it's odd to think that there aren't many other games that take cues from yoshi's island considering how well respected it is. the slower pace, nuanced character abilities, and high-concept level designs were incredibly novel in the mid-90s, but the shift away from side-scrolling platformers with the rise of 3D wilted this particular evolutionary branch before it had time to really blossom. thankfully while klonoa doesn't feature the sprawl of yoshi's beloved headlining debut, it offers a tightly-paced knockout of a platformer that tills the same field to create a masterfully crafted experience.

the gameplay of klonoa centers around the titular character's ability to grab virtually any enemy and use them as a makeshift projectile, which has the added by-product of giving him an extra jump when the enemy is thrown downward. while simple in concept, the planners stretched this mechanic as far as it would go thanks to smart enemy design and an excellent difficulty curve. klonoa is limited in his abilities outside of this power - he does have a yoshi-esque flutter jump when he's not carrying anything - so with any danger ahead of him the player must carefully consider enemy placement both for utility and avoidance. an enemy may need to be carried from a separate section in order to boost klonoa past an obstacle, or ungrabbable enemies in the way may force the player to lure grabbable ones over to use as ammo. further into the game the execution becomes more strict with strings of enemies to chain jumps with, insta-death surfaces, and shielded enemies, but the game never manages to feel unfair. given the number of lives that the game hands out, most will find the difficulty at that sweet spot between leisurely and strenuous. it's the perfect level of challenge for encouraging replays for collectables, and it provides enough training with mechanics to make that difficult extra stage feel achievable.

the macro-design shows a clear influence from some of the key-driven levels present in yoshi's island. levels here don't stick to a left-to-right structure and instead generally feature per-room challenges that require a higher level of spatial awareness thanks to elements of both the foreground and background playing into small puzzles. while early on each stage rarely approaches non-linearity outside of small side-jaunts that contain collectables, the later stages begin playing with interconnected stage designs that feature loop-backs and stage-wide object effects such as turning elevators on or opening doors. none of it is truly exploratory (outside of one neat stage that features four keys that can be obtained in any order), but it does go a long way towards actualizing the locations beyond mere vessels of challenge.

vision 6-2 in particular shows a keen awareness of parallelism as an effective way to both present a series of challenges and the feeling of an authentic environment. this level involves a single large cylindrical tower with a long column-filled room that contains different pathways to take. more difficult pathways are locked behind timed switch puzzles at the end of the pathway before it. these switch puzzles inside the tower must be accessed by moving a block located outside of the tower behind a puzzle centered around a super-sized version of a common enemy which impedes progress. reaching this section on the outskirts of the tower requires making it through a climb sequence from within the tower, and before that a precision platforming section over a perilous drop away from the tower. the cycle of these different elements each getting increasingly more difficult imparts the feeling of true progress as one makes their way further and further through the column-filled corridor until they finally reach the end, where they can ascend the final part of the tower to reach a monumental boss fight. an exceptional display of level design chops that illustrates - more than just mechanical understanding - a conscious synthesis of micro-design and macro-design to elevate mere gameplay into a worthy struggle through perilous odds that rewards persistance and patience.

it must be said that the bosses are all excellent as well. each provides a unique twist on the enemy-throwing formula that utilizes the same hierarchy of movement, primary, and auxillary obstacles that I layed out in my cuphead review. klonoa has the extra trick up its sleeve of having those enemies be both tool and trial at once, and the bosses use this to great effect. in many instances the auxillary attack itself consists of or contains the very enemies you need to use to damage the boss, and weighing when to avoid them and when to seize them for an attack creates a lovely risk/reward element that keeps each fight fresh. no boss resembles any other boss, and most of them provide a perfect blend of attacks to keep the player on their toes and repetition to a minimum (the second boss is a little stale tho, there's a lot of downtime during it that unfortunately makes it the weakest of the bunch).

what perhaps really elevates this game beyond the rest of its ilk is its attention to aesthetic detail. no aspect feels cheap or rushed, from the rotating pentagonal prism health bars that each boss has to the gorgeous vision start splashes with unique names and subtitles each. every character is well-animated and meshes well with the 3D backdrops, and the game doesn't skimp on gorgeous oscillating polygonal effects illustrating the magical capabilities of the cast, small particle effects when klonoa runs across certain surfaces, and cinematic swirling camera angles as klonoa takes corners and breathes in monumental structures. the story is also full integrated into gameplay, with smooth transitions and everything handled in-engine with unique sprites that really sell the integration. the story itself is compact and strays little from a vague KH-esque light and darkness dichotomy, which suits the pacing of the game perfectly; mature enough for adults to appreciate while simplisitic enough to avoid overwhelming a child. it neatly foreshadows up to its infamous final cutscene twist, and while shockingly abrupt and bittersweet for a game of this nature, it perfectly captures the emotion with the turmoil and rush of the final FMV before the credits roll. it's evident that this is the culmination of hideo yoshizawa's vision of an action game that marries unvarnished gameplay to cinematic qualities.

a little note to fellow popstarter users: this game is pretty playable up to the end if you can stomach semi-frequent crashes between levels that will require a quick reset (thankfully this is after you save, so you won't lose any progress). in a couple of cases this skips important cutscenes, so be advised. I also found it impossible to reach the credits thanks to a crash after the final boss, and thus after a couple tries I resorted to duckstation to finish the game off. disappointing to be sure, but it's a testament to the game's quality that I was perfectly willing to replay the final boss (all three phases) over and over again to make sure it wasn't a fluke, and frankly it was worth it in the end just so I could play the majority of the game on a proper CRT! this is a game that benefits greatly from that phosphorescent swirl of an authentic old screen.

it's been nearly two years since I closed the book on Project Diva Future Tone. my old roommate's now ex-girlfriend ran off with a 19 year-old mechanic at a go-karting place. whoops :( we haven't played project diva together in a while

I wrote that review under the impression that beatmania iidx was gonna take over my rhythm game grind, and for all intents and purposes it has. both future tone and megamix have unfortunately been uninstalled in order to make way for other titles, while I'll still sit down for iidx sessions at least once a week. however, around the time that review dropped, our local arcade began branching into imported rhythm games. I had been frequenting the place for a couple years by that point (also that same old roommate used to work with the arcade's owners at a barcade down the street back when we were in undergrad; small world!), and the owners had granted my request of kicking off their rhythm game selection with a real project diva cabinet. unfortunately my declining interest in the game had already taken hold, and I never really worked on transferring my skills over to the arcade version as I had initially hoped.

it wasn't until a chance meeting later that year that my interest was reignited. while visiting the arcade with friends from out-of-town and trying out a newly acquired jubeat cabinet, I cycled onto project diva to run a quick set after a girl who had been working on some hard charts. she stood beside me, enraptured in my skill, and quickly introduced herself afterwards. she was a local arts student and miku aficionado who had stumbled upon the switch game and began sinking countless hours into it, propelled even further by her later discovery that we had an arcade cabinet for the game locally. we talked for nearly an hour that day, leaning against pinball tables in this humid shop backroom, discussing our favorite songs while she asked endless questions on hand placement, chart details, and various other strategies.

arcade rhythm games pose significant barriers to those looking to excel at them. each cabinet prides itself on its foreign, sometimes unintuitive interface, all completely divorced from the dual analog and keyboard+mouse conventions we've grown accustomed to. practicing regularly requires either dumping money into a local cabinet, which may be hours away at best, or purchasing an expensive custom controller to play at home, which may require procuring a crack of the game and circumventing layers of copy-protection and environmental inconsistencies in order to run. so to get this social experience, where I could not only cheaply access a local cabinet but also train someone else to enjoy it just as much as I had over the years, was a small miracle. there's something beautiful in that that's difficult to approximate through another type of game; passing down my hard-earned knowledge about this confusing, niche machine to someone else, watching her progress through the ranks of extreme and exex charts, and crystallizing my own insights into something I could actually express to someone else.

as of the last few weeks, she finally surpassed me by clearing Disappearance of Hatsune Miku exex. its notoriously precise ending walled me back when I was playing the game daily, leaving it one of the charts I still have never cleared (along with both ex and exex intense voice and denparadigm exex, plus a couple other ones I've never played much bcs I never owned them at home). a magfest acquaintance of mine who streams project diva regularly and owns his own private cabinet still struggles to clear it every time I've watched him play it; clearing this is such a massive accomplishment. a lot of my study of the game for the last year has been spurned on by her talent and passion, sending me back to the lab to learn parts I had previously skimmed over and spool out new strategies. at the same time, I've transitioned into an adjunct teaching position that's monopolized my time in a way I haven't experienced since high school. I think it's time to close the book again on this game, even though I'm certain I'll play it again in the future.

much of my writing this last year has been on action and puzzle games; genres that are often analyzed through the lens of their depth and capability of decision-making. rhythm games are fully execution tests by comparison, which makes them less straightforward to view through that lens. consider this my first attempt to square that circle and analyze what makes an arcade rhythm game compelling at multiple levels of skill.


Background

The unexpected grassroots popularity of the Hatsune Miku Vocaloid software by Crypton Future Media quickly translated to licensing deals, and Sega managed to squeeze the first Project Diva game out for Playstation Portable in 2009, just months after Sony Music Japan reissued Supercell's landmark self-titled album and Miku's popularity went fully mainstream. This rudimentary early iteration of the series was helmed by Sega's CS3 studio (previously Overworks, known for Skies of Arcadia and the Shinobi reboot) in collaboration with shovelware producers Dingo Inc. With the release of a second Project Diva title subtitled "2nd" and its subsequent expansion "Extend", sales for the series began to dominate Japanese charts. Sega parted ways with Dingo Inc. after the PSP market declined and let CS3 handle two further entries for the Playstation 3 and Vita solo, which were known as Project Diva F and F 2nd. CS3's era ended with the release of Project Diva X on Playstation 4, which fell prey to a cool fan reception, a recall in Korea due to explicit lyrics in the song Holy Lance Explosion Boy, and the overall decline of the Miku brand. In their prime, these games were not only advertising vehicles for the primary Vocaloid products and characters (as well as shallow "pet" simulators outside of the main rhythm mode) but also an important venue for up-and-coming artists to spread their work. This series served an important tastemaker function; just look at the number of comments that mention Project Diva on the Niconico page for baker's excellent track Sound (they don't seem to be on this version of the site anymore but I found the old comments by using Google Translate across the whole page with a Firefox extension).

Meanwhile, the continuing relevance of arcade rhythm games led Sega to task a post-Yu Suzuki AM2 with developing an arcade translation of the PSP game. A prototype was undertaken using a variant of the older Virtua Fighter 5 engine before eventually debuting as a standalone title roughly a year after the release of the first PSP title. While some elements were retained from its sister series, including using Sony's trademark triangle/square/cross/circle symbols for its buttons and many of the same promotional videos (PVs), the underlying mechanics, scoring, and note chart design differed. Along with many tracks pulled from the PSP titles, Sega solicited fans to submit tracks in a contest to be added as arcade-only songs, with custom PVs also being produced via the PSP game's unique video editing mode.

AM2 continued to update the game through a series of minor revisions each containing a selection of new songs, while two major additional revisions added in a bulk of songs from the mainline series, with Version A covering Project Diva 2nd and Version B covering Project Diva Extend. A few final revisions trickled in songs from AM2's subsequent Nendoroid-inspired 3DS series Project Mirai before a full overhaul of the game was released in late 2013 as Project Diva Arcade Future Tone. This title reflected both a move from Sega's older Ringedge arcade board to the Nu platform as well as the addition of a touch-controlled slide bar. A slew of songs from the first Project Diva F were incorporated, with further small revisions bolstering the roster. However, the influx of arcade-original songs was minor, and virtually all songs from the Future Tone era were ported in from the mainline games and Project Mirai 2. The relative failure of Project Diva X signaled the end of active development on the series as a whole, and Future Tone was sundowned in 2016 with only one song from Project Diva X included. After six years of arcade exclusivity, Future Tone received a Playstation 4 release compiling nearly all of the songs from the history of the arcade game, with various DLC that further expanded the game. Fittingly, the arcade version of Future Tone received a late update in 2017 after a year of inactivity which added in two new songs, one of which was the incredibly popular Miku 10th anniversary song DUNE/Sand Planet. A slew of additional note charts for old songs (placed under the "Extra Extreme" label) were added over the course of 2018, with no new songs in their wake. Project Diva Arcade has been defunct since.


The Cabinet

Project Diva Arcade uses a traditional single-person cabinet size and structure, with a controller width of 930mm (around three feet), a depth of 865 mm, and a height of 2190mm (seven feet and change). Official images of the cabinet may be seen on Sega's official site. The main display sits roughly a little over four feet up and is gently tilted back for viewing from above. Its bottom edge is level with both the smooth, fiberglass-esque slide bar and four large hemispheric buttons. Above the screen sit two small speakers on either side of the assembly, although for those who find them quiet there is thankfully a headphone port as well. Virtually everywhere I've ever played this cabinet has necessitated use of the headphones, even when placed next to an identical cabinet.

The buttons are very similar to those used in Pop'n Music: they are around as large as the palm of one's hand and are gently curved. These use an Sanwa optical switch with a 200g spring. Third-party controllers often use a 100g spring instead for a quicker activation. I find the latter to be more comfortable; I was fortunate enough to experience a modded Diva cabinet at MAGfest one year that featured 100g springs, and I noticed virtually every high-level player immediately gravitate towards this cabinet. For a game that necessitates double-handed rolls on single buttons, the 100g springs feel much clickier and less prone to "squishing" into the switch such that they don't rebound when switching from hand to the other at a fast rate.

Regardless, each option affords an accurate experience for single-handed "jackhammer" sections where the same note is repeated many times. I have comfortably been able to execute consistent eighth notes at ~200 bpm (a little under 7 hits per second, such as seen here in Denparadigm Ex) and short rolls of sixteenth notes at ~140 bpm (a little over 9 hits per second) on both stock and modded cabs. However, these buttons are known to frequently experience failure; many of the cabs I've played on in my life have at least one button that will intermittently stick during rolls. This is less than optimal in a game so laser-focused on sequences of rolls, and it begs the question of whether a different type of button would have been more suitable or if, like the console series starting with Project Diva 2nd, they should have switched to a system that used a separate set of four buttons for each hand. Official arcade-style controllers for the console games indicate this could have been a reality. Alas, as Project Diva Arcade released shortly before 2nd, it is likely that their controller design paths diverged too early in the maturation of the series for this to have ever been under serious consideration.


Basic Mechanics

Project Diva Arcade retains many of the surface-level characteristics of the original Project Diva on PSP. It uses a four button layout featuring the traditional triangle/square/cross/circle symbols of the Playstation controller, although the buttons are laid out in a row in the aforementioned order instead of in a "plus" formation as on a Dualshock. The game does not use a traditional manner of scrolling notes; rather, the notes pop into existence at chart-specific positions as the song progresses. The notes are initially hollow (or rather, opaque black with a white outline) as they appear, but are filled by a corresponding colored opaque note that flies in from the edge of the screen. The moment at which these two notes intersect is the moment at which the correct button or set of buttons should be pressed.

It should be noted that this method of indicating timing has some unique problems associated with it. Most rhythm games use fixed, scrolling playfields that give each note an identical length of time from entry onto screen to the so-called "judgement line," or rather, the line at which intersecting scrolling notes should be met with an associated button press. However, Project Diva Arcade's judgement marker equivalents - the hollow notes - appear at wildly varying points on the screen, and thus the consistency for where notes appear from and where they are moving to is lost. Had there been no forethought, this would also result in different lengths of time for each filled note before it hits the corresponding hollow note. Project Diva Arcade compensates for this by ensuring that notes always enter from either the top or bottom sides of the screen (depending on which the hollow note is further from) and by giving each note a slight curvature to its path that varies depending on the distance between the judgement marker and the edge of the screen.

Of course, this creates a further issue: the note pathing is now non-linear and variant across different notes. It begs the question of why this method of marking the notes on screen was chosen in the first place. One answer may be to add visual flair to the note charts and incorporate them with the PVs, such as in this cheeky rendition of the Eiffel Tower seen in Paris Cinema Girl, and another may be found in the influence of the Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan series, which popularized a similar non-scrolling charting style reliant on notes placed on different parts of the screen. The original Project Diva developers on PSP may have taken inspiration from the Ouendan games for their casual appeal on a handheld console; however, Ouendan explicitly factors its moving notes in as an execution check on the player's ability to move their stylus around in tandem on the Nintendo DS's touch screen. The Project Diva series never ties its similar charting style to the mechanics in any meaningful way, as the note positions on screen have no bearing on play at all. This makes the choice more of an obstruction to clean chart design than anything else.

