absolutely hates women and denies them any personhood at all but simultaneously tries to be a critique of impotent men who hate women and deny them their personhood

IT FAILS REAL BAD!!!

A real shame because some of the satoshi kon-esque psychological imagery can be fun and the puzzle gamplay is devious and interesting.

The transphobic stuff is just repulsive and sad. The fact that this game was branded as some dark and cerebral adult drama that analyzes relationship dynamics is a pathetic joke. There's less nuance here than a Two and a Half Men episode.

not a poorly crafted experience in any sense and i'm sure theres a lot here i lacked the generosity to find but i felt like i could completely visualize the creators' concept and reference stack with such exact clarity that it became distracting:

femininely morose akihiko yoshida and ayami kojima art/
lilting twinklechoral keichi okabe-wave ost/
vanillaware storybook Spine animations/
folklore character collection combat/
soulstroidvania wielding its genre structure of labyrinthine sparseness to spin a ludically obvious yarn about seeking ~ absolution amidst decay ~

-- and I had to uninstall because the returns are so diminished for me at this point and it was genuinely making me sad that such a clear and passionate labor of love could feel so utterly taxonomizable and consumed by its own clockably interrelated references

at this point idk its just kind of upsetting to play something with such a rigorous and dogmatic commitment to its reference material that doesnt seem to extend very far beyond the world of games themselves, even if said games are all things i find personally beautiful and worth emulating. felt like a very workmanlike and glossy medley of touchstones from works that clearly moved the creators--but executed in a sort of surface way that belies their inability to cogently, personally express how said works resonated beyond mere facsimile. no judgies girl i relate and its why i havent reliably maintained any true semblance of a dedicated art practice for years!!!

tldr; i saw myself in this and i didnt like it

FYI this is still the best one. Most inspired soundtrack, most painterly and phantasmagorical setting, best hub zone and maiden, and laden with the most lyrical sense of tragedy and loss. Sure the gameplay is a little bit clunky compared to (some of) the later titles, but Deal With It!!

it makes me deeply sad that the online has been discontinued and we haven't heard anything about a re-release. Still totally playable offline, but the full experience deserves to be remembered and kept alive!

EDIT: WAIT I SAID RE-RELEASE NOT SLEEK HIGH POLY REMAKE DEVOID OF ATMOSPHERE AND RESTRAINT!!! WHY MUST THE DEVILS AT BLUEPOINT CONSPIRE TO MURDER EVERYTHING I LOVE

-The power and futility of images
-The unreconcilable friction between self expression, documentation, and occupation
-The urgency and necessity of cultural perseverance and joy, even as bloody torrents surge through broken dams
-The act of bearing witness to the places and people whose glittering specificity will be dashed and diluted by apocryphal, self-absolving media narratives scrawled by the servants of those who erased them
-The film reel collectibles are TOO SMALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

shocked by how into this I am despite it overtly representing like 800 simultaneous trending references and roguelikes not being a thing I typically enjoy at all! The scott/villeneuve style trappings are obvious but they're cleverly wielded to convey a story through refreshingly non-cinematic means, and so much of the housemarque soul is still present here. The playfeel is stellar--the dualsense and sound integration especially--and the grueling pointillist combat is reactive and wondrous in a resogun meets nier meets furi kinda way. The punitive precision and masochistic self-empowerment systems (parasites, malignancies) feel so synchronous with the game's themes about delusions of potentiality and the horror of being trapped within a losing conversation with yourself. The whole "the location is its own character" thing is so pat and tritely overused as an assessment at this point but uh... it kind of is tho and i really like it!!! I haven't finished yet and honestly don't think you're even intended to in order for the experience to meaningfully land; the whole notion of "seeing it all" as a means of understanding game messaging is so parochial and rooted in other mediums and their histories, and an especially odd cudgel to use against Returnal when frustration, obfuscation, and defeat are all integral ideas being directly explored in it!!! I will be genuinely kind of disappointed if the ending brings any semblance of traditional closure. Selene is a wonderful and subtly articulated character and the experience feels much more like a portrait rather than a journey. More cagey, damaged middle aged ladies in games plz, i love a smooth altruistic jrpg teen but it is really nice to get to excavate a thorny character who already comes with so much baggage and life experience!!!!!!!

repression is the most grueling form of labor / regret murders our potential selves

i am vast; i contain malignancies!!!!!!

This is way less of an ethically focus tested mental illness empathy simulator GAME 4 CHANGE than the (offputtingly self righteous) marketing might lead you to believe. I think this is both a good and bad thing. The way Senua experiences mental illness / hallucinations is hyperstylized and painted with both ridiculous elements of gameification (FOLLOW THE PUZZLE RUNES IN UR MINDZ EYE 4 NEXT OBJECTIVE) and nu-metal woad raider mythological window dressing. It's all just a tad TOO self-seriously morose and hellish and obsessed with exaggerated primeval suffering, and this God of Trauma vibe makes Senua's experiences of mental illness like, totally unrelatable and unaligned with the primary needs and struggles of people dealing with psychosis today. These real-life concerns are usually way more mundane and demoralizing; low decibel but high impact social and material struggles concerning healthcare availability, getting hired/making rent, and functioning in a a hostile individualist world of bootstrap productivity designed for neurotypical people but empathetic to nobody! I really dont understand how, aside from "ending stigma/spreading awareness" this game offers any real calls to action for the lifting up of mentally ill people. Ninja Theory framing their games marketing so high-mindedly but not engaging with any ideas of real material advocacy is laughable, and imo people are completely justified in their disgust and divestment from the entire project based on that alone.

