Nerdietalk
2019
The concept of “wholesome” media is a complicated one and it’s an idea that I feel like people are turning against. Sometimes I think I might be one of them. It makes sense how the trend would emerge. After a lengthy decade of edgy sad dads in Prestige Games, it was inevitable that trends would flip to something more chill and friendly. And so you get things like Wholesome Directs, which seem to be filled with announcements for twenty identical farming games starring animals. These games are so focused on being sweet and cozy that it’s hard not feel like there’s no meat on the bone. That in its pursuit of being “wholesome”, the text ultimately ends up feeling hollow.
So what’s needed for the “wholesome” media to work? It’s possible that this is a primarily American problem. I don’t think that there’s a lot of mainstream American media that focuses on providing a restorative vibe. The ones that are intended to be affirming tend to feel very… white. I understand why people assume Ted Lasso is just about white people hugging, but I think it’s a disservice to how that show understands the idea of narrative catharsis. You build flawed characters which realistic problems and you make your end goal the catharsis of them choosing self-improvement. It’s a fulfilling show because it makes the journey feel earned. Video games are highly centered around catharsis. Taunting players or dangling new things just out of reach.
A Short Hike is about a young girl climbing a mountain. There’s no real larger plot or narrative. There’s no dramatic secret waiting around the corner, it’s not as emotionally weighty as Celeste, it’s just about a climb up the mountain.
The catharsis in A Short Hike emerges from the small ways the player improves. The mountain contains numerous hidden sidequests. A man’s lost watch. A painter working on his masterpiece. A woman searching for her lucky headband. Cute little conversations and simple little anxieties. No one’s in any particular rush, they’re just sitting with this minor problems that give them emotional discomfort. You fix these problems, and you get a little better at climbing the mountain. You’re rewarded with stamina upgrades, which let you explore more things around the island. You took chosen to help someone and your life got easier. You earned more exploration, more gorgeous visuals, more chill music. You’ve earned the Catharsis. The spectacle of the game is in the quiet intimacy. Drifting in the wind for longer and longer stretches of time. The catharsis is more opportunities to relax. To play. To climb.
Sometimes it’s hard for me not to go into a game like this with expectations about its intentions. Something that’s marketing itself aggressively as “sweet,” to its detriment. I think why a Short Hike works is that it never feels like it’s trying to evoke a single feeling. It’s not aggressively courting this idea of being “wholesome” or “pure.” And that’s because there’s a sincerity here. Just a genuine love for video games and a genuine love of the craft. And that passion and care speaks through every single aspect of the game’s production.
It’s the kind of game I just really needed at 4 am after failing to get to sleep.
So what’s needed for the “wholesome” media to work? It’s possible that this is a primarily American problem. I don’t think that there’s a lot of mainstream American media that focuses on providing a restorative vibe. The ones that are intended to be affirming tend to feel very… white. I understand why people assume Ted Lasso is just about white people hugging, but I think it’s a disservice to how that show understands the idea of narrative catharsis. You build flawed characters which realistic problems and you make your end goal the catharsis of them choosing self-improvement. It’s a fulfilling show because it makes the journey feel earned. Video games are highly centered around catharsis. Taunting players or dangling new things just out of reach.
A Short Hike is about a young girl climbing a mountain. There’s no real larger plot or narrative. There’s no dramatic secret waiting around the corner, it’s not as emotionally weighty as Celeste, it’s just about a climb up the mountain.
The catharsis in A Short Hike emerges from the small ways the player improves. The mountain contains numerous hidden sidequests. A man’s lost watch. A painter working on his masterpiece. A woman searching for her lucky headband. Cute little conversations and simple little anxieties. No one’s in any particular rush, they’re just sitting with this minor problems that give them emotional discomfort. You fix these problems, and you get a little better at climbing the mountain. You’re rewarded with stamina upgrades, which let you explore more things around the island. You took chosen to help someone and your life got easier. You earned more exploration, more gorgeous visuals, more chill music. You’ve earned the Catharsis. The spectacle of the game is in the quiet intimacy. Drifting in the wind for longer and longer stretches of time. The catharsis is more opportunities to relax. To play. To climb.
Sometimes it’s hard for me not to go into a game like this with expectations about its intentions. Something that’s marketing itself aggressively as “sweet,” to its detriment. I think why a Short Hike works is that it never feels like it’s trying to evoke a single feeling. It’s not aggressively courting this idea of being “wholesome” or “pure.” And that’s because there’s a sincerity here. Just a genuine love for video games and a genuine love of the craft. And that passion and care speaks through every single aspect of the game’s production.
It’s the kind of game I just really needed at 4 am after failing to get to sleep.
I don't have a deep history with Sonic, I just really appreciate the direction the series has gone lately. There's such a sincere joy Sega seems to have rediscovered in these characters, from Sonic Frontiers to the Sonic comic stuff to this. Its what this franchise needed for a long time.
It would've been so easy to do a cheap "dating sim" joke that devs keep making on April Fools, but they committed to a delightful adventure. And you can tell the devs actually care about visual novels and understand the history. If you try to submit your name as "Ushiromiya" or "Phoenix Wright" the game MC politely says "we don't want to get in trouble." It cares about this genre and isn't looking for a cheap gag. They love these worlds, they love this medium, and they have genuine artistic talent behind it. Its really admirable.
It would've been so easy to do a cheap "dating sim" joke that devs keep making on April Fools, but they committed to a delightful adventure. And you can tell the devs actually care about visual novels and understand the history. If you try to submit your name as "Ushiromiya" or "Phoenix Wright" the game MC politely says "we don't want to get in trouble." It cares about this genre and isn't looking for a cheap gag. They love these worlds, they love this medium, and they have genuine artistic talent behind it. Its really admirable.
I probably didn’t need to add a full hour of playtime to this one hour game just grinding at the arena, but listen, what was I supposed to do? LET Doose hurt small businesses through his monster summoning, in some pathetic hunt for tourism? If Star Hollow falls, Lorelai would have to move back in with Emily and that be trapped in that abusive house all over again! Besides, getting Rory leveled up enough to use the game’s only master seal is the experience she needs if she’s gonna get to Harvard.
I’ve never watched Gilmore Girls. This was fun.
I’ve never watched Gilmore Girls. This was fun.
When you’re a young kid in the 00s who hasn’t quite figured out that you’re trans yet, there’s certain pieces of media you fixate on. Things that give you Feelings that you don’t fully understand or know how to explain. This is particularly weird with media that is created by people that are absolutely not trying to create a trans message and would probably spit on in your face if you implied they were. Polyjuice potions in Harry Potter, the entirety of Ranma, and, of course, the "Boy Who Would Be Queen" episode of Fairly OddParents.
There's a bizarre nature to these kinds of projects. The creators are so single minded in their idea of how things are "supposed" to be and so consistent in using things they consider "wrong" as a cheap gag, it kind of swerves back around to give some kids (or least me) some young gender euphoria. A lot of FOP falls under this umbrella, but The Boy Who Would Be Queen episode toys with some interesting attempts at examining the idea of gender. Timmy is magically transformed to become "Timantha" to understand his crush, and discovers how his tastes haven't really changed as a girl. He still likes soap operas and comics, but now he's supposed to be ashamed of the latter rather than the former. He discovers his crush falls into the same problem. Trixie likes comics and video games but feels the pressure of society forcing her to fill the traditional gender roles. The prison of gender hurts all parties involved. What's particularly easy to read as queer in the episode is how both Timmy and Trixie are presenting themselves. Timmy's obviously dressed as Timantha, but Trixie is also trying to pass as a boy. In these disguises, these two can express genuine, vulnerable feelings to each other that they will never express in the rest of the show. Trixie tells Timantha, a girl she's known for just a few hours, like a normal straight girl would, "If only you were a boy, then I'd date you for sure." The gag is obviously supposed to be that Timmy's crush is still out of reach, but its so on the nose its hard not to read into it. To a young 10 year old who was just lectured and ostracized for agreeing with the girls that "girls are better than boys", this episode sent a chill up my spine. And I wasn't the only one. If you dive into fanfiction communities, you'll find more than a few stories that center around Timmy choosing to permanently stay as Timantha so that Trixie can have a real "friend."
Much of Breakin' Da Rules rehashes various plots from the early FOP canon. Timmy becomes a dog. Timmy becomes microscopic. Timmy fights aliens. Timmy and friends trapped in a video game. And, of course, Timmy becomes Timantha.
There was a time in my life where I would focus in on that ten minute segment where you're Timantha, trying to ignore the "could this GET any more silly?" quips. Begging for something more, I would spin elaborate narratives in my mind where this segment could go on forever. I never finished the game proper, that segment was all I needed.
Now I'm an adult and I can do two things:
1. Mod the game to add the Timantha face onto Timmy full time, which I sat down and learned how to do.
2. Understand how deeply bad this game is past that ten minute segment.
There's certainly ambition here. When you crack into a game's files, you get a greater understanding of just how much work went into the game. There's dozens of different models that Timmy plays as throughout the game. Timantha, Dog Timmy, Superhero Timmy, Robin Hood Timmy, Greek Toga Timmy, and so on and so forth. Modding the game required me to manually change the eyes of every single one of these models. The levels themselves clearly built a lot of assets. Each level has a different gimmick, sometimes multiple gimmicks. The time travel level required a bunch of different textures and assets built for all three of the time periods you travel to. I can certainly respect how much effort went into that.
But its hard not to compare this to its successor Shadow Showdown. The other FOP focuses in on the fantastical and allows the developers to build huge, elaborate levels with bizarre mechanics and designs. Breakin' Da Rules sticks with the human world and the established FOP episodes, to its detriment. The level centered around Timmy's neighborhood is empty and miserable, its almost haunting. It doesn't feel lonely in Shadow Showdown when you're journeying through someone's dream or investigating a spooky mansion. It would be easy to call this a beta for Shadow Showdown until you look at all the same files I did. If they centered in on developing Timmy's central model and mechanics, even if it meant losing my girl Timantha, the game might at least feel alright to play. But they had to program all the ways these different models had to move and it clearly bogged the game down. The actual art decision and level design are messy, but at least that can be something I know they learned from moving forward. The mechanics themselves are similarly flawed. Each level requires collecting five stars for a wish, which typically involves "press this button to progress" with no change to the actual gameplay. The game operates on the life system, which most platformers had moved past already. Losing all your lives get punted past to the last save point, which forces you to repeat tedious and dull levels just to reach whatever stupid thing trapped you for so long. You just get the sense this game suffered from poor direction even beyond being an underfunded licensed game in the 00s. Its a real shame but its tempered with the face that the sequel is so much better.
And also, I learned to mod shit in the pursuit of fulfilling some childhood dreams, so I gotta give that to it.
