Can’t believe Dunkey really tricked nine million gamers into thinking The Last Guardian was this broken dumpster fire devoid of any fun or joy. Shaking my head. The gaming community really let me down with this one, maybe some other content creator a decade later will realize it was actually good when it’ll be +120$ on retro game store shelves.

Okay, being more rational here, I’ve always found the mixed reception of The Last Guardian to be rather puzzling. You’d think the third game from industry legend Fumito Ueda, the man behind ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, arguably two of the most influential PS2 games ever, would come out with more enthusiasm behind it after its infamously long nine-year development time, spanning a whole console generation. But quite literally the opposite happened. The game was so divisive on its release by critics and audiences it’s no surprise nobody wanted to be the guinea pig that invested their time and money into it. Many of its detractors claimed this was because Trico, the big animal companion and the main mechanic of the game, was unresponsive and unreliable too frequently, giving the player more lack of control than necessary and making playing the game more frustrating than it needed to be. Which I’ve always found that odd because I feel lack of control has always been a major theme in Ueda’s games?

In ICO, you play as a little boy trying to escape a big castle with a girl named Yorda who doesn’t speak the same language and can’t make the same jumps or climbs as you, yet is relied upon to open certain doors to progress your escape. You cannot progress without Yorda, you have to work around her limitations to solve puzzles and protect her from the occasional fight with these shadowy figures. If you go too many rooms too far away from her, you risk her getting captured which kills you. So you have to escort her a lot of the time by hand or yell for her to get her to come to you, which her AI has never really been the best to be honest? It was to the point where Team Ico moved development of the game from the PS1 to the PS2 so they can have more processing power to get her to work and it can still be a bit bumbly and finicky at times. In Shadow of the Colossus, you were this warrior who wandered into a forbidden land to make a deal with a deity to resurrect a girl named Mono from the dead by riding to and killing 16 Colossi, these impossibly towering creatures made of stone and fur. You had to climb on these things and find their weak spots to stab as you wrestle with the overwhelming forces of gravity of these massive creatures trying to shake you off, which oftentimes means you have to hang on for dear life for what seems minutes on end before you can keep climbing as you watch your stamina bar get lower and lower, creating more dread of falling off and having to get back on again. It’s not as if oppression by removing control from the player has never been in Ueda’s previous work before, and these are often aspects I’ve seen praised in these two games, myself included. However, I think these are often overlooked when talking about The Last Guardian because there’s always a sense that you have more kinds of control over your own actions in those games at the end of the day. That you are the one who can hold Yorda’s hand and take her where she needs to be most of the time, that you are the one who made the decision to climb upwards on the Colossi at the most inopportune time. Ueda’s games have always had this near-perfect balance of making the grand scenario more and more learnable while still grounding the player in the reality they’re really in.

This is why I feel The Last Guardian was a harder sell for many people. While I argue the journey itself is more tonally lighthearted than his previous work, The Last Guardian is by far Ueda’s most oppressive feeling game. The boy is not The Wanderer, he’s not even Ico, he’s just about as small and frail as Yorda and can only make the smallest of jumps, hang on the tiniest of ledges, and can push only certain objects around in terrain that scales from tower to tower in a journey that asks you to go higher and higher up the clouds. You more than ever have to rely on your partner Trico, this massive impossible mix of a cat and a bird probably the size of a small house. Only she can make you reach heights you otherwise can’t and make those impossible jumps from tower to tower. Trico is probably the most convincing animal in a video game I’ve ever played, but to some, that’s a burden they can’t deal with. Trico will get hungry so you have to look for barrels sometimes to feed her, Trico will get flustered when she attacks these strange inanimate stone guards so you have to pet her to calm her down, Trico gets scared of these glass windows with eye-shaped designs on them so you have to find a way to destroy them even if you have to do some insane parkour to get to them, Trico will sometimes just flat out ignore your yelling commands by design taking longer to do what the player may see as the simplest of jumps. While Trico is the most relied-on partner character ever in an Ueda game, the boy still has to escort and command this man-eating beast from place to place to solve puzzles or to platform around large jumps. In other words, it’s ICO again, but this time the roles are reversed.

Of course the pitch of “you move an animal around that will act like an animal” was only going to appeal to the most committed to its premise, and it being Ueda’s longest game meant more people were going to fall off of it before they got a chance to see its conclusion. But I feel that aspect also overshadowed discussion of other issues the game has to be honest. You can practically feel its nine years of ambitious development time when the game starts to barely contain its targeted 30fps threshold. The environmental flourishes and details around Ueda’s legendarily creative architecture are jaw-droppingly gorgeous, and as you get higher and higher up the clouds you see more and more of what you maneuvered around down below, but sometimes I feel this hyper fixation on its details mixed with its advanced lighting system can obfuscate puzzle information more often than it needed to, and I feel Team Ico knew this, which is why the game relies on its tip systems too much. There are not only button prompts that appear frequently on the top right of the screen to give clues on what you can interact with, but narration from the boy's perspective will appear similar to Shadow of the Colossus if the game detects the player being on a puzzle for too long. It’s kind of a shame that Ueda’s games still feature these immersion-breaking UI elements present and criticized in Shadow of the Colossus for years with no real way of turning them off, but I feel the game would’ve only been more frustrating on a first time playthrough if they weren’t there. Then there are the occasional physics engine issues that the game will stumble upon, while I found the physics complied with me more than most Havok engine games do to be honest, I did have a moment in my playthrough where when Trico jumped the boy was suddenly teleported upwards which made me fall towards my impending doom, so it’s by no means perfect even if I had a better time with it. The camera is by far my biggest issue with the game. It’s this fickle mistress that only focuses on what it wants to. Sometimes it’ll autofocus on Trico, or the ledge you need to jump on, and sometimes you have to adjust it yourself. Sometimes the camera will get stuck in tight environments with you and Trico which will reset itself with this awkward cut to black which can repeat over and over again rather than just clipping out of bounds to give the player a better view from behind similar to God Hand. The Last Guardian's technical ambitions from its AI to its environments can be seen from a distance as impressive, but its lack of gracefullness at times can also be seen as its downfall, and it’s no wonder why the game had the hardest time sticking with players the most.

It… might be my favorite Ueda game?