Nevertheless, both console and arcade Project Divas band-aid over the non-linear note pathing in the same way: by adding a marker with the appearance of a hand from a clock. When a hollow note appears on screen, it starts with a clock hand in the 12 o' clock position. This hand immediately starts rotating around the note clockwise until it reaches the 12 o' clock position again; this is the point at which the player must press the appropriate button(s). This lessens the overall clarity issue by localizing the judgement marking to the note itself, which keeps the player focused on the static hollow notes appearing instead of the filled notes flying in from off-screen. Still, this is an acquired taste, and one that is much more complex than notes scrolling down a playfield. It also does not provide a practical or consistent manner of indicating the temporal distance between two notes due to each clock hand being tied to a different note with no ability to directly compare two hands on the same note (except in rare cases with overlapping notes, such as this post-chorus breakdown in Soiyassa on Extra Extreme). As a result, the point at which Project Diva Arcade approaches unreadable note density is much lower than that of games with traditionally scrolling notes, creating practical limits on what is reasonable in high-level charts. High-level Project Diva Arcade players should expect to spend a significant amount of time studying endgame charts at slow speeds to grok unusual or poorly conveyed rhythms.

Each note press is graded on the accuracy of its timing on the enumerated scale of COOL, GOOD, SAFE, BAD, and WORST. These not only influence the player's score but also affect the player's remaining life. Project Diva Arcade features a life bar at the upper left of the screen that decays on missed or inaccurate notes (BAD and WORST), and when it drains it immediately ends the song (unless the game is played on the "premium" mode, which is one single song all the way through with no limitations). Getting COOLs and GOODs back to back will also create a combo multiplier; getting a SAFE or below will end it. One additional quirk is the WRONG grade, which occurs when the correct timing for a note is achieved with the wrong button pressed. The developers chose to make the life loss for this grade negligible, making it possible to skillfully mash through some sections that are otherwise too tricky. However, because this kills combos, it's not really exploitable, and the dire consequences of ruining the actual timing make it so that the player still needs to have some comprehension of the song's rhythm.

Project Diva Arcade Future Tone added a new input method alongside the normal buttons: the slide bar. This bar is touch-activated with a light array underneath that tracks points of contact. Sliding is represented in the game via orange arrows, which point either left and right and may have a "tail" of any length. This tail signals the length for which the slide must be conducted, with no tail requiring no particular slide distance and a long tail potentially requiring as much or more than the length of the entire bar. However, slides have no timing restrictions beyond initial contact. The tail technically consists of many smaller hollow slanted bars arranged in a line; tiny slide notes fly from the outer edges of the screen into the hollow bars along with the timing of the song much like regular notes. However, depending on the distance the player traverses sliding their fingers across the physical bar at the moment of the initial slide, a corresponding segment of the tail's hollow bars will fill blue. This will ensure that the player does not lose the slide when the filled hollow bars make contact with their associated notes, and thus it avoids the player needing to make physical contact with the slide bar the whole time the slide is in effect. Effectively, the player may buffer in slide inputs at the slide's initiation and spend the remaining time on hand positioning, although no song to my knowledge ever requires the player to babysit a long slide while simultaneously pressing buttons unfortunately. A fascinating side effect of this is that it also allows a long slide to be filled by multiple short slides, as long as slides past the first are input before the song's progression reaches a point where there are no more filled bars in the tail left. A player may choose to not only break up a long slide but to also switch hands in the middle of a slide without the threat of needing to maintain contact with the slide bar while doing so, which may be useful in scenarios where a slide effectively "crosses up" a player (i.e. a player has to perform a long slide from left to right and immediately jump back to the left buttons).

Slides in Project Diva Arcade may also be presented to the player as "chords," where multiple slides must be input simultaneously. While chords exist for the standard buttons as well, slide chords have the added wrinkle of their control surface being contactable at a continuous range of points; the only restriction for chords is that the two points of contact where the slides are initiated must be a nominal distance apart, perhaps a couple inches. There are four types of slide chords: both left, both right, pointing inwards towards each other (or -> <-), and pointing outwards from each other (or <- ->). A common way of dealing with these chords is through using the index finger of each hand simultaneously; the song Requiem of the Phantasm makes this clear in its Extra Extreme chart by tying this physical movement to the conductor-like gesticulating of Miku in its PV at multiple points, including twice in this clip here. However, astute players will note that the two slides don't need to originate from two separate hands; two fingers on one hand work as well if spaced correctly. Soiyassa on Extra Extreme has a good example of where this is useful in its end section, where the player must alternate double-button chords and slides in the first two measures and single buttons and slide chords in the second two measures. The second half gives the player the opportunity to create parity with the first half by continuing to use one hand on the slide bar and one on buttons if they choose to use two fingers on the same hand to slide; I often accomplish this with my index and ring fingers. Likewise, inward and outward slide chords can be accomplished with the thumb and middle fingers moving towards and away from each other, much like adjusting the zoom on a smartphone's screen. The integration of the slide bar into the player's finger and arm movements prevents them from keeping their hands glued to the buttons, which begins to form a picture of where Project Diva Arcade succeeds in creating opportunities for the players to plan physical routes for their hands through its unique controller.


Advanced Mechanics

The original Project Diva on PSP had a major mechanic that did not get directly ported to the arcade edition: held notes. For these notes, a full snake-like note would fly in from the edge of the screen with the shape of the corresponding button on both ends, and the player was required to press down on the button at the start of the snake and then release precisely at the end; both the press and release here were graded as separate notes. Again, visually this summons images of the similar "phrase marker" mechanic from Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, where the player drags their stylus over a ball that rolls down a snake-like track from one point to another.

Project Diva Arcade replaces this with a twist. The arcade hold mechanic is effectively an overlay on top of the regular note chart that does not directly affect the player's performance in terms of grading or combo breaks. Rather, when a note or set of notes is marked "HOLD," they can be optionally held down past the time where they need to be activated for additional points. The longer the note is held, the more points are earned, and the more notes held at once, the greater the multiplier on said score. A hold will automatically end at the five second mark, at which point an additional "max hold bonus" will be awarded to the player; otherwise the hold will end when one of the notes that is being held must be pressed again for a new note, even on versions of the game where one could theoretically press a note without breaking the hold. Holds can also be added in progressively much like slides, where consecutive held notes may be chained together to raise the hold bonus multiplier without breaking the previous hold. The key here is that while a note or set of notes is held, the player must continue playing the rest of the song. Notes other than the ones being held as well as slides will continue appearing on screen, necessitating that the player proceed with the track as usual while accounting for the held buttons up to and until the max hold.

Project Diva Arcade's take on hold notes is certainly unusual; most games hew closer to the model in the original Project Diva. However, Project Diva Arcade's version brings much-needed complexity to the otherwise drab four button layout. Let's consider the primary "home" position for the hands across the four buttons: virtually all players will play the triangle and square buttons with their left hand and the cross and circle buttons with their right hand. I personally play in a "penguin"-style, where I use my thumbs for the two inner buttons and the rest of my fingers on each hand for the outer buttons. This arrangement allows both symmetric coverage of the buttons and a fair range of movement where virtually everything is in reach with a bit of forward arm movement. All buttons lie directly beneath fingers, with the primary movement challenge being switching between the home position on the buttons and the slide bar.

The hold mechanic effectively removes forward arm movement, forcing the player to rethink the way they approach the control space. Consider a case where one must hold down the cross button (which is second from the right). If they are using their thumb for the hold, then all right arm movements must pivot around the thumb for the duration of the hold. Some aspects of play that this alters are relatively nuanced. If one is performing a trill between the cross and circle buttons (rapidly alternating between the two), they are likely going to quickly rock their wrist back and forth to shift weight between the thumb and the fingers in succession. Here the primary force is exerted by the forearm, with the thumb and fingers simply transmitting the force. If we then consider a situation where one is holding down on cross and then must rapidly play jacks on the circle button (the jackhammer rapid notes mentioned before), then this force exertion will not work, as twisting the wrist will release the cross button inadvertently. Instead, the muscles of the fingers must be directly used to "flap" downward onto the circle button, with care taken not to lose the thumb's grip on the square button during the movement. The same goes in the opposite direction, where one must hold down the circle button with the fingers and proceed to play jacks with solely the thumb. This may sound trivial, so hold your right hand up and attempt to flap the thumb back and forth independently at speed without jittering the rest of your hand. You'll find it to be difficult and potentially uncomfortable to do for more than a few seconds. If you press your fingers against a table you'll find it easier, but note that the buttons have a built-in spring force pressing against your hand that a static table doesn't have. Even the buttons for something like beatmania IIDX or Sound Voltex use significantly lighter springs designed for high accuracy and little input force from the player, making a button's response against the player while being held not much more than that of the table. The specificity of Project Diva Arcade's cabinet design enables its hold mechanic to diversify the way the player physically routes their body parts while playing the game.

The slide bar further complicates matters, as it sits out of range of the hands without movement of the arm. If we continue with the hypothetical held cross button of the previous example, we could theoretically slide our thumb forward over the cross button to reach the slide bar when needed without losing our hold. However, not only does the button's heavy spring render any major movement across the button dangerous due to the potential for an accidental momentary release, but the button has a curved surface which makes the requisite force magnitude and direction for holding the button down slightly different depending on where one's thumb is positioned. If the thumb is positioned near the center, as is intuitive, then one will likely not notice that this is an issue, but sliding towards the back of the button will quickly require the player consciously exert force fully downward even when pressing on a surface that would otherwise be sloped, diverting some of the player's force in a horizontal direction. Therefore, one must fully pivot their elbow around the thumb as a fulcrum in order to reach the slide bar, preferably with a 90 degree angle at the elbow with the fingers pointed towards the left side of the cabinet. The initial swivel can be used as momentum to begin a left-direction slide if the song calls for it, and the fingers can proceed to slide back and forth without much further arm movement. However, this blocks off access to the circle button completely, as it is now under the forearm. One may be able to press the circle button down with the arm, but doing this without the fine motor skills of the fingers is clumsy, and thus even using this technique in the first place may be only applicable to circumstances where the player feels comfortable jettisoning the circle button. Consider further that the circle button is being held down by the fingers and we are now required to attempt to slide by pivoting around said fingers. Trying to even figure out a suitable way to both hold and slide at the same time in that configuration may be more effort than it's worth.

While in many cases you can use a hand that is not holding any notes in order to perform the slide, there are certainly situations where the above becomes highly relevant. Consider this particular ending section from Transparent Watercolors ExEx. At the start of the linked section, the player must slide left, double tap triangle, and hold a triangle/cross chord. Note that this held chord not only requires both hands (unless one has a particularly wide hand span and could hold both with one hand) but also involves one outer button held with fingers (triangle) and one inner button held with the thumb (cross). Immediately after, the player must repeat the inverse of the same pattern, where they double-tap square, slide to the right, and hold down both square and circle, effectively causing a full four-button hold if done properly. The key interest here is the restriction that the held triangle and cross add when the phrase is replicated. The square must now be pressed without the thumb disturbing the held fingers on the left hand, and the fingers of the right hand must slide over the bar and immediately onto the circle button without disturbing the thumb holding down the cross button. I find this creates an incredibly pleasing sensation of holding down the left side of each hand and then flourishing over to hold down the right side of each hand, with a couple button taps in the middle.

Immediately afterwards, the rhythm is repeated yet with the holds changing; the first hold is now performed with a triangle/square chord and the second hold with a cross/circle chord. As the second part of the phrase now starts with a tap on the cross button, the partial sequence must now be performed fully by one hand, with a double tap of the thumb, a rightward slide across the bar with the fingers, and a return to home with both thumb and fingers holding down the chord. These two sequences illustrate situations where the hold may complicate otherwise straightforward patterns by restricting the movement of the player. Others with more comfort with different techniques may find alternate ways to route these physical movements, such as using palms to allow holding a button while freeing up the same fingers to perform slides or choosing specific fingers for each task; I personally use my middle finger to slide in the second variation of the above phrase and then chord the notes using my thumb and pinky, transforming the tap, slide, and hold steps all into a single wrist motion. This is made possible by the richness of routing in the physical domain, where the player can adapt their playstyle and approach to each song's chart according to their own bodily abilities.

The same could be said could be said for many other games with hold mechanics: Pop'n Music, having nine bubble-shaped buttons compared to Project Diva Arcade's measly four, not only has a more traditional hold mechanic but also frankly features much more prominent physical routing at its top level of play, as demonstrated in this video of top player TATSU. Note how elegantly his hands move across the board, swapping responsibilities for each button between hands as the song demands and avoiding getting too comfortable in any home position. Project Diva Arcade never quite reached this level of sophistication when it came to chart design. However, there are two major wrinkles that Project Diva Arcade brings with its approach to holds. The first, more minor one is the way the timing of the hold is completely decoupled from the rhythm of the song itself. Hold notes in most rhythm games directly correspond to phrases and rhythms within the song; the timing of the hold here is purely an overlay onto the regular chart. The player must account for the length of the hold note as a separate internal timer, even as the hold continues into separate phrases beyond the one where it was initiated.

The second, more important reason is the scoring. Project Diva Arcade uses two separate kinds of scoring: the regular score and a Completion Rate (this links to the Project Diva Wiki, shortened URL used due to embedded parentheses breaking on Backloggd). For the purposes of this critique, I will focus on Completion Rate, as it directly ties to song ranks. As with most rhythm games, Project Diva Arcade ranks the player on their performance with a set of separate, fixed grades: Standard, Great, Excellent, and Perfect (although the latter is not score-based and solely records whether the player hit every note in a song). These ranks are given as the player exceeds certain thresholds of earned Completion Rate given as a percentage, with the Extreme and Extra Extreme difficulties putting the thresholds at 70%, 85%, and 95% for Standard, Great, and Excellent. Completion Rate is calculated primarily as a ratio of the player's combo and timing score (without considering holds) to a hypothetical "maximum" score given by playing every note perfectly throughout the song with COOL timing, hence the use of a percentage to represent the score. This means that the primary component of a player's completion score (and therefore the rank they earn on a given song) rests on their basic ability to accurately hit notes.

On paper this sounds reasonable: if a scoring system is a game designer's way of conveying the importance of particular aspects of play to the player, then the scoring system here encourages the player to hit as many notes as possible while also focusing on timing. However, this ignores a key facet of score gained from hitting notes: the combo bonus. Project Diva Arcade applies a flat point bonus of 50 additional points per note multiplied by the tens place of the combo counter. For instance, hitting a note with a combo of between 10 and 19 notes will give a bonus of 50 points, hitting a note with a combo of between 20 and 29 notes will give a bonus of 100 points, and so on up until the combo reaches 50, at which point the combo bonus saturates to a bonus of 250 points per note hit from that point onward until the combo ends. This is not an insignificant amount; notes hit with a COOL timing give 500 points as a base, meaning that a bonus of 250 points will increase the score by a factor of 1.5. Notes hit with FINE timing give 300 points as a base, and the bonus increases them up to a whopping 550 points, which is worth more than a COOL timing with no combo. This scoring system favors consistency through maintaining long combos of correct over timing, the latter of which can be partially mitigated through the combo bonuses.

Looks are deceiving here, however. Consider that I have a song of some relatively long length, such as 500 notes long, which gives plenty of opportunities to build up a 50+ length combo even if it is dropped multiple times. Let's say I drop the combo twice, once around a third of the way through, and once around two thirds of the way through. I have now lost 7250 potential points from the full bonus each time I have dropped my combo (ignoring the points lost for actually missing a single note, which will vary depending on timing), which ends up being a total loss of 14500 points overall. Each combo drop results in the subsequent 50 notes each getting less points than they would have if the combo was not dropped, with the first nine notes being 250 points lower, the next 10 notes being 200 points lower, and so on. On a different attempt, let's say I again drop the combo twice but this time ten notes after the start of the song and 10 notes before the end of the song. I now only lose 2450 points on each combo drop, for a total of 4900 points lost total; a mere third of that compared to the first hypothetical. This is because on the first combo drop I will be losing only 50 points per note for the next 50 notes due to only lagging the original bonus by 10 notes instead of 50, and on the second combo drop I'll lose 250 points per note for only 10 notes as compared to 50. If the maximum score is 367750 (using the formula given in the previous wiki link), then the first hypothetical will result in a 2.6% higher Completion Rate than the second hypothetical even though only two spaced-apart notes were missed in each case. Although not earth-shattering, this is certainly enough of a difference to tip the scale over getting a particular rank, and I on multiple occasions have won or lost ranks thanks to missing single notes at the "right" or "wrong" times. It's difficult to enforce the idea of "consistency" through a scoring system such as this, as it ends up favoring longer combos to the extent that it prioritizes certain notes over others without any thought given to the context of the song. The lifebar does serve as a backup method of ensuring consistency by deducting life on every miss and regaining life on each correct note, but the weights allocated to the lifebar in this particular game make it so that one will rarely die outside of rapid flurries of notes that will instantly kill the player if missed; it has no way to punish long-term inconsistent play because the life regain from correct notes is too powerful. Therefore, the scoring system struggles to emphasize a method of play outside of maintaining large combos, which is applied inconsistently.

