With the Phantom Pain, Kojima avoids the kind of spectacular descent into villainy that the fans wanted and the trailers promised. Instead he gives us the Sopranos season 6 of Metal Gear (but instead of a depressed mobster, we play as a depressed war criminal). Maybe that sounds like one of those hack game journalist "the dark souls of x" comparisons but it's true. The best case scenario for all of our favorite characters at this point is a swift death.

Spoilers below.

After losing everything in 9/11 Ground Zeroes, having his mind and body shattered, Snake just... gets what's left of the gang back together, rebuilds his army, and tries the exact same shit again. Only now, it is completely devoid of purpose; The revolutionary anti-imperialist cause of the 70's is all but forgotten. There's a sinking feeling of dread as the camera pans to "our new Mother Base" in the helicopter after rescuing Kaz; an undeniable sense of this being a pointless, doomed effort. But since being a soldier is the only thing these people know how to do, they are stuck repeating the cycle. They're just going through the motions at this point; You really get a sense of that as the once charismatic and driven Big Boss is rendered a mute with a permanent thousand-yard stare who just does whatever Kaz and Ocelot tell him. When he's at the base between these missions he just stares at nothing and vapes for five hours straight. Far from the badass antihero that people expected from trailers. Venom Snake is actually kind of a directionless loser, which makes him just as good of a player stand-in as Raiden.

And the missions in this game, while incredibly fun and well-made, really beg the age-old American question "What are we even doing in Afghanistan?". The plot feels totally incomprehensible at times; you spend the whole game going after random acronym organizations, shell companies, and mercenary groups with some vague connection to Bin Laden Skullface and al-Qaeda the American deep-state/Cipher. But every single character is lying and basically, everyone is Cipher. I had to repeat mission briefings multiple times at certain points to figure out what the hell was going on, and I still really don't. You could say that's just bad writing, but it works for what the game is trying to do, which is to make you feel like someone with a severe head injury. You're not supposed to understand this convoluted imperial entanglement - no one can. Especially not someone as fucked up as Snake.

And like Snake, the returning characters from Peace Walker are reduced to these broken versions of themselves. The only person who seems to be doing well is Ocelot, who has really come into his own as the sort dead-eyed psychopath that thrives in this kind of environment. Honestly? Good for him. Kaz on the other hand is a crippled, traumatized husk driven by revenge which is in turn driven by his own guilty conscience, and Huey has become a delusional, pathological liar focused solely on self-preservation. The few unnamed soldiers who survived 9/11 Ground Zeroes are literally running around as raving lunatics in the wilderness. All of these people were supposed to die a decade ago, and instead they linger on as hollow men. Even the metal gear Snake fights is broken - it literally doesn't work without someone's magical powers. It's just this technological abomination created by a madman. When it tries to chase Snake it gets stuck in rocks because its sheer size is self-defeating, and Snake easily sneaks away. Probably the most obvious meta joke in the game (watch the last couple minutes of the launch trailer and tell me the game isn't making fun of itself). These Metal Gear (Solid)s aren't what they used to be. I mean come on, Metal Gear Rex roared like a T-Rex; Metal Gear Sahelanthropus... makes monkey noises.

Even Skullface, who was built up in trailers and in Ground Zeroes as this terrifying villain, turns out to be just a sad joke like everyone else. His plan is the most nonsensical, harebrained shit ever explained by a villain in any Metal Gear game. He spent a decade practicing a 10 minute theatrical monologue about why he has to eradicate the English language and give everybody nuclear weapons to unite the world. It makes absolutely no sense, it's a parody of Metal Gear villains, which were already parodies of 80's movie villains. While Skullface is performing his monologue in the jeep (to the wrong person), Venom just hits him with that fluoride stare and loops through a 20 second idle animation. Then Sins of the Father just... starts playing as they sit across from each other in complete silence and avoid eye contact. It's one of the funniest scenes in the entire series, mistaken by many fans as simply botched and awkward on accident (rather than on purpose, which it was). And if that wasn't obvious enough, Skullface's defeat is just straight up slapstick comedy; he gets crushed by his own non-functional Metal Gear in the middle of another absurd speech. Genuine comedy gold.

I think a lot of people overlook the humor in this game. It's a lot more muted and sad than in the rest of the series, but it's smarter here than in any other entry. Miller's "why are we still here" speech is MEANT TO BE FUNNY AND OVERLY MELODRAMATIC, as well as depressing and hard to watch. The way it ends, with that uncomfortable silence before he just... awkwardly sits back down? That was on purpose. The tone is that this has all become a very pathetic (and funny) spectacle at this point. Kojima's famously asinine dialogue becomes something really transcendent here; each hollow, ham-fisted statement really drives home the fact that everyone is just making this shit up as they go along now, trying to weave some bullshit heroic narrative out of a long series of L's. Kojima is telling us: "This is you dude. This is the American Empire. Your War on Terror is as darkly funny as it is monstrous." MGSV isn't the self-serious death march the trailers painted it as.

The way V's cutscenes are shot adds to these moments too. The shaky, handheld camera builds documentarian realism and a sense of witnessing real atrocities in more high-stakes scenes, but can also lend a comedic awkwardness to these exchanges between characters. I've seen someone compare it to The Office as a criticism but I think that's a feature and not a bug, as strange as it sounds. Somehow, it just works so well for the tonal balancing act this game maintains. But what really elevates V's cinematography thematically is its use of continuous shots. One-takes are often criticized as being essentially a gimmick, style over substance. But in Metal Gear Solid, a series defined by the juxtaposition between hard military realism and over the top fantasy? It's pure genius. Having all of this insane Kojima bullshit captured in documentary style is so fitting for this series. Perfectly hyperreal.

