TECHNOIR
18 reviews liked by TECHNOIR
Hitman 2
2018
Excellent work, 47. Using Liz Truss as a medium was a particularly inspired touch. The client will be most pleased that the target died before she had to give herself a letter for her 100th birthday. Head for an exit, and we'll speak again soon.
It's easy to look back at The Stanley Parable and laugh at it. It is, after all, a kind of self-important game that said things about video games that were getting pretty tired even in 2013. I loved the Stanley Parable when I first played the mod, loved it a little less when I played the steam release, and ultimately have found it less and less compelling as time goes on, as the times in which the jokes landed got more and more distant and the commentary got more and more trite.
One might reasonably ask why such an aging process has harmed Stanley when it hasn't harmed other games on quite the same level, and my argument for that would be that Stanley, to use a memetic phrase devoid of meaning, insists upon itself. There's little room for interpretation or multifaceted interpretation of it: Stanley Parable is a two-dimensional game, and what I mean by that is that it works on two dimensions: the jokes, and the commentary. There aren't really any other characters or themes or aesthetic twists and flourishes to appreciate: it's a game that is very blunt about what it's saying, and doesn't really have anything to it other than that. Which is fine! Really! But it kinda relies on the things it's saying being really good, and maybe they were, once on the facepunch forums or on ModDb. But now? Not so much.
Which is why the prospect of Ultra Deluxe intrigued me. It represented an opportunity to provide a new experience, to build on what came before, and make a case for Stanley Parable still being relevant, over a decade after the original mod came out. Perhaps I built some unrealistic expectations for it going in, as I did honestly think that a Rebuild of Stanley Parable was the right step to take for this, and I remember feeling similarly deflated by the steam release of Stanley hewing so close to the original mod, but regardless, The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe arrives with the enthusiastic impact of a wet fart in an empty room, not so much making a case for the relevance of the work in 2022 as making a supreme demonstration for it's growing irrelevance.
What we have here is an acceptable repackaging of the original game (with some pluses being options to sidestep some of the edgier stuff in the original release, namely the unbearably cringeworthy suicide sequence, and some minuses being the stripping out of jokes in the subtitles and the loss of the language of jokes that Source familiarity provided) alongside some, on the whole, pretty dire new content. Teeth-grindingly ancient observations on collectibles and DLC that would make CTRL+ALT+DEL groan paired with the Bucket. The fucking bucket. All the bucket stuff is absolutely unbearable humor that felt like being trapped in 2012-era reddit with people going on about narwhals and bacon. The superfluity of The Bucket Arc is clearly an argument about the futility of adding extra content in a re-release, but you still went and did it, and it was shit. It's satirical bent never rises above putting a dunce hat on itself and going "look at how dumb we're being". Ultra Deluxe has the same problem as Stanley Parable proper: it cannot help but slam you in the face with it's Point and it's Jokes, and when those land it works, but in Ultra Deluxe they almost never do, so you're just left trudging through a tediously unfunny experience reliving 2015 neoGAF in the most agonizing manner imaginable.
Ultra Deluxe is not without merit: there are truly talented artists and level designers at Crows Crows Crows, and they've crafted some really amazing spaces here. It's something they're really great at: their online multiplayer game/space TheClub.zone (which was shut down to give them time to develop this lol) is proof positive of that. But underneath the enormous weight of The Writing, they're never allowed to live, to breathe beyond the confines of The Writing's vehicle, and unfortunately, The Writing here is crap. It's as simple as that.
I wanted Ultra Deluxe to let me love Stanley Parable again. To prove once and for all that it has stood the test of time, that it does have a worthwhile place in video games and video game culture. But after seeing everything Ultra Deluxe has to offer, all I can do is sigh wearily, and type my review, which is as follows.
(ahem)
"Reddit Game."
One might reasonably ask why such an aging process has harmed Stanley when it hasn't harmed other games on quite the same level, and my argument for that would be that Stanley, to use a memetic phrase devoid of meaning, insists upon itself. There's little room for interpretation or multifaceted interpretation of it: Stanley Parable is a two-dimensional game, and what I mean by that is that it works on two dimensions: the jokes, and the commentary. There aren't really any other characters or themes or aesthetic twists and flourishes to appreciate: it's a game that is very blunt about what it's saying, and doesn't really have anything to it other than that. Which is fine! Really! But it kinda relies on the things it's saying being really good, and maybe they were, once on the facepunch forums or on ModDb. But now? Not so much.
Which is why the prospect of Ultra Deluxe intrigued me. It represented an opportunity to provide a new experience, to build on what came before, and make a case for Stanley Parable still being relevant, over a decade after the original mod came out. Perhaps I built some unrealistic expectations for it going in, as I did honestly think that a Rebuild of Stanley Parable was the right step to take for this, and I remember feeling similarly deflated by the steam release of Stanley hewing so close to the original mod, but regardless, The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe arrives with the enthusiastic impact of a wet fart in an empty room, not so much making a case for the relevance of the work in 2022 as making a supreme demonstration for it's growing irrelevance.
What we have here is an acceptable repackaging of the original game (with some pluses being options to sidestep some of the edgier stuff in the original release, namely the unbearably cringeworthy suicide sequence, and some minuses being the stripping out of jokes in the subtitles and the loss of the language of jokes that Source familiarity provided) alongside some, on the whole, pretty dire new content. Teeth-grindingly ancient observations on collectibles and DLC that would make CTRL+ALT+DEL groan paired with the Bucket. The fucking bucket. All the bucket stuff is absolutely unbearable humor that felt like being trapped in 2012-era reddit with people going on about narwhals and bacon. The superfluity of The Bucket Arc is clearly an argument about the futility of adding extra content in a re-release, but you still went and did it, and it was shit. It's satirical bent never rises above putting a dunce hat on itself and going "look at how dumb we're being". Ultra Deluxe has the same problem as Stanley Parable proper: it cannot help but slam you in the face with it's Point and it's Jokes, and when those land it works, but in Ultra Deluxe they almost never do, so you're just left trudging through a tediously unfunny experience reliving 2015 neoGAF in the most agonizing manner imaginable.
Ultra Deluxe is not without merit: there are truly talented artists and level designers at Crows Crows Crows, and they've crafted some really amazing spaces here. It's something they're really great at: their online multiplayer game/space TheClub.zone (which was shut down to give them time to develop this lol) is proof positive of that. But underneath the enormous weight of The Writing, they're never allowed to live, to breathe beyond the confines of The Writing's vehicle, and unfortunately, The Writing here is crap. It's as simple as that.
I wanted Ultra Deluxe to let me love Stanley Parable again. To prove once and for all that it has stood the test of time, that it does have a worthwhile place in video games and video game culture. But after seeing everything Ultra Deluxe has to offer, all I can do is sigh wearily, and type my review, which is as follows.
(ahem)
"Reddit Game."
Elden Ring
2022
Masterpiece of shit.
Elden Ring
2022
NOW
That's what I call Souls!
7
That's what I call Souls!
7
They made another Kingdom Hearts game.
Elden Ring
2022
This review contains spoilers
"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CW: Brief discussion on the game's use of rape
In Elden Ring, you can never discover anything once. That was the thought that entered my head early in the experience and never quite left it. One of the most evocative parts of the game's genuinely stunning art direction is the walking cathedral, a strange and arresting colossus that stumbles across the Weeping Peninsula, each step ringing the bell that hangs beneath its torso. It was a sight of strange, beautiful magic, the kind of which these games have been good at in the past.
Except, to describe this creature in the singular would be inaccurate. Because Walking Cathedrals appear all over the world of Elden Ring, each one identical in appearance, each one performing an identical, express mechanical function for the player. This cannot be left alone as a strange, unique beast, it has to be reduced to a Type of Content a player can engage with over and over again for a characterless transaction of pure mechanics. It is the excitement of coming across something esoteric that the Souls games have made a core part of their identity, utterly commodified and made into the exact same arc that applied to Assassin's Creed the moment climbing a tower to survey the environment and taking a leap of faith into a haystack below shifted from an exciting and evocative moment into a rote and tiresome mechanical interaction.
Because, that's right everyone, Dark Souls Is Now Open World. Not an open world in the same way that Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, or Dark Souls II were, where you could freely venture down different paths to different bosses and take things in an order outside of the game's expected leveling curve. No, this is an Open World as we understand it today: an enormous ocean of discrete repeated Activities dotted with islands of meaningful bespoke design. There's plenty of stuff to do in this world, but it's all of a specific type - in a catacomb you will navigate stone gargoyles and chalice dungeon designs to a lever that will open a door near the entrance that will contain a boss that you've likely found elsewhere in the world, and will be filled with stone gargoyles. Mines will be filled with mining rock-people and upgrade materials. Towers will have you find three spectral creatures around them in order to open them up and obtain a new Memory Slot. Camps will contain a patrolling enemy type and some loot. Even genuinely enchanting vistas and environments get their space to be repeated in slight variations. Boss battles too will be repeated endlessly, time and time again, with delightful designs like the Watchdog tragically becoming something I sighed and was annoyed to see crop up half-a-dozen times over the course of the adventure, and I was truly, deeply annoyed at fighting no less than about ten or twelve Erdtree Avatars and Dragons, with whom the moves never change and the fight plays out the exact same way every single time.
The first time I discovered these things, I was surprised, delighted even, but by even the second time, the truth that these are copied-and-pasted across the entirety of the Lands Between in order to pad it out became readily apparent, and eventually worn away even the enthusiasm of that first encounter. When I look back on my genuine enjoyment of the first battle with the Erdtree Avatar, I can only feel like an idiot for not realizing that this fight would be repeated verbatim over and over and become less fun every single time. When you've seen one, you've really seen all of them, and this means that by the time you leave Limgrave, you've already seen everything the Open World has to offer.
This is, of course, to be expected. Open world games simply have to do this. They are an enormous effort to bring into life, and the realities of game production mean that unless you're willing to spend decades on one game, you're going to have to be thrifty with how you produce content. I expect this, I understand this. Fallout: New Vegas is probably my favorite Open World game, but its world is also filled with this template design. But what's to be gained from this in a Dark Souls game? Unlike contemporaries like Breath of the Wild, your verbs of interaction in these games are frighteningly limited, with almost all of the experience boiling down to fighting enemies, and without a variety of interactions, the lack of variety in the huge amounts of content stands out all the more. Does fighting the same boss over and over and traversing the same cave over and over make Souls better? Even if you choose to just ignore all of these parts of the Open World (which is far easier said than done, as due to a very harsh leveling curve and the scarcity of crucial weapon upgrade materials outside of The Mines, the game's design absolutely pushes towards you engaging in these repetitious activities), the Legacy Dungeons that comprise the game's bespoke content are functionally completely separate from the Open World, with not even your Horse permitted to enter. This is no Burnout: Paradise or Xenoblade Chronicles X, which retooled the core gameplay loop to one where the open world was absolutely core to the design: this is a series of middling Dark Souls levels scattered among an open world no different from games like Far Cry or Horizon: Zero Dawn that many Souls fans have historically looked down on, and the game is only worse for it.