However, there is a secondary component to Completion Rate: the hold bonus, which is this second wrinkle for how the game handles its hold mechanic. The ratio of points received to maximum points only considers points gained from hitting notes, both in terms of points gained from accurate timing and the points awarded from longer combos. The hold bonus provides additional Completion Rate percentage points directly on top of the ratio up to a maximum of an additional 5% per song. For example, getting a four-button hold to the full five seconds (which is uncommon but certainly not rare) provides 18000 points, which will give a full additional 1% to one's Completion Rate in the aforementioned hypothetical song according to the formula given in the wiki link above. Under ideal circumstances, one can actually exceed 100% with exceptional performance on a given song (the maximum is 106%, with 100% coming from all COOL timing and a full combo, 5% coming from maxing out on the hold bonus, and an additional 1% coming from a full lifebar bonus per-hit that I've glossed over up to now). As the hold mechanic provides a much-needed complexity factor to a player's routing for each song, centering it as a vital mechanic with the scoring system in this way ensures that players are incentivized to pursue it as often as possible. It also papers over some of the issues with the combo scoring in terms of allowing the player to "make up" lost points from combo breaks with skilled play instead of inconsistently punishing them for their mistakes. For those primarily focused on achieving Excellent ranks on each song, the addition of this percentage cushion predicated on the advanced mechanic provides relief as long as one is willing to learn what makes the game unique compared to its competitors.


Chart Design - Pre-Future Tone

Each song in Project Diva is given between three and five different note charts on different difficulty levels: these are denoted as Easy, Normal, Hard, Extreme, and Extra Extreme, with the former and latter not making an appearance for certain songs. The Extra Extreme difficulty in particular originated in the Future Tone era as new charts with sliding mechanics for old songs that did not have them. Each chart is independently rated on a scale from 1 to 10 stars, including half-star denominations between ratings (i.e. 7.5*, 8.5*, etc.). While ratings for any chart on any difficulty can theoretically fall anywhere in the scale, charts for a given difficulty level tend to fall into a specific range; for example, Hard charts tend to be found in the 5* to 7* range, while Extreme charts are virtually always 8* and above. As a note, I'll be referring to Extreme and Extra Extreme charts as "Ex" and "ExEx" respectively throughout the rest of this analysis.

Many of the basic elements of Project Diva chart construction can be found through analysis of Denparadigm Hard, which, at an 8* rating, sits well above most of the other Hard charts in the game. From the opening verse, one may notice the general structure of the game's charts: each measure (four beats in this case, if you were to count along to the tempo of the song) has its own horizontal line of notes on the screen, which zig-zag back and forth across the screen moving downwards on each measure until reaching the bottom of the screen. Each string of notes on Hard tends to consist of only a single button, although at the blistering speed of Denparadigm it may as well be a jackhammer pattern as discussed before. If we review the layout of the buttons from left to right (triangle, square, cross, circle) we may also note that most of the adjacent phrases tend to use physically adjacent buttons as well, and often times the buttons appear in ascending or descending orders, such as four phrases starting at this timestamp moving from left to right until jumping back to square on the final phrase.

Indeed, I would expect most people watching this video after having read the Advanced Mechanics section to be puzzled at the lack of many of the previously discussed concepts appearing here. Chords are completely absent until nearly two minutes into the song and disappear after the bridge and final pre-chorus, holds only appear at the end of phrases before pauses, and slides seem tossed in haphazardly. Many of the aforementioned mechanics exclusively appear in high-level play, even as in many other arcade rhythm games you would find similar mechanics in much earlier difficulties. Perhaps this was done to assuage issues with the awkward visuals for determining the judgement of a note, or it may have arisen from trepidation about making a rhythm game with a strong appeal for casual fans of the subject material quite as brutal as its contemporaries. Such bland chart design permeated even the highest levels of the console series, with the infamous boss song Intense Voice of Hatsune Miku from Project Diva 2nd challenging its players to 20 straight seconds of sixteenth notes at 220 bpm in the exact same ascending pattern as seen in Denparadigm Hard (although for Project Diva 2nd, this would've been counter-clockwise around the face buttons). Both the console series and Project Diva Arcade illustrate teams with no prior rhythm game experience struggling to articulate novel and challenging chart designs on top of the inelegant base of the original Project Diva, and while it's inarguable that Denparadigm Hard would easily fluster a newcomer with its quick tempo and long strings of notes, it's not a terribly interesting chart either.

With that in mind, it would be more fair for us to analyze a true high-level chart in the arcade version. The Project Diva Arcade version of Intense Voice released two years after its original appearance in Project Diva 2nd, and it thankfully attempted to provide a more considered challenge on Extreme than the lazy button-mashing of its original iteration. As the arcade version's first 10*, we can immediately begin to see some more sophisticated design principles. Relatively close to the beginning of the song we can see rapid triplets: first with cross-square-cross, and second with circle-triangle-circle. This presents a twist on the design of button locality that we first glimpsed in the way that Denparadigm Hard laid out its button phrases.

If we recall the home position for the player's hands specified in the Advanced Mechanics section, we can specify relationships between each of the buttons based on how the player will interact with them in generic cases. There are two major pairings that give insight into how challenges can be inscribed into charts: a pairing based on separating the left and right hands, and a pairing based on the part of the hand used to hit the buttons. The first pairing is straightforward: we divide the cabinet down the middle, with a triangle/square pair tied to the left hand and a cross/circle pair tied to the right hand. The second pairing we see reflected in the above triplets: we have an "outer" pair controlled by the fingers consisting of triangle and circle and an "inner" pair controlled by the thumbs consisting of square and cross. The second pairing is significant because it's symmetrical; in the above triplets, the thumbs are used for the first triplet (cross-square-cross) and the fingers are used for the second triplet (circle-triangle-circle). This ensures that when the player alternates the buttons, they're doing so symmetrically on each hand, which allows the player to activate the same group of muscles on each hand in succession. The alternative, such as switching between circle and square rapidly, would require the player to move separate groups of muscles on each hand at a rapid, consistent rhythm, which would be more difficult. Another subtle aspect of these triplets is that they start with the right hand in both cases, ensuring that the majority of players will lead with their dominant hand. As the first significant execution barrier in the song, these triplets provide a tricky yet digestible challenge for the player.

A few more seconds into the song, we also see an appearance of three-button chords (which I'll refer to as tri-chords). With two-button chords (which I'll refer to as di-chords), there are multiple common combinations that can be done with a single hand, specifically triangle/square, square/cross, and cross/circle. No tri-chord could ever be pressed with a single hand however, making them generally more challenging. As seen in the former clip, these chords are often laid out in a triangle formation, and most often they are chosen based on button locality, with the two most common tri-chords being triangle/square/cross (a left-side tri-chord) and square/cross/circle (a right-side tri-chord). Shortly after the appearance of these we often see the sole quad-chord, where all four of the buttons must be pressed simultaneously. Unlike the tri-chords, where the player must discern which button is missing from a set of three, the quad-chord provides instant clarity into what buttons must be pressed due to there being only one possible combination. It also follows the aforementioned symmetry principle between the hands in an easily identifiable way: both hands must simultaneously press both of their assigned buttons at once. While Project Diva Arcade is nowhere near as chord-centric as many of its contemporaries, the game still deploys these chords frequently in higher-level charts.

In the second main section of the song, we can begin to see ways that chords are utilized in series to create meaningful challenges. Their first application here is in a variant on the staircase configuration, which generally refers to when multiple buttons are pressed in sequence in order from one side of the controller to the other. In this version, one button is repeatedly pressed as a base (first circle, and then triangle) three times in a row, with each press accompanied by each of the other buttons pressed in succession, ascending from one side to the other. This particular idiom lends itself well to moving one hand to the base button while using the other hand to ascend the staircase independently, shifting out of the home position in the process. The final aspect of this is key: by forcing the player to shift out of the home position, the designer immediately has the power to disorient the player by throwing notes at them that would be difficult to do without full coverage of the buttons, which requires the player to budget in time to return to the home position. We examined this concept previously in the Advanced Mechanics section regarding the slide bar, the sole purpose of which is to mandate that the player moves their hands away from their default position; a pre-Future Tone chart such as Intense Voice Ex does not have this luxury unfortunately. However, by moving away from home position, the player may have the ability to reduce physical complexity, such as in this example where a player may avoid fine motor control and asymmetric inputs in the home position (using individual parts of the hands to hit each button while hitting the last note of each staircase as a single-handed chord) by transitioning it into symmetric inputs with gross motor control (playing each side of each chord with a separate hand consistently). In this case, the long pause after the rapid staircase makes it trivial to return to the home position if one leaves it in order to execute the staircase.

I've covered the thought process without considering how the holds affect it, but we can clearly see that a number of these buttons have holds attached to them. In this particular case, the hold mechanic allows the player to optionally pursue the more complex home position route by requiring that they not only press each button in the ascension part of the staircase but hold them as well. This creates further asymmetry between the base button fingers and the remainder of the actionable bodily appendages by giving them different roles (one repeatedly presses, the others press and hold). Although a subtle example, we can see here how the hold mechanic is able to provide the incentive for more difficult physical routes through a sequence, giving players of different physical ability levels separate options for dealing with the section. We can see a Future Tone-era spin on this concept in Transparent Watercolor ExEx, where this particular staircase pattern is followed up immediately by a slide, with a return to home complicated by the immediate follow-up of the opposite staircase pattern with much smaller breaks.

Returning to this section in Intense Voice Ex, we can now observe a different kind of staircase, where the three separate adjacent di-chords are used in succession. If we look back at the common di-chord list, we can see that the first (cross/circle) and last (triangle/square) in the series are di-chords meant for a single hand in the home position, while the middle one is the "thumbs" di-chord (square/cross). Again, the player has the option to either let one of their hands leave the home position to hit the middle di-chord or go for the more complex hold route, where they quickly perform a single-hand chord, a chord with both thumbs, and the opposing single-hand chord in rapid succession. After two of these staircases (first starting at the right side and then the left) and a similar pattern where the single-hand chords occur first before the "thumbs" chord, we see the escalation of this challenge, where the two single-hand chords occur before the "fingers" chord (triangle/circle). In this instance, the less complex route of navigating away from the home position is removed due to the distance between triangle and circle; while square and cross could be pressed simultaneously with a single hand, the same does not exist for triangle and circle as they each sit at the outer and opposite edges of the cabinet. Therefore, while one may progress up to this point without the necessary fine motor skills to transition from full-hand movements to finger-specific movements, they must demonstrate them in this final phrase of the section in order to progress without a life penalty.

I've chosen these examples because they're relatively comprehendable when watching and provide a good entry-level understanding of the subtleties that come from these kinds of constructs when encountered in high-level play. This begs the question of why this kind of design exists in a top-level chart, which should theoretically have much more difficult design. The section after the above is mainly rapid-fire single-button presses, although the designers still are placing jackhammer sections on one button before trills between two buttons, indicating that they still have not realized that the former is harder than the latter due to the stiff button springs and precise timing needed to let the button rebound between successive presses. The real challenge comes within the last six measures, where extremely fast triplets give way to rapid single-button staircases (looping each button from triangle to circle and then later circle to triangle) and shifting trills between the two hands. This is an unfortunate example of a song infamous for ending with an sudden volley of notes, which makes the song aggravating to practice; every failed attempt at the very end of the song results in needing to replay over two minutes of comparatively easy gameplay to get back to the hardest section. While the original PSP version of this song had a similarly brutal outro, it was at least shrouded in a Chance Time mechanic that game had that removed the lifebar while giving the player additional points during the segment. It's also worth noting that this kind of frustration has been addressed in later songs, such as Leia ExEx putting its most technical section at the beginning of the song, making one's poor performance evident from the beginning of the song rather than the end (it's also worth comparing this song, a 9.5* in the Future Tone era, to the 10* Intense Voice Ex in terms of its more complex chord patterns in the chorus).Given that the pattern is not particularly complex at slower tempos and solely subsists on the speed to trip up the player, the song overall doesn't necessarily do an excellent job illustrating the higher levels of play.

Unfortunately, this may have been one of the more interesting endgame charts of its era. The next 10*, Two-Faced Lovers Ex (my apologies for the scantily clad Miku outfit that top-level player hisokee is using in this video), demonstrates a common kind of chart from this era: charts heavily based on the syncopation and rapid syllables of Miku's vocals. For those less familiar with music lingo, syncopation essentially refers to rhythms that prominently feature beats that fall "off-beat"; if you imagine tapping your foot or nodding your head along to a beat, syncopated rhythms will try to exclusively use beats in-between the "on-beats" made by your tapping. As such, most of this song's challenge is centered around long lines of single notes tightly woven together with few chords to speak of. This style of charting and the jackhammer patterns within present their own conflict for the player with regards to moving away from the home position: what segments should they attempt to mash with a single hand while keeping all buttons covered, and what segments should they attempt with two hands in order to ease the strain on a single hand over longer sets of jacks? However, in a chart with few chords to encourage button coverage or holds to encourage single-handed play, the easiest strategy is simply going for two hands as often as possible. Because the decision between remaining at home base or roaming the controller is given so many times, it dilutes its potential meaning and ends up making the chart feel long and samey. By the end of the song, the notes are so densely packed together that, with no adjustable scrolling speed or appearance rate for the judgement markers, they are difficult to even make out.

Two-Faced Lovers is a bit of an outlier example in terms of the severity of its devotion to jacks. However, most of the top charts from that era played with similar design paradigms. How'd It Get To Be Like This? Ex features less prominent syncopation and no jackhammers in favor of playing more with odd note localities and staircases, such as in this inspired sequence that both places staircases of different lengths next to one another in the same phrase as well as creating sequential staircases that actually "loop" from triangle on the left side to circle on the right side seamlessly. Po Pi Po Ex hews closer to Two-Faced Lovers regarding syncopation, with its primary chorus rhythm being iterated upon in adjusted staircases with mini-trills intertwined. Of this era, Paradichlorobenzene Ex may be the best expression of this style, with a rolling samba-esque rhythm underpinning some very creative extrapolations of the staircase featuring note triads that advance left and right across the controller. This chart in particular does an excellent job weaving chords into this playstyle, and in the second half of this clip it highlights pairings of notes that we glossed over earlier: button pairs with a single other button between them. This pairing, consisting of triangle/cross and square/circle, both exist across the hands in the home position and feature asymmetric pairings of hand muscles, with each one requiring use of the thumb of one hand and the fingers of the other. This pairing is essential for ratcheting up difficulty after particular rhythms are initially introduced with the two types of pairings mentioned prior, as they demand an additional layer of asymmetric coordination that the other pairing types do not require.

One design aspect each of these charts struggles with is their integration of chords, exemplified best by Saihate Ex. The first half of this chart is innocuous enough, replicating many of the same patterns we discussed previously regarding Intense Voice ExEx (another indicator that the latter chart punches well below its weight in terms of difficulty in its first few sections). The sheer volume of chords in some of these sections strains the player's ability to read them accurately on a first pass, exacerbated by their close locality, minute variations between chords, and lack of distinctions in color between the notes. If we slow this section down, it doesn't look complex on paper, with alternating inner and outer di-chords switching to alternating right and left tri-chords before doing a sort of muddled staircase from right to left using a mix of di-chords and tri-chords. One may feel compelled to leave the home position for the tri-chords, where they might use their right hand to hit the right-most buttons and the left hand to cover the single remaining button, which can then be simply moved one button to the side to hit the alternate tri-chord. Leaving the home position has next-to-no penalty for the player, as the alternating tri-chords end on the same chord they started on and can be easily transitioned out of into the final two di-chords, leaving the player back in the home position regardless. Given the poor visibility, it's more of a knowledge check than anything else; something a player would check in a video before playing the song in order to avoid being overwhelmed by the visual flurry of notes. One way to solve this would be to transpose the notes on screen to match the physical layout in front of the player, mimicking a vertically-scrolling rhythm game in the process. The chart does use this method at multiple points, begging the question of why they didn't choose to deploy this more frequently.

This is not to impugn all of Saihate Ex necessarily, as the song does introduce us to some other chord patterns that will be deployed again later, such as the additive staircase used in the third phrase of this clip that requires the player to actively add each button in successively larger chords before eventually making a quad-chord and subtracting all of the buttons in succession. However, what one may notice from watching the song in full is how segregated the single-button sections and the chords are in general. At this stage in the game's development, the designers seem to conceive of each type of note as a completely separate challenge, with the highest point of escalation being divided between fast jackhammer phrases such as in Two-Faced Lovers Ex and dense chord phrases such as in Saihate Ex. Intense Voice Ex may be one of the better examples of a song attempting to integrate the two, as it repeatedly uses these plinked notes between single buttons on one hand and chords on the other, and the era's final endgame chart World's End Dancehall Ex shows the designers finally giving blended sections a chance in its outro. The rest of the charts we've brought up this far (with the arguable exception of Paradichlorobenzene) fall into this trap pretty noticeably though: examine these examples from How'd It Get To Be Like This? Ex and Po Pi Po Ex.

This kind of chart design artificially limits the kinds of phrases that the player must learn, and it ultimately reduces the physical routing tradeoffs required in the learning process. Too many jackhammer sections on their own don't incentivize much other than two-handing each section, and chord spam can easily trap the player in the home position without confounding factors forcing one to move away. Holds, which should theoretically solve both of these issues, are underutilized as well; other than the smart example found in Intense Voice Ex, I found virtually no instances of holds that weren't at the end of phrases before a pause or spread throughout a section of single-button presses. There are glimpses of excellence here, but much of the older Project Diva Arcade material feels undercooked. Thankfully, the changes undertaken in the transition to Future Tone would remedy many of these issues.