Speaking of hyperreal, let's talk about Quiet. I've thought a lot about whether her portrayal plays into Kojima's contempt for the audience (and the Metal Gear series itself for that matter) or if it's just a part of the game that didn't land. I was inspired by this article to conclude the former. In classic Metal Gear fashion, Quiet's characterization is ridiculous and offensive, but ends up transcending its low-brow trappings and having an emotional payoff - all while playing into a greater meta-narrative. And if you don't like that method of storytelling, then you sure picked the wrong media franchise. That scene of her speaking for the first time to guide the helicopter through the sandstorm is genuinely great. It perfectly encapsulates Kojima's ability to make something ridiculous, cheesy, and melodramatic - but still deeply affecting and with a lot of heart.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves; Quiet is absolutely a biting self-parody of Kojima's own portrayal of women throughout his series and in the wider industry. It's Kojima saying "Is this what you like, you sick fucks?" or possibly a case of introspection on his part ("Oh God, is this what I like?"). She has some hastily made up bullshit explaining why she wears no clothes, she is literally incapable of speaking for herself, and she undergoes gratuitous violence and imprisonment. Kojima obviously knows how ridiculous this is; he's seen basically every American movie, he knows this isn't how you're supposed to respectfully portray women. No, Quiet's portrayal is purposefully exploitative. Her objectification starts out fairly straightforward, but it becomes more and more disturbing for the player to partake in as the game goes on, in order to heighten the dark absurdity of all of this (particularly in Chapter 2, which is where everything in the game falls apart, on purpose). The point of Quiet's character, and the whole game really, is to give players exactly what they want in the most contemptuous way possible. To make you "feel ashamed of your words and deeds", you could even say. MGSV is about getting exactly what you want (another MGS game, endless content, revenge on Skullface, a sniper gf) and resenting it.

To build on MGSV's portrayal of women though, I think it's important that Paz takes on the role that she does in this game. She makes an initially very confusing reappearance - that first moment when you see her is genuinely unnerving, as if even the strange, fucked up Metal Gear reality we have become accustomed to can't explain what we're seeing. Out of all the unrealistic fantasy bullshit we've seen in this series, a series where it feels like anything goes and there are no rules or laws of physics, this is the first moment where I went "Wait, what? How?" But as we find at the end of "Paz's" side story, this is all just a projection of Snake's fragmented psyche. It's incredible in the way it makes you question what's real and what isn't, while simultaneously using Paz as a proxy to just straight up diagnose Snake's own mental disorders. But it's tucked away where most probably never saw it - like a hidden repressed memory somewhere in Snake's mind.

It perfectly conveys his nostalgia for a time that was never even good, as well as his crushing guilt and helplessness over the death of Paz. It's genuinely moving. That last tape of hers is something right out of Silent Hill 2, and it adds such depth to Snake as this miserable person that you should absolutely not want to be. For Snake, women really are just these fixtures of loss, shame, and regret - feelings that no doubt originate from the killing of his mother figure, The Boss. And despite all of the talk about getting revenge and taking down Cipher, the only time we ever see Snake get animated in this game is in his scenes with Paz. Snake's desire for redemption, his insistence on nuclear disarmament that feels strangely out of place, and his statement at the start of the game that he's "already a demon"? It's all about Paz, man.

One thing fans really disliked about Snake's portrayal though is that he never really seems to become the demon we knew him as in the early games. We never get to see The Exact Moment Walt Became Heisenberg. Quite the opposite; his intentions appear to remain heroic all the way to the end. The only scene where Snake approaches the kind of evil fans wanted to see is when Snake appears to murder the children in the mines but ends up saving them instead. In trailers this was depicted as if Snake actually goes through with the murder; to me, this is the smoking gun of another Kojima bait-and-switch. Fans wanted a game full of shocking, flashy acts of villainy on the part of Snake, and Kojima deliberately lead them on in trailers (just like in MGS2) but denied them of it in the final game. What did fans get instead? Spreadsheets.

Don't miss the forest for the trees; Snake is absolutely responsible for unimaginable atrocities during the events of MGSV. But instead of sensationalist images of man's inhumanity to man, Kojima shows us the banal cruelty of what it really means to be at the top of the war machine: You're just... on the computer, like everyone else. And everything you're doing is represented through so many layers of abstraction that it is impossible to understand the consequences. This ties directly into the themes of Metal Gear Solid 2 as well; by issuing your orders via this computer interface, you are even further removed from what is happening in reality. You just do a cursory cost-benefit analysis before sending the next death squad to do god knows what in some African or South American country you don't even know the name of.

And when a disease outbreak hits Mother Base, Snake's iDroid computer makes it easy for him to commit ethnic cleansing, sentencing scores of people to imprisonment and death for the language they speak. It isn't until all of the digital artifice is stripped away, and Venom is forced to enter the quarantine zone and personally slaughter his own men, that he has any crisis of conscience (and you actually lose some of your best men, because Kojima never fails to give the story actual weight via game mechanics). And you can say "Venom didn't want to do it, he had no choice." But that's exactly the point. If the Metal Gear Solid series is about one thing, it's about individual will being crushed under the weight of systems and institutions that have become organisms in and of themselves.

It doesn't matter how much Venom yearns for redemption. It doesn't even matter if he's in charge of Diamond Dogs. The system of global private warfare that Big Boss and friends established has taken on a life of its own, just like the Patriots of MGS2. His own intentions are irrelevant. If this system demands he kill his own men, he will do it. If this system demands that Raiden later kill Solidus, he too will do it. All actions within the system, regardless of intent, perpetuate the cycle of violence, war, and profit. Even if Venom disarms all of the nukes and brings about the Peace Day that never came for Paz, it just sets up the nuke free world that we hear about Big Boss exploiting in the intro to Metal Gear 2.

That's why everything in MGSV takes on such a hilariously pathetic flavor. Nobody, not Big Boss, not Zero, not Skullface, not Venom, has any agency in any of this. They're just flailing, looking for anything they can do to enact their will in a system that now imprisons its own creators. The only person who manages to achieve victory over the system by the (chronological) end of the series is, once again, Revolver Ocelot. And he only does so by shedding all individuality, tearing his mind into a thousand schizophrenic pieces to always be one step ahead of the algorithm. And it's all because he wants to fuck Big Boss. In the end love wins, and I think that's beautiful. But for everyone else, they are doomed to perpetuate the system they so desperately want to be free of.