It might be too early to tell as I’m writing this, but it just feels right to say. This game just did it all for me. While ICO and Shadow of the Colossus are up there as some of my personal favorite games, I feel The Last Guardian is the most successful in what it sets out to do: to bond the player with its partner character. I never really particularly cared for Yorda or Mono or even Agro as much as I wish I could despite those characters being the central emotional core of the story. While I appreciate the former for its wordless communication between Yorda and Ico along their journey, I can understand the criticisms against the latter. It’s hard to place the corpse of a woman you’ve never interacted with in front of the player and expect them to care, which is why I feel players connected with Agro the horse a lot more since it’s someone you used to venture around the place even if all you did was ride on it and commanded where to go. Trico is that but taken a step further. Yes, Trico acts like a big dumb animal, but somehow managing to get her around these dark tight corridors with traps or these sky-bound vistas feels like accomplishing little miracles one at a time. The game features Ueda’s most creative puzzle design yet, asking the player to constantly think with Trico in mind, and it’s where the rooms where you are alone without Trico are the most pulse-pounding anxiety-inducing. Without that protection from Trico, you are more in danger from other threats like the stone guards or extreme heights you can’t fall on Trico as a failsafe. About halfway through I looked at Trico less like an obstacle and started to look at Trico as the guardian she really is. And you know what I think?

It’s rad as hell! And it’s fun! Seriously! Every time you get Trico to do her earth-shattering cat pounce from one stone pillar to the next it feels like this major accomplishment that the two of you managed to pull off. Every moment you have to climb around Trico when she sees an eye-shaped glass window hung by a stone tower and then get there by doing some mind-bending platforming as you look down at the stomach-churning distance between you and the ground (no seriously, jesus christ lol) and having to jump all the way down on her back is so immensely intense but pulling it off to progress just works. Every time Trico saves you from an army of mysterious stone guards is the ultimate “sick ‘em fido” of video games, yet the game always reminds you to comfort Trico after with a few pets, and maybe pull out a few spears thrown at her body. It’s this dedication the game has with these moment-to-moment connections between you and Trico as you two help each other out closer and closer to the end that makes the later moments where she starts to break design conventions all the more convincing and powerful. The Last Guardian to me is a game of little accomplishments up to the grand finale.

The Last Guardian is not a perfect game, and it’s hardly one I can see the casual player really sticking with very long. Even I had moments where I wished Trico would comply with me more and wished the game’s framerate didn’t give me a headache, but the last three hours of this game to me are borderline perfect, climaxing to Ueda’s strongest story beats yet, somehow managing to top himself with his best ending yet (a man already known for crafting the best endings ever). All the coincidental frustration I had with The Last Guardian seemed fleeting and diminutive. By the end of it, I was more frustrated at being reminded of its dismissive reputation that caused me to hold it off this long. The Last Guardian should be a testament to Team Ico’s mastery of storytelling through game design, rather than be left in the shadows of its predecessor's legacies, but even if it stays within those shadows of obscurity forever, I’m happy to have stuck with the journey through The Nest, atop Trico’s feathery back.

The Last Guardian is a game of accomplishments, and much like ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, stands just as tall as those games do, as the achievement it undoubtedly is.

Spoiler Warning for Strangers of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin, Final Fantasy (1987), and basically the entire franchise

Y’know, it’s funny. When I initially saw the announcement for this game around a year ago, I was absolutely livid. I hated the concept of the game, thought it was going to be a besmirchment of the very first game, especially when I saw that Tetsuya Nomura’s name was attached to it. I hate most of the works I’ve played by Nomura, and I was afraid at first that this game would ruin the reputation of Final Fantasy I, and possibly the entire franchise.

Eventually as more trailers came out, and I saw how absolutely ridiculous some cutscenes were, I warmed up to it and figured I’d be having a good time laughing at it.

Never did I expect this game to deliver the emotional gut punches and resonance that it did, and those very moments as well as the game as a whole served not just to be a love letter to fans of the original Final Fantasy, but to fans of the entire series.

Before you play this game however, I heavily recommend at least playing the original Final Fantasy to fully appreciate the plot and the various references throughout this game. It’s not required, but I would definitely recommend doing so, it isn’t very long by JRPG standards, and it has many rereleases.

We’ll start with the gameplay which I’ll admit was the weakest aspect of the game for me. While there are combos and interesting ways to utilize magic and class skills, a lot of the combat amounts to mashing RB, and then RT, and then the B button. It’s a bit unfortunate given that this game has quite the bevy of available classes, all with unique abilities, but you really don’t do much with them.

I was personally a big fan of the Void Knight class, which is really just the Rune Knight with a more memeable name. You can create a giant rune shield that absorbs magic attacks and gets bigger with the more attacks it absorbs, allowing you to slash with a large magical sword and fire an energy slash back at the enemy, in some cases one-shotting them, which I did with Tiamat when I fought her. Very kino class.

Even though the combat isn’t the most advanced thing in the world, there is something inherently satisfying about seeing Jack crystalize and bash every enemy into a pile of dust and blood. It reminds me a lot of Doom, which I also thought was very relaxing.

Don’t get me wrong though, there are parts where the combat gets pretty difficult. I for the record played on the Action difficulty, which is the Normal Mode of the game. Regular combat usually isn’t super difficult, but some bosses can and will absolutely wreck your shit if you aren’t prepared. A good example is the Dragon Zombie, which if you don’t have White Mage or its promoted classes leveled up, will be hell without Holy Magic to clear up the poison or heal your health. It has a small arena, and shoots out poison goo from almost every attack, which makes it quite the hassle to work around.

Almost the entire final stretch of the game has the difficulty spike up due to more aggressive enemies coming into play and points where you do not have party members. It was a little exhausting, but not enough to ruin the experience I found.

Level Design starts off pretty lackluster with how hyper linear it was, but by the second half of the game there are a lot more branching pathways that loop back into each other, allowing for faster travel through the levels. The levels themselves look absolutely phenomenal, and as we’ll get to in the story, carry a lot of significance for not just the plot, but for the franchise as a whole.

All in all, if you like high octane action with constant snarking by the cast members, you’ll definitely like the gameplay.

Now onto the actual meat of this review, the plot.

At first the game starts out with a really comedic tone, with Jack being the most blunt and hilariously assholish man to ever exist, yet somehow having this underlying belief of comradery with his initial companions, Ash and Jed.

The three strangers meet in front of a castle, and upon showing each other their crystals and discovering their shared goals, the trio makes an immediate friendship as they set off to KILL CHAOS!!

