The coolest thing about this game is that the act of finishing it is a smokescreen. If you actually went all the way to the end, and did everything, I salute you, but the real point for most is to stop playing the campaign and pretty much spend all your time using the custom workouts or something that feels right for you. To go at your own pace.

The amazing heartfelt purpose is simply to establish a routine, pushing you on, congratulating you, giving tool tips and etc. just to get you into a workout mindset. With enough body positivity I was able to come back and establish what I need to do, giving myself a full regimen to stick to for the past week or so now. The gamey part falls away, now earnestly happy to just let you use it to your heart's content. Feels great.

It’s really incredible how much you can accomplish within a genre space with what feels like very little to work with if you’re only willing to step outside of convention even just a little bit. There’s a commonly tossed off criticism of modern AAA games that is often deployed unthinkingly or without proper elaboration, that they “look like HBO shows” or like Hollywood blockbusters, with the understanding that most Hollywood blockbusters these days look like shit even as they dominate pop culture. I’m guilty of using this shorthand myself. I think when people say this it doesn’t mean that it’s bad inherently for video games to pull from other mediums for filmic inspiration, only that it’s bad to unthinkingly chase trends and replicate the aesthetics of things that are popular despite an absence of actual artistic intent or merit behind the inspiration beyond that. I actually think that it is generally cool and good to take overt influence from your inspirations if you pull it off. Across its disparate chapters, Live A Live not only pulls popular tropes and story structures from the genres it flits between, but more than once openly, probably actionably lifts scenarios directly from popular movies and tv shows. It does so with aplomb, and the game is better for it. It steals these things and adapts them to the strengths of the formats of 90s Square Enix JRPGs and this is the key difference between wholesale merging the plots of Every Toku Show From the 70s through 94 and Akira and something like the way we talk about your average modern Sony Studios game. There's a lot more intentionality in the selections and the implementations here even as the actual references and stylistic touches are a LOT more overt.

But it’s not JUST that one chapter of this game is Just Alien Plus 2001 A Space Odyssey, it’s also that the game knows when to mess with the structural conventions of RPGs, and, wisely, that is Almost All The Time. Of the seven main chapters of the game, only two of them even remotely resemble a typically structured RPG, with regular combat encounters, story interludes, equipment, etc. And even then, one is set in caveman times and playfully communicates its small story entirely through pantomime. Each of the seven chapters is set in a different time period and the wide array of settings is utilized to get really playful with the verb sets without ever actually changing the fact that you interface with the game via traditionally JRPG means.

For example, the kung-fu themed chapter has essentially no true combat encounters, focusing on the story of an elderly master finding, selecting, and beginning to train three possible successors to his martial art. A couple times you beat up some like, muggers, but they go down in one shot. The combat screen is also used during training sessions with the students, and the attacks you use on them most frequently will be the ones that they learn. As you engage in more and more training sessions the students’ stats increase rapidly and it starts to become evident that this powerful master who mops the floor easily with the local town’s shitty rival dojo’s riff raff, is actually a frail man nearing the end of his life. This is communicated as well via the stats screen and the fact that by session 12 Li or Yuan MIGHT almost get you to take a knee as it is by the ever-more-frequent scenes of the master huffing and puffing when he gets up in the morning. And that’s all there is as far as combat goes! You COULD grind, I guess, in ONE zone in the map, but it’s out of the way of all of the story scenes, there are only like five non-random enemies there, and they don’t even spawn in if you ever have to walk through that part of the map for a story reason. And that makes it all the more effective when finally, at the end of this chapter, the water boils over and the drama arrives and the tension breaks into an explosion of real violence. The climax is way more impactful than it would have been if you had been fighting tigers and bandits as you walked up and down the mountain paths for the two hours leading up to it. Every chapter is like this, and three of them are potentially devoid of combat entirely if you feel like it.

Even when the game is at its most tedious, in the two chapters that lean the hardest into normal JRPG conventions, there are always strong aesthetics (for example Yoko Shimomura is here doing the definitive, standout work of her early career in a decade that includes osts for street fighter 2, Mario RPG, Legend of Mana and Parasite Eve), and even excellent encounter design to compensate for the fact that you’re participating in The Grind. The Mecha chapter is mostly made up of encounters where there is one weak enemy you can take out that will end the encounter immediately and get full experience but as you level up the pattern, numbers, and strength of his robot minions will become stronger or more complicated, which not only makes getting to the weak leader harder but also increases the risk/reward present where if you DO kill all the robot minions first you get items that upgrade your own robot party member, which is the only way to power him up because he doesn’t level up via experience points like your human characters. It’s a layer of tactical depth that isn’t present in most of the rest of the game’s encounters (some of them though! The ninja chapter is a notable exception and the wrestling chapter is entirely comprised of intense combat strategy puzzles with no play outside combat whatsoever – something for everyone!) but usually isn’t necessary because of the prioritization of other shit than combat.

