TNB12
1997
Battle Circuit is immensely cool. A bunch of space bounty hunters search for the CD of a master program said to be able to control all the technology in the universe, while capturing the baddies who are after the same thing on the way.
I could leave it at that, but I do have a lot to say about this game and how influential and sick it is. Battle Circuit is the swan song of Capcom's classic arcade beat 'em ups, the very last one they released for the CPS2 in 1997. As such it takes a lot of the lessons learned from the best of the genre and applies its own creative spin that ends up being pivotal to character action games. If you don't see how beat'em ups and character action connect into a single evolutionary game design line, this game will show you.
The main thing that sets Battle Circuit apart is its progression system. It adopts a ranking system for each stage that ranges from S-rank to D-rank, which scores you on the time it takes for you to defeat the boss of that stage. The faster you are, the higher score you get, and more importantly the more money you're awarded for their bounty.
The progression in fact centers around the shop system that allows you to buy moves and upgrades in between each stage with the currency you acquire from combat and mission rankings. Sound familiar?
Yeah this game literally invented Devil May Cry's progression system.
While there is no live scoring during gameplay, the enemies will drop more coins the more attacks you're able to land on them, which incentivizes long combos, something that is challenging to achieve in a beat'em up where you're always juggling several enemies at once.
Aside from that, Battle Circuit also nails its gameplay, offering all the staples of Capcom beat'em ups, with special moves, invincible superjoy moves that cost your health, invincible throws galore, 8-way dash and and the usual. Everything is here including a true juggling system, moves that hit otg, special cancelling your main attack string into either your down, up uppercut attack or your throw by holding down (or down back to throw behind you), and some of the most distinct and fun characters ever seen in a beat'em up.
A lot of time and effort was evidently spent on making the 5 playable characters as deep as possible, so much so that weapon pickups are actually absent from this entry. I don't miss them though, since the baseline movesets are so fun I don't want to disconnect from them by carrying a weapon.
The five characters are great, with Cyber Blue being a spiritual successor to Captain Commando and having access to good tools all around, with a great dash attack and big hype laser charged move. The quintessential beat'em up character.
Yellow Iris is the fast, low-damage combo character, and probably the weakest at the start without any upgrades. She is one of the best characters to farm coins with thanks to her whip special though, making her quickly snowball into a strong combo character. She also has a pet squirrel that can be used to otg enemies with a charged move.
Alien Green is the resident grappler character, lacking acces to some standard tools like an uppercut special, but making up for it with assloads of damage and a ranged vine grab that allows you to land throws from far away. It also gets some very good non-standard tools like an otg projectile that launches enemies, extremely strong all around.
Pink Ostrich is probably my favorite character, as she's extremely safe and easy to play. She can hover in the air with up+jump, and gets some devastating follow ups like an air-to-ground throw and a multihit divekick that's amazing for farming coins. Her superjoy also allows you to move around and cover a lot of ground, making her very forgiving.
Finally Captain Silver is a bit of an oddball pick who I admittedly don't have a lot of playtime on, but he gets ice powers and great range on his attacks.
Each character has access to a power-up install that can be done by pressing attack and jump while in the air, and they will buff the whole team. All of them are useful, and are key to getting S rank clears on bosses. You get damage buffs, faster moves, healing or super armor and all of them have their place in the characters' kit.
While coins for upgrades are important, score also isn't just there to show off, as finishing the game with over 3.2 million score will unlock the true final boss, which is a super tough and satisfying fight. I've only managed to get to it once, but I will surely come back to this game again and get better at it.
With this secret taken into account, Battle Circuit is very much on the tougher side of the genre (other bosses like Zipang can also be quite troublesome), but I never found the game to be unfair. Bosses will often wake up with invincible reversal moves, as is the case for nearly all beat 'em ups, but leave a lot of openings to exploit otherwise, and most can be fully comboed, juggled, thrown or otg'd.
Every animation in this game oozes personality, and it's not afraid to be weird and cooky. I love when sci-fi settings get weird with their aliens, and this game has tons of great designs, down to biker girl enemies that Akira slide all over the screen, giant slugs mounted by annoying gremlins, a big baboon that uses holograms, and much, much more.
The stage design is always fresh and varied. I have to actively stop myself from running through the whole game if I'm just booting it up to experiment with the characters, because it's just so good at naturally inviting play.
The enemy variety is good, every stage has a unique boss and sometime miniboss, Capcom really pulled out all the stops for their final outing.
Battle Circuit gets my heartiest recommendation to everyone, not just fans of beat 'em ups or character action, this is one of the highest peaks of the genre and deserves to be played for its mechanical merits and incredible charm and style.
I really hope we may one day see more from the Captain Commando/Battle Circuit sci-fi bounty hunter verse, but for now this game is more than good enough.
I could leave it at that, but I do have a lot to say about this game and how influential and sick it is. Battle Circuit is the swan song of Capcom's classic arcade beat 'em ups, the very last one they released for the CPS2 in 1997. As such it takes a lot of the lessons learned from the best of the genre and applies its own creative spin that ends up being pivotal to character action games. If you don't see how beat'em ups and character action connect into a single evolutionary game design line, this game will show you.
The main thing that sets Battle Circuit apart is its progression system. It adopts a ranking system for each stage that ranges from S-rank to D-rank, which scores you on the time it takes for you to defeat the boss of that stage. The faster you are, the higher score you get, and more importantly the more money you're awarded for their bounty.
The progression in fact centers around the shop system that allows you to buy moves and upgrades in between each stage with the currency you acquire from combat and mission rankings. Sound familiar?
Yeah this game literally invented Devil May Cry's progression system.
While there is no live scoring during gameplay, the enemies will drop more coins the more attacks you're able to land on them, which incentivizes long combos, something that is challenging to achieve in a beat'em up where you're always juggling several enemies at once.
Aside from that, Battle Circuit also nails its gameplay, offering all the staples of Capcom beat'em ups, with special moves, invincible superjoy moves that cost your health, invincible throws galore, 8-way dash and and the usual. Everything is here including a true juggling system, moves that hit otg, special cancelling your main attack string into either your down, up uppercut attack or your throw by holding down (or down back to throw behind you), and some of the most distinct and fun characters ever seen in a beat'em up.
A lot of time and effort was evidently spent on making the 5 playable characters as deep as possible, so much so that weapon pickups are actually absent from this entry. I don't miss them though, since the baseline movesets are so fun I don't want to disconnect from them by carrying a weapon.
The five characters are great, with Cyber Blue being a spiritual successor to Captain Commando and having access to good tools all around, with a great dash attack and big hype laser charged move. The quintessential beat'em up character.
Yellow Iris is the fast, low-damage combo character, and probably the weakest at the start without any upgrades. She is one of the best characters to farm coins with thanks to her whip special though, making her quickly snowball into a strong combo character. She also has a pet squirrel that can be used to otg enemies with a charged move.
Alien Green is the resident grappler character, lacking acces to some standard tools like an uppercut special, but making up for it with assloads of damage and a ranged vine grab that allows you to land throws from far away. It also gets some very good non-standard tools like an otg projectile that launches enemies, extremely strong all around.
Pink Ostrich is probably my favorite character, as she's extremely safe and easy to play. She can hover in the air with up+jump, and gets some devastating follow ups like an air-to-ground throw and a multihit divekick that's amazing for farming coins. Her superjoy also allows you to move around and cover a lot of ground, making her very forgiving.
Finally Captain Silver is a bit of an oddball pick who I admittedly don't have a lot of playtime on, but he gets ice powers and great range on his attacks.
Each character has access to a power-up install that can be done by pressing attack and jump while in the air, and they will buff the whole team. All of them are useful, and are key to getting S rank clears on bosses. You get damage buffs, faster moves, healing or super armor and all of them have their place in the characters' kit.
While coins for upgrades are important, score also isn't just there to show off, as finishing the game with over 3.2 million score will unlock the true final boss, which is a super tough and satisfying fight. I've only managed to get to it once, but I will surely come back to this game again and get better at it.
With this secret taken into account, Battle Circuit is very much on the tougher side of the genre (other bosses like Zipang can also be quite troublesome), but I never found the game to be unfair. Bosses will often wake up with invincible reversal moves, as is the case for nearly all beat 'em ups, but leave a lot of openings to exploit otherwise, and most can be fully comboed, juggled, thrown or otg'd.
Every animation in this game oozes personality, and it's not afraid to be weird and cooky. I love when sci-fi settings get weird with their aliens, and this game has tons of great designs, down to biker girl enemies that Akira slide all over the screen, giant slugs mounted by annoying gremlins, a big baboon that uses holograms, and much, much more.
The stage design is always fresh and varied. I have to actively stop myself from running through the whole game if I'm just booting it up to experiment with the characters, because it's just so good at naturally inviting play.
The enemy variety is good, every stage has a unique boss and sometime miniboss, Capcom really pulled out all the stops for their final outing.
Battle Circuit gets my heartiest recommendation to everyone, not just fans of beat 'em ups or character action, this is one of the highest peaks of the genre and deserves to be played for its mechanical merits and incredible charm and style.
I really hope we may one day see more from the Captain Commando/Battle Circuit sci-fi bounty hunter verse, but for now this game is more than good enough.
2018
This review contains spoilers
I have a lot of unkind things to say about Octopath Traveler, so let's start with the good stuff first.