And to what end? The truth is that there is no point to this system beyond its own self-perpetuation - it's a Snake eating its own tail (pretty good, huh?). The soldiers of Diamond Dogs, and every other PMC, kill so that they can keep killing. It's all for the love of the game at this point. Sure, they did the same thing back in Peace Walker, but at least back then it felt like you were blazing a new trail, sending a ragtag band of freedom fighters to oppose imperialism - that's long gone now. Any lofty goals this organization may have had are now lying somewhere at the bottom of the Caribbean. All of the bullshit Snake and Kaz spout about "fighting for the future" and "standing tall on missing legs" are just words to talk the gun out of their own mouths, to convince themselves that they are still moving toward something.

But they aren't. In the end, after killing Skullface (which was made purposefully unsatisfying according to Kojima) as revenge for the events that destroyed his life a decade ago, Snake is left to rot in a hell of his own creation. There are no holiday celebrations or fun outings like on the Mother Base of Peace Walker, and it's far lonelier; Quiet is gone, Huey is gone, Paz is long dead but still haunts him, and some of his best men are dead by his own hand. His only friends, Kaz and Ocelot, are just using him in some schizo game of global 4D chess. Even Eli and the child soldiers are just suddenly gone, and your metal gear with them - much more simple and poignant than the infamously cut Episode 51 would have been.

The effort to rehabilitate these kids, and maybe figure out Eli's origins? Track him down after his escape? Nope, you never see them again; they're just another of Diamond Dogs' many failures, another part of yourself that will be missing forever. All you can do is take the same helicopter ride to do the same (flawlessly crafted) stealth infiltration missions again and again and again, because senseless murder is the only thing that makes you feel anything anymore. And with the battlefield always shifting to adapt to your tactics in-game, you'll never make any real progress. Oh yeah, and none of this is actually real and Snake's entire life is fake. And deep down, he knows it.

So what about the real Big Boss? Well, he's basically stuck in the same cycle, only he has shed even more of his humanity than Venom. By using Venom's life as a tool in his own geopolitical game, Big Boss has committed the very same crime that was done to him and The Boss back in Operation Snake Eater. And all you can do about it is watch him ride off into the sunset to pursue yet another stupid evil scheme (that we already know will be a total failure), before getting right back to work like the epic gamer you are. Because you the player, like Venom, love LARPing as Big Boss no matter how pointless and repetitive it becomes. You'll complain about how Chapter 2 is "unfinished" and repeats the same missions from Chapter 1 (those were optional just fyi), but guess what? You're still gonna play those missions.

The Phantom Pain left players with such a profound feeling of emptiness and loss, and that's the real reason they felt it was unfinished. It's not because of any actual missing content - MGS2 had far more cut content, backed up by documented evidence, not just internet memes. But the difference with that game was that there was no falling out between Kojima and Konami - a convenient scapegoat for any aspect of the game that wasn't what fans expected, anything that hit players the wrong way. But that gnawing void you feel playing this game, the feeling that something is missing? That was intended, and it's honestly pretty heavy-handed and obvious when you approach the game on its own terms. I mean do I even need to say it? The pain from something that's missing? It's barely subtext.

Kojima purposefully denied us almost all of the campy, goofy nonsense we love about the Metal Gear Solid series to force us to confront how fake and hollow the legend of "the world's greatest soldier" really is. The level to which this game irrevocably shattered the minds of Metal Gear fans, leaving them eternally chasing their White Whale (the Moby Dick references weren't for nothing), is a testament to how the whole experiment was a resounding success. It snuck past gamers' emotional defenses, subverted their media illiteracy, and made them actually fucking feel something for once. Something real, something about their actual lives even.

There's a reason the game ends on a mirror - it's because the game is trying to hold one up to its players. And they could never forgive it for that. For turning their shallow, campy video game funtime, where I get to be a cool secret agent and Solid Snake is my dad, into a challenging work of art that interrogates their life. Because it's true: you are Venom Snake. You're a slave to the whims of others, your own desire for satisfaction. You do not know why you do the things that you do. And everything you're doing here - in this video game, in the digital realm - is ultimately fruitless. Fans complain about how there's no real resolution or ending to the story in MGSV, but it seems to me like that's the point: There is no resolution to be found here - not for Snake, and not for you. None of this is moving toward any conclusion or moment of truth. If you spend your life playing video games, you certainly won't ever see one. Like Venom, you'll never understand yourself, never have a real identity. The only way out, to freedom, is to stop fighting - to stop gaming. You can't save MSF, or Paz, or the Boss, or even Snake - you can only save yourself. Get out while you can. In the words of Naomi at the end of MGS1: "You have to live, Snake."

And that's the way this story ends. No Mission 51 "Kingdom of the Flies", no unwinnable boss fight against Solid Snake like fans wanted. Not even a sudden cut to black à la the Sopranos. Just the same meaningless thing over and over again, but somehow getting worse, until it's just... over. Not with a bang, but a whimper. If Metal Gear Solid 4 was about accepting the death of something that has clung on to life far longer than it should (the Metal Gear Solid series), MGSV is about being denied that noble death, brought back to life in some profane necromantic ritual, forced to live a tortured, half existence for all of eternity.

MGSV is best summed up as Kojima's way of saying "You guys wanted to keep playing Metal Gear Solid forever? Fine, here you go. Enjoy yourselves." He knows that he'll never be able to give this series a conclusive ending - he already tried that with MGS4. Instead, Kojima hands it off to the player, letting each of us come to it on our own, privately. One day, each player will get tired of the same missions and the same fucking helicopter ride and quietly decide for themselves, once and for all "Alright... I guess Metal Gear Solid is over. I'm done." and turn the game console off.

