Along with Animal Crossing: New Horizons and DOOM, Call of Duty: Warzone formed part of what I've been internally referring to as "the saviour trilogy" - the three games that were up to the task of keeping me in the game of the early pandemic when everything was uncertain, indeterminate and appalling. Warzone was by no means a perfect game - it was janky, it was buggy, it was stupid (in both pejorative and complimentary senses) - but it was more than capable of performing the crucial "zoom call with the boys" function: while my girlfriend and my grandmother and my work colleagues hopped onto group video calls to play murder mysteries and do pop-quizzes, me and the fellas used Warzone as an excuse to war-room about what was (or, more accurately, what wasn't) happening in our lives while the viral battlefront raged outside.

The gameplay was mostly ancillary, but had plenty of highlights: BIG-team Call of Duty with proximity voice chat and "death screams" combined with semi-invincible vehicles and 1km+ sniper rifles lead to a lot of hilarity and outside-the-box gameplay you wouldn't expect from the franchise - chasing dudes up staircases with quad bikes, throwing tomahawks at UAVs, having a smoke+riff sesh with your dudes in a helicopter that's flying too high for the guys with SMGs and shotguns in the Final Circle to reach... the possibilities were more or less endless, and the creators of 1.0 seemed happy to permit revelry in regressive behaviour (though in reality I imagine patching a 100GB+ game in April 2020 was a living nightmare for Infinity Ward and the 13 other Activision studios who supported them).

The day Warzone asked me and the squad to download two 100GB patches in one week was the day the game died for us. We were all playing on Base PS4s with default hard-drives, luddite gamers who had no interest in Pros and Plus and Platter-Externals for the sake of a F2P Zoom call. We trailed off into the world of Hunt Showdown and Fortnite and never looked back at the gigabyte-gomorrah we uninstalled ourselves from; like Animal Crossing, there was probably some degree of post-covid relief to be found in that digital distance. I only ever really heard about the game again via the bizarre phenomenon of grown men in their thirties and forties telling me, with surprising frequency, that they'd queued for 8 hours or spent £1000 to get a PlayStation 5 specifically so that Warzone would load faster and could be installed alongside other games. Crazy, huh? Imagine being that invested in video games.

Ironically, it wasn't any new feature or map or content that brought me back for Warzone 2.0 - it was the simple announcement that the install size of the game had been reduced by 80%. The wonders of next-gen gaming! As you might expect from a project that has 23,000 people in the credits, the game itself is almost completely unchanged from Warzone 1.0; while there's an initial awkward adjustment period in exchanging East European forests for Middle-East Asian fields, it's surprising how familiar everything feels - almost as if someone's run a Google Translate AI filter over all the Кока-Кола billboards to make them say الكوكا كولا instead; difficult questions re: globalisation that emerge in trading out Ukraine for Iran are mostly side-stepped by simply having the new war-country act as a toybox for generic PMCs. War has changed in order to become unchanging. An eternal battleground that persists regardless of what language the 400MB road signs are in. And as far as gameplay goes, my only complaint is that they made the cars and trucks are weak as shit.

DMZ, the new Tarkov/Hunt/DayZ mode, comes under much tighter scrutiny. Or it would, if it was capable of running for more than 20 minutes at a time. Essentially a mini COD MMO with anywhere-PVP, it's a classic case of a gamer's platonic dream-ideal making way for a CEO deadline-induced nightmare: progress lost; parties blocked; playlists broken; queues abound; hard crashes at crucial moments - arguably it's all launch-week teething issues that will pass like unconvincing PhysX dust on the plains of Notpakistan, but this is a mode where every mote and moment of progress is supposed to count for something: all decisions are final, and there's only one way out. Losing progress to the desktop's void stings all the tighter when so much of the moment-to-moment gameplay here involves inventory management that doesn't matter - inventory management in games never matters all that much, but it really doesn't matter here: weighing up whether to stow the Aged Wine or the Vintage Wine for the difference of $50 (to buy a gun that costs $5000+) only to walk over a lagged-out landmine moments later and lose three hours of progression... That's life, I guess, but it's not exactly condusive towards the life-escaping levels of Zoom Call With The Boys.

Feels impeccably timed that this would drop at the same time as the Qatar World Cup - a broken Middle-East-bound versimilitude of something that once existed in a cleaner, sturdier but no less morally-ethically dubious form. Why was it palatable then, but not now? We're still chewing on it with some degree of gratitude, but there's a look of hypocritical disgust in our eyes. I guess the difference now is that the wheels are now coming off of everything everywhere and we can see the cracks that 'workers' once had the time to paper over. When everyone's connected all at once, there can be no blind eyes. Hopefully they patch in the ability to gib people with chopper blades again.

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.

I was born two months premature. When I was one, I was dropped on the porch. When I was two, I
had pneumonia. When I was three, I got the chicken pox. When I was four, I fell down the stairs and broke six ribs. When I was five, my uncle was decapitated by a watermelon. When I was six, my parents hit me in the head with a shovel. When I was seven, I lost my right index finger to my pet Rat. When I was eight, my dog Spike got hit by a tractor. When I was nine, my mother lost her arm to a rabid brahmin. When I was ten, my sister was torn to bits by a pack of dogs. When I was eleven, my grandfather killed himself because I was ugly. When I was twelve, my grandmother killed herself because I was ugly. When I was thirteen, my father poked out his eyes with a pitchfork in a drunken stupor. When I was fourteen, my brother lost his hand to a wallaby. When I was fifteen, my aunt choked to death on a chicken bone. When I was sixteen, I lost my cousin to a badger. When I was seventeen, I cut off my left big toe with a hoe. When I was eighteen, my father lost his right leg to the same tractor that killed my dog.

Trapped at the end of history, where humanity refuses to evolve. Not even total nuclear war really moved history forward. You could nuke the world five times over and still the survivors would huddle around a trash fire and drop Monty Python references.

Every character in this game is LARPing. LARPing as Vegas gangsters, knights of yore, 80's boxing champions, indigenous tribes, and whatever long dead culture they can scavenge from the rubble and haphazardly imitate. Humanity is recycling old ideas, systems, and aesthetics. It's a world of pastiche, everything a caricature of a caricature with no original. One of the enemies you can encounter is a malfunctioning pre-war robot that shouts references to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a movie no living person remembers at this point. That feels like a good summation of Fallout 2.

I don't know if this was intentional or not; maybe it's a just a consequence of Fallout itself being a pastiche of other cultural influences, or maybe it's self-aware. But the inability to move on from the past and create something new is clearly a theme they aimed for with this game, which is why the Enclave are the antagonists. They're the zombified corpse of the United States, and all that remains behind its dead eyes is the drive to rape and pillage the world and eventually, the stars. Fallout 2's vision of America is one giant CIA death squad squatting on an oil rig in the Pacific that can do nothing but consume everything in its path. These are the people responsible for the end of the world; they're a rabid dog that can't be reasoned with, only put down. It's fitting then that the final boss, Frank Horrigan, can't be talked down like his counterpart in Fallout 1. You have to kill him. And when you do, you may view that thematically as a final banishment of the old world, so now something new, like the NCR, can move the world forward and let go of the past.

But what are the NCR? They're just the Enclave from 350 years prior. They're directly modeled after the US government, except with some vague idea that they've learned from America's mistakes and are the better, truer fulfillment of its lofty ideals. But the differences are only superficial, and they'll eventually repeat those same mistakes (which is exactly what happens in New Vegas). The NCR has no industrial capacity and is relegated to scavenging and repurposing knowledge and tech from the old US. They never even had a chance to be different when they're so dependent on recycling America's technological, cultural, and political innovations. These are the people who are supposed to usher in a new era? It really portrays the world of Fallout as one with no future, where the same cycle of apocalyptic destruction driven by conflict over limited resources will happen again and again, because we are all haunted by the same failed systems. Instead of wiping the slate clean, the destruction and collective trauma of the Great War has robbed humanity of its capacity to imagine a future. "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living."