The game's music is incredibly well crafted, with a lot of amazing tracks courtesy of Yasunori Nishiki, he absolutely killed it delivering some of the best battle music the genre has to offer alongside beautifully melancholic and subdued emotional tracks that resonate deeply with me. The way the music dynamically trasitions from character theme to boss battle theme never fails to pump you up for the coming fight, and traversal through towns and dungeons is always a treat with the backing tracks on offer.
The game pioneered a new visual style that's highly distinctive and evocative of retro SNES-era RPGs, and while I know HD-2D has its detractors, I'm not one of them. The spritework on the enemies and bosses is particularly impressive, with limited animation tastefully keeping the sprites' silhouettes intact while offering a degree of liveness to everything. The official artwork by Naoki Ikushima is breathtaking and I couldn't ask for a better interpretation of the sprites on screen than the gorgeous art for each of the 8 main characters.
Unfortunately that's about where the positives end in my eyes, because while I can appreciate the artistic merit of the visuals and music when divorced from the game, Octopath's game component is just about the antithesis of everything that draws me to an RPG.
So where to begin? The story and characters are a good jumping off point, because it's probably the aspect the game fumbles the hardest. Simply put, there is no meaningful interaction between the 8 heroes. They do not form a party, they do not share common goals, they are not fighting a common enemy, they are simply complete strangers to each other that for some reason still decide to tavel together despite never acknowledging their party during a single story beat in the entire game.
It's genuinely baffling that they would set up a game like this and then proceed to treat every single person as a lone wolf going through their own adventure, the dissonance between having to manage a party of 4 and having NONE of that show during a single story-important event gives me the worst ludonarrative whiplash I've ever experienced.
To the game's credit the characters DO talk to each other sometimes... in optional banter dialogue that is never important to the story. What happens when Alfyn must confront the criminal whose life he just saved out of the boundless mercy of his heart and Therion, the party's resident thief, is also there? Nothing. Therion has nothing to say. At all. No one else outside of Alfyn does.
The individual stories aren't even good. They don't come together nicely like the ones in LiveALive do, and the amount of chapters I can even remember off the top of my head can be counted on one hand. The vast majority of story events in this game are just excuses to send you to a dungeon and fight a boss. EVERY chapter is like this, formulaic to the point of absolute flatline EEG.
So by the end it really does feel like playing 8 unremarkable different stories that have ZERO crossover except for some reason the girl looking for her dad's assassins was also there when Tressa confronted an evil pirate.
If you really wanted to set the stories up like that, I don't see why you would't crib from from LiveALive and just... make 8 different stories that you can engage with separately.
But it doesn't just end at the writing and narrative structure, I also quite dislike this game's battle and job system. Octopath's main idea is that of breaking enemies by attacking them with a damage type they're weak to. The problem with this is that really, until broken, enemies don't take much damage at all, so every single battle in this game turns into a race to break stuff as fast as possible so that you can get it over with. This creates a strong imbalance since breaking an enemy only depends on the number of hits you can dish out, making moves that deal multiple hits way more valuable than anything else you could possibly use.
However, this type of move only starts popping up an ungodly amount of hours into the game, meaning that for a LONG time the battles are just exceedingly slow and boring. This also destroys the creativity in strategic play, since breaking an enemy always skips their turn there really is no better strategy than doing it ASAP and then nuking them with all the damage you have, rinse and repeat. That's the whole game. Some bosses do try to mix it up by covering some of their weaknesses, but I can't stress enough how one-dimensional this whole system is.
BP is another system that on the surface seems like it would add depth, it functions like a sort of turn storage that you can burn to either use the standard attack multiple times in a single turn, or enhance one of your command abilities. Characters gain 1 BP per turn and can choose to spend 1 to 3 points for their action. This system is not terrible, but I can't ignore Team Asano's previous effort with the Bravely games, which featured a rich, carefully considered and wonderfully executed system that's everything BP is and then some, with a great balance of risk and reward by allowing you to go into the negative and burn some turns in advance and skip them later.
Octopath's BP feels like a limp version of this that fails to bring back everything that made the Brave and Default system fun, only functioning as a battery to burn on breaks to get the maximum damage output out of every attack.
Because of the way breaking works, you really only spend BP to maximize your damage, and the system serves very little purpose otherwise, once again resulting in an extremely one-dimensional game plan.
Compounding the one-dimensional and slow combat (no, the game does NOT have a speed up function), I have more complaints about the general structure and progression of the game.
First off, your party gets a "leader" character who is the very first character you pick to start the game with. This serves zero purpose in the game, the leader does not get any special abilities nor do they get any extra dialogue, which is especially baffling because whoever you pick first is PERMANENTLY LOCKED as the only party member you can't change. They'll always be your first, and you can freely swap the other 3 at taverns.
This really does not make sense to me, if they're not gonna have ANY special reason to be locked in and every charatcer is basically equivalent and goes through their story regardless of their leader status or not, WHY is this even a thing.
I happened to get stuck with Primrose who I found out to be an especially poor choice of leader, having access to only 2 damage types for a large chunk of the game (the least of any character), and ZERO multihit moves, making her pretty much the single worst option for getting breaks.
Objectively there is really no reason not to pick Therion as your leader, he's the only character who can open blue treasure chests so you'll ALWAYS want him in your party unless you're just a fan of missing free items. No other character gets an ability like this so it's honestly a no brainer.
The level curve of this game is also all kinds of fucked up. Since your leader cannot be changed, they'll naturally sponge all the XP you can possibly get, while benched characters not actively in your party will receive NO experience, meaning that every time you need to advance one of their stories, it's time to grind them up to the game's recommended level for that chapter. This results in an ungodly amount of grinding, the likes of which even NES RPGs would blush at. I seriously cannot understand why they couldn't just let benched characters gain XP and JP with the rest of them, that would've made the game SO MUCH better paced it maybe wouldn't have to take 100 hours just to reach the ending on each of the 8 stories.
Since your leader will naturally always be your highest level character, you COULD let them take over for each story, but I had Primrose so lol, lmao. Grinding the other party members it was.
Jobs are also insanely boring. And grindy. You have 8 jobs, one per character, that you can also unlock for use as the secondary jobs of other characters. You spend JP to climb up each job's skill tree and unlock passive abilities to equip to one of your 4 slots, and active commands for that job. This is pretty much the same as Bravely, which is good, but the jobs themselves leave a lot to be desired, with all 8 of them getting essentially powercrept later in the game by the 4 secret ultimate jobs that are so much better than everything else it's not even funny. No reason to use the 8 "normal" jobs as secondaries when those ones exist.
That about sums up everything that led me to eventually detest playing this game, but the real kicker arrives at the true final boss.
Aside from being unlocked through a convoluted series of sidequests regarding the most forgettable characters ever (oh yeah this game has sidequests and they SOMEHOW have even less personality than the main stories), the final battle is incredibly disrespectful of the player's time, like all the grinding wasn't enough already.
The last save point before the true final boss is located right before a gauntlet of rematches of the 8 final chapter bosses that lead straight to the final battle split in two phases.
Not only is the final battle the only actually difficult fight of the game that requires you to think deeper than "break and nuke", if you die at ANY point of this, you need to kill the 8 assholes again before you get another crack at the final boss proper.
This is just awful, the last 8 assholes aren't hard, they're literally just wasting your time, and is yet another example of this game trying to ape LiveALive and failing miserably. I know people who installed PC mods or used collision glitches to beat the 8 assholes and then go back and save so they could ACTUALLY start experimenting and formulating a strategy against the final boss without wasting hours of their lives beforehand.
So in the end this is unfortunately one of the worst RPGs I've ever played, all the while nothing is even offensively bad, but it's such a fundamentally boring and unremarkable game on so many levels it genuinely makes me mad I decided to waste 100 hours of my life finishing the 8 main stories. It's a disappointing failure from a team whose output I previously adored, both Bravely Default and Second ranking among my absolute favorite games, and that's what stings the most.
I've been repeatedly told the second Octopath game is good actually, but I honestly do not wish to play it at any point after the dreadful experience this one was.
I'm at least glad Bravely is alive and well with Bravely Default 2, which I actually liked a fair amount, although not to the extent of the previous two. It seems the plan for Team Asano is to continue both series simultaneously, and I'm glad those who saw potential in Octopath get to enjoy a seemingly decent game. Me though, I don't think I'll lay a hand on this series ever again.
The game's music is incredibly well crafted, with a lot of amazing tracks courtesy of Yasunori Nishiki, he absolutely killed it delivering some of the best battle music the genre has to offer alongside beautifully melancholic and subdued emotional tracks that resonate deeply with me. The way the music dynamically trasitions from character theme to boss battle theme never fails to pump you up for the coming fight, and traversal through towns and dungeons is always a treat with the backing tracks on offer.
The game pioneered a new visual style that's highly distinctive and evocative of retro SNES-era RPGs, and while I know HD-2D has its detractors, I'm not one of them. The spritework on the enemies and bosses is particularly impressive, with limited animation tastefully keeping the sprites' silhouettes intact while offering a degree of liveness to everything. The official artwork by Naoki Ikushima is breathtaking and I couldn't ask for a better interpretation of the sprites on screen than the gorgeous art for each of the 8 main characters.
Unfortunately that's about where the positives end in my eyes, because while I can appreciate the artistic merit of the visuals and music when divorced from the game, Octopath's game component is just about the antithesis of everything that draws me to an RPG.