They eventually arrive in Cornelia, and make their way to the king. After bringing up their quest, with the Chancellor questioning the validity of the trio’s claim as The Warriors of Light, the King sends them to investigate the Chaos Shrine. Before they leave, Princess Sarah asks Jack if he could find a knight she knew who went missing. The knight’s name is Garland. Jack makes no promises, and the three set off.

They arrive at the Shrine, kick the ass of a bunch of monsters, and find a man in a large suit of armor, Jack concludes that they must be Chaos, but Jed realizes that their description matches that of Garland. The suited man claims they are to become Chaos, and so Jack decides to kick his ass.

It then turns out that they were neither Chaos or Garland, but rather a young woman named Neon, who was attempting to become Chaos so that the Warriors of Light could come along and kill Chaos bringing an end to its spread. She believes Chaos isn’t really a deity but rather a concept, but Jack is having absolutely none of that so he just plays his Limp Bizkit and fucking leaves.

I will admit that up to this point, I was laughing my ass off. The character interactions felt so awkward that it was honestly hilarious, but now having finished the game it all kind of makes sense.That doesn’t mean these moments aren’t funny, but that in the full context of the plot the awkwardness serves a genuine purpose.

The four return to the King, who now firmly believes them to be the Warriors of Light, and are sent to the small town of Pravoka to speak to the Mayor about the Elemental Crystals that have gone out of balance, in order to fulfill Lukhan’s Prophecy.

Unfortunately, mayor’s dead, the townspeople hate the Kingdom, and the town is now run by pirates, specifically the Captain, Bikke. Back in the OG Final Fantasy I always pronounced his name like Bike, but the actual pronunciation is Bick-kay, which was interesting.

The Warriors go to the Pirates’ hideout to find Bikke and get info out of him on the crystals, which results in a fight between the two groups. After being soundly defeated, Bikke directs our heroes to find the King of the Dark Elves, Astos, who has apparently made a deal with Chaos, as he might have more answers.

So Jack and company make their way to the Western Keep, fighting their way through the colossal fortress and arriving in a throne room to encounter… one of the Black Knight enemies from Final Fantasy II. This was the point where I initially realized this game was going to be more than just a rewrite of the first game. After defeating the Knight, the group highlights how Jack has come back, and that only Jack can fight the way he does. It seems weird given that there’s been no point where we haven’t had Jack kicking massive ass, but this moment was carefully planting seeds for later.

Astos then appears and attempts to introduce himself, but Jack in his usual temperament, backs him the fuck off and demands just the important information. Astos, chuckling in his new, more coy personality which I definitely appreciate, directs the party towards the flying fortress of an ancient civilization known as the Lufenians. The location houses the Wind Crystal, so the crew wastes no time in making their way to it.

After a bit of traveling, they finally warp to the massive scientific facility that happens to be in space, and arrive at the Wind Crystal. They find that it is being protected by the giant, multiheaded dragon, Tiamat. Tiamat reveals herself as one of the Four Fiends, and attempts to slaughter our protagonists, but one Rune Shield Sword Beam later and she’s nothing more than a pile of crystals.

However, upon Tiamat’s death, Jack notices a pixelated phantom showcasing… something that happened in the past, and then a woman appears where Tiamat died. She introduces herself as Sophia, and much like our heroes, she too has an obsession with destroying Chaos, something which starts to feel very… unnatural.

Using a terminal in the crystal’s room, she shows the locations of two of the remaining Crystals, allowing the player to decide which route they want to take.

At this point, my suspicions arose quite a bit. Firstly, one of the key things about Jack, Ash, Jed, and Neon is that their names all fit within the four character limit of the original Final Fantasy, and that their initial classes reflected base classes of that game, Jack being the Warrior, Ash being the Monk, Jed being the Thief, and Neon being the Red Mage (in this game these are all promoted classes, but they’re also the promoted classes these character’s get so it still makes sense). Sophia on the other hand has a five character long name, and is associated with Lances (she can also be a mage, but Lancer is one of her starting classes) which are associated with the Dragoon class, which didn’t appear until Final Fantasy II. There’s also the fact that she also breaks the original Final Fantasy’s norm by being the fifth party member, where the original only had a party of four. It’s just something to put players of the original on their toes, along with the timing of her arrival, but it ultimately serves a different, more obvious purpose.

Since the game went in the unusual route of having Tiamat be the first fiend fought, which is the opposite of the original, I decided my next Crystal would be the Earth Crystal where I would fight the Lich, who is normally the first Fiend fought in the original.

The plot during this part focuses more on Ash as he starts to regain his memories, remembering his old companions and how he feared them dying and did everything in his power to stop it from happening. This of course conflicts with Jack, who wants solely to focus on the mission and keeps telling Ash that “forgetting is a mercy.” Jed also starts to recover his memory, but gets ignored by the rest of the group.

Eventually they arrive at the Cavern of Earth, a boobytrapped underground temple, which hosts the Earth Crystal. They arrive and encounter the Lich, who has been polluting and rotting the earth with his darkness. He begins introducing himself, and Jack, irritated from the entire experience, jumps to punch the ghastly fiend right in the face while saying “I DON’T GIVE A FUCK WHO YOU ARE!!”

I chuckled, as it was a very funny moment.

After a relatively tough fight, victory is again seized, and another phantom is found where the Fiend was killed. Their build being very buff, much like Ash, as the phantom lies there lamenting the death of their companions.

Eventually the darkness residue begins to move towards the group. Earlier in the story, Sophia mentions that the dark mist that comes from the enemies slain by Jack and the party can mess with their minds, and make them remember things they’re better off not knowing. Ash of course absorbs the darkness with his Crystal, and starts to ease up on the memory stuff, before the party is warped back to the Fortress to go to the next Crystal.

The Fire Crystal comes next, and the party makes their way to the treacherous Mount Gulg. Neon gets a little more characterization here as the crew talks to her about if she is starting to believe that Chaos actually exists and what not.

Our heroes eventually reach the core of the volcano, where they encounter the Fiend of Fire, Marilith. After finally beating her, another phantom is left in her place, with Neon absorbing the dark mist with her crystal. Neon later accepts that Chaos is real, and vows to continue fighting alongside Jack and company. Then, just as the volcano is about to erupt, the heroes are warped back to The Flying Fortress by Astos.

Astos shows them the location of the final remaining crystal, the Water Crystal. Once again, the heroes don’t hesitate to make their way to the Sunken Shrine. On the way, Jed begins to have more doubts about the mission as he begins to recall the past, with Jack becoming more irritable the more the past is brought up.