This is all very conceptually interesting - too bad the gameplay itself kind of falls apart in Fallout 2. In a very thematically appropriate move, the developers reused the engine, music, and assets of Fallout 1 and stretched them beyond their limits for the sequel. As a result, the game feels pretty agonizing to play at times; fights can go on for excruciating lengths due to the higher number of enemies, and they get sadistically difficult. The map is bigger making travel impractical unless you get the Highwayman (which is actually really cool to be fair), cities are bigger and are painfully long and monotonous to traverse, and there are so many more characters, very few of which have the memorable talking heads of the original.

And in general, there are a lot of design changes that make this game feel not as well-crafted as the first, like the Temple of Trials replacing the quick and simple cave start in Fallout 1, or the removal of the time limit getting rid of the focusing sense of urgency the original had. The main quest is longer and more padded out too, taking about twice as long to complete without really justifying the length. Fallout 2 had to be bigger than the first so it could feel like a proper sequel (which, in the 90s, also meant making the game harder), and because of that I think it highlighted how archaic and simple the engine was - a fact that actually didn't feel as noticeable to me while playing Fallout 1. It probably didn't help that they also released this game only a year after the first, which is pretty apparent given how unfinished and stapled together the game can feel in places. San Francisco is probably the best example of how this game is barely functional at times.

What ultimately makes this game a good sequel to me though is that it adds so much depth to the story told by the original. Fallout 2 is the exact nightmarish outcome the Master wanted to avert. He was the only one who saw the world's stagnation clearly and had a true vision of another way, one that required humanity to essentially shed its old skin. Forcing us to Evolve, literally and figuratively, to end this inescapable stagnation and get history moving forward once more. By assimilating every single person into the Unity, there would be no more conflict - just peaceful redistribution of resources based on our shared goals. We could finally see ourselves as something new, unburdened by humanity's past.

But it doesn't matter whether you think he was right or wrong. The Master's plan was doomed from the start and would have lead to its own Children of Men style world, as we find out in Fallout 1. And you can't cling on to the disappointments of history and wish things could have been different. You have to keep living and have enough faith to try and build something new and different, like Marcus in Broken Hills - even if there's a slim chance it will work out.

the most rancid, accursed odor a game has ever had. memories of a time when boys in your grade would laugh at Smosh videos and fight over yogurt tubes. of when eminem was the mainstream face of rap. a time where tobuscus was a guy who made epic parody songs and wasn't a guy who sexually assaulted people and melted his brain on drugs and conservative tweets. when pizza hut was fine dining. fruit gushers shared in humid computer classrooms. a time of pixar DVDs your mom's friend's husband burnt. a time of accursed rituals n goosebumps books n shit. just rancid.

In a bygone age where “See you in Rayman 4!” had yet to morph from an innocuous sequel hook into the cruellest lie since the Trojan Horse, Ubisoft were on a hot streak that few developers can claim to have had. It's not uncommon to scoff at them now, but much of the key talent that brought us so many instant classics of this era are still there, including Chaos Theory’s very own Clint Hocking. The personal touch of developers like him has become harder to parse with Ubi’s exponential growth and shifting priorities, but it’s hard not to retain a bit of goodwill so long as at least some of those who made Chaos Theory are still there, because it’s probably the best stealth game ever made.

Contrary to what one might think, Splinter Cell’s chief influence isn’t a certain other tactical espionage stealth action series, but rather Looking Glass. It’s not hard to imagine why – to this day, Thief has better sound design than any game that isn’t either its own sequel or System Shock 2, but the need for its state of the art reverberation system stemmed out of its first person perspective. If immersion is the name of the game, nothing sells it quite like having to track where enemies are through carefully listening the same way Garrett would, as opposed to having a disembodied floating camera that can see around corners do the work for you. How does Sam’s game measure up to that, given it’s in third person?

The answer is through a different kind of genius. In Chaos Theory, every individual part of Sam’s body is affected by light/darkness independently. You might not initially notice this until you arouse suspicion by peeking his head just a little bit too far out of a crawl space into a brightly lit area, or accidentally position him in such a way that his leg’s poking out from around a corner. Even now, it’s exceedingly rare for dynamic lighting to be anything more than window dressing, and yet Chaos Theory was making full use of its potential gameplay applications when N-Gage ports still existed. It goes further than this, too. Heavily armed enemies can not only light flares, but throw them in the direction they last saw or heard you, while others can flick on a torch that they’ll point at various angles as they follow your tracks. No other stealth game can match the anxiety Chaos Theory instils as you cling to a wall and hope that the guard a hair’s breadth away doesn’t turn in your direction while he's holding a light.

It’s important to note that despite its influences, Chaos Theory isn’t an immersive sim ᵃⁿᵈ ⁿᵒ ᴴᶦᵗᵐᵃⁿ, ᴹᴳˢ⁵ ᵃⁿᵈ ᴮʳᵉᵃᵗʰ ᵒᶠ ᵗʰᵉ ᵂᶦˡᵈ ᵃʳᵉⁿ'ᵗ ᵉᶦᵗʰᵉʳ ᵇᵘᵗ ᵗʰᵃᵗ'ˢ ᵇᵉˢᶦᵈᵉˢ ᵗʰᵉ ᵖᵒᶦⁿᵗ. It instead opts for a middle ground between their emergent problem solving and its own predecessors’ affinity for pre-baked scripted set pieces. This may sound eclectic on paper, but it works remarkably well in terms of pacing. Relax one moment as you clamber up and down several floors of an office block in any order and through whatever means you please, but be ready the next when you have to switch the power back on and quickly scramble out of the now gleaming room as a squad of guards floods in. Granted, there’s a slight degree of inconsistency in this respect. The bank level’s famously bursting with alternate pathways to accommodate more play styles than you can shake a stick at, while the end of the bathhouse level could drive even an actual Third Echelon agent to forsake his non-lethal playthrough, but this balancing of peaks and valleys overall allows for lots of creative, freeform solutions while still ensuring that there’ll always be segments which demand your attention even on repeat playthroughs.

The fact that Chaos Theory manages to stay so engaging from start to finish without giving you any new equipment along the way is a testament to this, but other areas of the game deserve as much attention as its level design. For instance, no matter how many people are aware of how much Amon Tobin outdid himself with this game’s music, it’s still not enough. This series of chords is Splinter Cell, as much as thick shadows and green goggles, and if it were distilled into a person they would assuredly be skulking about in the dark. The extra instrumentation which dynamically fades in and out according to enemies’ alertness level (my favourite example being this absolute tune) not only drives home his talent even further, but also acts as another way to communicate important information to the player if the increasingly copious sandbag checkpoints throughout the level hadn’t already clued you in. To put things in perspective, this may be the only example of Jesper Kyd’s involvement in a soundtrack not being the highlight.

Chaos Theory’s also a beneficiary of the time when different ports of one game would have exclusive features for no particular reason. I can’t speak for how it controls on console, but I can say that adjusting Sam’s movement speed with the mouse wheel is a fantastic alternative to the standard method of protagonists instantly becoming silent as soon as they crouch (to my surprise, it doesn’t work that way in real life). Combine it with a camera that gently shifts about to give you the best possible view depending on which direction Sam is moving in and the game feels like a dream to control. On PC you also have the added benefit of being able to toggle whether enemies speak in their native languages, a bit akin to Crysis’ hardest difficulty, which despite being such a minor feature seems like a really underutilised concept.