There's a bizarre nature to these kinds of projects. The creators are so single minded in their idea of how things are "supposed" to be and so consistent in using things they consider "wrong" as a cheap gag, it kind of swerves back around to give some kids (or least me) some young gender euphoria. A lot of FOP falls under this umbrella, but The Boy Who Would Be Queen episode toys with some interesting attempts at examining the idea of gender. Timmy is magically transformed to become "Timantha" to understand his crush, and discovers how his tastes haven't really changed as a girl. He still likes soap operas and comics, but now he's supposed to be ashamed of the latter rather than the former. He discovers his crush falls into the same problem. Trixie likes comics and video games but feels the pressure of society forcing her to fill the traditional gender roles. The prison of gender hurts all parties involved. What's particularly easy to read as queer in the episode is how both Timmy and Trixie are presenting themselves. Timmy's obviously dressed as Timantha, but Trixie is also trying to pass as a boy. In these disguises, these two can express genuine, vulnerable feelings to each other that they will never express in the rest of the show. Trixie tells Timantha, a girl she's known for just a few hours, like a normal straight girl would, "If only you were a boy, then I'd date you for sure." The gag is obviously supposed to be that Timmy's crush is still out of reach, but its so on the nose its hard not to read into it. To a young 10 year old who was just lectured and ostracized for agreeing with the girls that "girls are better than boys", this episode sent a chill up my spine. And I wasn't the only one. If you dive into fanfiction communities, you'll find more than a few stories that center around Timmy choosing to permanently stay as Timantha so that Trixie can have a real "friend."
Much of Breakin' Da Rules rehashes various plots from the early FOP canon. Timmy becomes a dog. Timmy becomes microscopic. Timmy fights aliens. Timmy and friends trapped in a video game. And, of course, Timmy becomes Timantha.
There was a time in my life where I would focus in on that ten minute segment where you're Timantha, trying to ignore the "could this GET any more silly?" quips. Begging for something more, I would spin elaborate narratives in my mind where this segment could go on forever. I never finished the game proper, that segment was all I needed.
Now I'm an adult and I can do two things:
1. Mod the game to add the Timantha face onto Timmy full time, which I sat down and learned how to do.
2. Understand how deeply bad this game is past that ten minute segment.
There's certainly ambition here. When you crack into a game's files, you get a greater understanding of just how much work went into the game. There's dozens of different models that Timmy plays as throughout the game. Timantha, Dog Timmy, Superhero Timmy, Robin Hood Timmy, Greek Toga Timmy, and so on and so forth. Modding the game required me to manually change the eyes of every single one of these models. The levels themselves clearly built a lot of assets. Each level has a different gimmick, sometimes multiple gimmicks. The time travel level required a bunch of different textures and assets built for all three of the time periods you travel to. I can certainly respect how much effort went into that.
But its hard not to compare this to its successor Shadow Showdown. The other FOP focuses in on the fantastical and allows the developers to build huge, elaborate levels with bizarre mechanics and designs. Breakin' Da Rules sticks with the human world and the established FOP episodes, to its detriment. The level centered around Timmy's neighborhood is empty and miserable, its almost haunting. It doesn't feel lonely in Shadow Showdown when you're journeying through someone's dream or investigating a spooky mansion. It would be easy to call this a beta for Shadow Showdown until you look at all the same files I did. If they centered in on developing Timmy's central model and mechanics, even if it meant losing my girl Timantha, the game might at least feel alright to play. But they had to program all the ways these different models had to move and it clearly bogged the game down. The actual art decision and level design are messy, but at least that can be something I know they learned from moving forward. The mechanics themselves are similarly flawed. Each level requires collecting five stars for a wish, which typically involves "press this button to progress" with no change to the actual gameplay. The game operates on the life system, which most platformers had moved past already. Losing all your lives get punted past to the last save point, which forces you to repeat tedious and dull levels just to reach whatever stupid thing trapped you for so long. You just get the sense this game suffered from poor direction even beyond being an underfunded licensed game in the 00s. Its a real shame but its tempered with the face that the sequel is so much better.
And also, I learned to mod shit in the pursuit of fulfilling some childhood dreams, so I gotta give that to it.
1999
The director of Bubsy 3D considered this game so morally troubling that he quit the company in protest. Now he makes casual games and runs a light jazz band. I've never played Syphon Filter, but nothing can match that story.
I think there's a lot of broad problems with certain parts of the ending and how the writers don't necessarily know how to write a story that doesn't end with all the characters getting paired up. There's a few points I would've liked the game to commit to or elaborate on, and some other weird writing choices here and there. Might put those problems in a rot13 comment later.
But for the most part, the experience of 13 Sentinels is really something special. A complicated web of a story that's arranged to be completely baffling for much of its runtime. It plays a number of tricks to deceive and confuse you. Much of the game's run focus on the player just utterly confused, trying to decipher all the bits and pieces and try to make it all even vaguely coherent in their heads. The real magic trick is that, by the end, the entire game makes perfect sense. All the game's spinning plates land perfectly on this immaculate dinner table its created for you to feast on. This game has some of my favorite characters of all time in it and even the characters I didn't connect with are endearing in some way. Its a truly incredible work of fiction and its a miracle it all flows as well as it does.
Even beyond all that character work, the gameplay was a delight. The real time strategy sections are crunchy little delights that reward a player's experimentation and care. I specifically want to praise the distinctions between the PS4 version and the Switch version I played. The Switch version gives each character unique attacks that weren't present in the original game. It helps differentiate your playable characters and helps encourage switching them out to see what everyone has to offer.
All these little factors combine together in one of the most overwhelmingly satisfying games I've ever played. There's a part of me that was dreading continuing because I didn't want the experience to end. I wanted to spend more time with these characters. Experience their everyday lives and conversations. After 36 hours, I wanted more. And that speaks to the incredible depth Vanillaware managed to put into this experience. One of my new favorite games of all time. What a phenomenal journey.
But for the most part, the experience of 13 Sentinels is really something special. A complicated web of a story that's arranged to be completely baffling for much of its runtime. It plays a number of tricks to deceive and confuse you. Much of the game's run focus on the player just utterly confused, trying to decipher all the bits and pieces and try to make it all even vaguely coherent in their heads. The real magic trick is that, by the end, the entire game makes perfect sense. All the game's spinning plates land perfectly on this immaculate dinner table its created for you to feast on. This game has some of my favorite characters of all time in it and even the characters I didn't connect with are endearing in some way. Its a truly incredible work of fiction and its a miracle it all flows as well as it does.
Even beyond all that character work, the gameplay was a delight. The real time strategy sections are crunchy little delights that reward a player's experimentation and care. I specifically want to praise the distinctions between the PS4 version and the Switch version I played. The Switch version gives each character unique attacks that weren't present in the original game. It helps differentiate your playable characters and helps encourage switching them out to see what everyone has to offer.
All these little factors combine together in one of the most overwhelmingly satisfying games I've ever played. There's a part of me that was dreading continuing because I didn't want the experience to end. I wanted to spend more time with these characters. Experience their everyday lives and conversations. After 36 hours, I wanted more. And that speaks to the incredible depth Vanillaware managed to put into this experience. One of my new favorite games of all time. What a phenomenal journey.
There's just a lot I'm willing to forgive when the emotional highs go that high. Muddled politics, uncomfortable stereotypes, kinda dull rpg design... I see a very sincere 40 year old boy and I let myself squint past the things that upset me.
2022
Making a 10 second Simpsons gag into an actual game is always a hard needle to thread. Going too meta vs being too basic all the little nuances in between. My Dinner With Andre smartly doesn't try to overstay its welcome and switches up the discussion about art and philosophy. Instead of centering on two friends talking about theater, Andre and Wallace talk about the game industry. Andre's disillusion with the AAA studios versus Wallace's financial struggles as an indie developer makes for a good turn and a good centerpiece for the commentary.
The choices are pretty straight-forward. Tell Me More lets Andre keep talking. Trenchant Insight allows Wallace to offer a counterpoint regarding his own gaming experience. Bon Mot lets Wallace make a quip. It doesn't change the actual discussion by any degree, but it doesn't really need to.
The key part of My Dinner With Andre, to me, is that there's no real right side of the debate. There's no winner or no victor, its just about the conversation. There's sort of a happy reconciliation in here when the two decide to build a game together. The original film has a discussion about how Andre could afford to leave the theater industry, while Wallace has to struggle more to pay the bills. I'm not asking them to go too far in the other direction and make them miserable. But its just a bit too tidy for me.
But also, its a ten minute gag game. There's some charming animation, there's sincere dedication to recreating both the Simpsons and the movie, its just delightful. I respect it.
The choices are pretty straight-forward. Tell Me More lets Andre keep talking. Trenchant Insight allows Wallace to offer a counterpoint regarding his own gaming experience. Bon Mot lets Wallace make a quip. It doesn't change the actual discussion by any degree, but it doesn't really need to.
The key part of My Dinner With Andre, to me, is that there's no real right side of the debate. There's no winner or no victor, its just about the conversation. There's sort of a happy reconciliation in here when the two decide to build a game together. The original film has a discussion about how Andre could afford to leave the theater industry, while Wallace has to struggle more to pay the bills. I'm not asking them to go too far in the other direction and make them miserable. But its just a bit too tidy for me.
But also, its a ten minute gag game. There's some charming animation, there's sincere dedication to recreating both the Simpsons and the movie, its just delightful. I respect it.
This review contains spoilers
Nostalgia is a strange beast. It's something of a dirty word in our current landscape, and for good reason. Nostalgia is blinding. It keeps you from facing the unpleasant truths or accepting the new. It's been a key motivator behind some truly heinous people committing some truly heinous acts. Nostalgia, more often than not, is bad.
But still, there’s something addicting about it. You can get how people fall into these traps with nostalgia properties and feelings. When I see the thing I recognize in the Marvel, I also hoot and holler. I’m not above it, even when I know in my heart the actual use of the things I recognize will upset me. It won’t really be the thing I like. It’ll feel shallow and pointless, partly because it is, but also because I’m not a child anymore. The same things don’t give me the same rush. And that’s alright.
When I was about 12, the special edition versions of Monkey Island were released. I understand why old fans didn’t like them, why they felt like something was lost in the process. But it was my first time playing the game and it set me on fire. It was the first non-Nancy Drew point and click I’d really played and it changed my whole world. It brought me into the wider world of the genre and it filled me with such a… lightness. I inhaled the whole franchise in one summer, followed by King’s Quest the next. I fantasized about having an “insult swordfighting” club with friends, I imagined the quiet, intimate moments of this goofy world, and I just let it all sink over me completely.
And despite rolling my eyes at those old fans all those years ago, I found myself falling into the same trap in 2022. My first reaction to the new art style was annoyance and confusion. It looked different. It wasn’t the thing I knew. It wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.
The marketing material around this game pitched it as Monkey Island 2B. Monkey Island 3-5 didn’t exist in Ron Gilbert’s vision, we’re back to where things left off. It's the old thing. It's the way it's supposed to be.
Except, that’s not exactly true. Because you can’t go back. You can’t turn back time. That’s just not how it works. The game instantly reveals that this was a prank. This is Monkey Island 6. Why would you want to go back?
When Guybrush Threepwood arrives on Melee Island, he’s excited to see all his old friends again. He’s decided he’s going to Return to Monkey Island to finally figure out the Secret of Monkey Island. He figures he’ll have to do a new version of the three trials from the first game, and heads off to the Pirate Leaders.
Except, that’s not true. You can’t go back. You can’t turn back time.