Live A Live was directed by Takashi Tokita, most famous for his work as lead designer and/or director on Final Fantasy IV, Chrono Trigger, and Parasite Eve, as well as SPECIFICALLY just event planning for Final Fantasy VII, and the scenario design was largely handled by Nobuya Inoue, famous for, well, this, and then for leaving Square a couple years later to cofound Brownie Brown and direct Magical Vacation, Magical Starsign, and Mother 3 before that company was tragically entirely subsumed into Nintendo’s first party support studio network. Clearly there is a design lineage here, with both of these creative leads interested in playing with the form and format of the JRPG – making games where atmosphere, narrative, and aesthetics take precedent over combat design or length. A lot of that DNA is present here in Live A Live, and it’s very telling that these guys, even an up-and-coming big shot like Tokita was made to exercise these design sensibilities in Square’s comparatively lower budget, smaller in scope, unpopular-even-in-the-country-it-got-released-in project of 1994, compared to the much more traditionally designed and obviously mass appeal Final Fantasy VI. I’m not a young adult in Japan in 1994 so I can’t say how much of this is a natural progression of popularity given Final Fantasy’s momentum as a series vs Square actively choosing to abandon this one to the wolves. Probably a little of both. Hopefully now that it’s getting a proper international release with the upcoming HD-2D remake, it’ll get some of the recognition I think it sorely deserves.

It's not that this game didn’t have any influence, but it definitely feels to me like that came more from the general interests and careers of its staff than from explicit love for Live A Live, which is a shame, because even with a shockingly, borderline offensively tedious final chapter this is easily, without question the most formally interesting and simply pleasurable traditional JRPG I’ve ever played. Games don’t get ANY better than Live A Live. A classic. A titan. Honestly shocking to me that they kept making these after this.

the xeno series has always struck a precarious balance between it's twin influences: contemporary anime tropes, and heady paperback golden-age science fiction. xeno has always been an incredibly derivative series that - when it is good - makes up for it's complete lack of originality with it's overwhelming enthusiasm for it's influences, and I think part of my continuing disappointment with The Direction xenoblade went after X was that it stopped pulling from 2010: The Year We Make Contact with the same fervor with which it pulled from Mobile Fighter G Gundam and instead went all in on aping the sensibilities and attitudes of repulsive but incredibly successful anime like Sword Art Online and Fate: Grand Order.

Xenoblade Chronicles X then, makes one last desperate stand for the paperback sci-fi side of the equation, leaning far harder into that side of the pendulum on every level of it's design and narrative intentions than any other game in the series. The common problem running through all three currently existing Xenoblade games - besides their choice of outfits for the girls, I mean - is that they are very bad at teaching the player how to play them, and I think X might be the most egregious example. It's this, more than any other element of the game, that I think kept people from accessing what is - for my money - the most narratively and mechanically accomplished game in the entire series.

Because, like I said, XCX isn't an anime. The main plot is leisurely and slight, not much happens except at the very end, and is mostly a vehicle for allowing the player to access the real narrative meat of the game - the myriad side quests that explore the game's sci-fi ideas, the world of Mira, and it's eclectic inhabitants. If that structure sounds familiar, it's probably because you've read a few of the golden-age sci-fi novels that director Tetsuya Takahashi is clearly so fond of. Looking at the audience the series has today, and even the one built up by the original game (or LPs of said game, XC1 standing alongside Earthbound and Persona 5 as JRPGs that developed a huge fandom through the lens of one or two big streamers/youtubers rather than solely the game itself) I don't think it's unreasonable to make the claim that many fans who derided XCX for "not having a story" didn't exactly have the framework to engage with this approach, and it's a shame the game didn't do enough to ease them into it.