NPC storylines in particular suffer massively, as the chances of you stumbling upon these characters, already often quite annoying in past games, are so low as to practically require a wiki if you want to see the end of multiple questlines. However, that assumes that you will want to see the end of these stories and that you are invested in this world, and I decidedly Was Not. Souls games have always had suspect things in them that have gone largely uninterrogated but Elden Ring really brings that ugliness to the surface, with rape being an annoyingly present aspect of the backstories of many characters, and even having multiple characters threaten to rape you, none of which is deployed in a way that is meaningful and is just insufferable edgelord fantasy writing, and the same could be said of the grimdark incest-laden backstory, the deeply suspect trans panic writing surrounding one of the characters, and the enthusiastic use of Fantasy Racism tropes in the form of the Demi-Humans. I remain convinced that George RR Martin's involvement in this game was little more than a cynical publicity stunt, but certainly the game's writing indulges in many of that man's worst excesses, whilst having almost none of his strengths.
None of this is to say that Elden Ring is devoid of enjoyment. While the fact that it did hit just in time for a manic-depressive mood that made me perfectly suited to play a game I could just mindlessly play for a couple of weeks, I did see it through to the end in that time, even if I did rush to the end after a certain point. From Software's artists remain some of the best in the industry, with some incredible environments and boss designs that deserve Olympic gold medals for how much heavy-lifting they're doing to keep the experience afloat. I loved being kidnapped by chests into other parts of the world, and I wish it happened more than a couple of front-loaded times. But the enjoyment I had in it never felt like stemmed from the open world, and even its highest points don't hang with the best bits of the prior installments. Stormveil is probably the level design highlight of the game but it already fades from my mind in comparison to the likes of Central Yharnam or the Undead Burg or the Dragon Shrine. Indeed, the fact that they exist as islands in an ocean of vacuous space between them precludes the so-called "Legacy Dungeons" of this game from having the satisfying loops and interconnections that are often the design highlights of prior entries. The bosses are a seriously uneven mixed bag as well; even setting aside the repetition, as the nasty trend of overturned bosses that started in Dark Souls III rears its unfortunate head again. The superboss Melania is an interesting design utterly ruined by her obscene damage output, and my personal highlight of the game, Starscourge Radagon, who is the only boss fight that felt like it played to the things that Elden Ring brought to the table, and is a moment among the series that the game can truly claim as it's very own...but the tuning of the fight prevented it from being the triumphant coming-together moment that it is clearly attempting for many of my friends, who left the fight feeling that it was just annoying and tedious. Modern From Software could never make a fight like Maiden Astrea again because they'd insist on making her really hard in a way that actively detracts from the emotional experience in the fight. Boss fights can be about more than just providing a challenge, and I think From has forgotten that.
Taken as a series of its legacy dungeons, of its finest moments, I think Elden Ring would only be a middling one of these games. The additions to the formula feel anemic and unbalanced, the multiplayer implementation is honestly a quite considerable step back from prior games (the decision to have the majority of invasions only occur during co-operation feels like an attempt to weed out trolls picking on weaker players but in reality what it does is make equal fights are next-to-impossible and put Seal-Clubbers in a place where they are the only players who can effectively invade, a completely baffling decision), but it's really the open world I keep coming back to as the reason this game doesn't work. Not only does it add nothing that wasn't already present in better ways in prior games, but it actively detracts from the experience. The promise of the Open World is one of discovery, of setting off in uncharted directions and finding something new, but do Open Worlds actually facilitate this any better than more linear games? I don't know if they do. I felt a sense of discovery and finding something in so many of these games, even the most linear ones, and felt it stronger because the game was able to use careful, meticulous level design to bring out those emotions. Walking out of a cave and seeing Irithyll of the Boreal Valley, or Dead Man's Wharf stretch out before me, were moments of genuine discovery, and they would not be improved if I found six more Dead Man's Wharfs throughout the game. Contrary to their promise, in my experience, the open world, rather than create a sense of discovery, undermine it due to the compromises necessary to create these worlds. All the openness does for your discoveries is let you approach them from a slightly different angle as everyone else.
That is, if you can even claim to have discovered anything in the first place. To call Elden Ring derivative of prior games in this milieu would be a gross understatement. I am far from the first person to note that the game's much-hyped worldbuilding is largely content to regurgitate Souls Tropes with the Proper Nouns replaced with much worse ones, but it goes beyond that - entire questlines, plot beats, character arcs, dungeon designs, enemies, and bosses are lifted wholesale from prior games practically verbatim. More often than not Elden Ring feels closer to a Greatest Hits album than a coherent piece in and of itself, a soulless and cynical repackaging of prior Souls Classics, irrevocably damaged by being torn from the original context from which they belonged. I'm not a fan of Dark Souls III, in part because it too is also a game that leans on repetition of prior games, but at the very least the game was about those repetitions, where yes, old areas and characters would be repeated, but at least it was thematically resonant with what the game was doing. Elden Ring can't even claim that. Whatever this shallow mess of a narrative, easily the worst of the franchise thus far by my reckoning, is going for, it is done no favors by being this stitched-together Frankenstein of Souls.
I was particularly shocked by the sheer ferocity with which the game steals from the fan-favorite Bloodborne. Quick, tell me if you've heard this one before: you encounter a hunched, bestial foe, who fights you with their fists, but once you get their health halfway down, the battle stops, a cutscene plays, where they speak coherently, summon a blade from their past, and stand with their former dignity restored, the music changes, and their name is revealed to be "X the Y Blade". Or what about a hub area, separated in its own liminal space from the rest of the map, that can be discovered in its True Form in the material world? What about when that hub area is wreathed in spectral flame and begins to burn as the final hours of the game is nigh? These are far from the only examples, as there are multiple enemies and ideas throughout the game that are shamelessly lifted from my personal favorite From Software effort, but these stand out as the most noxious of all, as they simply repeat beats that were effective in the game they originated from because the game was able to build to them and have them resonate with the rest of the experience. You cannot just graft things whole cloth from prior work onto a new one and expect it to work as a coherent piece, the very prospect is ridiculous.
When Elden Ring did all this, my jaw about hit the floor from the sheer unmitigated gall. When it chose to conclude itself with a straight-faced Moon Presence reference, complete with an arena that directly evokes the Hunter's Dream, I just had to laugh. The final statement the game made on itself, the bullet point it chose to put on the experience, was "Remember Bloodborne? That was good, wasn't it?" Because in many ways, that really was a perfect conclusion to this game.
While it would be a mistake to claim, as people seem increasingly eager to, that Souls emerged entirely out of the magical ocean that is Hidetaka Miyazaki's unparalleled genius or whatever, as these games have always drawn heavy inspiration from properties like Berserk, Book of the New Sun, and The Legend of Zelda, and were built on top of a framework clearly established by past Fromsoft series King's Field, the reason I think that myself and many others were initially enthralled by the promise of Demon's Souls or Dark Souls was because they were decidedly different. Their esoterica, willingness to buck modern design conventions and hugely evocative online elements were why these games set imaginations alight so strongly, and proved enormously influential for the past decade of game design.
Demon's Souls felt like something new. And while successive games in this series have felt far less fresh, none of them have felt as utterly exhausted as Elden Ring: a final statement from the designers and writers at From Software that they have officially Ran Out of Ideas, that the well has long gone dry, that all they can do is to hastily staple on the modern design trends they once rejected onto a formula that does not gel with them, and that they are wandering without life through a never-ending cycle of their own creation, branded by the Darksign. Perhaps it's no surprise that their least inventive, least consistent, and least creative game since Demon's Souls is also by far their most successful. Once From Software defied conventions and trends, and now, they are consumed by them.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CW: Brief discussion on the game's use of rape
In Elden Ring, you can never discover anything once. That was the thought that entered my head early in the experience and never quite left it. One of the most evocative parts of the game's genuinely stunning art direction is the walking cathedral, a strange and arresting colossus that stumbles across the Weeping Peninsula, each step ringing the bell that hangs beneath its torso. It was a sight of strange, beautiful magic, the kind of which these games have been good at in the past.
Except, to describe this creature in the singular would be inaccurate. Because Walking Cathedrals appear all over the world of Elden Ring, each one identical in appearance, each one performing an identical, express mechanical function for the player. This cannot be left alone as a strange, unique beast, it has to be reduced to a Type of Content a player can engage with over and over again for a characterless transaction of pure mechanics. It is the excitement of coming across something esoteric that the Souls games have made a core part of their identity, utterly commodified and made into the exact same arc that applied to Assassin's Creed the moment climbing a tower to survey the environment and taking a leap of faith into a haystack below shifted from an exciting and evocative moment into a rote and tiresome mechanical interaction.
Because, that's right everyone, Dark Souls Is Now Open World. Not an open world in the same way that Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, or Dark Souls II were, where you could freely venture down different paths to different bosses and take things in an order outside of the game's expected leveling curve. No, this is an Open World as we understand it today: an enormous ocean of discrete repeated Activities dotted with islands of meaningful bespoke design. There's plenty of stuff to do in this world, but it's all of a specific type - in a catacomb you will navigate stone gargoyles and chalice dungeon designs to a lever that will open a door near the entrance that will contain a boss that you've likely found elsewhere in the world, and will be filled with stone gargoyles. Mines will be filled with mining rock-people and upgrade materials. Towers will have you find three spectral creatures around them in order to open them up and obtain a new Memory Slot. Camps will contain a patrolling enemy type and some loot. Even genuinely enchanting vistas and environments get their space to be repeated in slight variations. Boss battles too will be repeated endlessly, time and time again, with delightful designs like the Watchdog tragically becoming something I sighed and was annoyed to see crop up half-a-dozen times over the course of the adventure, and I was truly, deeply annoyed at fighting no less than about ten or twelve Erdtree Avatars and Dragons, with whom the moves never change and the fight plays out the exact same way every single time.
The first time I discovered these things, I was surprised, delighted even, but by even the second time, the truth that these are copied-and-pasted across the entirety of the Lands Between in order to pad it out became readily apparent, and eventually worn away even the enthusiasm of that first encounter. When I look back on my genuine enjoyment of the first battle with the Erdtree Avatar, I can only feel like an idiot for not realizing that this fight would be repeated verbatim over and over and become less fun every single time. When you've seen one, you've really seen all of them, and this means that by the time you leave Limgrave, you've already seen everything the Open World has to offer.
This is, of course, to be expected. Open world games simply have to do this. They are an enormous effort to bring into life, and the realities of game production mean that unless you're willing to spend decades on one game, you're going to have to be thrifty with how you produce content. I expect this, I understand this. Fallout: New Vegas is probably my favorite Open World game, but its world is also filled with this template design. But what's to be gained from this in a Dark Souls game? Unlike contemporaries like Breath of the Wild, your verbs of interaction in these games are frighteningly limited, with almost all of the experience boiling down to fighting enemies, and without a variety of interactions, the lack of variety in the huge amounts of content stands out all the more. Does fighting the same boss over and over and traversing the same cave over and over make Souls better? Even if you choose to just ignore all of these parts of the Open World (which is far easier said than done, as due to a very harsh leveling curve and the scarcity of crucial weapon upgrade materials outside of The Mines, the game's design absolutely pushes towards you engaging in these repetitious activities), the Legacy Dungeons that comprise the game's bespoke content are functionally completely separate from the Open World, with not even your Horse permitted to enter. This is no Burnout: Paradise or Xenoblade Chronicles X, which retooled the core gameplay loop to one where the open world was absolutely core to the design: this is a series of middling Dark Souls levels scattered among an open world no different from games like Far Cry or Horizon: Zero Dawn that many Souls fans have historically looked down on, and the game is only worse for it.