The Pirate Leaders have been replaced with new, even colder pirate leaders. They aren’t interested in playing ball with Guybrush, a washed-up hack who’s never really done much pirating. Guybrush is forced to figure out his own way. His old crew has moved on. Carla the Swordmaster is a Governor now, no time for insult swordfights. The Voodoo Lady is closing up shop and she can’t be bothered to keep up the mystery of her name anymore. Things are changing. Things are ending.
In Act 3, Guybrush hops on a cliff, close to the edge. I grin. I know they’re teasing me. In the first Monkey Island, if you fall off the cliff, Guybrush will simply hop back up and casually report: “rubber tree.” It’s a gag that destroyed me back in the day.
Later on, Guybrush is pushed off the cliff. Instinctively, I wait for him to pop back up. This is a clever way to call back to that gag, I think. Despite myself, I look forward to seeing a reference to the thing I liked as a kid.
The camera pans down. The rubber tree was cut down ages ago. Guybrush is broken and bruised on the ground. Recreating the past is just hurting him.
You can’t go back. You can’t turn back time.
The nostalgia in Return to Monkey Island works so much because it's not a shallow reference to help the audience go “I recognize the thing!” It's Guybrush himself feeling that nostalgia and missing how things used to be. He treats the returning characters with a bit more care and sincerity and they treat him the same way. Despite all the damage he’s done to them across the franchise, they seem to have genuinely caught onto Guybrush’s good nature. There’s a warmth there.
At the same time, there’s a real reckoning with Guybrush’s behavior.
You have two to-do lists throughout the game. Your main to-do list, where your general game tasks sit, and LeChuck’s to-do list, an encouraging pamphlet you acquire for “how to be like LeChuck.”
The top priority on Guybrush’s to-do list is “relive the glory days.” He wants to feel the rush of it all again. As Guybrush gets more extreme in his methods, LeChuck’s to-do list starts checking off too. The distinction between the hero and the villain blurs. Nostalgia is driving them both to horrible acts, just to feel the same way you did back in the day. But the heroes are old now. The world’s changed.
Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman have changed.
I’ve never been fond of the ending of Monkey Island 2 and especially not the ending of Thimbleweed Park. Both of these games swerve out to reveal that, surprise, this was a game all along. Monkey Island 2 does this metaphorically while Thimbleweed Park does this more literally. It was particularly egregious with Park, as all of the character developments and plot get tossed out the window to have a meta-journey finale. I’ve joked to friends that “Ron Gilbert’s been chasing his perfect twist ending for years and he doesn’t know when to let it go.”
Return revists this ending once again, but for once, Gilbert genuinely seems to have nailed it. It makes me reflect on my negative reaction to the previous two attempts and wonder why I got so frustrated to begin with. It was always a game, I knew that when I started. Why would I be frustrated when the game acknowledges that? It's just a story. Those stories can have power and beauty and meaning. The joy in stories comes from sharing them, even if you have to accept that the stories will mean different things to other people.
Guybrush: “I guess I thought there would be something more at the end.”
Elaine: “Could anything ever live up to what you imagined?”
Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman, and their cohorts helped cultivate an entire genre, help it thrive, and had to watch the business leave them behind. I can’t even imagine how frustrating that was for them. But whatever their personal journey entailed, and it's certainly no business of mine, they use that to infuse Return with this quiet, peaceful energy by the end. Who knows if it will be a swansong for Guybrush, but it feels like the swansong for their relationship with Guybrush. They all got to sit together again, crack open a grog, and marvel at the life they’ve led and the world they built.
Stop the rides, turn off the lights, and lock the door. It's closing time.
But still, there’s something addicting about it. You can get how people fall into these traps with nostalgia properties and feelings. When I see the thing I recognize in the Marvel, I also hoot and holler. I’m not above it, even when I know in my heart the actual use of the things I recognize will upset me. It won’t really be the thing I like. It’ll feel shallow and pointless, partly because it is, but also because I’m not a child anymore. The same things don’t give me the same rush. And that’s alright.
When I was about 12, the special edition versions of Monkey Island were released. I understand why old fans didn’t like them, why they felt like something was lost in the process. But it was my first time playing the game and it set me on fire. It was the first non-Nancy Drew point and click I’d really played and it changed my whole world. It brought me into the wider world of the genre and it filled me with such a… lightness. I inhaled the whole franchise in one summer, followed by King’s Quest the next. I fantasized about having an “insult swordfighting” club with friends, I imagined the quiet, intimate moments of this goofy world, and I just let it all sink over me completely.
And despite rolling my eyes at those old fans all those years ago, I found myself falling into the same trap in 2022. My first reaction to the new art style was annoyance and confusion. It looked different. It wasn’t the thing I knew. It wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.
The marketing material around this game pitched it as Monkey Island 2B. Monkey Island 3-5 didn’t exist in Ron Gilbert’s vision, we’re back to where things left off. It's the old thing. It's the way it's supposed to be.
Except, that’s not exactly true. Because you can’t go back. You can’t turn back time. That’s just not how it works. The game instantly reveals that this was a prank. This is Monkey Island 6. Why would you want to go back?
When Guybrush Threepwood arrives on Melee Island, he’s excited to see all his old friends again. He’s decided he’s going to Return to Monkey Island to finally figure out the Secret of Monkey Island. He figures he’ll have to do a new version of the three trials from the first game, and heads off to the Pirate Leaders.
Except, that’s not true. You can’t go back. You can’t turn back time.
The Pirate Leaders have been replaced with new, even colder pirate leaders. They aren’t interested in playing ball with Guybrush, a washed-up hack who’s never really done much pirating. Guybrush is forced to figure out his own way. His old crew has moved on. Carla the Swordmaster is a Governor now, no time for insult swordfights. The Voodoo Lady is closing up shop and she can’t be bothered to keep up the mystery of her name anymore. Things are changing. Things are ending.
In Act 3, Guybrush hops on a cliff, close to the edge. I grin. I know they’re teasing me. In the first Monkey Island, if you fall off the cliff, Guybrush will simply hop back up and casually report: “rubber tree.” It’s a gag that destroyed me back in the day.
Later on, Guybrush is pushed off the cliff. Instinctively, I wait for him to pop back up. This is a clever way to call back to that gag, I think. Despite myself, I look forward to seeing a reference to the thing I liked as a kid.
The camera pans down. The rubber tree was cut down ages ago. Guybrush is broken and bruised on the ground. Recreating the past is just hurting him.
You can’t go back. You can’t turn back time.
The nostalgia in Return to Monkey Island works so much because it's not a shallow reference to help the audience go “I recognize the thing!” It's Guybrush himself feeling that nostalgia and missing how things used to be. He treats the returning characters with a bit more care and sincerity and they treat him the same way. Despite all the damage he’s done to them across the franchise, they seem to have genuinely caught onto Guybrush’s good nature. There’s a warmth there.
At the same time, there’s a real reckoning with Guybrush’s behavior.
You have two to-do lists throughout the game. Your main to-do list, where your general game tasks sit, and LeChuck’s to-do list, an encouraging pamphlet you acquire for “how to be like LeChuck.”
The top priority on Guybrush’s to-do list is “relive the glory days.” He wants to feel the rush of it all again. As Guybrush gets more extreme in his methods, LeChuck’s to-do list starts checking off too. The distinction between the hero and the villain blurs. Nostalgia is driving them both to horrible acts, just to feel the same way you did back in the day. But the heroes are old now. The world’s changed.
Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman have changed.
I’ve never been fond of the ending of Monkey Island 2 and especially not the ending of Thimbleweed Park. Both of these games swerve out to reveal that, surprise, this was a game all along. Monkey Island 2 does this metaphorically while Thimbleweed Park does this more literally. It was particularly egregious with Park, as all of the character developments and plot get tossed out the window to have a meta-journey finale. I’ve joked to friends that “Ron Gilbert’s been chasing his perfect twist ending for years and he doesn’t know when to let it go.”
Return revists this ending once again, but for once, Gilbert genuinely seems to have nailed it. It makes me reflect on my negative reaction to the previous two attempts and wonder why I got so frustrated to begin with. It was always a game, I knew that when I started. Why would I be frustrated when the game acknowledges that? It's just a story. Those stories can have power and beauty and meaning. The joy in stories comes from sharing them, even if you have to accept that the stories will mean different things to other people.
Guybrush: “I guess I thought there would be something more at the end.”
Elaine: “Could anything ever live up to what you imagined?”
Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman, and their cohorts helped cultivate an entire genre, help it thrive, and had to watch the business leave them behind. I can’t even imagine how frustrating that was for them. But whatever their personal journey entailed, and it's certainly no business of mine, they use that to infuse Return with this quiet, peaceful energy by the end. Who knows if it will be a swansong for Guybrush, but it feels like the swansong for their relationship with Guybrush. They all got to sit together again, crack open a grog, and marvel at the life they’ve led and the world they built.
Stop the rides, turn off the lights, and lock the door. It's closing time.
2021
Psychonauts 1 is a game aggressively from the 00s. Lots of obtuse collecting, antiquated view of mental health, and general excessive 00s cartoon-isms. As excited as I was for a sequel, I can't say I felt there was anything justifying its existence beyond the fact that people wanted a second one.
This game shatters those expectations handily.
Psychonauts 2 is just tighter, both mechanically and narratively. All the flaws of the original are gone and the story is polished to a fine sheen. There's incredible touches across the game to show the respect and care the story has for its world. From the opening trigger warnings to the way Raz asks permission before entering a mind to the way characters are more willing to be genuine and honest with each other. The entire first real level is about Raz fucking up in someone's mind and learning that he needs to be more responsible in how he behaves. This isn't summer camp anymore. These are people's lives.
But what really propels the story is its core idea. This is a story about trauma. Its about people making awful mistakes that haunt them. Its about people lashing out after trauma because they need to justify that trauma somehow. Its about how we try to rewrite the complicated parts of history to ourselves to make it easier to understand. And its about the trauma we pass on to the next generation from what remains of the histories we tell.
Its just... an incredibly compelling and exciting story. As the big Broken Age defender, I take no shame in saying this is Double Fine's greatest work.
This game shatters those expectations handily.
Psychonauts 2 is just tighter, both mechanically and narratively. All the flaws of the original are gone and the story is polished to a fine sheen. There's incredible touches across the game to show the respect and care the story has for its world. From the opening trigger warnings to the way Raz asks permission before entering a mind to the way characters are more willing to be genuine and honest with each other. The entire first real level is about Raz fucking up in someone's mind and learning that he needs to be more responsible in how he behaves. This isn't summer camp anymore. These are people's lives.
But what really propels the story is its core idea. This is a story about trauma. Its about people making awful mistakes that haunt them. Its about people lashing out after trauma because they need to justify that trauma somehow. Its about how we try to rewrite the complicated parts of history to ourselves to make it easier to understand. And its about the trauma we pass on to the next generation from what remains of the histories we tell.
Its just... an incredibly compelling and exciting story. As the big Broken Age defender, I take no shame in saying this is Double Fine's greatest work.
2019
This review contains spoilers
There’s this idea in human development and psychology called schema theory, assimilation, and accommodation. We all have different mental schema that hold different philosophies and information. More often than not, new information is simply assimilated into our existing understanding of the world. When the brain is shocked by new information, it has to make a new schema to understand the world. This is accommodation. This schema may conflict with one another and may require one schema to be destroyed and absorbed into the new schema. But this is the mental framework that our brains understand the world.