I’d be remiss not to mention the writing as well. While it’s fair to say that Chaos Theory probably isn’t a game you’d play for the story itself, it’s equally true that it wouldn’t be so beloved if its characters weren’t so charming, including the guards, whose responses to being interrogated are not just genuinely funny but also a glaring counterpoint to the notion that this series takes itself too seriously. Few voice actors understand their characters as well as Michael Ironside gets Sam Fisher. Every delivery of his is golden, whether grumbling in response to his support team constantly bullying him for being old or in the plot’s more cathartic moments. Given both that Ironside has now dabbed on cancer a second time and his recent-ish reprisals of the role in the form of Ghost Recon DLCs, one can only hope they get him to work his magic again in the first game’s upcoming remake.

Regardless of how that turns out, it’s nice to know that Splinter Cell has some kind of future again. Bringing back something old can have just as much value as creating something new, and while asking it to be as good as Chaos Theory is probably a tall order, all it really needs to do is be good enough to prove that pure stealth games still have a place in the mainstream. Sam has saved us from WW3 several times over by now, so hopefully he can also save his genre from the plague of waist-high grass.

Hedging my bets on this one – see you in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell® (TBD)!

in the first dungeon of pillars of eternity, there's a moment that really stuck with me. you encounter a xaurip - a classic fantasy racism beastman that trades in aesthetics uncomfortably pulled from indigenous american stereotypes. it indicates that you go no further, that you do not follow it down a path into it's territory. there's no option to convince it to step aside and let you past: you either respect it's wishes, turn around and find another path, or you walk forward and kill it as an enemy. it's a moment with, i think genuine nuance, where the agency of the xaurip is respected, a moment that actually asks the player to respect the culture of this people or defy it, preventing them from taking a empowering middle road where they can do whatever they want if they have high enough numbers.

anyway, in the very next area you immediately encounter a bunch of them that attack on sight and that you have no recourse but to slaughter.

this moment is pillars of eternity in microcosm. on every level of it's construction, it is a game that feels simultaneously genuinely aware of the fraught nature of many of the images it is evoking and the things it is doing, aware of the stain left by games of this ilk in the past, and also resignedly committed to doing those things anyway without the brazen dumb confidence of a game like divinity: original sin 2. progressive and regressive, inventive and derivative, evolutionary and counter-evolutionary, pillars of eternity is the fascinating attempt to harken back to bioware's baldur's gate and the crpgs of it's era made by a game that doesn't wholly see the value in going back there.

i won't speculate on director je sawyer's intent any more than the man has directly said himself, as he has shown real discomfort towards people suggesting his opinions on certain games, but i know from my mercifully brief visits to the fascist haven that is the rpgcodex forums that sawyer is a quite strong critic of how the classic infinity engine games actually played, and despite my fondness for RPGs of that style, i find myself very much on his side. there's a reason these games struggle to find new fans that aren't just going to turn the games down to the lowest difficulty to sidestep most of the actual playing of it as much as possible: advanced dungeons and dragons is not, by any metric, an elegant or intuitive system at the best of times, and while real-time with pause was an elegant solution to just how long combat in d&d can go on for (larian's proud statements that BG3 has an authentic, turn-based translation of 5E rules should absolutely terrify any prospective players), it only raises the barrier to entry for those not already au fe with ad&d's eccentricities.

pillars of eternity feels utterly unique in that it is a real-time with pause CRPG based on rules that were designed for a video game, and not for a very different medium, and as a result it is...actually good and fun. the rules and statistics are far clearer, the resource game is far more sensical, and the pace of encounters is such that individual moves are less frequent but far more impactful, maintaining the weighty impact turns have in a traditional turn-based game at a speed far more under your own control. experientially, pillars of eternity feels closer to FF12 than it does baldur's gate, with a sliding scale of playstyles ranging from making each move with care and precision, to writing full AI scripts for each member of the party and letting battles play out automatically at hyperspeed.

when i play games in this genre, i usually keep the difficulty low and drop it even lower if i encounter friction. but with pillars, i kept the difficulty on normal the entire way through because I genuinely enjoyed the gameplay and tactical puzzles it presented. it helped me to see, for the first time, why someone might prefer rtwp over turn-based, and when i started a pillars of eternity 2 playthrough shortly after playing this, i decided to stick to real-time rather than playing the game's new turn-based mode, because i became genuinely enamoured with this system.

pillars of eternity is in the unique position of being a baldur's gate homage that doesn't feel like it holds any particular reverence or great love for baldur's gate, and makes good on that position by well and truly killing bg's darlings where the system design is concerned. this isn't exactly uncharted territory for obsidian: but despite it's progressive approach to it's combat, it feels much more burdened by it's legacy than either kotor 2 or neverwinter nights 2, neither as caustic as the former nor as quietly confident as the latter. it sits uncomfortably among many of the things it does, inherited and otherwise.

to demonstrate: this is, in many ways, a d&d-ass setting. it's a roughly-medieval setting in a temperate forested coastal region, and yet the dyrwood is not medieval france/britain like the sword coast is, it's far closer to colonial canada both in terms of regional politics and technology. you have humans, you have elves, you have dwarves, and things that are kinda like gnomes but with the serial numbers filed off, you have the godlike, which are a twist on the aasimar/tieflings of d&d, each with their own gygaxian race science bonuses to stats, but aside from the aforementioned fantasy racism with the beastmen, these fantasy races matter less in the actual story than national identities and cultures, which makes one question why the race science stuff is even here. even stepping into the mechanical dimension, most of the classes are reasonably interesting interpretations of classic stock d&d archetypes like fighter, wizard, paladin, etc, but the two unique classes, chanter and cipher, are so obviously the design highlights and work in a way that would be incredibly difficult in a tabletop game but are beautiful in a video game. they eagerly invite the question of what this game would look like if it wasn't obligated to include the d&d obligations within it.

while i can't speak for every member of the development team, i know that for je sawyer, pillars of eternity was not necessarily a game he wanted to make - at least not in the way that it ended up being made. elements like the traditional fantasy setting, the real-time with pause gameplay, and even the presence of elves, were all things that were there to fulfil the demands of a kickstarter promising a baldur's gate throwback from a company that had fallen on difficult times. these things that feel like obligations feel like that because they are obligations: concessions to appeal to expectations and desires forged by nostalgia for a game that obsidian didn't actually make. these aren't the only visible compromises that mark the game - "compromise" being perhaps a generous word to describe the game's obnoxious kickstarter scars - but it is this tug of war between the parts of itself that wish to remain within the walls of baldur's gate, and the parts that cry out for escape, that ultimately defines pillars of eternity.

while maddening dreams and an epidemic of children born without souls is what drives the plot of pillars of eternity, the story is really in the conversations between tradition and very colonialist notions of progress, and the very opinionated characters you converse with along the way. likeable characters will hold quietly conservative worldviews that feel natural for them, people will say the right things for the wrong reasons, or the wrong things for the right reasons. friendly characters will have beliefs that are extremely distasteful to you but are so deeply held that there is no way to use the power granted to you by being the player character to dissuade them from their belief system with a few honeyed words. this is not a game where each element works towards a clear thematic conclusion, one that confidently knows what is right and what is wrong when discussing the things it brings up. it is a messy world filled with ugliness and argument and contradiction, and no clear definitive statement on its themes. it has a perspective, but it is not one held with immense confidence. it is a perspective mired with doubts and second-guessing that feels very conscious and deliberate. in particular, the final hour of the game has a twist that recontextualises the nature of the setting, but it's noticeable just how much of the cast, both in this game and in the sequel. find this not to be a redefining moment of their lives, but simply something they have to let sit in their gut like a millstone. it lets them see with new light things they once valued, but they feel unable to simply cast those things aside.