So where to begin? The story and characters are a good jumping off point, because it's probably the aspect the game fumbles the hardest. Simply put, there is no meaningful interaction between the 8 heroes. They do not form a party, they do not share common goals, they are not fighting a common enemy, they are simply complete strangers to each other that for some reason still decide to tavel together despite never acknowledging their party during a single story beat in the entire game.
It's genuinely baffling that they would set up a game like this and then proceed to treat every single person as a lone wolf going through their own adventure, the dissonance between having to manage a party of 4 and having NONE of that show during a single story-important event gives me the worst ludonarrative whiplash I've ever experienced.
To the game's credit the characters DO talk to each other sometimes... in optional banter dialogue that is never important to the story. What happens when Alfyn must confront the criminal whose life he just saved out of the boundless mercy of his heart and Therion, the party's resident thief, is also there? Nothing. Therion has nothing to say. At all. No one else outside of Alfyn does.
The individual stories aren't even good. They don't come together nicely like the ones in LiveALive do, and the amount of chapters I can even remember off the top of my head can be counted on one hand. The vast majority of story events in this game are just excuses to send you to a dungeon and fight a boss. EVERY chapter is like this, formulaic to the point of absolute flatline EEG.
So by the end it really does feel like playing 8 unremarkable different stories that have ZERO crossover except for some reason the girl looking for her dad's assassins was also there when Tressa confronted an evil pirate.
If you really wanted to set the stories up like that, I don't see why you would't crib from from LiveALive and just... make 8 different stories that you can engage with separately.
But it doesn't just end at the writing and narrative structure, I also quite dislike this game's battle and job system. Octopath's main idea is that of breaking enemies by attacking them with a damage type they're weak to. The problem with this is that really, until broken, enemies don't take much damage at all, so every single battle in this game turns into a race to break stuff as fast as possible so that you can get it over with. This creates a strong imbalance since breaking an enemy only depends on the number of hits you can dish out, making moves that deal multiple hits way more valuable than anything else you could possibly use.
However, this type of move only starts popping up an ungodly amount of hours into the game, meaning that for a LONG time the battles are just exceedingly slow and boring. This also destroys the creativity in strategic play, since breaking an enemy always skips their turn there really is no better strategy than doing it ASAP and then nuking them with all the damage you have, rinse and repeat. That's the whole game. Some bosses do try to mix it up by covering some of their weaknesses, but I can't stress enough how one-dimensional this whole system is.
BP is another system that on the surface seems like it would add depth, it functions like a sort of turn storage that you can burn to either use the standard attack multiple times in a single turn, or enhance one of your command abilities. Characters gain 1 BP per turn and can choose to spend 1 to 3 points for their action. This system is not terrible, but I can't ignore Team Asano's previous effort with the Bravely games, which featured a rich, carefully considered and wonderfully executed system that's everything BP is and then some, with a great balance of risk and reward by allowing you to go into the negative and burn some turns in advance and skip them later.
Octopath's BP feels like a limp version of this that fails to bring back everything that made the Brave and Default system fun, only functioning as a battery to burn on breaks to get the maximum damage output out of every attack.
Because of the way breaking works, you really only spend BP to maximize your damage, and the system serves very little purpose otherwise, once again resulting in an extremely one-dimensional game plan.
Compounding the one-dimensional and slow combat (no, the game does NOT have a speed up function), I have more complaints about the general structure and progression of the game.
First off, your party gets a "leader" character who is the very first character you pick to start the game with. This serves zero purpose in the game, the leader does not get any special abilities nor do they get any extra dialogue, which is especially baffling because whoever you pick first is PERMANENTLY LOCKED as the only party member you can't change. They'll always be your first, and you can freely swap the other 3 at taverns.
This really does not make sense to me, if they're not gonna have ANY special reason to be locked in and every charatcer is basically equivalent and goes through their story regardless of their leader status or not, WHY is this even a thing.
I happened to get stuck with Primrose who I found out to be an especially poor choice of leader, having access to only 2 damage types for a large chunk of the game (the least of any character), and ZERO multihit moves, making her pretty much the single worst option for getting breaks.
Objectively there is really no reason not to pick Therion as your leader, he's the only character who can open blue treasure chests so you'll ALWAYS want him in your party unless you're just a fan of missing free items. No other character gets an ability like this so it's honestly a no brainer.
The level curve of this game is also all kinds of fucked up. Since your leader cannot be changed, they'll naturally sponge all the XP you can possibly get, while benched characters not actively in your party will receive NO experience, meaning that every time you need to advance one of their stories, it's time to grind them up to the game's recommended level for that chapter. This results in an ungodly amount of grinding, the likes of which even NES RPGs would blush at. I seriously cannot understand why they couldn't just let benched characters gain XP and JP with the rest of them, that would've made the game SO MUCH better paced it maybe wouldn't have to take 100 hours just to reach the ending on each of the 8 stories.
Since your leader will naturally always be your highest level character, you COULD let them take over for each story, but I had Primrose so lol, lmao. Grinding the other party members it was.
Jobs are also insanely boring. And grindy. You have 8 jobs, one per character, that you can also unlock for use as the secondary jobs of other characters. You spend JP to climb up each job's skill tree and unlock passive abilities to equip to one of your 4 slots, and active commands for that job. This is pretty much the same as Bravely, which is good, but the jobs themselves leave a lot to be desired, with all 8 of them getting essentially powercrept later in the game by the 4 secret ultimate jobs that are so much better than everything else it's not even funny. No reason to use the 8 "normal" jobs as secondaries when those ones exist.
That about sums up everything that led me to eventually detest playing this game, but the real kicker arrives at the true final boss.
Aside from being unlocked through a convoluted series of sidequests regarding the most forgettable characters ever (oh yeah this game has sidequests and they SOMEHOW have even less personality than the main stories), the final battle is incredibly disrespectful of the player's time, like all the grinding wasn't enough already.
The last save point before the true final boss is located right before a gauntlet of rematches of the 8 final chapter bosses that lead straight to the final battle split in two phases.
Not only is the final battle the only actually difficult fight of the game that requires you to think deeper than "break and nuke", if you die at ANY point of this, you need to kill the 8 assholes again before you get another crack at the final boss proper.
This is just awful, the last 8 assholes aren't hard, they're literally just wasting your time, and is yet another example of this game trying to ape LiveALive and failing miserably. I know people who installed PC mods or used collision glitches to beat the 8 assholes and then go back and save so they could ACTUALLY start experimenting and formulating a strategy against the final boss without wasting hours of their lives beforehand.
So in the end this is unfortunately one of the worst RPGs I've ever played, all the while nothing is even offensively bad, but it's such a fundamentally boring and unremarkable game on so many levels it genuinely makes me mad I decided to waste 100 hours of my life finishing the 8 main stories. It's a disappointing failure from a team whose output I previously adored, both Bravely Default and Second ranking among my absolute favorite games, and that's what stings the most.
I've been repeatedly told the second Octopath game is good actually, but I honestly do not wish to play it at any point after the dreadful experience this one was.
I'm at least glad Bravely is alive and well with Bravely Default 2, which I actually liked a fair amount, although not to the extent of the previous two. It seems the plan for Team Asano is to continue both series simultaneously, and I'm glad those who saw potential in Octopath get to enjoy a seemingly decent game. Me though, I don't think I'll lay a hand on this series ever again.
2001
This review contains spoilers
Between the roaring success of Warren Spector's Deus Ex and the embarrassing downfall of John Romero's Daikatana, the third pillar of Ion Storm, Tom Hall, managed to find a different fate altogether for his game, that being obscurity.
There's something poetic about these three pieces and how wildly different the history of each one is, but while people talk to no end about Anachronox's older brothers, no one seems to remember this RPG epic.
Cards on the table, I went into it expressely with the intent of finding something to love about it, an approach I've been trying to apply more and more as my understanding of game development deepens over time. Still, I was pleasantly surprised by how, in the end, it didn't really make me dig for that something. There is plenty of good in Anachronox.
Admittedly it's not an amazing game, it radiates the energy of a project spawned from Tom Hall going on a massive Final Fantasy 7 bender in '97 and deciding to make something comparable.
As far as inspirations go, FF7 is sure a great one, but Anachronox doesn't quite stick the landing as elegantly.
Still, if anything, it manages to be extremely unique despite wearing its JRPG influence on its sleeve, being the one true Western JRPG as I like to call it.
Sylvester "Sly" Boots is a washed up private detective living on the alien planet of Anachronox, which is surrounded by a sort of spiked ball that has wormholes at each tip for various destinations across the galaxy.
Being a sort of huge trade center, Anachronox is naturally a pretty shitty place to live, a cyberpunk dystopia of smoke and dark skies where the rich live on an elevated layer from the poor.
While that is almost Final Fantasy 7 verbatim, the tone of the writing here is markedly more sarcastic and adult.
Adult in the "Isn't it fucked old Bertha had to amputate and sell her legs to cover the fees of her nephew's tuition?" kind of way, the way that's hyperbolic yet not far off from what we see here on Earth.
It manages to be genuinely funny in multiple occasions, with some scenes getting the odd belly laugh out of me while sitting alone in my room. Great stuff.
The story kicks in like 10 hours in, in proper JRPG fashion, after leaving Anachronox and witnessing a whole planet get inexplicably rended in half and deleted, our party being the sole survivors of this disaster, destined to become the universe's saviors.
Mechanically, I can make it sound interesting through words, I can tell you that the overworld exploration and progression is handled similarly to a 3D point-and-click adventure game, where reading dialogue and figuring out what to do through logical steps is key and the puzzles make sense, with collectibles scattered around the map.