NPC storylines in particular suffer massively, as the chances of you stumbling upon these characters, already often quite annoying in past games, are so low as to practically require a wiki if you want to see the end of multiple questlines. However, that assumes that you will want to see the end of these stories and that you are invested in this world, and I decidedly Was Not. Souls games have always had suspect things in them that have gone largely uninterrogated but Elden Ring really brings that ugliness to the surface, with rape being an annoyingly present aspect of the backstories of many characters, and even having multiple characters threaten to rape you, none of which is deployed in a way that is meaningful and is just insufferable edgelord fantasy writing, and the same could be said of the grimdark incest-laden backstory, the deeply suspect trans panic writing surrounding one of the characters, and the enthusiastic use of Fantasy Racism tropes in the form of the Demi-Humans. I remain convinced that George RR Martin's involvement in this game was little more than a cynical publicity stunt, but certainly the game's writing indulges in many of that man's worst excesses, whilst having almost none of his strengths.
None of this is to say that Elden Ring is devoid of enjoyment. While the fact that it did hit just in time for a manic-depressive mood that made me perfectly suited to play a game I could just mindlessly play for a couple of weeks, I did see it through to the end in that time, even if I did rush to the end after a certain point. From Software's artists remain some of the best in the industry, with some incredible environments and boss designs that deserve Olympic gold medals for how much heavy-lifting they're doing to keep the experience afloat. I loved being kidnapped by chests into other parts of the world, and I wish it happened more than a couple of front-loaded times. But the enjoyment I had in it never felt like stemmed from the open world, and even its highest points don't hang with the best bits of the prior installments. Stormveil is probably the level design highlight of the game but it already fades from my mind in comparison to the likes of Central Yharnam or the Undead Burg or the Dragon Shrine. Indeed, the fact that they exist as islands in an ocean of vacuous space between them precludes the so-called "Legacy Dungeons" of this game from having the satisfying loops and interconnections that are often the design highlights of prior entries. The bosses are a seriously uneven mixed bag as well; even setting aside the repetition, as the nasty trend of overturned bosses that started in Dark Souls III rears its unfortunate head again. The superboss Melania is an interesting design utterly ruined by her obscene damage output, and my personal highlight of the game, Starscourge Radagon, who is the only boss fight that felt like it played to the things that Elden Ring brought to the table, and is a moment among the series that the game can truly claim as it's very own...but the tuning of the fight prevented it from being the triumphant coming-together moment that it is clearly attempting for many of my friends, who left the fight feeling that it was just annoying and tedious. Modern From Software could never make a fight like Maiden Astrea again because they'd insist on making her really hard in a way that actively detracts from the emotional experience in the fight. Boss fights can be about more than just providing a challenge, and I think From has forgotten that.
Taken as a series of its legacy dungeons, of its finest moments, I think Elden Ring would only be a middling one of these games. The additions to the formula feel anemic and unbalanced, the multiplayer implementation is honestly a quite considerable step back from prior games (the decision to have the majority of invasions only occur during co-operation feels like an attempt to weed out trolls picking on weaker players but in reality what it does is make equal fights are next-to-impossible and put Seal-Clubbers in a place where they are the only players who can effectively invade, a completely baffling decision), but it's really the open world I keep coming back to as the reason this game doesn't work. Not only does it add nothing that wasn't already present in better ways in prior games, but it actively detracts from the experience. The promise of the Open World is one of discovery, of setting off in uncharted directions and finding something new, but do Open Worlds actually facilitate this any better than more linear games? I don't know if they do. I felt a sense of discovery and finding something in so many of these games, even the most linear ones, and felt it stronger because the game was able to use careful, meticulous level design to bring out those emotions. Walking out of a cave and seeing Irithyll of the Boreal Valley, or Dead Man's Wharf stretch out before me, were moments of genuine discovery, and they would not be improved if I found six more Dead Man's Wharfs throughout the game. Contrary to their promise, in my experience, the open world, rather than create a sense of discovery, undermine it due to the compromises necessary to create these worlds. All the openness does for your discoveries is let you approach them from a slightly different angle as everyone else.
That is, if you can even claim to have discovered anything in the first place. To call Elden Ring derivative of prior games in this milieu would be a gross understatement. I am far from the first person to note that the game's much-hyped worldbuilding is largely content to regurgitate Souls Tropes with the Proper Nouns replaced with much worse ones, but it goes beyond that - entire questlines, plot beats, character arcs, dungeon designs, enemies, and bosses are lifted wholesale from prior games practically verbatim. More often than not Elden Ring feels closer to a Greatest Hits album than a coherent piece in and of itself, a soulless and cynical repackaging of prior Souls Classics, irrevocably damaged by being torn from the original context from which they belonged. I'm not a fan of Dark Souls III, in part because it too is also a game that leans on repetition of prior games, but at the very least the game was about those repetitions, where yes, old areas and characters would be repeated, but at least it was thematically resonant with what the game was doing. Elden Ring can't even claim that. Whatever this shallow mess of a narrative, easily the worst of the franchise thus far by my reckoning, is going for, it is done no favors by being this stitched-together Frankenstein of Souls.
I was particularly shocked by the sheer ferocity with which the game steals from the fan-favorite Bloodborne. Quick, tell me if you've heard this one before: you encounter a hunched, bestial foe, who fights you with their fists, but once you get their health halfway down, the battle stops, a cutscene plays, where they speak coherently, summon a blade from their past, and stand with their former dignity restored, the music changes, and their name is revealed to be "X the Y Blade". Or what about a hub area, separated in its own liminal space from the rest of the map, that can be discovered in its True Form in the material world? What about when that hub area is wreathed in spectral flame and begins to burn as the final hours of the game is nigh? These are far from the only examples, as there are multiple enemies and ideas throughout the game that are shamelessly lifted from my personal favorite From Software effort, but these stand out as the most noxious of all, as they simply repeat beats that were effective in the game they originated from because the game was able to build to them and have them resonate with the rest of the experience. You cannot just graft things whole cloth from prior work onto a new one and expect it to work as a coherent piece, the very prospect is ridiculous.
When Elden Ring did all this, my jaw about hit the floor from the sheer unmitigated gall. When it chose to conclude itself with a straight-faced Moon Presence reference, complete with an arena that directly evokes the Hunter's Dream, I just had to laugh. The final statement the game made on itself, the bullet point it chose to put on the experience, was "Remember Bloodborne? That was good, wasn't it?" Because in many ways, that really was a perfect conclusion to this game.
While it would be a mistake to claim, as people seem increasingly eager to, that Souls emerged entirely out of the magical ocean that is Hidetaka Miyazaki's unparalleled genius or whatever, as these games have always drawn heavy inspiration from properties like Berserk, Book of the New Sun, and The Legend of Zelda, and were built on top of a framework clearly established by past Fromsoft series King's Field, the reason I think that myself and many others were initially enthralled by the promise of Demon's Souls or Dark Souls was because they were decidedly different. Their esoterica, willingness to buck modern design conventions and hugely evocative online elements were why these games set imaginations alight so strongly, and proved enormously influential for the past decade of game design.
Demon's Souls felt like something new. And while successive games in this series have felt far less fresh, none of them have felt as utterly exhausted as Elden Ring: a final statement from the designers and writers at From Software that they have officially Ran Out of Ideas, that the well has long gone dry, that all they can do is to hastily staple on the modern design trends they once rejected onto a formula that does not gel with them, and that they are wandering without life through a never-ending cycle of their own creation, branded by the Darksign. Perhaps it's no surprise that their least inventive, least consistent, and least creative game since Demon's Souls is also by far their most successful. Once From Software defied conventions and trends, and now, they are consumed by them.
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"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."
"You cannot escape the Nexus."
This review contains spoilers
Tell Us Why
Given Life
Are we meant to die
Helpless in our cries
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It’s early 2014, I’m pretty sure. Maybe around March, or April? It’s been a bad year. It’s going to get worse. I’m falling back into bad habits. Not leaving the house as much. Not going to classes. I’m trawling through Steam one day when I see a marginal discount on Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn. Wasn’t this good now, I heard? I hadn’t thought much of this game since I laughed at footage of the 1.0 version at launch. It’s cheap and comes with a month free trial. I like Final Fantasy. Why not?
I make my first character, a male miqo’te gladiator, a classic new player mistake to accidentally opt in to Tanking because Gladiators are the only class that starts with a sword. I name them Woodaba Vacaum, a surname that is borrowed from a character in a game I will never finish making. “Vacaum” doesn’t mean what I think it means and apparently isn’t even a latin word like I thought it was. I play for a few hours, and have a pretty good time, but, y’know…exams are coming up, there are other games to play, and this “Ifrit” boss seems pretty scary. I log out, let the free month lapse, and let the game languish in my steam library for years.
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It would be an incredible understatement to say that Endwalker had a lot on it’s shoulders. Not only was it following up on the near-universally beloved Shadowbringers, not only was it the first piece of content released after the game unexpectedly skyrocketed in popularity in 2021 and became the nigh-mythical “WoW Killer” almost out of nowhere, but it also had the unenviable task of wrapping up a story that has been in the making, in some shape or form, since 2010, a story that had some whispering in hushed tones about being “the best Final Fantasy, now”, whilst not resolving it too conclusively to encourage people to stop playing Square Enix’s most profitable venture. Given all that, it’s maybe a little churlish of me to point out that, under the weight of all this, Endwalker stumbles, falls, and ultimately chooses to lighten that load to ensure it can reach the finish line intact.
I’ll just be upfront with this: I don’t think this as good as Shadowbringers. I’m not even sure it’s as good as Heavensward. Even Stormblood, increasingly the punching bag of the XIV community, for all it’s messiness, feels like it’s aiming for more ambitious and thematically interesting things than Endwalker. I think as the afterglow fades, we’re going to see less and less people somewhat embarrassingly referring to this as “peak fiction”. There was genuinely a point in the main quest where I felt crushingly disappointed that this was the direction they had decided to take things for the grand finale, that the game had, in some ways, become the least interesting version of itself, went for a storyline that I would sooner expect from, say, Star Ocean, than Final Fantasy. But at the same time, there were moments that had my heart soaring for how much they affected me, left me feeling awed at just how tight a hold this story had on my heart. For everything that irks me, there are things I dearly love.
Thinking about Endwalker is difficult, and I think that might be why we’ve yet to see many substantive pieces of criticism on it that isn’t just effervescent praise. It’s taken me a long time to write this piece. I’m still unsure how I feel about many things in it. I don’t know if I’m ready to write this review.
Let's try anyway.
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It’s summer 2016. I’m at the end of my final year of university. I’m leaving with a decent grade in a subject that is kind of worthless, especially since the uncertainty following the Brexit vote is about to obliterate the few job opportunities there are in this field. If I’m honest with myself, I never quite thought about what I would do after university. I was so fixated on the dream of the rose coloured campus life that I never thought about what I’d do after that. So instead of answering that question, I’m playing MMOs again. I’ve been revisiting my childhood fascination of Azeroth, but it’s slowly losing its luster. But then, I remember. Didn’t I have Final Fantasy XIV on steam? I keep hearing that it’s really good now. Maybe I should try it again…
Suddenly, I’m Woodaba Vacaum once more, picking up just where I’d left off over two years ago. The necessity of having to do group content to continue the story gets me over a hurdle that I’ve never quite managed to get over for an MMO, and suddenly, I’m hooked. Over the coming months, I play through the entirety of the A Realm Reborn storyline as well as the Crystal Tower raid series, the very first raids I’ve done for any MMORPG “properly”, and finally reach Ishgard and the Heavensward expansion, forgoing the Paladin job in favour of Dark Knight because events of the main quest suddenly make me feel uncomfortable playing Paladin and in that moment, realise that I’m invested in this world quite unlike any other before. The incredible Dark Knight quests only solidify that for me. In late November, having started somewhere around June, I’m officially, for the very first time “caught up” with the main story of an MMORPG, finishing the 3.3 Dragonsong War quests with a final confrontation with Nidhogg.