Chart Design - Post-Future Tone

Instantly with the addition of the slide bar we can breathe a sight of relief; the game has finally added a mechanic that forces one to leave the home position as a rule, allowing the kind of physical routing I spoke of in the Advanced Mechanics section to finally blossom. There is a reason many other rhythm games that uses buttons has some sort of non-button control surface to add this kind of complication, from the turntable in IIDX to the knobs in Sound Voltex. Pop'n Music, which is closer to Project Diva Arcade in its button dimensions, solved this issue prior simply by having over twice as many buttons, far more than any person could ever cover simultaneously.

To succinctly demonstrate the drastic rise in the charting chops of the designers at this point in the game's development, let's examine this clip from the song Knife Ex, our first 8.5* we've examined. I've chosen this clip in particular because it does not use the slide bar; it simply shows how much more nuanced the original version could have been with better charting. The clip immediately begins with a hold on triangle that segues into a relatively slow trill on square and cross (our inside "thumb" buttons), where each trill phrase ends with di-chord on the right side of the controller (cross/circle). It's followed by an interlude that ends with a hold on circle, and the pattern repeats in an inverse fashion, with each trill phrase ending on the left side of the controller (triangle/square). Without the hold, this pattern is simple: alternate the thumbs for the trill and end each phrase with the full hand chord of whichever thumb you would have otherwise finished on. With the hold, suddenly our issues with accidentally releasing a held button on fingers while using the thumb to consistently play notes arise, as discussed in the Advanced Mechanics section.

Without the chord, one could move their non-held hand to the inside buttons and trill on a single hand. With all of these together, the player must now choose: do they consistently move between home position and the inside buttons in order to avoid using the thumb on the held hand, or do they attempt to do each section in the home position while carefully avoiding releasing the held button? This still finishes in the home position regardless, a complaint I levied in the previous Chart Design section, but note that this is an 8.5*; theoretically "easier" than the other charts we've covered up to now. It also has the bonus of being completely unique in its execution, compared to many of the prior examples, which used patterns repeated from song to song. Note as well how the held circle at the end hits max time not at the end of the phrase but a few notes into the next one right before a square/cross hold, perfectly segueing holds together! The sophisticated charting here in an 18-second clip perfectly demonstrates how one might have leveraged the mechanics of Project Diva Arcade before the slide bar was added.

A chart with more parity with the heavily syncopated examples from earlier is Gaikotsu Gakudan to Riria Ex, which originally debuted in the Project Mirai series. From the jump it becomes apparent that the old note layout style - long horizontal rows of notes moving from one side of the screen to the other - has been made less rigid, with more aesthetic flourishes and verticality featured by comparison. This layout style not only gives each song more individual flavor (such as in the Paris Cinema Girl example given earlier) but also can assist readability when deployed correctly. For example, the ending section uses it almost immediately to make a trill between circle and square more clear by staggering the two with a vertical offset. This eliminates one of the issues brought up in the previous section: the inability to parse tightly clustered groups of notes. This is made additionally important in the next phrase, which bucks the tradition established by many of the clips up to now by not fully mirroring the phrase before it. Instead of trilling on the same notes used in the chord as in the first phrase, cross and circle (the latter of which had not been used in the phrase before) are trilled, and by offsetting the cross notes in this phrase to be level with the cross of the chord before it, this twist immediately pops out of the screen differently than it would have it every note in the sequence was level.

The next phrase then starts at the bottom of the screen and works its way up to two inner di-chords, which are placed such that they line up with the controller buttons. The slides here additionally sandwich the di-chords instead of appearing on the same plane, indicating to the player that they should use their fingers to swipe the slide bar while holding with their thumbs. We previously saw this used to good effect in Saihate Ex, and by adding a non-horizontal lead-in, the effect is improved. Another small example of where this kind of charting can be an improvement is seen in these two clips from Step Forward Ex, which actually displays a staircase pattern as a literal staircase. Much like a section of How'd It Get To Be Like This? Ex that repeated a staircase multiple times with various notes cut off and ordered differently, Step Forward Ex repeats the same trick, but the visual layout of the staircase now immediately indicates where notes are truncated or where the staircase is reversed. While the original layouts undoubtedly stuck to simple patterns in order to keep the unorthodox judgement mechanics from becoming overwhelming, the designers eventually figured out how to make the quirks of their charting system work for them to enhance readability.

However, this kind of charting can also work against the player; in some cases the Future Tone-era charts actually employ obfuscation of the chart as a challenge. One subtle example seen in Gaikotsu Gakudan to Riria Ex actually relates to holds, where a chance for a seemingly juicy four-way hold immediately gets preempted by other holds. In this case, a left-side di-chord hold (triangle/square) has a circle hold immediately following it, signalling that one should hold all three simultaneously. However, the circle is not followed up with by a cross hold but rather another left-side di-chord hold before finally yielding to a cross hold; the player will optimally hold the di-chord, drop it right before holding the circle, and then re-hold the di-chord and then the cross in order to make a full four-way hold. I'll certainly grant that the conceit is clever in the way it upends the player's expectations on how the game sets up sequential holds, but at the same time this is a pure knowledge check, with as little depth as the long chord phrases that I criticized in the previous section.

A type of obfuscation more pertinent to visual layouts can be found in Jugemu Sequencer ExEx, effectively an entire song built around disorienting the player when attempting to sight read. This includes multiple different box-style layouts, a section that purposefully displays the notes out of order, notes surrounded by a chord that must be hit on each downbeat repeatedly, and trills where the alternating notes diverge away from each other. Clearly the chart designers had fun with this song as they tried to push the note layout system to its limit. Again, this song falls prey to being primarily a long series of knowledge checks, especially since, as a 10*, the actual note-to-note difficulty is probably notably lower than most of its cohort even when compared to the pre-Future Tone charts. Since it's only a single chart built entirely like this, I can let it slide, and since it's not a particularly brutal challenge comparatively, I actually enjoy it a fair bit having sat down and learned the whole thing.

Still, there are instances where these practices accidentally slip into more serious songs. One instance can be seen Denparadigm ExEx, where two right-hand tri-chords overlap with notes in-between the two chords placed between them. Evidently this is meant to both follow the standard of having tri-chords be an equilateral triangle while also having it appear as though they are actually separated from one another and squished to the top and bottom; an admirable attempt, but the overlap between the lines in each chord gives the impression that they're adjacent. Likewise, in Negaposi*Continues Ex, this particular chord sequence attempts to adhere to the faux-vertical scrolling template but jumps up to the top of the screen right as it throws a curveball triangle/cross di-chord instead of the adjacent di-chords preceding it. In this situation, it may have been better to squash the whole phrase vertically and let the curveball chord sit at the bottom so it's clearly visible as a twist by comparison.

Which is a shame, because otherwise this latter sequence is an extremely interesting pattern that far exceeds the examples we covered in the previous section. It starts off with a right-hand di-chord followed by two circle hits in what begins a triplet pattern in an odd time signature. However, as soon as the identical second di-chord is hit, the pattern shifts from double-tapping the right-most note (circle) and instead requires a double tap on the left-most note (cross). The game then turns this into an augmented staircase where the di-chord and its subsequent left-button double tap advance leftwards twice until the triangle is double-tapped, at which point it then throws the curveball triangle/cross chord to disrupt the staircase after only three iterations of the pattern. That curveball is meant to signal that the player must return to the original position (cross/circle) and pattern (right-button double tap as opposed to left), after which they then get thrown into a motif from earlier in the chart utilizing a rapid di-chord staircase that returns to center. This phrase not only completely defies the phrase symmetry that older charts relied on, but it also still somehow returns to its starting point as if it was symmetrical.

Diving into the nitty-gritty of the rhythm in this clip, the song takes the unusual tact of switching into a 3/4 rhythm (three beats in a measure) that is repeated five times. What's more, the actual beginning beat of the repeated pattern the player must hit falls just before the actual start of the 3/4 rhythm, and the accent continually hits preemptively on triplets over top of an already-3/4 rhythm, creating a desync between the actual beat (which is already an odd time signature) and the rhythm the player inputs. The two slides in between the end of the phrase and the start of the motif are essential because they effectively re-synchronize the player to the beat of the song before the motif, letting both the player and the song meet on the downbeat of the fourth measure of the overall clip. The marriage here between the song's whirlwind, atypical rhythm and the complex reinterpretation of a staircase pattern in its image is so crystalline and beautiful that it may be the most perfect five seconds of gameplay this cabinet has to offer; a point at which the game not only completely shears itself from traditional rhythm, but invites the player to partake in the spectacle. Attempting to explain the many ways this may be routed based on player preference could easily eat up an entire other paragraph. Truly phenomenal, even without holds or many slides to add complexity.

Indeed, some of Project Diva Arcade's best moments after the release of Future Tone come from these moments where the game encourages the player's two hands to cooperate past the point of straight lines of chords and into something polyrhythmic. In my interpretation of the above phrase, I completely exit the home position and treat each hand as a separate half of each chord, passing the baton of jackhammer notes from my right to my left and back to my right in the process; the two hands constantly swap different rhythms between one another. Disappearance of Hatsune Miku ExEx features a similar type of rhythm in its notorious ending, where the player plays jacks on one end of the button layout while tossing in other buttons every three notes. The escalation here is interesting, as the first phrase only requires the player to make chords using square and triangle against circle, thus allowing them to easily stay in the home position, while the second phrase with jacks on triangle weaves in a left-hand dichord (triangle/square) halfway through, suggesting that the player may need to move their right hand out of the home position. This rhythm doesn't quite tickle the itch of Negaposi*Continues due to it cinching up each measure in a trill that resyncs the player to standard rhythm on a consistent basis rather than at an odd time as in Negaposi*Continues, but it does innovate with the interwoven nature of chords and single presses more than what was seen in endgame charts in the early days of Project Diva Arcade.

Some of the game's versions of this concept instead fully suggest the home position, mandating fine motor control in the process, such as in this sequence from Denparadigm Ex. The phrase again uses triplets in a similar di-chord double-tap order, but here all the di-chords are outer di-chords (triangle/circle), the special combination that we saw restricts the ability to move from the home position in Intense Voice Ex. The double taps are a staircase from left to right where the player must continually tap the outer di-chord at each outset of each set of three while moving between the different individual notes in the process, while the second half of the phrase switches to alternating squares and crosses in place of the double taps. This hews closer to being a strict execution check; while I see the logic in making a section like this more free-form, I also personally enjoy the game foisting an unusual rhythm and pattern like this upon the player. If the rhythm wasn't triplets, I might be less impressed.

Perhaps the chart most exemplary of the strengths of the post-Future Tone-era design is Piano × Forte × Scandal Ex. This chart doesn't have a particularly awe-inspiring section a la our previous three examples (perhaps due to it being a 9.5* and not a 10*), but instead we see a consistently varied charting style that effortlessly weaves in many of the best elements of the game. The song itself serves as particularly fertile soil: it's not only syncopated but also much looser and airier than the older compositions, owing to composer OSTER project's talent for freewheeling big-band arrangements, and it features an unusual structure with multiple instrument solos interspersed between the traditional verses and choruses.

Even in the first verse we can already see some of the changes highlighted throughout this section, such as the specific placement of holds such that the logical end of each one transitions smoothly into a separate hold instead of large gaps between them. Of particular note is the way this chart deploys obfuscated hold patterns as shown here, here, and here. In each of these instances, continuing one hold with another will cause it to be cut short by an upcoming occurrence of the button used in the first hold, suggesting that the player should cut the first hold short right before beginning the second. On their own, I previously complained about these being knowledge checks; however, executed several times through a song, and when considering the limit of 5% Completion Rate that one can accrue through holds, I see this iteration of the concept as giving players multiple different hold routes throughout the song to consider based on their own personal competence, where even missing the most "optimal" hold in one instance could theoretically still result in the best score as long as enough of the other holds are hit. In the second of these instances, correctly switching holds to avoid ending the bonus also results needing to slide outward with the fingers while the thumbs hold in the center as previously seen in Gaikotsu Gakudan to Riria Ex, and this example switches back to the buttons from the slide bar without breaking the hold as well.

Beyond the acumen in its hold implementation, Piano × Forte × Scandal Ex has excellent fundamentals in terms of its use of the core buttons. One of the tricks the chart pulls repeatedly are slides before a tri-chord, putting the player away to the slide bar fractions of a second before they need to return both hands to the home position. However, shortly before this clip, the designers actually sneak in the same trick using jacks to pull the player's hands from the home position. The jacks could theoretically be done one-handed, but their length and transition between multiple buttons make them much more reasonable to do with two hands, which will require a quick move back to home at the end of the jacks on square in order to hit the tri-chord. Trills are also woven in with more care than we've previously seen, such in this short phrase right before the ending. Note that the first trill actually starts on cross, which is the inner button on the right hand, and it transitions seamlessly into a second trill that also starts with the inner yet is on the left hand. For those composed enough to do so, they could theoretically stay in the home position the whole time. However, this also presents the opportunity to move both hands to the right side of the controller and start the trill with the left hand, transitioning over to the left side in between trills. I personally do something a bit stranger: I cross my hands over one another to begin the trill on the right hand, with it on the cross button and my left hand on circle. I then execute the second trill the same as in the prior explanation, having performed a double tap from cross to square with my right hand while my left hand transitions over to the left side of the controller. While this sacrifices the smooth alternating pattern by adding a double tap in the middle, I find that it gives my hands an easier time moving over, as the right hand executes two hits on adjacent buttons while the left hand has those two presses to move over as compared to only a single one. To provide this abundance of physical routing from a single button-only section is rather genius.

There's another interesting section from earlier in the song that I find equally fascinating. This is a similar trill between cross and square where the cross hits suddenly drop out, leaving the square to wander along the off-beat until the triangle gets subbed in. Again, because the square must constantly be played here, I find myself starting in the home position with right hand on cross and left hand on square until crossing my right hand over my left in order to weave in those triangle notes. The way the chart designers extrapolated the lazy air of that piano line nearly trailing off as it edges higher until finally returning to the trill really sings the praises of what this system can do in the right hands. When Future Tone's charts are at their best, they paper over many of the issues brought up in previous sections, fulfilling the promise of a true arcade-quality rhythm game for the Vocaloid technology.


Analysis of High-Level Play

In the clips I've used up to now, you may have noticed that many of them feature a Dualshock controller in place of the arcade controller I have been describing. Since the release of Project Diva Future Tone on Playstation 4, the majority of the community has transitioned to widely available home versions of the game, which include Future Tone on Playstation and MegaMix/Mega39's across both Switch and PC. This also includes most of the top-level players using regular controllers, which would require a completely different line of analysis than the one used above given the considerable differences in techniques between using an arcade controller and a traditional gamepad. This version of the game is completely fine, and the way the control gets reinterpreted actually has many fascinating quirks of its own, if also sacrificing some of the mechanics in the process. However, it would be preferable if we could take a look at how an actual high-level player takes on the arcade version that we've been discussing. To do this, I'll be using this lovely full combo video of Sadistic.Music∞Factory Ex from top-level player F.SinA.

Sadistic.Music∞Factory Ex is overall a jackhammer- and trill-heavy chart, though it's occasionally sparse due to the designers gunning for 666 total notes in the song, which falls below most of its 10* brethren. Still, from the get-go watching this video we can immediately see why it makes an interesting watch: the amount of jacks necessitate quite a bit of two-handed playing on single buttons, which in turn means we'll see him leaving the home position quite a bit. There actually is a particular physical technique that can get around this: the "tickle," which you may have noticed F.SinA doing while screwing around in one of the breaks. We won't see him deploy it much, likely for its tendency for losing the even spacing needed to maintain good timing on jacks, but we get to see a good shot of it nonetheless. If you come from a game like Guitar Hero, you may be surprised that he doesn't drop a combo or lose health by doing this; generally the rules on when you can and can't hit notes are much more relaxed in arcade rhythm games, allowing him to freestyle in this otherwise empty section.

Getting into the first verse, we begin the fundamentals discussed above expressed. Holds are common but generally feature only one button at a time, yet we still get to see how it affects the way he navigates across the controller. He seems to not feel particularly strong about one-handed jacks with just his thumb, so you'll see him do short sets of jacks with his fingers even when on an inner button, and when he's performing holds on one of the outer buttons, he'll bring his alternate hand over to assist his thumb on inner jacks. Also pay attention to just how far he brings his hands up between each hit of the jacks, as doing otherwise would likely end up squishing the button in place. The most creative physical routing he incorporates here can be seen in this clip: during a section where he needs to hold triangle through three successive sets of inner jacks (square, cross, square), he initially uses his fingers for the hold before smoothly sliding his arm over the button to use his forearm for the hold such that he can use both hands on the cross button on the other side of the board. Such a clever incorporation of a non-hand body part, and one that requires some serious finesse in order to not lose the hold when sliding over the bump where the palm comes up to meet the wrist.

