LinkBetweenGames
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Banjo-Kazooie
1998
Give me Banjo Threeie you British fucks.
That, I can't deny.
The sorrow of a thousand thousand worlds weighs heavy, and yet, you can walk on.
Endwalker is a tale of loss, of fire, and faith, a journey of self discovery and enlightment, teaching us to value life and to find joy even in the deepest and darkest of despair.
What people live for ? What give their lives... meaning ?
From time immemorial, Man had always tried to answer this question. But a single and simple answer it seems not to be, so when striken by sorrow, rage, despair or hatred, Man faced harsh reality and came to curse life itself. Overwhelmed by negative feelings, he deemed the pursuit of power, only to become the architect of his own demise. Indeed, doomed by the failure of finding happiness, he seek deliverance in death or conflict with others.
Our existence seem pointless, life is fleeting and hardships are an inescapable part of it.
Yet I have faith in Mankind's potential. As long as he believes in himself, there is naught he cannot achieve, so I will not give up on him. On us.
But there is so much more that life has to offer. It's because we have known death, failure and frustration that we have learned and grown from them. That we might find love, friendships, ambition and hope. No happiness is without its shadows, each and every single one of us abideth pain within but by offering understanding and acceptance, we can forge ahead in the darkness and becoming a light to guide others.
We too are miracles, each and every one of us. Born of the warm breath of life that traverses the heavens, swirling through eternity.
Never a game as poured that much of love onto us, lifting us up everytime we faltered. The boundless love of mankind that transpires from the overall message of the story is particularly vibrant nowadays looking at certain circumstances. All of us are worthy to exist and our fate remains ours to shape.
.. Here, at the end of all stars, engulfed in despair, despite all that I've done, would you still take my hand.. ?
There, Beneath the light of a new dawn, where the hopes and dreams of our friends shapes the path to follow, despite all that I've done, Would you still be my friend ?
For those we have lost, for those we can yet save.
For those whose dreams were unfulfilled, those whose prayers were unheard, those whose labors were unrewarded.
Y O U A R E N O T A L O N E
Has your journey been good ? Has it been worthwile ?
It was the best one, I can't deny that.
Endwalker is a tale of loss, of fire, and faith, a journey of self discovery and enlightment, teaching us to value life and to find joy even in the deepest and darkest of despair.
What people live for ? What give their lives... meaning ?
From time immemorial, Man had always tried to answer this question. But a single and simple answer it seems not to be, so when striken by sorrow, rage, despair or hatred, Man faced harsh reality and came to curse life itself. Overwhelmed by negative feelings, he deemed the pursuit of power, only to become the architect of his own demise. Indeed, doomed by the failure of finding happiness, he seek deliverance in death or conflict with others.
Our existence seem pointless, life is fleeting and hardships are an inescapable part of it.
Yet I have faith in Mankind's potential. As long as he believes in himself, there is naught he cannot achieve, so I will not give up on him. On us.
But there is so much more that life has to offer. It's because we have known death, failure and frustration that we have learned and grown from them. That we might find love, friendships, ambition and hope. No happiness is without its shadows, each and every single one of us abideth pain within but by offering understanding and acceptance, we can forge ahead in the darkness and becoming a light to guide others.
We too are miracles, each and every one of us. Born of the warm breath of life that traverses the heavens, swirling through eternity.
Never a game as poured that much of love onto us, lifting us up everytime we faltered. The boundless love of mankind that transpires from the overall message of the story is particularly vibrant nowadays looking at certain circumstances. All of us are worthy to exist and our fate remains ours to shape.
.. Here, at the end of all stars, engulfed in despair, despite all that I've done, would you still take my hand.. ?
There, Beneath the light of a new dawn, where the hopes and dreams of our friends shapes the path to follow, despite all that I've done, Would you still be my friend ?
For those we have lost, for those we can yet save.
For those whose dreams were unfulfilled, those whose prayers were unheard, those whose labors were unrewarded.
Y O U A R E N O T A L O N E
Has your journey been good ? Has it been worthwile ?
It was the best one, I can't deny that.
This review contains spoilers
Tell Us Why
Given Life
Are we meant to die
Helpless in our cries
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It’s early 2014, I’m pretty sure. Maybe around March, or April? It’s been a bad year. It’s going to get worse. I’m falling back into bad habits. Not leaving the house as much. Not going to classes. I’m trawling through Steam one day when I see a marginal discount on Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn. Wasn’t this good now, I heard? I hadn’t thought much of this game since I laughed at footage of the 1.0 version at launch. It’s cheap and comes with a month free trial. I like Final Fantasy. Why not?
I make my first character, a male miqo’te gladiator, a classic new player mistake to accidentally opt in to Tanking because Gladiators are the only class that starts with a sword. I name them Woodaba Vacaum, a surname that is borrowed from a character in a game I will never finish making. “Vacaum” doesn’t mean what I think it means and apparently isn’t even a latin word like I thought it was. I play for a few hours, and have a pretty good time, but, y’know…exams are coming up, there are other games to play, and this “Ifrit” boss seems pretty scary. I log out, let the free month lapse, and let the game languish in my steam library for years.
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It would be an incredible understatement to say that Endwalker had a lot on it’s shoulders. Not only was it following up on the near-universally beloved Shadowbringers, not only was it the first piece of content released after the game unexpectedly skyrocketed in popularity in 2021 and became the nigh-mythical “WoW Killer” almost out of nowhere, but it also had the unenviable task of wrapping up a story that has been in the making, in some shape or form, since 2010, a story that had some whispering in hushed tones about being “the best Final Fantasy, now”, whilst not resolving it too conclusively to encourage people to stop playing Square Enix’s most profitable venture. Given all that, it’s maybe a little churlish of me to point out that, under the weight of all this, Endwalker stumbles, falls, and ultimately chooses to lighten that load to ensure it can reach the finish line intact.
I’ll just be upfront with this: I don’t think this as good as Shadowbringers. I’m not even sure it’s as good as Heavensward. Even Stormblood, increasingly the punching bag of the XIV community, for all it’s messiness, feels like it’s aiming for more ambitious and thematically interesting things than Endwalker. I think as the afterglow fades, we’re going to see less and less people somewhat embarrassingly referring to this as “peak fiction”. There was genuinely a point in the main quest where I felt crushingly disappointed that this was the direction they had decided to take things for the grand finale, that the game had, in some ways, become the least interesting version of itself, went for a storyline that I would sooner expect from, say, Star Ocean, than Final Fantasy. But at the same time, there were moments that had my heart soaring for how much they affected me, left me feeling awed at just how tight a hold this story had on my heart. For everything that irks me, there are things I dearly love.
Thinking about Endwalker is difficult, and I think that might be why we’ve yet to see many substantive pieces of criticism on it that isn’t just effervescent praise. It’s taken me a long time to write this piece. I’m still unsure how I feel about many things in it. I don’t know if I’m ready to write this review.
Let's try anyway.
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It’s summer 2016. I’m at the end of my final year of university. I’m leaving with a decent grade in a subject that is kind of worthless, especially since the uncertainty following the Brexit vote is about to obliterate the few job opportunities there are in this field. If I’m honest with myself, I never quite thought about what I would do after university. I was so fixated on the dream of the rose coloured campus life that I never thought about what I’d do after that. So instead of answering that question, I’m playing MMOs again. I’ve been revisiting my childhood fascination of Azeroth, but it’s slowly losing its luster. But then, I remember. Didn’t I have Final Fantasy XIV on steam? I keep hearing that it’s really good now. Maybe I should try it again…
Suddenly, I’m Woodaba Vacaum once more, picking up just where I’d left off over two years ago. The necessity of having to do group content to continue the story gets me over a hurdle that I’ve never quite managed to get over for an MMO, and suddenly, I’m hooked. Over the coming months, I play through the entirety of the A Realm Reborn storyline as well as the Crystal Tower raid series, the very first raids I’ve done for any MMORPG “properly”, and finally reach Ishgard and the Heavensward expansion, forgoing the Paladin job in favour of Dark Knight because events of the main quest suddenly make me feel uncomfortable playing Paladin and in that moment, realise that I’m invested in this world quite unlike any other before. The incredible Dark Knight quests only solidify that for me. In late November, having started somewhere around June, I’m officially, for the very first time “caught up” with the main story of an MMORPG, finishing the 3.3 Dragonsong War quests with a final confrontation with Nidhogg.
But it’s something I did alone. The duty finder is a godsend and encountering genuinely unpleasant people almost never happens, but I’m too shy to join a free company, or join in on any PF content for high-difficulty content. Bereft of MSQ, I log out for a while. Final Fantasy XV is coming out soon, after all. The book on the Dragonsong War closes in silence.
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Endwalker starts pretty slow, with Labyrinthos probably ranking as one of the lamer zones in the game and Thavnair taking a bit too long to go anywhere cool, but once you arrive in Garlemald, things pick up significantly, and the game dives headfirst into some of its most fascinating and thorny content in its history, and then, after a hugely surprising bodyswap sequence, the game slams down hard on the accelerator and leaves whatever expectations you might have for where the story is going to go far, far behind it. To leave me completely in suspense at where the story is going to go after this many expansions is a genuine feat that I appreciate, but it also means that sheer adrenaline and excitement does a lot to carry you through stuff that is maybe, in hindsight, more than a little thematically suspect. Still, my eyebrows went through the roof when I killed Zodiark in the first trial, and I spent the next couple dozen hours absolutely dumbfounded as to where the story could possibly go next, and completely enjoying that feeling of this game still being able to surprise me after all this time.
What’s also surprising is the quality of the battle content in the game thus far. The first two trials, in particular, are tuned to a notably higher difficulty than prior story trials, finally recognizing that if someone has three expansions under their belt they might be able to tackle some heftier mechanics than a stack or two. The dungeon bosses too are notably more demanding mechanically than even Shadowbringers’ bosses, continuing the style of that expansion of very simple layouts twinned with boss mechanics that would give a Heavensward boss a heart attack. The game in general seems more keen to prepare players for the jump in difficulty that comes with EX-level content, which is something I really appreciate, as someone who spent over a year of playing this game too terrified to even consider checking out some of the most mechanically engaging and satisfying multiplayer gameplay one can find. While I think The Seat of Sacrifice remains my favorite fight in the entire game, the fact that The Mothercrystal in particular is able to put in a decent fight for the top spot is incredibly high praise.