In terms of writing, X is the best Xenoblade game. I don't even think it's close. It's certainly the most thematically ambitious, with the weirdest, thorniest ideas, and least reliant on characters constructed wholesale from clichés. I like quite a few characters in Xenoblade 1, but do I find any of them interesting? Not really. They're broadly-drawn cartoon people, and they work in that context, but XCX has characters that I thought quite deeply about, characters whose inner lives were compelling to me. it's themes are unique and compelling, exploring what "humanity" as a concept could mean divorced from our past lives, our home planet, and even our very bodies. The Mimeosome is the entire Xenoseries' best idea, a frighteningly rich concept that pairs beautifully with the questions mecha so often raises about the relationship between the self, the body, and the society in which it inhabits. But almost all of this is in the side-quests and heart-to-hearts, or doled out in piecemeal over an absurdly long game, and I can't exactly blame people for not getting to that stuff. XCX makes it difficult to access the parts of itself that are truly remarkable, and that's such a shame.

The combat system is the same: it has truly cavernous depth and options and customization, but by the end of my original over 150 Hour-long playthrough, I felt like I had only just got a handle on the tangled web of systems and mechanics and stats. It doesn't so much as throw you into the deep end but throw you into the mariana trench. But once you do crack it? Once you have an armory of Skells tooled out with well-thought out builds, each named and given color-schemes after your favorite mechs? It feels incredible. XCX is a majestic mechanical mountain to climb, and while the view from the top is incredible, I could have done with a few ski-lifts on the way up here.

I completely understand why people dislike this game, why it was almost uniformly seen as a steep downgrade from it's predecessor, and why, with a sense of palpable resignation, the influence pendulum was swung completely back to Full Anime for future instalments. But I can't help but love this game. It's ideas are so genuinely thought-provoking that, half a decade after I wrapped up my playthrough, I still find myself turning it over in my head, thinking about what it tried to say and what it tried to do. The post-credits scene is maybe my favorite one in any video game or film, and completely set my mind on fire with it's implications both for a phantom Xenoblade Chronicles Double X and the adventure that just lay behind me. It's a deeply flawed game, one that could be improved immensely, but it will always have my heart, over it's more straightforwardly numbered siblings. It represents best the wild, wrongheaded, idiotic ambition that defines why I still, on some level, care about Xenogames, even if I think they have about a 50/50 track record at this point of Good to Total Shit, even if they will never, ever be normal about women, because I can't help but look at X and think "shine on, you crazy motherfucker".

I love it. I love being a BLADE!

Oh and the soundtrack rips so fucking hard you have no idea. Easily the best of the three, as long as you aren't someone who's phone is full of "EPIC ANIME BATTLE MUSIC" mp3s!! All those who think the NLA themes are bad are weak and will not survive the winter

preparing my finest, largest pair of clownshoes for anyone who tries to use the update that adds new apartments that you'll spend maybe 1 minute in each to make the one millionth attempt to rehabilitate this game. all a stable framerate will do to this game is let you see crystal clear how fucking ugly it is in attitude and design.

please just let this shit, racist, transphobic game made by overworked and abused developers die the death it so richly deserves to. there are so many pieces on this website and elsewhere either going for an infuriatingly smug centrist "both extremes are bad" read or desperately trying to resuscitate CP2077 by putting outrageous effort into finding whatever gold exists in the salted earth of these awful hills and it just isn't worth it on any level. i promise you, every second of that effort would be better served on almost every other game.

I took a college course titled "Creative Writing: Virtual Worlds" expecting to have a hyper-focused class dedicated to writing about augmented reality and shit like The Matrix. Turns out, it was a class where the students carried out assignments in Second Life.

The first rule of the class was that Second Life was not a video game—it was just as real as your "first life." Upon my birth in this virtual world, I was lost and confused. I entered the nearest building to my initial spawn. My eyes were assaulted by a collage of genitalia. Mirroring the myriad *** before me, the walls were closing in. I felt myself gasping for air. Luckily, I carried over an attribute from my first life into my Second Life—the power of flight. Clipping through the ceiling, I narrowly escaped my **** riddled demise. I was late to meet with my class at my professor's estate.

As I sat in my chair sideways, legs out through the hole in the arm, my professor called upon me. "BongoMan27, are you paying attention?" My friend from outside the class I had snuck into her domain, presently standing six meters tall with his face in the window behind her, staring ominously into the farthest reaches of my soul or lack thereof. From this point forward, she told the class about her hobbies. The most noteworthy hobby came in the form of rescuing animals. The professor then asked my friend and fellow classmate if he owned any pets. He went on to discuss his two dogs and cat that his family had. As he concluded sharing, the professor told us that she, too, had dogs. "Here comes one now."