This culminates in a moment where after killing the Cray Claw, which is a Final Fantasy V boss, Jack tries to absorb the dark mist with his Crystal, but Jed interrupts him, forcing the two of them to have a flashback of meeting each other at some place that wasn’t were they met earlier in the story.

Jack asks if this makes Jed happy and the two reconcile with a fist bump. Eventually they arrive in the Sunken Shrine, a large energy harvesting facility requiring multiple key cards in order to progress, and at the very bottom lies the Kraken.

Neon demands that the Kraken return the Crystal, but the Kraken posits as to why they need it, as they’ve been doing fine without it. This response causes Neon to clam up, but Jed comforts her before Jack goes in swinging. This of course ends with the group having a tough long fight against the mighty Fiend, with Jed absorbing the mist.

Can I just say that Jed’s voice actor, Alejandro Saab (better known as KaggyFilms), does such a phenomenal job voicing the character. Jed is very much the emotional core of the group and the performance makes him both incredibly relatable in both humorous and serious moments. Seeing him develop from the mostly comedic sidekick to a man who wants to know who he is and what his true purpose is just resonates so hard with me and I’m thoroughly impressed with how Alejandro captured the emotions of such a character.

Anyways, after completing the task they set out to do, the party makes their way to Cornelia to find… that it is covered in darkness. The villagers are suspicious of group, claiming that they serve Chaos and that one of them must be an imposter as the prophecy only mentions four Warriors of Light.

This of course pisses off Sophia, who besides Jack, has been the most obsessive in the group about forgetting the past and trying to kill Chaos. This scene, while a little awkward feeling, does elicit a genuine sense of frustration and anger. After everything the player and these characters have been through, seeing that your journey seemingly did nothing hurts quite a bit.

Jack then decides that maybe talking to the King will get them a warmer reception… which turns out to be false as the Chancellor and even the King believe that our heroes are to blame, and nearly has them executed. Luckily, Princess Sarah arrives and manages to convince her father that they shouldn’t expect for the world to immediately improve upon the rebalancing of the crystals.

This manages to save Jack and company for the time being, but that peace is short lived as the pirates from Pravoka have begun wreaking havoc in the city, with monsters appearing as well. This is because the pirates grew impatient with the restoration of the crystals, as the Wind Crystal being restored only made the raging of the seas due to the corrupted Water Crystal more difficult to work with.

The party is then ordered to stop the attack on Cornelia, and as they soon discover, the pirates themselves have been turning into the monsters, due to succumbing to the darkness. This eventually results in a rematch with a possessed Captain Bikke.

After his defeat, Bikke reveals the fact that the impatience of the pirates caused them to be possessed and that while he tried to keep them under control, he too lost control. He went to try and find Astos, but he was nowhere to be found.

Bikke then charges the heroes to find Astos, as he believes he is the only one who can find a solution to the massive spread of the darkness, telling the heroes to follow the ominous white bats that have been spotted throughout the game as they are Astos’ creations. Bikke then passes on while the heroes go seeking Astos.

Eventually they find a large ancient tower, and begin to regain memories about a race of people called Lufenians, with Sophia noting things like how she “never made it this far before”. The group discusses how the Lufenians were apparently a civilization that existed along with Cornelia, but surpassed it in regards to technology until one day disappearing altogether. Yet for some reason, they believe themselves to somehow be connected to the Lufenians in some way, with exception to Neon who says she was born in Cornelia and given a Dark Crystal by Astos at some point in time. She fears she can’t be trusted, but Jack says as long as she’s willing to help them, he has no reason to send her away.

The group begins to think that the darkness could be because of the Lufenians, and continues up the tower to encounter an Iron Giant which has apparently beaten up Astos. After turning the synthesoid creature into scrap, Jack tries to obtain some answers from Astos, especially after he keeps regaining more memories of his connections to Lufenia, and questioning his mission about killing Chaos. Astos tells him he’ll give him the answers he seeks, but only if he kills more creatures that have suddenly appeared in a weird modern skyscraper-like building.

Jack and the crew investigate the location, and start to firmly believe that this is definitely being caused by Lufenian interference, which makes the entire party believe that Astos is in league with the Lufenians and is perpetuating the cycle of darkness throughout the land. After encountering a Behemoth, which Jack recognizes despite never having seen the creature before, he crystalizes it… but then it turns into a makeshift Bahamut, coming with its own Megaflare. After managing to defeat that, Jack regains even more memories, finding out that the crystals he and the others bear are not merely for purifying the Elemental Crystals, but for retaining their memory data, and that Jack’s crystal is now completely full, meaning that he can no longer protect himself from remembering the past.

Our heroes, called “Strangers” by the Lufenians, are apparently a part of a project to find a way to balance light and darkness in the world of Cornelia.They are sent in to prevent the creation of Chaos, which is an element created when darkness mixes with negative emotions as it results in an uncontrollable circumstance, which causes the Lufenians to reset the timeline and send the Strangers back to get better results.

Astos being in league with the Lufenians leads the party to go to an area called the Terra Tortura. This was the part of the game where I fangasmed hard because Terra Tortura is… The Floating Continent from Final Fantasy VI. You have to go and destroy three statues in order to open the main gate, and the statues are directly referencing The Goddess, Fiend, and Demon from that game.

Actually on that note, most areas in this game are in reference to the other games, most of which is aptly described in the loading screen’s little journal entries called the “Fool’s Missive”. It turns out that the various areas are related to “Dimensions” with those Dimensions being the other games. For example, the Sunken Shrine level is in reference to the Mako Harvesting Factories of Final Fantasy VII, while the Crystal Mirage level is in reference to the worst part of Final Fantasy III. Meaning that the Lufenians have been pulling these areas from those worlds for some purpose.

Back to the story though, once we destroyed all of the statues and unlock the final gate, we finally encounter Astos. He reveals that those white bats that have been following him are actually Lufenians whom he transformed with magic. He was born in Cornelia, but was allowed to travel with the Lufenians to see the various Dimensions, eventually being brought back to be a part of the project as an organic reconnaissance unit. However, after having to see the timeline be reset, and being one of the only characters to retain his memories of the past resets, he has come to hate the Lufenians.

Jack demands that Astos give him a purpose, an enemy to fight, but Astos states that he has no enemy for Jack. Astos then asks who he is to Jack… with Jack recovering some memories about knowing Astos, but his uncertainty leads him to say that he is merely the King of the Dark Elves, and nothing more.