The new jobs are also two real winners, particularly Sage, which is positively electrifying to play, even in old content, thanks partially to the stat squish that has given a lot of old raids back some bite that they lost after Shadowbringers beefed up numbers so considerably. Getting O11 in Raid Roulette and finding it to be once again a tense white-knuckle drag race of a fight put an enormous smile on my face. Even stuff that seems rough at first glance, like Dark Knight and New Summoner, will continually evolve in both perception and tweaks as time passes, and already we’re seeing a re-evaulation of the initial backlash against Dark Knight after it unexpectedly found itself sitting atop the tanking DPS charts. Although I’m reviewing Endwalker now, as a period in the game’s life it is only just beginning, over the next couple years it will continue to evolve and change, and will succeed and fail in different respects, just like how Shadowbringers ended up as a mediocre expansion in the eyes of many who are strictly interested in high-level raid content despite being so beloved among those like myself who place a high value on narrative.
Ultimately, it’s that value that has my feelings on Endwalker so mixed. There’s so much to enjoy in this expansion, so much to appreciate, that the areas where it fumbles and falters are drawn into sharp relief, and ultimately it’s the areas of this story and this world that I value the most that Endwalker fumbles the hardest.
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It’s 2017. It’s a bad year. It will continue to be a bad year. Aside from a miserable fast food job I hold down for a couple months at the start of the year until one of the other workers there threatens to kill me, I am unemployed for the entirety of the year. I try a lot of things, and I fail at all of them. I am increasingly ill at ease with the person I am pretending to be. The details aren’t relevant. I am unhappy. But I still play Final Fantasy XIV, and, in fact, I find myself incredibly excited to take part in my first “live” expansion launch for an MMO, in the form of Stormblood. It’s certainly a rough one, and leads into something of a rough MSQ, but it’s one that I still treasure dearly as a light in a time where I had few.
I’m keeping up to date more regularly, I start doing content without guides, I level other jobs, and I find myself becoming a part of the community of the game in a way I simply haven’t before. As 2017 changes to 2018, FFXIV becomes more and more a part of my life, as starting a masters in a last ditch attempt to give my life a form of direction leaves me with far less time to play games than ever before, and FFXIV’s structure allows me to dive into content and experience the myriad stories within piecemeal in between work and classes. Whether it’s the Omega raids, the slowly unfolding MSQ, or getting into fishing while listening to revision notes, I have quite unexpectedly gone from someone who Plays XIV to a XIV Person. It gets me excited, helps me destress, helps me socialize, and is helping me in ways that I only begin to understand.
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When Shadowbringers discussed the Final Days as experienced by the Ancients, I thought what was happening was fairly conclusive: they encountered something that did not fit within their framework of understanding, and that lack of understanding led to a horrified revelation at their own limits and mortality, a fear of death that manifested via their creation magicks into demonic entities shaped like their own death. It was, I thought, quite clear and extremely resonant with the wider themes of the expansion vis a vis allowing old things to die and fade away and be replaced with better things, both the sadness and necessity of that. I genuinely wasn’t expecting further elaboration on The Final Days in Endwalker, but further elaboration is what we get, and the explanation only serves to narrow the scope of interpretation and resonance to such an extent that it arguably harms Shadowbringers in hindsight, which is maybe the most damning thing I can say about a story beat.
To put it simply, Meteion sucks. I know some people really like the birb but for me, she just blows, I’m sorry. This jokerfied Junko Enoshima wannabe is one of the lamer villains in the entire final fantasy pantheon, like if Seymour Guado was actually the villain of FFX instead of a distraction from the real problem. An evil bird-girl in space who is radiating Bad Vibes because she thinks life is meaningless and therefore everyone should die is something I would expect from an AI-generated parody of Bad JRPG plots, and yet, here it is, sitting as the culmination of this decade-long narrative. After the thoughtful theming of Shadowbringers I could not have imagined that its sequel would boil everything down to generalized Hopepunk but that is kind of what happened. No longer is the demise of the Ancients a result of the flaws of their own societal perspective that is resonant with real things, instead it is because a big ball of evil at the end of the universe turns you into a monster when you feel despair.
And yeah, I get that big loud themes of Hope facing Despair at the end of the universe is kind of a JRPG staple, but boiling things down to such primal themes causes a lot of friction with the kind of game Final Fantasy XIV, and, indeed, the series as a whole, has been up to this point. In Shadowbringers, you were fighting a near godlike entity at the end of their universe, but that godlike entity represented material things. They were an aging boomer who refused to accept or acknowledge the validity of the world that was coming in favor of their uncritical adoration of their idealized prelapsarian idea of the world as it was. In contrast to many lesser Hopepunk stories, Final Fantasy XIV has previously acknowledged that people feel despair for real, material reasons. The people of Ishgard and Dravania in Heavensward felt despair because they were trapped in a war built on lies and deception, a Foundation constructed to justify the unjustifiable. The people of Doma and Ala Mhigo in Stormblood felt despair because they were trapped under the boot of imperial tyranny and violence, of their cultures being taken from them and twisted beyond recognizability, of their lives being treated as sport by a spoiled brat born into immense power, an expansion who’s materialist concerns hit me particularly hard as someone living in a land occupied by a colonial power. And, of course, the people of The First in Shadowbringers despair because the ideology they were taught from birth was good and right and just turned against them and choked them to the edge of their life, and they overcame the despair by uniting to overthrow the (admittedly fatphobic caricature) eikon of greed and complacency at the top of it all. In Endwalker, people feel despair, ultimately, because an evil space bird with primary-school nihilist motivations makes them feel despair.
In the real world, people feel “despair” for many reasons, and more often than not, those reasons are directly related to the material circumstances that affect their daily lives. Not being able to pay rent, being unemployed, suffering heartbreak and depression, witnessing the callousness and greed of the people who hold positions of power in our world. Reducing Despair to an ontological narrative force completely divorced from the lived experiences of our everyday lives also divorces it from resonance with said lived experiences, and is what ultimately leaves Endwalker feeling intellectually hollow. Shadowbringers electrified my mind for months after I finished it and I am fairly confident the same will not happen here. When this reveal happened, Endwalker transformed from a story that had me literally trembling with excitement the more I played to something that, even if for just a moment, made me question whether investing in this world and these characters for as long as I have had been worth it after all.
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It’s 2019. I’m coming to the end of my masters, working on a dissertation project that is, hilariously, a “letterboxd for games” called…Backloggr. The release of Shadowbringers is imminent, and I am excited. Not like I was excited for Stormblood, no. Now I’m in and Shadowbringers is my most anticipated game of the year, and I’m planning how I can voraciously consume it whilst not letting my dissertation project suffer. What’s more, 2019 is the year I am finally honest with myself and others that I am trans, and my relationship with my FFXIV character finally makes sense. They are the medium in which I experiment with gender and gender presentation in a way that does not have the pressure and anxieties of experimentation in the real world, a way to experiment with an audience that won’t judge me in the way that I fear the most. This subject - and Final Fantasy XIV in general - becomes the subject of my first paid piece of games writing, and although I have mixed feelings on that article, the fact that I managed it at all is something that I hold dearly to heart. The article even goes up during my first clear of The Seat of Sacrifice [Extreme], my favorite fight in the entire game and one of my favorite moments in all of video games. It is the culmination of a story that has evolved from “pretty good, for an MMO” to a genuine contender for Best Final Fantasy Story, which I can only really express as the highest praise possible given that FF is probably my favorite series of games that contains multiple all-time contenders.
Final Fantasy XIV is a part of my life. I’m not going to credit it for the way I’ve grown as a person or a writer or say that it saved me or anything like that, I find the way people often give the media they enjoy the credit for accomplishing things like that disappointing because it deprives them of enormous credit. But during Shadowbringers especially, it helped me. It helped me work things out about myself, it helped me get work, it helped me develop my critical and creative writing faculties, it helped me make friends and it helped me get closer to old ones. And it helped make me happy when I wasn’t.
How do you even begin to review something like that?
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As a story, Endwalker is frequently and fairly consistently delightful and enjoyable moment to moment, but attempting to think more deeply about what it is trying to say causes a lot of friction, particularly when attempting to reconcile it with past expansions, and the Meteion stuff is maybe No.1 with a bullet as to why this is. I keep thinking about the scene where Jullus, one of the expansion’s most compelling new characters, rages with righteous anger against Zenos viator Galvus for destroying his home and people in his quest to fightfuck the player character, only for Alphinaud to tell him that he has to remain calm or else he’ll turn into a big evil monster the heroes will have no choice but to take down. Or how the fandom’s overly sympathetic lens of Emet-Selch and the Ancients in general has been absorbed wholeheartedly, leading to a shockingly uncritical depiction of a society that has a fundamental callous disregard for the sanctity of life, and particularly falls a little too much in love with Venat/Hydaelyn, sanding down many of the most interesting wrinkles of her character to make her a fairly unambiguous good guy at the end (which is not to say that her character is without depth - far from it - but the game does almost repel from the idea of really digging into that depth in favor of idolizing her), especially given things like the bodyswap and the conscious uselessness of the characters on the moon highlighting the fallibility of Hydaelyn and her plans, and casting a critical eye on the Scions’ uncritical adoration of her (you can even say “hey what was with Hydaelyn straight up lying to me in Heavensward ” to which an NPC says “huh dunno, probably nothing to worry about” which I thought for sure was Going Somewhere but no I was simply Not Supposed To Worry About it). And, frankly, only doom lays down the path of trying to parse any kind of statement out of the Final Days itself, what with it turning people feeling depression, righteous anger against injustice, and other true, human emotions unhelpfully grouped together and labeled “despair” into evil creatures who cannot be saved and must be put down lest they harm others.
Endwalker is a mess, both when it comes to reconciling what it’s trying to say with itself, and when it comes to how it interacts with prior expansions. But if it must be a mess? If it has to have this difficult and frictional relationship with the parts of the story I value the most? If it must end this way? Then let it be a beautiful mess. Let it be dumb and questionable with impeccable style, let it burn it’s bridges with impeccably dancing flames. Endwalker is many things at many times, but it is almost always doing what it is doing amazingly, with a confidence fully owned by a creative team burning with a confidence and passion found almost nowhere else in the big-budget space. Any time Endwalker goes somewhere, it does so in the most brash, confident manner possible, with some truly incredible visuals and direction that is genuinely staggering coming from a game that’s still kinda running on 13 year old FF13 tech. The music team once again does incredible work here, and if this soundtrack isn’t spoken of in the same hushed tones as all the expansion soundtracks before it, it’s only because Square Enix has become ever more draconian about allowing people to share this wonderful music. I said in a kind of cutting way earlier that Endwalker is consistently delightful and enjoyable moment to moment, but I want to stress that being continually entertaining throughout is something that many games utterly fail to manage, and the day I turn my nose up at a story that delights in its movements as much as Endwalker does is the day you can officially write me off as a lost cause.