I can tell you that the combat is FF7 inspired ATB, complete with unlockable limit breaks and a materia-lite system, and that encounters are scripted around the map like Chrono Trigger and not random.
But saying this honestly makes the game you might be picturing in your head sound better than what the reality of Anachronox is, and that's that 3D environments aren't really that fun to explore when all you can do is walk everywhere kind of slowly and regularly take multiple elevators to run errands around the map, and the MysTech magic system is heavily railroaded by characters only really being good at using one specific type, with the combat being very much a formality and incredibly simple.
Despite the game ending up less than the sum of its parts, there is a surprising amount of worldbuilding, and you can tell the people behind it really cared about the universe of Anachronox.
From Democratus, home to a bickering parody of council politics, to Haephestus, inhabited by religious monks who hastily build a theme park after the disaster awakens all the MysTech in the universe and makes it a hot tourist location, the narrative arcs marked by each planet are incredibly strong at making this feel like a truly varied and outlandish universe.
My absolute favorite bit in this whole game was saving Democratus from an invading alien wasp asteroid, leaving it behind as every person in charge of running that planet was evidently an insane democracy fetishist, and then witnessing this feverish scene of the WHOLE ASS PLANET pulling up into the bar you crashed at as a miniaturized version of itself (democratically shrunken down to follow our heroes) and joining your party as a playable character.
This shit just doesn't happen in other games man.
You probably get to know Democratus better than any other party member too, as later on in the story the planet is forced to return to its original size, and your party gets scattered on different zones of the surface, each going through their own solo mini-adventure in the varied locations of Democratus, and I mean truly varied. Some characters get stuck in a desert where soldiers are stationed, others in a forest reminiscent of Star Wars' Endor, or an icy, snow-swept town in the middle of a string of murders. Every party member has a possible substory here (well, except Democratus of course), and you only get to pick 3, so you'll never see them all by design, which is sort of neat.
It's common in videogames that use space travel to generalize a single planet as a sort of monolith, like "this is the fire planet" or "this is the science planet", but Democratus truly escapes this stereotyping, presenting various coexisting facets of the same world, extremely different but all part of the same démos.
I also ended up really liking what the antagonist really is, which, in a development I can't tell if it's giving nod to the original Final Fantasy or not, ends up being Chaos.
The Limbus part of the game lets us confront the forces of Chaos directly, before heading back to Anachronox for the grand finale against Detta, the crimelord turned billionaire that ruined Sly's life years ago, who we need to steal from in order to seal the portal that allows the forces of Chaos to attack the universe.
The saddest part is that, right as the game ends on a massive plot twist regarding one of your party members, and as the battle against Chaos is beginning in full, it ends.
Anachronox was meant to be developed across multiple games, but the collapse of Ion Storm and the failure on the part of Tom Hall to acquire the rights to it leave us with just the beginning of this space opera and the unfulfilled promise of much more.
Not too long ago I asked if Hall himself had any plans to return to Anachronox, and it seems like hope may yet remain.
So let us see if the forgotten third wheel of Ion Storm may one day finally earn the recognition it deserves for its uniqueness and inventiveness, this one-of-a-kind world sprung from the collision of JRPGs and WRPGs. I know it deserves it.
There's something poetic about these three pieces and how wildly different the history of each one is, but while people talk to no end about Anachronox's older brothers, no one seems to remember this RPG epic.
Cards on the table, I went into it expressely with the intent of finding something to love about it, an approach I've been trying to apply more and more as my understanding of game development deepens over time. Still, I was pleasantly surprised by how, in the end, it didn't really make me dig for that something. There is plenty of good in Anachronox.
Admittedly it's not an amazing game, it radiates the energy of a project spawned from Tom Hall going on a massive Final Fantasy 7 bender in '97 and deciding to make something comparable.
As far as inspirations go, FF7 is sure a great one, but Anachronox doesn't quite stick the landing as elegantly.
Still, if anything, it manages to be extremely unique despite wearing its JRPG influence on its sleeve, being the one true Western JRPG as I like to call it.
Sylvester "Sly" Boots is a washed up private detective living on the alien planet of Anachronox, which is surrounded by a sort of spiked ball that has wormholes at each tip for various destinations across the galaxy.
Being a sort of huge trade center, Anachronox is naturally a pretty shitty place to live, a cyberpunk dystopia of smoke and dark skies where the rich live on an elevated layer from the poor.
While that is almost Final Fantasy 7 verbatim, the tone of the writing here is markedly more sarcastic and adult.
Adult in the "Isn't it fucked old Bertha had to amputate and sell her legs to cover the fees of her nephew's tuition?" kind of way, the way that's hyperbolic yet not far off from what we see here on Earth.
It manages to be genuinely funny in multiple occasions, with some scenes getting the odd belly laugh out of me while sitting alone in my room. Great stuff.
The story kicks in like 10 hours in, in proper JRPG fashion, after leaving Anachronox and witnessing a whole planet get inexplicably rended in half and deleted, our party being the sole survivors of this disaster, destined to become the universe's saviors.
Mechanically, I can make it sound interesting through words, I can tell you that the overworld exploration and progression is handled similarly to a 3D point-and-click adventure game, where reading dialogue and figuring out what to do through logical steps is key and the puzzles make sense, with collectibles scattered around the map.
I can tell you that the combat is FF7 inspired ATB, complete with unlockable limit breaks and a materia-lite system, and that encounters are scripted around the map like Chrono Trigger and not random.
But saying this honestly makes the game you might be picturing in your head sound better than what the reality of Anachronox is, and that's that 3D environments aren't really that fun to explore when all you can do is walk everywhere kind of slowly and regularly take multiple elevators to run errands around the map, and the MysTech magic system is heavily railroaded by characters only really being good at using one specific type, with the combat being very much a formality and incredibly simple.
Despite the game ending up less than the sum of its parts, there is a surprising amount of worldbuilding, and you can tell the people behind it really cared about the universe of Anachronox.
From Democratus, home to a bickering parody of council politics, to Haephestus, inhabited by religious monks who hastily build a theme park after the disaster awakens all the MysTech in the universe and makes it a hot tourist location, the narrative arcs marked by each planet are incredibly strong at making this feel like a truly varied and outlandish universe.
My absolute favorite bit in this whole game was saving Democratus from an invading alien wasp asteroid, leaving it behind as every person in charge of running that planet was evidently an insane democracy fetishist, and then witnessing this feverish scene of the WHOLE ASS PLANET pulling up into the bar you crashed at as a miniaturized version of itself (democratically shrunken down to follow our heroes) and joining your party as a playable character.
This shit just doesn't happen in other games man.
You probably get to know Democratus better than any other party member too, as later on in the story the planet is forced to return to its original size, and your party gets scattered on different zones of the surface, each going through their own solo mini-adventure in the varied locations of Democratus, and I mean truly varied. Some characters get stuck in a desert where soldiers are stationed, others in a forest reminiscent of Star Wars' Endor, or an icy, snow-swept town in the middle of a string of murders. Every party member has a possible substory here (well, except Democratus of course), and you only get to pick 3, so you'll never see them all by design, which is sort of neat.
It's common in videogames that use space travel to generalize a single planet as a sort of monolith, like "this is the fire planet" or "this is the science planet", but Democratus truly escapes this stereotyping, presenting various coexisting facets of the same world, extremely different but all part of the same démos.
I also ended up really liking what the antagonist really is, which, in a development I can't tell if it's giving nod to the original Final Fantasy or not, ends up being Chaos.
The Limbus part of the game lets us confront the forces of Chaos directly, before heading back to Anachronox for the grand finale against Detta, the crimelord turned billionaire that ruined Sly's life years ago, who we need to steal from in order to seal the portal that allows the forces of Chaos to attack the universe.
The saddest part is that, right as the game ends on a massive plot twist regarding one of your party members, and as the battle against Chaos is beginning in full, it ends.
Anachronox was meant to be developed across multiple games, but the collapse of Ion Storm and the failure on the part of Tom Hall to acquire the rights to it leave us with just the beginning of this space opera and the unfulfilled promise of much more.
Not too long ago I asked if Hall himself had any plans to return to Anachronox, and it seems like hope may yet remain.
So let us see if the forgotten third wheel of Ion Storm may one day finally earn the recognition it deserves for its uniqueness and inventiveness, this one-of-a-kind world sprung from the collision of JRPGs and WRPGs. I know it deserves it.
20XX.
Global Warming has swallowed up the earth. Pollution has made most environments uninhabitable, and nuclear war has made sure to turn the rest into a wasteland.
After spending 500 years underground, humanity reemerges to find dinosaurs once again kings of the planet.
Mechanics and engineers are revered for their technological knowledge, and that's where the Cadillacs come in.
Essentially, this is Mad Max with dinosaurs, and child me could not be more captivated by a premise.
I played this game religiously back then, and it's a real shame that it never got a rerelease on anything other than the arcade, since being based off an animated series based off a comic book made dang sure navigating the licensing and rights required to publish this again damn near impossible.
It's sad especially because this is still, in my mind, the best beat 'em up Capcom has ever produced.
Cadillacs & Dinosaurs was the second game published for the CP System Dash, one of only five games, and it sits at a half-step between the CPS1 and CPS2 arcade boards.