Some months ago, there was a post I saw about Disney’s Andor that I’ve been thinking about frequently. The post asserted that it's actually concerning that a corporation could make a show so fiercely anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist. It means they don’t consider those ideas a real threat. They consider it fantasy. When Glass Onion and The Menu came out, articles and other posts reverberating this point emerged. These movies are Bad Actually because they have become part of the status quo.
It has a bit more validity than I’d like to admit (and it's possible some weird mental defensiveness has made me view those posts more negatively than the poster intended). If every movie just has a general “rich bad” observation, without more nuance or call to action than that, I’m not sure what they add. There has to be something meatier on that bone.
But I guess that opens to a wider conversation on how powerful art can or cannot be.
There’s certain things a corporate product is just not going to do. It's not going to call for global revolution, it's not going to call to dismantle every institution we need to dismantle, it's not going to say we need to execute people in the square.
Do these corporate products, in varying degrees of tepid or otherwise, still have validity outside of that if people read more into it than intended? Where does meaning begin and end with these kinds of products? Where does it falter?
And where does Persona 5 succeed and fail in delivering Meaning?
Kamoshida’s Palace
Kamoshida’s Palace may be one of the most striking and investing opening segments of an rpg I’ve ever played. The beginning storyline is so immediately successful at dropping you into the horrible environment of a high school. Whispers everywhere you go, teachers glaring at you for showing up, classmates bluntly informing you that “it's a distraction” for you to try and study with everyone else in the library. Kamoshida as a villain is a high point that I don’t think the game reaches again for… basically the rest of the game. The stakes feel so intimately real and pointed, the abuse he weaponizes against others so constant and direct. It's a phenomenal way to introduce the basic gimmick of your story and invest in the successes of your protagonists.
When I have to pick how to spend my in-game afternoons, I’d often just teleport away from the school to wherever I needed to go. On one occasion, I chose to walk out of the school for once. Suddenly, I'm cornered by Kamoshida. I don’t know if that was added to Royal or if I just missed it in the original, but if you walk past him on the first floor, he’ll force you into a conversation so he can mock and torment you some more. He'll do this every single day. Most people probably missed this, but once you know it, a new tension emerges. Teleporting out of the school now feels more intentional than passive. This optional, incidental piece of dialogue suddenly made the very act of choosing to walk out of the school feel more like a choice. Teleporting or sneaking around him felt more like I was dodging his abuse. It's an incredible feeling. It adds another dose of tension to a section that was already rife with tension.
But then there’s Ann.
Ann's character starts amazing, just a powerful and passionate addition to the cast. Its where the game takes that character that falters.
The Watsonian perspective: Royal’s boss fight with Kamoshida adds a fake version of Shiho, the girl who attempted suicide, as one of his supporters. She’s dressed up in a bunny suit. The original game left it unclear if Kamoshida even remembered who Shiho was after her hospitalization, but this was to ensure his warped view couldn’t be mistaken.
The Doylist perspective: One of the options when you see a fake!Ann in a bunny suit is to go “damn that’s hot.” Ann’s phantom thief costume is made up like a big sexy outfit that we’re supposed to be excited by. There’s various bits of dialogue where Ann is ogled by the camera and the characters. And, as mentioned above, out of all the things they chose to add to the game, they added Shiho in the bunny suit. On one hand, as said above, it further cements just how depraved he is. But on the other hand, that topic seemed pretty well covered. Was it more powerful back when he never mentioned Shiho? When he seemingly forgot about her mere seconds after she dropped off a roof? I dunno. It's something I’m still mixed on. Does showing that exploitation become exploitation in itself?
Are Kamoshida’s actions forcing brains to recognize monsters and accommodate that information into new rebellious schema? Or does he let the audience find excuses? What if instead, Kamoshida’s actions are just assimilating into the kind of schema that labels some people “bad outsiders”?
Madarme, Kaneshiro, Futaba, and Okumuda
It's hard to claim that the following palaces reach the stakes of the first palace. Madarame’s story is a genuine tale of corruption and in many ways it feels like something the creative team did care a lot about. There’s personal history there, personal stories among devs about stolen work. But at the same time, they clearly had trouble explaining how plagiarism and theft hurt their careers. Explaining the daily grind of increasing failure and loss is a much harder image to depict. So they have to go bigger and involve some murder.
Kaneshiro almost reaches something. He’s funding various politicians and I’ll probably have more to say about the precise history of yakuza in politics in during Shido’s chapter. But his existence as a guy committing petty scams and an obvious criminal lifestyle kind of makes him feel more like a threat outside the social systems the thieves claim to hate. He’s easier to dismiss as an outlier to a corrupt system.
At the same time, the purpose of these palaces aren’t really built around these actual people. Futaba’s palace cement that these are much more about the development of our cast than about the villains. And that’s fine. I think Futaba’s Palace is actually the most valuable level in conveying an actual message: how a person’s mindset can get warped and distorted by their lives. But I can also understand how that can feel… insulting. Big ol’ magic heist to fix your noggin. Fix some gears, no more depression. It's the same way Psychonauts both does and doesn’t work, for the same complicated reasons.
Okumura’s Palace is bad, in ways that tie into other Palace Problems. The puzzle design in P5 isn’t very advanced. It's just short ways of delaying progress, extending out the game. The Palaces are already mostly fun, we don’t need to extend them even more. But Okumura’s Palace also feels like it gets back to the stakes of Kamoshida. This man has an active harm on society that the others can’t compare to. The corporate culture is horrifically violent, even if its dressed up in silly alien aesthetics to cover the faults.
But the way the story goes, the game clearly doesn't want me to hate Okumura that much. I'm supposed to feel bad when he dies. "Even if he's evil, he doesn't deserve that" is the drum they pound on.
Haru, you’re my favorite character, but I kind of think your dad had it coming.
Confidants
The other aspects that falter after the first dungeon present themselves in the social links. Persona director Hashino allegedly said in an interview (that I can’t track down, don’t quote me) that he never had female friends. If that’s true, you can really tell.
jesus christ can you tell.
Ann’s sharp, serious character gets progressively lost to a “kind of a ditz” angle once she’s isolated into her social link. Ryuji starts the game as the most refreshing Persona Best Friend yet, but he displays all the same annoying traits before long too. Horny lad is horny. Nearly every main cast member gets worse in the social links and you kind of have to hope the main story will revive them to something reasonable, which is not guaranteed.
And then you get the social links with a teenager dating an older woman or the other creepy shit towards the women and there’s really no excuse for it. All those themes of commodification and exploitation are thrown to the wayside because “listen dude, this exploitation is like, really hot tho.”
This isn’t to say all the social links are bad. I have my favorites like anyone else. The underdog politician, the gun shop man, the doctor. But the game’s weird wink-wink-nudge-nudge “harmless” fanservice and misogyny, the inability to recognize the double standards, the insistence on maintaining some horndoggery. Its constant.
Assimilation or accommodation.
It's this part of the game that I can’t really muster any kind of defense for. It makes me uncomfortable. With the benefits you get from social links, someone trying to create the most beneficial playthrough is gonna need to date those women. Hire the maid teacher. You need those ethers, Joker. Entering a bizarre, uncomfortable, mess of a power dynamic is the only way.
Shinzo Abe
Masayoshi Shido. Political monster, sexual assault wielding asshole, man who destroyed any hope of opposition in the upcoming election.
To complete Shido’s palace, there’s several different miniboss shadows you need to track down. Each one represents one of Shido’s loyal cronies, someone that helps him in the real world. They’re unnamed and generally act as a catch-all to ideas of political corruption. But there’s several worth pointing out. The former noble, who’s family lost power after WWII. The yakuza muscle, who takes care of political opponents on Shido’s behalf. The TV exec, manipulating facts into Shido’s favor. And the general mass of right wing politicians these people tend to attract.
When Nobusuke Kishi was released from prison after WWII, after running various oppressive puppet states, he was immediately summoned to the Prime Minister’s house. He looked around the table at his old friends and war criminals, newly backed by the US. It was here that he infamously said “well, I guess we’re all democrats now.”
In his return to power, Kishi enacted a variety of notable moves. Through his connection with various yakuza organizations (supported by the US), the famed war criminal sabotaged left-leaning movements at every opportunity. Kishi’s inescapable grip on power only ended through the Anpo protests, where thousands upon thousands of people finally forced Kishi to resign in disgrace.
Throughout this period, Shinzo Abe was happily bouncing on his grandfather’s knee, buying into every word ol’ Pappy Kishi told him.
Abe inherited and maintained Kishi’s various political connections. He spent his entire career defending his grandfather’s war crimes and using right-wing rhetoric to make the world a worse place to live. He became a notable member of “Nippon Kage,” a fascist group pledging to bring back the monarchy, funded by various politicians, cults, and former nobles. Abe’s insistence on denying how so-called “comfort women” were exploited by his grandfather prior to the war is an internationally known fact. Abe also became embroiled in controversy for manipulating town halls and media events with paid actors, to make the government look more positive. His biographer Noriyuki Yamaguchi was a high-ranking journalist allied with various media think tanks, before the Me Too movement publicly exposed his history of assault.
Many of Persona 5’s references to historical figures tend to be clumsy or poorly thought out. Yuuki Mishima speaks to that just by existing. And one of the biggest misteps in handling Shido is that there's little to no interest in where he came from. There’s no mention of Shido having any connection to any previous war criminal. In fact, his past beyond his current political goals and the deaths he's orchestrated in Futaba's history are left vague and unclear. But the comparisons to Abe are pointed and direct. His rhetoric is populist and inflammatory. Campaign posters in his palace mirror Shinzo Abe’s real posters. It just says the quiet part out loud. Whatever else can be said about this game, it seems pretty evident to me that a large chunk of it involves pointing to Shinzo Abe and going “man, fuck that guy.” And I gotta respect that.
(On a related note, if you want to see Shinzo Abe get beat up by plastic monsters, watch Kamen Rider Black Sun. I know I'm building up to a thesis about "maybe looking for activism in fiction is poisoning my mind and I should stop hitching my internal morality to fiction" but that's a fucking great show.)
Rebellion
More than any scene in the game, of all things, I think about the starting party eating at a fancy diner. They’re trying to celebrate after defeating Kamoshida, feel some sense of success and joy after they’ve outed a predator. But these little sad moments keep happening. They speak a little too loud here, they spill something there, they lose track of their table, etc. They don’t know the social cues. They don’t belong in that rich society restaurant and everyone wants them gone. Their enthusiasm wanes bit by bit and you just get these sad kids who’s dream of a good time got crushed by the grim reality that they’re still outsiders.
And that’s when they start talking about becoming the Phantom Thieves full time.
It's a triumphant moment and the narrative knows it. This is their call to action, their decision to stand up for the little guy.
But there’s this unintentional (intentional?) subtext that these dumb teens just desperately want to be validated by their peers. It's rampant in Mishima’s storyline but it's always present if you look for it. So much of the game revolves around them seeking the approval of strangers online, to the point that being forgotten nearly destroys them. It's sad. It's so desperately sad.