And, hell, it’s not like the story isn’t worthwhile. I’ve been highly critical of the decisions made thematically, and I stand by those criticisms, but not only are the decisions not as disastrous as they could have been (in the incredible Answers scene the status of the Ascians as pining for a prelapsarian utopia that did not exist is upheld despite much of Elpis’ attempts to undermine that, which I felt was very important) but also there is still a great deal of resonance here to be found here. I truly think Garlemald, in particular, is a strong contender for best arc in the entire MSQ, and the character writing as a whole remains excellent. Thavnair is a cultural appropriation playground to be certain, but it’s also got one of the sickest characters in the whole game making his nest there, and I hope to see it developed further in future patches. The fact that I’m not as condemnatory of the Elpis arc as I think perhaps part of me wants to be is a testament to just how well rounded Hythlodaeus, Emet-Selch, Venat and Hermes manage to be. The Zenos duel at the end is obviously hysterical as a big dumb shonen finale but it also I think acknowledges a truth about this game and the people that play it that a lot of games (including this one, in the past) try to dance around. I may fundamentally disgree and find facile the game's argument that suffering is what gives life meaning, but it's in how that idea interacts with characters like the Ancients and Zenos, that this theme finds some purchase in my heart, an exploration of how people who have lived blessed, privileged lives of plenty are deaf and cold-hearted to the suffering of those less fortunate around them, and how that eventually twists into genuine malice as they become ever more desperate to maintain their comfortable status quo. Even if I find the root of why she has to do it fairly vacuous, Venat choosing to destroy her world for the sake of a potential better one is incredibly powerful. And above all, this story of people at the end of days finding something to hold onto, something worth living for, is something that I did find affecting and meaningful, even if I kind of have to avoid thinking about the details in order for it to have the biggest impact. Every day, I feel the crushing weight of the end of the world all around me, and I struggle greatly with just trying to live in a world where all around me are reminders trying to convince me that there is no hope to save our planet in the face of the people and systems killing it. And while I would caution against becoming addicted to Hope as a placebo against genuine change, there is still something to be said for making me feel like there is hope.
The answer that Endwalker ultimately arrives at, is that in the darkest of times, we find the strength to go on in each other, and in standing/working together, we can overcome anything. It’s a cliche, perhaps boring answer, but in many ways it is also the right one. The Warrior of Light has never walked alone, after all, they’ve always had a party of 3/7/23 others to journey alongside, to help carry them through their trials. Whether they saved others from death, took the fire for their friends, or slain the beasts that threatened them, we’ve always done this together. I know I have. I wouldn’t be here without those who have walked beside me, who healed me when I was at the end of my rope, who stood alongside me against my problems and granted me the strength to see them through. Whatever else I may think about what Endwalker has to say about living at the end of the world, I think it is right about that, at least.
Do I wish Endwalker handled things differently? Yeah, kinda. Do I think there are things about it that suck? For sure. Is this a fitting conclusion to a story over a decade in the making? Honestly, I still don’t know.
But did I have fun? Was it meaningful? Am I happy I made these friends, fought these battles? Am I glad I heard what I heard, felt what I felt, and thought what I thought?
Has my journey been good? Has it been worthwhile?
...That, I can’t deny.
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Whispers
Falling silently drifts on the wind
But I hear you
Our Journey
Now a memory fading from sight
But I see you
You're not alone.
Given Life
Are we meant to die
Helpless in our cries
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It’s early 2014, I’m pretty sure. Maybe around March, or April? It’s been a bad year. It’s going to get worse. I’m falling back into bad habits. Not leaving the house as much. Not going to classes. I’m trawling through Steam one day when I see a marginal discount on Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn. Wasn’t this good now, I heard? I hadn’t thought much of this game since I laughed at footage of the 1.0 version at launch. It’s cheap and comes with a month free trial. I like Final Fantasy. Why not?
I make my first character, a male miqo’te gladiator, a classic new player mistake to accidentally opt in to Tanking because Gladiators are the only class that starts with a sword. I name them Woodaba Vacaum, a surname that is borrowed from a character in a game I will never finish making. “Vacaum” doesn’t mean what I think it means and apparently isn’t even a latin word like I thought it was. I play for a few hours, and have a pretty good time, but, y’know…exams are coming up, there are other games to play, and this “Ifrit” boss seems pretty scary. I log out, let the free month lapse, and let the game languish in my steam library for years.
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It would be an incredible understatement to say that Endwalker had a lot on it’s shoulders. Not only was it following up on the near-universally beloved Shadowbringers, not only was it the first piece of content released after the game unexpectedly skyrocketed in popularity in 2021 and became the nigh-mythical “WoW Killer” almost out of nowhere, but it also had the unenviable task of wrapping up a story that has been in the making, in some shape or form, since 2010, a story that had some whispering in hushed tones about being “the best Final Fantasy, now”, whilst not resolving it too conclusively to encourage people to stop playing Square Enix’s most profitable venture. Given all that, it’s maybe a little churlish of me to point out that, under the weight of all this, Endwalker stumbles, falls, and ultimately chooses to lighten that load to ensure it can reach the finish line intact.
I’ll just be upfront with this: I don’t think this as good as Shadowbringers. I’m not even sure it’s as good as Heavensward. Even Stormblood, increasingly the punching bag of the XIV community, for all it’s messiness, feels like it’s aiming for more ambitious and thematically interesting things than Endwalker. I think as the afterglow fades, we’re going to see less and less people somewhat embarrassingly referring to this as “peak fiction”. There was genuinely a point in the main quest where I felt crushingly disappointed that this was the direction they had decided to take things for the grand finale, that the game had, in some ways, become the least interesting version of itself, went for a storyline that I would sooner expect from, say, Star Ocean, than Final Fantasy. But at the same time, there were moments that had my heart soaring for how much they affected me, left me feeling awed at just how tight a hold this story had on my heart. For everything that irks me, there are things I dearly love.
Thinking about Endwalker is difficult, and I think that might be why we’ve yet to see many substantive pieces of criticism on it that isn’t just effervescent praise. It’s taken me a long time to write this piece. I’m still unsure how I feel about many things in it. I don’t know if I’m ready to write this review.
Let's try anyway.
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It’s summer 2016. I’m at the end of my final year of university. I’m leaving with a decent grade in a subject that is kind of worthless, especially since the uncertainty following the Brexit vote is about to obliterate the few job opportunities there are in this field. If I’m honest with myself, I never quite thought about what I would do after university. I was so fixated on the dream of the rose coloured campus life that I never thought about what I’d do after that. So instead of answering that question, I’m playing MMOs again. I’ve been revisiting my childhood fascination of Azeroth, but it’s slowly losing its luster. But then, I remember. Didn’t I have Final Fantasy XIV on steam? I keep hearing that it’s really good now. Maybe I should try it again…
Suddenly, I’m Woodaba Vacaum once more, picking up just where I’d left off over two years ago. The necessity of having to do group content to continue the story gets me over a hurdle that I’ve never quite managed to get over for an MMO, and suddenly, I’m hooked. Over the coming months, I play through the entirety of the A Realm Reborn storyline as well as the Crystal Tower raid series, the very first raids I’ve done for any MMORPG “properly”, and finally reach Ishgard and the Heavensward expansion, forgoing the Paladin job in favour of Dark Knight because events of the main quest suddenly make me feel uncomfortable playing Paladin and in that moment, realise that I’m invested in this world quite unlike any other before. The incredible Dark Knight quests only solidify that for me. In late November, having started somewhere around June, I’m officially, for the very first time “caught up” with the main story of an MMORPG, finishing the 3.3 Dragonsong War quests with a final confrontation with Nidhogg.
But it’s something I did alone. The duty finder is a godsend and encountering genuinely unpleasant people almost never happens, but I’m too shy to join a free company, or join in on any PF content for high-difficulty content. Bereft of MSQ, I log out for a while. Final Fantasy XV is coming out soon, after all. The book on the Dragonsong War closes in silence.
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Endwalker starts pretty slow, with Labyrinthos probably ranking as one of the lamer zones in the game and Thavnair taking a bit too long to go anywhere cool, but once you arrive in Garlemald, things pick up significantly, and the game dives headfirst into some of its most fascinating and thorny content in its history, and then, after a hugely surprising bodyswap sequence, the game slams down hard on the accelerator and leaves whatever expectations you might have for where the story is going to go far, far behind it. To leave me completely in suspense at where the story is going to go after this many expansions is a genuine feat that I appreciate, but it also means that sheer adrenaline and excitement does a lot to carry you through stuff that is maybe, in hindsight, more than a little thematically suspect. Still, my eyebrows went through the roof when I killed Zodiark in the first trial, and I spent the next couple dozen hours absolutely dumbfounded as to where the story could possibly go next, and completely enjoying that feeling of this game still being able to surprise me after all this time.
What’s also surprising is the quality of the battle content in the game thus far. The first two trials, in particular, are tuned to a notably higher difficulty than prior story trials, finally recognizing that if someone has three expansions under their belt they might be able to tackle some heftier mechanics than a stack or two. The dungeon bosses too are notably more demanding mechanically than even Shadowbringers’ bosses, continuing the style of that expansion of very simple layouts twinned with boss mechanics that would give a Heavensward boss a heart attack. The game in general seems more keen to prepare players for the jump in difficulty that comes with EX-level content, which is something I really appreciate, as someone who spent over a year of playing this game too terrified to even consider checking out some of the most mechanically engaging and satisfying multiplayer gameplay one can find. While I think The Seat of Sacrifice remains my favorite fight in the entire game, the fact that The Mothercrystal in particular is able to put in a decent fight for the top spot is incredibly high praise.
The new jobs are also two real winners, particularly Sage, which is positively electrifying to play, even in old content, thanks partially to the stat squish that has given a lot of old raids back some bite that they lost after Shadowbringers beefed up numbers so considerably. Getting O11 in Raid Roulette and finding it to be once again a tense white-knuckle drag race of a fight put an enormous smile on my face. Even stuff that seems rough at first glance, like Dark Knight and New Summoner, will continually evolve in both perception and tweaks as time passes, and already we’re seeing a re-evaulation of the initial backlash against Dark Knight after it unexpectedly found itself sitting atop the tanking DPS charts. Although I’m reviewing Endwalker now, as a period in the game’s life it is only just beginning, over the next couple years it will continue to evolve and change, and will succeed and fail in different respects, just like how Shadowbringers ended up as a mediocre expansion in the eyes of many who are strictly interested in high-level raid content despite being so beloved among those like myself who place a high value on narrative.
Ultimately, it’s that value that has my feelings on Endwalker so mixed. There’s so much to enjoy in this expansion, so much to appreciate, that the areas where it fumbles and falters are drawn into sharp relief, and ultimately it’s the areas of this story and this world that I value the most that Endwalker fumbles the hardest.
