MFossy
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Sitting down at the computer like this, desperately suppressing the urge to go on a multi-paragraph tirade about Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga’s role as an ur-text of modern consumerism; an artless and godless capitalist confluence point that embodies all that is unholy and unhealthy about video games, children’s toys and Hollywood licensing - and then serenely closing sixteen tabs of free-market philosophy and commercial hauntology to write, simply:
fall down hole yoda make funny noise 🙂
fall down hole yoda make funny noise 🙂
Elden Ring
2022
This review contains spoilers
"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CW: Brief discussion on the game's use of rape
In Elden Ring, you can never discover anything once. That was the thought that entered my head early in the experience and never quite left it. One of the most evocative parts of the game's genuinely stunning art direction is the walking cathedral, a strange and arresting colossus that stumbles across the Weeping Peninsula, each step ringing the bell that hangs beneath its torso. It was a sight of strange, beautiful magic, the kind of which these games have been good at in the past.
Except, to describe this creature in the singular would be inaccurate. Because Walking Cathedrals appear all over the world of Elden Ring, each one identical in appearance, each one performing an identical, express mechanical function for the player. This cannot be left alone as a strange, unique beast, it has to be reduced to a Type of Content a player can engage with over and over again for a characterless transaction of pure mechanics. It is the excitement of coming across something esoteric that the Souls games have made a core part of their identity, utterly commodified and made into the exact same arc that applied to Assassin's Creed the moment climbing a tower to survey the environment and taking a leap of faith into a haystack below shifted from an exciting and evocative moment into a rote and tiresome mechanical interaction.
Because, that's right everyone, Dark Souls Is Now Open World. Not an open world in the same way that Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, or Dark Souls II were, where you could freely venture down different paths to different bosses and take things in an order outside of the game's expected leveling curve. No, this is an Open World as we understand it today: an enormous ocean of discrete repeated Activities dotted with islands of meaningful bespoke design. There's plenty of stuff to do in this world, but it's all of a specific type - in a catacomb you will navigate stone gargoyles and chalice dungeon designs to a lever that will open a door near the entrance that will contain a boss that you've likely found elsewhere in the world, and will be filled with stone gargoyles. Mines will be filled with mining rock-people and upgrade materials. Towers will have you find three spectral creatures around them in order to open them up and obtain a new Memory Slot. Camps will contain a patrolling enemy type and some loot. Even genuinely enchanting vistas and environments get their space to be repeated in slight variations. Boss battles too will be repeated endlessly, time and time again, with delightful designs like the Watchdog tragically becoming something I sighed and was annoyed to see crop up half-a-dozen times over the course of the adventure, and I was truly, deeply annoyed at fighting no less than about ten or twelve Erdtree Avatars and Dragons, with whom the moves never change and the fight plays out the exact same way every single time.
The first time I discovered these things, I was surprised, delighted even, but by even the second time, the truth that these are copied-and-pasted across the entirety of the Lands Between in order to pad it out became readily apparent, and eventually worn away even the enthusiasm of that first encounter. When I look back on my genuine enjoyment of the first battle with the Erdtree Avatar, I can only feel like an idiot for not realizing that this fight would be repeated verbatim over and over and become less fun every single time. When you've seen one, you've really seen all of them, and this means that by the time you leave Limgrave, you've already seen everything the Open World has to offer.
This is, of course, to be expected. Open world games simply have to do this. They are an enormous effort to bring into life, and the realities of game production mean that unless you're willing to spend decades on one game, you're going to have to be thrifty with how you produce content. I expect this, I understand this. Fallout: New Vegas is probably my favorite Open World game, but its world is also filled with this template design. But what's to be gained from this in a Dark Souls game? Unlike contemporaries like Breath of the Wild, your verbs of interaction in these games are frighteningly limited, with almost all of the experience boiling down to fighting enemies, and without a variety of interactions, the lack of variety in the huge amounts of content stands out all the more. Does fighting the same boss over and over and traversing the same cave over and over make Souls better? Even if you choose to just ignore all of these parts of the Open World (which is far easier said than done, as due to a very harsh leveling curve and the scarcity of crucial weapon upgrade materials outside of The Mines, the game's design absolutely pushes towards you engaging in these repetitious activities), the Legacy Dungeons that comprise the game's bespoke content are functionally completely separate from the Open World, with not even your Horse permitted to enter. This is no Burnout: Paradise or Xenoblade Chronicles X, which retooled the core gameplay loop to one where the open world was absolutely core to the design: this is a series of middling Dark Souls levels scattered among an open world no different from games like Far Cry or Horizon: Zero Dawn that many Souls fans have historically looked down on, and the game is only worse for it.
NPC storylines in particular suffer massively, as the chances of you stumbling upon these characters, already often quite annoying in past games, are so low as to practically require a wiki if you want to see the end of multiple questlines. However, that assumes that you will want to see the end of these stories and that you are invested in this world, and I decidedly Was Not. Souls games have always had suspect things in them that have gone largely uninterrogated but Elden Ring really brings that ugliness to the surface, with rape being an annoyingly present aspect of the backstories of many characters, and even having multiple characters threaten to rape you, none of which is deployed in a way that is meaningful and is just insufferable edgelord fantasy writing, and the same could be said of the grimdark incest-laden backstory, the deeply suspect trans panic writing surrounding one of the characters, and the enthusiastic use of Fantasy Racism tropes in the form of the Demi-Humans. I remain convinced that George RR Martin's involvement in this game was little more than a cynical publicity stunt, but certainly the game's writing indulges in many of that man's worst excesses, whilst having almost none of his strengths.
None of this is to say that Elden Ring is devoid of enjoyment. While the fact that it did hit just in time for a manic-depressive mood that made me perfectly suited to play a game I could just mindlessly play for a couple of weeks, I did see it through to the end in that time, even if I did rush to the end after a certain point. From Software's artists remain some of the best in the industry, with some incredible environments and boss designs that deserve Olympic gold medals for how much heavy-lifting they're doing to keep the experience afloat. I loved being kidnapped by chests into other parts of the world, and I wish it happened more than a couple of front-loaded times. But the enjoyment I had in it never felt like stemmed from the open world, and even its highest points don't hang with the best bits of the prior installments. Stormveil is probably the level design highlight of the game but it already fades from my mind in comparison to the likes of Central Yharnam or the Undead Burg or the Dragon Shrine. Indeed, the fact that they exist as islands in an ocean of vacuous space between them precludes the so-called "Legacy Dungeons" of this game from having the satisfying loops and interconnections that are often the design highlights of prior entries. The bosses are a seriously uneven mixed bag as well; even setting aside the repetition, as the nasty trend of overturned bosses that started in Dark Souls III rears its unfortunate head again. The superboss Melania is an interesting design utterly ruined by her obscene damage output, and my personal highlight of the game, Starscourge Radagon, who is the only boss fight that felt like it played to the things that Elden Ring brought to the table, and is a moment among the series that the game can truly claim as it's very own...but the tuning of the fight prevented it from being the triumphant coming-together moment that it is clearly attempting for many of my friends, who left the fight feeling that it was just annoying and tedious. Modern From Software could never make a fight like Maiden Astrea again because they'd insist on making her really hard in a way that actively detracts from the emotional experience in the fight. Boss fights can be about more than just providing a challenge, and I think From has forgotten that.
Taken as a series of its legacy dungeons, of its finest moments, I think Elden Ring would only be a middling one of these games. The additions to the formula feel anemic and unbalanced, the multiplayer implementation is honestly a quite considerable step back from prior games (the decision to have the majority of invasions only occur during co-operation feels like an attempt to weed out trolls picking on weaker players but in reality what it does is make equal fights are next-to-impossible and put Seal-Clubbers in a place where they are the only players who can effectively invade, a completely baffling decision), but it's really the open world I keep coming back to as the reason this game doesn't work. Not only does it add nothing that wasn't already present in better ways in prior games, but it actively detracts from the experience. The promise of the Open World is one of discovery, of setting off in uncharted directions and finding something new, but do Open Worlds actually facilitate this any better than more linear games? I don't know if they do. I felt a sense of discovery and finding something in so many of these games, even the most linear ones, and felt it stronger because the game was able to use careful, meticulous level design to bring out those emotions. Walking out of a cave and seeing Irithyll of the Boreal Valley, or Dead Man's Wharf stretch out before me, were moments of genuine discovery, and they would not be improved if I found six more Dead Man's Wharfs throughout the game. Contrary to their promise, in my experience, the open world, rather than create a sense of discovery, undermine it due to the compromises necessary to create these worlds. All the openness does for your discoveries is let you approach them from a slightly different angle as everyone else.
That is, if you can even claim to have discovered anything in the first place. To call Elden Ring derivative of prior games in this milieu would be a gross understatement. I am far from the first person to note that the game's much-hyped worldbuilding is largely content to regurgitate Souls Tropes with the Proper Nouns replaced with much worse ones, but it goes beyond that - entire questlines, plot beats, character arcs, dungeon designs, enemies, and bosses are lifted wholesale from prior games practically verbatim. More often than not Elden Ring feels closer to a Greatest Hits album than a coherent piece in and of itself, a soulless and cynical repackaging of prior Souls Classics, irrevocably damaged by being torn from the original context from which they belonged. I'm not a fan of Dark Souls III, in part because it too is also a game that leans on repetition of prior games, but at the very least the game was about those repetitions, where yes, old areas and characters would be repeated, but at least it was thematically resonant with what the game was doing. Elden Ring can't even claim that. Whatever this shallow mess of a narrative, easily the worst of the franchise thus far by my reckoning, is going for, it is done no favors by being this stitched-together Frankenstein of Souls.
I was particularly shocked by the sheer ferocity with which the game steals from the fan-favorite Bloodborne. Quick, tell me if you've heard this one before: you encounter a hunched, bestial foe, who fights you with their fists, but once you get their health halfway down, the battle stops, a cutscene plays, where they speak coherently, summon a blade from their past, and stand with their former dignity restored, the music changes, and their name is revealed to be "X the Y Blade". Or what about a hub area, separated in its own liminal space from the rest of the map, that can be discovered in its True Form in the material world? What about when that hub area is wreathed in spectral flame and begins to burn as the final hours of the game is nigh? These are far from the only examples, as there are multiple enemies and ideas throughout the game that are shamelessly lifted from my personal favorite From Software effort, but these stand out as the most noxious of all, as they simply repeat beats that were effective in the game they originated from because the game was able to build to them and have them resonate with the rest of the experience. You cannot just graft things whole cloth from prior work onto a new one and expect it to work as a coherent piece, the very prospect is ridiculous.
When Elden Ring did all this, my jaw about hit the floor from the sheer unmitigated gall. When it chose to conclude itself with a straight-faced Moon Presence reference, complete with an arena that directly evokes the Hunter's Dream, I just had to laugh. The final statement the game made on itself, the bullet point it chose to put on the experience, was "Remember Bloodborne? That was good, wasn't it?" Because in many ways, that really was a perfect conclusion to this game.
While it would be a mistake to claim, as people seem increasingly eager to, that Souls emerged entirely out of the magical ocean that is Hidetaka Miyazaki's unparalleled genius or whatever, as these games have always drawn heavy inspiration from properties like Berserk, Book of the New Sun, and The Legend of Zelda, and were built on top of a framework clearly established by past Fromsoft series King's Field, the reason I think that myself and many others were initially enthralled by the promise of Demon's Souls or Dark Souls was because they were decidedly different. Their esoterica, willingness to buck modern design conventions and hugely evocative online elements were why these games set imaginations alight so strongly, and proved enormously influential for the past decade of game design.
Demon's Souls felt like something new. And while successive games in this series have felt far less fresh, none of them have felt as utterly exhausted as Elden Ring: a final statement from the designers and writers at From Software that they have officially Ran Out of Ideas, that the well has long gone dry, that all they can do is to hastily staple on the modern design trends they once rejected onto a formula that does not gel with them, and that they are wandering without life through a never-ending cycle of their own creation, branded by the Darksign. Perhaps it's no surprise that their least inventive, least consistent, and least creative game since Demon's Souls is also by far their most successful. Once From Software defied conventions and trends, and now, they are consumed by them.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CW: Brief discussion on the game's use of rape
In Elden Ring, you can never discover anything once. That was the thought that entered my head early in the experience and never quite left it. One of the most evocative parts of the game's genuinely stunning art direction is the walking cathedral, a strange and arresting colossus that stumbles across the Weeping Peninsula, each step ringing the bell that hangs beneath its torso. It was a sight of strange, beautiful magic, the kind of which these games have been good at in the past.