i have a particular distaste for critiques in geek circles narrow their focus on what a work is saying to only the series or genre the work finds itself in, and ignoring whatever resonance it might have to the world outside the fiction, subconsciously because the author has little experience of that world. and yet, it's difficult to read pillars of eternity without looking at it's relationship to baldur's gate and it's ilk, especially given how it kickstarted (lol) the late 2010s CRPG revival that led to breakout hits like divinity: original sin 2 and disco elysium. it walks in the meadows of the past with an uneasy rhythm, constantly expressing it's discomfort with being there but never quite being able to find the way out. even at the end of the game, there is delightfully scarce resolution to the weighty philosophical questions raised by the final act - the immediate crisis dealt with, certainly, but the game ends on a world that has raised questions rather than answered them, and while you may have your own thoughts and perspectives, there is no great victory of ideologies to be found, no grand, world-defining choice about what to do with the wisdom of the past. it's a game that simply ends with you emerging back into a world that is materially largely unchanged but colored so different by the new perspective you have on it. it is a game that is deliriously inconclusive.

one could word that as a criticism - and indeed, a strict formalist lens would probably find it as such - but honestly, it's what i find delightful and resonant about pillars of eternity. i'm someone who thinks generally very poorly about d&d as a game, but my intermittently weekly d&d games with my friends that have been going on since the first lockdown have made some incredible memories, a world and story and cast that i find myself hugely invested in. despite my disdain for a lot of the recurring cliches and tropes of the genre, some of my favorite stories are fantasy stories. and despite my active distaste for a lot of the decisions pillars either makes or is stuck with, and indeed for some of the creative minds involved in it's production (chrs avellne's characters were substantially rewritten after his departure from obsidian to such an extent that neither he nor je sawyer recognize them as "his characters" but whoever was behind durance specifically is doing such a conscious avellone impression that i would be remiss not to note that his presence is certainly felt) i still enjoy it immensely regardless.

frequently, engagement with art is a negotiation with the parts about it that speak to us and the parts that fail to do so, where we may be able to excuse or enjoy parts that others find to sink the entire work for them, and it's unexpectedly moving to find a game that was so visibly having that conversation with itself as i played it, and rang so true for the relationship i have with the things that inspired it.

it's a game that embodies the sticky and troubling way all the games and stories of it's ilk sit in my mind and expresses them emotively through a story that, in fits and starts, writes quite powerfully on the unique pains and sensation of memory and tradition and progress. it's a game that feels all the more true, all the more real, for it's contradictions, compromises, and conversations capped off with trailing ellipses, leading down two roads to an uncertain future and a depressingly familiar past.

If there’s one thing people love, it’s a happy ending, but if there’s one thing people hate, it’s their favorite franchise not getting another entry. This leads to those situations where a hero keeps coming out of retirement for one last last job over and over again, and it becomes painfully obvious that the plot is no longer being moved by the characters, but by the demands of an industry. This is the dilemma that characterizes Yakuza 3, even when the team was much bolder in their approach to continuing the story of Kazuma Kiryu than most franchises would be with their heroes. If any other protagonist had wanted to run an orphanage at the end of their prior appearance, the next entry would simply open with a scene of the orphanage being attacked to spur the hero into action, but this game actually spends a lot of time depicting Kiryu’s new life. Hours are spent fleshing out his new family and exploring how he approaches the challenges of parenthood, there’s barely any action or drama at all. Even when it’s a massive pivot from the prior games, it’s a decision I highly value, perhaps directly because of the magnitude of such a change. It shows a commitment to the character, a respect for him as a person and not as a puppet to justify more games about beating people up. However, it’s not like the developers could forgo the formula completely and still expect to sell units and continue the franchise, so slowly but surely, a more orthodox crime drama takes the place of the intimate character study. I imagine that for most people, the change couldn’t have come soon enough, but the crime plot felt so contrived that I resented being taken away from the orphanage. It makes sense why this is one of the more divisive entries in the franchise, given this uncomfortable mix of narratives. On one hand, you get some great character development and a bold new direction, but on the other hand, there’s a reason why those “back in action” sequels pull in viewers so reliably. They’re a comfortable and simple platform to see your favorite characters doing the things you like seeing them do, and even if the call to action is a bit weak, it flies by fast enough not matter much. So, Yakuza 3 ends up in a situation where if you played it to follow Kiryu’s life, the back half feels like an annoying obligation, but if you wanted more punching and crime, the first half feels like a different franchise entirely. No one walks away completely satisfied, even if everyone still has a lot to appreciate.

My hunch is that the true value of Yakuza 3 shines in future installments, where all the development Kiryu got over the course of this game has more time to pay off. However, this is as far as I’ve gotten in the franchise, so I’m looking forward to seeing where things go from here. I’m not counting on getting as much character development, but from a team that was confident enough to go in that direction in the first place, I’m anxious to see what lessons they brought into the development of 4.

I don't know if I can properly "review" this game because i've played it in several ten hour bursts every like six months for the last three and half years and that's a difficult way to get one's head around a long story's Whole Deal so I guess in a quick and scattershot way I'll say that while this is certainly the messiest and most overtly stupid installment of the first three games, it's also BY FAR my favorite. You can really feel the change in writers, and this is clearly the start of the Vibes Road the series is gonna continue down for better and worse. We're in full soap opera mode here and while I think that really muddles the potential this series had to homage the yakuza cinema it so often overtly loves and loves to pay respects to (steal from?), I don't think these games have ever worked particularly well as the awkward blend of first and second wave yakuza movies that they so clearly want to be so I can't say I miss it SO much.

The plot of this game is unfocused and often nonsensical but what this means is that it plays more like a collection of smaller stories that are actually often really good? The early drama with the Ryudo family in Naha, the mini-Tojo power struggle with those three really great asshole weasels in the midgame (sidenote it's very funny that every game sees the Tojo Clan's fortunes somehow fall lower and lower, some of the most perennial losers in all of gaming, truly cruel of Kiryu to take advantage of his relationship with Majima to handcuff him to that sinking ship lol) , spending a night showing Rikiya around town, and of course, two separate, very long stretches of nothing but Running Your Orphanage, being the best paternal figure Kiryu knows how to be, wearing a COMICALLY inappropriate Sonatine cosplay all the while.

The orphanage content is far and away the best stuff in the game, probably in the series up to this point. Where these games always portray Kiryu as a guy whose life in the yakuza has a lot to do with how closely he values really really old timey values that never really existed in real life but would make him a perfect fit for the chivalrous ninkyo eiga films of the 50s and 60s, Yakuza 3 I think tends to overplay his Essential Goodness and overstate how much his value system is worth materially. He is a borderline messianic figure, giving speeches about the literal powers of friendship, extolling virtues of forgiveness and belief in his fellow man no matter what even in moments where he believes he’s actively dying as a result of his own misplaced trust. Other adult characters revere him for this, almost everyone he knows has mythologized him beyond the level of his famous deeds in previous games. These games have been critical of Kiryu before, and having played 0 I know that this same writing team will someday get a lot of dramatic irony out of the fact that application of this exact ideology will completely destroy his life and kill everyone he loves more than once, but in this game particularly it’s played up ridiculously.

When he’s acting as the paternal figure for the orphanage is the only time we see a truly naturalistic side to our guy. He is still able to solve every problem, charm every person, and get it all done by the end of the day in time for a good family supper, but we often see Kiryu obviously out of his depth. He’s one of those adults who feels like he’s just always existed fully formed in his mid-40s and does not remember what it’s like to be a kid, and as much as his honesty and realness with them is a generally good thing, Kiryu is also brash and temperamental and prone to honest mistakes. He’s a good guy though, and because you have access to his internal monologue at all times you see a lot of his anxiety. Big picture stuff, like making sure the kids feel at home and like they are part of a real group in a society that places particularly high value on traditional family dynamics and where orphans face a really intense stigma, like making sure they can all afford to eat and to live on the land their building sits on. But small stuff too, like fretting over how harshly he chastises kids for small infractions sometimes or how stupid he sounds when he’s like “i’m gonna scold all nine of them for this thing” only to realize halfway through that three of them don’t really have anything to do with it. It’s also good to see the game formalize the parts of Kiryu that are warm and friendly and solve problems without his fists? That stuff is so often reserved for side content that putting it front and center for the first long chunk of the game and again towards the end is really refreshing.