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It’s 2017. It’s a bad year. It will continue to be a bad year. Aside from a miserable fast food job I hold down for a couple months at the start of the year until one of the other workers there threatens to kill me, I am unemployed for the entirety of the year. I try a lot of things, and I fail at all of them. I am increasingly ill at ease with the person I am pretending to be. The details aren’t relevant. I am unhappy. But I still play Final Fantasy XIV, and, in fact, I find myself incredibly excited to take part in my first “live” expansion launch for an MMO, in the form of Stormblood. It’s certainly a rough one, and leads into something of a rough MSQ, but it’s one that I still treasure dearly as a light in a time where I had few.
I’m keeping up to date more regularly, I start doing content without guides, I level other jobs, and I find myself becoming a part of the community of the game in a way I simply haven’t before. As 2017 changes to 2018, FFXIV becomes more and more a part of my life, as starting a masters in a last ditch attempt to give my life a form of direction leaves me with far less time to play games than ever before, and FFXIV’s structure allows me to dive into content and experience the myriad stories within piecemeal in between work and classes. Whether it’s the Omega raids, the slowly unfolding MSQ, or getting into fishing while listening to revision notes, I have quite unexpectedly gone from someone who Plays XIV to a XIV Person. It gets me excited, helps me destress, helps me socialize, and is helping me in ways that I only begin to understand.
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When Shadowbringers discussed the Final Days as experienced by the Ancients, I thought what was happening was fairly conclusive: they encountered something that did not fit within their framework of understanding, and that lack of understanding led to a horrified revelation at their own limits and mortality, a fear of death that manifested via their creation magicks into demonic entities shaped like their own death. It was, I thought, quite clear and extremely resonant with the wider themes of the expansion vis a vis allowing old things to die and fade away and be replaced with better things, both the sadness and necessity of that. I genuinely wasn’t expecting further elaboration on The Final Days in Endwalker, but further elaboration is what we get, and the explanation only serves to narrow the scope of interpretation and resonance to such an extent that it arguably harms Shadowbringers in hindsight, which is maybe the most damning thing I can say about a story beat.
To put it simply, Meteion sucks. I know some people really like the birb but for me, she just blows, I’m sorry. This jokerfied Junko Enoshima wannabe is one of the lamer villains in the entire final fantasy pantheon, like if Seymour Guado was actually the villain of FFX instead of a distraction from the real problem. An evil bird-girl in space who is radiating Bad Vibes because she thinks life is meaningless and therefore everyone should die is something I would expect from an AI-generated parody of Bad JRPG plots, and yet, here it is, sitting as the culmination of this decade-long narrative. After the thoughtful theming of Shadowbringers I could not have imagined that its sequel would boil everything down to generalized Hopepunk but that is kind of what happened. No longer is the demise of the Ancients a result of the flaws of their own societal perspective that is resonant with real things, instead it is because a big ball of evil at the end of the universe turns you into a monster when you feel despair.
And yeah, I get that big loud themes of Hope facing Despair at the end of the universe is kind of a JRPG staple, but boiling things down to such primal themes causes a lot of friction with the kind of game Final Fantasy XIV, and, indeed, the series as a whole, has been up to this point. In Shadowbringers, you were fighting a near godlike entity at the end of their universe, but that godlike entity represented material things. They were an aging boomer who refused to accept or acknowledge the validity of the world that was coming in favor of their uncritical adoration of their idealized prelapsarian idea of the world as it was. In contrast to many lesser Hopepunk stories, Final Fantasy XIV has previously acknowledged that people feel despair for real, material reasons. The people of Ishgard and Dravania in Heavensward felt despair because they were trapped in a war built on lies and deception, a Foundation constructed to justify the unjustifiable. The people of Doma and Ala Mhigo in Stormblood felt despair because they were trapped under the boot of imperial tyranny and violence, of their cultures being taken from them and twisted beyond recognizability, of their lives being treated as sport by a spoiled brat born into immense power, an expansion who’s materialist concerns hit me particularly hard as someone living in a land occupied by a colonial power. And, of course, the people of The First in Shadowbringers despair because the ideology they were taught from birth was good and right and just turned against them and choked them to the edge of their life, and they overcame the despair by uniting to overthrow the (admittedly fatphobic caricature) eikon of greed and complacency at the top of it all. In Endwalker, people feel despair, ultimately, because an evil space bird with primary-school nihilist motivations makes them feel despair.
In the real world, people feel “despair” for many reasons, and more often than not, those reasons are directly related to the material circumstances that affect their daily lives. Not being able to pay rent, being unemployed, suffering heartbreak and depression, witnessing the callousness and greed of the people who hold positions of power in our world. Reducing Despair to an ontological narrative force completely divorced from the lived experiences of our everyday lives also divorces it from resonance with said lived experiences, and is what ultimately leaves Endwalker feeling intellectually hollow. Shadowbringers electrified my mind for months after I finished it and I am fairly confident the same will not happen here. When this reveal happened, Endwalker transformed from a story that had me literally trembling with excitement the more I played to something that, even if for just a moment, made me question whether investing in this world and these characters for as long as I have had been worth it after all.
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It’s 2019. I’m coming to the end of my masters, working on a dissertation project that is, hilariously, a “letterboxd for games” called…Backloggr. The release of Shadowbringers is imminent, and I am excited. Not like I was excited for Stormblood, no. Now I’m in and Shadowbringers is my most anticipated game of the year, and I’m planning how I can voraciously consume it whilst not letting my dissertation project suffer. What’s more, 2019 is the year I am finally honest with myself and others that I am trans, and my relationship with my FFXIV character finally makes sense. They are the medium in which I experiment with gender and gender presentation in a way that does not have the pressure and anxieties of experimentation in the real world, a way to experiment with an audience that won’t judge me in the way that I fear the most. This subject - and Final Fantasy XIV in general - becomes the subject of my first paid piece of games writing, and although I have mixed feelings on that article, the fact that I managed it at all is something that I hold dearly to heart. The article even goes up during my first clear of The Seat of Sacrifice [Extreme], my favorite fight in the entire game and one of my favorite moments in all of video games. It is the culmination of a story that has evolved from “pretty good, for an MMO” to a genuine contender for Best Final Fantasy Story, which I can only really express as the highest praise possible given that FF is probably my favorite series of games that contains multiple all-time contenders.
Final Fantasy XIV is a part of my life. I’m not going to credit it for the way I’ve grown as a person or a writer or say that it saved me or anything like that, I find the way people often give the media they enjoy the credit for accomplishing things like that disappointing because it deprives them of enormous credit. But during Shadowbringers especially, it helped me. It helped me work things out about myself, it helped me get work, it helped me develop my critical and creative writing faculties, it helped me make friends and it helped me get closer to old ones. And it helped make me happy when I wasn’t.
How do you even begin to review something like that?
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As a story, Endwalker is frequently and fairly consistently delightful and enjoyable moment to moment, but attempting to think more deeply about what it is trying to say causes a lot of friction, particularly when attempting to reconcile it with past expansions, and the Meteion stuff is maybe No.1 with a bullet as to why this is. I keep thinking about the scene where Jullus, one of the expansion’s most compelling new characters, rages with righteous anger against Zenos viator Galvus for destroying his home and people in his quest to fightfuck the player character, only for Alphinaud to tell him that he has to remain calm or else he’ll turn into a big evil monster the heroes will have no choice but to take down. Or how the fandom’s overly sympathetic lens of Emet-Selch and the Ancients in general has been absorbed wholeheartedly, leading to a shockingly uncritical depiction of a society that has a fundamental callous disregard for the sanctity of life, and particularly falls a little too much in love with Venat/Hydaelyn, sanding down many of the most interesting wrinkles of her character to make her a fairly unambiguous good guy at the end (which is not to say that her character is without depth - far from it - but the game does almost repel from the idea of really digging into that depth in favor of idolizing her), especially given things like the bodyswap and the conscious uselessness of the characters on the moon highlighting the fallibility of Hydaelyn and her plans, and casting a critical eye on the Scions’ uncritical adoration of her (you can even say “hey what was with Hydaelyn straight up lying to me in Heavensward ” to which an NPC says “huh dunno, probably nothing to worry about” which I thought for sure was Going Somewhere but no I was simply Not Supposed To Worry About it). And, frankly, only doom lays down the path of trying to parse any kind of statement out of the Final Days itself, what with it turning people feeling depression, righteous anger against injustice, and other true, human emotions unhelpfully grouped together and labeled “despair” into evil creatures who cannot be saved and must be put down lest they harm others.
Endwalker is a mess, both when it comes to reconciling what it’s trying to say with itself, and when it comes to how it interacts with prior expansions. But if it must be a mess? If it has to have this difficult and frictional relationship with the parts of the story I value the most? If it must end this way? Then let it be a beautiful mess. Let it be dumb and questionable with impeccable style, let it burn it’s bridges with impeccably dancing flames. Endwalker is many things at many times, but it is almost always doing what it is doing amazingly, with a confidence fully owned by a creative team burning with a confidence and passion found almost nowhere else in the big-budget space. Any time Endwalker goes somewhere, it does so in the most brash, confident manner possible, with some truly incredible visuals and direction that is genuinely staggering coming from a game that’s still kinda running on 13 year old FF13 tech. The music team once again does incredible work here, and if this soundtrack isn’t spoken of in the same hushed tones as all the expansion soundtracks before it, it’s only because Square Enix has become ever more draconian about allowing people to share this wonderful music. I said in a kind of cutting way earlier that Endwalker is consistently delightful and enjoyable moment to moment, but I want to stress that being continually entertaining throughout is something that many games utterly fail to manage, and the day I turn my nose up at a story that delights in its movements as much as Endwalker does is the day you can officially write me off as a lost cause.
And, hell, it’s not like the story isn’t worthwhile. I’ve been highly critical of the decisions made thematically, and I stand by those criticisms, but not only are the decisions not as disastrous as they could have been (in the incredible Answers scene the status of the Ascians as pining for a prelapsarian utopia that did not exist is upheld despite much of Elpis’ attempts to undermine that, which I felt was very important) but also there is still a great deal of resonance here to be found here. I truly think Garlemald, in particular, is a strong contender for best arc in the entire MSQ, and the character writing as a whole remains excellent. Thavnair is a cultural appropriation playground to be certain, but it’s also got one of the sickest characters in the whole game making his nest there, and I hope to see it developed further in future patches. The fact that I’m not as condemnatory of the Elpis arc as I think perhaps part of me wants to be is a testament to just how well rounded Hythlodaeus, Emet-Selch, Venat and Hermes manage to be. The Zenos duel at the end is obviously hysterical as a big dumb shonen finale but it also I think acknowledges a truth about this game and the people that play it that a lot of games (including this one, in the past) try to dance around. I may fundamentally disgree and find facile the game's argument that suffering is what gives life meaning, but it's in how that idea interacts with characters like the Ancients and Zenos, that this theme finds some purchase in my heart, an exploration of how people who have lived blessed, privileged lives of plenty are deaf and cold-hearted to the suffering of those less fortunate around them, and how that eventually twists into genuine malice as they become ever more desperate to maintain their comfortable status quo. Even if I find the root of why she has to do it fairly vacuous, Venat choosing to destroy her world for the sake of a potential better one is incredibly powerful. And above all, this story of people at the end of days finding something to hold onto, something worth living for, is something that I did find affecting and meaningful, even if I kind of have to avoid thinking about the details in order for it to have the biggest impact. Every day, I feel the crushing weight of the end of the world all around me, and I struggle greatly with just trying to live in a world where all around me are reminders trying to convince me that there is no hope to save our planet in the face of the people and systems killing it. And while I would caution against becoming addicted to Hope as a placebo against genuine change, there is still something to be said for making me feel like there is hope.