Where were you when cyberpunk became escapism?

Look around discussions of Cyberpunk 2077 and keep track of how long it takes before someone says that they wish they could live in Night City. Watch these conversations as they turn to screenshots of scenic views and vistas, with all involved waxing poetic about getting lost in the world. See the rising glut of "comfy" cyberpunk games — DYSTOPIKA, Skid Cities, Nivalis — and remember the genre's origins, written in blood and broken teeth from beneath the heel of a corporate boot. Cyberpunk has not been a genre where hope exists. It has not been a place for people to want to be. Cyberpunk media is a warning more than anything else. Despite this, more people than ever don't just see places like Night City as an acceptable alternative, but as something to yearn for. What they have now pales to what the genre's founders threatened would come to be. It isn't difficult to understand; I spent four years in Toronto, and that city has been a fucking shithole longer than I've been alive. This is a common opinion for extant cities and towns all around the globe. But what once existed as the worst-case scenario of a dark future has since emerged as more favorable to the world we occupy today.

There's an honesty to cyberpunk media that isn't there for much else. To pull an idea from Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, our world doesn't make sense. It's all abstraction. There are no roots, no sensible causes, just an ideological superstructure over everything that never seems to be shaped by its base despite all theory suggesting that it must. The bank owns a home owned by a landlord whose mortgage you pay. Your work is dictated by a boss who is dictated by a stock market which is dictated by investors, all so far removed from what you do that they couldn't ever comprehend it, yet they remain in charge of shaping it. Your country sends locals to other countries to kill other locals and nothing ever seems to come of it besides more people being dead sooner than they would have been otherwise. Cyberpunk media offers an escape from the absurd; it puts a gun in your hand and tells you to go and blow someone's fucking head off. The cops won't stop you, you'll get paid to do it, people will celebrate you. It's brutal, and barbaric, and it'll eventually leave you with more lead in your body than blood, but it's honest. It makes sense. There's no abstraction. There's you, there's a gun, there's a computer, there's a target, there's a legend. If it doesn't change much, it'll feel good to do it. Adventurism can't even promise you that in real life.

The greatest triumph of Cyberpunk 2077 is almost inarguably in its world design, doubtless thanks to the many decades of effort put in by creator Mike Pondsmith. Whether or not CDPR did a great job in translating all of that background lore into gameplay — in empty, clean streets, packed with inaccessible buildings and linear pathways — the design of everything borders on flawless. Night City is an urban planning nightmare, all twisted highways and too-dense housing. Drive a few miles out of town, though, and it starts looking like LA suburbs; drive a bit further than that, and you hit desert. While this alone is nothing new — Grand Theft Auto 5’s Los Santos is effectively the same thing — I feel that this is pretty rare for a lot of cyberpunk media, especially in the ones that break into the mainstream. People online will talk about that “eating noodles while wearing a trenchcoat in the rain” joke a lot when it comes to their ideal cyberpunk setting, but really take a second to think about how painfully generic cyberpunk media tends to be. Everyone wears stupid clothes, lives in permanently-raining cities with neon lights running 24/7, they all listen to nothing but darksynth, they’re all either corporate goosesteppers or chromed-out hackermen. People in cyberpunk settings are almost universally treated as set dressing, as indistinct and universal as the fucking wind. There’s some real diversity to both Night City and to the people that make it up, and it goes a long, long way in making it feel like a possible outcome for the real world rather than yet another piece of computer-anarchist wish fulfillment.

The characters themselves play a large part in why players seem so desperate to live here. Night City, as presented here, is kind of just filled with decent people. Now, we can’t talk about 2077 without talking about the Edgerunners anime, so I’ll be brief. What people liked about Edgerunners, I hope, is that it did a good job of establishing how someone can slip into a street gang. Not just a cyberpunk-themed one, but in general. David’s life fucking sucks from minute one, and it doesn’t stop sucking until the day he dies. His life is dog-eared by the deaths or betrayals or both of just about every person he’s ever cared about. He starts out with no money, no opportunities, and no future. Finding his crew is a release from that, but it’s short, and it’s painful. V, by contrast, has been born with a silver spoon in their mouth. The most stark difference you’ll notice happens right at the beginning, when Viktor Vektor gives you a free 21,000 eddies worth of cyberware that you never have to pay back. This is a strong line to draw between the two works. 2077’s Night City is nice, and forgiving. Edgerunners’s Night City will swallow you whole. It makes it really kind of difficult to believe that this is such a terrible world to occupy when V never really struggles for much, due in no small part to how strong of a support structure they both start out with and discover as the game goes on.

While nowhere near as cutthroat as they perhaps ought to be, considering that the way they act runs counter to how bad you’re told the setting is, 2077 has a strong supporting cast. What helps is that most of them are flawed in fairly believable ways: Judy is an idealist in a situation where it won’t work; Panam is so emotionally stunted that nearly every conversation she has ends with her blowing up on the other party; Jackie doesn’t know when to quit; River is here. Everyone’s favorite wholesome chungus Keanu Reeves is here as Johnny Silverhand, too, and he does a good enough job playing his character that you might forget that Silverhand is supposed to look like Bowie. Something I really do love about Silverhand is that it would have been so easy to make him fall on one extreme or the other — always right or always wrong — but he straddles that line exceptionally well. Johnny spends most of the game as an insufferable asshole, but when he’s right about something, he’s very right about it. By contrast, there’s a lot of time spent on him being wrong, and there’s really nothing to ought to say to him beyond telling him to go fuck himself. It’s a nice balance, and one that CDPR couldn’t keep up through Phantom Liberty, but that’s a review for another time.