The orphanage has wider thematic implications for the game too; a lot of stuff plays out there in miniature that the game will return to over and over again. One kid is bullied at school and also by one of the OTHER KIDS at the orphanage for his dark skin and this is treated like normal racism and addressed but it’s a specific racism that comes from Japan’s long imperial history in Okinawa (this kid specifically has mixed African heritage but his story echoes the racism present in other parts of this game and certainly in real life). This tension is represented in the main plot by the orphanage being threatened by a government land deal that wants to place EITHER a resort complex (the tourism industry destroying indigenous culture in the pacific islands damn such a familiar tune) OR a US-backed military defense complex (I feel this does not require elaboration lol). Okinawa’s culture being slowly erased from its own land is an omnipresent motif in the substories that take place in the game’s Naha map. Mainlander scammers selling cheap imported pork at premium prices with meaningless but exciting marketing gimmicks that undercut a longstanding local industry. When someone asks the owner of a long-closed local juice stand to make a cup of a famous drink for them, Kiryu is asked to retrieve the ingredients but the juice lady lists the names of the ingredients for him in Okinawa’s native language rather than Japanese, and the kid who wanted the drink, himself a native Okinawan but a very young one, has no idea what any of the words mean. It’s all creeping away but it’s not happening naturally, it’s happening by force. There’s not much anyone can do about it individually in real life but in Yakuza 3 Kiryu can certainly punch enough people that eventually that fucking resort won’t get built and displace all his neighbors and children.

There’s more right, there’s so much more – the way the ultimate villain’s story mirror’s Kiryu’s but also Haruka’s (who is becoming old enough that her Childish Wisdoms are giving way to adolescent naivete as she enters a world she cannot academically apply herself to beneath the notice of everyone else because she's being actively coerced into participating it as a teenager who is recognized as preyable by the systems that exploit vulernable people) and every other kid at Morning Glory’s. The dark echoes between Taichi’s asthma scare and the advice of “don’t do more than you can do now and burn out before you have a chance to do anything” and an adult character’s story being cut tragically short because they couldn’t overcome their impulsive need for yakuza justice. It’s incredible stuff all the way around, I would love to see these characters grow up alongside Haruka for the rest of the series but I assume they’ll be relegated to cameos at best; ideas this un-formulaic rarely stick and with what I must assume is a reduced presence for Kiryu in the coming multi-character entries I can’t imagine there’s a lot of room for them.

I think the villain is a much better anti-Kiryu than Goda from Yakuza 2, there’s a lot more to his character and being driven by specific ideology makes him much more effective as a moral and intellectual counterpoint to our guy. He’s cool and scary and he has one moment in particular that I think is absolutely incredible A+ shit (it’s when he says “you’re all his victims” and the stuff that comes after that it rules so hard.)

uhhhhh what else what else

oh yeah the combat right uh the blocking sucks and how unaggressive enemies are sucks but really if you take the time to unlock the moves on offer via side content you can get around that stuff pretty easily, I think this is, again, the best combat in the first 3 games. No Yakuza has much depth to the fighting but you get a ton of options and it starts to open up the versatility space in a way that will be elaborated upon significantly by 0’s time.

So I dunno clearly I ended up writing a lot actually but I don’t have a coherent point like I said I played this game weird but obviously it’s floating around a lot in my thoughts. I think there’s a lot on this game’s mind and maybe part of why I can’t come to a point here really is because I don’t think the game does either? It certainly ESPOUSES a point very clearly right at the end but that point is STUPID and NONSENSE and BARELY FOLLOWS the events of the game lol. That’s okay though. A thing doesn’t have to be clean to be good, and if nothing else I have a hard time imagining Yakuza is gonna be this INTERESTING for at least checks to see when Dead Souls came out one more game lol.

How different games might be if we didn’t have it in our heads that the right stick must be for camera control. Part of the fun of early 3D games is how little about them was standardised. Jump between any given two of them and there’s a decent chance that few, if any, of the skills or habits you develop in one will translate to another. The lengths a unique control scheme goes toward accentuating this sort of variety and distinctiveness probably goes without saying, but Ape Escape also makes a similarly strong case for how much more intuitive it can be.

Being able to swing a doodad in any direction you want with a simple tilt of the stick, no matter your positioning or which way you’re facing, feels so natural it’s unreal. It’s the type of seemingly mundane thing you don’t realise is so rare in games until you first encounter it and, given how erratically the monkeys move upon being alerted, comes in so handy I can’t imagine the game controlling any other way. That would already be worthy of enough praise as is, but the game’s bolstered even further by how the gadgets get more creative as it goes on.

The RC car is a particular standout. Few platformers will get your proverbial gears turning as much as guiding both Spike and the RC car through two different sets of moving obstacle courses at the same time. It’s really, really striking how similar the car feels to some action games of recent years in which controlling multiple characters has become increasingly common – if there was ever a context where “ahead of its time” was 100% appropriate to use, this is it, though Ecclesiastes 1:9 also comes to mind.

Don’t let the revelation that Astral Chain is secretly an Ape Escape sequel distract you from how remarkably forward thinking other aspects of this game are, though. Past a certain point, platforming sequences will demand you quickly rotate between several gadgets in quick succession to get to the monkey on the other side, but this is a totally fluid experience thanks to how you can instantly switch between gadgets with the face buttons. You can even go straight to the equipment menu without having to go through the pause menu first if you’d like to quickly swap out your current gadgets. Excessive menuing plagues many a game even now, to say nothing of how this could easily have been compounded by memory limitations of the day, which makes it all the more impressive how effortlessly Ape Escape almost completely circumvents that issue.

The water net and the (very few) tank segments are more finicky, but some misses here and there are to be expected when you’re tackling such an ambitious range of level concepts. When you’re rigorously working your way through precision platforming segments in a castle floating in Earth’s orbit at the end, it’s easy to forget that this is the same game in which you were sniping monkeys with a slingshot inside the belly of a dinosaur just a few hours ago.

Beyond using the time travelling premise to the fullest, the levels – and the game as a whole – are great at letting you progress at your own pace. Only half of all the monkeys in the game are required to catch to get to the end, so it feels very much like a precursor to the Jak & Daxter school of “don’t like it, don’t do it.” This freedom’s aided by the levels’ complexity and nonlinearity, especially those later on in the game, full of optional rooms packed with unique challenges you’re not likely to see anywhere else. Because of this, there’s also plenty of incentive to revisit previous levels with gadgets you didn’t initially have, a bit akin to one of those veinytroids or whatever they’re called.

Do that and you’ll eventually unlock a bunch of minigames that’re a fair bit more interesting than they have any right to be, again thanks to the unique use of the right stick. I found it hard to not walk away from them wishing that we could get a fully fledged monkey-centric boxing or ski racing game that simulates those even more closely, until I remembered that Japan Studio (pbuh) went kaput and the concept of fun was forever cancelled as a result.

Tempting as it is to mourn them, the same infectious charm that courses through everything else they worked on is present in Ape Escape in spades, which helps cast it in a more celebratory light. I can’t imagine the Sony of today greenlighting a game this outlandish visually, tonally and mechanically any time soon, but at least they did once. Somewhere, sometime, someone at Sony decided we needed a sci-fi monkey hunting simulator which happens to feature the world’s finest turn of the century drum ‘n’ bass album as its soundtrack, and I’m delighted not just because we've gotten some fantastic games out of that, but also because this shows that somebody out there truly understands my needs.