A virtual dog model spawned into the room.

i was talking with people today about my profound lack of interest in the upcoming "Dark Souls is now OPEN WORLD" game Elden Ring and it led me to think about Burnout: Paradise. this game was made before it became a trend, an expectation, to move your previously linear, level-based series into the open-world and it shows, because in stark contrast to games like Halo: Infinite or Grand Theft Auto V, Paradise's open world is actually purposeful in a sense that suggests that the open world was part of a wider design goal, rather than an existing series trying to cram itself into an open-world format because that is The Done Thing.

because Paradise doesn't really play like other burnout games. sure, the core tenets of driving dangerously to build up boost to hit ludicrous speeds is still there, but the game is utterly transformed by how races are built. there aren't circuits in this game, not in the sense we traditionally think of it, anyway: instead, each race begins at a specific intersection and ends at one of eight end points, and you can take whatever route you want across the vast complex supercircuit that is Paradise City to reach it. burnout paradise is essentially an enormous tesseract of a racing game, one gigantic race that you are constantly learning and improving on, where each event has you creating your own paths and routes to victory, filling out an ever more complete understanding of Paradise City until you know it's streets better than you know your hometown's. paradise embraces openness in every part of it's design, and you'd think that wouldn't be notable in the open-world space, but it is.

in Red Dead Redemption 2, the open-world essentially ceases to exist the moment you talk to someone and enter one of the game's interminable missions. in Halo: Infinite and Far Cry, the vast map of the game essentially acts as a glorified level select for a set of activities, large and small, that comprise the existing gameplay loop of those franchises. the open-world is an illusion, a marketing point, a buzzword. it exists so someone on an E3 presentation can press a button and phwoar! wow! look how far we can zoom out on this map! but you're doing all the same things in the same ways as you did in all the other games, usually less interestingly because the designs of these linear systems and the concept of a vast, freely explorable worlds cannot collide and leave both intact.

to be an open-world game, Burnout Paradise had to change. it had to be fundamentally different from prior Burnouts to such an extent that there exist many fans of the earlier Burnout games who do not like Paradise at all, and vice versa. i happen to think paradise is great, but it is great in a way largely divorced from why Burnout 3: Takedown was great. and I think that's a good thing. it demonstrates that the team at criterion used the open-world to create a genuinely transformative experience. if Elden Ring or Sonic Frontiers or however many upcoming games in which your favorite franchises decide haphazardly graft themselves onto a Breath of the Wild map end up great, they will be great because they allow themselves to transform, and race out into a brand new world, rather than trying to inflict the old one onto it.

"A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one." Sometimes a game is 5 different games. Maze Spelunking? Box Puzzles? Bank Robbery? Tomb Raiding? Cow Abduction? Cooking? Torture chamber? We got it all, smella! Tron Bonne is based and so is her game.

I love the servbots!!! Every time they say "Yes, Miss Tron!" I mark out. Me, too, guys. Tron Bonne rules. She's such a dork but she's also a bad bitch. And she built this little bots. Loyal friends with empty yellow heads. I know I'm about to get cliched but fuck it. Cliches exist for a reason. Tron Bonne is a fucking mech queen and they stan. If you've never wanted to protect the cinnamon roll, you're lying to yourself. We say "smol" not just because its a meme but also because sometimes a friend really is a smol. And the servbots are smol. They're just tiny idiots who wanna help!!! What kind of evil pirate would build such silly little guys? Are they intentionally such goofballs? Were they supposed to be evil and just ended up like a little peachypies? How much yogurt is in their processors? I want no harm to come to them. When the mean bird robots say mean things to them I get angry and am ready to destroy the mean birds. Do not be rude. They're proof machine intelligence is a good idea. They just smile and say "yay" and I think that is a good thing. When people compliment them they nearly cry. They're trying so fucking hard and they can't do anything right. They can't do anything right and when they do do something right it's a triumph, a beautiful miracle that need be heralded and rewarded by trumpets, by a symphony that would make the sun weep. Dumb idiot babies. They're doing their best, please for the love of god be nice to them.

There is a tendency in lots of games these days to focus on one thing and doing that one thing well. It can be a good design strategy. But sometimes? Sometimes a game is 5 games. And sometimes that's good, too.

I miss Lionhead.

I understand that's a controversial sentence to start with. Peter Molyneux has long been a snake oil salesman, and his latest pivot to crypto is just one of a million swindles he's pulled. And while he was still guilty of plenty of egregious shit at his 2000s development studio, Lionhead, there was a good run there where Molyneux and the team in Guildford knocked out some absurdly ambitious titles.

And while we're here to talk about Fable 3 (which, I promise, we will get to) I think the company's history can shed some light on the 2000s Liberal Mind.

Bear with me.