The writing, broadly speaking, is good. I think a lot of the best stuff gets tucked away in the side jobs where you can actually dig into who these characters are and what they’re about, rather than just using them as a point of contact to get more “go here and kill a guy” missions from. I’m not completely sold on this being a masterpiece once you start poking away at specific details; I remain very surprised by people who both got attached to Jackie and then were surprised to see him die. The guy is throwing death flags from the very first mission. “Mama Welles is worried about me because all of her other sons died doing exactly what I’m doing, but it’s okay, because I’m never going to die. I love being alive. Hey, bartender who works at the place where they name drinks after dead people, here’s what my drink would be.” It doesn’t help that CDPR apparently ran out of time and money and stuffed the majority of Jackie’s character development and V’s start in Night City into a montage. I don’t know for certain how much it would have helped, but I have to imagine that Jackie’s death might have hit a bit harder if the guy wasn’t gone after a grand total of two gigs.

V lives a remarkably untragic life when you really zoom out. Aside from Jackie’s death, basically everyone that V knows or cares about either continues living their lives just fine or straight up moves out of Night City to go someplace else. Evelyn’s suicide is barely felt because she’s barely known, a couple of Aldecados can bite it, some dolls die in a Tyger Claws raid, and that’s about it. When you see how easy it is for Judy to leave Night City, for Panam to leave Night City, for V to leave Night City, for River to go on the run, for Kerry to go on tour — it makes you wonder why the fuck anyone actually stays in Night City. It doesn’t really seem that hard to just bounce. Of course, this is where something like the core books or Edgerunners come in to demonstrate why people can’t leave, so I’d say CDPR just did kind of a bad job in conveying this.

2077 does manage to be a decent immersive sim released in the year 2020, and that’s something of a feat. While some missions are incredible railroads that essentially force you down a set of tight hallways, there are significantly more of them that allow for quite a bit of player expression. Far from your usual dichotomy of “guns blazing” or “rear-naked choke fanatic” — though that certainly still exists here — 2077 likes to play around with the idea of your skills allowing you to break a mission in half. These are usually relegated to your mobility options, as most characters can walk out of the first couple hours of the game with a double jump and an airdash that’ll allow them to soar like a majestic, sequence-breaking eagle. It’s like a more limited Cruelty Squad, as the closest comparison; there’s no gunk booster jetpacks or intestine grappling hooks, but you can instead kill people with your brain or get Gorilla Arms to punch them in half as a trade-off. These are what you should be prioritizing when it comes to killing people, because firing guns feels pretty bad. The best thing you can do with regards to firearms is get the biggest shotgun you can find and stuff it in someone’s chest, or get smart guns that don’t require you to aim. Peering down your sights and taking potshots at approaching enemies from anything more than ten meters may as well just subtract the ammo from your gun without all of the sound effects and visual flair that would suggest it would ever do anything. Of course, this is all moot when you consider that the most optimal and most fun way to play this is to activate your berserk implant and just smash everyone’s face in with a baseball bat like you’re the Babe Ruth of the dark future.

It’s still kind of a buggy piece of shit. I do like 2077, but this is not the absolute slam-dunk comeback that it’s been hailed as. Granted, it’s certainly a lot better now than it was — back when it was so bad that Sony pulled it from digital storefronts and issued no-questions-asked refunds — but you don’t get points for getting your game to day-one launch stability three years after you released it. The opening nomad lifepath at one point flung me a kilometer in the opposite direction from my car for seemingly no reason, and I had to walk all the way back to it. This is in the introduction mission, before you’ve done anything. This is not the point where things should be breaking yet.

More and more of these bugs will continue to rear their ugly heads the further into the game you get and the more things 2077 needs to keep track of, and it’s clear that it’s a juggler with too many balls. Cops stopped spawning entirely at one point, allowing me to massacre civilians with no penalty; calls for new missions stopped coming in, so I couldn’t progress the side stories; the game engine would forget a fundamental law of reality and drop me through the map, or launch me hundreds of feet into the air, or make it so my guns just wouldn’t fire when I pulled the trigger. These come infrequently, but popped up enough throughout my 25-hour playthrough to bother me. I’m playing this on a brand-new computer off of an M.2 drive and V’s dick is still out whenever he gets on a motorcycle for a few seconds before his clothes load in. Something’s fucked up behind the curtain.

2077 is good, but given how much of a moment it was intended to be, it falls more than a little flat. CDPR still made a fucking gajillion dollars before it even released, so it isn’t as if they’re going to learn anything from this. As The Witcher 3, as Cyberpunk 2077, so The Witcher 4. Expect their next title to also be a barely-working mess that takes years to patch to an acceptable state. This is good, but it’s only good. It's a lot of missed opportunities rolled into a single work.

In Night City, you can be cum.

I can barely form a coherent thought about what I just finished but I feel weirdly seen by Final Fantasy VIII and its protagonist in particular as this understanding of specific feelings of capitalist alienation that I've been unable to articulate for the longest time. I don't have any official diagnosis and especially do not want people I barely know armchair diagnosing me online but Squall's struggles to process the most basic social interactions in terms of anything other than capitalist obligations like school or work, "shut up and get the job done" mentality, and specific jaded outlook are core parts of myself I never expected to see reflected in this fashion. While I narrowly prefer the basic bitch choices of VI and VII in terms of Final Fantasy games, this surreal response to the cultural zeitgeist of the latter game and weird as fuck (complimentary) use of Marxist theory (specifically the "annihilation of space by time" described in Grundrisse and expanded upon over a century later by David Harvey) in the same way that most RPGs use religious/mythological concepts solely because it sounds cool is a game that will no doubt have a special place in my heart from now on.

STOP DOING HYPER REALISM
VIDEO GAMES WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE REAL LIFE
YEARS OF SO CALLED TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT YET NO REAL WORLD USE FOUND IN MAKING A GAME HAVE MORE REALISTIC VISUAL AESTHETICS THAN METAL GEAR SOLID 4

Wanted to look better anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that, it was called "ART DIRECTION"

"Yes give me SLIGHTLY more smudges on that brown stained floor, give me slightly more lighting that completely destroys the art style at the cost of taking HALF A YEAR from my graphics card's life expectancy." - statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.

