can be tiptoed across, but running or jumping will create the force needed for them to pierce through. Failing to take into account the weight and durability of your fragile human body will always result in a gruesome death, but you’re not the only one for whom that applies. Guards litter the hallways of the castle, and all of them are susceptible to the same grisly horrors as the player character. The imposing guillotines, pressure plates and falling tiles can all be used against your adversaries, they’re even as vulnerable to fall damage as you are. Prince of Persia’s environments are built out of only a handful of elements, but each one is an unalienable fact of the setting, and must be treated as such. It’s not the layouts of these levels which create that all-important sense of verisimilitude, fun as they can be to explore and find new routes around, but the consistency and believability of their laws.

The sheer amount of danger lurking around every corner and crevice coupled with the level of commitment required of the player’s inputs means it’s tempting to take a very slow and methodical approach to Prince of Persia, but we can’t have that. For it to succeed as a dramatic game, every moment has to carry a degree of real importance. To reference the canon Mechner was drawing from, one of Indiana Jones’ most prominent filmmaking techniques is “the ticking clock.” Rewatch any of those movies, and you’ll find that there’s almost always some manner of time bomb or closing door in the background of an action scene, which applies an underlying layer of tension to every fist-swinging, heart-pounding moment of struggle. It’s no less effective in an interactive setting. The game is filled with both short and long-term ticking clocks, whether it takes the form of a pressure plate which opens a gate just long enough to slip by after a death-defying leap, or the Grand Vizier’s massive hourglass which contextualizes the time limit looming over the whole game. These push the player to be bold in their performance, encouraging them to take risks in places they otherwise wouldn’t. They heighten the threat of obstacles and draw the player even more deeply into every moment of committed action. Win or lose, they’ll only have one hour to reach the end. That in itself also contributes to the game’s “cinematic” sensibility, its length makes it as digestible as a short film, and the level design is as tightly paced as any action movie. The designs of its stages are clearly considered with an eye for that hour-long playtime — their battles and sizes grow longest in the middle before becoming a triumphant string of victories leading to the final confrontation. It helps that there are no menus or extraneous elements involved. Instead, each area transitions directly into the next. Once mastered, the performance of that arc becomes a thing of beauty.

The game comes together to form an experience almost as nail-biting to spectate as it is to play, but that can’t be attributed to its adherence to these design principles alone. Rather, it’s the way it plays with the expectations those rules create which elevates Prince of Persia beyond its successors in the “cinematic platformer” genre. The game’s heart lies in the recurring “Shadow Man” who disrupts and undermines the player’s efforts at every turn, stepping on pressure plates to shut doors and stealing potions which are meant to increase the player’s maximum health. It lies in the surprise skeleton battle, the magic mirror, the levitation potion, and a penultimate encounter that had to have inspired Final Fantasy IV. It takes every opportunity to use its established rules for dramatic purposes, and never deviates from that goal. As Noah Caldwell-Gervais recently said of Sekiro, Prince of Persia is “cinematic in a way that cutscene-driven games have only ever gestured towards,” and it rallied every ounce of the Apple II to do it.

All my life as a Nintendo-clutching child, Final Fantasy VII’s reputation had loomed high and large like the towering remains of an ancient giant. The internet was yet ruled by the previous dynasty of game-people, and its inescapable legacy had been etched into the marble pillars of their digital shrines. In a generation made of generationally-defining masterpieces (or so it went), the wily double-crossing traitors at SquareSoft defected to the PlayStation and unleashed their secret weapon — the most generationally defining-ist game of all. My blood boiled for a feud long ended. I may have only known caricatures and tall tales of its porcupine-haired Hot Topic-lookin’ Link-like, its pioneering the “first death in videogames” (oh, please), its dumpster-esque graphics and its wildly convoluted plot, but that was all I needed to hear. And besides, it was one of those reviled JRPGs. But I’d gone to college and played Chrono Trigger by the time I received a text message while waiting for the subway one cold, January evening. It assured me that Final Fantasy VII was a soaring epic, that it deserved its reputation and, most shocking of all, that it had dethroned perennial front-runner Twilight Princess as his “favorite game.”