Except, to describe this creature in the singular would be inaccurate. Because Walking Cathedrals appear all over the world of Elden Ring, each one identical in appearance, each one performing an identical, express mechanical function for the player. This cannot be left alone as a strange, unique beast, it has to be reduced to a Type of Content a player can engage with over and over again for a characterless transaction of pure mechanics. It is the excitement of coming across something esoteric that the Souls games have made a core part of their identity, utterly commodified and made into the exact same arc that applied to Assassin's Creed the moment climbing a tower to survey the environment and taking a leap of faith into a haystack below shifted from an exciting and evocative moment into a rote and tiresome mechanical interaction.
Because, that's right everyone, Dark Souls Is Now Open World. Not an open world in the same way that Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, or Dark Souls II were, where you could freely venture down different paths to different bosses and take things in an order outside of the game's expected leveling curve. No, this is an Open World as we understand it today: an enormous ocean of discrete repeated Activities dotted with islands of meaningful bespoke design. There's plenty of stuff to do in this world, but it's all of a specific type - in a catacomb you will navigate stone gargoyles and chalice dungeon designs to a lever that will open a door near the entrance that will contain a boss that you've likely found elsewhere in the world, and will be filled with stone gargoyles. Mines will be filled with mining rock-people and upgrade materials. Towers will have you find three spectral creatures around them in order to open them up and obtain a new Memory Slot. Camps will contain a patrolling enemy type and some loot. Even genuinely enchanting vistas and environments get their space to be repeated in slight variations. Boss battles too will be repeated endlessly, time and time again, with delightful designs like the Watchdog tragically becoming something I sighed and was annoyed to see crop up half-a-dozen times over the course of the adventure, and I was truly, deeply annoyed at fighting no less than about ten or twelve Erdtree Avatars and Dragons, with whom the moves never change and the fight plays out the exact same way every single time.
The first time I discovered these things, I was surprised, delighted even, but by even the second time, the truth that these are copied-and-pasted across the entirety of the Lands Between in order to pad it out became readily apparent, and eventually worn away even the enthusiasm of that first encounter. When I look back on my genuine enjoyment of the first battle with the Erdtree Avatar, I can only feel like an idiot for not realizing that this fight would be repeated verbatim over and over and become less fun every single time. When you've seen one, you've really seen all of them, and this means that by the time you leave Limgrave, you've already seen everything the Open World has to offer.
This is, of course, to be expected. Open world games simply have to do this. They are an enormous effort to bring into life, and the realities of game production mean that unless you're willing to spend decades on one game, you're going to have to be thrifty with how you produce content. I expect this, I understand this. Fallout: New Vegas is probably my favorite Open World game, but its world is also filled with this template design. But what's to be gained from this in a Dark Souls game? Unlike contemporaries like Breath of the Wild, your verbs of interaction in these games are frighteningly limited, with almost all of the experience boiling down to fighting enemies, and without a variety of interactions, the lack of variety in the huge amounts of content stands out all the more. Does fighting the same boss over and over and traversing the same cave over and over make Souls better? Even if you choose to just ignore all of these parts of the Open World (which is far easier said than done, as due to a very harsh leveling curve and the scarcity of crucial weapon upgrade materials outside of The Mines, the game's design absolutely pushes towards you engaging in these repetitious activities), the Legacy Dungeons that comprise the game's bespoke content are functionally completely separate from the Open World, with not even your Horse permitted to enter. This is no Burnout: Paradise or Xenoblade Chronicles X, which retooled the core gameplay loop to one where the open world was absolutely core to the design: this is a series of middling Dark Souls levels scattered among an open world no different from games like Far Cry or Horizon: Zero Dawn that many Souls fans have historically looked down on, and the game is only worse for it.
NPC storylines in particular suffer massively, as the chances of you stumbling upon these characters, already often quite annoying in past games, are so low as to practically require a wiki if you want to see the end of multiple questlines. However, that assumes that you will want to see the end of these stories and that you are invested in this world, and I decidedly Was Not. Souls games have always had suspect things in them that have gone largely uninterrogated but Elden Ring really brings that ugliness to the surface, with rape being an annoyingly present aspect of the backstories of many characters, and even having multiple characters threaten to rape you, none of which is deployed in a way that is meaningful and is just insufferable edgelord fantasy writing, and the same could be said of the grimdark incest-laden backstory, the deeply suspect trans panic writing surrounding one of the characters, and the enthusiastic use of Fantasy Racism tropes in the form of the Demi-Humans. I remain convinced that George RR Martin's involvement in this game was little more than a cynical publicity stunt, but certainly the game's writing indulges in many of that man's worst excesses, whilst having almost none of his strengths.
None of this is to say that Elden Ring is devoid of enjoyment. While the fact that it did hit just in time for a manic-depressive mood that made me perfectly suited to play a game I could just mindlessly play for a couple of weeks, I did see it through to the end in that time, even if I did rush to the end after a certain point. From Software's artists remain some of the best in the industry, with some incredible environments and boss designs that deserve Olympic gold medals for how much heavy-lifting they're doing to keep the experience afloat. I loved being kidnapped by chests into other parts of the world, and I wish it happened more than a couple of front-loaded times. But the enjoyment I had in it never felt like stemmed from the open world, and even its highest points don't hang with the best bits of the prior installments. Stormveil is probably the level design highlight of the game but it already fades from my mind in comparison to the likes of Central Yharnam or the Undead Burg or the Dragon Shrine. Indeed, the fact that they exist as islands in an ocean of vacuous space between them precludes the so-called "Legacy Dungeons" of this game from having the satisfying loops and interconnections that are often the design highlights of prior entries. The bosses are a seriously uneven mixed bag as well; even setting aside the repetition, as the nasty trend of overturned bosses that started in Dark Souls III rears its unfortunate head again. The superboss Melania is an interesting design utterly ruined by her obscene damage output, and my personal highlight of the game, Starscourge Radagon, who is the only boss fight that felt like it played to the things that Elden Ring brought to the table, and is a moment among the series that the game can truly claim as it's very own...but the tuning of the fight prevented it from being the triumphant coming-together moment that it is clearly attempting for many of my friends, who left the fight feeling that it was just annoying and tedious. Modern From Software could never make a fight like Maiden Astrea again because they'd insist on making her really hard in a way that actively detracts from the emotional experience in the fight. Boss fights can be about more than just providing a challenge, and I think From has forgotten that.
Taken as a series of its legacy dungeons, of its finest moments, I think Elden Ring would only be a middling one of these games. The additions to the formula feel anemic and unbalanced, the multiplayer implementation is honestly a quite considerable step back from prior games (the decision to have the majority of invasions only occur during co-operation feels like an attempt to weed out trolls picking on weaker players but in reality what it does is make equal fights are next-to-impossible and put Seal-Clubbers in a place where they are the only players who can effectively invade, a completely baffling decision), but it's really the open world I keep coming back to as the reason this game doesn't work. Not only does it add nothing that wasn't already present in better ways in prior games, but it actively detracts from the experience. The promise of the Open World is one of discovery, of setting off in uncharted directions and finding something new, but do Open Worlds actually facilitate this any better than more linear games? I don't know if they do. I felt a sense of discovery and finding something in so many of these games, even the most linear ones, and felt it stronger because the game was able to use careful, meticulous level design to bring out those emotions. Walking out of a cave and seeing Irithyll of the Boreal Valley, or Dead Man's Wharf stretch out before me, were moments of genuine discovery, and they would not be improved if I found six more Dead Man's Wharfs throughout the game. Contrary to their promise, in my experience, the open world, rather than create a sense of discovery, undermine it due to the compromises necessary to create these worlds. All the openness does for your discoveries is let you approach them from a slightly different angle as everyone else.
That is, if you can even claim to have discovered anything in the first place. To call Elden Ring derivative of prior games in this milieu would be a gross understatement. I am far from the first person to note that the game's much-hyped worldbuilding is largely content to regurgitate Souls Tropes with the Proper Nouns replaced with much worse ones, but it goes beyond that - entire questlines, plot beats, character arcs, dungeon designs, enemies, and bosses are lifted wholesale from prior games practically verbatim. More often than not Elden Ring feels closer to a Greatest Hits album than a coherent piece in and of itself, a soulless and cynical repackaging of prior Souls Classics, irrevocably damaged by being torn from the original context from which they belonged. I'm not a fan of Dark Souls III, in part because it too is also a game that leans on repetition of prior games, but at the very least the game was about those repetitions, where yes, old areas and characters would be repeated, but at least it was thematically resonant with what the game was doing. Elden Ring can't even claim that. Whatever this shallow mess of a narrative, easily the worst of the franchise thus far by my reckoning, is going for, it is done no favors by being this stitched-together Frankenstein of Souls.
I was particularly shocked by the sheer ferocity with which the game steals from the fan-favorite Bloodborne. Quick, tell me if you've heard this one before: you encounter a hunched, bestial foe, who fights you with their fists, but once you get their health halfway down, the battle stops, a cutscene plays, where they speak coherently, summon a blade from their past, and stand with their former dignity restored, the music changes, and their name is revealed to be "X the Y Blade". Or what about a hub area, separated in its own liminal space from the rest of the map, that can be discovered in its True Form in the material world? What about when that hub area is wreathed in spectral flame and begins to burn as the final hours of the game is nigh? These are far from the only examples, as there are multiple enemies and ideas throughout the game that are shamelessly lifted from my personal favorite From Software effort, but these stand out as the most noxious of all, as they simply repeat beats that were effective in the game they originated from because the game was able to build to them and have them resonate with the rest of the experience. You cannot just graft things whole cloth from prior work onto a new one and expect it to work as a coherent piece, the very prospect is ridiculous.
When Elden Ring did all this, my jaw about hit the floor from the sheer unmitigated gall. When it chose to conclude itself with a straight-faced Moon Presence reference, complete with an arena that directly evokes the Hunter's Dream, I just had to laugh. The final statement the game made on itself, the bullet point it chose to put on the experience, was "Remember Bloodborne? That was good, wasn't it?" Because in many ways, that really was a perfect conclusion to this game.
While it would be a mistake to claim, as people seem increasingly eager to, that Souls emerged entirely out of the magical ocean that is Hidetaka Miyazaki's unparalleled genius or whatever, as these games have always drawn heavy inspiration from properties like Berserk, Book of the New Sun, and The Legend of Zelda, and were built on top of a framework clearly established by past Fromsoft series King's Field, the reason I think that myself and many others were initially enthralled by the promise of Demon's Souls or Dark Souls was because they were decidedly different. Their esoterica, willingness to buck modern design conventions and hugely evocative online elements were why these games set imaginations alight so strongly, and proved enormously influential for the past decade of game design.
Demon's Souls felt like something new. And while successive games in this series have felt far less fresh, none of them have felt as utterly exhausted as Elden Ring: a final statement from the designers and writers at From Software that they have officially Ran Out of Ideas, that the well has long gone dry, that all they can do is to hastily staple on the modern design trends they once rejected onto a formula that does not gel with them, and that they are wandering without life through a never-ending cycle of their own creation, branded by the Darksign. Perhaps it's no surprise that their least inventive, least consistent, and least creative game since Demon's Souls is also by far their most successful. Once From Software defied conventions and trends, and now, they are consumed by them.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
Elden Ring
2022
When Demon’s Souls released in 2009, I was going through a pretty hard crisis of faith regarding videogames. I had grown old enough to finally see their limits, the industry-imposed repetition and condescention in their design, the corners that have to be cut and padded. I blindly took the advice from a few raving cynics I aligned myself with and imported Demon’s Souls from America as a last shot before I defiantly moved on from the medium like the little drama queen I was. DeS was exactly the game I needed, I had never played anything else like it, I had my mind shattered by the way the bosses in the title weren’t so much battles as they were puzzle boxes - imposing small situations to solve, being asked to find the lone small thread that will make the beast unravel. It felt like a NeverEnding Story adventure or something, I loved it, I still do.
With every new Fromsoft game, Hidetaka Miyazaki takes the opportunity to twist the dial even further from Adventure Fantasy to Battle Fantasy, the focus becoming more oriented around a type of mechanisation I personally find diagnostic-feeling, much less fulfilling - stat optimising and gear building, rote memorisation of excruciatingly difficult boss movesets. Very disenchanting open world too; everything in every corner is there to make your character more powerful, a handful of “types” of dungeon/outpost, a truly memetic core routine that made me feel like I was just playing Genshin Impact. This is obviously just a preference thing, but you must forgive me for feeling a little left behind.
There is a lot beauty in Elden Ring’s world, if I had anyone to thank for giving me the desire to trudge through this game to the end, it’ll be the stellar art and design team. Some of the most stunning locales I’ve seen in a minute; I’m particularly fond of miquellas haligtree, crumbling farum azula, and even revisiting Radahn’s arena post-battle for a taste of what I’d personally hoped exploring Elden Ring’s open world would feel like. The monster designs are nuts too, some skirting the perfect balance between recognisable and grotesque to lend some genuine unease.