Astos finally snaps, and goes all out against the party. This was easily the second hardest fight in the game for me as Astos is not just capable with magic, but is a master of martial arts and can mix both to deadly effect. However, after his initial defeat, he goes all out and transforms into THE FIRST CANONICAL VERSION OF THE ULTIMA WEAPON!! with a design that mixes the VI, VII, and VIII designs all together, and he uses familiar attacks like Flare Star and Antimatter. Unfortunately, he is much easier as Ultima Weapon Origin, but the fight is still cool as shit.
Astos is defeated, and begins to pass away. Jack tragically regains all of his memories of Astos, things like Jack’s line earlier in the game “Nothing a bit of spit can’t handle” being something that Astos said to him about his own injuries in a previously reset timeline.

Astos initially thought of himself as nothing more than an item to be used whenever the heroes needed, but Jack and the rest of the party grew to see him as a friend, and due to the constant suffering, Jack proposed a plan with Astos and the others to end the Lufenian’s grip over Cornelia for good, utilizing as many exploits as they could like Astos’ retaining his memory.

Before departing back to Lufenia to begin the plan, Jack entrusts Astos to guide the group to this end by any means necessary. Astos states he’ll simply forget, but Jack promises that he won’t.

Unfortunately, Astos winds up being right about his assumption, but does his best to get the warriors on the path towards completing their true goal. However, Astos grew resentful of being forgotten, despite knowing that it wasn’t Jack’s fault, and it led to him giving in to the growing hatred inside of him.

Todd Haberkorn’s portrayal of the character absolutely nails the rage and emotion that fuels Astos’ final speech, and was a mastery of voice work. Usually I can recognize Todd’s voice in most of the things he does, as I’ve usually seen his more comedic high pitch voice roles like that of Jaco and Death the Kid that this deeper, more distant voice he gives to Astos was stunning to me. He truly brings out the anger and frustration of a man who has been through time loop after time loop, abused like a tool by a civilization who sees you as only a means to an end, forgotten by the friends he made who trusted him with their ultimate mission.

As he dies, the Lufenian Bats die with him, and he directs the heroes to fight back against Lufenia and save the Cornelian people from the constant repetition of the timeline.

So, with nowhere to go off of, the heroes head back to Cornelia, which has all but been consumed by the darkness. The King and Queen are dead, along with most of the soldiers. Princess Sarah is alive, but is headstrong in not abandoning her people, something which Jack sees as suicidal… so he punches her in the gut to knock her out. It’s kind of a standard thing in media, but it was definitely not something I expected.

Jack has the soldiers and the party escort the Princess out of the city while he takes on the hordes of monsters on his lonesome. As he does, he winds up rescuing civilians to escape along with the princess.

As they exit the city, the Princess realizes that her initial mentality would have meant the death of her and all of the Cornelians who will depend on her guidance during these times, and the party ponders where they will take the remaining civilians.

However, the darkness winds up being too strong and corrupts the soldiers and the townsfolk, resulting in all of their deaths, including Sarah… who happens to also be holding a Dark Crystal.

Both her and Jack remember one of the timelines that was reset, where the two of them were very close to one another. Jack introduced her to the song that she would go on to play on her Lute in the future timelines. At one point, she asks what his name is, with it being Jack Garland.

At the end of the memory, it is revealed that Jack gave her his previous Dark Crystal so that his memories could be truly restored during the plan he set up with Astos.

She asks him if it was worth it to try and change the world, before passing away in his arms…

What happens next… was probably one of the most heartbreaking moments in any video game for me.

Ash, Jed, Neon and Sophia all turn their weapons on Jack, as Jack questions what is going on. They tell him that he needs to take in the darkness and rage, and begin to attack him.

Jack, or rather you the player, are forced to singlehandedly murder these characters that you have grown to love and care about throughout the course of this game. You don’t want to do it, but they give you no choice.

This was the part of the game where I almost cried, as it was such an utterly painful moment for me. Slowly killing each and every one of the members of the party, doing those critical attacks which no longer feel satisfying but rather agonizing as Jack screams and cries that he doesn’t want to do this, and me feeling in my heart that *I didn’t want to do this.

All of the fist bumps, all of the chitchats while walking through the levels… it was all gone. Jack had to kill them… I* had to kill them, all in order to get the power to defeat the Lufenian’s for good.

To become Chaos.

Jack questions where he should go, before being reminded by a memory of Astos that one of the Lufenian’s primary pickup points was the Chaos Shrine.

The final level is a solemn reprise of the first level, with Jack wandering through the shrine on his lonesome. Muttering to himself about how he’ll make the Lufenian’s pay, how he’ll make them suffer.

He eventually arrives at the pickup point, and enters into the wheatfield seen throughout the game. Voices of Lufenian’s tell him that they’re going to reset the timeline as he screams that he’ll destroy them as he begins attacking their crystal computer matrix.

Suddenly, the darkness within Jack manifests into a physical form that calls itself Chaos. Jack, pissed off and claiming himself to be Chaos, faces it off in the final encounter.

The big meme about this game was all about how the mission was to “Kill Chaos” and stuff, but at the end of the game you do so much more.

You don’t just kill Chaos…





YOU MAKE CHAOS YOUR BITCH!! AND TAKE ALL OF ITS POWERS AS YOUR OWN!! THE LUFENIAN’S TELL YOU THAT THEY’RE IN CONTROL AND YOU SAY “FUCK YOU ASSHOLE, THIS IS MY WORLD NOW!!”

As Jack attempts to destroy them, they disconnect themselves from Cornelia, as Jack gets pulled back in time by the Four Fiends, revealed to be our party members.

The plan was a success. Cornelia is finally free.

They admit that they remembered the plan far earlier than Jack did, as evidenced by those earlier lines like “Jack’s finally back” and “Only Jack can fight like that”, things that in the situation they were initially stated in didn’t make much sense, but those seeds were planted to make that ending twist much more impactful, which is something I love about this game.

It all sets up for a “how” situation, since Jack’s identity was spoiled long before the game came out, and I think the way they handle steadily building up questions for the player is phenomenal.

The group asks what the plan is now, and Jack states that now they’ll be the ones to train the actual Warriors of Light and fulfill the true prophecy, to truly save Cornelia once and for all.

The game then ends with Garland, sitting on his throne, as the Warriors of Light (which includes the specific one from Dissidia) arrive to fight him.