Now, yes, Twilight Princess may kinda suck, but coming from this particular text message author, I could not dismiss the thought. This review, my recent awakening to the potential of this genre, and the announcement of Final Fantasy VII’s imminent release on Nintendo Switch all miraculously collided into a Total Eclipse of anticipation. I played Final Fantasy IV in preparation, took a pit stop to flail at Metal Slimes, and at last, in the dead of night, I picked up Final Fantasy VII the instant it became available.

In the six years between IV and VII, cinematography, pre-rendered graphics, and 3D animation weren’t just possibilities, they were being put to use in grand, ambitious spectacles. Removed from the context of their era, those visuals lend themselves to an unmistakable style, a crusty collage of aesthetics delivered with such tenacity that I can’t help but love 'em. The sweeping orchestration of its intro spills over with so much confidence that, for the tiniest microscopic fraction of a second, we’re not worthy. But beneath it all, I could feel the same heart as its ancient predecessor beating within. An act of terrorism, a weathered protagonist, a second job whose conclusion results in a meeting with the last survivor of a magic tribe, a love triangle, a death, a mad scientist, a cosmic entity — but all of them are strengthened by a more experienced staff, reinvigorated by a whole host of new tricks. But of course, with new priorities also come new compromises.

Final Fantasy VII trades in FFIV’s expressive classes for a modular Materia system, leaving characterization to body language and a newly-dynamic dialogue format. Limit Breaks are about all that’s left to get across party personality via gameplay, but it’s sure that those designs and scenarios will be enough to endear the player, because by minimizing the influence and development of their specialties, it gives us free rein to focus on our favorite people. Its three-man battles poked my Chrono Trigger nerve, though they should’ve rattled my Super Mario RPG bones. Without that same commitment to action or an addition to rival the tech system, it translates into an overt simplification; a transparent effort to bump up Cloud’s polygon count. Minigame setpieces ranging from rad to horrible litter the plot, sometimes boneheadedly positioned between affecting story moments. But look at that. As much as I can scrutinize these tottering steps toward a more complete visual experience, I can’t rightly say those moments didn’t reach me.

In its wild world-building, its earnest explorations of life and identity, its most honest character interactions and its simplest plot devices, Final Fantasy VII earned more than my respect, it got my admiration. It makes a whole heap of mistakes, but the passion and excitement of its developers circa 1997 transcends time, it’s infectious. It revels in Blade Runnerish grunge and solemn subjects, but won’t hesitate to fling out the goofiest nonsense with genuine glee. Even when I was laughing at FFVII’s expense, I felt like it was in on the joke. It sold me on its weirdest twists, endeared me to its characters, and swept me up in its melodrama. Most of all, it’s not afraid to say something real. It packs that train full of everything it’s got and rides to the end of the line, blasting Nobuo Uematsu’s incredible soundtrack all the way. For better and worse, Final Fantasy VII is fearless.

Alright guys, cards on the table – Dark Souls represents so much of what I love and aspire to in videogames that not loving it felt like some kind of divine prank. In 2018, I finally got my hands on this Super Metroid/3D Zelda/Classicvania hybrid, complete with immaculate, intertwining level design, nuanced environmental storytelling, and a deep respect for the player's curiosity, persistence and attention span, and my impression was all the way down the middle of the road. Was it the jank? The stagnant, entropic world? The overblown expectations from myself and others developed over years of game design-y conversations with friends? Was it just too hard? Most of Dark Souls went by with a sigh instead of a smile, and I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to puzzle out exactly why. After beating Ornstein and Smough by waiting an eternity for their recovery animations to line up enough times, the game simply lost me, and not without some hard feelings.