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- The First Roar -
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Lionhead Studios was established in 1997 after EA bought Bullfrog in the early 90s. Peter Molyneux, designer of Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper, was dissatisfied with corporate meddling in Bullfrog's affairs, and left to start a new studio. Bullfrog would close just four years later, in 2001. Development started on Black and White shortly after the studio's establishment and was also released in 2001. A direct descendant of Molyneux's Populous and the most literal definition of a God Game you can imagine, Black and White was an RTS about building influence for you, a new god. The way you did this was largely up to you, and (in what would become something of a hallmark for Lionhead) was remarkably free-reign for the time. Performing miracles, satisfying villager requests, keeping them fed and healthy, and completing sidequests would expand your influence through praise and reverence, leading to you being perceived as a benevolent god by your people. Conversely, should the mood take you, you can also pursue a darker path, waging war, crushing people, animals and buildings, expanding your rule through fear and hatred. This is where we see Molyneux's digital view of morality start to take shape - each action you take affects your moral standing, but (likely through technical necessity) context on your decision is never considered. If you steal food from your people to give it to someone more in need? That's bad, baby! Should have found it another way! Black and White would be followed by a sequel in 2005, which dropped much of the interesting godliness and focused instead on building and ordering your army - much like many other RTSes. The sequel was much less successful than the original and Black and White would not see another game.

Just three years later would come Fable. An action RPG for the original Xbox, Fable was also fascinated with morality, again promising the player could "be their own hero." An instant hit, it would go on to spawn two sequels, two spinoffs, a cancelled co-op free to play adventure, and most recently, a reboot from Playground Games. Fable stratified the organic moral choices from Black and White into more direct questions to the player, allowing you to pick a good, an evil or rarely, a "neutral" path. Again, context on choices was largely ignored and you're left with choices that can be boiled to "holier than though" action and "just murder someone for no reason" action. Still, this was 2004, and moral choices of any kind were pretty rare, so this was quite the novelty and Fable was a success. It is also the origin of the infamous "if you plant an acorn as a child it will grow to be a mighty oak tree over the course of the game" which was, of course, utter nonsense.

Releasing just a single month after Black and White 2, The Movies was a Theme Hospital type management sim focused on building a movie studio. The gimmick here was that you could actually direct those movies yourself, picking actors, costumes, themes, plot, etc. Again, remarkably amibitious, especially when those movies could be rendered out and saved to your hard drive - or directly uploaded to the game's own website, an entire year before Youtube was first live. Unfortuantely The Movies was again, perhaps too ambitious for its time, and it was not particularly well received. An expansion pack would be released in 2006, then the game was never heard from again.

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- Fable II -
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Fable II is truly beloved by many 360 owners. The best selling RPG for the console (outselling even Skyrim on the platform), II took the formula from Fable and chiselled it down to its purset qualities. Combat was simplified, assigning a type of combat (melee, ranged and magic) to a button each, and encouraging experimentation with combining them. The plot was a pretty straightforward telling of the hero's journey, but again involved moral choices akin to the first game's that impacted NPC perception of you. But perhaps Fable II's most well-remembered move was The Spire chapter. Before this chapter, the game was largely a carefree lark with a young protagonist, finding heros of legend and awakening true power - the standard stuff. The Spire shifts all that in a, frankly, unexpectedly horrifying fashion. The Spire is the big bad's plan to grant himself a wish, a Tower of Babel piercing the heavens that gets built over the course of the game. But you don't only see this happen from afar - the player character is taken there as forced labour, and you witness this work camp yourself. Over the course of the chapter, your character ages 7 years, maturing into grizzled adulthood, pivoting the tone of the game much darker. It's fair to say this move stuck with people, and it was clearly recognised within Lionhead as the standout moment of the game - because for Fable 3, they'd try and do the same thing, to an undeniably worse result.

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- The Game We're Here To Talk About -
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Fable 3 is about the child of Fable II's hero leading a rebellion and becoming a monarch, then ruling over Albion as a threat from an exotic foreign land encroaches. If you're reading that sentence and seeing immediate red flags, don't worry - you're not alone, and we'll get to it. But first, the central gimmick. The first half of Fable 3 plays out much the same way as Fable 2's - jolly along on an adventure, meet a bunch of people who'll help you out, make moral choices that don't really do much. Shoot things and stab things and spell things. The RPG mechanics are watered down, reducing levelling to a perk system - but they weren't that present in Fable 2 anyway, so it's not a massive loss. Once you've successfully led a rebellion, deposed your brother, and become the definitely democratically elected head of state, you're then faced with a number of Royal Decisions to make. These mostly consist of spending a bunch of the treasury to fulfill promises you made to the people who helped you, or breaking those promises to make cash money to build your defences for the coming threat. These decisions play out on the world itself, making changes to the landscape, the people, and their perception of you. At the end of the game, you spend all the money in the treasury, with the cash you managed to shore up going towards saving your citizens - the more you have, the more you save. If you're a benevolent ruler, then, your citizens will live a blessed life - then all die at the end of the year. If you're a tyrant, thery have a shit time for a year but all survive. Ooooh, choices!