Elden Ring is a fantastic game, just not a game for me. It actually gives me a little tinge of sadness to play a Fromsoft title and be made to think “this reminds me of another game” so many times. I respect the player-hostility maximalism of the bosses and the dizzying open-endedness of character builds - and in all honestly, Elden Ring very clearly has some of the richest thematic storytelling across the Miyazaki platter right now - I would just rather watch people snap the game over their knee on Youtube than ever play this again.
2024 Addendum long after the point of writing: I'm not exactly comfortable with my "eh it's not really for me" take being among the top reviews for this game. I use this site as a personal journal more than a platform for formal academic reviews; ultimately I'm glad that I'm not alone in my perspective, but we all know how Souls fans act, and believe me I'm not pissing all over your holy object - I'm bemoaning the fact that I've felt this illustrious series slip through my fingers and take the form of something I can no longer care for.
With every new Fromsoft game, Hidetaka Miyazaki takes the opportunity to twist the dial even further from Adventure Fantasy to Battle Fantasy, the focus becoming more oriented around a type of mechanisation I personally find diagnostic-feeling, much less fulfilling - stat optimising and gear building, rote memorisation of excruciatingly difficult boss movesets. Very disenchanting open world too; everything in every corner is there to make your character more powerful, a handful of “types” of dungeon/outpost, a truly memetic core routine that made me feel like I was just playing Genshin Impact. This is obviously just a preference thing, but you must forgive me for feeling a little left behind.
There is a lot beauty in Elden Ring’s world, if I had anyone to thank for giving me the desire to trudge through this game to the end, it’ll be the stellar art and design team. Some of the most stunning locales I’ve seen in a minute; I’m particularly fond of miquellas haligtree, crumbling farum azula, and even revisiting Radahn’s arena post-battle for a taste of what I’d personally hoped exploring Elden Ring’s open world would feel like. The monster designs are nuts too, some skirting the perfect balance between recognisable and grotesque to lend some genuine unease.
Elden Ring is a fantastic game, just not a game for me. It actually gives me a little tinge of sadness to play a Fromsoft title and be made to think “this reminds me of another game” so many times. I respect the player-hostility maximalism of the bosses and the dizzying open-endedness of character builds - and in all honestly, Elden Ring very clearly has some of the richest thematic storytelling across the Miyazaki platter right now - I would just rather watch people snap the game over their knee on Youtube than ever play this again.
2024 Addendum long after the point of writing: I'm not exactly comfortable with my "eh it's not really for me" take being among the top reviews for this game. I use this site as a personal journal more than a platform for formal academic reviews; ultimately I'm glad that I'm not alone in my perspective, but we all know how Souls fans act, and believe me I'm not pissing all over your holy object - I'm bemoaning the fact that I've felt this illustrious series slip through my fingers and take the form of something I can no longer care for.
Watching my SO play this game after getting it set up for her on her PC has been a full appreciation hours experience. I realized the many limits and sides of the game I never would've sincerely done on my own. When I played, I was a very objectives focused player at the time. Not exactly check all the boxes but I did mostly head towards Shrines, Divine Beasts, Memories. I did a little bit extra here and there, but generally it was just that.
She plays differently of course, far more observant explorer than I for example. She ended up finding a ton of korok seeds so far, simply because she loved just looking around the environments. It's become a common phrase just for me to hear by earshot "there's something suspicious around here" and then the familiar jingle. She also just talks to every single npc, something I'd certainly do now were I playing for the first time but experiencing all the first time dialogue with her together has been sincerely charming. There's a profuse amount of work to make all of the characters just dotting the little villages you find endearing and earnest. I never really touched the quests and she's filling them out as she finds them. It's genuinely astounding how nothing that I see here feels too trodden or familiar to me just watching her play, I'm just watching with her and feeling a heavy surge of joy. I honestly wish there was co-op!!!
Both our birthdays are coming up this week, and living this game again together crafts a warm blanket, a sincere coziness to the days ahead. Bless
She plays differently of course, far more observant explorer than I for example. She ended up finding a ton of korok seeds so far, simply because she loved just looking around the environments. It's become a common phrase just for me to hear by earshot "there's something suspicious around here" and then the familiar jingle. She also just talks to every single npc, something I'd certainly do now were I playing for the first time but experiencing all the first time dialogue with her together has been sincerely charming. There's a profuse amount of work to make all of the characters just dotting the little villages you find endearing and earnest. I never really touched the quests and she's filling them out as she finds them. It's genuinely astounding how nothing that I see here feels too trodden or familiar to me just watching her play, I'm just watching with her and feeling a heavy surge of joy. I honestly wish there was co-op!!!
Both our birthdays are coming up this week, and living this game again together crafts a warm blanket, a sincere coziness to the days ahead. Bless
Jet Set Radio Future
2002
after playing the original jet set radio so much in my younger years, I was absolutely salivating at the prospect of getting to play its follow-up at some point. however, my dad was a firm sony acolyte by that point, so I never had an opportunity to snag an xbox and give jsrf a shot. right before I began college I managed to get ahold of an original xbox for $40 (an unthinkably low price to me now, where an og will cost ~$120) with a copy of jsrf/sega gt 2002 for $10 (which even at the time was a complete rip-off, I found a 50 cent copy mere weeks later). that first playthrough began so well, but as I progressed, it dawned on me just how severely different and compromised the experience was versus the original, and after beating it I reluctantly admitted to myself that the venture had been a bust. I got to play one more title on xbox (silent hill 2, which was an absolute godsend for poor gamers like myself in the pre-definitive edition on pc days) before it succumbed to trace corrosion from a capacitor leakage on my 1.4 board. I scrambled to fix it, eventually installing a new motherboard/HDD combo until within months the EEPROM failed and I was left with a brick yet again. recently I opted to get an xbox 360 s on sale instead, and after finding jsrf on the backwards compatibility list, I felt the urge to return and perhaps see the game in a new light, or to reevaluate the game without its predecessor looming over it.
instead, with a heavy heart I must say that jsrf is even worse than I remember it being upon my first playthrough. the wonder I felt traversing the startlingly-large areas on my first playthrough has been replaced with utter boredom, and the aspects I so hated past the halfway point now strangle my enjoyment even further. it's remarkably ambitious, and I respect the team's desire to remix the original gameplay and setting into an alternate interpretation of the original, but its design strips out the genius of jsr's interlocking mechanics and accentuates the worst aspects.
jsrf moves away from the mission-based structure of the original and allows players to explore a segmented open world, all centered around the GG's garage. there's some level of interconnectivity between the levels, but in actuality three main hubs exist: one based around shibuya terminal, one based around the sewage facility accessed through rokkaku-dai heights, and one highway connecting 99th street, the skyscraper district, and highway zero together with various one-off areas attached. any unlocked area can be accessed at any time to complete optional challenges and collect graffiti souls. however, the game is otherwise rather linear, with objectives being relayed via cutscenes and directives from professor k over the returning pirate radio station Jet Set Radio. occasionally these objectives can be completed out of order, but otherwise a slightly uncomfortable amount of time is spent backtracking to reach far-flung destinations.
the level design itself initially comes off as much more expansive than its predecessor, but further examination reveals the actual tasks are more rigid and demanding. the majority of areas are designed as giant loops to faciliate various races and chases throughout the game, and given that there are often one-way chokepoints that prevent the player from exploring them backwards, it is difficult to freely move about in each beyond going around the loop repeatedly. when missing objectives or collectables along the way this becomes exceedingly tedious. shibuya terminal is a tidy contraindicator to this trend at the very least. this level drastically expands upon the modest bus terminal from the original jsr by adding a mesh of walkways high above the cars below, with nooks and crannies spread throughout and numerous ways to transport oneself from edge to edge. fittingly enough, the game opens with a kinetic sizzle reel of the GG's rolling through this area and performing a dazzling array of tricks all while bounding between rails and lightpoles and jumping between bus stop overhangs. some of the other non-loop stages are not so lucky. 99th street features a nice dragon statue centerpiece but with two nearly-identical downtown shopping areas on either side that lack identity beyond reinterpreting a similar yet singular area from the original title. hikage street is even worse, with three boxed areas with a giant spiraling staircase each, and an interconnecting maze that will force the player to repeatedly and slowly puruse their map in order to proceed.
in terms of the challenges presented, jsrf hews far closer to being a traditional platformer than jsr. each area is focused around a single type of obstacle, and generally moving through each area requires repeatedly surmounting the obstacle, whether it's chained wall-rides on billboards, flipping off of ladders, or doing boost jumps out of half-pipes. unfortunately, given that the skating and grinding has still not progressed far from jsr, there simply isn't enough nuance in control available to actually iterate the difficulty of the obstacles throughout each area, and so instead the game resorts to simply copy-pasting structures for long spans and forcing the player to repeat the same tricks ad nauseum with little variation. enjoy mindless rail-to-wall-ride-back-to-rail sections in chuo street? have fun going through five in a row every time you have the misfortune of needing to visit the rear of the stage for any reason. some stages pull this off better than others: the sewage facility, while mostly linear in terms of how the obstacles are reached, has a variety of different half-pipe-centric challenges throughout its runtime that keep the concept fresh throughout, even though a section requiring literal jump-between-platforms platforming halfway through illustrates how poorly jsr's slippery momentum-based movement translates to grind-less areas. on the other end of this is the fortified residential zone towards the end of the game, where the bottom level involves flipping off ladders and the top level involves making long jumps off of steep downward ramps towards spiral rail climbs. on this bottom level, remembering which of the many identical ladder sections you've already climbed (switches must be activated at the top of each one) becomes tiresome, especially since the map does not seem to help in the slightest. by the time you've surpassed both levels, you're thrust into three back-to-back sections requiring you to fall through wooden awnings to find which ones are sturdy enough to support your weight and can lead you to the next area. one by itself would have been troublesome enough, but three separate ones chained together with no breaks truly illustrates a laziness in design that should have been cut down to size long before the game went gold.
the controls themselves have been tweaked, and on the surface the changes fix many issues with the first game:
-player acceleration has been bumped up slightly, removing some of the sluggishness many complained about. on its own this is a great change other than making turn radii just a wee bit wider than the first game, but the way it interacts with the grinding is suspect. when jumping, the difference between a regular jump and a trick jump (with exaggerated air time)
depends on the speed the player currently has, just as in the first game. since the player is overall faster, it's very difficult to ever pull off a regular jump, and so virtually every jump from a rail is overly floaty.
-rails grab more easily than they did in the first, making missed grinds less frequent. in the original this would have been a nice change, but jsrf vastly increases the number of grindable surfaces at any given time, and it results in far too many instances of the player randomly grabbing onto rails when they aren't meant to. a grind button is still desperately needed here, and possibly a way to quickly jump between parallel rails a la sonic.
-large graffiti has been changed from a series of QTEs to a group of various one-shot graffiti points in a row. while theoretically this should keep the pace steady, it ends up causing unnecessary interruptions because the targeting system simply refuses to let you do a line of them in one go. occasionally I have actually gotten a run of five or seven graffiti points when holding the button down, but it's so inconsistent and really halts the game when I have to round back to get the one or two points that somehow didn't get covered, especially when they're on a rail.
-the previously unused X and Y buttons have now been allotted to performing tricks, which is a godsend on rails, where they allow you to build speed without jumping. if I had to single out one addition that really elevates the experience and that I would love to backport to jsr, it would be this one. however, there's an awkward unforced error in the design here in that the player must use a certain rhythm to perform them lest it fails. if the rhythm were consistent it would be no big deal, but it absolutely changes depending on location/speed/incline/etc. and is entirely indecipherable. I would also raise the max cap on speed you could gain a bit, but that's a more minor tweak.
-you can also now turn around at will by pressing Y while moving compared to the awkward analog stick method from the original. you also frequently turn around while performing tricks, and will land moving backwards. this is way more of a hindrance than a boon, since you cannot boost while turned around, and as far as I'm aware your turn radius is even larger than it was before. totally useless feature as far as I'm concerned.
-boosting has been changed from a cooldown with minor effects to a 10-can cost with a major increase in speed. in theory I agree with the decision, but the price is just way too much... five cans probably would have worked, but with every character having a 30 can cap now, you'll have to jettison a third of your cans for a three second boost. there's also a frustrating smear filter it applies to the screen when boosting, and it can make it difficult to discern fine details when the boost is being used before jumping.