Look at what NVidia and it's mafia of bitcoin miners have been demanding your money all this time, with all the decades worth of beautiful low spec games in your backlog.
???????????
"Hello I would like my games to run and look worse please"
They have played us for absolute fools.

nintendo salvaging the american gaming market with the release of the NES was the modern inflection point for our industry, in some ways that are less obvious than others. the console enshrined gaming as a medium with legitimacy beyond the original fad-like relevance of the atari VCS, but the centralization of this success around nintendo gave the company an uncomfortable amount of leverage. this immediately portended poorly with the simultaneous release of the console's killer app: super mario bros., which gestured to a sinister rejection of the console's original intent. look to the japanese launch line-up and you'll see arcade staples such as donkey kong and popeye; games that lauded precise, restricted play with definitive rules and short runtimes. super mario bros. was a refutation of this design philosophy in favor of the loosey-goosey variable jump heights, frequent health restoration items, and long hallways of copy-paste content replacing the tightly paced experiences that defined the era before. the NES still featured arguably the greatest console expressions of the rigorous arcade action experiences that defined the '80s - castlevania, ninja gaiden, and the early mega mans all come to mind - but the seeds super mario bros. planted would presage a shift into more and more experiences that coddled the player rather than testing their fortitude. in some ways, super mario bros. lit the match that would leave our gaming landscape in the smoldering ruins of the AAA design philosophy.

the '90s only deepened nintendo's exploration of trends that would further attempt to curb the arcade philosophy, which still floated on thanks to the valiant efforts of their competitors at sega, capcom, konami, and others. super mario world kicked off nintendo's 16-bit era with an explicitly non-linear world map that favored the illusion of charting unknown lands over the concrete reality of learning play fundamentals, and its pseudo-sequel yoshi's island would further de-emphasize actual platforming chops by giving the player a generous hover and grading them on their ability to pixel hunt for collectables rather than play well, but the most stunning example of nintendo's decadence in this era is undoubtedly donkey kong '94. the original donkey kong had four levels tightly wound around a fixed jump arc and limited ability for mario to deal with obstacles; its ostensible "remake" shat all over its legacy by infusing mario's toolkit with such ridiculous pablum such as exaggerated flip jumps, handstands, and other such acrobatics. by this point nintendo was engaging in blatant historical revisionism, turning this cornerstone of the genre into a bug-eyed circus romp, stuffed with dozens of new puzzle-centric levels that completely jettisoned any semblance of toolkit-oriented level design from the original game. and yet, this was the final fissure before the dam fully burst in 1996.

with the release of the nintendo 64 came the death knell of the industry: the analog stick. nintendo's most cunning engineers and depraved designers had cooked up a new way to hand unprecedented control to the player and tear down all obstacles standing in the way of the paternalistic head-pat of a "job well done" that came with finishing a game. with it also came this demonic interloper's physical vessel, super mario 64; the refined, sneering coalescence of all of nintendo's design tendencies up to this point. see here a game with enormous, previously unfathomable player expression, with virtually every objective solvable in myriad different ways to accommodate those who refuse to engage with the essential challenges the game offers. too lazy to even attempt some challenges at all? feel free to skip over a third of the game's "star" objectives on your way to the final boss; you can almost see the designers snickering as they copy-pasted objectives left and right, knowing that the majority of their player base would never even catch them in the act due to their zombie-like waddle to the atrociously easy finish line. even as arcade games stood proud at the apex of the early 3D era, super mario 64 pulled the ground out underneath them, leaving millions of gamers flocking to similar experiences bereft of the true game design fundamentals that had existed since the origination of the medium.

this context is long but hopefully sobering to you, the reader, likely a gamer so inoculated by the drip-feed of modern AAA slop that you likely have regarded super mario 64 as a milestone in 3D design up to now. yet, it also serves as a stark contrast to super mario 64 ds, a revelation and admission of guilt by nintendo a decade after their donkey kong remake plunged modern platformers into oblivion.

the d-pad alone is cool water against the brow of one in the throes of a desert of permissive design techniques. tightening up the input space from the shallow dazzle of an analog surface to the limitations of eight directions instantly reframes the way one looks at the open environments of the original super mario 64. sure, there's a touch screen option, but the awkward translation of a stick to the literal flat surface of the screen seems to be intentionally hobbled in order to encourage use of the d-pad. while moving in a straight line may still be simple, any sort of other action now begets a pause for reflection over the exact way one should proceed. is the sharp 45 or 90 degree turn to one side "good enough", or will I need to make a camera adjustment in-place? for this bridge, what combination of angles should I concoct in order to work through this section? the removal of analog control also forces the addition of an extra button to differentiate between running and walking, slapping the player on the wrist if they try to gently segue between the two states as in the original. the precision rewards those who aim to learn their way around the rapid shifts in speed while punishing those who hope they can squeak by with the same sloppy handling that the original game allowed.

on its own this change is crucial, but it still doesn't cure the ills of the original's permissive objective structure. however, the remake wisely adds a new character selection system that subtly injects routing fundamentals into the game's core. for starters: each of the characters has a separate moveset, and while some characters such as yoshi and luigi regrettably have the floaty hover and scuttle that I disdained in yoshi's island, it's at least balanced here by removing other key aspects of their kit such as wall jumps and punches. the addition of wario gives the game a proper "hard mode," with wario's lumbering speed and poor jump characteristics putting much-needed limiters on the game's handling. for objectives that now explicitly require wario to complete, the game is effectively barring you from abusing the superior movement of the original game by forcing you into a much more limited toolkit with rigid d-pad controls, the kind of limitations this game absolutely needed in order to shine.

that last point about objectives that specifically require a given character is key: the remake segments its objectives based on which characters are viable to use to complete them. however, while in some cases the game may telegraph which specific characters are required for a particular task, in many cases the "correct" solution is actually to bounce between the characters in real time. this is done by strategically placing hats for each of the characters throughout the map - some attached to enemies and some free-floating - which allow the player to switch on the fly. this adds new detours to the otherwise simple objectives that vastly increases their complexity: which toolkit is best suited for which part of each mission? how should my route be planned around the level to accommodate hats I need to pick up? will I be able to defeat an enemy that's guarding the hat if I had to? this decision-making fleshes out what was previously a mindless experience.

