Fresh off Crash 2 and 3 and after enjoying Jak 1 thoroughly at the time of its release, begging and pleading with my parents to let me play this game because it, unlike its predecessor, (gasp) had a T-rating, "I'm gonna kill Praxis" made a psychic impact crater on my 8-year-old brain
I eventually wore down my Dad into buying it for me while we were sitting at Burger King
I could barely get this game so you know sure as shit my parents wouldn't even let me be in the same room as GTA, which made anything like it a sort of occult forbidden object
Open-world games were chaos, and I lived in a world of order, manicured for such objects and selected out, but this game got through
With all the effortlessly edgy aesthetic of a non-existent cool older brother, Naughty Dog's voice-cracking awkward puberty had everything I could've wanted at the time, like a character from a game I already played suddenly talking and having a cool SSJ transformation going absolutely sicko mode, it had police state dystopia, it had a fat guy in a hoverchair, cars, guns, and even Swear Words
I don't know if I dare revisit this game because it might not be as cool as it was in my memory
Jak 3 was received eagerly, preordered (!) and devoured with day-one pride, Jak X blew for reasons my young mind was incapable of articulating despite CTR being evergreen, and then Naughty Dog really dropped off and never made a game that would keep me hooked enough to finish it ever again
Unkarted remains unseen to this day, let alone The Laps of Us

"lf only you could talk to these creatures, then perhaps you could try and make friends with them, form alliances... Now, that would be interesting." ~ Albert Einstein
Sephonie is the mythical game that he was alluding to. We found it!

Cinematic platformers like Another World and Flashback finally make their 2D → 3D jump in spectacular form with Sephonie, which dares to imagine if your favorite cult-classic PS2 platformer had actual pathos, global concerns, and character development
It possesses environments with a haunting atmosphere like if the first Jak & Daxter game grew up by 20 years, attained a respectable career as a biologist, and took MDMA.
Achingly sentimental, but that's a good thing, you fucks are too irony-poisoned nowadays, toss out your depression memes into the recycle bin and try to form an actual bond with your fellow humans, Sephonie will teach you how
Memory is a fickle and suggestive thing, loss even moreso, and this game engages with these topics in such a way that you form an ONYX Mindshare with the themes and your own memories comingle with those of the main trio, where your memories sync with theirs and where they differ and the cognitive distortions that you four have in-common

HQ may have coincidentally landed on three kids of similar background to steer this ship but I truly think that this game describes memories in such a way that everybody will find something here to relate to, and if LGBT themes and the struggle to maintain a sense of Taiwanese identity in the wake of generational assimilation and a hegemonic unpersoning of the whole country is something of personal significance to you, that'll just magnify its emotional impact
Anodyne 2 was an easy 5/5 and Sephonie proves that Analgesic's talent is not a fluke and that they have a bright future ahead of them, can't wait to see what they come up with next

This game reminds me of the time I went to the National Park with my ex and his friends and surrounded ourselves with nature while I kept watch over his friends doing psychedelics. I did not take the psychedelics. Sephonie makes a compelling argument that maybe I should have.

Sephonie lays bare the truth, that the entire unabridged tale of human history is told by fragments of a whole, when we hurt others, we hurt ourselves, because we're kin, but we're not just kin, we are each other
Identity is important but it's also just a thin A.T. Field protecting our identity from becoming part of the same juice as every other person alive or who will ever live
Every part of the island harmonizes with every other part, because they intuitively understand the one truth, that being a cohesion we as humans have never been able to achieve because we're all screaming out for someone to love us and praise us and see us for who we are to ourselves, we lack the ability to reckon with our shared personhood because we're caged in our own skin and caged by our own egos, so when are we going to take the damn hint marker?
Ashes to ashes, Dust to Dust

"People killin' people dyin', children hurtin', I hear them cryin', could you practice what you preach? Would you turn the other cheek?" ~ William James Adams, Jr.