While Warriors of Fate, the previous title for the board, was a feast for the eyes in terms of color, it didn't really innovate the genre, mostly cribbing ideas that were already established in the previous, hugely influential beat 'em ups Final Fight and Knights of the Round. It crucially omitted one of the best things Capcom brought to the genre, that being the 8-way dash first pioneered by Captain Commando.
As a result Warriors of Fate was a very slow and methodical beat 'em up, not that it's a bad thing, but I'd argue Final Fight was still on top in terms of design in that specific style.
Then came Cadillacs & Dinosaurs, and this time, they decided to go all out.
Not only was the 8-way dash brought back, but now we had the throw combos that were so sorely missing from Captain Commando, giving us a way to get invincibility periods while beating the shit out of enemies with our main string.
The music was vastly improved, with incredible percussion and great instrument samples, the graphics were more detailed than ever before and the animation and game-feel incredibly fluid.
Weapon pickups included firearms and grenades that would gib the opponents and send blood spurting everywhere, air strikes were called on the player's position on every respawn and it all felt so gosh darn empowering.
This is the first Capcom beat 'em up that feels truly freeform and improvisational, chaining grounded strings into throws and then into your special input move (done with down, up, attack), or flying across the screen chasing down enemies with your incredible dash attack, or grabbing enemies and being able to follow up with throws, input moves or superjoy, they got it all so RIGHT.
The last time I ran through it with a friend, he managed to punch a knife that was thrown by an enemy out of the air, then pick it up and use it as a weapon, to the hootin' and hollerin' of the both of us when we realized that was a possibility.
The characters are 4 this time, withCody Jack, Hannah, Mess and Mustapha.
Jack, as the name suggests, is the balanced one, pretty decent range, strength and speed, and his dash attack can be a great tool to get enemies off of you since it's a low slide to the ground that can go through a lot of stuff.
Mess is the grappler, he gets two different throws, although no Haggar piledriver here.
He has some funny momentum stuff with his dash jump attack, and one of the most ridiculous dash attacks I've ever seen.
Hannah is the fast one and she gets the good stabbys with knives. Her input move is basically Claw's rolling crystal flash from SF2, and is very satisfying to land.
Mustapha is also kind of like Jack but completely bonkers strong, both his dash attack and input move are probably the best in the game. He has the Guy walljump too.
Enemy variety could be improved, something a lot of the genre has always struggled with, but the combat is so fun that there isn't really any enemy type that makes you groan when having to deal with them. C&D has a very good difficulty curve all around, and is on the easier side of the genre.
This game stands head and shoulders above the rest of the genre, with only Streets of Rage 4 managing to surpass it in my eyes.
Play it, by whatever means.
Global Warming has swallowed up the earth. Pollution has made most environments uninhabitable, and nuclear war has made sure to turn the rest into a wasteland.
After spending 500 years underground, humanity reemerges to find dinosaurs once again kings of the planet.
Mechanics and engineers are revered for their technological knowledge, and that's where the Cadillacs come in.
Essentially, this is Mad Max with dinosaurs, and child me could not be more captivated by a premise.
I played this game religiously back then, and it's a real shame that it never got a rerelease on anything other than the arcade, since being based off an animated series based off a comic book made dang sure navigating the licensing and rights required to publish this again damn near impossible.
It's sad especially because this is still, in my mind, the best beat 'em up Capcom has ever produced.
Cadillacs & Dinosaurs was the second game published for the CP System Dash, one of only five games, and it sits at a half-step between the CPS1 and CPS2 arcade boards.
While Warriors of Fate, the previous title for the board, was a feast for the eyes in terms of color, it didn't really innovate the genre, mostly cribbing ideas that were already established in the previous, hugely influential beat 'em ups Final Fight and Knights of the Round. It crucially omitted one of the best things Capcom brought to the genre, that being the 8-way dash first pioneered by Captain Commando.
As a result Warriors of Fate was a very slow and methodical beat 'em up, not that it's a bad thing, but I'd argue Final Fight was still on top in terms of design in that specific style.
Then came Cadillacs & Dinosaurs, and this time, they decided to go all out.
Not only was the 8-way dash brought back, but now we had the throw combos that were so sorely missing from Captain Commando, giving us a way to get invincibility periods while beating the shit out of enemies with our main string.
The music was vastly improved, with incredible percussion and great instrument samples, the graphics were more detailed than ever before and the animation and game-feel incredibly fluid.
Weapon pickups included firearms and grenades that would gib the opponents and send blood spurting everywhere, air strikes were called on the player's position on every respawn and it all felt so gosh darn empowering.
This is the first Capcom beat 'em up that feels truly freeform and improvisational, chaining grounded strings into throws and then into your special input move (done with down, up, attack), or flying across the screen chasing down enemies with your incredible dash attack, or grabbing enemies and being able to follow up with throws, input moves or superjoy, they got it all so RIGHT.
The last time I ran through it with a friend, he managed to punch a knife that was thrown by an enemy out of the air, then pick it up and use it as a weapon, to the hootin' and hollerin' of the both of us when we realized that was a possibility.
The characters are 4 this time, with
Jack, as the name suggests, is the balanced one, pretty decent range, strength and speed, and his dash attack can be a great tool to get enemies off of you since it's a low slide to the ground that can go through a lot of stuff.
Mess is the grappler, he gets two different throws, although no Haggar piledriver here.
He has some funny momentum stuff with his dash jump attack, and one of the most ridiculous dash attacks I've ever seen.
Hannah is the fast one and she gets the good stabbys with knives. Her input move is basically Claw's rolling crystal flash from SF2, and is very satisfying to land.
Mustapha is also kind of like Jack but completely bonkers strong, both his dash attack and input move are probably the best in the game. He has the Guy walljump too.
Enemy variety could be improved, something a lot of the genre has always struggled with, but the combat is so fun that there isn't really any enemy type that makes you groan when having to deal with them. C&D has a very good difficulty curve all around, and is on the easier side of the genre.
This game stands head and shoulders above the rest of the genre, with only Streets of Rage 4 managing to surpass it in my eyes.
Play it, by whatever means.
1987
What on the surface is an incredibly brutal and unforgiving game eventually cedes way to a tight and razor sharp experience once you gain more confidence and practice with the game's mechanics.
Shinobi knows how to be extremely punishing, famously making any game over in the final chapter permanent even with credits still left in the cabinet, but in the modern day where we're allowed to remove ourselves from that with savestates, I gained a lot of appreciation for its enemy and level design.
The game throws you a bone by having specific enemies permanently disappear from the stages if you continue after rescuing some hostages, but I feel like this can end up messing with the flow you're intended to go with, since once you rescue some specific hostages you get a significant powerup to your weapon, giving the stages a downward sloped difficulty curve if completed without dying, which is super satisfying to accomplish.
Mastering each chapter and flowing through hordes of punks and ninjas with precise shuriken strikes or proximity melee attacks is exhilarating, and while stages will have chokepoints where the enemy placement can be especially cruel, you get one invincible screenclear move per level for those moments, even if I preferred finding ways around using it entirely.
The enemy types are all very simple yet deadly in the right combinations, with gunmen wasting no time to fill you with lead, green ninjas that roam around with permanently active hitboxes on their sword, blue ninjas that will constantly try to jump attack you, and guards that come in the purple variety that only blocks and melee attacks, requiring you also get up close and personal, or orange flavor that will boomerang throw their sword, or let it go in its flight path if you kill them during the act.
Truly the only weak link in this game's design is the bosses, specifically Mandara, which is balanced to be mathematically close to impossible to beat on your first life, and then gets easier after your first death. There are ways to get past the wall of statues that involve clipping into it, which is what I did, but it still doesn't feel like particularly strong game design.
Lobster can also be very random and demands excruciating precision, but at least the final boss is very well designed.
Shinobi knows how to be extremely punishing, famously making any game over in the final chapter permanent even with credits still left in the cabinet, but in the modern day where we're allowed to remove ourselves from that with savestates, I gained a lot of appreciation for its enemy and level design.
The game throws you a bone by having specific enemies permanently disappear from the stages if you continue after rescuing some hostages, but I feel like this can end up messing with the flow you're intended to go with, since once you rescue some specific hostages you get a significant powerup to your weapon, giving the stages a downward sloped difficulty curve if completed without dying, which is super satisfying to accomplish.
Mastering each chapter and flowing through hordes of punks and ninjas with precise shuriken strikes or proximity melee attacks is exhilarating, and while stages will have chokepoints where the enemy placement can be especially cruel, you get one invincible screenclear move per level for those moments, even if I preferred finding ways around using it entirely.
The enemy types are all very simple yet deadly in the right combinations, with gunmen wasting no time to fill you with lead, green ninjas that roam around with permanently active hitboxes on their sword, blue ninjas that will constantly try to jump attack you, and guards that come in the purple variety that only blocks and melee attacks, requiring you also get up close and personal, or orange flavor that will boomerang throw their sword, or let it go in its flight path if you kill them during the act.
Truly the only weak link in this game's design is the bosses, specifically Mandara, which is balanced to be mathematically close to impossible to beat on your first life, and then gets easier after your first death. There are ways to get past the wall of statues that involve clipping into it, which is what I did, but it still doesn't feel like particularly strong game design.
Lobster can also be very random and demands excruciating precision, but at least the final boss is very well designed.
This review contains spoilers
I was honestly surprised by how much I liked this game.
I went into Mother expecting hellish grinding, constant random encounters and cryptic progression galore.