But it’s something I did alone. The duty finder is a godsend and encountering genuinely unpleasant people almost never happens, but I’m too shy to join a free company, or join in on any PF content for high-difficulty content. Bereft of MSQ, I log out for a while. Final Fantasy XV is coming out soon, after all. The book on the Dragonsong War closes in silence.
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Endwalker starts pretty slow, with Labyrinthos probably ranking as one of the lamer zones in the game and Thavnair taking a bit too long to go anywhere cool, but once you arrive in Garlemald, things pick up significantly, and the game dives headfirst into some of its most fascinating and thorny content in its history, and then, after a hugely surprising bodyswap sequence, the game slams down hard on the accelerator and leaves whatever expectations you might have for where the story is going to go far, far behind it. To leave me completely in suspense at where the story is going to go after this many expansions is a genuine feat that I appreciate, but it also means that sheer adrenaline and excitement does a lot to carry you through stuff that is maybe, in hindsight, more than a little thematically suspect. Still, my eyebrows went through the roof when I killed Zodiark in the first trial, and I spent the next couple dozen hours absolutely dumbfounded as to where the story could possibly go next, and completely enjoying that feeling of this game still being able to surprise me after all this time.
What’s also surprising is the quality of the battle content in the game thus far. The first two trials, in particular, are tuned to a notably higher difficulty than prior story trials, finally recognizing that if someone has three expansions under their belt they might be able to tackle some heftier mechanics than a stack or two. The dungeon bosses too are notably more demanding mechanically than even Shadowbringers’ bosses, continuing the style of that expansion of very simple layouts twinned with boss mechanics that would give a Heavensward boss a heart attack. The game in general seems more keen to prepare players for the jump in difficulty that comes with EX-level content, which is something I really appreciate, as someone who spent over a year of playing this game too terrified to even consider checking out some of the most mechanically engaging and satisfying multiplayer gameplay one can find. While I think The Seat of Sacrifice remains my favorite fight in the entire game, the fact that The Mothercrystal in particular is able to put in a decent fight for the top spot is incredibly high praise.
The new jobs are also two real winners, particularly Sage, which is positively electrifying to play, even in old content, thanks partially to the stat squish that has given a lot of old raids back some bite that they lost after Shadowbringers beefed up numbers so considerably. Getting O11 in Raid Roulette and finding it to be once again a tense white-knuckle drag race of a fight put an enormous smile on my face. Even stuff that seems rough at first glance, like Dark Knight and New Summoner, will continually evolve in both perception and tweaks as time passes, and already we’re seeing a re-evaulation of the initial backlash against Dark Knight after it unexpectedly found itself sitting atop the tanking DPS charts. Although I’m reviewing Endwalker now, as a period in the game’s life it is only just beginning, over the next couple years it will continue to evolve and change, and will succeed and fail in different respects, just like how Shadowbringers ended up as a mediocre expansion in the eyes of many who are strictly interested in high-level raid content despite being so beloved among those like myself who place a high value on narrative.
Ultimately, it’s that value that has my feelings on Endwalker so mixed. There’s so much to enjoy in this expansion, so much to appreciate, that the areas where it fumbles and falters are drawn into sharp relief, and ultimately it’s the areas of this story and this world that I value the most that Endwalker fumbles the hardest.
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It’s 2017. It’s a bad year. It will continue to be a bad year. Aside from a miserable fast food job I hold down for a couple months at the start of the year until one of the other workers there threatens to kill me, I am unemployed for the entirety of the year. I try a lot of things, and I fail at all of them. I am increasingly ill at ease with the person I am pretending to be. The details aren’t relevant. I am unhappy. But I still play Final Fantasy XIV, and, in fact, I find myself incredibly excited to take part in my first “live” expansion launch for an MMO, in the form of Stormblood. It’s certainly a rough one, and leads into something of a rough MSQ, but it’s one that I still treasure dearly as a light in a time where I had few.
I’m keeping up to date more regularly, I start doing content without guides, I level other jobs, and I find myself becoming a part of the community of the game in a way I simply haven’t before. As 2017 changes to 2018, FFXIV becomes more and more a part of my life, as starting a masters in a last ditch attempt to give my life a form of direction leaves me with far less time to play games than ever before, and FFXIV’s structure allows me to dive into content and experience the myriad stories within piecemeal in between work and classes. Whether it’s the Omega raids, the slowly unfolding MSQ, or getting into fishing while listening to revision notes, I have quite unexpectedly gone from someone who Plays XIV to a XIV Person. It gets me excited, helps me destress, helps me socialize, and is helping me in ways that I only begin to understand.
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When Shadowbringers discussed the Final Days as experienced by the Ancients, I thought what was happening was fairly conclusive: they encountered something that did not fit within their framework of understanding, and that lack of understanding led to a horrified revelation at their own limits and mortality, a fear of death that manifested via their creation magicks into demonic entities shaped like their own death. It was, I thought, quite clear and extremely resonant with the wider themes of the expansion vis a vis allowing old things to die and fade away and be replaced with better things, both the sadness and necessity of that. I genuinely wasn’t expecting further elaboration on The Final Days in Endwalker, but further elaboration is what we get, and the explanation only serves to narrow the scope of interpretation and resonance to such an extent that it arguably harms Shadowbringers in hindsight, which is maybe the most damning thing I can say about a story beat.
To put it simply, Meteion sucks. I know some people really like the birb but for me, she just blows, I’m sorry. This jokerfied Junko Enoshima wannabe is one of the lamer villains in the entire final fantasy pantheon, like if Seymour Guado was actually the villain of FFX instead of a distraction from the real problem. An evil bird-girl in space who is radiating Bad Vibes because she thinks life is meaningless and therefore everyone should die is something I would expect from an AI-generated parody of Bad JRPG plots, and yet, here it is, sitting as the culmination of this decade-long narrative. After the thoughtful theming of Shadowbringers I could not have imagined that its sequel would boil everything down to generalized Hopepunk but that is kind of what happened. No longer is the demise of the Ancients a result of the flaws of their own societal perspective that is resonant with real things, instead it is because a big ball of evil at the end of the universe turns you into a monster when you feel despair.
And yeah, I get that big loud themes of Hope facing Despair at the end of the universe is kind of a JRPG staple, but boiling things down to such primal themes causes a lot of friction with the kind of game Final Fantasy XIV, and, indeed, the series as a whole, has been up to this point. In Shadowbringers, you were fighting a near godlike entity at the end of their universe, but that godlike entity represented material things. They were an aging boomer who refused to accept or acknowledge the validity of the world that was coming in favor of their uncritical adoration of their idealized prelapsarian idea of the world as it was. In contrast to many lesser Hopepunk stories, Final Fantasy XIV has previously acknowledged that people feel despair for real, material reasons. The people of Ishgard and Dravania in Heavensward felt despair because they were trapped in a war built on lies and deception, a Foundation constructed to justify the unjustifiable. The people of Doma and Ala Mhigo in Stormblood felt despair because they were trapped under the boot of imperial tyranny and violence, of their cultures being taken from them and twisted beyond recognizability, of their lives being treated as sport by a spoiled brat born into immense power, an expansion who’s materialist concerns hit me particularly hard as someone living in a land occupied by a colonial power. And, of course, the people of The First in Shadowbringers despair because the ideology they were taught from birth was good and right and just turned against them and choked them to the edge of their life, and they overcame the despair by uniting to overthrow the (admittedly fatphobic caricature) eikon of greed and complacency at the top of it all. In Endwalker, people feel despair, ultimately, because an evil space bird with primary-school nihilist motivations makes them feel despair.
In the real world, people feel “despair” for many reasons, and more often than not, those reasons are directly related to the material circumstances that affect their daily lives. Not being able to pay rent, being unemployed, suffering heartbreak and depression, witnessing the callousness and greed of the people who hold positions of power in our world. Reducing Despair to an ontological narrative force completely divorced from the lived experiences of our everyday lives also divorces it from resonance with said lived experiences, and is what ultimately leaves Endwalker feeling intellectually hollow. Shadowbringers electrified my mind for months after I finished it and I am fairly confident the same will not happen here. When this reveal happened, Endwalker transformed from a story that had me literally trembling with excitement the more I played to something that, even if for just a moment, made me question whether investing in this world and these characters for as long as I have had been worth it after all.
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It’s 2019. I’m coming to the end of my masters, working on a dissertation project that is, hilariously, a “letterboxd for games” called…Backloggr. The release of Shadowbringers is imminent, and I am excited. Not like I was excited for Stormblood, no. Now I’m in and Shadowbringers is my most anticipated game of the year, and I’m planning how I can voraciously consume it whilst not letting my dissertation project suffer. What’s more, 2019 is the year I am finally honest with myself and others that I am trans, and my relationship with my FFXIV character finally makes sense. They are the medium in which I experiment with gender and gender presentation in a way that does not have the pressure and anxieties of experimentation in the real world, a way to experiment with an audience that won’t judge me in the way that I fear the most. This subject - and Final Fantasy XIV in general - becomes the subject of my first paid piece of games writing, and although I have mixed feelings on that article, the fact that I managed it at all is something that I hold dearly to heart. The article even goes up during my first clear of The Seat of Sacrifice [Extreme], my favorite fight in the entire game and one of my favorite moments in all of video games. It is the culmination of a story that has evolved from “pretty good, for an MMO” to a genuine contender for Best Final Fantasy Story, which I can only really express as the highest praise possible given that FF is probably my favorite series of games that contains multiple all-time contenders.
Final Fantasy XIV is a part of my life. I’m not going to credit it for the way I’ve grown as a person or a writer or say that it saved me or anything like that, I find the way people often give the media they enjoy the credit for accomplishing things like that disappointing because it deprives them of enormous credit. But during Shadowbringers especially, it helped me. It helped me work things out about myself, it helped me get work, it helped me develop my critical and creative writing faculties, it helped me make friends and it helped me get closer to old ones. And it helped make me happy when I wasn’t.
How do you even begin to review something like that?
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As a story, Endwalker is frequently and fairly consistently delightful and enjoyable moment to moment, but attempting to think more deeply about what it is trying to say causes a lot of friction, particularly when attempting to reconcile it with past expansions, and the Meteion stuff is maybe No.1 with a bullet as to why this is. I keep thinking about the scene where Jullus, one of the expansion’s most compelling new characters, rages with righteous anger against Zenos viator Galvus for destroying his home and people in his quest to fightfuck the player character, only for Alphinaud to tell him that he has to remain calm or else he’ll turn into a big evil monster the heroes will have no choice but to take down. Or how the fandom’s overly sympathetic lens of Emet-Selch and the Ancients in general has been absorbed wholeheartedly, leading to a shockingly uncritical depiction of a society that has a fundamental callous disregard for the sanctity of life, and particularly falls a little too much in love with Venat/Hydaelyn, sanding down many of the most interesting wrinkles of her character to make her a fairly unambiguous good guy at the end (which is not to say that her character is without depth - far from it - but the game does almost repel from the idea of really digging into that depth in favor of idolizing her), especially given things like the bodyswap and the conscious uselessness of the characters on the moon highlighting the fallibility of Hydaelyn and her plans, and casting a critical eye on the Scions’ uncritical adoration of her (you can even say “hey what was with Hydaelyn straight up lying to me in Heavensward ” to which an NPC says “huh dunno, probably nothing to worry about” which I thought for sure was Going Somewhere but no I was simply Not Supposed To Worry About it). And, frankly, only doom lays down the path of trying to parse any kind of statement out of the Final Days itself, what with it turning people feeling depression, righteous anger against injustice, and other true, human emotions unhelpfully grouped together and labeled “despair” into evil creatures who cannot be saved and must be put down lest they harm others.