When it’s all said and done, Ape Escape is as fun as a barrel of... you know.

I could, and did (on an episode of Retronauts), speak at length about Ape Escape and each aspect of its being but I want to focus on controls here.

Much ink has been spilled in reverie of Super Mario 64's influence on 3D gaming. It rests on a pedestal so as to always invite comparison, hailed as "the new gold standard in video games" since its release.¹ The notion that Super Mario 64 was "the first [game] to get the control scheme right" in the 3D platformer space is evident by that separation of player movement and camera movement across the gaming landscape today.² With how infrequently - which is to say, not all of the time - the player moves the camera in Super Mario 64, the relegation of the camera to a quartet of readily accessible buttons is puzzling but forgivable for such an early True 3D Platformer.

The most critical part of Super Mario 64's legacy is its insistence on player control in a 3D space being simple and streamlined; push forward to go forward, press A to jump, no faffing about. As seen with early 2010s titles like Octodad or Surgeon Simulator, requiring players to engage in more direct, less conventional control schemes is a 'meme,' some source of comedy in large part because those controls are in direct defiance of reiterated means of control in gaming. While neither title nor their contemporaries illustrate with clarity the benefit of these subversive control methods, Ape Escape did over a decade earlier.

As the first PlayStation game to necessitate use of the DualShock controller, Japan Studio sought to use its features maximally from the ground up due to its potential as a dual analog device.³ The use of the second dog-nose textured stick for gameplay and direct character action was one of the only marked control innovations in the 3D platformer space since Super Mario 64. Demo discs espoused the DualShock and its implementation in Ape Escape as a tool one needed to master alongside the gameplay itself. Contemporary reviews corroborated these claims in large part because Ape Escape's controls refused the immediacy of Mario, Spyro, Banjo-Kazooie, and Crash. Jumping could happen with the tap of a button but gadgets were not so simple, yet they were even more intuitive because of the DualShock's second analog stick.

The Stun Club and Time Net are swung by moving the right analog stick towards your target, or spun through a full rotation. The Monkey Radar similarly is aimed in any direction to highlight the location of monkeys. This trio of tools is served to the player first because their input and action are direct -- you point the stick where you want the thing to happen, just as you do with the left stick for movement.

The Slingback Shooter presents the first deviation from what one might expect - rather than move the stick towards the target the player instead moves it away from the target as if operating an actual slingshot, releasing to fire. This movement is tactile thanks to the re-centring of the stick, snapping back with speed like taut elastic released. The Dash Hoop and Sky Flyer both require full, repeated rotations of the stick to simulate the movement, the latter mimicking a propeller around an axle, the former acting not as the hula hoop itself moving around the player but the player's hips working to get the hoop up to speed.

The final gadget (not including the post-game Magic Punch), the R.C. Car, is the most abstracted from convention as the second analog stick directly moves the vehicle separate from the player, likened by Tim Rogers to the dual arrows of Namco's 1983 game Libble Rabble.⁴ The comparison is apt on a surface level but while Libble Rabble requires simultaneous movement of Libble and Rabble to achieve the player goal of harvesting Mushlins, Ape Escape's R.C. Car is primarily maneuvered independently of the player in short bursts while the player adjusts their view or, more likely, stands still to focus solely on the R.C. Car. The player can, of course, move all they want while using the R.C. Car but this is not required because of Ape Escape's focus on oneness of control instead of separation of function and movement.

The Monkey Radar and R.C. Car notwithstanding, every gadget in Ape Escape complements movement in a similar manner to Mario's moveset in any of his 3D romps but with an added layer of immersion and intent. Chasing a monkey is not just a matter of platforming one's way toward an object through movement. The player needs to use the gadgets for their approach and for the act of catching the monkey, be it by hitting it with the Stun Club or Slingback Shooter, or just through aiming the Time Net towards an often moving target. The evasive maneuvers used by the monkeys heightens the pursuit further. If a monkey dives away from the Time Net the player can flick the stick towards its new location or perhaps keep the analog stick tilted and rotate it to catch the monkey in a spin. If a monkey is airborne the player can get near and shoot them down with the Slingback Shooter, or use the Sky Flyer to ascend to their level then quickly swap to the Time Net and catch them while you fall. Some monkeys require silver bullet solutions but player freedom is abundant across Ape Escape.

One of the greatest challenges of Ape Escape and enjoying it is that one has to meet it on its own terms. Just like one can't go into Gunstar Heroes expecting it to be like Contra, the prospective player cannot go into Ape Escape with the expectation it will control like or even resemble Super Mario 64. Just like the aforementioned piece of Treasure developed software, Ape Escape defies a reading which compares it to that which it is aesthetically associated with.

A few years back I came across an article which lambasted Ape Escape's controls following an authorial statement "to assess [old] games as if they were released today, not as products of the times in which they were created."⁵ Merits and flaws of such an approach aside, this umbrage with Ape Escape's convention-eschewing control scheme suggests that breaking from the Super Mario 64 style of platforming is itself heretical. Mention is made of the difficulty of rapidly adjusting the camera which were moved to the D-Pad and L1, something allegedly taken for granted presently whereas in 1999 there was "no well of experience to draw on" for this predicament.⁶ Ignoring the fact that 3D platformers had already contended with camera movement through the N64's C Buttons, effectively an analog to the DualShock's right analog stick, this perspective ignores Ape Escape's own camera concessions and means of manipulation. Ape Escape's levels are generally large enough to not require camera movement, and when the camera does need adjusting the L1 button immediately snaps the camera behind Spike, just as the R button did in Banjo-Kazooie. More direct control of the camera via the D-Pad is indeed more tedious and cumbersome but it is also in effect unnecessary by virtue of those expansive spaces. The article similarly raises qualms with the use of gadgets, considering the use of gadgets while moving to be analogous to patting one's head and rubbing one's tummy. This anapodoton that Ape Escape's controls equate to being poor is by no means unique to the article, and as a punchline it seems willfully ignorant of what Ape Escape expects of the player and their ability to adopt its way of thinking about control.⁷ Ultimately the article stands as the apex of decades of whinging about Ape Escape's perceived awkwardness, and the claims from those scant few who consider a suitable alternative to be pushing a button to engage in an action, akin to Mario punching. This is especially curious as Ape Escape got a port which 'remedied' this exact problem with 2005's Ape Escape: On the Loose.

The absence of a second analog nubbin on the PlayStation Portable saw gadgets being used through buttons, snatching from the player the degree of freedom in action the original release had. More critically, however, this digital interpretation of once analog intentions widens the gap between the player's actions and the actions of the character. The aforementioned oneness of Ape Escape is fundamental to the play experience because the title was developed for the DualShock, not around it or in spite of it. The placelessness of Super Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie or Spyro or any other 3D platformer which sees them effortlessly ported to new hardware with vastly different methods of control when compared to their original hardware is of value for those games, but it also demonstrates with crystal clarity that their universality opposes innovation vis-a-vis interaction with a game in a physical way. Contrastingly, Ape Escape occupies a position unique to and necessitated by the DualShock, evoking a sort of critical regionalism for games. In a similar vein to Alvar Aalto or Luis Barragán, both of whom have seen their architectonics (re)iterated outside of Finland and Mexico so as to suggest their forms exist and flourish outside their specific constraints and qualities of space and place, Ape Escape's ability to be placed outside of the PlayStation, with controllers that are not the DualShock (but resemble its form through four shoulder buttons and two analog sticks) should not be construed as it being separate from the DualShock.