After one of the song's more iconic sections and another verse of jacks, we finally get to see F.SinA play some chords during this clip. A few important key points stand out to me about his play here. First, you'll notice in the opening di-chord staircase he favors the right hand to play both the right-side di-chord and the center one; as a fellow right-hander, I tend to do this as well. This is followed by a bit of a break section with some slides during which he holds cross and circle simultaneously throughout. Be careful to note the incredibly tight timing with which he releases cross and then represses it before another slide, ensuring that he gets the max hold bonus in the process. Surprisingly, he then chooses to play the next section by one-handing each di-chord and then two-handing each trill afterwards, again preferring his right hand. We then see some quick alternations between triangle/cross and square/circle di-chords followed by the usual tri-chords, where F.SinA chooses to leave the home position for the first set and then execute the same strategy I mentioned earlier for Saihate Ex for the tri-chords. Indeed, I learned that strategy from watching this video; I used to alternate my forearms across three buttons at once to hit these alternating tri-chords! Not a good strategy if you're hoping to avoid bruising unfortunately.

The song enters a lull for a bit before launching into its next-most iconic section: a 12-second sequence of constant triplets. The fluidity of F.SinA's movement is impressive here, as he successfully gets all of the available holds in this section without dropping a single note. His initial route through the jacks section is interesting: he starts with his left hand on triangle as one would expect, before switching to right hand for square and then cross before coming back to his left hand for a repeat on the square. My theories for this are either that it was a snap reaction, or that he does it on purpose to favor his right hand, as we've seen that he prefers it in ambiguous circumstances. During the next section with triplet trills and a hold on circle, he alternates between his right thumb and left fingers for trills between cross/triangle and later triangle/cross, but surprisingly when the trill switches to triangle/square he rapidly moves his left hand between the two. It begs the question of whether he finds his left hand (or either hand) to struggle with trills between thumb and fingers on the same hand, as we've seen repeatedly before that he generally elects not to go that route when possible. The rest of the sequence plays out roughly as we would expect.

The following sequence is somewhat obfuscated but ultimately not much different than we've seen earlier in the song, with more presence of di-chords but otherwise a lot of trills and jacks. When we reach the ending sequence, two particular choices jump out at me. At the beginning of the above clip, F.SinA initiates a hold on circle before playing jacks on cross, a square/cross di-chord, and then jacks on square. Those jacks on square in particular we seem him for the first time attempt one-handed, and with some careful attention we can see he actually begins trailing off after the first three jacks in the sequence, causing him to only get FINE ratings on the last two. It's an extraordinary amount of swag for what I imagine could be little more a couple hundred points; what he gains from holding circle a little less than a second would be just under 600 points, and the two FINEs lose him 400 points from COOLs. I respect his dedication to squeezing as many points out as he possibly could. The second fascinating section is the literal ending, which quickly alternates circle with the cross/square di-chord and then triangle with the same di-chord. Rather than stick to the home position, F.SinA goes to cross his arms over each other, using the right hand on both circle and triangle in order to preserve the alternation of the hands.

From this commentary I've provided on his play, hopefully it is evident how much of each person's playstyle and physical routing depends on their own personal preferences and abilities. F.SinA far outstrips me or most other players in skill, and part of his talent comes not only from emphasizing his strengths but also identifying his weaknesses. He comes up with routes that focus on his strong ability for two-handing jacks and trills and avoids instances of one-handed versions of the same, to the extent that he even incorporates a hold using his forearm in order to keep both hands in play at once. While I wouldn't put Sadistic.Music∞Factory Ex in my list of favorite songs, the way F.SinA approaches provides many examples of the kind of play that Project Diva can excel at when charted correctly: highly demanding charts that allow for physical experimentation and routing on behalf of the player.


Final Thoughts

When I first encountered Project Diva Arcade two years ago at MAGfest, it reinvigorated for me what had become a stale game on gamepad and has kept me coming back off and on since. I would be the first to admit that it has serious flaws in its basic design, as I have extensively covered above in the mechanics sections. These aspects have left me reluctant to invest serious time past what I already have into the game, especially when it comes to the often confusing judgement method that prevents me from playing on reaction as much as I would with a vertically scrolling game. This is also confounded by the fact that there aren't many charts left for me to learn, and the few that still are present tend to lean heaviest into the need for extensive prior study before tackling them appropriately. In a much more mature game like IIDX, I persistently have new charts to tackle, giving me experience without resorting to repeatedly attempting charts. Meanwhile, Project Diva Arcade's endgame didn't extensively develop until the last few years of the game, leaving the top-level chart selection a bit barren.

At the same time, when I get to play one of these many charts listed above, ones that I've spent a considerable time working my way through the intricacies of, I still find myself enraptured by simply how physically engaging the game is. Even though I found myself light on interesting examples of charts using the slide bar (and I left out goofier slide charts such as Po Pi Po ExEx), the sensation of running my fingers across it and seamlessly returning to the buttons thrills me. The hold mechanic is even more genius, adding a significant amount of complexity in planning to a game that may have otherwise felt overly straightforward. Its these elements that I find are totally unmatched when not on the original arcade controller, and if you find one of these cabinets in the wild, it would be worth your time to try it just to get a glimpse of what these mechanics feel like in practice.

I would still wholeheartedly recommend the console ports of this game to anyone, especially those who want an entry point into the genre. However, if you're a rhythm game aficionado and have otherwise passed this one up, or you find you have a cabinet for this local to you, I still believe it's well worth your time to learn this particular version of the game. Although the skill ceiling falls comparatively lower than most games in the genre, it'll still provide many dozens of hours worth of playtime to explore, especially if you find yourself enjoying the music.

I've got real admiration for the theatrical trappings, with panels falling off the back wall and gyrating stagehands gussying up the set as you stroll through, but I think coming back to this style of gameplay doesn't hit the same for me anymore. the treasure hyperfocus on impressive boss fights is here without the richer mechanics of gunstar heroes or alien soldier, leaving much stricter scenarios where the player has less leverage over the proceedings. it's heavily setpiece-driven and thus built upon cracking open whatever essential strategy solves each individual encounter rather than learning particular mechanics over the course of the game. a good example would be izayoi, who has a rapid arm extension attack that aims for your head, so if you throw your head above you right when she starts tracking, you can repeatedly have her whiff and then bop her in the face when she briefly exposes it afterwards. that's a cool little extension of the game's primary mechanic (you can throw your head in any direction), but once you lock it in the repetition of her behavior pattern and her cyclically available weak point make the fight rather static.

not sure what to think of the different abilities you can get with various heads throughout either. theoretically I could've enjoyed having them woven in through enemies or something else organic a la kirby, but having the abilities just sitting out in the open right where you need them feels a bit raw. it's especially apparent given how few there are that alter mobility or do anything other than make combat easier; perhaps a bit of tunnel vision on the developer's part, even though you can tell they attempted some actual level design here. you may get a sequence with some wall-climbing thanks to the spiky head ability, but these segments boil down just to "scale the wall with the powerup" without many complicating factors thrown in aside from a late-game segment where you use it to stall on the ceiling and avoid rocket trains zooming by. the way that abilities are applied in the boss fights also fall into a narrow paradigm, with more than a few bosses having abilities sitting around that effectively shut them off: time stop in multiple fights, both a bomb with crazy damage and invincibility in the aforementioned izayoi fight, and the hammer in both rever face and the final boss fight. really something where some sort of trade-off regarding grabbing the ability would've made more sense; the developers settled instead of interleaving junk abilities in the rotating ability selection that will inevitably cause you to eat a lot of damage until they wear off.

killer7 may be the first game where I've actively sought out analysis of the plot and themes beyond just basic examinations; it reminded me a lot of NGE where it's pretty digestible once you lock down the core concepts but still rich enough to make exploring various interpretations worthwhile. part of this is because of how the game expresses its ideas both from a modern political context as well as a timeless, cyclical myth. on top of all of that, it's a fun adventure/light gun game in its own right thanks to having a consistent design language and an expansive amount of hints. suda has called this his crowning achievement, and in a lot of ways I think this may be a perfect expression of his narrative ideas with his unorthodox gameplay design.

it's hard to go over the plot without getting into spoiler territory, but I'll try my best. the plot details the affable combat between a set of idle demigods who frequently dabble in world politics. meanwhile, around the turn of the millennium, a new semi-communal world order is established that cements continual peace and anti-terror initiatives within the tight grasp of US hegemony. as a new sect of spiritually-enhanced suicide bombers (the Heaven Smiles) begin wracking havoc across the world and as japanese political forces convene to secede as an independent nation, the US government influences paranormal assassins Killer7 (also known as the Smith Syndicate) to intervene on the side of pro-globalist japanese operatives to promote US interests. in a series of vignettes in the middle of the game, Killer7 are tasked with continuing to deal with downstream effects of their prior operation as well as previous US overreach both public and private. as the game draws to a close, the true nature of the powers of Killer7 are revealed to its members as well as their long-reaching ties to political apparatuses within america.

an interpretation I'd like to discuss is the messaging on east-west relations presented in the game. while the context is lopsided (both in-game and in parallels to the US's vulgar displays of foreign power irl), I don't see this as a game explicitly singling out the evils of western powers over those of eastern ones. I originally had this interpretation myself until I reached the ending, upon which I realized the futility and perpetuity of conflict between sides as presented in the final scenes. with that in mind, the game uses a real-life context familiar to those of the early 21st century (a single global superpower and an exceedingly violent anti-terror movement) to contextualize an evergreen tale of nations jockeying for supremacy. the game does an expert job of dissecting the death drive the individuals involved have for power at any cost. virtually every character is deeply entwined in the existing power structures, and those who are not desperately claw their way into new ones (see Ulmeyda's cult/corporation during the Cloudman episode). the mortals and their grasps at legacy, relevance, and pleasure contrast nicely with the reincarnated demigods who walk among them and absent-mindedly reorient the world order at will in a sort of "long dark tea-time of the soul" to pull a phrase from douglas adams. this is all not to say the game doesn't indulge itself at all - far from it - but the underlying currents of the plot are grim towards the coexistence of different powers even in a globally-enforced peace arrangement.

as others have pointed out, I did want to briefly mention the mid-game sag that makes the plot a little hard to follow. as mentioned previously, there's three chapters in the middle of the game that are self-contained intersituals centered on dangerous forces within the US. the Cloudman chapter is definitely the best of the three, thanks to how it draws parallels between religious cults and the cult of personalities around business tycoons (a too-easy real world example: elon musk's following vs the sketchy finances of his company tesla) all being seasoned to taste by the US intelligence community. a lot of this is conveyed through animated sequences as well, which are in a western style that reminds me of older Korn music videos for better or for worse. the Encounter chapter covers an organ trafficking operation as well as Dan Smith's backstory, which is fascinating with context from the supplementary material but doesn't cover much interesting ground in the game itself. finally, the Alter Ego chapter tosses some interesting ingredients into the mix such as government involvement in private media and corporate exploitation of creative works, but without enough time to simmer these threads feel too underdeveloped to analyze in detail. this chapter is animated in a more traditional anime style, though everyone's faces are lopsided in an exceedingly ugly way that I'm not sure was intentional. this middle section is very playable so it's not an immense drag on the game, but I feel like I have to bring up the faults as well as part of my honest opinion.

on the flipside, the gameplay is pretty easy to parse thanks to a nice heap of quality of life features and smart design decisions. as everyone probably knows, this game is controlled on rails with one button moving you forward and another moving you backwards. while it takes a bit to get used to, it's mapped to W and S on k+m as if it were WASD controls, and at the same time it keeps everything important directly in your path, keeping the player from missing an important item or objective. this also allows for creative camera angles when it isn't locked in the classic grasshopper manufacture worm's eye view perspective. in your way moving between areas are plenty of Heaven Smiles, which you can deal with in a first-person aiming mode reminiscent of a light gun game. enemies are initially invisible but have distinctive laughter that let you know when one is in the vicinity (a godsend considering the odd camera angles), and each can be scanned to visualize them and find weak points. I was surprised by the variety of enemies in this game, many of which encourage experimentation to determine the best way to take them down. minibosses can get annoying here or there, but once the mechanics are learned and you have a good grasp on your combat options it becomes more rewarding to encounter new enemies.

one of the big draws here are the switchable characters, both for puzzles and for combat. there are six that can be swapped between at will via the menu as well as Garcian, who is mainly used to revive other characters when they are killed. by sitting through all of the optional tutorials you can find out the ins-and-outs of each, though I did not do this and found that I was able to sus out their differences just from organic trial-and-error. each one has a unique method of combat that goes beyond simple differences in stats and instead alters the gunplay for each. getting a handle on each character's abilities is key, as most of the chapters lock some personalities behind a set amount of kills that you must meet, though generally it isn't difficult to unlock whichever ones you're missing. I personally focused on coyote in the early game thanks to his wide applicability to puzzles, fast reload time, and solid damage, and I eventually branched out to the others. dan is powerful in combat thanks to his collateral shot charge special, while kaede and mask are situationally useful for certain enemies that require precision aiming/large explosives respectively. the only one I didn't get a lot of juice out of is kevin: he can easily skip large groups of enemies with his invisibility but is rarely useful in puzzles and lacks the firepower of the other characters. then again, I can't fault the game too much for this considering that it was more personal choice that I chose not to use him.

beyond understanding the above mechanics, most of the game really consists of learning the language of the design concepts for each puzzles. when I first played this briefly on gamecube I was quickly confused by the abstract language, frequent codewords, overwhelming amount of abilities, and the unfamiliar combat. on returning though, I feel like I understood how each in-game mechanic maps to a classic game mechanic pretty well, ie thick blood = exp, thin blood = mana pool, warped guitar riff = unsolved puzzle, soul shard = plot coupon, gimp suit guy on wall = soul shard nearby, and so on. learning to separate out the random musings from the side characters from important puzzle hints is vital to getting by, though the puzzles aren't that hard to begin with. the majority just involve using the correct character ability or ring in the right place, and which you should use where can generally be figured out just from whether a given object is interactable or not. more complicated puzzles generally involve passcodes or tiny quizzes or other things that don't really take mental gymnastics to figure out, and there's a built-in character who will give you clear hints in exchange for thick blood/EXP. I'll mention the bosses here as well because they're all puzzles to some extent: they're hit and miss, but nothing terrible. a couple times I got a little confused on the mechanics of a given fight, but none of them are strenuous to the point of being frustrating. some of them are straight-up scripted, and the rest should be easy to deal with as long as you keep your characters leveled up.

some other quick bullet points I wanted to mention:
+so many people have already mentioned it, but I gotta bring up the sound design. the soundtrack is great front-to-back, sound effects are vibrant, and you can even pinpoint enemy positions thanks to the clever stereo panning at play here.
+upside of the steam port: this game feels really natural with k+m controls. downside: all of the FMVs are super compressed and look pretty ugly to be honest.
+the chapter selection menu is really fun, and I love the way that you shoot each target when the chapter is selected and they explode into particles.
+definitely read Hand in Killer7 after playing, it helped me organize my thoughts on the plot and it adds a lot of context that didn't make it into the final game
+the remnant psyches are all a joy to talk to, though I wish I could clicked through the dialogue at my own place sometimes. I initially thought they had animal crossing-style babble, but it seems like they actual speak from an alternative engrish script through a modulator? hard to tell, but neat nonetheless.
+I like the way the mad doctor holds his hands up while cooking up serum for you to level up your characters with, and how he bangs the machine when it stops working aka when you've produced as much serum as you can for a given level.

it's a singular, unique game that goes down smooth while also packing a lot of punch thanks to the amount of depth in its story. after my mixed experiences with no more heroes I think this is the game that really made me appreciate suda's work. I already want to hop back onto my gamecube save just to get that experience, and I'm excited to play his other early games that I've had sitting in my backlog for ages. none of them may unseat this game for me, but anything even approaching this level of quality would be worth playing in my book.

since the time when sonic first entered the 3D realm, sonic team's primary struggle with designing each game revolves around how to structure each in order to provide a satisfactory amount of content for the player. this was the major motivating design inquiry behind my sonic adventure review that I posted recently -- not required reading to understand the rest of this review but might be handy if you want some context on my interpretation of sonic's primary design philosophy.

in the years since sonic adventure 1 and 2 attempted to pad time with the variety of gameplay styles and reused content, sonic has jumped from concept to concept in such a manner that the franchise's flexibility and wavering identity have become odd staples of the series. some entries pursued hot ideas at the time, such as shadow the hedgehog's ratchet & clank/jak II-inspired shooter mechanics or unleashed's god of war-style action sequences, while others relied strongly on specific unique selling points such as generations' recreations of old levels or forces' character creation function. all of these ultimately exist to add on layers and layers to sonic's "boost gameplay" level design that has been quietly undergirding the series for the past 15 odd years.

in that chronology sonic frontiers is not really out of place. it seizes upon the open world design methodology of its contemporaries in order to bolster its traditional levels. its aesthetic stylings offer another radical change in tone and environment for the franchise, mixing alien architecture and geometric, glitchy robot adversaries with scenic vistas and muted, dour exploration. in many ways, it fits the series' design trajectory perfectly. what makes the game fascinating is how surprisingly well-designed it is without sacrificing or compromising its status as a sonic game. an oddly ambitious title to release when no one was looking, as the previous game in the franchise had launched and flopped right as yakuza/lad was in ascendance in the west, which overtook it as sega's premier gaming franchise (though not quite biggest brand).