there's one additional element to this system that truly elevates it to something resembling the arcade experiences of yore. while you can enter a level as any character, entering as yoshi allows you to preemptively don the cap of any other character as you spawn in, preventing the player from having to back-track to switch characters. on the surface this seems like another ill-advised QoL feature, but some subtle features reveal something more fascinating. yoshi has no cap associated with him, so to play as him, one must enter the level with him. however, you often need to switch to another character in the middle of a level. how do you switch back? by taking damage. to solve the ridiculously overstuffed eight piece health bar of the original, this remake transforms it into a resource you expend in order to undergo transformation. sure, one could theoretically collect coins in order to replenish this resource, but this adds a new layer onto the routing that simply didn't exist in the original game, where there were so many ways to circumvent obstacles with the permissive controls that getting hit in the first place was often harder than completing the objective. by reframing the way that the player looks at their heath gauge, the game is calling to mind classic beat 'em ups, where the health gauge often doubled as a resource to expend for powerful AoE supers.

the game still suffers from much of the rotten design at the core of its forebear; these above changes are phenomenal additions, but they're grafted onto a framework that's crumbling as you delve into it. regardless, the effort is admirable. for a brief moment, nintendo offered an apology to all of those hurt by their curbstomping of the design philosophies that springboarded them into juggernaut status in the first place, and they revitalized classic design perspectives for many millions more who first entered the world of gaming after it had already been tainted by nintendo's misdeeds. the galaxy duology, released a few years after this game, attempted to rework the series from the ground up with a new appreciation for arcade design by limiting the bloated toolkit of previous games and linearizing levels, but the damage had already been done. the modern switch era has magnified nintendo's worst tendencies, putting proper execution and mechanical comprehension to the wayside as they accelerate the disturbing "the player is always right" principles that have infested their games since that original super mario bros. by looking at super mario 64 ds in this context, we at least get a glimpse of what a better world could have looked like had nintendo listened to their elders all along.

Minstrel Song is an old skool rpg where you get into lots of fights with monsters to level up and learn techniques for your characters weapons as well as entirely new game mechanics, killing monsters is also the only way to advance the in game timer, the monsters will be replaced with stronger monsters at a rate faster than you will improve, on top that it will cause quests to time out, and new quests to become available, so actually you want to avoid combat as much as possible to keep the timer from moving forward and instead to focus on quests for character progression, only carefully incrementing it when you run out of things to do but monsters in the overworld spawn in huge numbers and are highly aggressive, so you can't totally avoid combat, but if you get into a fight you can just retreat to avoid advancing the timer, but retreating costs crucial resources so actually you need to run around like scooby doo with a trail of monsters chasing you while trying to progress quests, but the locations where you can find new quests are unmarked, and where you need to go to progress quests is unstated, so you need to run around the overworld getting chased by monsters like scooby doo so you can find quests to level up because there's no main quest, and you don't even know if you've done everything you can do before making the call to kill some monsters to advance the game clock, eventually you'll do this enough to get multiple quests that specifically tell you to go out and kill shitloads of monsters and they're really important so to do the most important quests you need to ignore everything you've learned about playing the game and potentially time out dozens of quests that you don't know how to do because they don't tell you where to go or what to do never mind the quests that you don't know about because they could be handed out by any of the dozens of NPCs who had nothing to say to you an hour ago, who are potentially in locations you haven't discovered because the only way to discover locations is either to talk to people or to recruit new party members, but you can only have a limited party size so to see if a new party member will give you a location (which they may not) you need to kick out an existing party member first if you are full, the removed party member will later reappear in potentially any one of the many pubs, one per city, scattered around the dozens of cities in the game, including ones you haven't discovered, after doing all that for a while the final boss shows up and you are probably not strong enough to kill him even with all that effort. This anti-lesson on game design could only be enjoyed by criminally deranged perverts.

a triumph for scenario design aficionados. hour after hour of slices of the real world perfectly aligned into a playground of roving militants and hapless civilians. rarely does a game ever make its missions feel properly explorable while keeping it taut and linear at the same time, and yet deus ex routinely weaves both together. for every point A to point B underground lair with traps laid out in sequence there is a completely open venue, such as the suffocating catacombs and their dimly lit hallways giving way to the Champs-Élysées avenue of paris, with a bakery to pilfer contraband drugs from, a hostel with full bar access, and an arms dealer's loaded apartment, all off the beaten path from your main objective. military bases and science labs retain the layout you'd expect had you ever toured one, and you'll find that locker rooms, rows of cubicles, and break rooms feature just as prominently in the dungeon crawling as warehouses with guards patrolling or tightly wound mazes of laser tripwires and turrets. the authenticity and legibility of these areas comes first, and yet more often than not the designers still manage to weave in appropriate challenges without violating each location's fidelity in the process.

and really, dungeon crawling is the name of the game here, more or less. at least half of the game takes place in some sort of complex with a destination and a set of non-linear gates along the way, all of which serve as hinge points for the player to choose which resources to expend. the "immsim" label comes from just how many resources have all gotten slammed together in your control: lockpicks and "multitools" for bypassing security, ammo for many different varieties of firearms, bio-energy for utilizing your augmented abilities, and a slew of consumable items meant for tanking bullets, running past enemies undetected, or breathing under water for long periods of time. at its most taut, the game generally puts some sort of barrier up in your way and then a way around it, with the direct option being something like combat or picking a lock and the indirect option being finding a vent or waterway to circumvent the barrier. with enough of these situations back to back, the game hopes that you'll avoid sticking to one gameplay style in order to preserve your resources in that area for later when they seem more necessary; you can't crack every door with lockpicks, so you'll probably have to get your hands dirty or crawl on your belly here and there if you want to keep your picks for when the alternative is, say, running through a irradiated area. the nice part of this is that it truly does work: I explored, snuck around, and fought off enemies all in equal measure throughout the game through entirely organic response to each of the situations. the downside is by endgame the resource economy has completely turned in your favor assuming you've been rotating all of your options, making decisions on resource expenditure past a certain point much more about cleaning out your inventory rather than rationing.