I've now penned an awful lot of words describing just basic movement/graffiti/level design/etc., and that's because here it makes up a good 75% of the game. unlike the first game, which required an understanding of multiple intertwined mechanics and hazards to successfully develop routes for each level, here you're often required to simply go around spraying every graffiti point in an environment with no pushback from external forces. herein lies the major design paradigm shift between the two titles: the original focused on creativity and route-planning in environments with dynamic processes, whereas jsrf focuses on fixed challenges delivered in strictly partitioned segments. the challenges themselves require a greater level of finesse to accomplish, but the only punishment is generally falling some distance and needing to try again. every punishment is delivered via frustration and lots of retracing steps to climb up and attempt the trick again, and while this is technically easier than the original, which required full-mission retries upon death, this game feels so much more unnecessarily punitive. the verticality of many stages exacerbates this issue with just how far you can fall from a screw-up. failure in jsr often encouraged new strategies, and each level was open-ended enough in that game to allow route changes if a particular approach wasn't working. here it's just constantly bashing your head against clunky challenges over and over again, and the game is so much worse for it.
of course, there's more beyond simply spraying graffiti and platforming here. for one, combat has taken on a heightened important in quartered-off encounters. generally you will run into an invisible trigger that plops you into a small arena surrounded by electrified fences and forced to fight cops or golden rhino. fighting mainly consists of running into opponents, knocking them down, and spraying them... and it really never gets more complicated against human foes. the lack of mechanics and variety seems almost unfinished considered how many times you need to take on enemy forces, and beyond some armored opponents requiring a boost to knock over there's little challenge or strategy in taking down humanoid opponents. the sole exception is a late-game miniboss who can use doc ock-esque extendable robotic arms to attempt to attack you, allowing you to grind on his arms once they have been shot and knock him down; even this fight never increases in complexity past the beginning. there's also a couple true bosses to take on, which range in quality. the mid-game fight against the spider-esque police mecha is so quick and simple as to be unmemorable. there's a late-game train robot which is great in how it forces you to jump between rails to dodge various telegraphed attacks, but as mentioned before jumping between rails is very clumsy, and you'll often waste so many cans boosting to get close enough to attack that you won't have enough to actually attack with. the final boss is particularly annoying in that you must boost into it multiple times with no indicator that you are doing any damage until it finally breaks open the weak point. by this point, you must drop to the bottom of the stage, grab cans to restock, and then climb all the way back up in a rather annoying sequence that requires you to make multiple blind jumps (the camera faces towards the player during spirals, and with jumps at the end of the spirals you must memorize where the rail ends... very frustrating). the original boss was certainly not amazing, but it was at the very least much less involved in terms of the platforming involved. the original stood out to me in how little it emphasized combat overall and how well the game performed without it, so the move towards required combat here grates on me a bit, especially since it's not particularly fun.
rival gangs also show up here, with their own set of events for you to take on. "Tagger's Tag" returns from the original game, where you must chase each rival gang member in a loop and spray them a certain number of times. this is arguably the worst part of the original game, and thankfully it's slightly better here. the new lock-on system makes staying behind a moving target much easier, and downed rivals don't deal damage like they used to. a couple of the fights do have much higher can counts required to take them on (poison jam took me 30 a pop), which is certainly annoying, but since you can hold the button down here to spray consistently it's less of a problem. races aren't too difficult either given that you understand the loop in a given stage. however, the capture the flag game is a total dud. in open levels where you could choose and optimize routes between flags, perhaps this could be fun, but in both of the available capture the flag matches the areas are virtually straight lines you must run between. if you grab the first flag, and the next flag is straight behind you in a corridor, your opponents trailing you will have an instant headstart on that flag, making racing for it pointless. in the hikage street version, it's better to straight-up memorize the flag placements and then only go for the odd-numbered flags. rounding these out is the absolute slog that is death ball. halfway through the game you're captured and forced to win three back-to-back death ball rounds to earn your freedom. this sport consists of grabbing a ball and running it around a track while avoiding your opponents. there's a mechanic where you can toss a ball to and from your AI-controlled partner, but it's completely broken, and your companion is next to useless in terms of tactics. on my first playthrough this was a nightmare for me, and this time I ended up trivializing it by simply standing in place, waiting for the AI to get closeish, and then running while hoping the AI didn't attempt to run backwards and cross me at any point. total waste of time, and especially unbearable considering you have to do three in a row.
I do want to give the game credit where credit is due of course, and it's impossible to downplay the technical improvements the game has made over the dreamcast original. it's sadly unclear what the early dreamcast builds of this looked like, but this is pushes the xbox non-stop to great effect with long draw distances and complex level geometry. the new aesthetic moves away from the 10-minutes-in-the-future setting of jsr while completely skirting any sort of gritty cyberpunk look in favor of sleek, almost retrofuture robot-esque characters and pastel colored buildings. I still have a preference for the original areas, but it relates more to the jsrf having such artificial area design to the point where it ruins the immersion that the original creates with its much more naturalistic urban layouts. the soundtrack is also incredibly strong, favoring a heavier dance influence over the more kitschy plunderphonics of the original. there are fewer guest tracks, but the ones that appear are just as memorable as those from the first game. real talk: birthday cake gets some undue hate, but the real detestable track here is Aisle 10. such a beyond-corny rap track that reeks of loser white boy energy; I was shocked to find out that it was an actual hit that they licensed and not some shitty no-name artist. thankfully we also got contributions from The Latch Brothers, a very solid beastie boys side project. there's a lot of solid little technical touches; the one that sticks out for me is how the characters seem to melt at high speeds, like their polygons begin warping from the momentum they carry.
it's not that I don't want to like this game; I wanted to love it when I originally played it. I made it up to the death ball tournament completely convinced that it was a classic in its own right and that my frustration would cease with time. this replay has made it so incredibly apparent that this isn't the case though, and any slight nostalgia I had for it quickly disappeared given the how dull the experience is. to me "dull" describes the majority of the game, and there's no better section that illustrates it than the noise tank section past the halfway point. you're required to take down many noise tanks that have infested the previous areas you've already explored, and rather than any sort of intelligent enemy design they simply stand in bunches looping their dance animation, often floating inexplicably above the ground waiting for you to run into them so they can disappear with no effects. just a total drag that siphons your time by running you through on-rails areas you've already experienced. no matter what I do in this game it always seems to interrupt my flow to toss me into some shit I don't wanna do: some random fight, running back and forth between areas, untelegraphed and uncancellable events with rival gangs, and any number of other tedious and frustrating activities, none of which make me think about the mechanics outside of basic execution. it's not the kind of game I want to invest time into, and to me it doesn't live up its predecessor.
a note about playing this on 360: everything I said above but a good smattering of slowdown (depends on area + player character) along with some screen tearing. it made the skyscraper district -- already one of the worst areas in the game -- so bad as to give me a headache... it's definitely not the optimal way to play, but this game is already rather inaccessible as is, so I wouldn't blame anyone for trying it out that way.
instead, with a heavy heart I must say that jsrf is even worse than I remember it being upon my first playthrough. the wonder I felt traversing the startlingly-large areas on my first playthrough has been replaced with utter boredom, and the aspects I so hated past the halfway point now strangle my enjoyment even further. it's remarkably ambitious, and I respect the team's desire to remix the original gameplay and setting into an alternate interpretation of the original, but its design strips out the genius of jsr's interlocking mechanics and accentuates the worst aspects.
jsrf moves away from the mission-based structure of the original and allows players to explore a segmented open world, all centered around the GG's garage. there's some level of interconnectivity between the levels, but in actuality three main hubs exist: one based around shibuya terminal, one based around the sewage facility accessed through rokkaku-dai heights, and one highway connecting 99th street, the skyscraper district, and highway zero together with various one-off areas attached. any unlocked area can be accessed at any time to complete optional challenges and collect graffiti souls. however, the game is otherwise rather linear, with objectives being relayed via cutscenes and directives from professor k over the returning pirate radio station Jet Set Radio. occasionally these objectives can be completed out of order, but otherwise a slightly uncomfortable amount of time is spent backtracking to reach far-flung destinations.
the level design itself initially comes off as much more expansive than its predecessor, but further examination reveals the actual tasks are more rigid and demanding. the majority of areas are designed as giant loops to faciliate various races and chases throughout the game, and given that there are often one-way chokepoints that prevent the player from exploring them backwards, it is difficult to freely move about in each beyond going around the loop repeatedly. when missing objectives or collectables along the way this becomes exceedingly tedious. shibuya terminal is a tidy contraindicator to this trend at the very least. this level drastically expands upon the modest bus terminal from the original jsr by adding a mesh of walkways high above the cars below, with nooks and crannies spread throughout and numerous ways to transport oneself from edge to edge. fittingly enough, the game opens with a kinetic sizzle reel of the GG's rolling through this area and performing a dazzling array of tricks all while bounding between rails and lightpoles and jumping between bus stop overhangs. some of the other non-loop stages are not so lucky. 99th street features a nice dragon statue centerpiece but with two nearly-identical downtown shopping areas on either side that lack identity beyond reinterpreting a similar yet singular area from the original title. hikage street is even worse, with three boxed areas with a giant spiraling staircase each, and an interconnecting maze that will force the player to repeatedly and slowly puruse their map in order to proceed.
in terms of the challenges presented, jsrf hews far closer to being a traditional platformer than jsr. each area is focused around a single type of obstacle, and generally moving through each area requires repeatedly surmounting the obstacle, whether it's chained wall-rides on billboards, flipping off of ladders, or doing boost jumps out of half-pipes. unfortunately, given that the skating and grinding has still not progressed far from jsr, there simply isn't enough nuance in control available to actually iterate the difficulty of the obstacles throughout each area, and so instead the game resorts to simply copy-pasting structures for long spans and forcing the player to repeat the same tricks ad nauseum with little variation. enjoy mindless rail-to-wall-ride-back-to-rail sections in chuo street? have fun going through five in a row every time you have the misfortune of needing to visit the rear of the stage for any reason. some stages pull this off better than others: the sewage facility, while mostly linear in terms of how the obstacles are reached, has a variety of different half-pipe-centric challenges throughout its runtime that keep the concept fresh throughout, even though a section requiring literal jump-between-platforms platforming halfway through illustrates how poorly jsr's slippery momentum-based movement translates to grind-less areas. on the other end of this is the fortified residential zone towards the end of the game, where the bottom level involves flipping off ladders and the top level involves making long jumps off of steep downward ramps towards spiral rail climbs. on this bottom level, remembering which of the many identical ladder sections you've already climbed (switches must be activated at the top of each one) becomes tiresome, especially since the map does not seem to help in the slightest. by the time you've surpassed both levels, you're thrust into three back-to-back sections requiring you to fall through wooden awnings to find which ones are sturdy enough to support your weight and can lead you to the next area. one by itself would have been troublesome enough, but three separate ones chained together with no breaks truly illustrates a laziness in design that should have been cut down to size long before the game went gold.
the controls themselves have been tweaked, and on the surface the changes fix many issues with the first game:
-player acceleration has been bumped up slightly, removing some of the sluggishness many complained about. on its own this is a great change other than making turn radii just a wee bit wider than the first game, but the way it interacts with the grinding is suspect. when jumping, the difference between a regular jump and a trick jump (with exaggerated air time)
depends on the speed the player currently has, just as in the first game. since the player is overall faster, it's very difficult to ever pull off a regular jump, and so virtually every jump from a rail is overly floaty.
-rails grab more easily than they did in the first, making missed grinds less frequent. in the original this would have been a nice change, but jsrf vastly increases the number of grindable surfaces at any given time, and it results in far too many instances of the player randomly grabbing onto rails when they aren't meant to. a grind button is still desperately needed here, and possibly a way to quickly jump between parallel rails a la sonic.
-large graffiti has been changed from a series of QTEs to a group of various one-shot graffiti points in a row. while theoretically this should keep the pace steady, it ends up causing unnecessary interruptions because the targeting system simply refuses to let you do a line of them in one go. occasionally I have actually gotten a run of five or seven graffiti points when holding the button down, but it's so inconsistent and really halts the game when I have to round back to get the one or two points that somehow didn't get covered, especially when they're on a rail.
-the previously unused X and Y buttons have now been allotted to performing tricks, which is a godsend on rails, where they allow you to build speed without jumping. if I had to single out one addition that really elevates the experience and that I would love to backport to jsr, it would be this one. however, there's an awkward unforced error in the design here in that the player must use a certain rhythm to perform them lest it fails. if the rhythm were consistent it would be no big deal, but it absolutely changes depending on location/speed/incline/etc. and is entirely indecipherable. I would also raise the max cap on speed you could gain a bit, but that's a more minor tweak.