He truly did it his way.

While the story might seem convoluted, I think the emotional beats hit hard nonetheless. This game did an amazing job at making me feel joy and pain throughout the story, and it really captures the essence of friendship and comradery that some of the best Final Fantasy games are known for.

At the end of the day, while I’m sure a lot of people will simply discount this game for seeming schlocky and being a stupid edgy mess, I think this game tries to do something that a lot of games don’t do anymore.

It tries to be genuine.

I recommend giving this game a shot, though be warned that the PC Port (which I unfortunately played) is incredibly unstable and frequently suffers from crashing, even on high end PCs. You are better off playing the console versions of the game if available.

The people who worked on this game truly created a celebration of 35 years of Final Fantasy that I believe should be experienced by all. A respectable entry in the long lasting series that despite having “Final” in the title, will likely not be ending anytime soon.

They did it their way, and this review is my way of showing my appreciation of a project that I initially doubted would hold unironic value to me.

POST-MILLENNIUM RACING. type 4 is for your worldly mensch, the racing connoisseurs and aficionados. the final legs of real racing roots '99 ushered in the new millennium on new year's eve, signalling celebration of what came before and eager anticipation of what was to come. the future arrived in V, a title with sensibilities that cut deeper than expression.

competitive sports (and more particularly mixed martial arts/combat sports) over the past few decades have long reckoned with and compulsively obsessed over the perfect distillation of instinct and science; they have subsequently raced toward achieving idealized equilibriums of the two to sharpen emerging talent, and in no ridge racer is this competitive element more clearly expressed than in V. V is for the drifting junkies, the highway savants, the people who communicate in shifting gears. ridge racer's humble offerings have long skewed towards quality over quantity, and V remains no exception with only seven tracks, but they're by far the best tracks in the entire franchise - the perfect intersection between high-octane enjoyment and intense opportunity for replayability and mastery. even at normal difficulty this is a significant degree more demanding than any ridge racer prior to it. not only is the general tempo of a racing bout faster, but success (and lack thereof) can be determined in the first lap depending on whether or not you have demonstrated the prerequisite driving IQ. without a consummate level of control and without the ability to read flow, you're going to be almost immediately outclassed by the enemy AI which has now been retooled to be far more aggressive than in prior entries. at a minimum, you'll need to configure every single corner and stretch of the track into an equation to be solved and make an effort to intimately understand their nuances, which is compounded by the handling of the default six cars feeling more distinct than ever before. no two vehicles are ever going to approach a situation the exact same way anymore, with routes on a map feeling tailored to each of their advantages and disadvantages. one vehicle might be able to get away with gripping asphalt til their rubber is chafed and raw; another might find that shifting gears down temporarily is the only option for success. it was the first time in the franchise i felt like all the minutiae of a match really mattered and if i wasnt countersteering appropriately, looking for opportunities to shunt out trailing cars behind me, and committing terrain to memory i'd be done for. the relentless difficulty coalesced into probably the most intense racing game i have ever played, but it felt alien at first; more than ever, drifting, seemingly built on new physics, appears to factor in gear, weight, speed, acceleration undertaken during the drift, countersteering input, proximity to other vehicles, and terrain, so it almost evokes ace combat's core appeal of a constant set of calculations to be undertaken. aesthetically it's really impressive for one of the first games launched on the PS2: muted winter-blue skies, sunsets on the hills of ridge city, darkened city apartment blocks as if to suggest no life exists outside of the competition on the streets. strong art direction has really allowed it to stand the test of time in a similar capacity to type 4. drifting into the warm and heightened glow of the sun at dusk is everything in this game. once again the soundtrack just does not miss a beat, this time incorporating more diversity in the tracks that really perfectly encapsulate the game's identity as an early aughts project. fogbound serving as the game's lo-fi grungy breakbeat anthem is just perfect for immersing you into the hyper-vigilance required for a race and euphoria is pretty much one of the all-time great VGM tracks. really didn't expect this but i think i have to give V the edge over type 4, with its gorgeous menus and evocative soundtrack it genuinely goes blow for blow with type 4's accomplished aesthetic while simultaneously offering the in-depth and transformative qualities i tend to look for in racing games. i think there's something to be said for type 4's aesthetic idealization for driving versus V's gesturings at reality that games of its generation would later become obsessed with, expressed through an air of practicality that emphasizes function over form, a less flashy yet sleek UI combined with more in-depth mechanics. to put it a different way: never did the characteristic racing game lean in type 4, did it unconsciously in almost every race in V. gonna be playing this one for a looong time. the only real problem i have here is that going for a grip class vehicle with automatic transmission is unquestionably the easiest way to play which is unfortunate for people like me who prefer the exact opposite

also ai fukami is a much hotter race queen than reiko nagase is, it's insane. earnestly upset she never came back because people thought she wasnt as iconic as reiko. once again tenure has sabotaged the prospects of a promising young lady and all you fools have deprived her of a JOB! sorry your 3D waifish mascot lady who only appears in pre-rendered CG to fawn over you and your big [engine] can't compare to the brazen edge of realtime animated ai fukami!!!! as if to say 'show me what you're made of, first!' well, i pledge this grand prix to you, fukami! drift-class danver toreador, manual transmission, i know what im about

Attempting to characterize a website with a diverse community is always something of a fool's errand, as by definition you are making a broad generalization about a very large group of people, which is usually not a good thing to do. However, I don't think it would be remiss of me to observe that, at least among the writers I follow routinely putting out wonderful pieces, there is an interest in examining friction in game design, games that push back against a player rather than yield to them. It's a subject I've been interested in for years, and in my time on Backloggd, I've been absolutely feasting on these perspectives.

Which is not to say I always agree with them. One game I was disappointed to find myself somewhat let down by was perennial backloggdcore crown jewel Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days, which was a game I found to honestly be a little trite and vapid. As an aesthetic achievement it's wonderful, and I have nothing but praise for that side of the equation, but I found myself really disappointed by how ultimately unadventurous I found it's play. It reminded me of Spec Ops: The Line, another game that has much I find praiseworthy in it's presentation, but kinesthetically unsatisfying because of how the game's presentational and narrative ideas failed to transfer over to the play experience.