The answer that Endwalker ultimately arrives at, is that in the darkest of times, we find the strength to go on in each other, and in standing/working together, we can overcome anything. It’s a cliche, perhaps boring answer, but in many ways it is also the right one. The Warrior of Light has never walked alone, after all, they’ve always had a party of 3/7/23 others to journey alongside, to help carry them through their trials. Whether they saved others from death, took the fire for their friends, or slain the beasts that threatened them, we’ve always done this together. I know I have. I wouldn’t be here without those who have walked beside me, who healed me when I was at the end of my rope, who stood alongside me against my problems and granted me the strength to see them through. Whatever else I may think about what Endwalker has to say about living at the end of the world, I think it is right about that, at least.
Do I wish Endwalker handled things differently? Yeah, kinda. Do I think there are things about it that suck? For sure. Is this a fitting conclusion to a story over a decade in the making? Honestly, I still don’t know.
But did I have fun? Was it meaningful? Am I happy I made these friends, fought these battles? Am I glad I heard what I heard, felt what I felt, and thought what I thought?
Has my journey been good? Has it been worthwhile?
...That, I can’t deny.
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Whispers
Falling silently drifts on the wind
But I hear you
Our Journey
Now a memory fading from sight
But I see you
You're not alone.
Dear Esther
2012
You know how certain gamer types like to shit on narrative games? How they say they're pretentious and fake-deep, and all you do is walk around and wait for the story to happen? Aren't you glad that most "walking simulator" games are nothing like that? Well, Dear Esther IS literally that, and it feels like a parody of the genre. Don't play it.
I Am Setsuna
2016
The snowy world and soundtrack that almost exclusively uses piano make what's quite frankly a pretty standard JRPG into something really memorable. This is a world that's dying, where everyone is doing what they can just to cling onto life for another day, another year. The presentation of this game does an excellent job of conveying that underlying despair without constantly beating the player over the head with it.
I Am Setsuna
2016
I think this is very much a love it or hate it game. If you enjoy turn based battles and piano music, then chances are this will be right up your street!
There are definitely some balance issues and some odd design choices (like the lack of world map, and the random nature of fluxation), but if you can look past these faults there's a lot of charm, an intriguing story and good fun to be had with the combo system.
I really enjoyed this game, but can definitely see why some people wouldn't. You can get it on PS Plus Extra, so I'd recommend giving it a try if you like turn based RPGs.
There are definitely some balance issues and some odd design choices (like the lack of world map, and the random nature of fluxation), but if you can look past these faults there's a lot of charm, an intriguing story and good fun to be had with the combo system.
I really enjoyed this game, but can definitely see why some people wouldn't. You can get it on PS Plus Extra, so I'd recommend giving it a try if you like turn based RPGs.
Ys
1988
It Ys what it Ys
Final Fantasy Type-0
2011
This review contains spoilers
Class Zero has died a thousand thousand times. They're going to die, and die, and die again. They're going to keep dying, forever. And no one will remember them, because the Crystals won't let them.
Type-0 begins, after a characteristically bombastic intro CG cutscene displaying all the visual panache and particle effects one would expect from a Squeenix production, in a decidedly much less characteristic manner, in which we see, over the course of a long cutscene, a character slowly bleed out and die waiting for the "heroes", Class Zero, who will not arrive in time to save him, watching as he goes through periods of calm, resignation, acceptance, and then, most cuttingly and affecting at all, last minute panic as he spends his final moments screaming about how he doesn't want to die, before he finally, inevitably, does.
In the world of Type-0, the dead are erased from the minds of the living, an act framed as a kindness on behalf of the benevolent crystals, but in reality is only a measure to ensure the grand experiment of Orience continues in the most efficient manner possible. So, when members of Class Zero find Izana Kunagiri's body, they don't see him. They see a shape, an empty vacuous hole in the shape of a human being, everything he was and could have been having been violently stripped from him as he passed, with only Ace (who for reasons the game is largely uninterested in explaining, is one of only a few people in the world who can remember the dead) actually being able to see this for what this is: a young man, with thoughts and feelings and dreams, a loved one, taken from the world before any of those things could be fulfilled. Ace looks on at Izana, tears welling up as he strains to maintain his composure, before his companions demand he continue the mission, the social violence of this system the crystals perpetuate consuming even those who are able to sidestep its immediate effects. Not even given the space to process what this loss means for him - because his allies are literally incapable of understanding it - Ace turns away, and back into the battle...to die, and die again.
This is what it means to exist in Orience, the world of Final Fantasy Type-0. It's not simply that it is a hostile world to exist in (though, it definitely is that, as the preponderance of level 99 behemoths that can wipe your entire party effortlessly wandering even the low-level areas makes navigating it's world a constantly tense affair), but that the modes and rhythms of play constantly emphasize the ever-present threat of death, not just death, but callous, uncaring death that comes quickly, nastily, and brutishly.
When you first start Type-0, 14 party members right from the start feels like a lot. But you're going to need them, because on any given mission, most if not almost all of them will die, either at the hands of the astonishingly quick TTK given how high the Numbers are for your health, or for being summarily executed by your own side in the middle of a battle for failing to execute an optional order, or from the insta-kill Killsight mechanic that exists for both the enemy and you, or simply because you yourself sacrifice them to bring out the game's magical WMDs de jour, the Eidolons. The constancy of death in play, combined with the fact that revival items are absurdly rare and expensive, means you can't just keep throwing Phoenix Downs at your fave to keep them up and in the action. You can easily exhaust the entire game's quantity of Phoenix Downs on a single mission by doing that. So, instead, you have to roll with the punches, and soon, you learn to take part in the grim moral calculus of which party members are expendable, which ones you want to throw into the fire of almost certain death, and which ones you value enough to protect and keep for later.
It's a sickening realization to come to, to realize that Type-0 demands you play it in such a way that you hold the lives of these children in your hands and decide which life holds value to you.
It's also revelatory of who the player character of Type-0 actually is. It's not Ace, who is prominently fronted in the opening cutscene and is the go-to rep for Type-0 in crossover media, because despite that (and being my favorite character) he's not that important. It's not Machina or Rem, who are both taken out of the action in the final chapter and are best described as the Witnesses of the story rather than it's protagonists.
No, the person you are playing as is actually Arecia al-Rashia, the abusive mother of Class Zero who kidnapped, brainwashed, and made these children into weapons as part of a nebulous goal she has thus far failed to achieve 600,142,971 times, and will likely fail to achieve 600,142,971 times more.
Experiencing the playing of an RPG - the levelling, the equipping, the customization - through this frame is a confronting experience that is difficult to sit with. When you're playing Dragon Quest III, for example, there is a level of assumed abstraction, that when you de-equip a sword from one character to give to another, that there is not a godlike entity watching over the cast that makes these decisions for them, we take as given that our mechanical movements here represent an interaction between these characters. Type-0 removes this comforting abstraction, and ties the acts of JRPG mechanical play with parental abuse in a way that, once you realize what is happening here, tints even the most mundane of mechanical interactions in the game in upsetting hues.
I want to stress, because I think there's a bad, almost solipsistic tendency on behalf of players to associate criticism and condemnation of a player character with criticism and condemnation of the player themself, that I do not think Type-0 thinks that RPG mechanics are abusive. Rather, I think this lens of abuse exists because of what Type-0 is actually interested in, which is the deeply cruel and dehumanizing effect of the way we raise young people in schools.
It's easy to assume that the school setting of Type-0 is barely meant to be thought about, used as shorthand for a relatable shared social space in the way that many anime and anime-adjacent media do, and I think that is exactly what we are supposed to think at the beginning, before the unique cruelties of this school environment begin to properly reveal themselves.
What the Akademia of Rubrum exists to teach these kids is not the things that will actually meaningfully enrich their lives. It is not the things that will help them become happier, brighter people. They are taught how to be better killers, how to increase their stats and get better equipment to more efficiently kill others, all for the sake of the adults in charge of the school, blissfully comfortable far behind the frontlines, churning through these children in order to achieve a nebulous, undefined goal that, owing to said undefinability, can never and will never be achieved. In play, this creates a dynamic where unlike, say, Persona, socializing with others represents time that would be better spent, in the eyes of the faculty, on training missions, classes to raise stats, and other strict mechanical bonuses that will allow you to succeed in upcoming "exams" in the form of mandatory story missions.
School in Type-0 is not, as in Persona, a kind of fantastical place to live out an idyllic, largely frictionless school life. It is the infliction of a cold, brutal calculus of choosing between academic/mechanical success and developing relationships and more positive memories, a kind of calculus that you don't really have much choice but to acquiesce to, because it's not like you can challenge the school system as a school student, can you?
I'd like to use the character of Ace as my case study for this. As mentioned above, Ace is my favorite character in this game. We're introduced to him, after the dramatic entrance of Class Zero, crying over the passing of Izana Kunagiri, the boy who slowly dies in the game's opening suquence. This established that unlike his comrades, Ace can remember Izana, but it's only in flashbacks as the game goes on (flashbacks that take up valuable time the faculty would rather you use on training) that their relationship is revealed, and it only enhances the tragedy of the opening moments by making clear that the tears Ace shed over Izana's passing were the only time he was able to be fully emotionally honest with him in a way he could understand, because Ace, as a sheltered child soldier raised from birth within this system doesn't have the framework to ask Izana to hang out sometime or play Tekken with him after school or whatever. His opening up to Izana comes in the form of asking him to go on a mission with him, the same mission that will lead to his death. It's tragic, and thorny, and difficult to turn over in my head without it cutting against me. Ace in general empathizes greatly with a lot of the interactions and distances my autism created for me in school, but I don't want to center this reading on myself when I think the game is so good at reflecting the meaningful lived experience of far more people than just myself.