-you can also now turn around at will by pressing Y while moving compared to the awkward analog stick method from the original. you also frequently turn around while performing tricks, and will land moving backwards. this is way more of a hindrance than a boon, since you cannot boost while turned around, and as far as I'm aware your turn radius is even larger than it was before. totally useless feature as far as I'm concerned.
-boosting has been changed from a cooldown with minor effects to a 10-can cost with a major increase in speed. in theory I agree with the decision, but the price is just way too much... five cans probably would have worked, but with every character having a 30 can cap now, you'll have to jettison a third of your cans for a three second boost. there's also a frustrating smear filter it applies to the screen when boosting, and it can make it difficult to discern fine details when the boost is being used before jumping.
I've now penned an awful lot of words describing just basic movement/graffiti/level design/etc., and that's because here it makes up a good 75% of the game. unlike the first game, which required an understanding of multiple intertwined mechanics and hazards to successfully develop routes for each level, here you're often required to simply go around spraying every graffiti point in an environment with no pushback from external forces. herein lies the major design paradigm shift between the two titles: the original focused on creativity and route-planning in environments with dynamic processes, whereas jsrf focuses on fixed challenges delivered in strictly partitioned segments. the challenges themselves require a greater level of finesse to accomplish, but the only punishment is generally falling some distance and needing to try again. every punishment is delivered via frustration and lots of retracing steps to climb up and attempt the trick again, and while this is technically easier than the original, which required full-mission retries upon death, this game feels so much more unnecessarily punitive. the verticality of many stages exacerbates this issue with just how far you can fall from a screw-up. failure in jsr often encouraged new strategies, and each level was open-ended enough in that game to allow route changes if a particular approach wasn't working. here it's just constantly bashing your head against clunky challenges over and over again, and the game is so much worse for it.
of course, there's more beyond simply spraying graffiti and platforming here. for one, combat has taken on a heightened important in quartered-off encounters. generally you will run into an invisible trigger that plops you into a small arena surrounded by electrified fences and forced to fight cops or golden rhino. fighting mainly consists of running into opponents, knocking them down, and spraying them... and it really never gets more complicated against human foes. the lack of mechanics and variety seems almost unfinished considered how many times you need to take on enemy forces, and beyond some armored opponents requiring a boost to knock over there's little challenge or strategy in taking down humanoid opponents. the sole exception is a late-game miniboss who can use doc ock-esque extendable robotic arms to attempt to attack you, allowing you to grind on his arms once they have been shot and knock him down; even this fight never increases in complexity past the beginning. there's also a couple true bosses to take on, which range in quality. the mid-game fight against the spider-esque police mecha is so quick and simple as to be unmemorable. there's a late-game train robot which is great in how it forces you to jump between rails to dodge various telegraphed attacks, but as mentioned before jumping between rails is very clumsy, and you'll often waste so many cans boosting to get close enough to attack that you won't have enough to actually attack with. the final boss is particularly annoying in that you must boost into it multiple times with no indicator that you are doing any damage until it finally breaks open the weak point. by this point, you must drop to the bottom of the stage, grab cans to restock, and then climb all the way back up in a rather annoying sequence that requires you to make multiple blind jumps (the camera faces towards the player during spirals, and with jumps at the end of the spirals you must memorize where the rail ends... very frustrating). the original boss was certainly not amazing, but it was at the very least much less involved in terms of the platforming involved. the original stood out to me in how little it emphasized combat overall and how well the game performed without it, so the move towards required combat here grates on me a bit, especially since it's not particularly fun.
rival gangs also show up here, with their own set of events for you to take on. "Tagger's Tag" returns from the original game, where you must chase each rival gang member in a loop and spray them a certain number of times. this is arguably the worst part of the original game, and thankfully it's slightly better here. the new lock-on system makes staying behind a moving target much easier, and downed rivals don't deal damage like they used to. a couple of the fights do have much higher can counts required to take them on (poison jam took me 30 a pop), which is certainly annoying, but since you can hold the button down here to spray consistently it's less of a problem. races aren't too difficult either given that you understand the loop in a given stage. however, the capture the flag game is a total dud. in open levels where you could choose and optimize routes between flags, perhaps this could be fun, but in both of the available capture the flag matches the areas are virtually straight lines you must run between. if you grab the first flag, and the next flag is straight behind you in a corridor, your opponents trailing you will have an instant headstart on that flag, making racing for it pointless. in the hikage street version, it's better to straight-up memorize the flag placements and then only go for the odd-numbered flags. rounding these out is the absolute slog that is death ball. halfway through the game you're captured and forced to win three back-to-back death ball rounds to earn your freedom. this sport consists of grabbing a ball and running it around a track while avoiding your opponents. there's a mechanic where you can toss a ball to and from your AI-controlled partner, but it's completely broken, and your companion is next to useless in terms of tactics. on my first playthrough this was a nightmare for me, and this time I ended up trivializing it by simply standing in place, waiting for the AI to get closeish, and then running while hoping the AI didn't attempt to run backwards and cross me at any point. total waste of time, and especially unbearable considering you have to do three in a row.
I do want to give the game credit where credit is due of course, and it's impossible to downplay the technical improvements the game has made over the dreamcast original. it's sadly unclear what the early dreamcast builds of this looked like, but this is pushes the xbox non-stop to great effect with long draw distances and complex level geometry. the new aesthetic moves away from the 10-minutes-in-the-future setting of jsr while completely skirting any sort of gritty cyberpunk look in favor of sleek, almost retrofuture robot-esque characters and pastel colored buildings. I still have a preference for the original areas, but it relates more to the jsrf having such artificial area design to the point where it ruins the immersion that the original creates with its much more naturalistic urban layouts. the soundtrack is also incredibly strong, favoring a heavier dance influence over the more kitschy plunderphonics of the original. there are fewer guest tracks, but the ones that appear are just as memorable as those from the first game. real talk: birthday cake gets some undue hate, but the real detestable track here is Aisle 10. such a beyond-corny rap track that reeks of loser white boy energy; I was shocked to find out that it was an actual hit that they licensed and not some shitty no-name artist. thankfully we also got contributions from The Latch Brothers, a very solid beastie boys side project. there's a lot of solid little technical touches; the one that sticks out for me is how the characters seem to melt at high speeds, like their polygons begin warping from the momentum they carry.
it's not that I don't want to like this game; I wanted to love it when I originally played it. I made it up to the death ball tournament completely convinced that it was a classic in its own right and that my frustration would cease with time. this replay has made it so incredibly apparent that this isn't the case though, and any slight nostalgia I had for it quickly disappeared given the how dull the experience is. to me "dull" describes the majority of the game, and there's no better section that illustrates it than the noise tank section past the halfway point. you're required to take down many noise tanks that have infested the previous areas you've already explored, and rather than any sort of intelligent enemy design they simply stand in bunches looping their dance animation, often floating inexplicably above the ground waiting for you to run into them so they can disappear with no effects. just a total drag that siphons your time by running you through on-rails areas you've already experienced. no matter what I do in this game it always seems to interrupt my flow to toss me into some shit I don't wanna do: some random fight, running back and forth between areas, untelegraphed and uncancellable events with rival gangs, and any number of other tedious and frustrating activities, none of which make me think about the mechanics outside of basic execution. it's not the kind of game I want to invest time into, and to me it doesn't live up its predecessor.
a note about playing this on 360: everything I said above but a good smattering of slowdown (depends on area + player character) along with some screen tearing. it made the skyscraper district -- already one of the worst areas in the game -- so bad as to give me a headache... it's definitely not the optimal way to play, but this game is already rather inaccessible as is, so I wouldn't blame anyone for trying it out that way.
As the start of a new mascot platforming series launching around the turn of the millennium, one might assume Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus would stand as nothing but a sloppy first step for a long abandoned IP, but I was delighted to realize this assumption of mine was misguided, at least for the most part. In an effort to make a title that stood out from other games released for the PS2 in 2002, as well as potentially compete with the competition on Nintendo's platform, Sucker Punch aimed to make a platformer that played as smoothly as the aesthetic it was draped under. Setting the game around a globe-trotting adventure following the escapades of a sneaky Raccoon and his fellow band of misfits was already a recipe for success as far as I was concerned, but managed to be elevated even further by its gameplay.
Following in the approach of its narrative, Sly Cooper leans into a more adventure oriented design philosophy when it comes to its various locales, focussing less on gamey platforming playgrounds and more on the feeling of scavenging through organic feeling levels and environments. One of my favorite elements to the game is absolutely the levels themselves, once you reach a new level, there's basically no breaks until you complete the objective at hand, which more often than not tasks the player with collecting a few trinkets that tie into the level itself in some way. While I could have gone without Sly’s disembodied head being scattered throughout levels to give you more lives, I love how the game goes out of its way to make some of its more gamey elements feel a bit more diegetic. You’re not breaking boxes to fill an imaginary quota or collecting Stars to bring power to a castle, you’re collecting keys to open locks or finding pages of Sly’s family handbook to unlock more abilities focussed on the art of thievery. The platforming is pretty basic compared to other games of its ilk, but these little elements go a long way towards making the experience stand out from the crowd.
Thankfully, even while traversal isn’t necessarily taxing, Sucker Punch added just enough flourishes to Sly’s kit to make progression feel smooth and satisfying for the entire runtime of the game. Through the use of a single multi-purpose stealth button, Sly is able to interact with the world around him in practically any way you see fit to sneak by undetected. Hiding along walls, climbing up poles, sneaking on overhead wires, you name it. Everything lends further credence to the idea that you’re a master thief sticking your nose in spots you're not supposed to.
Unfortunately, the game’s design cohesion is not completely airtight. My statement earlier on the levels feeling organic is only partially true. While it's correct that each individual section is laid out in a way that makes it feel like a more believable place, each area is generally connected to a central hub that splits off into segmented levels through Super Mario 64-esque portals where the game warps you to a new section of the map. Sadly this is an element to the experience I can’t say I’m fond of. It may feel pedantic to rag on something as small as this, but when the rest of the experience goes out of its way to feel organic in its pacing and progression, it makes something like this stand out pretty hard. I tend not to care about it in something as whimsical as SM64, but I suppose I expected something more, forward thinking(?) for a game with a world as confident and grounded as this (ironic given the fact that the leads are anthropomorphized animals scouring the globe for the missing pages of a book)
The strength of the level design also tends to get lost when you’re stuck performing arduous mini-games that are clearly only there to extend the runtime or occasionally give Sly’s fellow thieves something to do on the field. It was a bit of a shame to see such a colorful cast of characters mostly swept to the side in place of the admittedly fun and charismatic Sly. It makes me wish there were a version of this group where overcoming obstacles felt more like a collaborative effort, rather than Sly doing everything himself and dragging his friends along
I could go on about smaller nitpicks like the mostly forgettable bosses or other teeny world-breaking elements, but on the whole I greatly enjoyed my time with this. Despite my issues with how it all ties together, a strong foundation was clearly laid with this game and I don’t think that should go overlooked. All it would take is some rethinking of the level structure, some extra polish on the objectives, and maybe a better balance between the cast, and I think you'd have a game that truly makes the thief motif shine. (I wonder what a game like that would look like 🗿)
Following in the approach of its narrative, Sly Cooper leans into a more adventure oriented design philosophy when it comes to its various locales, focussing less on gamey platforming playgrounds and more on the feeling of scavenging through organic feeling levels and environments. One of my favorite elements to the game is absolutely the levels themselves, once you reach a new level, there's basically no breaks until you complete the objective at hand, which more often than not tasks the player with collecting a few trinkets that tie into the level itself in some way. While I could have gone without Sly’s disembodied head being scattered throughout levels to give you more lives, I love how the game goes out of its way to make some of its more gamey elements feel a bit more diegetic. You’re not breaking boxes to fill an imaginary quota or collecting Stars to bring power to a castle, you’re collecting keys to open locks or finding pages of Sly’s family handbook to unlock more abilities focussed on the art of thievery. The platforming is pretty basic compared to other games of its ilk, but these little elements go a long way towards making the experience stand out from the crowd.
Thankfully, even while traversal isn’t necessarily taxing, Sucker Punch added just enough flourishes to Sly’s kit to make progression feel smooth and satisfying for the entire runtime of the game. Through the use of a single multi-purpose stealth button, Sly is able to interact with the world around him in practically any way you see fit to sneak by undetected. Hiding along walls, climbing up poles, sneaking on overhead wires, you name it. Everything lends further credence to the idea that you’re a master thief sticking your nose in spots you're not supposed to.