Endwalker is a mess, both when it comes to reconciling what it’s trying to say with itself, and when it comes to how it interacts with prior expansions. But if it must be a mess? If it has to have this difficult and frictional relationship with the parts of the story I value the most? If it must end this way? Then let it be a beautiful mess. Let it be dumb and questionable with impeccable style, let it burn it’s bridges with impeccably dancing flames. Endwalker is many things at many times, but it is almost always doing what it is doing amazingly, with a confidence fully owned by a creative team burning with a confidence and passion found almost nowhere else in the big-budget space. Any time Endwalker goes somewhere, it does so in the most brash, confident manner possible, with some truly incredible visuals and direction that is genuinely staggering coming from a game that’s still kinda running on 13 year old FF13 tech. The music team once again does incredible work here, and if this soundtrack isn’t spoken of in the same hushed tones as all the expansion soundtracks before it, it’s only because Square Enix has become ever more draconian about allowing people to share this wonderful music. I said in a kind of cutting way earlier that Endwalker is consistently delightful and enjoyable moment to moment, but I want to stress that being continually entertaining throughout is something that many games utterly fail to manage, and the day I turn my nose up at a story that delights in its movements as much as Endwalker does is the day you can officially write me off as a lost cause.
And, hell, it’s not like the story isn’t worthwhile. I’ve been highly critical of the decisions made thematically, and I stand by those criticisms, but not only are the decisions not as disastrous as they could have been (in the incredible Answers scene the status of the Ascians as pining for a prelapsarian utopia that did not exist is upheld despite much of Elpis’ attempts to undermine that, which I felt was very important) but also there is still a great deal of resonance here to be found here. I truly think Garlemald, in particular, is a strong contender for best arc in the entire MSQ, and the character writing as a whole remains excellent. Thavnair is a cultural appropriation playground to be certain, but it’s also got one of the sickest characters in the whole game making his nest there, and I hope to see it developed further in future patches. The fact that I’m not as condemnatory of the Elpis arc as I think perhaps part of me wants to be is a testament to just how well rounded Hythlodaeus, Emet-Selch, Venat and Hermes manage to be. The Zenos duel at the end is obviously hysterical as a big dumb shonen finale but it also I think acknowledges a truth about this game and the people that play it that a lot of games (including this one, in the past) try to dance around. I may fundamentally disgree and find facile the game's argument that suffering is what gives life meaning, but it's in how that idea interacts with characters like the Ancients and Zenos, that this theme finds some purchase in my heart, an exploration of how people who have lived blessed, privileged lives of plenty are deaf and cold-hearted to the suffering of those less fortunate around them, and how that eventually twists into genuine malice as they become ever more desperate to maintain their comfortable status quo. Even if I find the root of why she has to do it fairly vacuous, Venat choosing to destroy her world for the sake of a potential better one is incredibly powerful. And above all, this story of people at the end of days finding something to hold onto, something worth living for, is something that I did find affecting and meaningful, even if I kind of have to avoid thinking about the details in order for it to have the biggest impact. Every day, I feel the crushing weight of the end of the world all around me, and I struggle greatly with just trying to live in a world where all around me are reminders trying to convince me that there is no hope to save our planet in the face of the people and systems killing it. And while I would caution against becoming addicted to Hope as a placebo against genuine change, there is still something to be said for making me feel like there is hope.
The answer that Endwalker ultimately arrives at, is that in the darkest of times, we find the strength to go on in each other, and in standing/working together, we can overcome anything. It’s a cliche, perhaps boring answer, but in many ways it is also the right one. The Warrior of Light has never walked alone, after all, they’ve always had a party of 3/7/23 others to journey alongside, to help carry them through their trials. Whether they saved others from death, took the fire for their friends, or slain the beasts that threatened them, we’ve always done this together. I know I have. I wouldn’t be here without those who have walked beside me, who healed me when I was at the end of my rope, who stood alongside me against my problems and granted me the strength to see them through. Whatever else I may think about what Endwalker has to say about living at the end of the world, I think it is right about that, at least.
Do I wish Endwalker handled things differently? Yeah, kinda. Do I think there are things about it that suck? For sure. Is this a fitting conclusion to a story over a decade in the making? Honestly, I still don’t know.
But did I have fun? Was it meaningful? Am I happy I made these friends, fought these battles? Am I glad I heard what I heard, felt what I felt, and thought what I thought?
Has my journey been good? Has it been worthwhile?
...That, I can’t deny.
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Whispers
Falling silently drifts on the wind
But I hear you
Our Journey
Now a memory fading from sight
But I see you
You're not alone.
Given Life
Are we meant to die
Helpless in our cries
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It’s early 2014, I’m pretty sure. Maybe around March, or April? It’s been a bad year. It’s going to get worse. I’m falling back into bad habits. Not leaving the house as much. Not going to classes. I’m trawling through Steam one day when I see a marginal discount on Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn. Wasn’t this good now, I heard? I hadn’t thought much of this game since I laughed at footage of the 1.0 version at launch. It’s cheap and comes with a month free trial. I like Final Fantasy. Why not?
I make my first character, a male miqo’te gladiator, a classic new player mistake to accidentally opt in to Tanking because Gladiators are the only class that starts with a sword. I name them Woodaba Vacaum, a surname that is borrowed from a character in a game I will never finish making. “Vacaum” doesn’t mean what I think it means and apparently isn’t even a latin word like I thought it was. I play for a few hours, and have a pretty good time, but, y’know…exams are coming up, there are other games to play, and this “Ifrit” boss seems pretty scary. I log out, let the free month lapse, and let the game languish in my steam library for years.
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It would be an incredible understatement to say that Endwalker had a lot on it’s shoulders. Not only was it following up on the near-universally beloved Shadowbringers, not only was it the first piece of content released after the game unexpectedly skyrocketed in popularity in 2021 and became the nigh-mythical “WoW Killer” almost out of nowhere, but it also had the unenviable task of wrapping up a story that has been in the making, in some shape or form, since 2010, a story that had some whispering in hushed tones about being “the best Final Fantasy, now”, whilst not resolving it too conclusively to encourage people to stop playing Square Enix’s most profitable venture. Given all that, it’s maybe a little churlish of me to point out that, under the weight of all this, Endwalker stumbles, falls, and ultimately chooses to lighten that load to ensure it can reach the finish line intact.
I’ll just be upfront with this: I don’t think this as good as Shadowbringers. I’m not even sure it’s as good as Heavensward. Even Stormblood, increasingly the punching bag of the XIV community, for all it’s messiness, feels like it’s aiming for more ambitious and thematically interesting things than Endwalker. I think as the afterglow fades, we’re going to see less and less people somewhat embarrassingly referring to this as “peak fiction”. There was genuinely a point in the main quest where I felt crushingly disappointed that this was the direction they had decided to take things for the grand finale, that the game had, in some ways, become the least interesting version of itself, went for a storyline that I would sooner expect from, say, Star Ocean, than Final Fantasy. But at the same time, there were moments that had my heart soaring for how much they affected me, left me feeling awed at just how tight a hold this story had on my heart. For everything that irks me, there are things I dearly love.
Thinking about Endwalker is difficult, and I think that might be why we’ve yet to see many substantive pieces of criticism on it that isn’t just effervescent praise. It’s taken me a long time to write this piece. I’m still unsure how I feel about many things in it. I don’t know if I’m ready to write this review.
Let's try anyway.
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It’s summer 2016. I’m at the end of my final year of university. I’m leaving with a decent grade in a subject that is kind of worthless, especially since the uncertainty following the Brexit vote is about to obliterate the few job opportunities there are in this field. If I’m honest with myself, I never quite thought about what I would do after university. I was so fixated on the dream of the rose coloured campus life that I never thought about what I’d do after that. So instead of answering that question, I’m playing MMOs again. I’ve been revisiting my childhood fascination of Azeroth, but it’s slowly losing its luster. But then, I remember. Didn’t I have Final Fantasy XIV on steam? I keep hearing that it’s really good now. Maybe I should try it again…
Suddenly, I’m Woodaba Vacaum once more, picking up just where I’d left off over two years ago. The necessity of having to do group content to continue the story gets me over a hurdle that I’ve never quite managed to get over for an MMO, and suddenly, I’m hooked. Over the coming months, I play through the entirety of the A Realm Reborn storyline as well as the Crystal Tower raid series, the very first raids I’ve done for any MMORPG “properly”, and finally reach Ishgard and the Heavensward expansion, forgoing the Paladin job in favour of Dark Knight because events of the main quest suddenly make me feel uncomfortable playing Paladin and in that moment, realise that I’m invested in this world quite unlike any other before. The incredible Dark Knight quests only solidify that for me. In late November, having started somewhere around June, I’m officially, for the very first time “caught up” with the main story of an MMORPG, finishing the 3.3 Dragonsong War quests with a final confrontation with Nidhogg.
But it’s something I did alone. The duty finder is a godsend and encountering genuinely unpleasant people almost never happens, but I’m too shy to join a free company, or join in on any PF content for high-difficulty content. Bereft of MSQ, I log out for a while. Final Fantasy XV is coming out soon, after all. The book on the Dragonsong War closes in silence.
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Endwalker starts pretty slow, with Labyrinthos probably ranking as one of the lamer zones in the game and Thavnair taking a bit too long to go anywhere cool, but once you arrive in Garlemald, things pick up significantly, and the game dives headfirst into some of its most fascinating and thorny content in its history, and then, after a hugely surprising bodyswap sequence, the game slams down hard on the accelerator and leaves whatever expectations you might have for where the story is going to go far, far behind it. To leave me completely in suspense at where the story is going to go after this many expansions is a genuine feat that I appreciate, but it also means that sheer adrenaline and excitement does a lot to carry you through stuff that is maybe, in hindsight, more than a little thematically suspect. Still, my eyebrows went through the roof when I killed Zodiark in the first trial, and I spent the next couple dozen hours absolutely dumbfounded as to where the story could possibly go next, and completely enjoying that feeling of this game still being able to surprise me after all this time.
What’s also surprising is the quality of the battle content in the game thus far. The first two trials, in particular, are tuned to a notably higher difficulty than prior story trials, finally recognizing that if someone has three expansions under their belt they might be able to tackle some heftier mechanics than a stack or two. The dungeon bosses too are notably more demanding mechanically than even Shadowbringers’ bosses, continuing the style of that expansion of very simple layouts twinned with boss mechanics that would give a Heavensward boss a heart attack. The game in general seems more keen to prepare players for the jump in difficulty that comes with EX-level content, which is something I really appreciate, as someone who spent over a year of playing this game too terrified to even consider checking out some of the most mechanically engaging and satisfying multiplayer gameplay one can find. While I think The Seat of Sacrifice remains my favorite fight in the entire game, the fact that The Mothercrystal in particular is able to put in a decent fight for the top spot is incredibly high praise.