sonic frontiers structures its open zones as endless fields of boost level excerpts which often link as intuitive chains. the boost gameplay pattern itself is rather discrete and almost QTE-like in its obstacle structure, with hitting homing attacks at the proper time and performing correct actions such as switching rails or jumping over spikes serving as individual actions performed in between watching sonic roll through loops and zipline around to the next obstacles. in stark contrast with prior games using boost, frontiers chooses to frame the experience of these quick-fire reaction tests in a much more somber fashion. rushing up rails and running up walls center visions of decay with plaintive music behind the preceedings. rain showers occasionally coat sonic's surroundings in a evolving weather system that rotates day and night in a swirl that makes the passage of time feel like a daze. it's an odd juxtaposition of sonic's usual confrontational, energetic get-up borne out through his typical gameplay design against these trappings of loneliness in post-civilization.

surprisingly, this works! the secret behind this is a major shift in how sonic contextualizes these individual gameplay sections scattered throughout the world: absolutely nothing is compulsory. each zone's progression lies in a web of collectables that seem dense at first glance but quickly become second nature. defeating major enemies yields gears that open level portals that grant vault keys via mission completion which unlock emerald vaults, and specific memory items found via "completing" small boost sections strewn across the world open up side character interactions that open up new areas and lead to the final boss of each section. quite a mouthful; combined with the rest of the collectables such as small koko creatures, health and defense pickups, and rings, the design seems to share more in common with donkey kong 64 than breath of the wild.

however, more time spent with the game reveals that obtaining these collectables is not as rigid as it seems at first glance. gears will occasionally drop from random enemies, memory tokens can be found in certain caches hidden around the world, and random breakables with drop any number of other items. in a sense, all the content is optional to some extent. this enhances the forward momentum in an odd way while it makes the pace lackadaisical; simply run into as much new shit as you can until you feel ready to tackle whatever the main quest marker is leading you towards. if you tire of even this, you can choose to fish at one of the spots located in each zone (paid for with yet another currency: purple coins), where no fish can get caught twice and each one showers you with tokens exchangable for virtually any other collectable in the game. compared to its open world ilk, which seek to bury the player in a mound of optional questlines, rigid interactables, and outposts to capture, sonic frontiers eases off and lets the player drive for a while. the content flows so plentifully here that engorging yourself on it all seems grossly decadent. the game even heavily restricts its own fast travel system in an attempt to get the player to just meander. unexpected tact but I fuck with it!

this pacing comes as a cost however, and in this game's case the story takes a notable blow. with sonic breezing through small challenges and exploring semi-aimlessly, each memory-token-brokered cutscene has to take place completely bereft of action given the assumed non-linearity of execution. in each sonic blankly chats with a pal at a standstill remarking on the many off-screen events that occur or working through retreads of each character's "arc" from prior games in a disjointed, abbreviated manner. much of this is peppered with some of the most dreadful MCU-level dreamworks-smirk quips I've ever witnessed in a piece of media. a giant artificial lightning storm arrives at one point after a certain pillar is activated causing tails and sonic to recoil, and sonic without any irony utters "so, that was a thing!". truly a head-spinning display of whedonisms, upstaged only by the late game's unceremonious exposition dumps and heavily-worn "robot learns what human emotion/will/determination" is themes. utterly unsurprising that the lead writer here was plucked from the comic book sphere (archie's old sonic series, obv). this a downside in the absolute sense, but in reality these are not intrusive and the layperson playing this game would certainly not be primarily interested in its story regardless. the actual sonic fans seem to be lapping up the fact the tone is radically opposed to saturday-morning-cartoon vibe of pontac and graff's run on the franchise, so make of that what you will.

the other elements of the game that feel undercooked or particularly uneven feel mostly like results of sonic team's hit-or-miss variety of ideas and poor execution. the combat may be the most egregious of these: much like the open world, it initially seems like the team struck gold simply by throwing the prior boost gameplay elements into these fights. simply serve up these fundamentals with about fifteen different taped-on moves (that each "extend combos" ie play pace-breaking animations while having identical end results) and the system should be fine, right? other than the laughable "variety" of moves, with virtually all enemies being utterly decimated by one of sonic's two projectile moves rendering the rest pointless, each enemy has a heavily telegraphed counterstrategy that makes repeat fights undesirable. these tend to make each fight shockingly quick in the most free cases or unreasonably tedious when the fight requires sitting through repeated platforming challenges. specific ones like squid and caterpillar truly strain the pace with their overly long traversal phases required to simply access the privilege to fight them; caterpillar makes this even worse with laser beams that have a buggy habit of meaty-ing the player upon get-up and effectively OHKOing them. this didn't have to be the case; fortress has its own rail-grinding section and yet conjures the thrill dogfighting with its fast pace and multiple unique quick rail-switches required to approach its head. most regular fights (and some other major fights like certain towers) becomes slogs of repeatedly "cyloop"-ing each enemy's shield and then peppering them with projectiles. of special note in this section is the parry, which merely has to be held to successfully dispel the attack without any timing component. this appears like some last-minute mechanical change to be honest (there's a series of escalating challenges that feature parrying faster and faster projectiles... which makes no sense without the timing component), and by proxy this trivializes every ninja-type encounter. too many instances of these combat mechanics seeming cobbled together in a way that begs the question of why they were included at all.

combat is likely the worst of frontiers' sins when you break it down (I'm saying this to make myself feel better about that prior monster paragraph), with the other point of contention being the boost stages proper. these draw from generations' asset pool and feel somewhat awkward on first pass thanks to the general handling evidently being tuned for free-roam gameplay. however, these grew on me quickly. the vast majority of these particular boost stages rank among sonic's best, with a much better emphasis on verticality, alternate paths, and interesting structures and obstacles compared to sonic's other similar games that I've experienced. certain stages recreate famous SA2 adventure stages such as city escape and metal harbor, and playing these back to back with the others showcases just how bare the boost gameplay skeleton is. SA-era sonic was much richer in terms of its environmental variety in exchange for consistency in terms of mechanics, whereas boost reuses the same toolkit frequently with the reassurance that the mechanics will be predictable. the combination of these here as well as the surprising amount of juice squeezed from the now-old boost fruit make this feel rather robust in terms of its levels. it helps that each one is only about a minute and a half to three minutes -- the ideal sonic level length.

thankfully you can modulate how much you want to experience any of these facets with the fishing minigame, and with that sonic frontiers reorients the focus back to simply experiencing the vastness of each zone and the intermingling of rails, spring pads, and boost pads in each. a particularly neat trick it pulls in this regard occurs in the second island, where an initally large desert plateau gives way to a much larger web of tunnels and valleys once one climbs to the ridge cutting them off from the rest of the island. unfortunately the third island focuses too heavily on island-hopping that requires knowing specific entrances and exits; this is annoyingly infeasible without memorization thanks to the game's poor draw distance. it is also during this section that the amount of 2D boost sections in the overworld increases, which have the unfortunate effect of both struggling to work if their camera trigger is not activated as well as locking the player in to surmounting the obstacles once triggered even if the reward had already been received. the final major area (not as big as any of the others but still plenty large) splits the difference, with the most annoying enemies in the game and more forced 2D but a nice big contiguous hunk of land to traverse. at the very least each island has some dazzling structure that can be triumphantly scaled from multiple directions. this never ceased to excite me even when other environmental elements blended together in my brain.

in some ways, the lack of compulsory objectives in sonic frontiers (outside of completing each area-end boss; these use the same combat mechanics as the other sections but you get to play as super sonic so they're passable) makes it feel the perfection of sonic as the lightning-fast 3D playground series. by padding out the game with the boost sections themselves, sonic team has managed to make a seamless entry that still packs a significant amount of content; I ran a little over 20 hours without doing a decent amount of levels or uncovering each part of the map. in that way it seems like less of an "open world" game and more like an askew modern take on the collectathon. much like how sonic's older games featured multiple different level routes to cater to each player's needs, so too does frontiers allow a wide array of different experiences, event orders, and paths through its boundless exploration. I'm equally curious to see if sonic team attempts to expand on these particular ideas and aghast at the idea of them doing the same thing twice. I think there's enough here to overhaul or improve that proves this particular field is still very fertile.

even beyond what I've discussed there's more little goodies and surprises to find (pinball: meh, shmup sections: honestly pretty tight??). true final boss also definitely delivered on the crazy overwrought schmaltz and surprising mechanics. definitely worth playing through the game on hard just for that even though it made the combat 2% more tedious and isn't even necessary since you can switch it in the menu. platinum looks pretty doable too... I still have trophy hunter brainrot even though I've barely tried for completion shit since I started using this site. but maybe someday...

my high school years coincided perfectly with the sudden success of nu-FE and the proliferation of the 3DS after its sluggish start, so why I never glommed onto the series sort of eludes me. had it just been popular online it would be one thing, but I was flanked on both sides both by people I was dating and by my usual gaming group to get into it, and yet just something about it put me off. if it wasn't the cult fandom the series had accrued on the internet dissuading me for the newer titles, it was certainly the idiosyncratic mechanics of the older titles keeping me at bay.

of course I eventually did dip my toe into the series with an obsessive three houses grind after its release, so it's only natural that I finally try out one of the older ones to compare (ignoring my playthrough of blazing blade a few years ago that sort of trailed off). path of radiance at least attempts to assuage some of my misgivings about older fire emblem titles. at the same time it's mired in the series legacy to an extent that holds me back from truly investing myself in the experience. after thinking it over I've outlined two major shortcomings that left me wary.

permadeath: yes, I am fully aware of why this series has such a feature. in fact, on paper I respect it! this is a series of linear, story-driven campaigns that attempts a semblance of the reality of war, and the permanence of loss accentuates the reality of failure in combat. poor play only results in a potential softlock situation if you truly hemorrhage your roster beyond the constant stream of new units. grieving your fallen allies is part and parcel with the atmosphere the game creates, and the game is designed specifically around throwing alternate implementations of an archetype at you should you tragically lose your early-game mage or myrmidon.

but this simply isn't how we play games; it is virtually everyone's urge to reset the map upon a death. save scumming is inevitable and we will inevitably exploit it to cheat death. to foreshadow my second main mechanical objection, there simply are units I absolutely cannot afford to lose, and a minor mistake could easily result in an hour lost to a reset. admittedly some of these are completely player-driven; if I place a frail or wounded unit in a spot without adequately checking for assailants in range, I certainly deserve to lose said unit from my negligence. god forbid I let an otherwise bulky unit stand their ground and abruptly die from a highly unlikely crit though, or even worse, lose a troop of wounded soldiers I had hidden away because the black knight appeared out of a seemingly vacant house. that latter situation I withstood as an act of fate frankly, even though my freshly-recruited kieran took the fall. truly a bitter pill to swallow.

maybe in a different style of game I could stomach this, but path of radiance is otherwise not very interesting when retrying a map. I now understand why a high school friend of mine had explicitly recommended I try it on hard, as once a given map's various reinforcement locations and stage-specific wrinkles are apparent, their sense of surprise is mitigated and left somewhat bereft of excitement. simply plop titania/oscar/jill at the most problematic spot and guide everyone else to the exit/boss. this is not to say it isn't more involved on a blind attempt, but rather that retracing 30 minutes of troop movements due to a moment of absent-mindedness or an unfortunate roll of the dice drains me. the modern rewind system present in echoes (which I have not played mind you) and three houses alleviates this a fair bit. these allow forgiveness for small disgressions while ensuring that larger tactical failures with unavoidable losses will still require an acceptance of death or a full reevaluation of the player's game plan. thankfully in any case I stopped having notable troop deaths by the last third of the game thanks to increased overall bulk and lucky rolls, lending credence to the saying that fire emblem games often get easier chapter-by-chapter.

character imbalance: again, the narrative reasons for this are sound in some instances. early-game units are split between your long-term initially-weak investments and your stronger pre-premoted caretakers who age less gracefully; your fresh-faced youngins and your battle-hardened vets. character levels and abilities are generally mapped to their story-justified strengths and weaknesses when they arrive, with the most skilled recruits slotting in during the later missions when you need them most.

this is from a broad perspective anyway, as anyone you've held onto from the first couple chapters will be a complete monster by the end, and anyone available from beyond the midpoint will likely barely be functional just a few chapters after introduction. understandably this is partially a way to avoid total punishment for losing an important early-game character, as you'll likely have a weaker replacement available in the late game. however, many of these units come without mounts, and inevitably the real stratifying aspect rears its ugly head: unmounted units suck! fire emblem is not close-quarters tactics more akin to ff tactics/tactics ogre, and having high movement is everything to outpacing opponents, seizing objectives quickly, and staying out of trouble. canto alone (the ability that allows mounted units to move after attacking) makes virtually every option on the battlefield safer, and unmounted units simply can't cut it in comparison.

thankfully, path of radiance introduces the bonus experience system, which the game allocates for meeting bonus objectives + clearing maps quickly. these exp points can be applied freely between chapters to buff up characters who are falling behind or that have little functionality when recruited. not only does this make otherwise-useless characters viable, but it also helps archetypes such as dancers and healers who otherwise build exp at a slow, fixed rate. as I became comfortable doling out bexp I managed to really save my own ass giving fragile units like jill and astrid much-needed growth spurts to get them to the point of being essential. this is a shallow level of customization that still alleviates some of the issues I have with the shoddy balance, and I have to applaud path of radiance for adding such a feature. it may not feel as fun or intensive to me as three houses' incredible level of per-character tweaking, but it works well within the structure of classic FE.

three houses had a surprisingly interesting overarching narrative that made me curious to revisit the older titles even as it was diluted by reams of one-note characters quipping at pivotal moments. path of radiance thankfully lacks this bloat in favor of a more focused plot, especially given that it's missing the common FE trope of having the player character stand in as a silent tactician. in their place is soren, who illustrates much of what I appreciate about the character interactions and intermission conversations. prickly, honest to a deadpan fault, and chronically on-edge, soren never misses a moment to spoil the mood with his lack of idealism. yet the other characters don't bemoan his tactlessness at every turn; they begrudgingly accept it and continue to value him as an essential ally, at times silently using him as encouragement to speak bluntly when they would hold their tongue otherwise. ike especially leans on soren's cynicism to balance out his own naivety, both bracing him for the reality of continent-spanning war he's been thrust into as well as feigning maturity in the audience of those much older than he. this in turn rarely goes unnoticed as self-conscious posturing, often resulting in gentle prodding from those around him; the scene at the end where ike declares he will somehow abdicate his nobility to return to being a simple mercenary after which sephiran bursts into laughter, clearly wounding ike's pride stands out to me. you can wring these subtleties out for many characters, and I appreciate the timbre of the dialogue for exactly this reason, even though the smaller characters really never develop quite as fully.

from a thematic perspective I have to assume that path of radiance treads familiar territory for fire emblem: protracted military campaigns, international politics, and the rift between classes in a feudal hierarchy. the plight of the laguz as slaves and experimentation subjects for the beorcs is explored in detail without feeling exploitative or hokey, which I can only attribute to the even-handed dialogue and characterization. discrimination infests the populace at every level, riling up commoners in crimea's port town only to side with their oppressors, while at the same time driving nobles in begnion to violate the country's tenuous emancipation act to indulge in their fetishization of the laguz. it's thorough in its analysis up until the back quarter, where the plot threads begin drying up and the retalitory invasion draws to its conclusion. the main antagonists have flimsy motivations and face abrupt endings that refuse to let them raise the stakes or truly challenge the main force, and it detracts from some of the interest in the overall plot I had within the closing hours. I also object to the writing of the herons, who are split into "the good tribe and the bad tribe" in such a way that sort of diminishes the agency of their characters to have complex allegiances, though I will say the game at least plays with their sense of morality at times.

enjoyable but admittedly exhausting. I am an action guy at heart, and even with text scrolling at max speed and battle animations turned off I must admit I ended up trapped looking at my phone in the middle of playing pretty frequently. so perhaps take my review with a grain of salt...

biggest accomplishment for me during magfest this year was winning the typing of the dead tournament... huge surprise to me a day or two before the proceedings when I looked at the event roster and found they even had a tournament for it at all. great memories from my first magfest a few years back where I crushed a blunt with the squad in the smoke pit and then strolled into the expo hall, sat down at typing of the dead, and rolled through the whole thing in a single sitting with a rotating set of randos next to me. visceral feeling of sinking into the keyboard; this game is real fun to play high because you can roll your tongue around the words in your brain while you play. imo a lot of typing uses similar thought processes as speaking, including the same propensity for tripping over particular letter combinations. your lips might go crosswise at the prospect of uttering "ignominious" and its jarring hard G smashed against a puddle of weak tongue-tip-against-the-palate consonants and squishy vowels, whereas on the keyboard I fall to pieces attempting those left hand-heavy words like "exonerate" or "quarter". my dad gave me a pirated CD-R of Adventures in Typing with Timon & Puumba when I was a child and unfortunately I lost interest around the time they started teaching that qwer stretch of keys, leaving me somewhat awkward even in adulthood when trying to use anything that requires a left pinky.