Despite the claims of many purveyors of the most profoundly annoying and vacuous "critique" ever made of a game, Spec Ops doesn't think you are evil for playing it, and it does want you to finish it, to see the end, which is partly why it remains an interesting but unsatisfying game for me. The same is true of Kane & Lynch 2: while I don't think that game wants you to finish it, exactly, as the basically nonexistent narrative has no direction or payoff and neither does the gameplay design, it doesn't really resist you either, beyond the initial culture shock that comes from trying to get to grips with this presentation. The thing that let me down about K&L2 is that I simply learned to deal with it, and play it like I would Spec Ops or Binary Domain. I think it's a fine game, but I don't really find it terribly remarkable in the same way that I don't get a lot out of A Serbian Film. It's an important step in the development of video games as an art-form, in that it's one of the first mainstream video games to successfully make me shrug and move on the same way I do at a lot of empty transgressive art.

While I am sure there are some artists who are able to derive fulfillment from the act of creation alone and have no need for an audience, I imagine that most artists are like myself, in that they need an audience for their work to come alive. Certainly, when I was making (excruciatingly bad) games more regularly, I wanted people to play them, wanted people to see the end, even when I wrote awful dialogue about how, actually, by playing this game you have fallen into some nebulously defined trap and how you should have simply stopped playing, blah blah blah. If I didn't need other people to see my work, to share my thoughts and ideas, then they would remain in my own head, where my words are immune to the cold gaze of time and the imperfect translation process of thought to word. Most of us make games because we want people to play them. It may be harder to work out why, exactly, we want people to play them, but I know that we do. And those of us who write and post do so because we want people to read what we have to say.

None of this is written with a shred of condemnation. It's natural, and good. But it presents a problem when it comes to making truly frictional art, games that actively do not want you to finish them, games that do not push back a little but eventually relent, because ultimately, most people care about their art, and most of those people want people to see it.

What then, would a truly repellant game look like? A game that truly did not want the player to finish it, to see it through to the end, a game that, in every aspect of it's construction, repelled enjoyment? Let me introduce you all to Taz-Mania: friction embodied, and the ultimate Backloggdcore video game.

I'll save you the trouble of regurgitating in detail the ways in which this game sucks, partly because it would be identical to a list of things that are in this game, but mostly because every other review for Taz-Mania have accomplished that task better than I ever could. Instead, I'd like to draw your attention to the GDQ run of this game where one of the co-commentators claims to unironically love this game. Before I sat down and actually tried to play this, I thought this was just hyperbole, but now...I think I'm with them. I think I love Taz-Mania too.

Preemptive apologies for the navel-gazing that is to follow here, but I've been thinking a lot lately about writing, about why I do it, and specifically why I write about video games and how they tell stories. Professionals in the industry are exhausted individuals who lead thankless jobs and who inevitably try to seek succor elsewhere in the industry or beyond it rather than continue to write guides for Horizon Two Dawn or whatever for GamerCum Dot Com. Why do I aspire to this? Why do I aspire to write my own games, when all around me people who write and talk about games assert wholeheartedly that games are just bad at telling stories compared to films? What worth is to be found here?

What is it for? Who is it for? Is it for me? Is it for you? I don't know. I genuinely don't know. Sometimes I fucking hate this place. Believe me, I have often wondered if I would be happier if I hadn't posted a stupid mean Xenoblade 2 review last year. But it's also given me a lot of joy. Sometimes I want to pack it in. Sometimes I want to write more. Sometimes I feel proud of what I've written, and sometimes I feel deeply embarrassed about it. And sometimes I feel all of these things, at once.

I thought about all of this as I tried to play Taz-Mania. Why was I here? Why was I pushing myself forward through a game that was hurting my eyes and was actively miserable to play? For the sake of a joke? For the sake of a meme?

But I kept going. For a good bit, anyway. Sadly, Taz-Mania defeated me because it just became too frustrating to master. But still, for a good while, I persevered. Partly because I went to the trouble to find a Master System/Game Gear emulator, something I was sure I would never use again, but also because, well, someone wanted to know what I thought about this game, and no matter how much of a joke that was, no matter how serious or why they did that, they still did it. And others did the same and wrote reviews I got great enjoyment out of reading. In this barren wasteland of thought, these people found meaning. They made something out of nothing.

Taz-Mania is not just backloggdcore, Taz-Mania is video games. It is amateurish, barely functioning, and devoid of the qualities that prescriptivists about "quality of art" extol in other mediums. And yet it lives, lives in the words and in the minds of others, breathing life into a collection of pixels held together by tape and code and hope. More repulsive than Kane & Lynch, and providing a truer test of the meaning and worth of video games than Ending E of Nier: Automata could ever muster.

To a certain extent, I do agree with many of those why say that video games struggle to reach the narrative heights of other mediums, but I also acknowledge that those heights are there because we put them there: regardless of the theory and thought behind it, sound as they may be, ultimately things are considered good because we like them, and great literature and great filmmaking and great game design is considered such because we've, consciously or unconsciously, come to some kind of a general agreement over factors that are desirable in a work of art. And to be sure, Taz-Mania doesn't meet any of those factors. But I like it anyway. Because I choose to. Because that's really all it comes down to, isn't it?

Why do I write? Because I want to. Why do we like and care about video games? Because we do. Why do we find profound meaning in Kane & Lynch, in Paper Mario, in Ocarina of Time, in Persona 4 or Kingdom Hearts? Because in play, in investing in these dumb things wholeheartedly and earnestly, we create that meaning. And Taz-Mania is here - will always be here - to remind us that that deep down, no matter what else we might say, this is the truth at the heart of it. Video games are stupid, broken, vacuous, often ugly and repellant. But we love them anyway, and because we love them, they come to life.

Now and forever, we're gaming.

Thanks for the recommendation, LetsHugBro!

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“Life does not have inherent meaning; to say that our lives are pointless and our achievements meaningless is to state the obvious. No matter how grand our achievements or how broad their scope, time turns all to dust and death destroys all memory. But that does not mean we cannot ascribe our own meaning to what we do. It is because nothing has meaning unto itself that we are free to create meaning, to make metaphor, and in doing so reflect on ourselves and our world.

Leveling to 99 in the first reactor is pointless and meaningless. So why do I do it? I do it to express my hatred, and more importantly my disdain, for Dick Tree. I do it to express the camaraderie I feel for those of us who have followed this topic for years only to be disappointed by Dick Tree. I do it to prove to myself that I can persevere. The act is meaningless; I give it meaning.”