Probably the best conversation piece in my collection, which is saying a lot, Terrifying 9/11 is a strange work of heated anti-imperialist schadenfreude gestating a surprisingly competent Metal Slug port for Game Boy Color that outdoes its Neo-Geo Pocket Color siblings in terms of faithfulness to the original game
Some speculate, based solely off the game's remarkable adherence to its source material, that this may have been an official port from Takara (who made numerous SNK ports for GBC) that got canceled, and I can definitely see that
The dialogue is incredibly tone-deaf, especially because this came out in 2002, but it's precisely its status as a cursed artifact that makes it interesting
It's the kind of thing that feels like it should only exist as deliberate satire, like somebody made a video game out of an article from The Onion, but yet this game bafflingly occupies the status of being naïve camp, and not deliberate
It's a weird sight as an American who lived through its cultural shockwaves in the haziest fog of early memory, who knows people who were personally impacted by this tragedy, to imagine the people who created this in 2002, a room full of people so far removed from the national trauma that shaped multiple generations that they found it fit to use our seismic cataclysm as gag gift wrapping for a (probably) laundered incomplete prototype game?
Who can forget Osama bin Laden himself telling GWB "I DIDN'T DO THE ATTACKS. NO EVIDENCE."? and then having that juxtaposed with a shockingly faithful rendition of one of the best run-n-gun games ever made, on a platform where it shouldn't exist, on top of knowing that this isn't some rom hack or another form of satire but rather a real commercial product somebody found fit to sell on store shelves?
Don't mean to be disrespectful towards people who were impacted by 9/11, rather, I think this game's existence makes some sort of point on just how quickly 9/11 entered a purgatorial state of existing as a cultural unreality. 9/11 became realer than real, for us it redefined the boundaries between private and public for the next century, the rest of us rebuilding our cities and psyches around the negative space the towers left, for them, they were so far removed from it that within a year they laughed at us, or, if you prefer, were so far removed from our psychic scars that 9/11 was just another brand to capitalize from them, either way, this game was immaculately conceived by the anonymous cultural subconscious in some twisted act of hyperreality, outside the mortal bounds of good taste, and copyright, trauma, and visible intent.
Worth 70 bucks to me, when faced with the financial choice between a new-in-box next gen game and...this, the choice is obvious, 4/5 would "buy off an obscure regional competitor to eBay in a country I don't live in" again
Limited Run wouldn't have the balls to reprint this lmao

K: "Hello, Potion Seller, I am going into battle and I want your strongest potions."

PS: "My potions are too strong for you, traveler."

K: "Potion Seller, I tell you I am going into battle, and I want only your strongest potions."

PS: "You can't handle my potions. They're too strong for you."

K: "Potion Seller, listen to me; I want only your strongest potions."

PS: "My potions would kill you, traveler. You cannot handle my potions."

K: "Potion Seller, enough of these games. I'm going into battle and I need your strongest potions."

PS: "My strongest potions would kill you, traveler. You can't handle my strongest potions. You'd better go to a seller that sells weaker potions."

K: "Potion Seller, I'm telling you right now; I'm going into battle and I need only your strongest potions."

PS: "You don't know what you ask, traveler. My strongest potions will kill a dragon, let alone a man. You need a seller that sells weaker potions, because my potions are too strong."

K: "Potion Seller, I'm telling you I need your strongest potions. I'm going into battle! I'm going to battle and I need your strongest potions!"

PS: "You can't handle my strongest potions! No one can! My strongest potions aren't fit for a beast let alone a man."

K: "Potion Seller, what do I have to tell you to get your potions? Why won't you trust me with your strongest potions, Potion Seller? I need them if I'm to be successful in the battle!"

PS: "I can't give you my strongest potions because my strongest potions are only for the strongest beings and you are of the weakest."

K: "Well then that's it, Potion Seller. I'll go elsewhere. I'll go elsewhere for my potions."

PS: "That's what you'd better do."

K: "I'll go elsewhere for my potions and I'll never come back!"

PS: "Good. You're not welcome here! My potions are only for the strongest and you're clearly are not of the strongest you're clearly the weakest."

K: "You've had your say, Potion Seller but I'll have mine. You're a rascal, you're a rascal with no respect for knights. No respect for anything... except your potions!"

PS: "Why respect knights... when my potions can do anything that you can."