Just so you know in advance, this review is going to be terrible. It’s going to be long and rambling and nitpicky, because I’ve struggled for years to figure out how to articulate my opinion on this game. However any of this may come across, I’m not trying to tell you you’re wrong, I’ve just gotta work this out for myself.

I think I was afraid of what it could mean for me to not resonate completely with this pillar of a medium I've devoted so much of myself to. If Dark Souls was not for me, was I in the wrong place? If I diverted from the lessons of this biblical text, could I make something of worth to anyone but myself? I had to pick it apart and ascertain some reason. Sounds ridiculous when I put it that way, but Dark Souls seemed to haunt me no matter where I went. The series' values turned up time and again in discussions with my professors and peers. Like the game's map, there seemed no topic that couldn't bend back around to Dark Souls, so it was inevitable that I'd be drawn back to Firelink Shrine myself. After all, it's a synthesis of so many textbook design concepts that it has become the textbook, but for me, this leads to some of the game's bigger problems.

Before we unpack any of that, though, let me first say that I found more to enjoy this time around than before, but a lot of that has to do with the amount of knowledge I had going in. People online like to make a big stink about how cryptic the first Zelda can be, but I struggle to imagine how I might've learned half of Dark Souls' mechanics just by playing the game. Noah Caldwell-Gervais' excellent video about the trilogy centers around how deceptively accessible it is, and perhaps I went in with the wrong mentality, but I didn't quite find this to be the case. From kindling bonfires and summoning spirits to unraveling the nature of the game's equipment and stat mechanics, Dark Souls either mires its details in maximalist menus, or leaves them to the birds. I want to emphasize that I don't have an issue seeking out external sources or making use of prior knowledge when it comes to delving into a game's deepest depths (I'm one of those weirdos who replays games an awful lot, often a great game only truly blossoms after the first experience), but without a foothold in the nature of the system or what it expected of me, it didn’t seem possible to make interesting decisions. Dark Souls’ solution is to bring the internet into the world, allowing players to offer each other tips and hints through messages left on the floor, but, as with most internet-related things, your mileage may vary. Having said that, I absolutely respect the confidence of this approach, and the intention to get people talking about its systems. The experience of discovery on a first playthrough sometimes equals and even outweighs the joy of making decisions with knowledge of a game’s intricacies on a replay, but in Dark Souls’ case, I don’t know if that applies for me. Maybe that’s an ego thing, I don’t want to have to ask someone what “kindling” is and what it does, I don’t need someone telling me how “poise” works, or what the magic system entails, or that kicking can be used to bypass enemy defenses, I’d like to be able to learn at least most of this stuff on the back of my own perseverance. Yes, one of my problems with Dark Souls is also one of my problems as a human being – I’m very bad at asking for help, and I’ll sooner resign myself to a challenge I don’t enjoy than swallow my pride and reach out to others (yes, I have seen Neon Genesis Evangelion). Dark Souls knows it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and I know that’s one of its strengths as a cultural artifact, but I think it’d be a little more considerate if it didn’t make me confront my personality flaws in the process. Jokes(?) aside, I’ve often heard the game compared to Super Metroid, but in this regard, I’d say they’re almost polar opposites. On a first Metroid playthrough, the process of learning where everything is through discovery results in constant upgrades and lessons which keep the player almost too powerful in an effort to teach them the lay of the land. With that knowledge, they can take the game’s challenge to beat it in faster, tougher, and more creative ways on subsequent attempts. This isn’t quite the arc that Dark Souls is after, but the resulting effect on returning playthroughs is similar.