(Though, I do gotta say: the scene where Ace sings the opening bars of the game's theme song to try to communicate his feelings to the rest of the class because he doesn't feel like he can manage it with his own words? Broooooooooooooooooo 😭😭😭😭😭😭)
Far be it from me to speculate on the tastes of an entire nation, but if there is a reason I can point to for why Type-0 was a surprise hit in Japan when it was originally released on PSP, despite the deeply frictional and hostile nature of many of it's design decisions, I think this might be why. I do not want to suggest that anime as a medium is entirely uninterested in interrogating the violence of education because that is clearly untrue, but I do think there is a ubiquity to the school setting in anime that belies what a troubling and traumatic experience it can be for many people, myself very much included. Type-0 is far truer to experience of School as I experienced it than most any other game depicting that environment I have ever played, first and foremost by acknowledging the uniquely upsetting experience of spending years inside a system where you are taught in such a manner as to mold you into a nebulous concept rather than to meaningfully broaden your horizons.
Indeed, if you just go through the main story of Type-0 and don't take time out to talk to NPCs in the World Map or read the Rubicus lore book, you might completely miss out on certain details, and have certain late-game plot turns completely blindside you with their apparent abruptness. Even past this, certain key characters are introduced after the final cutscene and first ending, and require a second playthrough - with new scenes and plot elements - to fully grasp the significance of. This is the element of the game I most struggled with on my past abortive attempts to get into Type-0, but when I finally did break past the loop and find myself in Type-0, it was one of the elements I appreciate the most. Much like this team's next work, Final Fantasy XV, Type-0 is very intentional with the elements it presents to you and the elements it leaves out, and the elements it wants you to seek out for yourself. The game's major cutscenes are presented like wartime propaganda, and that's because they are: selectively informative newsreels that tell you what the Dominion of Rubrum wants you to know. Very rarely does a game withhold so much information so intentionally, to let you miss out on so many things if you are unwilling to seek out that information for yourself, and broaden your knowledge beyond what the Powers That Be want you to know.
The more you learn, the bleaker and more desperate the world of Orience seems, with a similar effect reading the news and histories of our own world can have. If you are familiar with the Fabula Nova Crystallis lore that Type-0 draws from you might realize what exactly is going on reasonably quickly, but even without that, the game does an excellent job of giving you information that rarely gives simple answers to simple questions. Instead, everything it tells you makes everything thornier, more complicated, less the simple "we are being invaded by fascists" premise the story fronts as. It's a kind of complexity that reaches fever pitch in time for the game's final act where Rubrum, your nation, manages to hold back a two-pronged attack by enacting - out of desperation, for whatever that is worth - what can only be described as a wartime atrocity, annihilating the Evil Army you've spent the entire game fighting against and setting the stage for a penultimate chapter wherein you are obviously - if you have been paying attention - becoming the villains, moving beyond simply reclaiming your own territory and outright conquering the entire world with your overwhelming military strength. I've not really touched on the game's RTS elements but I do want to note them here because this is another example where Type-0 takes it's mechanics to their uncomfortable conclusions: what does Painting A Map Your Colour practically mean in a world full of real, living people?
There's interesting stuff in this lore - particularly with regards to the world's relationship with Agito and Finis, and the motivations of Grand Marshal Cid Aulstyne, who initially appears to be a laughably unsympathetic fascist analogue but who eventually reveals himself to be a troubled idealist who is taking whatever methods necessary to free the people of Orience from the hell they are blissfully unaware of being trapped in (yes, I am aware that once again I have found a Problematic Char Aznable to Stan) - but the importance of it is in how it is placed, this act of you going to seek out this information on your own, to push against the boundaries of the system you are trapped in even if breaking through entirely might be impossible. When Tempus Finis comes - the final exam both for you and all humanity - you can learn all you want about why it's occurring and what it's purpose is, but no matter what, the game will still end with a final dungeon that consists almost entirely of arbitrary challenges you must follow to the letter or face death. No one in the world of Orience can escape examination, and because of the nature of that world, none can ever truly meet the standards of their deific examiners.
VERDICT: FINIS.
I love how this game ends. It's the strangest final dungeon I've ever experienced in an RPG, one that lays bear the question-answer-response loop of almost every video game remotely like this bare in a strangely upsetting and beautifully alienating way. It's oft been described that bosses and final levels should act as examinations for everything the player has been taught so far, and Type-0 literalizes that in such a charismatic way. And the glimmer of hope at the end, where you persist even after the Arbiter fails you, where you fight and die and fight and die again to finally defeat him and end the apocalypse is so beautiful...and only made more so when it is eventually snatched from you again. The true end of the game is not when you defeat the final boss, but when the party, in a position to be ressurected once again by Arecia, begs to be allowed to finally die and for the world to escape from it's cycle, to which Arecia, seemingly, acquiesces. As a beat, this didn't sit right with me, but, in the one true act of brilliance the HD port offers, I was surprised to find the game agreeing with that read, choosing instead to truly close out Type-0 on one final secret ending that reveals that, eventually, Arecia ignored the pleas of her children, changes her mind, and resets everything for one more turn of the wheel.
The world won't change by begging for it to. Because, fundamentally, the Powers That Be don't actually care. And so, Class Zero and the rest of Orience remain trapped. Forever.
Class Zero has died a thousand thousand times. They're going to die, and die, and die again. They're going to keep dying, forever. And no one will remember them.
"This makes it 600,142,972 times."
VERDICT: ZERO
In 2016, I was starting to fall out with video games a little. Increasingly, it felt like there weren't really any video games coming out that were For Me. Between a few high-profile disappointments in the form of Fire Emblem Fates, launch-era Civilization VI, and SMTIV: Apocalypse, and cases where games I did like, like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Dishonored 2, were commercial flops that killed their franchises, it felt like it just wasn't possible to make games anymore that hit me like the ones that made me fall in love with this medium in the first place. And then Final Fantasy XV came out, a game I approached with cautious optimism at best, but which absolutely blew me away, for being this deeply idiosyncratic game that did things I simply thought were impossible to do in the contemporary big-budget video game space, a game that removed it's own open world at the halfway point, when continuing to have it would be detrimental to the narrative, a game that was willing to be absolutely miserable to play for multiple chapters in order to underscore the collapsing relationships it was depicting, a game that enthralled me because it knew exactly what it wanted to do and what it wanted to be about, focusing it's entirety on that goal and leaving areas of traditional narrative or game design wisdom to languish where they weren't necessary.
I adored that game. It reignited my passion for video games, and set ablaze my fandom for Final Fantasy once again after the XIII series (at the time) left me feeling mixed, at best. But it was deeply divisive, outright loathed in many circles, and Square, for better or worse, released a series of updates and DLC content that sought to address those criticisms. Some of these additions were fine, others less so, but for someone who already loved the game exactly the way it was, it felt...strange and upsetting to watch a game I loved try to contort itself into new shapes to try to appeal to people who just weren't interested in it in the first place, and by the end of this process, with the absolutely execrable Episode Ardyn and Dawn of the Future novel that sought to effectively rewrite the story of Final Fantasy XV into a more traditional epic fantasy narrative that run roughshod over everything that made it exceptional in the first place, brought me back to the same place I was before XV, feeling that a game like this just wasn't possible to make in this environment.
Type-0 brought back those feelings, and served to solidify further that the team's decisions on XV were not the result of incompetence or a rushed development, but from genuine consideration for what would be the most effective way to tell this story. Hajime Tabata and his team at what would become Luminous Productions fucking had it, man, and it's a crying shame that Tabata left and Luminous was shifted onto a project steered into the dirt by Gary Fucking Whitta.
Type-0 is a difficult game to enjoy. It's not for nothing that it took me three or four attempts to get into it: it is frictional, off-putting, and alienating, and doesn't even have a beloved auteur's name attached like Suda51 or Yoko Taro that would give people a reason to push further in. But I've also never played a game quite like it. It's been about 3 months since I finished it and it's never quite left my head in that time. I don't think everyone is going to love this, which is why I've been a bit more laissez-faire with spoilers here (though i'm still not giving everything away) than normal, but I think if you want to love it, if this sounds like your thing...you owe it to yourself to play Type-0.
I am under no illusion that most people will not fall into that category. This game is even more alienating than launch-era FFXV, a game that to this day inspires some of the most venomous tracts I have ever heard towards any video game. And it's really not helped by the fact that the complete picture of the game is difficult to see, with the fan-translated PSP port's multiplayer features functionally inaccessible at this point, and the officially-translated HD port being, to be blunt, rubbish in many ways but also the most practically convenient way to play. Even Square has not seen fit to remember and honor Class Zero the way my heart cries out for them to be.
So, let this be my own personal epitaph for them. Not a recommendation, because I know most people won't like this game. Not an excoriation, because I still believe this game has immense worth. These are just words to mark it in one place, in one time.
History has left Final Fantasy Type-0 behind. But I remember it. And I am still here.
Type-0 begins, after a characteristically bombastic intro CG cutscene displaying all the visual panache and particle effects one would expect from a Squeenix production, in a decidedly much less characteristic manner, in which we see, over the course of a long cutscene, a character slowly bleed out and die waiting for the "heroes", Class Zero, who will not arrive in time to save him, watching as he goes through periods of calm, resignation, acceptance, and then, most cuttingly and affecting at all, last minute panic as he spends his final moments screaming about how he doesn't want to die, before he finally, inevitably, does.
In the world of Type-0, the dead are erased from the minds of the living, an act framed as a kindness on behalf of the benevolent crystals, but in reality is only a measure to ensure the grand experiment of Orience continues in the most efficient manner possible. So, when members of Class Zero find Izana Kunagiri's body, they don't see him. They see a shape, an empty vacuous hole in the shape of a human being, everything he was and could have been having been violently stripped from him as he passed, with only Ace (who for reasons the game is largely uninterested in explaining, is one of only a few people in the world who can remember the dead) actually being able to see this for what this is: a young man, with thoughts and feelings and dreams, a loved one, taken from the world before any of those things could be fulfilled. Ace looks on at Izana, tears welling up as he strains to maintain his composure, before his companions demand he continue the mission, the social violence of this system the crystals perpetuate consuming even those who are able to sidestep its immediate effects. Not even given the space to process what this loss means for him - because his allies are literally incapable of understanding it - Ace turns away, and back into the battle...to die, and die again.
This is what it means to exist in Orience, the world of Final Fantasy Type-0. It's not simply that it is a hostile world to exist in (though, it definitely is that, as the preponderance of level 99 behemoths that can wipe your entire party effortlessly wandering even the low-level areas makes navigating it's world a constantly tense affair), but that the modes and rhythms of play constantly emphasize the ever-present threat of death, not just death, but callous, uncaring death that comes quickly, nastily, and brutishly.