I shouldn't have to say this, but this is neoliberalism at its most naked. While the game portrays itself as the story of a working class insurrection, this is immediately undercut by the insurrection being led by a royal. The insurrection has to be led by the royal, because the royal is a Medieval Jedi by birthright and so only they have the power to yadda yadda yadda. The leader of the working class in Bowerstone, Page, is a black woman, but you, the player, are the white saviour (there is no character customisation), and her work is ineffective until you come along. You venture over to Aurora, an analog for the middle east, and perform the same saviour narrative there. The Dwellers (wisely renamed from g*psys in Fable II) take you in at the game's kick-off, and sure enough, you're gonna save them too. Fable 3 is not the story of an insurrection. It is the dream of liberalism - everyone equally helping the privileged whites.

This shines through even more once you take the throne. The choices you make are comically opposed - will you open a school or enforce child labour? Will you retain a natural lake or drain it to mine for diamonds? - and naturally these are the only ways to make money within the framework of ruler, outside of a couple of day ending quests where you travel to a corner of the empire and steal an ancient treasure (Lionhead is British, by the way). But don't worry, gamers - you can donate your personal adventuring funds to the treasury to make up the cost. Unfortunately, the final cost of saving everyone is 6.5 million gold, far more than you could ever earn from adventuring alone. But don't worry again, gamers, for there is a solution to that problem too - the One True Profession, Landlordism.

Yes, Fable 3 is, underneath it all, a game spewing the virtues of being a landlord. The way to win the game is to buy every house, every business, and jack up the rent. Doing this will net you an income of nearly 200,000 gold every five minutes. It doesn't take long to save up the money you need to win with that kind of income - and hey, once you have, why bother dropping the prices? You need a 6 million pile to reach a silver key in your Sanctuary, after all.

I think this, combined with the flimsy moral choices, should have been an early warning sign for the kinds of swindles Molyneux would try and pursue in future. It's a pretty direct line from "landlords will save us all" to shilling NFTs in the liberal mind - because in the liberal mind, equity and morality are but tools to make more capital. Molyneux's g(r)ift of the gab - vast promises, overambitious development, condensing down to games that while impressive, were just games - would go on to produce Curiosity, a vampiric F2P game that promised to reward the person who reached the centre with a then unknown gift (at time of writing, the winner of that has still yet to receive their prize, that is, to be the "god" of Godus and receive some of its profits), and is now ostensibly producing Legacy, the NFT-utilising god game that has barely been mentioned since 2019.

Fable 3, then, is a fascinating curio - a relic of a once impressive studio, a pale imitation of its forebear, and an ill potent of what would follow.

3/5.

It's the streamlined, simplified, casualised Monster Hunter, and I still look at 99% of it like a dog looking at a sum. Endless menus that mean nothing to me, an item box full to the brim with icons I will never understand. I take on quests to unlock stickers that are immediately lost within the labyrinthine options. I will never see them. Where would I equip them? One of my several "shortcut" wheels? Who knows? During the final battle, I found myself asking "Which button do I use to attack with again?" by which I meant "Which combination of buttons do I use to ready my weapon to attack with again?" Sometimes I send the Argosy out. Why? I don't know.

But here's the thing. Name a game. Any game.
Monster Hunter Rise is better than that game.

Johoho!

what does it mean to "feel like Spider-Man"? after all, that's the refrain we heard time and time again upon the release of Spider-Man for the PS4, and it's the question that I couldn't get out of my head every time I thought about this game.

looking at the mechanics of the game doesn't really answer that question for me, mostly because a shocking amount of the experience of this game is simply lifted wholesale from the Batman Arkham games with precious little alteration. the combat, the surprisingly present stealth sections that involve isolating a group of enemies with a chronic neck injury that prevents them from looking even slightly Up, "detective" segments that entirely involve looking for a yellow line to follow, even an omnipresent voice in your ear feeding you constant info, it's all as it was all the way back in 2009's Arkham Asylum, mostly unaltered. indeed, these games themselves were lauded at the time for "making you feel like Batman" but not nearly to the same hyperbolic memetic extent as marvel's sony's kevin feige's ike perlmutter's spider-man does for the ultimate arachnid-boy. generally speaking I would not consider Spider-Man and Batman to be characters that share an enormous deal in common outside of the very basic concept of fighting criminals in an urban environment, and in many ways there is an argument to be made that spider-man is batman's antithesis. and yet, somehow, essentially the same mechanics that created an experience that made you Feel Like Batman has made a great many people Feel Like Spider-Man.