Using the Master Key and some persistence, I skipped the Capra Demon and the Gaping Dragon and rang the Bells of Awakening in just a few hours. I charged up Sen's Fortress and slammed my head against Ornstein and Smough for a second time. Having accumulated some suspicions about Frampt's intentions (both intuitively and having gathered a few tidbits from outside sources), I avoided him and decided to seek out another way, and somehow managed to actually find it (though it’s a bit of a shame that the objectives themselves aren’t any different, only the sequence). However mixed my feelings might’ve been, I wouldn’t have been caught dead deriding Dark Souls’ level design even in 2018. It really is a triumph of digital architecture whose exploration is, for me, the game’s greatest joy. Watching it always manage to somehow loop back around to Firelink Shrine is almost a running gag, and navigating its ever-increasing network of shortcuts to tear from one side of the map to the other in search of leads to new discoveries is engrossing. I’ll take its tightly wound approach over Elden Ring just about any day for the rest of my life. Its sense of total seamlessness never fails to amaze me, as is its Symphony of the Night-like seeming endlessness. Each individual area plays more like a classic, straightforward Castlevania level in the moment, but fits into the larger world in a more intricate way. When Dark Souls is immersing the player in its creative variety, its shortcut-full pathways, its internally logical spider web of a world, it’s at its absolute best. I often viewed Dark Souls’ setting as a pastiche of dark fantasy tropes, but Lordran always manages to take ownership over whatever cultural touchstones it swipes, both in its lore, and the ways they’re implemented into the game design. The skeletons in the graveyard to the left of Firelink which pummel every unsuspecting player are the videogame skeletons, as is the dragon which makes its powerful entrance in the Undead Burg. Mario Odyssey’s dragon will forever be known as the “Dark Souls Dragon” (despite having as much in common with the one from Shrek), because Dark Souls owns videogame dragons now, that’s just the world we live in. Every archetype is presented with a sense of grandeur and scale, both visually and mechanically, which unites them under Dark Souls’ banner. That creative variety extends to so many of its scenarios and locations as well. Ceaseless Discharge, Sif, and Priscilla all go out of their way to provide memorable experiences beyond simple tests of skill, as do the trickery of Sen’s Fortress and the horror of The Abyss (and it seems obvious to me now that Ornstein and Smough are trying to get the player to bring their own buddy along to even out the odds). The Hydra is an incredibly clumsy encounter, but I’ll be darned if it won’t forever reverberate in my brain as the hydra for the rest of my days. As I became comfortable with the game’s systems and its medium-speed rhythm, and accumulated enough resources to expand my breadth of possible strategies, all of these things became far easier to appreciate. Prior knowledge of the map allowed me to make interesting decisions about which areas and objectives to tackle and in what order. It’s satisfying to develop plans and map out routes, develop my character and make progress on my own terms (which goes to show just how much Dragon Quest III is hiding in Dark Souls), but the satisfaction of actually overcoming the obstacles within this world varies wildly.

Dark Souls' combat generates a lot of praise for its sense of weight, the balance of its stamina system, and the satisfaction of overcoming its punishing enemy design, but it's a pretty passive affair. The level of punishment only further prolongs the process of waiting for the enemy to attack and retaliating yourself, and a good lot of the rogues gallery isn't receptive to the game's only two counter tactics, it's inconsistent. I can't say so with any kind of authority, but one on one systems like this most resonate with me when they're tugs of war between contenders for moments of dominance, but that sense of back and forth only vaguely applies against the most lowly of foes. The system is serviceable for most encounters (at its best, it's about provoking the enemy to leave an opening at the cost of making the environment itself more perilous to navigate (see: Quelaag)) but the dearth of depth is felt as the game grows long. There's little means of pressuring the opponent and they only occasionally react to taking damage, so encounters scarcely branch out of a neutral state. To be clear, I'm not defining this as some sort of hard and fast rule. After all, Hyper Light Drifter is also about dodging and attacking enemies who hardly flinch, but the perspective and player moveset allows any given moment to be far more active, enemies don't have to rotate to track the player's movement, and every opponent can be designed with the knowledge that they'll be responding to the same set of tools. It's particularly because this system relies so heavily on animations that it feels lacking in this way. Against most enemies, the best method of responding to an attack animation cycle is by rolling, and, with the exception of some environmental obstacles, that's about as dynamic as it ever gets. You roll at the right times and punish, but not so much that you'll run out of stamina and find yourself unable to roll away. No doubt this is a consequence of the level of build variety on offer. The game is more interested in delivering a swiss army knife than a singular, refined tool – you can cast spells and wear different kinds of armor and wield any combination of weapons in both hands – but as Dark Souls' most pronounced form of interaction, it doesn't have much going for it.