After Okumura’s Palace, the cast wonder amongst themselves if they were truly fighting for justice or for vanity. It's partly just a typical “the heroes doubt themselves” story beat. But it ties into groundwork the game has set down before now.
Here’s the hard truth I’ve had to face as someone who loves history: any revolution will have unintentional victims. It's an inescapable fact, seen time and time again. So the essential question of revolution rests on a simple fact: is the violence inflicted by the existing corrupt state worse than the violence that will ensue in a revolution?
Much of the game wrestles with this, even if it doesn’t realize it. Is the violence of stealing a heart equal to the violence of these oppressive figures? I say no and I assume much of the audience shares that sentiment. Which is part of why I think the game’s final act rings so hollow for so many people. The final bosses of both versions of the game are provided as examples that the violence inherent in stealing a heart is too dangerous to hold onto long-term. “We can’t ethically hold onto this power. The public has to make these choices, not us.” That’s a fair message but the thing the game seems to somehow miss is that the characters are part of the public. They aren't above or outside it. Stepping away from their revolution because its getting too violent is... kind of bizarre. And sure, approaching this gets muddy when dealing with magical powers. But the public is being manipulated so they can’t make these choices. They’ve been provided the wrong information, on purpose, by political machines far beyond our scope. The messaging here falls flat.
The theme of “are we in danger of being baddies” also ends up pushing the heroes dangerously close to that “now that we beat the villains, let’s conform to the status quo again” storyline. We’ve seen this in Persona 4 and it was already bad there. And this is particularly aggravating with the changed ending for Royal. The original game lets you ride off into the sunset on a road trip with your friends. Royal? Not so much. Ryuji goes back to track, Ann goes back to being a model, the gang “grows up” past this rebellion. Just a childhood indulgence. Now they can join society and become Normal Good Workers. Maybe that’s not the meaning the designers intended to impart but it’s there.
Perhaps that’s the biggest issue with the game’s messaging. Intentionally or not, the information it gives you can be assimilated into existing ideas. It certainly points to dangerous targets. Sexual predators, plagiarists, short-staffing CEOs, malicious politicians. But its pledge to reshape society is more debatable. If the characters return to society in the Royal version, can we really say they’re truly still radicals? Can this game be a radical story? Did corporate demands water down the messaging? Or is it a more sinister thrall of moderate sentiments assimilating rebellion into acceptability? If the thing Royal mainly adds is more Ann perving, if that's their grand intention, what do they really have to say about anything that's worthwhile?
Assimilation or accommodation?
It's tough.
Apathy
The text of the game is that God has emerged to control the population, brainwash them to follow the status quo, and leave them resting in happy cages while he burns down the world. As with many of these rpgs, you gotta attack and dethrone god.
It's in the subtext and metaphor that I find this finale much more interesting.
The Phantom Thieves spend all their time warning the world about Shido. If they can make him confess, if they can just expose his crimes, they’re sure everything will work out. That’s what keeps them going.
Except, that’s not reality. Because the truth is, things are always more complicated than exposing/killing a few specific people.
The political machine that benefits from Shido won’t even let him confess. They cover it up, they use the media machine, and they prey on public fears. Shido has so effectively presented himself as a savior that the public cult of personality can’t grapple with the alternative. The system is so thoroughly rigged that the Phantom Thieves have no chance.
The Thieves panic and journey to the center of the collective subconscious. And that is where God exists, the physical manifestation of these systems. It keeps the public chained down, supported by their apathy and eagerness to hand their freedom over to an oppressive force. And when the Thieves are forced back into Shibuya, they’re confronted with a true look at the world. Everything around them, every building, streetlight, every street corner, is built of violence. The totality of existence is covered by the blood of the systems that built it.
And every passerby around them just ignores it. Violence and blood? Don’t be dramatic. It's just a normal street, a normal boring life. Any rebel that has pointed out these things is delusional or never existed in the first place. And this denial is so maddening that the few people that do see the evidence of violence around them feel crazy themselves.
To keep supporting these systems of violence, the history of its rebels are erased. The Thieves cease to exist. Locked away without a trace.
The only path of success left is to find the very soul of these apathetic systems, with all its Christian roots, and shoot it in the face.
Its this intentional? Fuck no. But its where my mind went playing it. I could try and justify my points by claiming some cultural aspect needs to be considered. Japan’s LDP has basically been in power for seventy years with only brief interruptions. The failure of the New Left movement in the 60s to 70s only compounded the party’s authority. I feel like that level of political stagnation and people’s willingness to put up with that bad status quo has to be considered when tied with the themes of the apathetic public.
But a white american claiming she “knows more” about a foreign country’s culture is cringe as fuck so, I do have to admit the theme just… works for me. It doesn’t have to work for you, would not force that on anyone. But… Desperately screaming against an apathetic society that won’t put in the effort to change, feeling bogged down by the fact that it’s just so much easier to fall into that same apathy than to keep screaming, and finally ending with shooting God in the face?
I can’t not think about it. The theme just works for me. Even if I start second-guessing myself with the same tired question.
Accommodation or assimilation?
But what’s left after all that? What’s left after all that 100 hour story? What’s waiting for you in this game?
Gameplay and Style
Fuck. Like. Fuck. Y’know? One of the main reasons its easy to enjoy this game is just how fucking fun the gameplay is. The speed of the combat, the flow of battle, the way all these systems blend into each other to be maximized and measured from beginning to end…. Fuck!
And the whole game just drips with aesthetics. Every visual, every menu screen, every music track, all perfectly calculated to this moody, jazzy feeling. Fucking stellar. Put that shit on my homebrewed 3DS and I don’t regret it.
Royal goes further and adds some mechanical flourishes. The fusion system now has periodic “alarms” if you’ve been grinding through Mementos a lot. Those alarms mean you can get new results from fusing or itemizing persona. Now getting a character’s ultimate weapon requires planning and deliberation rather than just throwing cash into the fusion grinder.
Royal’s new location Kichijoji also holds some special mechanical additions. The darts minigame helps improve the effectiveness of “baton passing”, letting characters infinitely weaponize the weakness of enemies and keep smacking them down. The billiards minigame improves technical attacks, using status debuffs to launch critical attacks and make it easier to launch All Out Attacks on a foe. And the jazz club lets you give your party special new skills, allowing greater freedom and customization of your party line up. It adds so much to the existing system. I went from barely engaging with vanilla P5’s gameplay to going full completionist on the Persona Compendium. It's just rad as hell.
Royal’s New Content
Akechi fucking rules.
This poor kid, abandoned by his father, desperately missing his mother, has launched a complicated revenge scheme to take down Shido. Bring Shido to the top of the world, then expose Shido as a fraud and be there to watch him fall. He’s so embraced this dream, he kills and betrays anyone to see the journey through.
But what’s truly sad about Akechi is how doomed his plan was from the start. Shido always knew Akechi was his secret son and was always planning on killing Akechi once he lost his use. We see how the political machine defends Shido and that’s proof that this secret child revelation would get covered up and suppressed in minutes. Akechi’s plan was never going to work.
But Akechi can’t accept that until it's too late. Because despite his hatred, despite his fury, he just desperately wants his dad to love him.
Royal’s bonus section, the third semester, is… weird. It's a compelling morality play about happiness versus trauma. If you could erase the traumas of your past and integrate yourself back into “respectable” society, would you? As the Phantom Thieves realize, their gut instinct would be yes. Deep down, they’d love to live normal lives again. But that would be a disrespect to that pain they grew from. Denying it happened denies themselves. It's hard, but they’re stronger for accepting it.
Akechi’s storyline features Akechi dropping the mask and just relishing in being a nasty little crime boy. The voice actor delights in going over the top nefarious, howling PERSONA like he’s clinging onto the edges of sanity.
And by extension, by bringing Akechi back, the game gives the protagonist/Joker/Kirby Styles a specific personality and desire outside of player action.
Joker wants Akechi back and he wants him to be more unhinged. He wants the mask off, he wants the true Akechi, even if that man is an asshole.
Outside of player control, Joker Persona 5 loves Akechi.
The final villain of this semester, Dr. Maruki, is a deeply sad man. His denial of a broken past only hurts him in the long run. He has to convert other people into his ideology because it's the only thing he has left. If you accept Maruki’s deal, Maruki isolates himself into a role as a kindly messiah. When he shows up in the bad ending scenes, his character portrait vanishes. He’s not a person anymore. He’s lost any human connections keeping him stable. Even when Maruki wins, he loses. Failure is his only option and it's the only way his life can get better.
To save Maruki, you have to destroy his delusional dream. To give Akechi his freedom, you have to let him die. You have to let Akechi make his choice for himself, even if it sends him off to his demise.
Still, there’s weirdness to the section. The third semester might have been better as an AU story, DLC, or some kind of spin-off novel. It just doesn’t flow with the main game’s themes and ideas. It's hard to go from shooting God in the face to “a happy cult.” I enjoyed it, but it's hard to argue in favor of the game’s themes when this section provides even more tangible proof of its inconsistency.
Coupled with the changed ending mentioned in the Rebellion section, it's hard to say that the new story content benefits the game overall. The additional Ann perving, the cast returning to their status quos... any defense I can make of Royal crumbles with the knowledge of what the devs chose to add. This was their vision.
Anyway
I don’t think Persona 5 is a perfect or consistent text. I think it fails in a lot of its efforts, particularly in how it treats women and minorities. I often flip-flop on how generous I’m feeling towards its themes and meanings, as is probably obvious in this twelve page rambling. I’ve seen the Disco Elysium image about capital and critique. A capital product cannot, truly, be a meaningful message under the material conditions we’re stuck in.
But I still get excited by the sense of freedom and rebellion this game offers. Maybe that’s me falling for it. Maybe that’s me getting subsumed by capital, falling under the sway of apathy and false promises, instead of making the kind of direct action I need to. I’m not as ideologically steadfast in my beliefs as I want to be.
And what does that mean for me?
I think it means I need to log the fuck off.
This review reached twelve pages at one point and I got this truly strange anxiety writing it. This endless dithering and agonizing about being a bad leftist, about failing, about exposing myself as a moron who was still untangling some ingrained societal shit. And it just suddenly hit me at some point how… hollow this feeling was. What does this anxiety do for me? Do for anyone? Does worrying about what media I consume actually impact the wider activism efforts, or is it just getting in the way of me doing that activism? It's the constant pattern of online activism, something I find it too easy to fall into, worrying so much about performance that I don’t actually do the real work.
Maybe it doesn’t have to be that deep. Maybe it doesn’t have to be all those things I wish it was. Maybe I don’t need to obsess and worry over defending how I feel about something.
Maybe sometimes I just need to be okay with enjoying a dumb video game, flaws and all.
Some months ago, there was a post I saw about Disney’s Andor that I’ve been thinking about frequently. The post asserted that it's actually concerning that a corporation could make a show so fiercely anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist. It means they don’t consider those ideas a real threat. They consider it fantasy. When Glass Onion and The Menu came out, articles and other posts reverberating this point emerged. These movies are Bad Actually because they have become part of the status quo.