playing this game competitively adds an awkward layer of tactics on top of what traditionally is a cooperative experience. at the end of each chapter of arcade play both of the players receives a score based primarily on their speed rankings across each individual prompt that they typed, along with an accuracy bonus, fixed points for each citizen saved, and an elusive "base points" value that I do not quite understand. because the prompts are summed in their totality rather than calculating an average speed for each user, the key way to receive points is simply to beat your opponent to the punch on as many prompts as possible. in encounters with multiple targets this goes from a mere race to something more interesting: which prompt will the opponent go for first? generally they'll chase whoever appears first on their side of the screen, which can make for an easy snipe provided you don't need to clear anyone from your side of the screen first. something more exploitable is the tendency to approach the screen from top to bottom, which actually often exposes one to danger given that usually closer enemies will appear lower on the screen; anyone familiar with house of the dead 2 (which this game directly copies its entire layout and encounter structure from) should recognize this. tackling the lowest prompt on the screen before sniping the second-highest often puts you in a good position to lead your opponent from prompt to prompt, provided that you have the edge in terms of typing speed.

tournament itself was as awkward as one can imagine, with ~30 people crowded around two setups, each running those spongey dreamcast keyboards. players shared credits too, meaning that often a less cautious player could tank the other by chewing through the credits and leaving their rival with none to fall back on in case of a death. rather uncomfortable considering that the game throws some rather questionable situations at you, particularly when it comes to thrown projectiles. in the original hotd2 you could divert your aim from a zombie to shoot one of these down in mid-air, but in totd the player is locked into the first prompt they begin typing without being able to switch on the fly, making dealing with said projectiles near impossible unless each player remains idle when the prompts originally appear. lost quite a bit of health in the final level to this, giving my final evaluation near perfect ratings in every other than "Decision making", where I received an E lmfao

the actual typing challenges really sell the game however, transforming what would be a quirky novelty into a legitimately excellent typing showcase. other than basic design like escalating the length and challenge of the phrases as the game progresses, the game often plays with its phrasing to surprising and occasionally hilarious effect. other than the various sexual innuendos that sneak into otherwise-innocuous sessions of play, there lies hidden modifiers that, when shot, will cause a cascade of phonetically-similar yet entirely-bizarre spellings to appear such as "jurasskicked" or "handkerchiever". late-game stuff also takes some real left turns, from odd references like "ecnalubma" to spelling bee bamboozlers like "otorhinolaryngologist" to a prompt that's literally just "www.sega.co.jp" (this latter one the other finalist and I both completely bombed and had a good laugh about afterwards). bosses are generally fine (the magician fight that penalizes any missed letter fucking killed in both semis and grands), but the best of the bunch has to be tower, the hydra villain. this fight presents questions with multiple answers tied to each one of the various heads on the beast, leaving the player scarce few seconds to correctly identify the valid choice. I always felt confident on this one playing normally, but the tournament was ran on Very Hard, leaving me sputtering each time I had to perform the fight. answering "what decomposes?" with "fossils" instead of "crab salad" in front of an audience will forever be a gash in my pride...

Roxy conjures images of decay and desolation in her sophomore work, which explores our symbiosis with the pests that inhabit our homes. our fear of pests lies within seeing those that we do not accept trespassing on our property; a desperate clinging to impose a totalizing will in our domain. to that end, Roxy heightens the terror by marking her own body as the point of infestation, where unknown alien entities lurk under the surface and bubble up at times of strife and anger. with everything physical in the world dominated by insects and parasites, the game paints the descent of the psyche into the world of the roach.

definitely appealed to me based on my current living situation renting a townhouse littered with mouse droppings and roaches. insects I can mostly handle, other than a little incident last week where I bit into a 7-11 cookie that had been sitting on the shelf in a folded-over bag, noticed it tasted off, and then looked at its wrapper that had been crawling with ants. promptly screamed and hurled up into the trash can. also have had to both kill multiple living mice caught in traps or dispose of corpses of ones that have died in our cabinets. no matter how many openings I plug with steel wool (which ends up getting into your clothes and scratching you while you're out and about) there always seems to be new ways for them to get in. I'm definitely getting a cat when I move out.

also great work by conecvltist on the music. enjoyed Concrete Hive the most thanks to its animating, hollow rhythm and the multiple layers of grimy buzzsaw pads littered on top.

contrary to popular belief, the wiimote does not have a gyroscope in it. gyroscopes are devices commonly used to measure rotation, so this may come as a bit of a shock to you if you've played kororinpa or its sequel, which are entirely based around rotating the wiimote to tilt obstacle courses for a rolling marble. instead, the wiimote features a three-axis accelerometer, which tracks linear movement. imagine that these devices feature a small weight suspended by springs. when the device is moved in a direction, the acceleration will cause the weight to squash a spring in the direction it moves in while stretching a spring in the opposite direction. thus, by measuring the squash and stretch of these springs (or whatever equivalent is actually in the accelerometer you're using), you can detect linear movement in any given direction. if you want to prove to yourself that this technology drives the motion sensing in kororinpa, simply turn the tilt visualization on during a stage, place the wiimote on a flat surface, and push it from side to side. even though the wiimote isn't tilting at all, the tilt visualization will rock back and forth as if it were.

knowing this, the precision of the tilt sensing in kororinpa stumped me for quite a while until I stumbled upon this tidbit of information. the accelerometer in the wiimote measures acceleration in its rest frame, which is on Earth, where we are constantly experiencing a gravity force downwards into the planet's core. because everything we are surrounded by experiences this, the accelerometer, if it were in free fall and only affected by the Earth's gravity, would not register any movement at all. likewise, when the wiimote is sitting flat in your hand or resting on a table, it is being pushed up against gravity, and so it registers a constant acceleration upwards. kororinpa exploits this by constantly tracking which axes the upwards acceleration affects at any given time. for example, if the wiimote is at rest and there's still a constant acceleration in the positive X direction (that is, jutting out from the left side of the controller), then the player must have rolled the wiimote clockwise, and the game will tilt the current level clockwise as well. extremely clever and well-implemented for a japanese launch title!

the gameplay brilliance of this control scheme comes from the ability to freely tilt each level in any direction and thus alter its relative position to the marble, changing walls to floors and vice versa. in each level, the game requires the player to search out some number of orange diamonds before reaching an end goal. combined with the ability to freely tilt, each level places its collectable diamonds in spots that must be approached by transitioning the marble up walls and back onto floors without accidentally letting it fly into the void. the best applications of these let the player skip wide gaps and navigate complex 3D mazes by "altering gravity" as well as letting the ball purposefully free-fall before catching it onto a surface with a careful tilt.

of course, the resourcefulness of this control scheme naturally forces restrictions on what kinds of levels are feasible without causing the controller to go haywire. firstly, because the reference values for movement are calculated when the wiimote is right-side up, it is much less precise when completely upside-down, and thus no stages ever force you to completely turn the wiimote over. secondly, because the reference view for the player must be consistent, the game always displays in a fixed perspective slanted down at the marble. any section that requires the player to roll the ball towards themselves cannot actually show upcoming obstacles to the player, which necessitates frustrating trial-and-error in these sections thanks to the lack of line of sight. the map, which does not allow free-roam and is uncomfortable fixed to the marble as a center point, is not a great help either. the most disappointing expression of both of these restrictions is the final unlockable level, which seems like the ideal complex 3D maze mentioned in the previous paragraph at first glance yet shies from truly maximizing the mechanical potential because every single section can be tackled without fully flipping the orientation of the level.

fortunately basic execution tests on your fine motor skills and ability to control your tilting through tight corridors and wall-less ledges serves as a solid foundation for the majority of the levels. most levels in the main campaign are less exploratory and more akin to linear gauntlets, which helps alleviate frustration with the camera. while the designers have a decent grasp on how to design appropriate challenges around the limited controls and unique free-tilt mechanics, the later stages begin exhibiting an uncomfortable tendency to escalate difficulty by simply drawing out the length of the stages. often times the most difficult stages feel more like disjoint challenges glued together with no connecting throughline, or worse, copy-pasted segments obsessed with testing consistency. fun enough for one straight playthrough, but rather tedious when going for faster times. perhaps they should've chopped many of these stages into multiple smaller stages and driven up overall stage count.

kororinpa is a budget title that can be bested within a couple of hours, but to the developers' credit they padded out the experience in meaningful ways for those looking to invest more brainpower. for starters, new marbles with different handling characteristics and shapes are unlocked during the campaign, and experimenting with which marbles work best with which layouts and hazards helps diversify approaches when optimizing each level. to encourage this, the game offers a rank system, with extra-difficult bonus levels appearing as the player achieves more and more "gold trophy" times in levels. there are also emeralds tucked away in each level as collectables; the best of these illustrate routes for interesting skips or narrow alternate routes, while the worst merely require tossing one's self off an edge repeatedly until hitting the emerald off-screen. each set of collected emeralds unlocks another set of bonus levels, which veer more towards "shitpost-y" themes like castle exploration and slalom skiing. it's unfortunate that these two separate extrinsic motivation methods feel antithetical to each other, as going for the emeralds often jeopardizes a gold trophy time, and you're unable to recollect emeralds after collecting them the first time in case you wanted to try a route that both sets a record time and collects the emerald.

overall this game shines best when it leans into the strengths of its control scheme and lets you devise nasty flips and skips, gently tossing the marble around between different surfaces. I would have liked to have seen more variety in these surfaces, as many of the levels descend to mediocrity by keeping all of their surfaces flat with guard rails and each of the joints between walls and floors completely 90 degrees. the most interesting levels are those that play with sloping surfaces, especially when switching between different slopes very quickly. another good variation on this are levels that feature heavy curved edges where one can build up speed yet must avoid careening off from the downward force, such as the ufo bonus level or the downward jam in the dessert world. more levels that utilized these concepts would have kept me from viewing a decent chunk of the levels as nondescript; a major dampener in any puzzle action game. still impressed by it nonetheless.

+re5/re6 are already pretty comfy to play, but this next-iteration of RE third-person shooter mechanics has really refined all the best parts of the prior entries. running is smooth (though understandably not that fast), turning around isn't a nuisance in instances where the quick-turn isn't optimal, and the handling for the guns nails the tense wobble of prior games without the same seemingly inconsistent shots.
+indeed, much of the fear in zombie confrontations comes from their erratic movements. zombies take many bullets to permanently dispatch, and lining up headshots isn't child's play. the undead will seize up, crane their noggins over lopsided, and stumble back and forth; all the while evading your fire.
+the whole police station section from the clock tower above to the dog pound below rules. perfect balance of planning your runs/routes + working out the various puzzles around the station.
+love the concept of the locker room. finding one of the blank keys lit my brain up with thoughts of what goodies I would get next. would have been interested in seeing this expanded.
+the usual resident evil cheese is much appreciated in the notes and emails and such over the course of the game. the cutscenes feel suitably more serious than the truly B-movie ones from the psx games, but the supplementary text belies the schlock under the hood.
+inventory system is cramped enough to not make smart loadout choices pointless, but also far less annoying to manage from when I played REmake. the hip pouches are also perfectly timed as you build out your weapon selection, great addition.
+best jumpscares and overall terror out of any of the REs I've played up to this point. when tyrant burst out of that wall in the east hall first floor my heart skipped a beat.
+ada...

-tyrant was honestly underused compared to what I expected from hearing others talk. he's present for a bit of the police station, but is unfortunately absent from the rest of the game other than a couple obviously scripted appearances. he's not really much of a threat either given that his punches don't deal much damage.
-the sewer and the lab arent't bad but don't have the great design web of the station. the sewer really just requires making like two loops through to get everything, and the lab has one small five-minute area + another area that just takes two loops through. puzzles are stlil fun, but it didn't quite hit the same for me.
-enemies also feel less threatening during these sections than the zombie windows and lickers of the station. the giant water monsters in the sewer are freaky but really only show up in two main locations, while the plant monsters of the lab go down quickly with the flamethrower regardless of their regeneration and their potentially to insta-kill leon.
-given the engine I actually wouldn't have minded an action focus later on in the game. missed opportunity imo, again given that the latter half is missing that je ne sais quoi of the first half.
-the section where you actually play as ada isn't that great. tracing the electrical systems made me feel like I was playing some obnoxious insomniac spider-man mission.

hit the spot as a "no thoughts" game while I recovered from marathoning so many games in the last two months. in terms of pacing I would have preferred a bit more bulk (I came in just shy of 8 hours IGT) or at the very least some way to just mow down zombies for a bit towards the end. the setpieces are good and the bosses passable for RE, but the bar is low, is it not? I absolutely could not put it down in the station though; playing this and onimusha sort of close to each other reminded me how much my brain gets tickled by RE-style puzzles.

mizuguchi's work fascinates me because it often incorporates musical elements without being explicitly rhythmic. the player within his games becomes an equal contributor to the creative tapestry of the soundscape rather than reciting canned phrases or demanding precision. as you move, rotate, place, and destroy blocks throughout this game, your actions directly accent the soundtrack and create new polyrhythmic layers over top of it, leading to a temporally fluid pacing that ebbs and flows with the eye-catching and psychedelic backdrops that each "skin" (or stage) brings. the effect is subtle; auspiciously off-beat inputs will not result in any added sonics, and with enough play this absence becomes noticeable. you unconsciously begin to follow the tempo and create your own grooves over top of the gameplay, and in this way the game manages to gently control your input timing to match up with the moving cursor that destroys your grouped blocks. this cursor slides along in perfect sync with the backing track... and here we come full circle. our button presses, twitches, and excited exhalations form their own accompaniment to the game, and lumines codifies these subliminal impulses to alter the player's behavior without letting them know explicitly. terrific design.

thankfully lumines would be an addictive puzzle game even without the audiovisual spectacle. the goal here is to clear 2x2 single-color block squares made up from two-tone squares you drop to keep them from stacking up to the top of the play area. while it draws heavily from the tetris-esque block puzzler genre, it twists the expected elements in ways that will fascinate and challenge even those who excel at other games of its ilk. the play area is much wider than it is tall, owing to the four-beat phrase that the cursor moves on sweeping the field of finished squares each measure. gravity is also in complete effect at all times, allowing you to easily chunk squares on uneven terrain in order to transform the structure by controlling where the blocks fall. once the idioms become apparent it becomes a classic game of optimization and risk evaluation: should I try to set up this complicated chain that's dependent on good block RNG? do I have a free spot open for this or will I have to set it down and hope for the best? that one column is getting a little high, do I have anything that could potentially break it down? etc. back when I initially played it it was an essential part of my podcast-listening routine, and one that I wouldn't mind pulling out today to kill a little time or occupy my hands.

I originally played the remaster though, and admittedly this version pales a bit in comparison to the content offered in that package. for a less serious player like myself, shuffle mode was an essential way to keep things fresh with a mix of skins from all modes rather than repeating the basic challenge playlist over and over. sadly it's not available here, as you can only choose between an endlessly looping of the basic playlist and single-skin play, the latter of which loses some of the charm of the skin variety. puzzles and the CPU versus mode seem basically identical between the two releases, and neither of which are particularly revelatory in comparison to the primary gameplay, but I do miss the often-perplexing missions within the remaster. in terms of mechanics, only one major difference exists: chain blocks which can wipe all attached blocks of a matching color whether within a square or not must be activated within a square in this original release, while in the remaster they fire off instantaneously upon touching another colored block. as for its ramifications on the design, I find both to be valid expressions of the quick-clear concept, with the original variation favoring more strategic play but only insofar as you care about score. the remaster has a bit of an 8th-gen mobile-esque sheen that will make fans of the starker, more lo-fi original blanch, but at the same time these updates have made the UI more consistent (a debatable positive) and made confusing layouts such as "Please return my CD" much more legible. ymmv on whether the remaster compromises the experience or not, but for me I will likely keep the remaster in my occasional rotation as much as I enjoy the novelty of playing it on a psp.

in the early days of the pandemic I dedicated at least an hour a day to playing the remaster, and replaying through everything now has brought a lot of those memories back to the forefront. while the game is second nature to me now, I still have those glimpses of utter confusion from when I first encountered it and attempted to make sense of its unorthodox characteristics. with a little time and effort, I think anyone can become comfortable with the concepts here and fall in love with the gorgeous and varied soundtrack. a must-play for puzzle fans of all stripes.

obviously with mikami at the top of the masthead on this one it's very tempting to extract the seeds of resident evil and his later titles out of this one. hmmm... limited inventory, you say? narrow corridors with dangerous enemies that you have to expend limited ammo against or lure away through subtle AI manipulation?? all these environments that loop back on themselves... you can really see the sketches of the spencer mansion here...

but really, it's heavily streamlined zelda in the same way quackshot is heavily streamlined metroid. the structure is effectively five dungeons in the classic single-screen room format strung along with some cute cutscenes of goofy and max trying to rescue pete and pj from a group of pirates. there's no resource management; exiting and reentering a room resets the majority of its state, which includes various throwable objects used to attack enemies. occasionally a puzzle will affect something in the next room over, but by and large every room here is a self-contained puzzle, ranging from "clear all the enemies" to push-block puzzles to a couple things in between. they're pretty solid too: the push-block puzzles often require using certain blocks to line up others, keeping the mapping of routes from becoming rote, and since clearing a room requires paying attention to where throwables are located and how to access them, some cool ideas arise from determining an order of attack and manipulating enemies to assist you with killing others. AI manipulation puzzles are a thing as well, ensconced into the game's toolkit with a bell item that draws aggro and thus controls enemy movement. the concepts stay remarkably fresh throughout, although given that the game is only a couple hours long, it would be tedious if this wasn't the case. a couple favorites of mine would be ones where you trick enemies into walking into oncoming fire from cannons and a particular one where you line up four enemies in a corridor to kill them with a single sliding block.