(As an aside – I’ve heard it compared to Punch-Out!!, but that game better rewards successful attacks by retaining the player’s stamina and causing hitstun, and mastery requires counter-punching and acting on even the slightest tells. Weighing whether a body-blow, face punch or star uppercut is the right move in any given situation is a more impactful decision than any light or heavy attack in Dark Souls, and the right move at the right time allows the player to press an advantage. Some attacks are best dealt with by blocking, countering, or ducking underneath them. Even a wayward punch at the wrong moment incurs a response from the opponent, rather than being ignored outright. Of course, this aspect of Dark Souls’ combat has the effect of evoking helplessness in the face of insurmountable odds, but it makes for a repetitive and tedious dynamic)

By and large, I'd say the game is well served by its degree of punishment. It lends a real sense of credibility to every obstacle the player comes across, but where difficulty often reveals the deepest nuances of a system, the one-dimensionality and tedium of the combat is only exacerbated by this decision. I'm only waxing on about it because Dark Souls leaves so much in the hands of this system, it wouldn't bother me to the same degree if it weren't such a significant focus. Thirteen years out from Demon's Souls, I'm sure this is old news for a lot of you, and yeah, I've come to agree that it's most charitably viewed as a vehicle for Dark Souls' method of delivering atmosphere and varied situations. If there's any benefit to be had from this prioritization of breadth over depth, that's it, and its best areas know this. The aforementioned Sen’s Fortress isn’t made of difficult combat encounters, but awkward walkways and hidden traps. Like so many of the game’s best setpieces, it doesn’t feel designed for the player’s convenience. The boss of the area is more like a climactic punctuation mark than a punishing fight meant to keep the player stuck for hours on end. The Iron Golem is one of the few who can be severely staggered, and given how easily the nearby bonfire can be missed, the tension comes more from the threat of having to navigate the entire tower again than the battle itself. The Painted World of Ariamis is peppered with damaging, but squishy groups of enemies who can be deftly dealt with if the player keeps a clear head and some distance. It’s one of the most architecturally varied and visually enthralling environments in the game, and it’s capped off by a boss who requests the player leave her in peace. When all of the pieces align in just the right ways, Dark Souls achieves an immersive quality that just sings and keeps me arrested in its setting. I could just as easily romanticize many of the game’s other moments using this kind of language (the Bell Gargoyles, the Four Kings, the Capra Demon, the Tomb of the Giants, etc.) because it isn’t hard to make the process of overcoming punishing challenges sound glamorous, but that would be disingenuous, because the moment to moment experience can feel clumsy and unrewarding. Dark Souls is often best served by foregoing the traditional methods of challenge scaling, because while it does contain moments that reveal the potential of the combat system, It only works so well as a straightforward action game; I was best able to appreciate it when I stopped viewing it through this lens.

Dark Souls is very much cut from the cloth of its RPG forebears (the likes of which I have far more experience with today than I did at the outset), which should’ve been obvious, but I felt it best when I hit a wall in the form of The Four Kings, and ventured across every corner of the setting in pursuit of treasures, routes, and resources that could strengthen my character. The game put me up against several of what I could only describe as Dungeons and Dragons parties, and the more of them I encountered, the more I began to feel like I’d been doing a solo run of Dragon Quest III the whole time. I’ve never exactly felt that action games benefit from these kinds of progression systems, and frankly, I’m still not entirely swayed, but if we view Dark Souls’ stamina system as some iteration on Chrono Trigger’s ATB mechanics (it’s better compared to Secret of Mana in this respect, but let’s make like Dark Souls and roll with this comparison), all about taking turns and exchanging numbers with the added benefit of being able to avoid damage through positioning, it clicks together a little more nicely in my mind. Still not an entirely favorable comparison, since the most interesting feature of any RPG combat system is the management and development of multiple characters who all balance out each other’s weaknesses, though the multiplayer features do make an effort to close that gap. Given the prominence of Humanity (the resource), the online features, and the game’s inclination to punish death with the removal of the player’s Humanity, I’ve gotta wonder if the intention was to incentivize players to make use of multiplayer as often as possible, using Dark Souls as a digital D&D campaign. There are multiple boss encounters which might support this, but, conspiracy theorizing aside, that’s simply not how I’ve played it (or how the community treats it), so I can’t provide much insight either way.