the one meaningful mechanic which differentiates this from Arkham (though, maybe not as much as it perhaps should given the zip-to-point mechanic is again lifted completely wholesale from Arkham City) is the web-swinging, and it's a useful point in elucidating what the mechanical experience of this game does. web-swinging in this game is pleasing, stunningly well-animated, highly responsive, and also completely effortless. it's a struggle to even call it a mechanic: it is almost completely on auto-pilot, with nothing more involved than successive presses of R2 seeing Miles swing, leap, run on walls, the navigational experience of Spider-Man swinging through a painfully detailed recreation of Manhattan reduced to a single button. much like Assassin's Creed's automated free-running that clearly inspired the rhythms of play here, web swinging in this game looks fantastic - especially on a twitter clip captured with the patented SonyTM PlayStationTM ShareTM ButtonTM - but mechanically vacuous to the point of non-existence.

comparisons to Spider-Man 2's (the 2004 game, not this, the second instalment of the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise, nor the upcoming Marvel's Spider-Man 2, the third game in the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise) much lauded web swinging are passé, I know, but indulge me for just a moment: web-swinging in that game was beloved because it was a system. It had depth, it had a skill ceiling, it had moves that were difficult to pull off and a learning curve that required familiarity with the mechanic. it was enough to make a game in and of itself, and indeed it largely did because the rest of Spider-Man 2 ranges from unremarkable to poor. i don't know if i would go as far to say that this system "made me feel like spider-man" but it was, at the very least, a systemisation of this aspect of the character in such a way that it made for a compelling gameplay experience.

spider-man PS4 has none of this. it's mechanics are intentionally stripped down to the point that essentially the entire game is about pressing buttons at the right time in response to on-screen stimuli, and I know all video games can be boiled down to that, but Marvel's Spider-Man comes pre-boiled: the illusion it creates is so wafer thin that even a minute of thought reveals the 4K smoke and mirrors for what they really are. contrary to the appeals to the fraught concept of immersion the phrase "makes you feel like spider-man" evokes, I've scarcely felt more painfully aware that I am a person sitting on a sofa, holding a controller, than when playing this. when your entire game is frictionless, there's nothing to hang onto, either.

there is one sense in which the gameplay experience of Marvel's Miles Morales succeeds in capturing the spirit of the character, and that's in how his new powers frequently dissolve tension in the gameplay, with his invisibility offering you a fast charging get-out-of-jail-free card if you mess up the stealth (if being the operative word here) and the way almost every fight will end with an overpowered Venom Blast.

indeed, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales often does feel like a Spider-Man comic, but rarely in ways I enjoy. After tremendous backlash from vocal fans at the time to "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" issue of Spider-Man, Stan Lee (who at this point was increasingly disconnected from the actual goings-on of the universe he helped create to the point that he only knew Gwen was dead when someone at a con asked if she would come back to life) decreed that Marvel Comics should avoid meaningful change, change that might alienate longtime fans or, more importantly, those who wished to turn marvel characters into lunchboxes and action figures and cartoons and movies, and instead only offer the illusion of change. while the obvious response to this is that Peter Parker could only be replaced by his clone, Ben Reily, for a short period of time before the gravity of the status quo would pull Peter Parker back into the starring role, it also had something of a side-effect, which is that as a universe where meaningful change is resisted and avoided, Marvel Comics as a whole has a reactionary and conservative worldview that gravitates towards it's baked-in assumptions and the presumed goodness of those assumptions.

in 2004's Civil War, Marvel Comics sided with the PATRIOT act. In 2008's Secret Invasion, Marvel Comics used evil religious extremist shapeshifting Skrulls who hide among us and could be friends, co-workers, countrymen plotting the destruction of earth as an analogy for islamic terrorism. In 2012's Avengers VS X-Men, five heroes empowered by a cosmic force change the world for the better, curing diseases, ending world hunger, only to have those changes be rejected as unnatural, and eventually are consumed by said cosmic power. In 2019's House of X/Powers of X, the X-Men founded a nationalistic ethnostate for mutants that is an explicit parallel for the apartheid state of Israel and sees this as a good thing.