BUT BUT BUT

As a survival horror / walking sim tonal experiment with a unique setting and bold audiovisual design? There are some very interesting choices here. The 3d sound design and fully narrated internal greek chorus is moody, genuinely disturbing, and almost totally unique in popular gaming. The FMV/CGI composite memory sequences have a singular, scuzzy visual texture I just love. IMO Melina Juergens delivers a really absurd performance of almost universally one-note agonized wailing, but her naive (and probably badly directed) commitment to the "heightened intensity equals good acting" bit is equal parts camp and actually kind of cool and transporting if you can meet it where it's at??? The game lags and fails in many ways (redundant, tepid puzzles, kind of awful combat that truly feels there for no reason) but there are a lot of laudable aesthetic choices that give it a much more entrancing and horrific atmosphere than it would have without them. I think this is FAR less of a "mental illness empathy sim" than it is an unrelentingly bleak tone poem about celtic death mythology/ripoff chris cunningham music video using stylized trappings about mental illness to reinforce its oppressive atmosphere, without being 100% hostile and stigmatizing to people with mental health conditions in real life. Personally? I think it's okay for media to explore stylized (even grandiose, mythologized, lurid, "unhelpful") renditions of neuroatypical characters in all kinds of settings, especially when it does make an effort to not make you hate or fear schizophrenic people by its end. I DONT think its okay for work like this to advertise itself as groundbreaking or progressive, especially with so little material centering the lives of neurodivergent people out there.

That's maybe a weird line to draw, and I completely understand (but dont fully agree with) anyone feeling like it's 100% not okay to use such a sensitive topic as window dressing for your grimdark survival horror game under any circumstances. I COMPLETELY agree that the marketing of this game is maybe the most ableist and grotesque thing about it and that just calling it an exploitation horror game would be way more honest. It's like if fromsoftware came out saying that bloodborne is ACTUALLY about ENDING MENTAL ILLNESS STIGMA with FULLY RESEARCHED DEPICTIONS OF BREAKS FROM REALITY. like i dont care if you parade footage from some sensitivity focus group in your making of featurette who the fuck are you guys kidding

fyi I am not someone who deals with hallucinations or any of the symptoms Senua (and millions of irl people) experience, so I am by no means any authority on this--plz dont listen to me i have no power or sway 0:). I'm a big dumb idiot writing about a middling videogame with aesthetics i only sometimes really clicked with!

also the credits song is one of the most embarrassing and maudlin things of all time

also its SO stupid they're making a sequel to this and it totally reveals the insincerity behind all their high-minded promotion of the first game :)

just an fyi that if this is your first exposure to FFX and you want to hop on the bandwagon of being a smug little brat about the supposedly "awful" voice acting (it's not, it's remarkably accomplished and effective considering the insane tech constraints the team was working under--the depth of performance these actors were able to achieve still blows more current games and their aggressively codified anime archetype voices out of the water! good luck finding protagonists with as specific and non-cliche intonations as Tidus/Yuna. Watching Hedy Buress' thoughtful interview featurette about playing Yuna literally makes me cry) you should know that you probably are feeling a weird friction between the voice/characters moreso because the hd remaster completely butchered so much of the animation and visual storytelling present in the faces of the original character models, which the english voice actors were directly responding to and taking influence from in their performances! OG Yuna had so much intimate detail written into her ps2-era features--her gentle, tired eyes, full of fatigue but never resignation. This new baby eyed smoothface Dissidia treatment has turned both our protags into puffy blowfish with hyper-saturated irises and deer in the headlights stares, and the pioneering facial animation from the og has all but been completely erased! literally you are seeing a vastly inferior treatment than 20 years ago. Devastating 2 observe this homunculus pantomime, truly can not bear it

also deriding the laughing scene for being cringe is so tedious, it IS cringe but in a beautiful and very real, well contextualized way and the reason the game contains this "cringe" scene is also the reason its literally the only convincing romance in like any videogame ever made !!!! sad how you've all forgotten how to love, i will be praying 4 u

FFX is an all timer for me and my connection to the mastery present in like every specific element of its original iteration have made playing this remaster completely impossible lol

maybe you will experience much less revulsion to the facial animation than me and i truly hope you do because this is one of the most holistically well considered and thematically cogent Final Fantasies and jrpgs in general. Just play the OG upscaled i literally just did and it looked infinitely more appealing than this

I'm not convinced by the "color the world with fun~!" snake oil De Blob is selling me!!! You can paint this totally depersonalized metropolitan hellscape with as many garish colors as u want and it will still be a PANOPTIC BIOME OF CORPORATE SUBMISSION AND CONTROL!!!!!!!!!!! De Blob as the neoliberal compromise candidate in contrast 2 Jet Set Radio's radical reclamation of the urban landscape as a communal artspace 4 anticarceral revolt!!!!!!!!!!! more like de COP!!!! go open a frozen yogurt store in a disenfranchised community u slimy gentrifying FREAK!

wanderer above the sea of fog above the 45th boss arena above the medieval fort archipelago adjacent to the nodal sprinkling of challenge tower/upgrade caves in conversation with the impenetrable questline diaspora above the ancient pagan city above the ancienter pagan plague swamp above ash lake above the fromsoftware slurpee dispenser of mass effect 3 endings

Frightfully fun, often peerlessly gorgeous devourer of my finite life! Truly engrossing and addictive for its often well masked vacuity and kind of horrifying that this and FFXIV will likely end up being the longest single campaigns of any story I've ever experienced. I like it I love it I want some more or it and dear god I hate myself