Whatever the case may be, Dark Souls’ most basic progression system remains divisive in my mind, and for a number of reasons. Legend has it that Yuji Horii’s theory in implementing the concept of grinding experience in Dragon Quest was that the player’s hard work would always be rewarded with some gains. The player levels up immediately upon reaching the experience threshold, and doesn’t lose those points after dying, so they’re always making some sort of progress. Dark Souls punishes the players who need those experience points most, and best rewards those who don’t. Souls have to be retrieved after death at the spot where the player died, and that spot can be locked behind a boss door, at which point the only way to keep them is by killing the boss. If a new player manages to reach a boss door with a whole lotta souls, their best option is simply to turn back and level up their attributes. Of course, they’re not going to do this. At its worst, this mechanic disincentives players from leaving an area for later and pursuing another which might be more manageable for their skill level, because they’ve already invested so much in their current run (I consider this an issue in Hollow Knight as well, because it undermines the game’s breadth of exploration with an incentive to stay in one place).

The risk/reward aspect can be compelling, but I’ve gotta question how effective it is when the game has to offset that system with collectible items which contain large quantities of souls. Of course, losing experience points forever is a staple feature of the series, and I don’t consider it a misguided concept for a game that prides itself on developing an oppressive atmosphere through challenge and punishment, but some of its quirks don’t seem to be implemented to the benefit of the game’s progression system, or the player’s engagement with it. Yes, that’s part of the intent, and those aforementioned soul items and boss drops might make up the difference, but at that point, the motivation to engage enemies begins to erode somewhat. Several areas have sharp enemy placement which deeply discourages players from ignoring threats, but just as often, it’s optimal to run directly past them and get to the boss, and the risk of gaining souls by fighting punishing enemies isn’t worth it when the player is endeavoring to learn the boss’ patterns across various attempts. It might’ve been possible to mitigate this problem by applying some sort of multiplier to the boss’ souls for every enemy killed along the way, maybe with a cap to prevent the optimal strategy from becoming too tedious. It’s not impossible to bank experience in the boss’ room by repeatedly retrieving one’s souls on arrival, but that’s not particularly better than grinding the area’s enemies at any point after the boss’ defeat, so you tell me.

It’s taken me a while to come around to the lore, mostly because of how often fan culture seems to fixate on trivial details and factoids rather than the broader meaning of a work, but the effect of distributing the game’s story throughout its item descriptions, environmental design, and occasional NPC dialogue is a potent one. Even if I only gathered a fraction of Dark Souls’ background on my own, the cohesion between the game’s rules and its themes is admirable, and even without explanation, the aura of rot is palpable. This isn’t the last time FromSoft would explore stagnation as a result of undeath, a rebellion against the natural order which prevents the world from moving on and highlights the importance of death in the cycle of existence. It might not even be the best exploration of that particular idea, but this method of storytelling, the process of archaeologically piecing together the history of Lordran, feels more appropriate here than in any of its successors. In the past, I’ve derided Dark Souls’ lore for ultimately amounting to little more than explanations for why bosses are sitting in rooms, just waiting for the player to kill them. For me, that quality undermined the verisimilitude of the setting, but that fails to account for the plots running underneath this basic structure. Solaire and Siegmeyer are on similar quests as the player, as are the various other travelers which can be confronted along the way. There are character motivations which drive subplots throughout Dark Souls, and that their quests parallel your own and similarly orbit around this stagnant setting serves to highlight that quality even further. The world is trapped in the Age of Fire, and the only people left with any kind of agency are those seeking an end to the curse of the undead (and more often than not, they succumb to the madness as well). It’s a no less convenient premise for a videogame, but it’s also uniquely suited to being conveyed through this medium. Its greatest disappointment is that either ending or prolonging the Age of Fire requires the same set of steps, simply shuffled around. These actions don’t reflect the differences in motivation behind them, and one might say that’s indicative of the fact that both goals are equally suspect, but that seems a little generous. Still, I’m willing to forgive that concession for the sake of providing an equally engaging experience regardless of the player’s decision. At the very least, it’s not an unreasonable solution.