The new jobs are also two real winners, particularly Sage, which is positively electrifying to play, even in old content, thanks partially to the stat squish that has given a lot of old raids back some bite that they lost after Shadowbringers beefed up numbers so considerably. Getting O11 in Raid Roulette and finding it to be once again a tense white-knuckle drag race of a fight put an enormous smile on my face. Even stuff that seems rough at first glance, like Dark Knight and New Summoner, will continually evolve in both perception and tweaks as time passes, and already we’re seeing a re-evaulation of the initial backlash against Dark Knight after it unexpectedly found itself sitting atop the tanking DPS charts. Although I’m reviewing Endwalker now, as a period in the game’s life it is only just beginning, over the next couple years it will continue to evolve and change, and will succeed and fail in different respects, just like how Shadowbringers ended up as a mediocre expansion in the eyes of many who are strictly interested in high-level raid content despite being so beloved among those like myself who place a high value on narrative.
Ultimately, it’s that value that has my feelings on Endwalker so mixed. There’s so much to enjoy in this expansion, so much to appreciate, that the areas where it fumbles and falters are drawn into sharp relief, and ultimately it’s the areas of this story and this world that I value the most that Endwalker fumbles the hardest.
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It’s 2017. It’s a bad year. It will continue to be a bad year. Aside from a miserable fast food job I hold down for a couple months at the start of the year until one of the other workers there threatens to kill me, I am unemployed for the entirety of the year. I try a lot of things, and I fail at all of them. I am increasingly ill at ease with the person I am pretending to be. The details aren’t relevant. I am unhappy. But I still play Final Fantasy XIV, and, in fact, I find myself incredibly excited to take part in my first “live” expansion launch for an MMO, in the form of Stormblood. It’s certainly a rough one, and leads into something of a rough MSQ, but it’s one that I still treasure dearly as a light in a time where I had few.
I’m keeping up to date more regularly, I start doing content without guides, I level other jobs, and I find myself becoming a part of the community of the game in a way I simply haven’t before. As 2017 changes to 2018, FFXIV becomes more and more a part of my life, as starting a masters in a last ditch attempt to give my life a form of direction leaves me with far less time to play games than ever before, and FFXIV’s structure allows me to dive into content and experience the myriad stories within piecemeal in between work and classes. Whether it’s the Omega raids, the slowly unfolding MSQ, or getting into fishing while listening to revision notes, I have quite unexpectedly gone from someone who Plays XIV to a XIV Person. It gets me excited, helps me destress, helps me socialize, and is helping me in ways that I only begin to understand.
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When Shadowbringers discussed the Final Days as experienced by the Ancients, I thought what was happening was fairly conclusive: they encountered something that did not fit within their framework of understanding, and that lack of understanding led to a horrified revelation at their own limits and mortality, a fear of death that manifested via their creation magicks into demonic entities shaped like their own death. It was, I thought, quite clear and extremely resonant with the wider themes of the expansion vis a vis allowing old things to die and fade away and be replaced with better things, both the sadness and necessity of that. I genuinely wasn’t expecting further elaboration on The Final Days in Endwalker, but further elaboration is what we get, and the explanation only serves to narrow the scope of interpretation and resonance to such an extent that it arguably harms Shadowbringers in hindsight, which is maybe the most damning thing I can say about a story beat.
To put it simply, Meteion sucks. I know some people really like the birb but for me, she just blows, I’m sorry. This jokerfied Junko Enoshima wannabe is one of the lamer villains in the entire final fantasy pantheon, like if Seymour Guado was actually the villain of FFX instead of a distraction from the real problem. An evil bird-girl in space who is radiating Bad Vibes because she thinks life is meaningless and therefore everyone should die is something I would expect from an AI-generated parody of Bad JRPG plots, and yet, here it is, sitting as the culmination of this decade-long narrative. After the thoughtful theming of Shadowbringers I could not have imagined that its sequel would boil everything down to generalized Hopepunk but that is kind of what happened. No longer is the demise of the Ancients a result of the flaws of their own societal perspective that is resonant with real things, instead it is because a big ball of evil at the end of the universe turns you into a monster when you feel despair.
And yeah, I get that big loud themes of Hope facing Despair at the end of the universe is kind of a JRPG staple, but boiling things down to such primal themes causes a lot of friction with the kind of game Final Fantasy XIV, and, indeed, the series as a whole, has been up to this point. In Shadowbringers, you were fighting a near godlike entity at the end of their universe, but that godlike entity represented material things. They were an aging boomer who refused to accept or acknowledge the validity of the world that was coming in favor of their uncritical adoration of their idealized prelapsarian idea of the world as it was. In contrast to many lesser Hopepunk stories, Final Fantasy XIV has previously acknowledged that people feel despair for real, material reasons. The people of Ishgard and Dravania in Heavensward felt despair because they were trapped in a war built on lies and deception, a Foundation constructed to justify the unjustifiable. The people of Doma and Ala Mhigo in Stormblood felt despair because they were trapped under the boot of imperial tyranny and violence, of their cultures being taken from them and twisted beyond recognizability, of their lives being treated as sport by a spoiled brat born into immense power, an expansion who’s materialist concerns hit me particularly hard as someone living in a land occupied by a colonial power. And, of course, the people of The First in Shadowbringers despair because the ideology they were taught from birth was good and right and just turned against them and choked them to the edge of their life, and they overcame the despair by uniting to overthrow the (admittedly fatphobic caricature) eikon of greed and complacency at the top of it all. In Endwalker, people feel despair, ultimately, because an evil space bird with primary-school nihilist motivations makes them feel despair.
In the real world, people feel “despair” for many reasons, and more often than not, those reasons are directly related to the material circumstances that affect their daily lives. Not being able to pay rent, being unemployed, suffering heartbreak and depression, witnessing the callousness and greed of the people who hold positions of power in our world. Reducing Despair to an ontological narrative force completely divorced from the lived experiences of our everyday lives also divorces it from resonance with said lived experiences, and is what ultimately leaves Endwalker feeling intellectually hollow. Shadowbringers electrified my mind for months after I finished it and I am fairly confident the same will not happen here. When this reveal happened, Endwalker transformed from a story that had me literally trembling with excitement the more I played to something that, even if for just a moment, made me question whether investing in this world and these characters for as long as I have had been worth it after all.
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It’s 2019. I’m coming to the end of my masters, working on a dissertation project that is, hilariously, a “letterboxd for games” called…Backloggr. The release of Shadowbringers is imminent, and I am excited. Not like I was excited for Stormblood, no. Now I’m in and Shadowbringers is my most anticipated game of the year, and I’m planning how I can voraciously consume it whilst not letting my dissertation project suffer. What’s more, 2019 is the year I am finally honest with myself and others that I am trans, and my relationship with my FFXIV character finally makes sense. They are the medium in which I experiment with gender and gender presentation in a way that does not have the pressure and anxieties of experimentation in the real world, a way to experiment with an audience that won’t judge me in the way that I fear the most. This subject - and Final Fantasy XIV in general - becomes the subject of my first paid piece of games writing, and although I have mixed feelings on that article, the fact that I managed it at all is something that I hold dearly to heart. The article even goes up during my first clear of The Seat of Sacrifice [Extreme], my favorite fight in the entire game and one of my favorite moments in all of video games. It is the culmination of a story that has evolved from “pretty good, for an MMO” to a genuine contender for Best Final Fantasy Story, which I can only really express as the highest praise possible given that FF is probably my favorite series of games that contains multiple all-time contenders.
Final Fantasy XIV is a part of my life. I’m not going to credit it for the way I’ve grown as a person or a writer or say that it saved me or anything like that, I find the way people often give the media they enjoy the credit for accomplishing things like that disappointing because it deprives them of enormous credit. But during Shadowbringers especially, it helped me. It helped me work things out about myself, it helped me get work, it helped me develop my critical and creative writing faculties, it helped me make friends and it helped me get closer to old ones. And it helped make me happy when I wasn’t.
How do you even begin to review something like that?
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As a story, Endwalker is frequently and fairly consistently delightful and enjoyable moment to moment, but attempting to think more deeply about what it is trying to say causes a lot of friction, particularly when attempting to reconcile it with past expansions, and the Meteion stuff is maybe No.1 with a bullet as to why this is. I keep thinking about the scene where Jullus, one of the expansion’s most compelling new characters, rages with righteous anger against Zenos viator Galvus for destroying his home and people in his quest to fightfuck the player character, only for Alphinaud to tell him that he has to remain calm or else he’ll turn into a big evil monster the heroes will have no choice but to take down. Or how the fandom’s overly sympathetic lens of Emet-Selch and the Ancients in general has been absorbed wholeheartedly, leading to a shockingly uncritical depiction of a society that has a fundamental callous disregard for the sanctity of life, and particularly falls a little too much in love with Venat/Hydaelyn, sanding down many of the most interesting wrinkles of her character to make her a fairly unambiguous good guy at the end (which is not to say that her character is without depth - far from it - but the game does almost repel from the idea of really digging into that depth in favor of idolizing her), especially given things like the bodyswap and the conscious uselessness of the characters on the moon highlighting the fallibility of Hydaelyn and her plans, and casting a critical eye on the Scions’ uncritical adoration of her (you can even say “hey what was with Hydaelyn straight up lying to me in Heavensward ” to which an NPC says “huh dunno, probably nothing to worry about” which I thought for sure was Going Somewhere but no I was simply Not Supposed To Worry About it). And, frankly, only doom lays down the path of trying to parse any kind of statement out of the Final Days itself, what with it turning people feeling depression, righteous anger against injustice, and other true, human emotions unhelpfully grouped together and labeled “despair” into evil creatures who cannot be saved and must be put down lest they harm others.
Endwalker is a mess, both when it comes to reconciling what it’s trying to say with itself, and when it comes to how it interacts with prior expansions. But if it must be a mess? If it has to have this difficult and frictional relationship with the parts of the story I value the most? If it must end this way? Then let it be a beautiful mess. Let it be dumb and questionable with impeccable style, let it burn it’s bridges with impeccably dancing flames. Endwalker is many things at many times, but it is almost always doing what it is doing amazingly, with a confidence fully owned by a creative team burning with a confidence and passion found almost nowhere else in the big-budget space. Any time Endwalker goes somewhere, it does so in the most brash, confident manner possible, with some truly incredible visuals and direction that is genuinely staggering coming from a game that’s still kinda running on 13 year old FF13 tech. The music team once again does incredible work here, and if this soundtrack isn’t spoken of in the same hushed tones as all the expansion soundtracks before it, it’s only because Square Enix has become ever more draconian about allowing people to share this wonderful music. I said in a kind of cutting way earlier that Endwalker is consistently delightful and enjoyable moment to moment, but I want to stress that being continually entertaining throughout is something that many games utterly fail to manage, and the day I turn my nose up at a story that delights in its movements as much as Endwalker does is the day you can officially write me off as a lost cause.