It has a bit more validity than I’d like to admit (and it's possible some weird mental defensiveness has made me view those posts more negatively than the poster intended). If every movie just has a general “rich bad” observation, without more nuance or call to action than that, I’m not sure what they add. There has to be something meatier on that bone.
But I guess that opens to a wider conversation on how powerful art can or cannot be.
There’s certain things a corporate product is just not going to do. It's not going to call for global revolution, it's not going to call to dismantle every institution we need to dismantle, it's not going to say we need to execute people in the square.
Do these corporate products, in varying degrees of tepid or otherwise, still have validity outside of that if people read more into it than intended? Where does meaning begin and end with these kinds of products? Where does it falter?
And where does Persona 5 succeed and fail in delivering Meaning?
Kamoshida’s Palace
Kamoshida’s Palace may be one of the most striking and investing opening segments of an rpg I’ve ever played. The beginning storyline is so immediately successful at dropping you into the horrible environment of a high school. Whispers everywhere you go, teachers glaring at you for showing up, classmates bluntly informing you that “it's a distraction” for you to try and study with everyone else in the library. Kamoshida as a villain is a high point that I don’t think the game reaches again for… basically the rest of the game. The stakes feel so intimately real and pointed, the abuse he weaponizes against others so constant and direct. It's a phenomenal way to introduce the basic gimmick of your story and invest in the successes of your protagonists.
When I have to pick how to spend my in-game afternoons, I’d often just teleport away from the school to wherever I needed to go. On one occasion, I chose to walk out of the school for once. Suddenly, I'm cornered by Kamoshida. I don’t know if that was added to Royal or if I just missed it in the original, but if you walk past him on the first floor, he’ll force you into a conversation so he can mock and torment you some more. He'll do this every single day. Most people probably missed this, but once you know it, a new tension emerges. Teleporting out of the school now feels more intentional than passive. This optional, incidental piece of dialogue suddenly made the very act of choosing to walk out of the school feel more like a choice. Teleporting or sneaking around him felt more like I was dodging his abuse. It's an incredible feeling. It adds another dose of tension to a section that was already rife with tension.
But then there’s Ann.
Ann's character starts amazing, just a powerful and passionate addition to the cast. Its where the game takes that character that falters.
The Watsonian perspective: Royal’s boss fight with Kamoshida adds a fake version of Shiho, the girl who attempted suicide, as one of his supporters. She’s dressed up in a bunny suit. The original game left it unclear if Kamoshida even remembered who Shiho was after her hospitalization, but this was to ensure his warped view couldn’t be mistaken.
The Doylist perspective: One of the options when you see a fake!Ann in a bunny suit is to go “damn that’s hot.” Ann’s phantom thief costume is made up like a big sexy outfit that we’re supposed to be excited by. There’s various bits of dialogue where Ann is ogled by the camera and the characters. And, as mentioned above, out of all the things they chose to add to the game, they added Shiho in the bunny suit. On one hand, as said above, it further cements just how depraved he is. But on the other hand, that topic seemed pretty well covered. Was it more powerful back when he never mentioned Shiho? When he seemingly forgot about her mere seconds after she dropped off a roof? I dunno. It's something I’m still mixed on. Does showing that exploitation become exploitation in itself?
Are Kamoshida’s actions forcing brains to recognize monsters and accommodate that information into new rebellious schema? Or does he let the audience find excuses? What if instead, Kamoshida’s actions are just assimilating into the kind of schema that labels some people “bad outsiders”?
Madarme, Kaneshiro, Futaba, and Okumuda
It's hard to claim that the following palaces reach the stakes of the first palace. Madarame’s story is a genuine tale of corruption and in many ways it feels like something the creative team did care a lot about. There’s personal history there, personal stories among devs about stolen work. But at the same time, they clearly had trouble explaining how plagiarism and theft hurt their careers. Explaining the daily grind of increasing failure and loss is a much harder image to depict. So they have to go bigger and involve some murder.
Kaneshiro almost reaches something. He’s funding various politicians and I’ll probably have more to say about the precise history of yakuza in politics in during Shido’s chapter. But his existence as a guy committing petty scams and an obvious criminal lifestyle kind of makes him feel more like a threat outside the social systems the thieves claim to hate. He’s easier to dismiss as an outlier to a corrupt system.
At the same time, the purpose of these palaces aren’t really built around these actual people. Futaba’s palace cement that these are much more about the development of our cast than about the villains. And that’s fine. I think Futaba’s Palace is actually the most valuable level in conveying an actual message: how a person’s mindset can get warped and distorted by their lives. But I can also understand how that can feel… insulting. Big ol’ magic heist to fix your noggin. Fix some gears, no more depression. It's the same way Psychonauts both does and doesn’t work, for the same complicated reasons.
Okumura’s Palace is bad, in ways that tie into other Palace Problems. The puzzle design in P5 isn’t very advanced. It's just short ways of delaying progress, extending out the game. The Palaces are already mostly fun, we don’t need to extend them even more. But Okumura’s Palace also feels like it gets back to the stakes of Kamoshida. This man has an active harm on society that the others can’t compare to. The corporate culture is horrifically violent, even if its dressed up in silly alien aesthetics to cover the faults.
But the way the story goes, the game clearly doesn't want me to hate Okumura that much. I'm supposed to feel bad when he dies. "Even if he's evil, he doesn't deserve that" is the drum they pound on.
Haru, you’re my favorite character, but I kind of think your dad had it coming.
Confidants
The other aspects that falter after the first dungeon present themselves in the social links. Persona director Hashino allegedly said in an interview (that I can’t track down, don’t quote me) that he never had female friends. If that’s true, you can really tell.
jesus christ can you tell.
Ann’s sharp, serious character gets progressively lost to a “kind of a ditz” angle once she’s isolated into her social link. Ryuji starts the game as the most refreshing Persona Best Friend yet, but he displays all the same annoying traits before long too. Horny lad is horny. Nearly every main cast member gets worse in the social links and you kind of have to hope the main story will revive them to something reasonable, which is not guaranteed.
And then you get the social links with a teenager dating an older woman or the other creepy shit towards the women and there’s really no excuse for it. All those themes of commodification and exploitation are thrown to the wayside because “listen dude, this exploitation is like, really hot tho.”
This isn’t to say all the social links are bad. I have my favorites like anyone else. The underdog politician, the gun shop man, the doctor. But the game’s weird wink-wink-nudge-nudge “harmless” fanservice and misogyny, the inability to recognize the double standards, the insistence on maintaining some horndoggery. Its constant.
Assimilation or accommodation.
It's this part of the game that I can’t really muster any kind of defense for. It makes me uncomfortable. With the benefits you get from social links, someone trying to create the most beneficial playthrough is gonna need to date those women. Hire the maid teacher. You need those ethers, Joker. Entering a bizarre, uncomfortable, mess of a power dynamic is the only way.
Shinzo Abe
Masayoshi Shido. Political monster, sexual assault wielding asshole, man who destroyed any hope of opposition in the upcoming election.
To complete Shido’s palace, there’s several different miniboss shadows you need to track down. Each one represents one of Shido’s loyal cronies, someone that helps him in the real world. They’re unnamed and generally act as a catch-all to ideas of political corruption. But there’s several worth pointing out. The former noble, who’s family lost power after WWII. The yakuza muscle, who takes care of political opponents on Shido’s behalf. The TV exec, manipulating facts into Shido’s favor. And the general mass of right wing politicians these people tend to attract.
When Nobusuke Kishi was released from prison after WWII, after running various oppressive puppet states, he was immediately summoned to the Prime Minister’s house. He looked around the table at his old friends and war criminals, newly backed by the US. It was here that he infamously said “well, I guess we’re all democrats now.”
In his return to power, Kishi enacted a variety of notable moves. Through his connection with various yakuza organizations (supported by the US), the famed war criminal sabotaged left-leaning movements at every opportunity. Kishi’s inescapable grip on power only ended through the Anpo protests, where thousands upon thousands of people finally forced Kishi to resign in disgrace.
Throughout this period, Shinzo Abe was happily bouncing on his grandfather’s knee, buying into every word ol’ Pappy Kishi told him.
Abe inherited and maintained Kishi’s various political connections. He spent his entire career defending his grandfather’s war crimes and using right-wing rhetoric to make the world a worse place to live. He became a notable member of “Nippon Kage,” a fascist group pledging to bring back the monarchy, funded by various politicians, cults, and former nobles. Abe’s insistence on denying how so-called “comfort women” were exploited by his grandfather prior to the war is an internationally known fact. Abe also became embroiled in controversy for manipulating town halls and media events with paid actors, to make the government look more positive. His biographer Noriyuki Yamaguchi was a high-ranking journalist allied with various media think tanks, before the Me Too movement publicly exposed his history of assault.
Many of Persona 5’s references to historical figures tend to be clumsy or poorly thought out. Yuuki Mishima speaks to that just by existing. And one of the biggest misteps in handling Shido is that there's little to no interest in where he came from. There’s no mention of Shido having any connection to any previous war criminal. In fact, his past beyond his current political goals and the deaths he's orchestrated in Futaba's history are left vague and unclear. But the comparisons to Abe are pointed and direct. His rhetoric is populist and inflammatory. Campaign posters in his palace mirror Shinzo Abe’s real posters. It just says the quiet part out loud. Whatever else can be said about this game, it seems pretty evident to me that a large chunk of it involves pointing to Shinzo Abe and going “man, fuck that guy.” And I gotta respect that.
(On a related note, if you want to see Shinzo Abe get beat up by plastic monsters, watch Kamen Rider Black Sun. I know I'm building up to a thesis about "maybe looking for activism in fiction is poisoning my mind and I should stop hitching my internal morality to fiction" but that's a fucking great show.)
Rebellion
More than any scene in the game, of all things, I think about the starting party eating at a fancy diner. They’re trying to celebrate after defeating Kamoshida, feel some sense of success and joy after they’ve outed a predator. But these little sad moments keep happening. They speak a little too loud here, they spill something there, they lose track of their table, etc. They don’t know the social cues. They don’t belong in that rich society restaurant and everyone wants them gone. Their enthusiasm wanes bit by bit and you just get these sad kids who’s dream of a good time got crushed by the grim reality that they’re still outsiders.
And that’s when they start talking about becoming the Phantom Thieves full time.
It's a triumphant moment and the narrative knows it. This is their call to action, their decision to stand up for the little guy.
But there’s this unintentional (intentional?) subtext that these dumb teens just desperately want to be validated by their peers. It's rampant in Mishima’s storyline but it's always present if you look for it. So much of the game revolves around them seeking the approval of strangers online, to the point that being forgotten nearly destroys them. It's sad. It's so desperately sad.
After Okumura’s Palace, the cast wonder amongst themselves if they were truly fighting for justice or for vanity. It's partly just a typical “the heroes doubt themselves” story beat. But it ties into groundwork the game has set down before now.
Here’s the hard truth I’ve had to face as someone who loves history: any revolution will have unintentional victims. It's an inescapable fact, seen time and time again. So the essential question of revolution rests on a simple fact: is the violence inflicted by the existing corrupt state worse than the violence that will ensue in a revolution?