Whatever form it may take, whatever illusions of change may, however briefly, be affected, Marvel Comics are bound to a reflection of our status quo that is essentially desirable, and a huge amount of Superhero comics are about reinforcing their own status quos as well as our own, with high-profile stories such as DC's Doomsday Clock ultimately being nothing more than desperate appeals to the supposed self-evident relevance and importance of the unchanging status of these characters. All of this does not even mention the aggressive copaganda of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, to the point where Captain Marvel was reproduced unaltered as propaganda for the US Air Force. Mainstream superheroes are always enforcers of the status quo, for good or for ill, but it's when the enforcement of that status quo comes up against depictions and discussions of the injustices of the real world that this becomes most uncomfortable.

There's a bit in this game, once you finish a side quest, where the camera pans up to a Black Lives Matter mural painted on the side of a building, and lingers there for just long enough to feel awkward. I don't object to the presence of this mural at all, but the direction decision here smacks as performative. It's not enough that the building is placed very prominently to ensure you can't miss it, but the game cranes itself to show you the image again, and the feeling of this can only really be described as the cinematography equivalent of "You know, I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could." It's desperate to demonstrate that it knows, it supports Black Lives Matter, but the functional reality of the rest of the game is aggressively at odds with what that movement is materially about.

I knew that the original 2018 Marvel's Spider-Man was in love with The Police but I can't describe how unprepared I still was for how aggressively conservative this game is. The story revolves around Miles Morales, while Peter Parker is on holiday to Generic Eastern Europeaistan, fighting against The Tinkerer and their evil plot to...destroy a product of an Evil Corporation that is giving people cancer. While at the eleventh hour they do contrive a reason why The Tinkerer's plan is #GoingTooFar, for most of the game there's actually no material reason for her to be in the wrong, and Miles Morales - and by extension, the game - is completely incapable of coming up with a single argument against her plan, simply resorting to "it's wrong! blowing things up is against the law!" or the classic "it's too risky! if even one person gets hurt that is too much!" said while Miles gives a Goon a severe concussion.

When I think of what Spider-Man means to me, what it is About, I think I'd describe it as the struggle to live up to an ideal of being our best selves, of always doing the right thing, in a world that makes that incredibly difficult to actually achieve, with our own personal failings and our endless conflicting responsibilities. In that sense, the Tinkerer, instrumentalized into meaningful action against an evil corporation by the death of a loved one, and struggling with how that affects her personal life and the relationships she has, is far more of a Spider-Man than Miles Morales in this game could ever be, given that his job is one of endless praise and assumed goodness facilitated by a hilarious uncritical depiction of the gig economy that sees the responsibility of Spider-Man morphed into a Deliveroo hustle grindset that always makes sure to respect Our Boys In Blue. How can something that loves the Police and hates direct action this much possibly claim to believe that Black Lives Matter?

In attempting to provide an "All-New, All-Different" up-to-date Spider-Man without making any effort to change the underlying assumptions it has about the world in which it lives, all this game does is expose how out of touch and outdated this whole concept is when the illusion of change fades away. Everything about this game is completely surface-level, all a well-presented illusion of Being Spider-Man that breaks the instant you think about it in any way, and you find yourself sitting your sofa, with your expensive toy for privileged people, pressing buttons to make the copaganda continue to play out in front of you.

I finished Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I had a perfectly ok time. I was rarely frustrated and occasionally found it charming and visually enthralling. I liked stuff with Miles' uncle. It also made me feel like everything about this style of game and this type of story had hit an evolutionary dead-end and had nowhere to go but running on the same treadmill, forever.

So, yes. It made me feel like Spider-ManTM.

checked out the ign walkthrough to see how far through this chore i was and almost started crying when i saw the video linked for "how to find the infinity gauntlet easter egg" guys i can't do it

this is literally stale white bread in video game form like i don't get it!! what do we all like so much about this?? i see the upgrade menu and the quest log and all the useless extra skills and my eyes glaze over instantly. i literally have not felt less of a drive to keep playing something since i trudged through bioshock infinite. this thing is 20 hours long apparently and even with my relatively generous amount of free time i absolutely cannot imagine getting through all of that

also the combat is barely functional and contextually boring as shit, i've been spoiled by other games that make an effort to characterise their enemies bc seriously - what is there to be engaged by while i'm fighting generic troll #8 or a fucking stone golem. at the worst of times there's absolutely nothing here

i'm gonna go retreat back to my cave. fallout 2 here we come babeyyyyy!!!