And, hell, it’s not like the story isn’t worthwhile. I’ve been highly critical of the decisions made thematically, and I stand by those criticisms, but not only are the decisions not as disastrous as they could have been (in the incredible Answers scene the status of the Ascians as pining for a prelapsarian utopia that did not exist is upheld despite much of Elpis’ attempts to undermine that, which I felt was very important) but also there is still a great deal of resonance here to be found here. I truly think Garlemald, in particular, is a strong contender for best arc in the entire MSQ, and the character writing as a whole remains excellent. Thavnair is a cultural appropriation playground to be certain, but it’s also got one of the sickest characters in the whole game making his nest there, and I hope to see it developed further in future patches. The fact that I’m not as condemnatory of the Elpis arc as I think perhaps part of me wants to be is a testament to just how well rounded Hythlodaeus, Emet-Selch, Venat and Hermes manage to be. The Zenos duel at the end is obviously hysterical as a big dumb shonen finale but it also I think acknowledges a truth about this game and the people that play it that a lot of games (including this one, in the past) try to dance around. I may fundamentally disgree and find facile the game's argument that suffering is what gives life meaning, but it's in how that idea interacts with characters like the Ancients and Zenos, that this theme finds some purchase in my heart, an exploration of how people who have lived blessed, privileged lives of plenty are deaf and cold-hearted to the suffering of those less fortunate around them, and how that eventually twists into genuine malice as they become ever more desperate to maintain their comfortable status quo. Even if I find the root of why she has to do it fairly vacuous, Venat choosing to destroy her world for the sake of a potential better one is incredibly powerful. And above all, this story of people at the end of days finding something to hold onto, something worth living for, is something that I did find affecting and meaningful, even if I kind of have to avoid thinking about the details in order for it to have the biggest impact. Every day, I feel the crushing weight of the end of the world all around me, and I struggle greatly with just trying to live in a world where all around me are reminders trying to convince me that there is no hope to save our planet in the face of the people and systems killing it. And while I would caution against becoming addicted to Hope as a placebo against genuine change, there is still something to be said for making me feel like there is hope.
The answer that Endwalker ultimately arrives at, is that in the darkest of times, we find the strength to go on in each other, and in standing/working together, we can overcome anything. It’s a cliche, perhaps boring answer, but in many ways it is also the right one. The Warrior of Light has never walked alone, after all, they’ve always had a party of 3/7/23 others to journey alongside, to help carry them through their trials. Whether they saved others from death, took the fire for their friends, or slain the beasts that threatened them, we’ve always done this together. I know I have. I wouldn’t be here without those who have walked beside me, who healed me when I was at the end of my rope, who stood alongside me against my problems and granted me the strength to see them through. Whatever else I may think about what Endwalker has to say about living at the end of the world, I think it is right about that, at least.
Do I wish Endwalker handled things differently? Yeah, kinda. Do I think there are things about it that suck? For sure. Is this a fitting conclusion to a story over a decade in the making? Honestly, I still don’t know.
But did I have fun? Was it meaningful? Am I happy I made these friends, fought these battles? Am I glad I heard what I heard, felt what I felt, and thought what I thought?
Has my journey been good? Has it been worthwhile?
...That, I can’t deny.
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Whispers
Falling silently drifts on the wind
But I hear you
Our Journey
Now a memory fading from sight
But I see you
You're not alone.
Just a concentrated burst of what has become one of my favourite games of all time. Yuffie is one of the most fun characters to embody in recent memory, being both delightful to play and watch in cutscenes. I was extremely sceptical about removing character switching - such a cornerstone of the base game - for this DLC expansion but damn if they didn't manage to pull it off, and the cutscenes well and truly speak for themselves, some of the most expressive and well directed and animated cutscenes in the entire medium. Watching the cutscenes for this straight after a session of the technically impressive but creatively limp Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart was like "Oh, shit. Cinematography!!!"
Hanging out in Sector 7 playing Fort Condor, listening to the BANGIN' Happy Turtle Jingles, seeing all the incidental NPCs, it's a reminder of just how good FF7R was at constructing lived-in spaces, and while there's a degree of artifice in certain elements (forcing Roche in was a bit much), it remains a joy simply to Exist under this steel sky. Certain segments (the chase in Chapter One) feel overly long in the tooth, but that's about the only complaint I can level at one of the most consistently enjoyable slices of Game that I've played in some time.
There's a temptation to dismiss this as inconsequential filler, but I would strongly disagree with that sentiment. Not only is Yuffie's character arc extremely well done, with its exploration of the weight and expectations that her nation has projected onto her poetically embodied in the fraught and interesting Sonon, but thematically this feels like a strong next step for this series. If Final Fantasy VII Remake set out to prove, emphatically, that a better world is possible, and the moral imperative that exists to reject our comfortable status quo in order to fight for it, then INTERmission is an exploration of the obstacles in our way, of the divisions that keep us from uniting against the boot on all our heads.
The stuff with the Avalanche cell we interact with in Chapter One is undoubtedly the highlight, exploring the dynamics of division in the struggle through a cast of likeable but ultimately kinda shitty casual racists and centrists whose unwillingness to work with Barret's Avalanche causes both their individual causes to falter and where both the cells distrust and cynicism towards Wutai ultimately allows Shinra to get away with their evil plans, while the tunnel vision of the Wutaian characters recontextualises the Sector 7 disaster as something horribly preventable. The context and way in which this has explored takes what is a fairly stock JRPG arc of learning to Work Together and brushes it up against a more nuanced statement on Class Consciousness than anyone could reasonably expect. It's really good, pointed stuff, and while it's mostly front-loaded, they still manage to tie it into the later stuff through, of all things, Deepground, an exploited class of Shinra living weapons whose Tsviet leaders are literally vampiric forces leeching off the misplaced loyalty of their underlings for their own benefit. The treat of getting to see ludicrous characters like Weiss and Nero again would be worth it all on it's own, but the fact that this story manages to make their presence meaningful blows me away. It won't affect me quite the way the original Remake did, but this is still an exciting, well-told story about knowing who the Real Enemy is, and knowing you can't take them alone.
The irony of all this being exclusive to the most exclusive console in the market is not lost on me. Capitalism's a bitch, huh?
I've been on record as saying that I was very satisfied by the ending of Remake, and do not feel the burning desire for a follow-up that has apparently consumed the discourse surrounding it on all sides, eroding any discussion of what the game might be saying on its own in favour of what might come next. Even if the next Remake thing is bad, even if it never comes out, Remake remains a deeply powerful game all its own that satisfactorily concludes its themes. But INTERmission gives me hope that the future for this series is bright.
They might do it. They might actually do it.
Boundless, terrifying, freedom. It's a hell of a thing, huh?
Hanging out in Sector 7 playing Fort Condor, listening to the BANGIN' Happy Turtle Jingles, seeing all the incidental NPCs, it's a reminder of just how good FF7R was at constructing lived-in spaces, and while there's a degree of artifice in certain elements (forcing Roche in was a bit much), it remains a joy simply to Exist under this steel sky. Certain segments (the chase in Chapter One) feel overly long in the tooth, but that's about the only complaint I can level at one of the most consistently enjoyable slices of Game that I've played in some time.
There's a temptation to dismiss this as inconsequential filler, but I would strongly disagree with that sentiment. Not only is Yuffie's character arc extremely well done, with its exploration of the weight and expectations that her nation has projected onto her poetically embodied in the fraught and interesting Sonon, but thematically this feels like a strong next step for this series. If Final Fantasy VII Remake set out to prove, emphatically, that a better world is possible, and the moral imperative that exists to reject our comfortable status quo in order to fight for it, then INTERmission is an exploration of the obstacles in our way, of the divisions that keep us from uniting against the boot on all our heads.
The stuff with the Avalanche cell we interact with in Chapter One is undoubtedly the highlight, exploring the dynamics of division in the struggle through a cast of likeable but ultimately kinda shitty casual racists and centrists whose unwillingness to work with Barret's Avalanche causes both their individual causes to falter and where both the cells distrust and cynicism towards Wutai ultimately allows Shinra to get away with their evil plans, while the tunnel vision of the Wutaian characters recontextualises the Sector 7 disaster as something horribly preventable. The context and way in which this has explored takes what is a fairly stock JRPG arc of learning to Work Together and brushes it up against a more nuanced statement on Class Consciousness than anyone could reasonably expect. It's really good, pointed stuff, and while it's mostly front-loaded, they still manage to tie it into the later stuff through, of all things, Deepground, an exploited class of Shinra living weapons whose Tsviet leaders are literally vampiric forces leeching off the misplaced loyalty of their underlings for their own benefit. The treat of getting to see ludicrous characters like Weiss and Nero again would be worth it all on it's own, but the fact that this story manages to make their presence meaningful blows me away. It won't affect me quite the way the original Remake did, but this is still an exciting, well-told story about knowing who the Real Enemy is, and knowing you can't take them alone.
The irony of all this being exclusive to the most exclusive console in the market is not lost on me. Capitalism's a bitch, huh?
I've been on record as saying that I was very satisfied by the ending of Remake, and do not feel the burning desire for a follow-up that has apparently consumed the discourse surrounding it on all sides, eroding any discussion of what the game might be saying on its own in favour of what might come next. Even if the next Remake thing is bad, even if it never comes out, Remake remains a deeply powerful game all its own that satisfactorily concludes its themes. But INTERmission gives me hope that the future for this series is bright.
They might do it. They might actually do it.
Boundless, terrifying, freedom. It's a hell of a thing, huh?
Splatoon
2015
The me who bounced off this in 2015 was a fool.
I decided to give it another go on a whim and got sucked all the way in. It's one of the most stylish things I've ever played. I saw the first boss and said "Oh shit, I'm gonnae end up buying the artbook", and dear reader I did, before even finishing it. I caught myself at work making quiet squid noises like I was singing the lyrics to the songs. I think I might be a fan of this thing.
I decided to give it another go on a whim and got sucked all the way in. It's one of the most stylish things I've ever played. I saw the first boss and said "Oh shit, I'm gonnae end up buying the artbook", and dear reader I did, before even finishing it. I caught myself at work making quiet squid noises like I was singing the lyrics to the songs. I think I might be a fan of this thing.
No More Heroes III
2021
This review contains spoilers
I don't really know where to begin. It's hard to think of a bigger letdown for me in recent memory. Almost every aspect of this game feels underbaked, undeveloped, and unfinished. None of it congeals together. It's a trainwreck of the likes I haven't seen since - well, since the kind of games Grasshopper Manufacture were making in the early 2010s. The more things change.
So, let's tackle these in order.
RANK #10: DIABOLICAL PITCH
The combat's fine. It's alright. I know there are people who super dig it. It's probably the most fun combat that's ever been in a NMH game, but I find that it pales in comparison to a lot of the fantastic action games on the market today. Even compared to indie efforts like Assault Spy, Travis' limited moveset sticks out like a sore thumb, and means that despite there being some genuinely creative and cool enemy designs in the bunch, I still found myself tackling encounters almost the exact same way every single time.
RANK 9: DESPERATE STRUGGLE
Now, I said most fun combat in a NMH game. I didn't say best. Because for me, NMH1 still has that crown. Yes, it's grindy and repetitive. Yes, it feels like a chore. But in a game about stripping away the romanticisation of the life of a video game hero and revealing it to be labour-intensive contract work performed by someone's who's adolescent fantasies are exploited for profit, that works. It enhances the experience tremendously. What does the combat here do? What does it say? Nothing, really. It's just quite fun. But why should I turn this game on just for quite fun combat when I have DMC5 also on my shelf, a game who's combat I enjoy much more? The combat fails to be interesting or thematically resonant, and fails to compete as a surface-level thrillride. Just like the rest of the game!
RANK 8: HEROES' PARADISE
This affliction of total purposeless afflicts the open world as well. No More Heroes 1 caught a lot of flack for its buggy and barren open world, and while I won't defend the performance issues, I will defend its inclusion. In a game about labour and work, the commute is an important part of contextualising that. What does the open world of No More Heroes III serve? What point does it make? What does it say? Nothing really. There are suggestions, things you could read into what they might have said if the game was interested in actually exploring its world, but that's all it is, a veneer of purpose papered over an empty world that exists only because fans wanted it to exist.