Much of the game wrestles with this, even if it doesn’t realize it. Is the violence of stealing a heart equal to the violence of these oppressive figures? I say no and I assume much of the audience shares that sentiment. Which is part of why I think the game’s final act rings so hollow for so many people. The final bosses of both versions of the game are provided as examples that the violence inherent in stealing a heart is too dangerous to hold onto long-term. “We can’t ethically hold onto this power. The public has to make these choices, not us.” That’s a fair message but the thing the game seems to somehow miss is that the characters are part of the public. They aren't above or outside it. Stepping away from their revolution because its getting too violent is... kind of bizarre. And sure, approaching this gets muddy when dealing with magical powers. But the public is being manipulated so they can’t make these choices. They’ve been provided the wrong information, on purpose, by political machines far beyond our scope. The messaging here falls flat.
The theme of “are we in danger of being baddies” also ends up pushing the heroes dangerously close to that “now that we beat the villains, let’s conform to the status quo again” storyline. We’ve seen this in Persona 4 and it was already bad there. And this is particularly aggravating with the changed ending for Royal. The original game lets you ride off into the sunset on a road trip with your friends. Royal? Not so much. Ryuji goes back to track, Ann goes back to being a model, the gang “grows up” past this rebellion. Just a childhood indulgence. Now they can join society and become Normal Good Workers. Maybe that’s not the meaning the designers intended to impart but it’s there.
Perhaps that’s the biggest issue with the game’s messaging. Intentionally or not, the information it gives you can be assimilated into existing ideas. It certainly points to dangerous targets. Sexual predators, plagiarists, short-staffing CEOs, malicious politicians. But its pledge to reshape society is more debatable. If the characters return to society in the Royal version, can we really say they’re truly still radicals? Can this game be a radical story? Did corporate demands water down the messaging? Or is it a more sinister thrall of moderate sentiments assimilating rebellion into acceptability? If the thing Royal mainly adds is more Ann perving, if that's their grand intention, what do they really have to say about anything that's worthwhile?
Assimilation or accommodation?
It's tough.
Apathy
The text of the game is that God has emerged to control the population, brainwash them to follow the status quo, and leave them resting in happy cages while he burns down the world. As with many of these rpgs, you gotta attack and dethrone god.
It's in the subtext and metaphor that I find this finale much more interesting.
The Phantom Thieves spend all their time warning the world about Shido. If they can make him confess, if they can just expose his crimes, they’re sure everything will work out. That’s what keeps them going.
Except, that’s not reality. Because the truth is, things are always more complicated than exposing/killing a few specific people.
The political machine that benefits from Shido won’t even let him confess. They cover it up, they use the media machine, and they prey on public fears. Shido has so effectively presented himself as a savior that the public cult of personality can’t grapple with the alternative. The system is so thoroughly rigged that the Phantom Thieves have no chance.
The Thieves panic and journey to the center of the collective subconscious. And that is where God exists, the physical manifestation of these systems. It keeps the public chained down, supported by their apathy and eagerness to hand their freedom over to an oppressive force. And when the Thieves are forced back into Shibuya, they’re confronted with a true look at the world. Everything around them, every building, streetlight, every street corner, is built of violence. The totality of existence is covered by the blood of the systems that built it.
And every passerby around them just ignores it. Violence and blood? Don’t be dramatic. It's just a normal street, a normal boring life. Any rebel that has pointed out these things is delusional or never existed in the first place. And this denial is so maddening that the few people that do see the evidence of violence around them feel crazy themselves.
To keep supporting these systems of violence, the history of its rebels are erased. The Thieves cease to exist. Locked away without a trace.
The only path of success left is to find the very soul of these apathetic systems, with all its Christian roots, and shoot it in the face.
Its this intentional? Fuck no. But its where my mind went playing it. I could try and justify my points by claiming some cultural aspect needs to be considered. Japan’s LDP has basically been in power for seventy years with only brief interruptions. The failure of the New Left movement in the 60s to 70s only compounded the party’s authority. I feel like that level of political stagnation and people’s willingness to put up with that bad status quo has to be considered when tied with the themes of the apathetic public.
But a white american claiming she “knows more” about a foreign country’s culture is cringe as fuck so, I do have to admit the theme just… works for me. It doesn’t have to work for you, would not force that on anyone. But… Desperately screaming against an apathetic society that won’t put in the effort to change, feeling bogged down by the fact that it’s just so much easier to fall into that same apathy than to keep screaming, and finally ending with shooting God in the face?
I can’t not think about it. The theme just works for me. Even if I start second-guessing myself with the same tired question.
Accommodation or assimilation?
But what’s left after all that? What’s left after all that 100 hour story? What’s waiting for you in this game?
Gameplay and Style
Fuck. Like. Fuck. Y’know? One of the main reasons its easy to enjoy this game is just how fucking fun the gameplay is. The speed of the combat, the flow of battle, the way all these systems blend into each other to be maximized and measured from beginning to end…. Fuck!
And the whole game just drips with aesthetics. Every visual, every menu screen, every music track, all perfectly calculated to this moody, jazzy feeling. Fucking stellar. Put that shit on my homebrewed 3DS and I don’t regret it.
Royal goes further and adds some mechanical flourishes. The fusion system now has periodic “alarms” if you’ve been grinding through Mementos a lot. Those alarms mean you can get new results from fusing or itemizing persona. Now getting a character’s ultimate weapon requires planning and deliberation rather than just throwing cash into the fusion grinder.
Royal’s new location Kichijoji also holds some special mechanical additions. The darts minigame helps improve the effectiveness of “baton passing”, letting characters infinitely weaponize the weakness of enemies and keep smacking them down. The billiards minigame improves technical attacks, using status debuffs to launch critical attacks and make it easier to launch All Out Attacks on a foe. And the jazz club lets you give your party special new skills, allowing greater freedom and customization of your party line up. It adds so much to the existing system. I went from barely engaging with vanilla P5’s gameplay to going full completionist on the Persona Compendium. It's just rad as hell.
Royal’s New Content
Akechi fucking rules.
This poor kid, abandoned by his father, desperately missing his mother, has launched a complicated revenge scheme to take down Shido. Bring Shido to the top of the world, then expose Shido as a fraud and be there to watch him fall. He’s so embraced this dream, he kills and betrays anyone to see the journey through.
But what’s truly sad about Akechi is how doomed his plan was from the start. Shido always knew Akechi was his secret son and was always planning on killing Akechi once he lost his use. We see how the political machine defends Shido and that’s proof that this secret child revelation would get covered up and suppressed in minutes. Akechi’s plan was never going to work.
But Akechi can’t accept that until it's too late. Because despite his hatred, despite his fury, he just desperately wants his dad to love him.
Royal’s bonus section, the third semester, is… weird. It's a compelling morality play about happiness versus trauma. If you could erase the traumas of your past and integrate yourself back into “respectable” society, would you? As the Phantom Thieves realize, their gut instinct would be yes. Deep down, they’d love to live normal lives again. But that would be a disrespect to that pain they grew from. Denying it happened denies themselves. It's hard, but they’re stronger for accepting it.
Akechi’s storyline features Akechi dropping the mask and just relishing in being a nasty little crime boy. The voice actor delights in going over the top nefarious, howling PERSONA like he’s clinging onto the edges of sanity.
And by extension, by bringing Akechi back, the game gives the protagonist/Joker/Kirby Styles a specific personality and desire outside of player action.
Joker wants Akechi back and he wants him to be more unhinged. He wants the mask off, he wants the true Akechi, even if that man is an asshole.
Outside of player control, Joker Persona 5 loves Akechi.
The final villain of this semester, Dr. Maruki, is a deeply sad man. His denial of a broken past only hurts him in the long run. He has to convert other people into his ideology because it's the only thing he has left. If you accept Maruki’s deal, Maruki isolates himself into a role as a kindly messiah. When he shows up in the bad ending scenes, his character portrait vanishes. He’s not a person anymore. He’s lost any human connections keeping him stable. Even when Maruki wins, he loses. Failure is his only option and it's the only way his life can get better.
To save Maruki, you have to destroy his delusional dream. To give Akechi his freedom, you have to let him die. You have to let Akechi make his choice for himself, even if it sends him off to his demise.
Still, there’s weirdness to the section. The third semester might have been better as an AU story, DLC, or some kind of spin-off novel. It just doesn’t flow with the main game’s themes and ideas. It's hard to go from shooting God in the face to “a happy cult.” I enjoyed it, but it's hard to argue in favor of the game’s themes when this section provides even more tangible proof of its inconsistency.
Coupled with the changed ending mentioned in the Rebellion section, it's hard to say that the new story content benefits the game overall. The additional Ann perving, the cast returning to their status quos... any defense I can make of Royal crumbles with the knowledge of what the devs chose to add. This was their vision.
Anyway
I don’t think Persona 5 is a perfect or consistent text. I think it fails in a lot of its efforts, particularly in how it treats women and minorities. I often flip-flop on how generous I’m feeling towards its themes and meanings, as is probably obvious in this twelve page rambling. I’ve seen the Disco Elysium image about capital and critique. A capital product cannot, truly, be a meaningful message under the material conditions we’re stuck in.
But I still get excited by the sense of freedom and rebellion this game offers. Maybe that’s me falling for it. Maybe that’s me getting subsumed by capital, falling under the sway of apathy and false promises, instead of making the kind of direct action I need to. I’m not as ideologically steadfast in my beliefs as I want to be.
And what does that mean for me?
I think it means I need to log the fuck off.
This review reached twelve pages at one point and I got this truly strange anxiety writing it. This endless dithering and agonizing about being a bad leftist, about failing, about exposing myself as a moron who was still untangling some ingrained societal shit. And it just suddenly hit me at some point how… hollow this feeling was. What does this anxiety do for me? Do for anyone? Does worrying about what media I consume actually impact the wider activism efforts, or is it just getting in the way of me doing that activism? It's the constant pattern of online activism, something I find it too easy to fall into, worrying so much about performance that I don’t actually do the real work.
Maybe it doesn’t have to be that deep. Maybe it doesn’t have to be all those things I wish it was. Maybe I don’t need to obsess and worry over defending how I feel about something.
Maybe sometimes I just need to be okay with enjoying a dumb video game, flaws and all.
There's a realism to the pre-Awakening FE that I really admire. The franchise has always been Anime, don't get me wrong. There's gonna be the occasional demon king and dragon war here and there. But the characters really tend to avoid too many trappings. There's a quiet fact of life to them. There's whole backstories you can only find in certain supports and quiet sort of tragedies you might not ever find. Most of your party is ordinary people. You aren't repeating the same character beats over and over. Its soothing.
But honestly, the stand out star is L'arachel. A loud, boastful woman yelling about her holy purpose to smite out evil. You think she'll be annoying on the first impression. But she charmed me really quickly as this lovable narcissist character. Its a hard character beat to land, but there's something endearing about someone running around going "I'm the best in the world and therefore you, my friend, are also the best by association." Papyrus Undertale is probably the best example, but its a winning formula. Her support chain with the main girl is also just the gayest shit in the world, with L'arachel chilling out her persona for a little to genuinely, truly bond with someone. It shows you how she can operate outside of those egotistic moments and be a real person for a while.