In less grandiose terms, Ape Escape is the DualShock. Ape Escape deliberately avoided grafting camera controls to the second analog stick in favour of something more nuanced yet more natural and intuitive. Super Mario 64, the supposed pinnacle of 3D platforming and 'perfect' camera controls, is not the Nintendo 64 controller -- Miyamoto himself allegedly did not even like the C Buttons, and the game was designed using modified Sega gamepads for much of its development.⁸ Yet both can be and are played on newer hardware with controllers not of their era without being worse for the wear, if only because the DualShock and its dual analog sticks became the norm, the second stick functioning as a decent simulacrum for the solution of C Button cameras. And when Super Mario 64 got its portable port on the Nintendo DS, it was no worse for wear because the lack of C Buttons did not equate to a drastic change in gameplay. What is seen as awkward to some is precisely what makes Ape Escape work, and what made it so captivating to players in its own time, and still is today. That perfect implementation of a novel control scheme demonstrates to us a world of gaming that could have been; perhaps what should have been.
____________________
¹ "The Fun Machine: An Exclusive World Tour of the First Nintendo 64 Games," Nintendo Power 85, June 1996, 16.
² "Countdown to 200: The 10 Most Important Games," Electronic Gaming Monthly 187, January 2005.
³ "Ape Escape," PlayStation Underground 3, 1999.
⁴ Tim Rogers, "ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS PAC-MAN," YouTube video, 2:55:58, November 22, 2020.
⁵ Patrick Arthur, "Ape Escape and the Things We Take for Granted," Retro Spectives Podcast, March 31, 2019, https://www.rspodcast.net/articles/ape-escape-and-the-things-we-take-for-granted.
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ https://www.twitch.tv/protonjon/clip/LitigiousExcitedWrenDendiFace-uWmxCn2TR-f5klsO?filter=clips&range=7d&sort=time
⁸ "The Making of Mario 64: Giles Goddard Interview," NGC Magazine 61, December 2001.

The legend goes that there was a holy trinity of slightly older-in-spirit mascot platformer series iconic to the Playstation 2: Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, and Sly Cooper. It was one of those things where as a kid it felt like you did kind of have to BE FOR one of them and not the others, like there was this invisible, arbitrary competition between nine year old fans, and of course, obvious for anyone who knows me, I was dyed in the wool for my boy Jak. Did I play those games entirely out of order? Yes. Did I play Jak 2 like a decade after the other two? Yes. Did I EVER meet a kid who had played Sly Cooper? No. The big rival was always Ratchet and Clank. And those games looked cool, really, but when you’re a kid you gotta pick and choose. And now that all three of the studios who made these games have gone from informally cementing Sony’s brand with the quality of their exclusive series to being fully subsumed into Sony’s obnoxious first and second party AAA Cinematic Game Studio Network pumping out the most boring games of all time, Ratchet and Clank is the only one of these iconic franchises that’s still kicking, with the most recent release on PS5 in 2021 being ESSENTIALLY a launch title (ps3 has no games is BACK lol) and beloved by critics and making a shit ton of money. That one coming out did remind me that I’ve always wanted to play these but other than going through Deadlocked as a kid and maybe the first HALF of the first Future game a few years ago, I never got around to it. Since then I’ve developed my “you gotta play every series from the beginning” thing so now I have bought all of the original games on my PS3 and AWAY WE GO damn I sure hope I like these lmao I should think before spending forty dollars.

So the game itself, it’s a little weird! It definitely feels like a first try, a bit of a rough draft at what I know these will become. From a studio that cut its teeth on platformers it makes sense to make another game based around platforming and indeed as far as 3D platformers of the early PS2 era go I think all that Spyro experience shows here SORT OF. On one hand the level design is frequently great, with considered challenges that keep you on your toes, require regular use of your entire move set, and multiple paths on nearly every level that always loop back into each other very naturally. It gives the feeling that each level is made up of two or three obstacle courses, each with some kind of treat at the end, and I want to give the game kudos for making even the optional rewards feel rewarding pretty much every time. That can be hard to do in a game like this but they pull it off here, and even if they hadn’t I do think that the level design is strong enough that just playing through each path is fun on its own even without a carrot at the end of the stick.

On the flip side, there are some choices here that feel strange, particularly the movement. Ratchet’s movement is really imprecise. He turns in these big, wide arcs and he stops in these slow, long skids. He moves at a pleasantly speedy clip, which is generally good, but when the platforming becomes a little more demanding or you’re asked to walk along more narrow paths over death pits it becomes problematic. It just feels like a weird choice to me from the studio that’s coming off of three games starring Spyro the Dragon, who regardless of how you feel about the level design and verb set of the character, does control really tightly and stop like a dime. Additionally, there’s the Ratchet and Clank series’ most famous aspect, it’s array of over-the-top weaponry, which does get its start here in full force, but doesn't quite feel tuned correctly either.

I will applaud the variety of weapons – I know this series is famous for getting silly with things and I wasn’t expecting it to be all in on that right away but it pretty much is, shit like a gun that turns guys into chickens and a gun that sucks up small enemies and fires them like grenades and a gun that shoots little guys who run around and explode on the nearest enemy are fun highlights of a diverse arsenal. They unlock for purchase at a steady rate, the prices never seemed unfair to me, and I never had a problem buying ammo if I needed to, though I could usually find what I needed from ammo boxes in the world as well.

The real issue with the guns is the way the game is and is not built around them. The game really starts to feel, especially in the back third, like it wants to be a shooter as much as it wants to be a platformer, which is fine, it strikes that balance okay for the most part. The problem is that as the gunplay begins to take center stage in those last few levels and the enemies become more and more designed around the guns, they don’t really account for the fact that Ratchet himself is not really designed around the guns, at least not to the degree of precision that begins to be asked of you. There’s no manual lock on, the first person mode doesn’t allow movement while it’s in use, there’s KIND OF a strafe but it’s tied to an alternate control scheme introduced near the end of the game when you get a jetpack hover ability and almost all of your other movement and attack abilities are disabled while you’re using it and without a lock on for any weapon and coupled with how almost all of your weapons have extremely limited range and low ammo capacity it’s essentially useless to begin with even if it WASN’T criminally slow-moving. It gets to a point where all of the enemies in the final level fly and have attacks at such long range that essentially only three of my weapons could hit them at all, and they would come in such tight clusters and high numbers that encounters would be extremely tedious affairs.

There’s no life system or anything, but your ammo and money you’ve spent (like on ammo, for instance) don’t replenish when you die, and the checkpoints are NOT frequent, so you could be redoing as much as half of a level, which towards the end of the game could be long stretches of almost exclusively combat, and Ratchet’s verb set just doesn’t feel appropriate for it. I often felt like I was taking hits and losing health because Ratchet isn’t really able to dodge and shoot and face his enemies properly at the same time in situations where it felt like he was expected to, and the invincibility window after taking a hit is criminally small. You start with 4 pips of health and you can get a fifth one late in the game for a LOT of money, and I really think that SHOULD be enough, but it didn’t feel like it towards the very end largely because I felt ill-equipped in my moves. I really think there’s something here with the combat, and there are like 500 games in this series so obviously I am not alone lol. I think it would only really take one or two key changes to the way ratchet moves, and I know he’ll get them by the fourth game at least, which is basically just a shooting game with no platforming at all, so I’m hoping these control changes are implemented sooner rather than later.