RANK 7: SERIOUS MOONLIGHT
Every element of this game has the same feel: shallow, insubstantial, underused, underdeveloped. You can feel the shadow of "this was developed during COVID" looming over the entire world of this game, but even setting that aside, no idea, motif, or theme this game haphazardly throws out has any nuance whatsoever. GHM have finally made a game that truly feels true to the ancient criticism of them: they have made a game that genuinely feels like they threw a million things at a wall and none of them stick. Superheroes? Streaming? Retro gaming? Call of Duty? Fortnite? Mad Max? Rocky? All of it is thrown out there, and none of it amounts to anything. That's why when I say this game feels unfinished, I don't mean that's buggy or missing content or anything like that: I mean that every single element of this game feels like a first draft that goes nowhere (including combat, what other explanation can there be for the game making you use SCREW CRUSHER DEATH KICK exclusively for multiple hours only to unceremoniously throw you every single other death skill at you at once?), a digital version of a planning whiteboard full of everyone's vague ideas.
RANK 6: STRIKES AGAIN
There's a faint air of desperation about it all, leaping from scene to scene hoping that at least some of it will sink in and resonate. And, fair dos: I thought the Midori Midorikawa bit was cute and Death Chair Girl's section, involving murdering a sobbing alien mourning its friend while it quoted the end Rocky over and over while Travis says "I'm finally a hero!", was genuinely gnarly in an interesting way and was the only time I felt the spirit of NMH1 shine through. But as the game goes on it only gets more and more desperate to be liked, culminating in a last couple hours that are genuinely embarrassing and cringeworthy to behold, from simply recycling the ending of TSA with zero of the original impact, to begging Takashi Miike to make a No More Heroes movie after the entire game has been spent singing his praises (admittedly these scenes are fun in isolation but my god do they grate repeated ad nauseam) before the train finally meets its wreck as the game ends in what can only be described as a digital adolescent temper tantrum, as Grasshopper copes hard about not getting Travis in Smash Bros. while Suda once again makes a simulacrum of John Riccitello to make fun of and digitally take his revenge on for not getting to make Kurayami the way he wanted. I cannot describe how utterly embarrassing and pathetic this spectacle is: I think Riccitello is a shitbag too (for other reasons than Kurayami, admittedly) but all of you are way too old to be engaging in "oh yeah!!! i'll show u!!! i'll make you into my game and have you be a big ugly loser who gets killed by my OC while piloting an advertisement for another game!!!!" petulant childish nonsense.
RANK 5: LOLLIPOP CHAINSAW
This isn't the thing I found most upsetting about the game, though. That would be the way in which this game continues an upsetting trend from No More Heroes 2: that of extremely upsetting purposeless psychosexual hyperviolence against women for no good reason. Shinobu is brutally fridged at the start of the game and ends up doing basically fuck-all for the whole experience, whatever wrinkles TSA introduced to Bad Girl's character that made her return an intriguing prospect are completely dropped here, but most upsetting of all is the return of Kimmy from NMH2, already a pretty suspect idea in that game, which is turned up to eleven when she is murdered in a flagrantly pornographic way that is deeply uncomfortable, but not in any way that feels purposeful in any way shape or form. I'm not gonna describe the scene other than saying it's the most violently sexual thing I've seen in a game in some time and seems to be played largely for titillation because there's zero discussion on anything that occurs here. Whatever nuance that has to be entered into a scene to have it be more than a straightforwardly exploitative misogynistic scene is absent here.
RANK 4: REPORT FROM HELL
In this way, the shape of this scene is the shape of the game itself: there's no nuance anywhere, nothing substantive to justify any of this. In the early hours of my playthrough, I latched onto the one cohesive element of the game: the fact that every single element feels hollow, undeveloped, like a total facade, was surely deliberate, surely leading to something. But as time passed, as image after unremarked upon image is vaguely gestured at by the game only to be dropped with zero development or nuance, that reading became more and more strained. I could galaxy brain this, I could say that Santa Destroy is a wasteland full of no real people purposefully, I could say that every single fight taking place in the same warehouse with different set-dressing is deliberately drawing attention to the hollowness of it all, but at what point do I have to admit that the game isn't engaging with any of this in a meaningful way? At what point is this game not commenting on facile, undeveloped, perfunctory sequels, and is it just...one of those?
RANK 3: KILLER IS DEAD
I have no doubt that there are people for whom this resonates. I recognise that I'm coming in with quite a strong take: not for nothing is the game sitting pretty with a very high average score on this website. But I have to be honest with myself and say that any attempts to be generous with my reading of this game are based solely in the pedigree of those behind it, and that I have been harsher to better games in the past. I could be extremely generous, I suppose. But it would just be because I want to be, not because I think the game actually deserves it. At some point, I simply have to admit that this cloying, overly-referential, late-era punk band album desperately screaming about how much it wants to be liked...is just kinda sad.
RANK 1: LET IT DIE
No one can like a band forever. Sometimes you grow apart. And at this point, there are talented creators I would have a much better time exploring, rather than chasing the shadow of games that came out around 15 years ago.
I guess that's me killing my past.
So, let's tackle these in order.
RANK #10: DIABOLICAL PITCH
The combat's fine. It's alright. I know there are people who super dig it. It's probably the most fun combat that's ever been in a NMH game, but I find that it pales in comparison to a lot of the fantastic action games on the market today. Even compared to indie efforts like Assault Spy, Travis' limited moveset sticks out like a sore thumb, and means that despite there being some genuinely creative and cool enemy designs in the bunch, I still found myself tackling encounters almost the exact same way every single time.
RANK 9: DESPERATE STRUGGLE
Now, I said most fun combat in a NMH game. I didn't say best. Because for me, NMH1 still has that crown. Yes, it's grindy and repetitive. Yes, it feels like a chore. But in a game about stripping away the romanticisation of the life of a video game hero and revealing it to be labour-intensive contract work performed by someone's who's adolescent fantasies are exploited for profit, that works. It enhances the experience tremendously. What does the combat here do? What does it say? Nothing, really. It's just quite fun. But why should I turn this game on just for quite fun combat when I have DMC5 also on my shelf, a game who's combat I enjoy much more? The combat fails to be interesting or thematically resonant, and fails to compete as a surface-level thrillride. Just like the rest of the game!
RANK 8: HEROES' PARADISE
This affliction of total purposeless afflicts the open world as well. No More Heroes 1 caught a lot of flack for its buggy and barren open world, and while I won't defend the performance issues, I will defend its inclusion. In a game about labour and work, the commute is an important part of contextualising that. What does the open world of No More Heroes III serve? What point does it make? What does it say? Nothing really. There are suggestions, things you could read into what they might have said if the game was interested in actually exploring its world, but that's all it is, a veneer of purpose papered over an empty world that exists only because fans wanted it to exist.
RANK 7: SERIOUS MOONLIGHT
Every element of this game has the same feel: shallow, insubstantial, underused, underdeveloped. You can feel the shadow of "this was developed during COVID" looming over the entire world of this game, but even setting that aside, no idea, motif, or theme this game haphazardly throws out has any nuance whatsoever. GHM have finally made a game that truly feels true to the ancient criticism of them: they have made a game that genuinely feels like they threw a million things at a wall and none of them stick. Superheroes? Streaming? Retro gaming? Call of Duty? Fortnite? Mad Max? Rocky? All of it is thrown out there, and none of it amounts to anything. That's why when I say this game feels unfinished, I don't mean that's buggy or missing content or anything like that: I mean that every single element of this game feels like a first draft that goes nowhere (including combat, what other explanation can there be for the game making you use SCREW CRUSHER DEATH KICK exclusively for multiple hours only to unceremoniously throw you every single other death skill at you at once?), a digital version of a planning whiteboard full of everyone's vague ideas.
RANK 6: STRIKES AGAIN
There's a faint air of desperation about it all, leaping from scene to scene hoping that at least some of it will sink in and resonate. And, fair dos: I thought the Midori Midorikawa bit was cute and Death Chair Girl's section, involving murdering a sobbing alien mourning its friend while it quoted the end Rocky over and over while Travis says "I'm finally a hero!", was genuinely gnarly in an interesting way and was the only time I felt the spirit of NMH1 shine through. But as the game goes on it only gets more and more desperate to be liked, culminating in a last couple hours that are genuinely embarrassing and cringeworthy to behold, from simply recycling the ending of TSA with zero of the original impact, to begging Takashi Miike to make a No More Heroes movie after the entire game has been spent singing his praises (admittedly these scenes are fun in isolation but my god do they grate repeated ad nauseam) before the train finally meets its wreck as the game ends in what can only be described as a digital adolescent temper tantrum, as Grasshopper copes hard about not getting Travis in Smash Bros. while Suda once again makes a simulacrum of John Riccitello to make fun of and digitally take his revenge on for not getting to make Kurayami the way he wanted. I cannot describe how utterly embarrassing and pathetic this spectacle is: I think Riccitello is a shitbag too (for other reasons than Kurayami, admittedly) but all of you are way too old to be engaging in "oh yeah!!! i'll show u!!! i'll make you into my game and have you be a big ugly loser who gets killed by my OC while piloting an advertisement for another game!!!!" petulant childish nonsense.
RANK 5: LOLLIPOP CHAINSAW
This isn't the thing I found most upsetting about the game, though. That would be the way in which this game continues an upsetting trend from No More Heroes 2: that of extremely upsetting purposeless psychosexual hyperviolence against women for no good reason. Shinobu is brutally fridged at the start of the game and ends up doing basically fuck-all for the whole experience, whatever wrinkles TSA introduced to Bad Girl's character that made her return an intriguing prospect are completely dropped here, but most upsetting of all is the return of Kimmy from NMH2, already a pretty suspect idea in that game, which is turned up to eleven when she is murdered in a flagrantly pornographic way that is deeply uncomfortable, but not in any way that feels purposeful in any way shape or form. I'm not gonna describe the scene other than saying it's the most violently sexual thing I've seen in a game in some time and seems to be played largely for titillation because there's zero discussion on anything that occurs here. Whatever nuance that has to be entered into a scene to have it be more than a straightforwardly exploitative misogynistic scene is absent here.
RANK 4: REPORT FROM HELL
In this way, the shape of this scene is the shape of the game itself: there's no nuance anywhere, nothing substantive to justify any of this. In the early hours of my playthrough, I latched onto the one cohesive element of the game: the fact that every single element feels hollow, undeveloped, like a total facade, was surely deliberate, surely leading to something. But as time passed, as image after unremarked upon image is vaguely gestured at by the game only to be dropped with zero development or nuance, that reading became more and more strained. I could galaxy brain this, I could say that Santa Destroy is a wasteland full of no real people purposefully, I could say that every single fight taking place in the same warehouse with different set-dressing is deliberately drawing attention to the hollowness of it all, but at what point do I have to admit that the game isn't engaging with any of this in a meaningful way? At what point is this game not commenting on facile, undeveloped, perfunctory sequels, and is it just...one of those?
RANK 3: KILLER IS DEAD
I have no doubt that there are people for whom this resonates. I recognise that I'm coming in with quite a strong take: not for nothing is the game sitting pretty with a very high average score on this website. But I have to be honest with myself and say that any attempts to be generous with my reading of this game are based solely in the pedigree of those behind it, and that I have been harsher to better games in the past. I could be extremely generous, I suppose. But it would just be because I want to be, not because I think the game actually deserves it. At some point, I simply have to admit that this cloying, overly-referential, late-era punk band album desperately screaming about how much it wants to be liked...is just kinda sad.
RANK 1: LET IT DIE
No one can like a band forever. Sometimes you grow apart. And at this point, there are talented creators I would have a much better time exploring, rather than chasing the shadow of games that came out around 15 years ago.
I guess that's me killing my past.