Here’s the twist that, for some of you, might discredit that whole heap of words you’ve so generously combed through (thank you for that, by the way, you’re looking great). Right now, I’m sitting in the Tomb of the Giants, right in front of Nito’s fog door. I’ve been sitting here for the last two days, without progressing, just trying to unpack everything I’ve felt over the cumulative fifty nine hours I’ve spent with Dark Souls. Am I going Hollow? I used to play this game while listening to “Boy Oh Boy” from LISA: The Painful, because its dedication to silence bored me as much as its combat. I don’t do that anymore, I don’t even hate the fighting system now. Dark Souls is a whole lot of ancient, timeless game design principles swimming in a vat of acid. They rarely coalesce into something greater, but on the rare occasion that every ingredient is balanced just right, there’s a real magic that can’t be denied. Almost everything that Dark Souls attempts is done better in other places, but its level design and premise and its best moments are worth the experience, and, if nothing else, seeing those ideas come together in real time, through uninterrupted gameplay, is thoroughly novel. I’m not certain I’d have returned to Dark Souls at all, though, without the knowledge that every last one of my nitpicks and criticisms would be validated by a certain other FromSoft game. As far as I’m concerned, Sekiro was Hidetaka Miyazaki’s gesture to me, personally, that I wasn’t a moral failure for dropping his most famous game. Maybe we’ll talk about that one some other time, but for now, I stand before Nito, weighing my options as Anubis weighs hearts on a cheap kitchen scale. Do I care enough to see it through? Has this long and rambling inner monologue spilled out every last drop of Dark Souls-related emotion in the depths of my own soul? Is this Age of Fire destined to burn on interminably, never to confidently reach a decisive verdict, or will I put it to rest and allow the Age of Dark to begin?

Does it matter?

POST-SCRIPT

After some time, I did finally find it in me to dust off the ol' save file and see it through to the end. Within an afternoon, the gods were slain and I was left staring down the credits — from Seath, back to Nito, and through the Bed of Chaos (with a bit of a detour taken to see what all this "Artorias" business has been about), before, at last, putting Gwyn out of his misery. Seems I'm far from the first to recognize how...shoddy this last leg of the journey feels. I'd always considered its surrounding gameplay systems a mixed bag, but there's a confidence and unity to Lordran's layout and aesthetic which begins to slip away, and the deeper I went, the more flummoxed I became that this was the same "Dark Souls" so often whispered about in the tomes. I never stopped respecting its desire to maintain visual and mechanical variety (so many works would kill for this level of creativity) but, even as someone who doesn't particularly love this game, it was a bit sad to see it reduced to a parody of itself. Running back through long, boring zones to engage in half-baked boss fights again and again, I had to wonder if anything was cut from the final product. These areas aren't without their moments, but at this point, it seemed Dark Souls was struggling as hard as I was to stay awake.