When you first start Type-0, 14 party members right from the start feels like a lot. But you're going to need them, because on any given mission, most if not almost all of them will die, either at the hands of the astonishingly quick TTK given how high the Numbers are for your health, or for being summarily executed by your own side in the middle of a battle for failing to execute an optional order, or from the insta-kill Killsight mechanic that exists for both the enemy and you, or simply because you yourself sacrifice them to bring out the game's magical WMDs de jour, the Eidolons. The constancy of death in play, combined with the fact that revival items are absurdly rare and expensive, means you can't just keep throwing Phoenix Downs at your fave to keep them up and in the action. You can easily exhaust the entire game's quantity of Phoenix Downs on a single mission by doing that. So, instead, you have to roll with the punches, and soon, you learn to take part in the grim moral calculus of which party members are expendable, which ones you want to throw into the fire of almost certain death, and which ones you value enough to protect and keep for later.
It's a sickening realization to come to, to realize that Type-0 demands you play it in such a way that you hold the lives of these children in your hands and decide which life holds value to you.
It's also revelatory of who the player character of Type-0 actually is. It's not Ace, who is prominently fronted in the opening cutscene and is the go-to rep for Type-0 in crossover media, because despite that (and being my favorite character) he's not that important. It's not Machina or Rem, who are both taken out of the action in the final chapter and are best described as the Witnesses of the story rather than it's protagonists.
No, the person you are playing as is actually Arecia al-Rashia, the abusive mother of Class Zero who kidnapped, brainwashed, and made these children into weapons as part of a nebulous goal she has thus far failed to achieve 600,142,971 times, and will likely fail to achieve 600,142,971 times more.
Experiencing the playing of an RPG - the levelling, the equipping, the customization - through this frame is a confronting experience that is difficult to sit with. When you're playing Dragon Quest III, for example, there is a level of assumed abstraction, that when you de-equip a sword from one character to give to another, that there is not a godlike entity watching over the cast that makes these decisions for them, we take as given that our mechanical movements here represent an interaction between these characters. Type-0 removes this comforting abstraction, and ties the acts of JRPG mechanical play with parental abuse in a way that, once you realize what is happening here, tints even the most mundane of mechanical interactions in the game in upsetting hues.
I want to stress, because I think there's a bad, almost solipsistic tendency on behalf of players to associate criticism and condemnation of a player character with criticism and condemnation of the player themself, that I do not think Type-0 thinks that RPG mechanics are abusive. Rather, I think this lens of abuse exists because of what Type-0 is actually interested in, which is the deeply cruel and dehumanizing effect of the way we raise young people in schools.
It's easy to assume that the school setting of Type-0 is barely meant to be thought about, used as shorthand for a relatable shared social space in the way that many anime and anime-adjacent media do, and I think that is exactly what we are supposed to think at the beginning, before the unique cruelties of this school environment begin to properly reveal themselves.
What the Akademia of Rubrum exists to teach these kids is not the things that will actually meaningfully enrich their lives. It is not the things that will help them become happier, brighter people. They are taught how to be better killers, how to increase their stats and get better equipment to more efficiently kill others, all for the sake of the adults in charge of the school, blissfully comfortable far behind the frontlines, churning through these children in order to achieve a nebulous, undefined goal that, owing to said undefinability, can never and will never be achieved. In play, this creates a dynamic where unlike, say, Persona, socializing with others represents time that would be better spent, in the eyes of the faculty, on training missions, classes to raise stats, and other strict mechanical bonuses that will allow you to succeed in upcoming "exams" in the form of mandatory story missions.
School in Type-0 is not, as in Persona, a kind of fantastical place to live out an idyllic, largely frictionless school life. It is the infliction of a cold, brutal calculus of choosing between academic/mechanical success and developing relationships and more positive memories, a kind of calculus that you don't really have much choice but to acquiesce to, because it's not like you can challenge the school system as a school student, can you?
I'd like to use the character of Ace as my case study for this. As mentioned above, Ace is my favorite character in this game. We're introduced to him, after the dramatic entrance of Class Zero, crying over the passing of Izana Kunagiri, the boy who slowly dies in the game's opening suquence. This established that unlike his comrades, Ace can remember Izana, but it's only in flashbacks as the game goes on (flashbacks that take up valuable time the faculty would rather you use on training) that their relationship is revealed, and it only enhances the tragedy of the opening moments by making clear that the tears Ace shed over Izana's passing were the only time he was able to be fully emotionally honest with him in a way he could understand, because Ace, as a sheltered child soldier raised from birth within this system doesn't have the framework to ask Izana to hang out sometime or play Tekken with him after school or whatever. His opening up to Izana comes in the form of asking him to go on a mission with him, the same mission that will lead to his death. It's tragic, and thorny, and difficult to turn over in my head without it cutting against me. Ace in general empathizes greatly with a lot of the interactions and distances my autism created for me in school, but I don't want to center this reading on myself when I think the game is so good at reflecting the meaningful lived experience of far more people than just myself.
(Though, I do gotta say: the scene where Ace sings the opening bars of the game's theme song to try to communicate his feelings to the rest of the class because he doesn't feel like he can manage it with his own words? Broooooooooooooooooo 😭😭😭😭😭😭)
Far be it from me to speculate on the tastes of an entire nation, but if there is a reason I can point to for why Type-0 was a surprise hit in Japan when it was originally released on PSP, despite the deeply frictional and hostile nature of many of it's design decisions, I think this might be why. I do not want to suggest that anime as a medium is entirely uninterested in interrogating the violence of education because that is clearly untrue, but I do think there is a ubiquity to the school setting in anime that belies what a troubling and traumatic experience it can be for many people, myself very much included. Type-0 is far truer to experience of School as I experienced it than most any other game depicting that environment I have ever played, first and foremost by acknowledging the uniquely upsetting experience of spending years inside a system where you are taught in such a manner as to mold you into a nebulous concept rather than to meaningfully broaden your horizons.
Indeed, if you just go through the main story of Type-0 and don't take time out to talk to NPCs in the World Map or read the Rubicus lore book, you might completely miss out on certain details, and have certain late-game plot turns completely blindside you with their apparent abruptness. Even past this, certain key characters are introduced after the final cutscene and first ending, and require a second playthrough - with new scenes and plot elements - to fully grasp the significance of. This is the element of the game I most struggled with on my past abortive attempts to get into Type-0, but when I finally did break past the loop and find myself in Type-0, it was one of the elements I appreciate the most. Much like this team's next work, Final Fantasy XV, Type-0 is very intentional with the elements it presents to you and the elements it leaves out, and the elements it wants you to seek out for yourself. The game's major cutscenes are presented like wartime propaganda, and that's because they are: selectively informative newsreels that tell you what the Dominion of Rubrum wants you to know. Very rarely does a game withhold so much information so intentionally, to let you miss out on so many things if you are unwilling to seek out that information for yourself, and broaden your knowledge beyond what the Powers That Be want you to know.
The more you learn, the bleaker and more desperate the world of Orience seems, with a similar effect reading the news and histories of our own world can have. If you are familiar with the Fabula Nova Crystallis lore that Type-0 draws from you might realize what exactly is going on reasonably quickly, but even without that, the game does an excellent job of giving you information that rarely gives simple answers to simple questions. Instead, everything it tells you makes everything thornier, more complicated, less the simple "we are being invaded by fascists" premise the story fronts as. It's a kind of complexity that reaches fever pitch in time for the game's final act where Rubrum, your nation, manages to hold back a two-pronged attack by enacting - out of desperation, for whatever that is worth - what can only be described as a wartime atrocity, annihilating the Evil Army you've spent the entire game fighting against and setting the stage for a penultimate chapter wherein you are obviously - if you have been paying attention - becoming the villains, moving beyond simply reclaiming your own territory and outright conquering the entire world with your overwhelming military strength. I've not really touched on the game's RTS elements but I do want to note them here because this is another example where Type-0 takes it's mechanics to their uncomfortable conclusions: what does Painting A Map Your Colour practically mean in a world full of real, living people?
There's interesting stuff in this lore - particularly with regards to the world's relationship with Agito and Finis, and the motivations of Grand Marshal Cid Aulstyne, who initially appears to be a laughably unsympathetic fascist analogue but who eventually reveals himself to be a troubled idealist who is taking whatever methods necessary to free the people of Orience from the hell they are blissfully unaware of being trapped in (yes, I am aware that once again I have found a Problematic Char Aznable to Stan) - but the importance of it is in how it is placed, this act of you going to seek out this information on your own, to push against the boundaries of the system you are trapped in even if breaking through entirely might be impossible. When Tempus Finis comes - the final exam both for you and all humanity - you can learn all you want about why it's occurring and what it's purpose is, but no matter what, the game will still end with a final dungeon that consists almost entirely of arbitrary challenges you must follow to the letter or face death. No one in the world of Orience can escape examination, and because of the nature of that world, none can ever truly meet the standards of their deific examiners.
VERDICT: FINIS.
I love how this game ends. It's the strangest final dungeon I've ever experienced in an RPG, one that lays bear the question-answer-response loop of almost every video game remotely like this bare in a strangely upsetting and beautifully alienating way. It's oft been described that bosses and final levels should act as examinations for everything the player has been taught so far, and Type-0 literalizes that in such a charismatic way. And the glimmer of hope at the end, where you persist even after the Arbiter fails you, where you fight and die and fight and die again to finally defeat him and end the apocalypse is so beautiful...and only made more so when it is eventually snatched from you again. The true end of the game is not when you defeat the final boss, but when the party, in a position to be ressurected once again by Arecia, begs to be allowed to finally die and for the world to escape from it's cycle, to which Arecia, seemingly, acquiesces. As a beat, this didn't sit right with me, but, in the one true act of brilliance the HD port offers, I was surprised to find the game agreeing with that read, choosing instead to truly close out Type-0 on one final secret ending that reveals that, eventually, Arecia ignored the pleas of her children, changes her mind, and resets everything for one more turn of the wheel.
The world won't change by begging for it to. Because, fundamentally, the Powers That Be don't actually care. And so, Class Zero and the rest of Orience remain trapped. Forever.
Class Zero has died a thousand thousand times. They're going to die, and die, and die again. They're going to keep dying, forever. And no one will remember them.
"This makes it 600,142,972 times."
VERDICT: ZERO
In 2016, I was starting to fall out with video games a little. Increasingly, it felt like there weren't really any video games coming out that were For Me. Between a few high-profile disappointments in the form of Fire Emblem Fates, launch-era Civilization VI, and SMTIV: Apocalypse, and cases where games I did like, like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Dishonored 2, were commercial flops that killed their franchises, it felt like it just wasn't possible to make games anymore that hit me like the ones that made me fall in love with this medium in the first place. And then Final Fantasy XV came out, a game I approached with cautious optimism at best, but which absolutely blew me away, for being this deeply idiosyncratic game that did things I simply thought were impossible to do in the contemporary big-budget video game space, a game that removed it's own open world at the halfway point, when continuing to have it would be detrimental to the narrative, a game that was willing to be absolutely miserable to play for multiple chapters in order to underscore the collapsing relationships it was depicting, a game that enthralled me because it knew exactly what it wanted to do and what it wanted to be about, focusing it's entirety on that goal and leaving areas of traditional narrative or game design wisdom to languish where they weren't necessary.