What I actually got was a compelling gem of an RPG that, for being released on Famicom in 1989, was frankly far ahead of its time, and very playable nowadays as well.
Yet all those things I listed as worries were not exactly inaccurate.
Let me explain, Mother absolutely can be all of the above, but the key aspect that made me warm up to it considerably was how the progression of this game is explicitly built to steadily and gradually alleviate all of those issues, making the game not only easier on you as you level up, but also just as you progress and start unlocking extremely valuable items and abilities that directly counteract the tedious stuff people complain about.
As far as I can tell, this is the first RPG that lets you use an item to significantly reduce the encounter rate of enemies, which becomes available fairly early on in Magicant and the second town you visit, making the encounter rate very much a non-issue as long as you're willing to stock up on those.
Combat starts off incredibly harsh, and you will be spending your first few hours just grinding those levels in order to not get murdered the moment you step out of your house. Yet eventually you start learning that not all random encounters in this game are worth fighting, and running from shitty enemy formations is oftentimes a great choice, aided also by the 4th-D Slip spell.
Speaking of the combat, I was left pleasantly surprised by how little mandatory boss fights and encounters there are in this game. I believe the only bosses you must fight in this game (that you can lose against at least, there are a surprising amount of scripted fights) are the Starman Jr. in the Zoo, the Dragon in Magicant, and Giegue, the final boss. That is really it. Everything else is just dungeons where you're constantly tested on which battles you deem worth fighting. This also ties into my ultimate point about this game's final hours.
A lot of people, when presented with the ending stretch of this game, will immediately point out how Mt. Itoi houses tons of incredibly tough enemy encounters and how hellish that area is to get through.
Itoi himself famously stated that they did not really balance the final area at all, shrugging it all off with a frustrated "Whatever!" to meet deadlines.
But here's the thing. It doesn't actually matter, because you don't really have to fight anything. Stocking up on Repel Rings and running from fights where you're hilariously outnumbered goes a long way to making it a fairly standard romp.
The convenience of Magicant is also hard to overstate. Being able to teleport to a safe place, restock and heal up at any time is something that is only counterbalanced by the fact that getting out of Magicant is a bit of an annoying process until you get the Teleport spell.
After that though? Go nuts.
The progression and figuring out where all the melodies are is probably the hardest part of this game, but I still managed to find everything on my own (maybe due to knowledge that still lay dormant from watching chuggaaconroy's playthrough a decade ago).
The game supposedly has a map feature, but I honestly could not figure out how to get it to work.
Fret not however, because the game's manual comes with a beautifully hand-drawn map detailing all the points of interest you'll come across and their relative location. I used this translation, and while the town names are all different from the ones in the Earthbound Beginnings ROM, you can figure it out without much issue. The item and spell guide also massively comes in handy.
So, with most of this stuff out of the way, what do I actually think about the game?
As I stated paragraphs ago, I was delighted for most of my playthrough.
The game is not very long, and after getting your first companion, the game's structure suddenly opens up with the railway giving you access to three different towns and a path to the desert. Of all the Mother games, this is probably the least linear, and it's cool to tackle things at your own pace.
The writing and music are absolutely what steal the show here. This game sits alongside the Mega Man games as some of the best music you can hear on the system, and the story and characters, while not necessarily complex, are charming and endearing nonetheless.
I have to say I really vibed with the narrative in a way I could not have anticipated, with everything more or less orbiting around the relationship between Maria and Giegue, hence the game's name.
It's not explored in depth, but it doesn't need to be, Maria found herself as a sort of surrogate mother to Giegue after being kidnapped by aliens alongside her husband George, and while George eventually returned to Earth and presumably studied and taught his family the ways of the psychic abilities featured so prominently, Maria chose to spend the rest of her days up there in space.
This makes Magicant and what it represents a really touching send-off to the family Maria never saw again, a spiritual safe haven for Ninten to retreat into. Maria may have been gone for 80 years, but pieces of her are still inextricably linked to Earth, as they manifest in the 8 melodies.
Once Giegue and the other aliens find out that George has stolen the ways of their PSI powers, they invade Earth with the objective of wiping out all humans, since those abilities could pose a very significant threat to them.
And so Ninten sets off on his quest to recover the 8 melodies from the last scattered remnants of his grandma, to use this song, the lullaby Maria used to sing to Giegue, in the hopes of breaking through to the militaristic alien race and save the Earth.
In all this, we only find out about Magicant's role and nature at the very end, and the scene where it all dissipates back into a wasteland no longer animated by our mind is pretty moving.
There are a lot of moments in this game that just come across as really heartfelt and genuine, like Ninten being unflinchingly friendly towards Lloyd, the gang performing a dance in Ellay for the heck of it, or the personal final dance between Ninten and Ana at the cabin on Mt. Itoi.
Most importantly of all, a theme that is outright stated in the text and reinforced by how pivotal avoiding combat becomes in the final hours, Mother is a game about finding resolution to conflict without employing brute force.
The RPG genre, more than any other, ludonarratively lends itself to exploring the real nature of conflict in how all sides come out of it lesser than they were. While action games always leave the possibility of incarnating a perfect warrior that can weave through countless foes without the tiniest scratch, the same is rendered all but a statistical impossibility in RPGs.
Most times you fight a battle, you'll take losses, you'll get hit, you'll drain your energy or whatever other resource, and the challenge is in managing this drain and making it to the next safe spot before you're all spent. There are no winners in war. Everyone loses something.
Embracing this, the only way to beat the game and defeat the final boss is not to simply fight and beat Giegue, but it's to tug at their heartstrings by continuously and stubbornly singing the 8 melodies, this unflinchingly positive song about love and joy and music in the face of annihilation, a lullaby reminding them of Maria, of Mother, of how humanity can harbor goodness and compassion in their heart despite all the evil that exists, a fundamental rejection of violent conflict.
That is how you do ludonarrative, and for being, to my knowledge, the first game with this sort of messaging built into its gameplay, it deserves all the praise I've given it.
Congratulations Mr. Itoi, this is a great piece of art.
I went into Mother expecting hellish grinding, constant random encounters and cryptic progression galore.
What I actually got was a compelling gem of an RPG that, for being released on Famicom in 1989, was frankly far ahead of its time, and very playable nowadays as well.
Yet all those things I listed as worries were not exactly inaccurate.
Let me explain, Mother absolutely can be all of the above, but the key aspect that made me warm up to it considerably was how the progression of this game is explicitly built to steadily and gradually alleviate all of those issues, making the game not only easier on you as you level up, but also just as you progress and start unlocking extremely valuable items and abilities that directly counteract the tedious stuff people complain about.
As far as I can tell, this is the first RPG that lets you use an item to significantly reduce the encounter rate of enemies, which becomes available fairly early on in Magicant and the second town you visit, making the encounter rate very much a non-issue as long as you're willing to stock up on those.
Combat starts off incredibly harsh, and you will be spending your first few hours just grinding those levels in order to not get murdered the moment you step out of your house. Yet eventually you start learning that not all random encounters in this game are worth fighting, and running from shitty enemy formations is oftentimes a great choice, aided also by the 4th-D Slip spell.
Speaking of the combat, I was left pleasantly surprised by how little mandatory boss fights and encounters there are in this game. I believe the only bosses you must fight in this game (that you can lose against at least, there are a surprising amount of scripted fights) are the Starman Jr. in the Zoo, the Dragon in Magicant, and Giegue, the final boss. That is really it. Everything else is just dungeons where you're constantly tested on which battles you deem worth fighting. This also ties into my ultimate point about this game's final hours.
A lot of people, when presented with the ending stretch of this game, will immediately point out how Mt. Itoi houses tons of incredibly tough enemy encounters and how hellish that area is to get through.
Itoi himself famously stated that they did not really balance the final area at all, shrugging it all off with a frustrated "Whatever!" to meet deadlines.
But here's the thing. It doesn't actually matter, because you don't really have to fight anything. Stocking up on Repel Rings and running from fights where you're hilariously outnumbered goes a long way to making it a fairly standard romp.
The convenience of Magicant is also hard to overstate. Being able to teleport to a safe place, restock and heal up at any time is something that is only counterbalanced by the fact that getting out of Magicant is a bit of an annoying process until you get the Teleport spell.
After that though? Go nuts.
The progression and figuring out where all the melodies are is probably the hardest part of this game, but I still managed to find everything on my own (maybe due to knowledge that still lay dormant from watching chuggaaconroy's playthrough a decade ago).
The game supposedly has a map feature, but I honestly could not figure out how to get it to work.
Fret not however, because the game's manual comes with a beautifully hand-drawn map detailing all the points of interest you'll come across and their relative location. I used this translation, and while the town names are all different from the ones in the Earthbound Beginnings ROM, you can figure it out without much issue. The item and spell guide also massively comes in handy.
So, with most of this stuff out of the way, what do I actually think about the game?
As I stated paragraphs ago, I was delighted for most of my playthrough.
The game is not very long, and after getting your first companion, the game's structure suddenly opens up with the railway giving you access to three different towns and a path to the desert. Of all the Mother games, this is probably the least linear, and it's cool to tackle things at your own pace.
The writing and music are absolutely what steal the show here. This game sits alongside the Mega Man games as some of the best music you can hear on the system, and the story and characters, while not necessarily complex, are charming and endearing nonetheless.
I have to say I really vibed with the narrative in a way I could not have anticipated, with everything more or less orbiting around the relationship between Maria and Giegue, hence the game's name.