when the game is firing on all cylinders, you'll get something like bunker III from the aforementioned catacombs. the area is two large rooms with a camera and turret tracking you at the back of the first room right in front of a cell full of hostages, multiple floors connected by stairs with archways for cover in the second room, and a back hallway swarming with rocket-strapped operatives where the camera/turret controls and a key to the next reside; a waterway additionally connects the front of the first room with the back of the second room. here you have actual tradeoffs to deal with: just grabbing the key and skipping the whole area by going through the waterway works, but the coverage in the back hallway can be intense depending on the AI's behavior, and your direct path to the key is blocked by strategically placed crates as soon as you leave the waterway. gunning for the security controls instead is feasible, and you can leverage the fact that hacking computers (sometimes?) pauses enemies for a bit to quickly run out, disable everything, and hop back in the waterway. you could also sneak in from the front and use an augmentation that hides you from cameras to avoid triggering the turret, and if you rescue the hostages with lockpicks instead of locating the cell key and leave the area early, you'll get the next area's key from their camp leader anyway. when the game constructs situations like these, they not only make the discrete tradeoffs impactful on the flow of a given level, they also weave it into the actual second-to-second movement, stealth, and combat as well.

at its worst it's the opposite: individual rooms with a guard or two and maybe a computer system or locked door stitched together by long hallways that inoculate each scenario from one another. in these sections the main appeal is exploration, either through finding nooks and crannies hidden from view or by reading the many "data cubes" with flavor text strewn around. it can still be exciting, especially earlier on when you don't have tools to detect enemies through walls and the suspense of moving around still persists. later in the game when one has more abilities at their disposal, breaking apart puzzles or barriers by jumping over them with enhanced height, moving large crates to use as stairs with enhanced strength, or shooting down doors with a mastered rifle ability can potentially make the monotony less apparent. some of the barriers don't fare quite as well due to a lackluster implementation: the hacking, for instance, is more or less free even with minimal upgrades, and for every camera you have to actually maneuver around there's at least four you'll disable without thinking just because the security terminals are easy to access. if the mission locations didn't adhere to the small details of real environments or didn't have cute little secrets in vents and lock-boxes, these issues would likely overcome the holistic experience and result in tedium.

the tiny details extend further than objects in the world as well. from early on when one of your augmented colleagues begins spontaneously complaining about getting the wrong can of soda from a vending machine, I had hoped that the scripting for the NPCs would stay high quality, and it absolutely persisted to the final moments of the game, when a civilian mechanic distraught by my actions pulled a gun on me behind my back. the tight pacing of the levels compared to a full open world experience allows for many of the individual NPCs to have unique dialogue, behavior, and even inventory when subdued. of these the most fascinating to me may have been a conversation with a chinese bartender in hong kong, who extolled the CCP's commitment to capitalist enterprise outside the purview of the new world order by emphasizing authoritarian nationalism against main character denton's idealized western democratic order. it's something you wouldn't see now in the xi jinping era and weirdly reflective of the game's almost non-ideological view of politics: people-facing organizations controlled by layers upon layers of shadowy organizations, each manipulating social behavior in a top-down way compared to the bottom-up class struggle and ideological superstructure of reality. not really a thought-provoking work unless you're particularly animated by vague gesturing towards "control" and "liberty," but at least you can tell the developers didn't take it too seriously either. there's roswell-style gray aliens running around for christ's sake.

engineered to make me wince but wanted a JRPG in the Switch's first year real bad and gave it a shot. has a feel adjacent to a crusty comedy seasonal anime about a 13yr old with fucked up teeth who can't stop kissing her older brother in an isekai world. i like a lot of its ideas but its tone and script are frustrating. i like starting as a diver-miner worker dude but i hate the guy who is that. he should be chill and real as fuck but he's this lame dork and not in an endearing sense. there are multiple scenes where the little boy accidentally touches tits and they go all "stupid baka pervert!" and i just don't care for it. i've seen this all too many times before, i simply cannot get down with these anime babes. i hear it gets better but it shoulda been good when it had the chance to hook me!!! aside from Nia, i didn't connect with any of the characters. Pyra and Mythra especially bored me to tears (i just don't like those sorts of tropes) and i wanted to throw Rex into an evil boiling cauldron. this game is stuffed with lame anime gfs who call u 'master.' the battle system has a gacha mechanic just to spite me and a UI so overstuffed it invokes violent urges in me like a caged, tortured gorilla. the environments and character models look really great for switch although this game's character design is mostly (Morag is pretty cool the game should be about her) some of the lamest, goofiest, and horniest (in a bad way) i've ever seen in a wide-release game of its pedigree. horny in the most boring way, in a vanilla ecchi way where it's too cowardly to get weird with it. the voice acting is silly (positive) and kicks ass tho. and Nia, she's pretty good.


why did they put this in Smash instead of my boy Travis Touchdown smh. i want the bad anime enjoyer, not the bad anime

I started this game with a hater's killing intent, Final Fantasy simply does not mean anything to me, and I've tended to a garden of dislike for Disney movies from a young age that has blossomed into a forest of disdain as they evolved from saccharine and condescending children's films to emotional therapy for stunted millennials dragging their disinterested kids to watch their dad cry at a cartoon personification of an emotion wiggling it's eyebrows. I had often heard that a 'critical mode level 1' play through was a legendary action game on par with the greats, and had the full bad faith intention of saying this game sucked actually. Unfortunately my faculties are too objective and like the Casu Martz, just because something is conceptually and aesthetically revolting, doesn't mean it's not worth 100 dollars a pound.