Fire Emblem games are pretty neat, I think. Just very charming and fun.
But honestly, the stand out star is L'arachel. A loud, boastful woman yelling about her holy purpose to smite out evil. You think she'll be annoying on the first impression. But she charmed me really quickly as this lovable narcissist character. Its a hard character beat to land, but there's something endearing about someone running around going "I'm the best in the world and therefore you, my friend, are also the best by association." Papyrus Undertale is probably the best example, but its a winning formula. Her support chain with the main girl is also just the gayest shit in the world, with L'arachel chilling out her persona for a little to genuinely, truly bond with someone. It shows you how she can operate outside of those egotistic moments and be a real person for a while.
Fire Emblem games are pretty neat, I think. Just very charming and fun.
2013
I often struggle with abstract stories and ideas. A childhood of Montana education systems and Nostalgia Critic videos have sort of poisoned my mind to largely view text as literally as possible. At the same time, I really treasure the unexplained in stories. Its hard as a writer to leave something up to interpretation, but it adds a layer of discussion and analysis to a work that I think so many stories tend to lack.
The idea of Games As Art is a hard topic because it slams right into that question of what exactly makes something art. I'm not looking to point fingers at any group of people online, so I'll just fill in David Cage as my strawman. Your David Cage types think the Games As Art question is all about creating something that everyone loves and adores without thinking too much deeper than that. I generally tend to imagine art needs to serve a purpose. An argument, an idea. But that's not fair either, forcing a requirement that a story shouldn't be beholden to. Maybe I don't know how to define art. Maybe I'm not supposed to.
I don't know how to define Kentucky Route Zero either. Its an ambitious story that somehow feels low-scale despite the full reach of its ideas. So much of the story leaves itself to your own imagination. Building up characters and backstories to your own leisure. You aren't controlling everything per se, but you are shaping things. Interpreting them. Its not a game where choices matter or change things. You can't stop the direction of the story. You can't keep every character safe. But... your choices still matter. It matters in the sense that you made those choices. They matter to you.
Tl:dr
The critically acclaimed game is good and made me cry.
The idea of Games As Art is a hard topic because it slams right into that question of what exactly makes something art. I'm not looking to point fingers at any group of people online, so I'll just fill in David Cage as my strawman. Your David Cage types think the Games As Art question is all about creating something that everyone loves and adores without thinking too much deeper than that. I generally tend to imagine art needs to serve a purpose. An argument, an idea. But that's not fair either, forcing a requirement that a story shouldn't be beholden to. Maybe I don't know how to define art. Maybe I'm not supposed to.
I don't know how to define Kentucky Route Zero either. Its an ambitious story that somehow feels low-scale despite the full reach of its ideas. So much of the story leaves itself to your own imagination. Building up characters and backstories to your own leisure. You aren't controlling everything per se, but you are shaping things. Interpreting them. Its not a game where choices matter or change things. You can't stop the direction of the story. You can't keep every character safe. But... your choices still matter. It matters in the sense that you made those choices. They matter to you.
Tl:dr
The critically acclaimed game is good and made me cry.
Despite having never finished a Disaster Report game, I love this franchise a lot. It’s the exact kind of niche, jank nonsense I’m a complete sucker for. Ridiculous melodrama, goofy acting, poorly animated visuals… it’s got it all! After the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, however, it seemed likely that the franchise was dead. Studio Irem shut down and it’s devs left to make studio Granzilla. The PS2 era was over and these kinds of goofy C-tier games didn’t have a space to exist anymore.
Which is why it’s kind of stunning this game exists at all, much less is as compelling as it is.
The ThorHighHeels video review covers the topic in much more detail and I’ll hit a lot of the same points here, but I need to convey my thoughts down anyway or I’ll melt. Even so, I highly recommend checking his analysis out.
Like all Disaster Report games, the set-up is straightforward. There’s a disaster. You need to survive it. Gather resources, make ethical decisions, press a button to brace for earthquakes. Previous entries often involved a vast conspiracy, with some villain creating an artificial flood or earthquake for their own evil ends.
Disaster Report 4 sheds that angle though and goes for a quiet character drama. The disaster is natural. There’s no mastermind. It’s just you and thousands of others trying to survive an awful situation. You can tell that the 2011 disaster actually impacted how the team was approaching these stories. Rather than a lot of high-octane chases, a lot of the game is about traveling around and visiting different tragedies or morality plays. You find people price gouging on emergency supplies or using the chaos to support their own vices. You can also find communities binding together and cutting down old barriers in favor of overcoming these tremendous odds.
I think the most striking, and probably controversial, sequence of the game is the Miracle Water subplot on Day 4. You’ve reached an elementary school that’s been turned into a shelter. But the community is distrustful of outsiders, particularly foreigners. Immigrants from outside the country are forced to sleep in the parking lot and the playground rather than indoors with the others. After grabbing some water and helping some of these children, rumors start to spread about the “Miracle Water.” Before long, before you can stop it, you’re being hailed as a messiah by those same racist community members. The game never lets you correct them but it’s hard not to see an advantage in keeping up the con. They’re giving you food to give to the children. They’re letting outsiders sleep indoors. If you’re playing an immoral play through, you can even get a sailboat out of it to escape from the city. And people are happy. Is it that bad a lie?
Things break bad eventually and the chaos that emerges is genuinely upsetting. You’re chased out of the shelter and one of the immigrants is brutally assaulted by the angry mob. It’s horrifying and sickening and it left an awful pit in my stomach that AAA games haven’t ever done to me. Until the epilogue section, I was actually pretty sure he was murdered. While not being able to stop the lie could be annoying, the lack of control makes it more effective as an extreme action somewhat might take in upsetting circumstances. It’s a genuinely engaging story about how desperate people buy into cults and myths, a story of racism, and about the stress of disaster. When an actual villain does emerge in the climax, their motives and beliefs seem more believable because of plots like that. The villain commits some horrible crimes, and justifies it to themselves by pointing to angry mobs of normal people like we’ve just seen. “These people seem civilized, but it’s no different from the war zones I grew up in. Distrust of outsiders, selfish behavior, falling for cons out of desperation… it’s all the same”
But even with how bleak that sounds, this is a light game in the end. While you can do horrible things, the game actually gives you plenty of ways to turn those bad actions into good deeds. In fact, that’s encouraged for a player that wants to see everything. Steal thousands of dollars from a cult? Pay off people’s loans, save the orphanage, support communities. It’s also still a VERY silly game. You can run around in a chef or superhero or whatever costume through all these scenes. You can convince a con artist that you’re Mary Crawford. You can blackmail the mayor to change the game’s title, which permanently changes the loading screens to “Disaster Report 5?” The optional epilogue becomes a fighting game in the climax and the protag finishes it up saying “oh the ending song is playing.” Even with its shift to a character drama, the game hasn’t left its roots.
There’s a couple narrative threads that don’t ultimately go anywhere as part of the game’s chaotic nature. A subplot about a shady business only wraps up in the epilogue. The epilogue is packaged with the main switch copies, but it looks like the PC and PS4 version has the epilogue as paid dlc. Truly bizarre choice.
A brief confession. If a Switch game wasn’t made by an indie studio, I probably pirated it. I won’t explain how. 13 Sentinels, Kirby, and Animal Crossing I bought legally, the latter mainly for online services. Otherwise, I really try to avoid paying $60 for a game.
But… I might go legally buy this? I don’t know if or when I’d play this again, but this game just stuck with me in such a way that I feel like I want it on my shelf in a permanent way. It’s such a fascinating experience.
2023
My family traveled a lot for work. Flying from state to state, resting in a variety of hotel rooms. Back in the early 00s, some hotel rooms came with game systems. For $10 an hour, you could play from a short selection of N64 or Gamecube games. In the 2010s, these would be replaced with PS3s and you would have to rent from a nearby Redboxes. And by that point, my brother had his Xbox he'd lug across the country and I had my DS. But those 00s were a very specific era for us in hotel gaming. My brother often got frustrated with wasting any precious second because there was such a hard financial limit to how far we could play. I was well aware that my parents were never going to approve anything past the $20 mark. But I couldn't help but dither around in these worlds. The first two hours of Paper Mario 64 and TTYD are permanently etched into my mind. I remember every corner, every NPC conversation, every polygonal line and invisible wall. Its impossible for me to be objective when it comes to Paper Mario.
Which is partly why this game hit such a strange euphoria for me.
TTYD64 primarily involves adding TTYD mechanics into 64. That's already a great sales pitch. The gameplay flows smoother and there's more intent to unravel in how you approach the game. Accounting for partner health and additional badges adds such an important spice to the game's feel. I feel like I'm planning more than before and making considerations on top of that.
But elDexter and his modding team go above and beyond. To unlock the new badges or upgrades, they aren't content to simply give those skills to you. Instead, new areas are carefully crafted into this game's world. And suddenly, my perfect memory of this game runs up against entire new ideas. A hole in the ground that didn't exist before, a crack in the wall, a new path in the forest, a back alley in the shopping district. Filled with puzzles or characters or even recreated TTYD level screens, there's so much elaborate care in this game. Its not front-loaded or back-loaded, its carefully measured out across the game's entire length.
The game has other important features, things that ease the game's pace. Difficulty modes, cutscene skipping, randomizers, challenge modes, New Game +. All carefully built to provide more to a game people love. To a game I love. You can truly feel how deeply the team cared about this game and wanted to provide every bit of polish possible. Just like me, they could play this game a million times and still find joy in discovering something new.
I can't be objective about anything Paper Mario. Its carved into my soul. Seeing other people who feel the same way leaves a special mark in my heart. It doesn't matter if this mod rules or if it sucks (hint: it rules). That feeling of pure creative joy is gonna stick with me for a long time. Worth the price of admission for that.
Which is partly why this game hit such a strange euphoria for me.
TTYD64 primarily involves adding TTYD mechanics into 64. That's already a great sales pitch. The gameplay flows smoother and there's more intent to unravel in how you approach the game. Accounting for partner health and additional badges adds such an important spice to the game's feel. I feel like I'm planning more than before and making considerations on top of that.
But elDexter and his modding team go above and beyond. To unlock the new badges or upgrades, they aren't content to simply give those skills to you. Instead, new areas are carefully crafted into this game's world. And suddenly, my perfect memory of this game runs up against entire new ideas. A hole in the ground that didn't exist before, a crack in the wall, a new path in the forest, a back alley in the shopping district. Filled with puzzles or characters or even recreated TTYD level screens, there's so much elaborate care in this game. Its not front-loaded or back-loaded, its carefully measured out across the game's entire length.
The game has other important features, things that ease the game's pace. Difficulty modes, cutscene skipping, randomizers, challenge modes, New Game +. All carefully built to provide more to a game people love. To a game I love. You can truly feel how deeply the team cared about this game and wanted to provide every bit of polish possible. Just like me, they could play this game a million times and still find joy in discovering something new.
I can't be objective about anything Paper Mario. Its carved into my soul. Seeing other people who feel the same way leaves a special mark in my heart. It doesn't matter if this mod rules or if it sucks (hint: it rules). That feeling of pure creative joy is gonna stick with me for a long time. Worth the price of admission for that.