- CirclMstr

i'll cut to the chase and spare you some prose and witticisms you'll read either through glazed eyes or gritted teeth: six and a half years ago i was in a real bad way and i wasnt enjoying a single one of my hobbies the way i had used to. i had made plans to try to get into this series from its inciting incident just to have something to do that day, and it was around that time that yakuza 5 was serendipitously announced for localization, an unprecedented miracle that blindsided its then-largely isolationist and niche fanbase. felt like a sign, to me - i was playing this game the very next day, and within four months had completed all hitherto localized titles in the franchise, eagerly anticipating the fifth game. i was having fun with games again.

since then the series has received widespread recognition, often for better or worse (usually for very cynical reasons, attracting a specific kind of crowd that i would like to stay very, very far away from, and yet still needlessly spurring on several inane culture wars because no one knows how to react to media with good sense, tact, or nuance anymore) but im still here playing this franchise for reasons im not sure i'll ever be able to adequately articulate. and despite all this - this is the entry i return to the most. it's a kind of ritual homecoming. certainly, yakuza 2 is the more refined title. it's a successor which embraces its cinematic lineage and nagoshis directorial flavourings; it is pulpy and jettisons any sense of restraint, it sports a combat system arguably better than the roughness of its predecessor, it is more cognizant of how to utilize its living and breathing world and array of denizens to capture the frivolities of the human experience. but it's also the establishment of something formulaic, a pattern. a mold for a franchise aided by the careful supervision of fan-feedback and by the business acumen necessary to pilot an initiative that transformed yakuza into a yearly asset-flip series (this is undoubtedly in addition to a shitton of crunch. there is no doubt in my heart that y2 worked its employees to the bone.)

when so many of yakuza and yakuza 2s strengths in atmosphere and design tend to overlap, it's not hard to see why im kind of enamored with the guts this specific project displayed in a way that yakuza 2 does not. and when looking at the overarching path the series has taken - in which entries felt increasingly hurried and fraught until learning to respect restraint in 0 - this becomes especially clear. it's bold, it's risky - researching it, it becomes clear that it required a lot of attitude, finesse, trust, and collaboration to see a unique vision like this to the end and there are still flashes of that experimental tendency to be found in this specific entry. i love how punishing the games central heat mechanic is because it forces you to expend it desperately which often resulted in greater xp gain, i love how abilities are often tied to exploration, i love the overhead camera angles of this gritty and noirish red light district as opposed to the bog-standard third-person view the rest of the series employs, i love how its heat actions are absolutely brutal but orchestrated around brevity so as not to interrupt the flow of combat (something which later entries completely miss the point of), i love how its perhaps the only yakuza that doesnt necessarily characterize kiryu as a rogue paladin or a saint, i love that the substories are all grunt-work, assisting normal-ass people who often dont have much vested interest in you, the player, or kiryu, the supposed paragon of humanity, i love that there are cursory glances of what the series could have become in its structure had it not been turned into an asset-flip series, hell i even love the awkward english dub which tried to endear itself to the cult of rockstar and GTA. it's not very good, but much of that is attributable to script rewrites and voice acting direction as opposed to the fault of the actors themselves, and even at its very worst it is infinitely preferable to parse when contrasted against some localization decisions in the recent remastered collection which, at least at launch, frustratingly changed instances of dialogue in substories to include insular online lingo as the punchline. these are minimal in number, but they tie into what i stated earlier about how i fear this series is perceived, and it's often not in a very sincere or affectionate way. say what you will about the english dub wherein kiryu uses a slur or two, but he actually sounds like a former gangster, at the very least. keep in mind that i'm more than a little bitter that impassioned fans could not get people to play this series, but a single screenshot of a chicken did, no doubt influencing the direction of marketing, teaching profit-driven suits the value of the snapshot and altering franchise perception for the rest of time.

and while the series has continued to take risks, trying their hands at ideas various other studios would never consider because of RGG Studio's unique developmental approach (spin-offs as experimental grace periods developed for reprieve or to test new technology, each mainline entry's narrative being set in the year in which it was released, a greater than the sum of its parts design approach largely centered around content density), no title has ever been as uncompromising experimental as this one. its janky and its rough, but its unapologetic and totally committed - that's why im such an ardent fan, and probably at least subconsciously why i return every now and again. helps that 'tis the season, and it's a peak christmas game too.

in fact, even with the series transitioning to the turn-based genre, when so much of the post-0 output is so utterly reliant on incessant callbacks and fanservice relating to that one moment the western discovered this franchise existed in 2017, i'd without hesitation wager it still hasn't been anywhere near as risky as the first yakuza!

living with yakuza for as long as i have, learning the ins and outs of its development process, appreciating it from afar and growing to love this specific entry in retrospect has oddly enough honed my creative ability and imbued me with a sharper edge, a specific sense of what endears me to any given work. it's forced me to challenge convention and to be confident in conveying my thought process - to say with defiance that this is what i, singularly, admire and respect about a work. this is undeniably a strange and alienating response to have to a 2005 JRPG brawler laden in machismo, but stranger things have happened. that's the power of art as it relates to the individual, i'd say. goes without saying but if you havent gotten the picture from the tone of this review yet i think kiwami is awful

racing games' The Bouncer, and i mean that as the highest praise possible. cannot really bring anything more to the table that the excellent reviews by squigglydot, kingbancho, and letshugbro have not already discussed but god damn i completely adored this game. aesthetics, vibes...all of it is off the god damn charts and hits my aesthetic sensibilities dead-on.

this simple but deceptively taxing game of knowing when to push your machine and when to let go to handle unforgiving corners on your way to the front of the pack has a mood and vibe that leaves modern multi-million dollar productions hopelessly in the dust. y2k optimism in it's purest form, trusting the machine to take you where you need to go but never letting it control you.

few games have better endings than this. on a track where the assumptions you have built up will fail you time and time again, in the closing minutes of the 20th century, how do you survive? by slamming your foot down on the accelerator and never letting go, never looking back, until the years become blurred around you, until 1999 is nothing but a distant speck in the rear view mirror, and you reach the future before it arrives.

a masterpiece.

Soul-restoring.

Can’t stress enough how much the human element adds to this; normally I’m content with the bare minimum needed to qualify in racing games (hard for me to get invested in what seems to be such a mechanical exercise), but put the pride of the team on the line, have some characters that are pulling for me? Then I’ll have to start finding the lines and gunning for first place. Particularly liked the bittersweet victories of the Dig Racing Team- finally winning the Grand Prix while parting ways with your manager and newfound friend seemed the most appropriate way to enter the new millennium.