It's not explored in depth, but it doesn't need to be, Maria found herself as a sort of surrogate mother to Giegue after being kidnapped by aliens alongside her husband George, and while George eventually returned to Earth and presumably studied and taught his family the ways of the psychic abilities featured so prominently, Maria chose to spend the rest of her days up there in space.
This makes Magicant and what it represents a really touching send-off to the family Maria never saw again, a spiritual safe haven for Ninten to retreat into. Maria may have been gone for 80 years, but pieces of her are still inextricably linked to Earth, as they manifest in the 8 melodies.
Once Giegue and the other aliens find out that George has stolen the ways of their PSI powers, they invade Earth with the objective of wiping out all humans, since those abilities could pose a very significant threat to them.
And so Ninten sets off on his quest to recover the 8 melodies from the last scattered remnants of his grandma, to use this song, the lullaby Maria used to sing to Giegue, in the hopes of breaking through to the militaristic alien race and save the Earth.
In all this, we only find out about Magicant's role and nature at the very end, and the scene where it all dissipates back into a wasteland no longer animated by our mind is pretty moving.
There are a lot of moments in this game that just come across as really heartfelt and genuine, like Ninten being unflinchingly friendly towards Lloyd, the gang performing a dance in Ellay for the heck of it, or the personal final dance between Ninten and Ana at the cabin on Mt. Itoi.
Most importantly of all, a theme that is outright stated in the text and reinforced by how pivotal avoiding combat becomes in the final hours, Mother is a game about finding resolution to conflict without employing brute force.
The RPG genre, more than any other, ludonarratively lends itself to exploring the real nature of conflict in how all sides come out of it lesser than they were. While action games always leave the possibility of incarnating a perfect warrior that can weave through countless foes without the tiniest scratch, the same is rendered all but a statistical impossibility in RPGs.
Most times you fight a battle, you'll take losses, you'll get hit, you'll drain your energy or whatever other resource, and the challenge is in managing this drain and making it to the next safe spot before you're all spent. There are no winners in war. Everyone loses something.
Embracing this, the only way to beat the game and defeat the final boss is not to simply fight and beat Giegue, but it's to tug at their heartstrings by continuously and stubbornly singing the 8 melodies, this unflinchingly positive song about love and joy and music in the face of annihilation, a lullaby reminding them of Maria, of Mother, of how humanity can harbor goodness and compassion in their heart despite all the evil that exists, a fundamental rejection of violent conflict.
That is how you do ludonarrative, and for being, to my knowledge, the first game with this sort of messaging built into its gameplay, it deserves all the praise I've given it.
Congratulations Mr. Itoi, this is a great piece of art.
2021
![NieR Re[in]carnation](https://images.igdb.com/igdb/image/upload/t_cover_big/co7bm4.jpg)
I can't believe people actually play this crap, my calculator is a better videogame and it's not even programmable.
The game essentially plays itself and all you have to do is gather resources (via ungodly grinding or paying real money, neither of which are valid) to make your party's number get bigger.
If your number is bigger than the enemy, you win.
I don't know why they pretend to have a battle system, it doesn't really matter.
Avoid at all costs, this is the only gacha I tried to play because I love this series, but not even my blind faith in Nier could make me stomach the insult this "genre" is to the medium.
The game essentially plays itself and all you have to do is gather resources (via ungodly grinding or paying real money, neither of which are valid) to make your party's number get bigger.
If your number is bigger than the enemy, you win.
I don't know why they pretend to have a battle system, it doesn't really matter.
Avoid at all costs, this is the only gacha I tried to play because I love this series, but not even my blind faith in Nier could make me stomach the insult this "genre" is to the medium.
1989
I've always had a strange fascination with this game.
The weird mix of red scare era communist imagery, the bizarre space wizard dictator laughing at you right at the beginning, the frankly undecipherable overabundance of robot animals and dinosaurs and cavewomen in a futuristic setting.
It feels very much like a melting pot of random aesthetics and imagery tailor made to catch a kid's eyes in the arcade, and by god did it work on me.
It is not an easy game, but it mostly manages to stay on the side of fairness. You at least have a health bar that can be upgraded with powerups so you can take a reasonable amount of hits before it's time to pop in another quarter. Other powerups are also massively helpful offensively, if you can keep them.
It generally seems like a lot of effort has gone into this game at the time, getting hit provokes elaborate reactions, with Strider Hiryu recoiling and rolling on the ground, your movement animations are plentiful and adapt to the steepness of the incline you're moving on, or clinging onto.
There are momentum mechanics that let you gather speed for big, cinematic jumps, long before a certain blue hedgehog made its debut.
There are altered gravity sections, bosses that constitute their very own gravitational pole, it's all extremely inventive for the time.
But these days, these days I still remember Strider for a different reason.
There is something I find very thematically appropriate about the gameplay of Strider.
The futuristic ninja protagonist is armed with the cypher blade, a sleek, razor sharp, disciplined weapon, only a slash rending metal in half in a glorious burst of energy no longer than a couple of frames.
It is the cypher I obsess over so much. Hiryu swings the thing with the greatest of ease, faster than any human would ever be able to catch, but in this also comes a lot of the challenge of the game.
Do you have what it takes to be like Hiryu? Can you swing your cypher as fast and precisely as a real ninja would?
Playing this game with a controller and using your thumb does not do it justice, you will inevitably be limited by your dexterity.
The cypher demands speed. It demands your index finger, maybe even the middle finger to piano that attack button.
The only limit is your humanity.
Tear those gravity orbs and steel gorillas and dinosaurs to shreds, lest they do the same to you.
So, get those fingertips primed and ready, and enjoy the absolute powertrip that this game lets you live out.
So long as you don't fall up into the sky in that darn final stage.
The weird mix of red scare era communist imagery, the bizarre space wizard dictator laughing at you right at the beginning, the frankly undecipherable overabundance of robot animals and dinosaurs and cavewomen in a futuristic setting.
It feels very much like a melting pot of random aesthetics and imagery tailor made to catch a kid's eyes in the arcade, and by god did it work on me.
It is not an easy game, but it mostly manages to stay on the side of fairness. You at least have a health bar that can be upgraded with powerups so you can take a reasonable amount of hits before it's time to pop in another quarter. Other powerups are also massively helpful offensively, if you can keep them.
It generally seems like a lot of effort has gone into this game at the time, getting hit provokes elaborate reactions, with Strider Hiryu recoiling and rolling on the ground, your movement animations are plentiful and adapt to the steepness of the incline you're moving on, or clinging onto.
There are momentum mechanics that let you gather speed for big, cinematic jumps, long before a certain blue hedgehog made its debut.
There are altered gravity sections, bosses that constitute their very own gravitational pole, it's all extremely inventive for the time.
But these days, these days I still remember Strider for a different reason.
There is something I find very thematically appropriate about the gameplay of Strider.
The futuristic ninja protagonist is armed with the cypher blade, a sleek, razor sharp, disciplined weapon, only a slash rending metal in half in a glorious burst of energy no longer than a couple of frames.
It is the cypher I obsess over so much. Hiryu swings the thing with the greatest of ease, faster than any human would ever be able to catch, but in this also comes a lot of the challenge of the game.
Do you have what it takes to be like Hiryu? Can you swing your cypher as fast and precisely as a real ninja would?
Playing this game with a controller and using your thumb does not do it justice, you will inevitably be limited by your dexterity.
The cypher demands speed. It demands your index finger, maybe even the middle finger to piano that attack button.
The only limit is your humanity.
Tear those gravity orbs and steel gorillas and dinosaurs to shreds, lest they do the same to you.
So, get those fingertips primed and ready, and enjoy the absolute powertrip that this game lets you live out.
So long as you don't fall up into the sky in that darn final stage.
2021
This review contains spoilers
Videogames have so much untapped potential as an art form.
This game is one of the most unique and excellent experiences the medium has been able to offer so far, enriching its storytelling with its sole central mechanic of time moving forward when blinking.
Suddenly, you're hyper-aware of your eyelids.
Every scene is a struggle against your very nature, it quickly becomes straining and tiring, you start relishing every moment where nothing is being actively remembered, giving you respite from the searing screen before you.
It must feel similar to what the game's protagonist is feeling at that moment too.
Trying their hardest to lie, to invent memories on the spot of how great and meaningful their life was.
You can connect to that struggle, and as the outsider looking in you feel the fatigue of peering into another's soul, neither side having an easy time.
This piece made me come to realizations, stuff perhaps I was already aware of in the back of my mind, but it hit me with the full blunt force of the momentariness and brevity of life.
It got me to endlessly ponder what my future will be like, ten or fifteen years from now, when my parents won't be there anymore. If I will ever be ready. If I will ever consider myself enough.
What are memories, if not short windows of time we freeze up and gaze upon in times of need.
What are stories, if not memories we make up to gaze upon in times of need.
At some point, you will blink. At some point, you will die. Time is unavoidable. And yet we crave more of it, always. We keep wishing we didn't have to blink.
Whatever you're going through, this game is a touching reminder that you don't need to be a great, famous, revered, accomplished person to be enough.
As long as you're honest with yourself, you'll be enough.
Now rest easy and wipe those tears, you got this.
This game is one of the most unique and excellent experiences the medium has been able to offer so far, enriching its storytelling with its sole central mechanic of time moving forward when blinking.
Suddenly, you're hyper-aware of your eyelids.