Unfortunately, the game’s design cohesion is not completely airtight. My statement earlier on the levels feeling organic is only partially true. While it's correct that each individual section is laid out in a way that makes it feel like a more believable place, each area is generally connected to a central hub that splits off into segmented levels through Super Mario 64-esque portals where the game warps you to a new section of the map. Sadly this is an element to the experience I can’t say I’m fond of. It may feel pedantic to rag on something as small as this, but when the rest of the experience goes out of its way to feel organic in its pacing and progression, it makes something like this stand out pretty hard. I tend not to care about it in something as whimsical as SM64, but I suppose I expected something more, forward thinking(?) for a game with a world as confident and grounded as this (ironic given the fact that the leads are anthropomorphized animals scouring the globe for the missing pages of a book)
The strength of the level design also tends to get lost when you’re stuck performing arduous mini-games that are clearly only there to extend the runtime or occasionally give Sly’s fellow thieves something to do on the field. It was a bit of a shame to see such a colorful cast of characters mostly swept to the side in place of the admittedly fun and charismatic Sly. It makes me wish there were a version of this group where overcoming obstacles felt more like a collaborative effort, rather than Sly doing everything himself and dragging his friends along
I could go on about smaller nitpicks like the mostly forgettable bosses or other teeny world-breaking elements, but on the whole I greatly enjoyed my time with this. Despite my issues with how it all ties together, a strong foundation was clearly laid with this game and I don’t think that should go overlooked. All it would take is some rethinking of the level structure, some extra polish on the objectives, and maybe a better balance between the cast, and I think you'd have a game that truly makes the thief motif shine. (I wonder what a game like that would look like 🗿)
Metroid Prime
2002
no schmovement + linear + cringe + ratio
Prime takes its series to new heights in atmosphere, environmental storytelling and polish, but also sacrifices a little too much of Super Metroid's sweaty energy and genius level design structure for my tastes. Morphballing over bumpy terrain, side-stepping around Space Pirates and double jumping between platforms is fun, but is it as fun as it could be when every room is a tiny self-contained box? It sucks ass how you can get the Ice Beam, see eight Ice Beam doors on your map and then realize that seven of them are dead ends.
The wide-eyed little gamer in me hopes Retro will take inspiration from more loosey-goosey schmovement sandbox FPS games like Quake, Titanfall 2 or Halo Infinite for Prime 4. As it stands though, I can appreciate this more rigid Ocarina of Time-style take on Metroid for what it is!
Prime takes its series to new heights in atmosphere, environmental storytelling and polish, but also sacrifices a little too much of Super Metroid's sweaty energy and genius level design structure for my tastes. Morphballing over bumpy terrain, side-stepping around Space Pirates and double jumping between platforms is fun, but is it as fun as it could be when every room is a tiny self-contained box? It sucks ass how you can get the Ice Beam, see eight Ice Beam doors on your map and then realize that seven of them are dead ends.
The wide-eyed little gamer in me hopes Retro will take inspiration from more loosey-goosey schmovement sandbox FPS games like Quake, Titanfall 2 or Halo Infinite for Prime 4. As it stands though, I can appreciate this more rigid Ocarina of Time-style take on Metroid for what it is!
Bar none the greatest strength of the Myst series was always its ability to convey the human mind's fascination with deciphering the unknown and making sense out of the alien and illogical. Myst's cold, empty and artifical island filled with misplaced familiarity beckoning you to interact with its clunky buttons and mechanical contraptions was all about finding meaning in its dreamlike language, which while a fruitful and inspiring endeavor as the series first step, was something that its sequel Riven managed to slightly iterate and expand upon to deliver something much more profoundly alluring.
Masterfully intertwining its worldbuilding with its puzzles, Riven presents a cohesive and tangible world filled with enigmas within enigmas, where understanding the solution means understanding the people, culture, rules and symbols that govern its world, and preceeding titles like The Witness or Fez, it offers a singular idea to the player that progresssively and beautifully flourishes into revelation with each new discovery of its meaning, exposing its crucial purpose and importance to every facet of Riven's existence.
A meticulously designed gameworld that perfectly parallels the antagonist's obssessive imperialistic dreams of divinity and supremacy over the world of Riven, and whose vision is ultimately and inevitably undone by the same reverence he bestows upon the devices and symbols he created in his tyranny. And just as his unsustainable dream crumbles apart, so too does the player's, as figuring out Riven means the destruction of its mystique, leaving nothing but a virtual space of beautiful static pre rendered backgrounds, and while the awe of enlightenment is something that I will never be able to experience ever again in Riven, the joyful smile I get while looking at my notebook filled with scribbles and doodles of its world is proof that I was truly there.
Refrain from resorting to a guide, click anything and everything, close and open every door, observe closely, and take a sip each time you have to endure a grueling slow animation, and I promise it will be worthwhile.
Masterfully intertwining its worldbuilding with its puzzles, Riven presents a cohesive and tangible world filled with enigmas within enigmas, where understanding the solution means understanding the people, culture, rules and symbols that govern its world, and preceeding titles like The Witness or Fez, it offers a singular idea to the player that progresssively and beautifully flourishes into revelation with each new discovery of its meaning, exposing its crucial purpose and importance to every facet of Riven's existence.
A meticulously designed gameworld that perfectly parallels the antagonist's obssessive imperialistic dreams of divinity and supremacy over the world of Riven, and whose vision is ultimately and inevitably undone by the same reverence he bestows upon the devices and symbols he created in his tyranny. And just as his unsustainable dream crumbles apart, so too does the player's, as figuring out Riven means the destruction of its mystique, leaving nothing but a virtual space of beautiful static pre rendered backgrounds, and while the awe of enlightenment is something that I will never be able to experience ever again in Riven, the joyful smile I get while looking at my notebook filled with scribbles and doodles of its world is proof that I was truly there.
Refrain from resorting to a guide, click anything and everything, close and open every door, observe closely, and take a sip each time you have to endure a grueling slow animation, and I promise it will be worthwhile.
Demon's Souls
2009
In my short time on this platform I've noticed that a not-insignificant portion of FromSoft fans tend to look back on Demon's Souls as nothing but a stepping stone to Dark Souls, and while DeS certainly laid the groundwork for a new sub-genre of adventure games that future titles would learn from, I don't think it's fair to sweep it under the rug as nothing but a prototype.
Something we tend to hear about in games criticism is the idea of conventional design. For example, a platformer that teaches a concept in a safe environment and tests your knowledge on the concept incrementally will likely be heralded as an example of good game design. It doesn't have to be a platformer, every genre under the sun tends to have games that follow what's expected, and more often than not those games see success over those that break the mold. This makes sense to a certain degree, something comfortable to the consumer is clearly a safe investment, odds are they'll be more satisfied with their purchase in the short term, etc. The fallacy here, of course, is the implication that the best games only stem from those that don't take risks, but looking at the most successful games of all time night trick you into believing this. Market trends continue to worm their way into every corner of the medium, allowing for higher profits for the higher ups at big companies leading to more disposable experiences (quick aside, but this is a big reason why i tend to be more cynical towards remakes these days. it's more profitable to take a classic title and reshape it to better fit in with modern standards rather than just preserve the art as it once was).
This is why a game like Demon's Souls slipping through the cracks is all the more fascinating to me. Back in an era where most devs fell into formulaic trappings that some would follow for the next decade, DeS not only made it to shelves in the tangled abrasive state it was in, but actually managed to resonate with it's playerbase. What other game was cool with you missing massive pieces of lore right before the final boss? What do you mean other players can join my world and punish me for successfully regaining my humanity? Even today, Demon's Souls was able to capture my attention in how it was somehow able to tie all these disparate gameplay elements together cohesively.
Now, it'd be foolish of me to write any piece on a Miyazaki-directed title without bringing up the difficulty, but to those of us who've played DeS, the way the game expects mastery from the player is more thoughtful than you might be led to believe. If there's one slice of the game that exemplifies this well, it's gotta be the cycle between soul form and human form. Starting the game with half your health slashed might be devastating to a first-time player, but it will surely teach them one thing: patience. After the player has carefully navigated the first level and taken down their first boss, they're rewarded with their humanity, but only for a fleeting moment. Since they know that this only lasts as long as they can handle, it will make them more cautious of traps and upcoming dangers, as the punishment for death will be severe. But even though they may lose their humanity in the moment, the reward for pushing through can't be understated. It's a brilliant little loop of design that not only keeps the player engaged throughout, but expertly threads the game's depressing mood and theming into the core gameplay. It's gameplay ideas like this that are so insane when stacked up against the larger gaming landscape, but the team behind the project had faith and passion in what they were creating, any potential accolades were secondary to the game itself.
Suffficed to say, it's very cathartic to see a game like Demon's Souls make an impact despite not even the publishers and higher ups at Sony believing in it. Even though Dark Souls was the game that changed the world in a more significant way, it wouldn't have turned out the way it did had Demon's Souls been adjusted to better fit in with the industry. Is it a game that can stumble over its own ideas occasionally? Sure. Are there clearly rough edges that slipped past QA that wouldn't have existed if the team had more experience? Absolutely. But we need more games that are willing to bend conventions and see what they can get away with. We need more rule breakers like Hidetaka Miyazaki that care about creating meaningful experiences above all else. Though even if all creativity was drained from humanity tomorrow and we only got slop for the rest of our existence, at least that wouldn't wash away the diamond in the rough that came to life against all odds.
Simply put, few games have managed to capture my soul quite as much as this, and that's probably the highest praise I can give.
Something we tend to hear about in games criticism is the idea of conventional design. For example, a platformer that teaches a concept in a safe environment and tests your knowledge on the concept incrementally will likely be heralded as an example of good game design. It doesn't have to be a platformer, every genre under the sun tends to have games that follow what's expected, and more often than not those games see success over those that break the mold. This makes sense to a certain degree, something comfortable to the consumer is clearly a safe investment, odds are they'll be more satisfied with their purchase in the short term, etc. The fallacy here, of course, is the implication that the best games only stem from those that don't take risks, but looking at the most successful games of all time night trick you into believing this. Market trends continue to worm their way into every corner of the medium, allowing for higher profits for the higher ups at big companies leading to more disposable experiences (quick aside, but this is a big reason why i tend to be more cynical towards remakes these days. it's more profitable to take a classic title and reshape it to better fit in with modern standards rather than just preserve the art as it once was).
This is why a game like Demon's Souls slipping through the cracks is all the more fascinating to me. Back in an era where most devs fell into formulaic trappings that some would follow for the next decade, DeS not only made it to shelves in the tangled abrasive state it was in, but actually managed to resonate with it's playerbase. What other game was cool with you missing massive pieces of lore right before the final boss? What do you mean other players can join my world and punish me for successfully regaining my humanity? Even today, Demon's Souls was able to capture my attention in how it was somehow able to tie all these disparate gameplay elements together cohesively.
Now, it'd be foolish of me to write any piece on a Miyazaki-directed title without bringing up the difficulty, but to those of us who've played DeS, the way the game expects mastery from the player is more thoughtful than you might be led to believe. If there's one slice of the game that exemplifies this well, it's gotta be the cycle between soul form and human form. Starting the game with half your health slashed might be devastating to a first-time player, but it will surely teach them one thing: patience. After the player has carefully navigated the first level and taken down their first boss, they're rewarded with their humanity, but only for a fleeting moment. Since they know that this only lasts as long as they can handle, it will make them more cautious of traps and upcoming dangers, as the punishment for death will be severe. But even though they may lose their humanity in the moment, the reward for pushing through can't be understated. It's a brilliant little loop of design that not only keeps the player engaged throughout, but expertly threads the game's depressing mood and theming into the core gameplay. It's gameplay ideas like this that are so insane when stacked up against the larger gaming landscape, but the team behind the project had faith and passion in what they were creating, any potential accolades were secondary to the game itself.
Suffficed to say, it's very cathartic to see a game like Demon's Souls make an impact despite not even the publishers and higher ups at Sony believing in it. Even though Dark Souls was the game that changed the world in a more significant way, it wouldn't have turned out the way it did had Demon's Souls been adjusted to better fit in with the industry. Is it a game that can stumble over its own ideas occasionally? Sure. Are there clearly rough edges that slipped past QA that wouldn't have existed if the team had more experience? Absolutely. But we need more games that are willing to bend conventions and see what they can get away with. We need more rule breakers like Hidetaka Miyazaki that care about creating meaningful experiences above all else. Though even if all creativity was drained from humanity tomorrow and we only got slop for the rest of our existence, at least that wouldn't wash away the diamond in the rough that came to life against all odds.
Simply put, few games have managed to capture my soul quite as much as this, and that's probably the highest praise I can give.