This is, of course, with the exception of the game's DLC and final areas. In the Sanctuary Guardian and Artorias, it's already possible to glimpse Hidetaka Miyazaki gearing up for Bloodborne and Dark Souls III (heck, Bloodborne himself is hanging out close by), with timing specifically built around acrobatic light rolling, tight windows for retaliation, and little opportunity for recovery. I've still not been converted into an outright fan of this highly evasive style of 3D combat, with its unflinching bosses and more or less prescribed moments for offense and defense (which isn't to dismiss the game's build and weapon variety so much as it is to highlight the nature of the game's enemy design and stamina system), but I'd be lying if I said that the pace of these meat and potatoes heavy action setpieces weren't (quite literally) more my speed than almost anything else in the game (and it was especially cool to recognize that Sif had adopted many of her owner's techniques. That's Dark Souls for ya). Yeah, I do hold that the game is at its most engaging and interesting when it’s doing away with “traditional” methods of challenge scaling, but the Artorias gang makes a clean case. Their wind-ups and telegraphs were excellently done for the most part (and both have striking designs, even if one is just a straight-up Manticore), but I did note that both of these bosses had the ability to sometimes extend otherwise normal attacks into combos. This isn't anything insane on its own, but the severity of the game's stamina management and the inability to cancel actions once committed made this feature a little more questionable than it might've been otherwise. If the player can't reliably know when damage can be dealt and has to guess at whether the boss is finished attacking after every swing of the sword, attacks which can kill immediately and look identical to their single-hit variations, then every time the player waits for a combo that doesn't come, they've given up on some amount of progress through the fight, and every time they don't, they're putting themselves at risk. This isn’t the worst thing in the world, Artorias does always open up at the end of his combos, whenever they may arrive, but I found myself wishing those extended chains were given more distinct telegraphs to plan around and reward observant play. Gambling can be a welcome addition to a combat system, but I can't say I was thrilled to find it here, where I lacked a moveset dynamic enough to switch up my responses, and the stakes can involve immediate death and an inordinately long trek back to the arena. I don't consider this as big a problem against Artorias as, for example, the Margit boss fight in Elden Ring (where his combos will sometimes only come out if you decide to attack), but it was surprising to find this early in the FromSoft canon. I still had a good time against these bosses, but I thought I'd be thorough, since I spent so much time discussing my thoughts on the combat mechanics back in my last write-up. I'm aware there's more DLC stuff to be found beyond this point, but, for me, that may be better left to another life. It was time to leave.

The Kiln of the First Flame might just be one of the most striking pieces of visual storytelling in Dark Souls. Mounds upon mountains of grey ash surrounding a man too far gone to know just what he's wrought, or even what it is he's so bent on defending. Here, I wouldn't have needed the guidance of Darkstalker Kaathe to realize that Frampt and Gwynevere's cause was more than a little questionable, that linking the fire and continuing this age of stagnation and rot was nothing but a mad conservative dream. After finally managing to parry Gwyn's sword a whole fifteen times in a row (I didn't count), the future was left in my hands. In one last bit of gameplay/story integration, the act of linking the fire is identical to lighting a bonfire anywhere else in Lordran, only with a different text prompt. It tempts the player forward with a familiar sight, but I had no love for this place. I turned around and walked out of the chamber. Maybe this whole mess could've been prevented if I'd done so earlier. Then again, if the immediate start of New Game + is any indication after the credits, perhaps not.

And that was my Dark Souls. For all the time and attention I've given it in-game and in writing, I don't love this game. Some of the time, I don't even like it. More than anything, I'm fascinated by it as a work of world design, and as a cultural artifact. Fascinated enough to head down to Quelaag immediately after finishing the game and ring the second Bell of Awakening on New Game +, if for no other reason than some subconscious, poetic desire to leave this playthrough where it began. Still, I never did quite get to feel out and achieve a sense of oneness with the rhythm of Dark Souls' moment to moment gameplay, and only flickers of its emotional highs ever managed to truly land. To me, there's no question that From and Miyazaki would go on to make stronger, more consistent games which resonate more deeply with me (or at least one), but, as far as the rest of The World is concerned, they will always live in the shadow of this one. I'm glad I experienced it for myself from front to back, but I think it's high time I extinguished this weight from my mind and finally found it in me to walk away, even if I've gotta do it alone.

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.