beyond throwing items and kicking blocks, goofy can hold two items at any given time to assist in particular puzzles. other than the bell one mentioned earlier, the hookshot serves the most "interesting" purpose of the bunch, as it can both stun enemies and create tightropes. not exactly exhilarating, but its latter purpose consumes the item, making searching for new hookshots an additional intrigue that drives exploration. beyond these the applications lack substance; the candle widens the sight radius in infrequent dark rooms, keys are just keys, and shovels can be used to farm life-up items in some rare locales with movable dirt. in this way the restriction of holding only two items at once becomes less demanding, since the latter set are so situational that holding onto them longer than a room or two will always be a waste. by the late game item-reliant puzzles give way to ones that leverage the game's inherent mechanics, so it seems like the designers figured this out as well.

no other game experiments with diegetic rhythm gameplay like space channel 5 part 2. eschewing the opaque freestyle gameplay of the similar parappa series, space channel 5 instead presents easy-to-grasp rhythms conveyed via creative visual cues. the call-and-response challenge paradigm is accented with twists that extend beyond pure memorization: long strings of inputs may be symbolized by the movements of a boss robot's appendage, or panels featuring dance poses lighting up in time with the backing beat. once basic concepts are established, the designers throw curveballs to screw with the player and add some much-needed challenge to the experience. you may have to single out an out-of-place opponent who sings the wrong input, or carefully count spores crashing down from a gargantuan mutated plant. as each stage goes on the music gets progressively faster and the commands begin demanding better reflexes all the way up until a climatic motif that ends each stage. even with its simplicity it's an absolute ball to play.

the game also oozes a retro sci-fi style that showcases go-go boots, smooth curved architecture, and rave-tinged big band tunes. I absolutely need to shout out director yumiko miyabe, who created the original design for protagonist ulala in the first game as well as having art/CG credits on other sega staples like panzer dragoon saga and NiGHTS. it's obvious that she was a primary influence on the game's unique vibrance and campy encounters. this game also boasts fully 3D environments that vastly outdo the crunchy FMV backdrops of the first game. there's a much heavier focus on environment interaction in this one given that elements can change on the fly much more quickly, and towards the end it segues into some truly abstract areas filled with gripping tessellations. these combined with the extensive choreography and the eclectic musical themes work fuse in a way that absolutely screams "Dreamcast."

the game is not long, but at the very least they added some neat extra content on to satiate those wanting to squeeze more out of the campaign. there's a pseudo hard-mode that's unlocked after finishing the main story; I wouldn't call it a true hard mode since not all sections have more challenging patterns, but at least they tried to stretch it as far as they could. there's also a special survival mode with a hand-selected set of rhythms that will truly test a player's mettle given that a single mistake will send you right back to the start. setting high scores on the main stages and getting far in survival mode will unlock extra costumes, which functionally serve as a proto-achievement system. to add an extra layer of complexity, there are also multiple hidden inputs in each stage that can be subtly noticed by additional accents present in the backing tracks even when left unsaid in actual gameplay. that commitment to unorthodox ways to extend the replayability of these short titles is exactly what I expect from a sega title, and part 2 absolutely leapfrogs the first in that respect.

it helps that this is the only one available on modern platforms, as the aforementioned FMV backdrops of the original have seemed to let it fade into obscurity. this is the superior game by any metric anyway, so stream it live with your friends. revel in the charmingly awkward localized singing and cheerful grooves present throughout. indulge in one of the best early console rhythm titles available!!

pour one out for the mid-size developers; the hard-working designers cranking out licensed titles and budget IPs left and right before the HD era killed off small-team development and financial consolidation came back in vogue. the jank if you will, that lovely feeling of finding a solid 6 or 7 out of 10 with a couple kooky mechanics and a simple gameplay loop tucked away in your favorite console's library.

cavia may be one of the most prolific of these developers: their ouevre includes drakengard 1 and 2 (with d3 being handled by fellow jank purveyors access games), resident evil dead aim, gits:sac on ps2, beat down fists of vengeance, bullet witch, and nier... a truly stellar roster of B games. and in this sense, drakengard is a perfectly solid action title. in fact, I would call the dragon flying sections downright fun! it plays like a cross of ace combat's free-roam target-based objectives and flight control and panzer dragoon's targeting system, with some smart movement mechanics added in such as lateral dashes/dodges/blinks and 180 turnarounds. the enemy roster in these areas is solid as well, mixing more traditional flight combat fare such as oddly geometric aircraft with heat missiles with more magical fantasy elements such as flying reapers who can only be hit when they throw their scythes at you. just enough variety between missions to keep things interesting, and the bosses for this mode hit just right. in my mind even if an encounter is initially frustrating, as long as you can experiment and find the right tools to handle it I think it's a design success - ie the ending B boss whose air slices I found hard to reliably dodge until I began combining the lateral dodges with dashing at a different pitch angle.

the ground combat is a bit more of a hang-up overall, and it quickly becomes apparent that this mode is the more hastily constructed of the two. there's an inordinate amount of weapons with uncomfortably long grinds required and unique magic for each, a parry system that I almost never used, blocking and lateral rolls, and yet somehow in all of this they left out the right-stick camera control. very unfortunate! though given that it's a musou it's not difficult to adjust to using the minimap for guidance on enemy arrangement along with frequently using the center camera button. at the end of the day you can hew close to caim's default weapon with little trouble, and after you adjust it becomes as relaxing and mindless as any other musou. it helps that it has the extremely inspired ground/air hybrid levels, which allow you to lay waste to dozens of foes at once between handling magic-resistant enemies or trebuchets on foot.

if anything the biggest problem holding this game back is the mission structure. rarely do the designers muster anything more than waves of identical targets with the occasional twist such as "fight through a crevasse instead of an open field" or "we have some wizards here too" or possibly "explore this dungeon that is mostly just regular goons strewn throughout." it's a bit upsetting when they do go out on a limb and end up producing some of the lowest points in the game, such as the mission that requires you to take down a golem in a labyrinth of ravines - caim cannot mount angelus in the middle of the maze, so whenever he gets knocked off the dragon he must trek all the way back to the start to try again. these moments are mostly annoying rather than truly game-breaking, but it is disappointing that the game never elevates its scenario design, especially since missions can often run in the 15+ minute range unfortunately.

what also drags the missions down is that the story integration into each mission is rather poor. while there's evidently a large-scale war going on, you have no real present allies to fight beside, and the enemies have no dynamism beyond chasing you when you come within range. instead the plot points are parroted to you by off-screen characters represented as talking heads in a banner at the top of the screen. since caim and his party end up losing virtually every locale they defend to the empire, perhaps this conveys the futility of the conflict and the abject weakness of the union in face of the threat of the gods. at the same time, it left me feeling rather disconnected from the salient plot points when little what I do moves the plot forward; it often feels like these missions are just buffers between cutscenes.

if characters aren't babbling about off-screen events, they are often scolding caim for killing scores of people in an insatiable bloodlust driven by revenge. I went in with this knowledge and expected some cloying "you are the real bad guy" moral, but drakengard really surprised me with how it played with caim's character. he's potentially the best silent protagonist ever conceived: a man who literally let his sword do the talking, one who is so committed to violence that he willingly exorcises his voice in pursuit of absolute power. yet while verdehet pleads with him to spare his fellow man and angelus sneers at his animalistic instincts, neither can do much more than tsk tsk since they absolutely need caim whether he's a psychopath or not. the reality of their world is so deeply bathed in despair that the lives that caim takes are merely specks on top of the mountain of humanity's sin, totally and comprehensively meaningless. this ties in to the overarching flood-like narrative that the game pushes for, where the planet's most powerful force yearns to let the gods completely and utterly extinguish life in order to cleanse the world of its caked layers of immorality. in this setting, caim's actions are a form of idealism that proposes that perhaps humans can still change reality through sheer force of will, as angelus realizes when caim pushes her to reach new heights of power towards the end of the first ending. his actions directly convince her that perhaps humanity is worth saving and perserving after all... caim demonstrates a fascinating moral decay of the hero complex that manages to stubbornly save mankind from an extinction wrought by its own hand.

unfortunately much of the intrigue of the rest of the cast has been bowderlized in localization - even more unfortunately this is still present in the undub I played. how much this affects the story beyond pure shock value is up for debate, and I'm not sure I have an answer. whether leonard is any more compelling of a character without his nonce arc present for instance doesn't perhaps matter too much to the plot as a whole given that he does very little except make off-handed remarks of self-loathing (though his scenes towards the end are rather affecting and well done in CGI, which btw is pretty excellent throughout the game). arioch is just a vessel for female trauma with no characteristics beyond that, though given the cavalcade of woe already present the male cast is entirely unempathetic to her plight and seems to view her as a liability. out of all three of the side allies seere is easily the most interesting. his naivete and extreme need for validation stemming from his abusive mother's favoritism legitimately develops over the course of the game, to the point where he eventually accepts that true heroism requires tremendous sacrifice and is willing to accept the reality of his world. his bickering with angelus over the myths he's enraptured by is turned on his head as the world's grim recreation narrative is laid out for all to see, and thus to see him step into the shoes of those who came before is fulfilling. I also love the scene where he's trapped in the coliseum and caim comes in to slaughter an entire horde of "subhumans," to which angelus exhorts him for finally "learning how to save a life with [his] blade." truly great black comedy.

these characters don't make much of an appearance in the main story though, and if you play that first set of endings before going through the side content it will feel a little bare given the small cast. thankfully inuart is a satisfying secondary antagonist, one who's envious of caim's masculine strength over his own and seeks to exceed him and demonstrate sexual dominion to assert himself. his frenzy towards the end of the game as he plays directly into the hands of the cult of the watchers is a fulfilling downfall to witness, even if in the process (ending B) he manages to create an eldritch horror in the process thanks to his warped conception of mysticism stemming from the aforementioned web of myths humanity has woven for itself. those first three endings were all worth it on their own, and then the fourth one really blew things open and got me thinking more heavily about the narrative themes.

in fact, I nearly considered rating it higher, and then I played that final mission in ending D. what can I say? some people are just not very good game designers. I'll try to remember the fun I had with it prior at least... and to be clear, I didn't get ending E and instead just watched it on youtube. looks goofy!

the jointed, scythe-like arms on the necromorphs stick out for multiple reasons, but there's a subtle trick the designers pull with it (intentionally or unintentionally) that fucked me up so many times playing through this game. with the camera in the traditional claustrophobic over-the-shoulder view, there's virtually no way to view what's behind the player without carefully swinging it around. when one of those necromorphs silently creeps up on you and dangles their arms right over isaac's head, letting them peek right into the frame... it elicits such a snap reaction from me anytime it happens. in an otherwise quiet situation there's a hope that hauling ass without looking back will put enough distance between you and them to turn around safely, but god forbid it happens when you're already firing off shots at enemies ahead of you. that heart-sinking feeling of realizing the crowd you had carefully herded together isn't the extent of the danger in the room and that you're actually completely flanked turns tense strategy into desperate flailing. rarely does isaac lack for available weapons or resources, but encounters like these reinforce that it's a constant struggle for survival regardless.

in many ways this is the bastard heir to the resident evil 4 throne, and it even attempts to be a "regular" survival horror game to boot. besides the perverse way bodies are reanimated and mutated into angular beasts, intestines dangling and writhing outside of the torso, there's some gesturing towards explorable environments and puzzle-solving. each chapter is located in a different wing of the ship, with each of these areas arranged in a spoked hub design with linear branches leading to key items towards some sort of general puzzle located in the center. no real brainteasers here -- most of it's either just picking up key items or manipulating interactables with the kinesis ability -- but I found the scenario escalation here surprisingly appealing. driven on by various talking heads over the diegetically-integrated hologram comms, the pace feels brisk, and the game rarely stumbles in regards to directing the player to their next location. it's certainly not organic, but this is the re4 model, not re1.

the first five chapters or so were novel but felt overly dependent on fetch objectives, and it was in the second half of the game where it seemed like the designers stretched their legs a bit. setpiece loaded areas such as the USS valor and its power outages, fiery engine interiors, and wide-open bridges ripe for combat arenas elevate what otherwise would have been dry encounters into a strained flow of ratcheting tension from room to room. much of this is helped by the disorienting zero gravity sections that open up some minor platforming and release the shackles on isaac's otherwise-lethargic movement. at their best they hinder typical combat and make ordinary enemies more threatening through spatially-foreign positioning that plays with one's typical mental layout of encounter locality; at worst they are perfunctory beyond the clunky fun of watching isaac bounce from wall to wall. the sections exploring the vacuum of space are less interesting... any attempt to constrain the player by tethering them to a countdown (in this case an oxygen meter) risks them struggling to execute within the limit or becoming anxious at the impending doom. the designers punt on these issues by introducing heavy guardrails into these sections along with frequent oxygen refills, which take what should be the threat of venturing beyond the limits of human existence into the void of space and reduce them to a dog leash.

these are just the bits of downtime between the combat, however, and each encounter feels like a proper challenge to optimize and strategize within. shooters generally use the general projectile model of impact: momentum (and thus kinetic energy) demonstrated by the jitter of firing of a clip and the repeated thud of the bullet meeting its mark. dead space sets itself apart by dispensing with this and introducing the slice. much like how simply unloading rounds into a zombie's torso is inefficient in resident evil, dead space heavily discourages aiming for the easiest targets in favor of severing appendages. the hooked arms and stubby legs of necromorphs come in a variety of configurations from wildly dangling to tucked in to swaying alongside a jaunty waddle, and learning how to properly dissect each orientation is key. this makes lining up shots less focused on quick reactions and more on careful placement, and no weapon handles this better than the handgun equivalent: the plasma cutter. it evicersates even late-game enemies with ease so long as the player properly places its linear crosshairs perpendicular to the extremity, which requires instinctual understanding of both its vertical and horizontal firing modes. the other weapons are equally as impressive: the line gun and the contact beam both hail from applications in excavations and provide extremely powerful severing power with a wide horizontal blast for the former and a focused vertical shot for the second. the ripper in theory was one of my favorites as well with its remote controlled sawblade that could easily trim opponents down to size, though its stopping/staggering potential is low and prevented it from keeping a permanent spot in my inventory. indeed, most of these extra weapons have excellent specific uses but lack that high reliability and versatility of the plasma cutter. if I did a second playthrough right now, I may as well just do a handgun-only run.

the typical crane-arm necromorph comprises most of the alien cast, but it's worth mentioning that many other enemies take advantage of your special abilities as well. where I fall regarding whether this is a good or bad thing is mixed... after all, the bread-and-butter of the game is severing, and when the game attempts to introduce additional factors it's hit or miss. take for example enemies that split open into reams of parasitic spawn upon death, specifically when the arms have not been severed. the little tykes are finicky to dispatch with anything other than the flamethrower, and when not getting picked off one by one they have a bad tendency to leap upon you and force you to perform a mashing QTE to remove them, something the game leans on a bit too heavily even with regular enemies. anything with projectiles is also sketchy, as isaac struggles to maneuver around them thanks to the camera angle; the damage is less the issue compared to the obnoxious hitstun. even then, much of the annoyance is combat stems from ignoring the severing gimmick, and I more or less understand the designer's intent in slapping the player's wrist for attempt to play guns ablaze, but no one is a perfect aim (esp on ps3 at ~20 fps). I could do without lethargic segments of carefully sniping single-tendril projectile minions strewn across the ground when I could be thrown into the actual fear inherent in the quickly-moving enemies of regular combat. plenty of the necromorph variants don't have the issues regardless and enrich the design no matter the apperance whether it's the occasional invincible stalker miniboss or the shuddering valor crewmembers that move at lightning speeds.

which is to say, the game is frequently great and occasionally fantastic whether wading through a sea of aliens or being a handyman around the decks of the ishimura. for perspective, I believe this game took me around nine hours, and at the same time by re4 rules it bats a lower average in terms of overall scenario/encounter creativity, regardless of the praise above. the bar is high! I'm putting it in this context because the other, possibly more intended context of tense space thriller is less appealing to me. bioshock-esque audio logs, frequent yammering from people never properly introduced, an extremely on-the-nose analogue to scientology, pointless intrigue that never affects your actual tasks around the station... how many times must I watch an NPC soliloquize from behind plexiglass before executing something supposedly shocking before I get the point. it was de rigeur to do shit like this tho in the 360 era, and the absence of traditional cutscenes makes it easier to swallow for sure. it's just odd none of the staff ever realized how goofy it is for isaac to be running around digging through receptacles for spare items while someone is solemnly shooting a random crew member. in 2022 you're not here for the story though, you're here because you want an early HD third-person shooter that doesn't lean on a cover system as a crutch. in that respect dead space is a lot more clever than it originally lets on.