Silent Hill 2
2001
Content Warning for Attempted Suicide, Terminal Illness, Death, and Chronic Illness
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It’s September 2011 and I’m seventeen years old when I try to kill myself. There are two ponds near my parent’s house. It’s like 4 AM. I like to be out this early. Nobody else is awake, and they won’t be for a while. It’s like the whole world belongs to me. I wander around between the neighborhoods, along the roads, and in the fields. In ten years these will be fresh real estate properties but today they’re still farmland. This hour and a half is the only time the anxiety quells. The real world never knows peace. There’s a dread that accompanies every action and every moment; living in that house, going to school, hanging out with my friends (are they my friends? They are but I won’t be able to understand that until I’m healthier). I’ll always have to go back home. I’ll never be able to articulate what’s happening to me. The pressure is too intense. I don’t plan it, but, the pond is right there, and it’s deep enough, and early enough that no one will hear me. Not having a plan is what saves my life. Turns out impromptu self-drownings are difficult to pull off when the water is still and not THAT deep. So, it doesn’t work, and I’m soaked, and grateful to get home and hide the evidence before my parents wake up, but I don’t feel BETTER. I feel despair, still. There’s no way out. I wish I could just climb up the stairwell, out of this. I wish I had the clarity to understand what was wrong with me.
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What do you even say about Silent Hill 2? To say that it’s one of the best video games ever made feels simultaneously obvious and like I’m underselling it, right? Fuckin, uhhhh, Resident Evil 2 is one of the best video games ever made. Ace Attorney 3 is one of the best games ever made. Come on! When we see people talk about old games that they like they’ll so often say stuff like “it holds up really well for its age” or some similar comment that implies that progress is the same as quality. This is, of course, nonsense. I wouldn’t say video games are better as a medium in 2021 than they were in 2001; on the whole and in the mainstream I would say they’re demonstrably worse in almost every way – how they look, how they sound, how they feel. Silent Hill 2 was a AAA game. What do we get now instead? Far Cry 6? The fuckin, THE MEDIUM? We’ve lost everything in pursuit of bad lighting and looking like a mediocre episode of whatever was popular on HBO three years ago. Silent Hill 2 looks great and sounds great and fuck you it plays great too it feels good and even the puzzles are MOSTLY FINE. MOSTLY. Listen I’m saying this is the all time best video game I’m not saying it fuckin ended world hunger.
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It’s October 2012, I’m nineteen and I’m sitting in a business communications class when I get the text confirmation that Sam’s brain tumor is back, again. It’s not the first time, and I know that there’s nothing left to do, he’s going to die. It’s fast, untreated. He’s one of my best friends, and the only person I know from home who went to the same college as me, but we live really far apart on a big urban campus and I haven’t seen him as much as I’d have liked to. Now he’s gonna spend the rest of his time with his family back home. When I see him next it’s at a hometown charity event for his family in December. He’s unrecognizable physically, and he can’t speak. The event is at our old catholic elementary school, in the gym, where in the years since we graduated they’ve painted a giant tiger on the wall. It’s the school mascot. I feel incredibly awkward around him and spend most of the time away with our other friends. I only speak to him briefly, and when I do it’s a stupid joke about the tiger mural. These will be my last words to him. I do know this will be the case, I think. Later that month I’ll be one of his pallbearers. I spend a lot of time angry and ashamed of myself for not being better to him, not knowing how to act or what to say. I’m about to drop out of school for reasons financial and related to my mental health.
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So what DO you say about Silent Hill 2? That it’s a masterpiece? That it’s the most well-conceived and executed video game ever made? That every detail of it dovetails into every other in a legitimately perfect cocktail story, presentation, and play? That the performances, cinematography, soundscape, all of it are untouchably top of their class? That when Mary reads the letter at the end I WEEP because it’s one of the best pieces of acting I’ve ever heard? That if I ever meet Troy Baker it’s ON SIGHT? These things are all true. We all know it. Everybody knows this. It’s Silent Hill 2.
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It’s August 2019, I’m twenty-five and I’ve just managed to graduate college in time to move to a new city with my partner as she enters her third year of medical school. That’s the year they kick you out of the classroom and you start going to the hospitals to do your real hands-on training month to month. I’m job hunting unsuccessfully and we’re living exclusively off her loans, when what seems at first like a pulled lower back muscle becomes a fruitless early morning ER trip (five hours, no results, not seen by a doctor) becomes an inability to get out of bed becomes a forced leave of absence. Without a diagnosis she can’t get disability accommodations. While on a leave of absence we can’t have her loans, and in fact we have to pay them back. We’re getting desperate, thousands of dollars in debt, and I take the first soul sucking job I can find. It takes almost a full year of visits to increasingly specialized physicians but eventually my partner is diagnosed with non radiographic axial spondyloarthritis, an extremely rare condition that culminates in the fusion of the spinal column. We can treat the pain, sort of, but it’s only a matter of time until it’s likely to evolve into a more serious condition, she’ll never have the strength or stamina she had before, and the treatment options are expensive and difficult. Her diagnosis doesn’t even officially exist as a recognized condition that people can have until September 2020.
Suddenly I am a caretaker and everything is different now. Obviously our mood is stressed from the financial dangers, but she’s in pain, terrible pain, constantly for months. She can’t sleep, she can’t eat. There’s nothing I can do. It’s exhausting to live like that. She’s depressed. On good days we try to walk outside but good days are few and far between, and grow fewer over time, and her body makes her pay for the walks. She’s on drugs, a lot of them. Do they help? It’s unclear. They don’t make her feel BETTER. Nobody knows what’s wrong with her. Her school thinks she’s faking, they’re trying to concoct ways to get her kicked out. She wants to die. It breaks my heart. She’s everything to me, all that there is. She has literally saved my life. And I can’t help her. But it’s exhausting for me too. I don’t want to admit this, not even privately, to myself. It is hard to be the person who is leaned on, especially when the person you love can’t give anything back. I’m tired. I’m not angry, and I don’t think I’m resentful. But I’m tired. I feel shame for thinking about it, for acknowledging it. I know it’s silly to feel the shame but it’s there. I do find a job eventually, thankfully, but it’s still a long time before we get a diagnosis, much less an effective treatment. Even after things settle somewhat, it’s a hard year. And there are hard times to come.
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Ever since I first played it as a teen, Silent Hill 2 is a game that has haunted me through life, like a memory. It struck a deep chord with me when I was too young for that to be fair, too young to identify why I could relate to these people and their ghosts. I used to think this was a special relationship that I had with the game, the way you kind of want to think you have these when you’re younger, but the older I get the more I recognize this as part of growing up. Silent Hill 2 doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve encountered situations in life that closely mirror that of the protagonist. I mean, Angela’s story resonates deeply with me despite little overlap in the specifics of our family traumas. Silent Hill 2 touches me – and most of us – so deeply, because it has such a keen understanding of what it feels like to be Going Through It. It is a game that knows what it is to grieve, to despair, to soak in the fog, and also, maybe, to feel a catharsis, if you’re lucky, and you do the work.
I’ve been Angela, parts of her. I’ve been Laura too. I’ve had more James in me than I would prefer. I suspect all of us have these people, these feelings in us, to some degree or another. We collect them as we get older. That’s just part of it. Silent Hill 2 isn’t a happy game, but it’s one that Gets It, and lets us explore those spaces in a safe and cathartic way. It does this about as well as any piece of media I’ve encountered, on top of being so excellent at all the cinematic and video game stuff. But that’s really what makes it what it is. The empathy, and the honesty. I think it’s beautiful.
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It’s September 2011 and I’m seventeen years old when I try to kill myself. There are two ponds near my parent’s house. It’s like 4 AM. I like to be out this early. Nobody else is awake, and they won’t be for a while. It’s like the whole world belongs to me. I wander around between the neighborhoods, along the roads, and in the fields. In ten years these will be fresh real estate properties but today they’re still farmland. This hour and a half is the only time the anxiety quells. The real world never knows peace. There’s a dread that accompanies every action and every moment; living in that house, going to school, hanging out with my friends (are they my friends? They are but I won’t be able to understand that until I’m healthier). I’ll always have to go back home. I’ll never be able to articulate what’s happening to me. The pressure is too intense. I don’t plan it, but, the pond is right there, and it’s deep enough, and early enough that no one will hear me. Not having a plan is what saves my life. Turns out impromptu self-drownings are difficult to pull off when the water is still and not THAT deep. So, it doesn’t work, and I’m soaked, and grateful to get home and hide the evidence before my parents wake up, but I don’t feel BETTER. I feel despair, still. There’s no way out. I wish I could just climb up the stairwell, out of this. I wish I had the clarity to understand what was wrong with me.
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What do you even say about Silent Hill 2? To say that it’s one of the best video games ever made feels simultaneously obvious and like I’m underselling it, right? Fuckin, uhhhh, Resident Evil 2 is one of the best video games ever made. Ace Attorney 3 is one of the best games ever made. Come on! When we see people talk about old games that they like they’ll so often say stuff like “it holds up really well for its age” or some similar comment that implies that progress is the same as quality. This is, of course, nonsense. I wouldn’t say video games are better as a medium in 2021 than they were in 2001; on the whole and in the mainstream I would say they’re demonstrably worse in almost every way – how they look, how they sound, how they feel. Silent Hill 2 was a AAA game. What do we get now instead? Far Cry 6? The fuckin, THE MEDIUM? We’ve lost everything in pursuit of bad lighting and looking like a mediocre episode of whatever was popular on HBO three years ago. Silent Hill 2 looks great and sounds great and fuck you it plays great too it feels good and even the puzzles are MOSTLY FINE. MOSTLY. Listen I’m saying this is the all time best video game I’m not saying it fuckin ended world hunger.
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It’s October 2012, I’m nineteen and I’m sitting in a business communications class when I get the text confirmation that Sam’s brain tumor is back, again. It’s not the first time, and I know that there’s nothing left to do, he’s going to die. It’s fast, untreated. He’s one of my best friends, and the only person I know from home who went to the same college as me, but we live really far apart on a big urban campus and I haven’t seen him as much as I’d have liked to. Now he’s gonna spend the rest of his time with his family back home. When I see him next it’s at a hometown charity event for his family in December. He’s unrecognizable physically, and he can’t speak. The event is at our old catholic elementary school, in the gym, where in the years since we graduated they’ve painted a giant tiger on the wall. It’s the school mascot. I feel incredibly awkward around him and spend most of the time away with our other friends. I only speak to him briefly, and when I do it’s a stupid joke about the tiger mural. These will be my last words to him. I do know this will be the case, I think. Later that month I’ll be one of his pallbearers. I spend a lot of time angry and ashamed of myself for not being better to him, not knowing how to act or what to say. I’m about to drop out of school for reasons financial and related to my mental health.
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So what DO you say about Silent Hill 2? That it’s a masterpiece? That it’s the most well-conceived and executed video game ever made? That every detail of it dovetails into every other in a legitimately perfect cocktail story, presentation, and play? That the performances, cinematography, soundscape, all of it are untouchably top of their class? That when Mary reads the letter at the end I WEEP because it’s one of the best pieces of acting I’ve ever heard? That if I ever meet Troy Baker it’s ON SIGHT? These things are all true. We all know it. Everybody knows this. It’s Silent Hill 2.
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It’s August 2019, I’m twenty-five and I’ve just managed to graduate college in time to move to a new city with my partner as she enters her third year of medical school. That’s the year they kick you out of the classroom and you start going to the hospitals to do your real hands-on training month to month. I’m job hunting unsuccessfully and we’re living exclusively off her loans, when what seems at first like a pulled lower back muscle becomes a fruitless early morning ER trip (five hours, no results, not seen by a doctor) becomes an inability to get out of bed becomes a forced leave of absence. Without a diagnosis she can’t get disability accommodations. While on a leave of absence we can’t have her loans, and in fact we have to pay them back. We’re getting desperate, thousands of dollars in debt, and I take the first soul sucking job I can find. It takes almost a full year of visits to increasingly specialized physicians but eventually my partner is diagnosed with non radiographic axial spondyloarthritis, an extremely rare condition that culminates in the fusion of the spinal column. We can treat the pain, sort of, but it’s only a matter of time until it’s likely to evolve into a more serious condition, she’ll never have the strength or stamina she had before, and the treatment options are expensive and difficult. Her diagnosis doesn’t even officially exist as a recognized condition that people can have until September 2020.