I adored that game. It reignited my passion for video games, and set ablaze my fandom for Final Fantasy once again after the XIII series (at the time) left me feeling mixed, at best. But it was deeply divisive, outright loathed in many circles, and Square, for better or worse, released a series of updates and DLC content that sought to address those criticisms. Some of these additions were fine, others less so, but for someone who already loved the game exactly the way it was, it felt...strange and upsetting to watch a game I loved try to contort itself into new shapes to try to appeal to people who just weren't interested in it in the first place, and by the end of this process, with the absolutely execrable Episode Ardyn and Dawn of the Future novel that sought to effectively rewrite the story of Final Fantasy XV into a more traditional epic fantasy narrative that run roughshod over everything that made it exceptional in the first place, brought me back to the same place I was before XV, feeling that a game like this just wasn't possible to make in this environment.
Type-0 brought back those feelings, and served to solidify further that the team's decisions on XV were not the result of incompetence or a rushed development, but from genuine consideration for what would be the most effective way to tell this story. Hajime Tabata and his team at what would become Luminous Productions fucking had it, man, and it's a crying shame that Tabata left and Luminous was shifted onto a project steered into the dirt by Gary Fucking Whitta.
Type-0 is a difficult game to enjoy. It's not for nothing that it took me three or four attempts to get into it: it is frictional, off-putting, and alienating, and doesn't even have a beloved auteur's name attached like Suda51 or Yoko Taro that would give people a reason to push further in. But I've also never played a game quite like it. It's been about 3 months since I finished it and it's never quite left my head in that time. I don't think everyone is going to love this, which is why I've been a bit more laissez-faire with spoilers here (though i'm still not giving everything away) than normal, but I think if you want to love it, if this sounds like your thing...you owe it to yourself to play Type-0.
I am under no illusion that most people will not fall into that category. This game is even more alienating than launch-era FFXV, a game that to this day inspires some of the most venomous tracts I have ever heard towards any video game. And it's really not helped by the fact that the complete picture of the game is difficult to see, with the fan-translated PSP port's multiplayer features functionally inaccessible at this point, and the officially-translated HD port being, to be blunt, rubbish in many ways but also the most practically convenient way to play. Even Square has not seen fit to remember and honor Class Zero the way my heart cries out for them to be.
So, let this be my own personal epitaph for them. Not a recommendation, because I know most people won't like this game. Not an excoriation, because I still believe this game has immense worth. These are just words to mark it in one place, in one time.
History has left Final Fantasy Type-0 behind. But I remember it. And I am still here.
Boku no Natsuyasumi
2000
i try not to be crt pilled but playing this on a crt kinda blows my fucking mind dog
Boku no Natsuyasumi
2000
Where videogames usually tend to go for escapism and fantasy to reconnect with the sense of wonder, with innocence, with freedom... Boku no Natsuyasumi finds all of that in a more down to earth context. Every day is an adventure, there is no need for magic or silly objectives, exploring in the countryside, catching some bugs, watering flowers until they bloom… No wonder why at the end of each day the game asks you if you want to keep playing, it seems like it’s asking at the same time if you don’t want to go out and enjoy your own surroundings.
Despite being set in the 70’s, Boku no Natsuyasumi avoids falling into prison with nostalgia. Rather than keeping you trapped in an endless summer full of joy, the calendar is always moving forward and the days fly by, just as when we were kids. And there are some rough edges too, even if the game is always looking through the eyes of innocence. Between the fun of summer days there is space to talk about deciding what to do in the future, dealing with moving away from your family, the memories of a not so distant war, the grief of losing a dear one too soon… And of course, a never repeated summer cannot end in any other way but with an emotional goodbye, nothing left but memories, but nothing else needed anyway.
Despite being set in the 70’s, Boku no Natsuyasumi avoids falling into prison with nostalgia. Rather than keeping you trapped in an endless summer full of joy, the calendar is always moving forward and the days fly by, just as when we were kids. And there are some rough edges too, even if the game is always looking through the eyes of innocence. Between the fun of summer days there is space to talk about deciding what to do in the future, dealing with moving away from your family, the memories of a not so distant war, the grief of losing a dear one too soon… And of course, a never repeated summer cannot end in any other way but with an emotional goodbye, nothing left but memories, but nothing else needed anyway.
Boku no Natsuyasumi
2000
don't let my 'completed' on this fool you: i'm never wrapping this game up and i'm never seeing the ending. i don't know how this ends, and i don't want to. in my world, boku's going to get that ultimate wish and live out a truly endless summer as long as i have a say in it. he's going to draw pictures and catch bugs and sit on logs and explore the sunflower fields for as long as his little heart can take it, until his smile sticks on his face for good.
ozu's 'good morning' and home movies of the summer of your first kiss, wrapped in a deep embrace in a sleeping bag surrounded by the buzzing of the august cicadas. this is one of the games i started learning japanese with the hopes of playing and now that i'm here, i can say it was worth all that work. this is the grateful dead's 'ripple' of video games - one of the few genuinely perfect, genuinely, overabundantly loving and tender experiences in its medium. truly in the league of katamari damacy and earthbound in that regard. just dear... just precious.
ozu's 'good morning' and home movies of the summer of your first kiss, wrapped in a deep embrace in a sleeping bag surrounded by the buzzing of the august cicadas. this is one of the games i started learning japanese with the hopes of playing and now that i'm here, i can say it was worth all that work. this is the grateful dead's 'ripple' of video games - one of the few genuinely perfect, genuinely, overabundantly loving and tender experiences in its medium. truly in the league of katamari damacy and earthbound in that regard. just dear... just precious.
Boku no Natsuyasumi
2000
hoo boy where do I even start here? This game stands proud as one of the vibest of vibe games, and with good reason, because the vibes here are truly on another level compared to most games today, let alone on the PS1.
It's a game where in the grand scheme of things not much happens as you spend a month over at your cousins house in summer. What you do with your 31 days at their countryside abode is entirely up to you. It is your summer vacation, after all, so there's no real correct or incorrect way to spend your time, and the game is entirely developed with that in mind.
The game very obviously isn't designed much like a traditional video game, as rewards for exploration are more scenes that try to evoke a particular emotion rather than being any sort of progress-making videogamey reward. I guess a good example is a random well that exists in a corner of the countryside. It's a dead end, there aren't many bugs to collect near the well, nothing inside the well, you can't go in the well to a new area, all that you can do is examine the well. Doing so plays a cutscene showing Boku looking down the well in intimidation before taking a few steps back in fear. That one particular area really has very little significance in the entire map as a side route, and it's really not like that area has any real threat to it. But like, I'm sure there has been a time in all of our youths where we ended up wandering somewhere we probably weren't supposed to be unsupervised and getting psyched out from something completely harmless. Bokunatsu is absolutely chock full of moments like that from start to finish. Regardless of whether or not you actually have experience of being a child living in rural 1970's Japan, this game covers so many aspects of being a kid in general that there's bound to be tons of things to relate to in spite of its setting.
Another impressive aspect to me was just the design of the whole world and it's characters. It's probably one of the most peaceful games to ever exist, with breathtaking hand-drawn 2D backgrounds of natural countryside landscapes and characters that feel like actual people just living another month in their lives. The wide age disparity between the different characters also provides insight in how summer is spent at different points of life. Kids like Boku and his little sister spend their time completely free and at their own discretion, being curious about the many things in the world, generally playing around every day with all their free time. There's Moe, the older cousin in her teens, where she struggles with growing up, spending most of her days studying inside or sitting outside at night thinking more philosophically about her future as she is about to enter high school. And then there's your Aunt and Uncle, where to their adult lives August is just another month of the grind doing work stuff and housekeeping. This game just excels at being a window into this precise household in this precise one month in time, allowing you as the player to observe the countryside and the family living in it just the same way as Boku does.
I could honestly keep going on about all the various moments in the game and the many different memories they made me feel, but I think yall get the point. Would definitely highly rec to anyone even remotely interested in these kinds of peaceful vibes, as this game definitely hits in a unique way to everyone who would play it. Much like actual summer vacation to a kid, this game is entirely what you make of it. or something like that.
It's a game where in the grand scheme of things not much happens as you spend a month over at your cousins house in summer. What you do with your 31 days at their countryside abode is entirely up to you. It is your summer vacation, after all, so there's no real correct or incorrect way to spend your time, and the game is entirely developed with that in mind.
The game very obviously isn't designed much like a traditional video game, as rewards for exploration are more scenes that try to evoke a particular emotion rather than being any sort of progress-making videogamey reward. I guess a good example is a random well that exists in a corner of the countryside. It's a dead end, there aren't many bugs to collect near the well, nothing inside the well, you can't go in the well to a new area, all that you can do is examine the well. Doing so plays a cutscene showing Boku looking down the well in intimidation before taking a few steps back in fear. That one particular area really has very little significance in the entire map as a side route, and it's really not like that area has any real threat to it. But like, I'm sure there has been a time in all of our youths where we ended up wandering somewhere we probably weren't supposed to be unsupervised and getting psyched out from something completely harmless. Bokunatsu is absolutely chock full of moments like that from start to finish. Regardless of whether or not you actually have experience of being a child living in rural 1970's Japan, this game covers so many aspects of being a kid in general that there's bound to be tons of things to relate to in spite of its setting.
Another impressive aspect to me was just the design of the whole world and it's characters. It's probably one of the most peaceful games to ever exist, with breathtaking hand-drawn 2D backgrounds of natural countryside landscapes and characters that feel like actual people just living another month in their lives. The wide age disparity between the different characters also provides insight in how summer is spent at different points of life. Kids like Boku and his little sister spend their time completely free and at their own discretion, being curious about the many things in the world, generally playing around every day with all their free time. There's Moe, the older cousin in her teens, where she struggles with growing up, spending most of her days studying inside or sitting outside at night thinking more philosophically about her future as she is about to enter high school. And then there's your Aunt and Uncle, where to their adult lives August is just another month of the grind doing work stuff and housekeeping. This game just excels at being a window into this precise household in this precise one month in time, allowing you as the player to observe the countryside and the family living in it just the same way as Boku does.
I could honestly keep going on about all the various moments in the game and the many different memories they made me feel, but I think yall get the point. Would definitely highly rec to anyone even remotely interested in these kinds of peaceful vibes, as this game definitely hits in a unique way to everyone who would play it. Much like actual summer vacation to a kid, this game is entirely what you make of it. or something like that.
this actually did happen to my buddy noah
This review was written before the game released
THE BRITISH ARE COMING
THE BRITISH ARE COMING
THE BRITISH ARE COMING