Immediately the game’s aesthetics stick out intensely. It cannot go unsaid that the music slaps so hard, one of the sickest soundtracks of its era. The visuals lean into this late 90s alt comicky sort of vibe, a sort of Pixar filtered through a light Vaseline smear of Invader Zim or Aaahh!!! Real Monsters which match well with the irreverent tone. Captain Quark in particular is this really grotesque twisting of what a human being looks like in a way that I’m not sure is WHOLLY intentional because everyone looks a LITTLE fucked up in this game and things get really clean later in this series in a way that loses some of the charm, but here it really works for the style and theming. This is the kind of universe where all the alien names are like Blorgons and Flixops and shit like that, we’re cruising on pure vibes here and R&C nails the kind of irreverent tone it’s going for, like one notch of maturity and dignity above fart jokes. I looked into some behind the scenes stuff for this game and was surprised to find that Insomniac Games did not have actual writers at all until the third Ratchet and Clank game, which shocked me because while I don’t think this is a revolutionary or deep narrative experience or a moving character study, it is a work with strong themes that hangs really cleanly with itself. I would not have guessed that this was a case of “we already made all of the levels and now two of our animation leads are gonna bang out a story to fit it together” but really kudos to them. The character arcs I think are the most obvious symptom of this, with Ratchet’s developments and personality shifts being simultaneously abrupt in terms of when and why they happen in the story (particularly right at the end) and also really dragged out (the unpleasant middle chapter where they’re fighting seems to really just go on). But the story itself comes together pretty well imo.

R&C is about a little guy called Ratchet who’s a mechanic from a backwater planet in a big galaxy who wants to get off this fuckin’ rock, maaaaaaaan, who meets Clank, a defectively small robot who escapes from the production line of the evil corporation run by Chairman Drek, a guy whose homeworld is so P O L L U T ED (2002 buzzword) that he and his army are going around harvesting chunks off of other populated planets to make a new one. It is of course eventually revealed that Drek intentionally had his corporation devastate his world, and has sold all the land on this new one ahead of time, and once everyone is moved in he’ll just have his corporation operate the same way until this planet is unlivable too and they do it all over again, feeding his military complex and his real estate schemes, and he wins both ways. Clank wants to stop him and Ratchet wants to see the galaxy and both of them want to not be murdered by Drek’s corporate army so they team up to go find Captain Quark who is this like, famous intergalactic superhero, I guess? So they can let him know what’s going on and then he can stop Drek. This takes them across many planets, most of which are besieged by Drek’s forces, where they meet a colorful cast of assholes whose sole unifying characteristic is the grift.

R&C is very much a product of its time, and by that I mean it’s not actively trying to say anything subversive to the status quo. There was a time in the late 90s and early 2000s, at least in American media, where the popular message was this kind of vague liberal anti-consumerism. We “knew” that “pollution” was bad and that “recycling” was good and uhhhh “buying stuff” I guess was bad because of maybe, plastic? And maybe it was bad that corporations were greedy. But the way to stop them was to simply, not buy their stuff. Recycle your plastic. Carpool! And this is all well and good by all means if you’re a guy who tries to limit their plastic footprint go nuts I’m all for it. But there’s a very pat nature to these critiques of…who, exactly? I feel like the answer was right in the name of the idea right? Anti-consumerism doesn’t put the onus on the systems that manipulate markets and consumers, on the powerful people and organizations and governments that controls the ways things are produced and advertised, it puts it on consumers as individuals. If we all just got our shit together and made better spending choices then we wouldn’t be in this mess, the world wouldn’t be in this mess, the planet wouldn’t be in this mess, things would get better. It is a blind-eyed belief that greater capitalist systems do not have power over us as individuals and it is of course hugely misguided, and wrong, and ineffectual, and ultimate aid to the very forces it ostensibly opposes.

Ratchet and Clank has not uhhh, thought about this. Ratchet and Clank does not care THIS much about what it’s saying. Ratchet and Clank is about a funny little guy and a funnier littler guy who has a propellor that comes out of his head. Ratchet and Clank was written by an animation director and a lead model rigger. It’s a game that wants to say “hey did you ever notice that corporations are evil but their ads are nice” and like hey, yeah lol, that is true you nailed it R&C. THE THING IS THOUGH, that Ratchet and Clank, in making its light, goofy satire of consumerist 90s culture, I believe accidentally stumbles into some deeper and more biting depictions of the ways that capitalism grinds all of us down regardless of our stations within it.

Like, it’s one thing for every level to be introduced via an over-the-top advertisement or for Captain Quark’s status as a Famous Superhero to mean he doubles as a corporate shill who hawks various products, but it comes out in darker and more truthful ways too. Quark is the secondary villain of the game, in Drek’s pocket in exchange for a publicity deal with his megacorporation which he sees as his path back to the limelight, a balm for his waning stardom. Even the people who are ostensibly at the top of the heap are actually precariously at the whim of greater forces, entirely dependent on the goodwill of the real powers of capital and influence. Quark isn’t actually as desperate and scrappy as anyone else in the game because he’s still wealthy and he still exerts his power cruelly over people beneath him (the game specifically calls out that he pays his bodyguard minimum wage, and he uses his celebrity and public image to manipulate Ratchet and Clank into a position where he can quietly assassinate them), but because he operates beneath Drek, who is ACTUALLY a man of true power and true wealth and true influence, Quark is made to FEEL like he has to scrape and fight to maintain his position, which drives his desperation and cruelty much further than it is implied he would act without prompting.

Similarly, every single character you meet in the game charges Ratchet for whatever good or service they provide, often at obviously absurd prices. Some of these are actual business owners, but often the circumstances are ridiculous and uncalled for. These cash gates are here for perhaps misguided gameplay reasons first and foremost (why would you make me spend this money arbitrarily when I could be spending it on a new gun but WHATEVER) but within the fiction these people are like this because the world they live in has forced them to be this way to get by. Most of them are not people of means, they’re modest, working-class people, tradesmen and plumbers and soldiers who were explicitly coerced into service by military benefits packages. This game came out about ten years too early for it but if it was a modern game I am confident that The Plumber holding up his finger and going “socioeconomic disparity!” would have been an early reaction meme on twitter.

Ratchet himself can’t escape from this. He’s cynical and detached. Even before this game’s turn where he becomes completely laser-focused on finding and killed Quark, his reactions to the suffering of people on other planets are not unsympathetic, but certainly of a “well that sucks for them but what are we gonna do about it?” bent. (Because what ARE they gonna do about it? Ratchet and Clank can’t fight an army, and they don’t, really, the evil plan does go through all the way to the very end, you stop it at the eleventh hour, I would assume billions die during this game.) Part of this is Ratchet being characterized as a Very Marketable In 2002 Funny Cool Skater Bro Guy but he’s a poor person from a backwater planet, he is also a a victim of this system. Time and again in this game Clank’s earnest appeals to people’s better natures simply don’t work, and it’s Ratchet’s manipulative dealsmanship that gets them what they need to continue their quest. Ultimately his compassion shines through this sour armor he wears but it takes almost the entire game for that to happen – he’s as naturally beaten down and bought into the system as everyone else is, and Clank only isn’t because he is an outsider to it who is literally only just born at the beginning of the game.

I must assume that the true tendrils of implication here are unintended by the writers of the game, but this is just how it goes, right? No matter how hard we try, it is impossible to craft a story and a world that is separate from our own values and biases, even for excellent writers. I do think Ratchet and Clank is entertainingly written, but it wasn’t written by people who even consider themselves professional writers at all, and a story that was conceptualized as a light and obvious satire of consumerist culture was inevitably going to be a mirror into the darker truths of the realities of capitalism, and that’s exactly what happened here.

It's a solid first try. I may have become frustrated with the combat towards the end and had my issues with the controls, and I don’t expect to find as much to dig into narratively in future games, but I do think that what’s here at face value is good too. Ratchet and Clank both have a lot of personality and they work well as a pair. The jokes are by and large amusing if not LAUGH OUT LOUD funny. It’s a good template. You could, feasibly, have these guys go on an adventure every year or two for the next twenty years and I bet people wouldn’t even get that tired of it. Right? Yeah. Surely.