Suddenly I am a caretaker and everything is different now. Obviously our mood is stressed from the financial dangers, but she’s in pain, terrible pain, constantly for months. She can’t sleep, she can’t eat. There’s nothing I can do. It’s exhausting to live like that. She’s depressed. On good days we try to walk outside but good days are few and far between, and grow fewer over time, and her body makes her pay for the walks. She’s on drugs, a lot of them. Do they help? It’s unclear. They don’t make her feel BETTER. Nobody knows what’s wrong with her. Her school thinks she’s faking, they’re trying to concoct ways to get her kicked out. She wants to die. It breaks my heart. She’s everything to me, all that there is. She has literally saved my life. And I can’t help her. But it’s exhausting for me too. I don’t want to admit this, not even privately, to myself. It is hard to be the person who is leaned on, especially when the person you love can’t give anything back. I’m tired. I’m not angry, and I don’t think I’m resentful. But I’m tired. I feel shame for thinking about it, for acknowledging it. I know it’s silly to feel the shame but it’s there. I do find a job eventually, thankfully, but it’s still a long time before we get a diagnosis, much less an effective treatment. Even after things settle somewhat, it’s a hard year. And there are hard times to come.
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Ever since I first played it as a teen, Silent Hill 2 is a game that has haunted me through life, like a memory. It struck a deep chord with me when I was too young for that to be fair, too young to identify why I could relate to these people and their ghosts. I used to think this was a special relationship that I had with the game, the way you kind of want to think you have these when you’re younger, but the older I get the more I recognize this as part of growing up. Silent Hill 2 doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve encountered situations in life that closely mirror that of the protagonist. I mean, Angela’s story resonates deeply with me despite little overlap in the specifics of our family traumas. Silent Hill 2 touches me – and most of us – so deeply, because it has such a keen understanding of what it feels like to be Going Through It. It is a game that knows what it is to grieve, to despair, to soak in the fog, and also, maybe, to feel a catharsis, if you’re lucky, and you do the work.
I’ve been Angela, parts of her. I’ve been Laura too. I’ve had more James in me than I would prefer. I suspect all of us have these people, these feelings in us, to some degree or another. We collect them as we get older. That’s just part of it. Silent Hill 2 isn’t a happy game, but it’s one that Gets It, and lets us explore those spaces in a safe and cathartic way. It does this about as well as any piece of media I’ve encountered, on top of being so excellent at all the cinematic and video game stuff. But that’s really what makes it what it is. The empathy, and the honesty. I think it’s beautiful.
Sin and Punishment
2000
(I didn't have this logged already...?)
The ever-shifting perspective in Stage 2-2 (the aircraft carrier level) is one of the biggest flexes that the genre has ever experienced, and it being on the N64 of all consoles makes it even better.
I emulated this game but I could still hear the hardware crying.
The ever-shifting perspective in Stage 2-2 (the aircraft carrier level) is one of the biggest flexes that the genre has ever experienced, and it being on the N64 of all consoles makes it even better.
I emulated this game but I could still hear the hardware crying.
Copy Kitty
2016
Let me give you the elevator pitch on what might be the best action game of its decade: "What if Kirby played like Bangai-O?"
Copy Kitty rules. It whips, it melts, it owns, it slaps. Any butt-kicking verb capable of being performed, Copy Kitty performs it. I say it might be the best action games of the decade, and I mean it. Because while I might like other games with action more, Copy Kitty is pure action. It is action with a raw, molten core, full of dynamic challenges and massive explosions. It's art-style and lore are completely silly, but are genuine and charming. It also has a level editor and an endless mode and a completely seperate and radically different second playable character and??? It's just so damn good. If you love action games, do yourself a favor and check Copy Kitty out.
Copy Kitty rules. It whips, it melts, it owns, it slaps. Any butt-kicking verb capable of being performed, Copy Kitty performs it. I say it might be the best action games of the decade, and I mean it. Because while I might like other games with action more, Copy Kitty is pure action. It is action with a raw, molten core, full of dynamic challenges and massive explosions. It's art-style and lore are completely silly, but are genuine and charming. It also has a level editor and an endless mode and a completely seperate and radically different second playable character and??? It's just so damn good. If you love action games, do yourself a favor and check Copy Kitty out.
Disco Elysium
2019
I'll be honest in admitting that the mental damage I endured over the years from purposefuly subjecting myself to the clutches of the internet had made me apprehensive and cynical of Disco Elysium's preceeding reputation, but having gone through its rollercoaster of drugs, alcohol and communism, I am truly glad to be able to add this one to the list of all time great CRPGs that continue to be undisputed as the smartest videogame experiences you can have.
Having the confidence that even Planescape: Torment lacked, Disco Elysium ditches the combat completely and takes the biggest strength of the genre to immerse the player in his own perceived virtuousity and egotistic idealization, dice rolling from a caricature of extreme ideology to the next, only to have such deified facade shattered and mocked as the cracks start to reveal what is behind the constructed mask. Dystopic and endlessly ravaged, Revachol opens up its angry chasm to reveal an unflincing sad mirror in its politically charged inhabitants that reflects back to us a vast ocean filled with boats blindly passing by each other in the mist blasting Sad FM.
Immensely thought provocking, always hilarious, and with some of the best interconnected writing I have seen in the genre, Disco Elysium has definitely cemented itself as a modern age classic that will make even the biggest game bro go "yes, please, keep politics in my game!". An unabashedly leftist game that manages to avoid falling into the usual misgivings of being obnoxious, obvious and self centered as its contemporaries often do, and that beautifully exposes our innate ability to project our deepest grudges and hangups into unreachable dreams and expectations that further disconnect us from the acceptance and understanding we so demand from others. In the end, everything is escapism. But we can never truly escape, can we? Whatever I end up saying about Disco Elysium says more about my view of the world than the game itself, but I think that's what makes it such a great piece of art.
You did look fucking cool smoking that cigarette, Kim. And you knew it.
Having the confidence that even Planescape: Torment lacked, Disco Elysium ditches the combat completely and takes the biggest strength of the genre to immerse the player in his own perceived virtuousity and egotistic idealization, dice rolling from a caricature of extreme ideology to the next, only to have such deified facade shattered and mocked as the cracks start to reveal what is behind the constructed mask. Dystopic and endlessly ravaged, Revachol opens up its angry chasm to reveal an unflincing sad mirror in its politically charged inhabitants that reflects back to us a vast ocean filled with boats blindly passing by each other in the mist blasting Sad FM.
Immensely thought provocking, always hilarious, and with some of the best interconnected writing I have seen in the genre, Disco Elysium has definitely cemented itself as a modern age classic that will make even the biggest game bro go "yes, please, keep politics in my game!". An unabashedly leftist game that manages to avoid falling into the usual misgivings of being obnoxious, obvious and self centered as its contemporaries often do, and that beautifully exposes our innate ability to project our deepest grudges and hangups into unreachable dreams and expectations that further disconnect us from the acceptance and understanding we so demand from others. In the end, everything is escapism. But we can never truly escape, can we? Whatever I end up saying about Disco Elysium says more about my view of the world than the game itself, but I think that's what makes it such a great piece of art.
You did look fucking cool smoking that cigarette, Kim. And you knew it.
Silent Hill 2
2001
When discussing sequels that fully realize the potential of the original's premise, elevating it to a level of perfection and showmanship that would forever be near impossible for subsequent entries to overcome, you will be hard pressed to find a better example than Silent Hill 2. That isn't to say that SH1 wasn't already lightning in a bottle, but the level of confidence and talent Team Silent poured into its sequel, just 2 mere years later, is nothing short of amazing to witness.
While Harry Mason's plight in SH1 was easy to sympathize and engage with, there was always a level of detachment between the personal search for his daugther and the source of the emotional trauma that the town of Silent Hill manifested. By shifting the subconscious reflection of the town from a NPC to the player character itself, Team Silent creates with James Sunderland one of the most fascinating explorations of the human psyche and is able to more expertly utilize the setting to inform the state of mind of its victim through a much subtler and escalating process.
This switch in perspective also enables Team Silent to put aside the literalization of Silent Hill's cursed nature as the result of a devil worshiping cult in service of a much more Lynchian approach to storytelling that lends SH2 its ethereal and fleeting somber atmosphere. And don't get me wrong, the cult stuff is still there, and I wouldnt have it in any other way. But by putting that context into the background instead of being the main focus, it imprints SH2's setting with an odd believability and suspension of disbelief that turns it into one of the best purgatory stories ever told.
With the leap to the 6th generation, every aspect that made SH1 special is further iterated and expanded on. The lighting effects are greatly improved and still a marvel to look at, working in tandem with an even more unreliable and claustrophobic camera that Team Silent confidently utilizes to create dread and horror out of every angle and point of view possible. The mundanity of the suburbian spaces you walk through is even more apparent and scary, with each room you pass by being filled with detail and texture that new gen games wouldn't dare mimic. Even the soundscape of SH2 is vastly improved upon, filled with wailings, heavy breathings and industrial clangs and bangings that give an unsettling life to the town.
These tools and devices end up working so well together, that for the most part SH2 is more than happy to let the implications of horror work their way on you instead of actually presenting any real threat, fully aware that the player's mind can do all the work inside a dark empty room. Which makes the actual few and far between jumps scares that much more memorable. It has been 20 years and the Silent Hill Historical Society still remains one of the finest horror moments in all of fiction.
And everyone already knows how well executed the story and revelations of SH2 are. To this day, you will not find many games willing to successfully tackle such serious and morally taxing subject matters with the level of nuance and sincerity that is displayed in Mary's letter. Silent Hill 2 has installed itself as one of the Greats in the videogame halls of history, and weirdly enough that has given it nowadays a target on its back, similar to games like Shadow of the Colossus or Nier Automata. And I kinda understand, Silent Hill 2 is an easy game that anyone can latch onto for quick "videogames are art" cred, but going against the tide here feels like sorta trying to trash Goodfellas. And you don't wanna be the guy who trashes Goodfellas, do you?
If anything, take solace in the fact that SIlent Hill 2 still manages to filter such renowned and prestigous videogame critics such as this one after all these years:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lhy9QnBHmo&ab_channel=MrStuntAction
While Harry Mason's plight in SH1 was easy to sympathize and engage with, there was always a level of detachment between the personal search for his daugther and the source of the emotional trauma that the town of Silent Hill manifested. By shifting the subconscious reflection of the town from a NPC to the player character itself, Team Silent creates with James Sunderland one of the most fascinating explorations of the human psyche and is able to more expertly utilize the setting to inform the state of mind of its victim through a much subtler and escalating process.
This switch in perspective also enables Team Silent to put aside the literalization of Silent Hill's cursed nature as the result of a devil worshiping cult in service of a much more Lynchian approach to storytelling that lends SH2 its ethereal and fleeting somber atmosphere. And don't get me wrong, the cult stuff is still there, and I wouldnt have it in any other way. But by putting that context into the background instead of being the main focus, it imprints SH2's setting with an odd believability and suspension of disbelief that turns it into one of the best purgatory stories ever told.
With the leap to the 6th generation, every aspect that made SH1 special is further iterated and expanded on. The lighting effects are greatly improved and still a marvel to look at, working in tandem with an even more unreliable and claustrophobic camera that Team Silent confidently utilizes to create dread and horror out of every angle and point of view possible. The mundanity of the suburbian spaces you walk through is even more apparent and scary, with each room you pass by being filled with detail and texture that new gen games wouldn't dare mimic. Even the soundscape of SH2 is vastly improved upon, filled with wailings, heavy breathings and industrial clangs and bangings that give an unsettling life to the town.
These tools and devices end up working so well together, that for the most part SH2 is more than happy to let the implications of horror work their way on you instead of actually presenting any real threat, fully aware that the player's mind can do all the work inside a dark empty room. Which makes the actual few and far between jumps scares that much more memorable. It has been 20 years and the Silent Hill Historical Society still remains one of the finest horror moments in all of fiction.
And everyone already knows how well executed the story and revelations of SH2 are. To this day, you will not find many games willing to successfully tackle such serious and morally taxing subject matters with the level of nuance and sincerity that is displayed in Mary's letter. Silent Hill 2 has installed itself as one of the Greats in the videogame halls of history, and weirdly enough that has given it nowadays a target on its back, similar to games like Shadow of the Colossus or Nier Automata. And I kinda understand, Silent Hill 2 is an easy game that anyone can latch onto for quick "videogames are art" cred, but going against the tide here feels like sorta trying to trash Goodfellas. And you don't wanna be the guy who trashes Goodfellas, do you?
If anything, take solace in the fact that SIlent Hill 2 still manages to filter such renowned and prestigous videogame critics such as this one after all these years:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lhy9QnBHmo&ab_channel=MrStuntAction
I could provide a rationalization of the Dog Airport game, argue how this game is a unique and interesting portrayal of air travel, how tender and subtle its apocalyptic romance is, or even offer some unique philosophical analysis of the game, to explain why I love it so much.
But the truth is? It just makes me smile.
Utterly delightful and charming. Constantly smiling and laughing throughout the whole game. Some of the best game writing I've seen in years.
But the truth is? It just makes me smile.
Utterly delightful and charming. Constantly smiling and laughing throughout the whole game. Some of the best game writing I've seen in years.