Every scene is a struggle against your very nature, it quickly becomes straining and tiring, you start relishing every moment where nothing is being actively remembered, giving you respite from the searing screen before you.
It must feel similar to what the game's protagonist is feeling at that moment too.
Trying their hardest to lie, to invent memories on the spot of how great and meaningful their life was.
You can connect to that struggle, and as the outsider looking in you feel the fatigue of peering into another's soul, neither side having an easy time.
This piece made me come to realizations, stuff perhaps I was already aware of in the back of my mind, but it hit me with the full blunt force of the momentariness and brevity of life.
It got me to endlessly ponder what my future will be like, ten or fifteen years from now, when my parents won't be there anymore. If I will ever be ready. If I will ever consider myself enough.
What are memories, if not short windows of time we freeze up and gaze upon in times of need.
What are stories, if not memories we make up to gaze upon in times of need.
At some point, you will blink. At some point, you will die. Time is unavoidable. And yet we crave more of it, always. We keep wishing we didn't have to blink.
Whatever you're going through, this game is a touching reminder that you don't need to be a great, famous, revered, accomplished person to be enough.
As long as you're honest with yourself, you'll be enough.
Now rest easy and wipe those tears, you got this.
1992
Kirby's Dream Land is a cute and charming entry-level platformer that left me thoroughly delighted while and after playing.
When it comes to retrogaming, people may be intimidated by the prevalent design philosophies at the time, like restrictive, deliberate movement, tight and demanding level and enemy design or low margin for error.
Games have steadily moved away from this type of arcade-adjacent design as retaining player engagement became a larger priority over the years, a process which I'd argue we've started to see collapse in on itself.
Plenty of games coming out today are not built to be inherently fun experiences when mastered, but rather miserable content slop that only serves to perpetuate itself to keep players spending on the latest developments.
I want to pose Kirby's Dream Land as a perfect introductory piece for the complete opposite end of the spectrum, a simple yet rich gameplay experience that shows the value that can lay dormant in games that are willing to put up even the slightest bit of friction.
Kirby's Dream Land is by no means a hard game, it lifts almost all of the aforementioned restrictions save for a very deliberate way to attack enemies and bosses. It's intended for someone who has never played anything before, and as such your first playthrough will likely go down smoothly no matter your background in this medium.
However, the coolest part of this game to me has always been the Extra Mode.
After beating the final boss and seeing the end, you're prompted to start a new adventure with a button combination.
This Extra Mode is a tweaked "second quest", a rebalanced run through the game that bumps up the difficulty by a notch.
This isn't the first game to propose such a challenge, plenty of famous "hardest games ever" like Ghosts 'n Goblins have done this before, but Kirby's Dream Land is such a short and sweet experience that it's very easy to feel compelled by the Extra Mode.
I feel like it's safe to say that Extra Mode Kirby's Dream Land is a far more interesting, fun and engaging version of the game.
The enemy configurations being swapped out for more difficult foes and all the bosses getting some new tricks, combined with your lower effective health due to the increased damage, make for a much more satisfying experience, all thanks to the added challenge brought in by the Extra Mode mechanics.
In a sense, the normal game is more like practice for Extra Mode, and is something that works really well for this genre.
Providing a "training wheels" mode (like infinite credits on emulated arcade games) is a great way to get players to see what they can expect the game to ask of them, and then pushing them into the decision to take on the harder challenge to start the process of mastery that the genre excels at.
And it doesn't even stop there!
After beating Extra Mode, a new button combination is revealed to you, unlocking what's pretty much a custom difficulty mode that allows you to tweak the amount of health and lives you bave to beat the game.
I obviously immediately set everything to be at its hardest, and had a blast yet again, with one hit kills and fewer lives.
Bottom line is: challenging yourself can be its own fun, a lot retro games were really good at this, and if you're still unsure of your capabilities, that's fine.
Savestates and other tools are there to help and there is no shame in using them to learn.
Just keep in mind you can always get better, and doing so is its own reward.
When it comes to retrogaming, people may be intimidated by the prevalent design philosophies at the time, like restrictive, deliberate movement, tight and demanding level and enemy design or low margin for error.
Games have steadily moved away from this type of arcade-adjacent design as retaining player engagement became a larger priority over the years, a process which I'd argue we've started to see collapse in on itself.
Plenty of games coming out today are not built to be inherently fun experiences when mastered, but rather miserable content slop that only serves to perpetuate itself to keep players spending on the latest developments.
I want to pose Kirby's Dream Land as a perfect introductory piece for the complete opposite end of the spectrum, a simple yet rich gameplay experience that shows the value that can lay dormant in games that are willing to put up even the slightest bit of friction.
Kirby's Dream Land is by no means a hard game, it lifts almost all of the aforementioned restrictions save for a very deliberate way to attack enemies and bosses. It's intended for someone who has never played anything before, and as such your first playthrough will likely go down smoothly no matter your background in this medium.
However, the coolest part of this game to me has always been the Extra Mode.
After beating the final boss and seeing the end, you're prompted to start a new adventure with a button combination.
This Extra Mode is a tweaked "second quest", a rebalanced run through the game that bumps up the difficulty by a notch.
This isn't the first game to propose such a challenge, plenty of famous "hardest games ever" like Ghosts 'n Goblins have done this before, but Kirby's Dream Land is such a short and sweet experience that it's very easy to feel compelled by the Extra Mode.
I feel like it's safe to say that Extra Mode Kirby's Dream Land is a far more interesting, fun and engaging version of the game.
The enemy configurations being swapped out for more difficult foes and all the bosses getting some new tricks, combined with your lower effective health due to the increased damage, make for a much more satisfying experience, all thanks to the added challenge brought in by the Extra Mode mechanics.
In a sense, the normal game is more like practice for Extra Mode, and is something that works really well for this genre.
Providing a "training wheels" mode (like infinite credits on emulated arcade games) is a great way to get players to see what they can expect the game to ask of them, and then pushing them into the decision to take on the harder challenge to start the process of mastery that the genre excels at.
And it doesn't even stop there!
After beating Extra Mode, a new button combination is revealed to you, unlocking what's pretty much a custom difficulty mode that allows you to tweak the amount of health and lives you bave to beat the game.
I obviously immediately set everything to be at its hardest, and had a blast yet again, with one hit kills and fewer lives.
Bottom line is: challenging yourself can be its own fun, a lot retro games were really good at this, and if you're still unsure of your capabilities, that's fine.
Savestates and other tools are there to help and there is no shame in using them to learn.
Just keep in mind you can always get better, and doing so is its own reward.
This review contains spoilers
The past does nothing but grow, it expands until it becomes large and heavy enough to smother each and every one of us.
Harrier DuBois knows this, he's clearly haunted by his personal history, and so tries to escape. He must forget. There has to be a way.
You can bury the past, drink to forget, intoxicate yourself until your neural pathways twist and contort into a tangled mess, resembling nothing of the person that was there before.
It's worth a shot.
Yet nothing can erase the scars and the wear brought upon by the past.
You wake, reborn a broken mess of a man, barely able to comprehend your surroundings. All that's left to do, is to investigate.
The world of Elysium is familiar, yet is pervaded by mysterious allure, be it some retrofuturistic elements like radiocomputers and motor carriages, or a general feeling of unease around all these unknown names of locations and people you've never heard of.
Digging a little deeper reveals unsettling truths like the Pale, or the alleged powers of Dolores Dei, and it all creates this unnaturally mundane impossible world.
The prose in this game is simply astounding, each sentence impressively worded in just the right way to elicit a feeling, a thought or a deep existential crisis.
Writing like this is more than unique in the medium of videogames, at times beautifully poetic and at others horrifyingly blunt, but always a notch above the rest with its choice of words, sentence structure and their sequential delivery.
The narration also does a lot to elevate the writing, each character embodied by a voice that matches their demeanor perfectly, with rich, crisp and textured performances for nearly every utterance the characters, or our thoughts, make.
An incredible number of different accents of the English language are used here, to underline just how different the backgrounds of each of the poor souls that wound up in Revachol are.
You're just a tiny part of this social puzzle, yet your thoughts make up a staggeringly large portion of the script.
Your inner world is almost as frighteningly complex as what's out there, and the voices in your head will constantly chime in to advise, react or argue with each other about every little thing.
Your stats will determine when and how much each of these individual facets of yourself will take the stage, alongside the dice rolls used to actively engage with the world around you.
There's a mystery to solve, a well-crafted one at that, which will take you all over the bay of Martinaise, and will see you participate in some of the tensest moments this medium has to offer.
Whether it's interrogations or a mercenary tribunal, the rolling of the dice will always feed the uncertainty in your heart, anticipating the result of each action with bated breath.
Even if it's possible to savescum these moments, I never felt the need to do so, as regardless of what happens, the game will move on and adjust to your failures and successes (for the most part at least).
I've had the game hang on me a couple times and softlock in the occasions where you get Measurehead to bring down the corpse from the tree, and when you let Ruby go after the interrogation. Not ideal, and I was forced to reload my savefile and have things play out differently, but it didn't impact my enjoyment too much.
Instead, I want to talk about what DID leave a profound impact on me.
Right off the bat, the first thing that made me realize this game was going to be special, was talking to Joyce Messier and accidentally stumbling into the concept of the Pale.
I was immediately enamoured with it, a thick, featureless mist that dulls the senses, carrying the memories of all that has been, contaminating the minds of those who enter it.
There's this existential dread derived from its ever-expanding nature, the perfect metaphor of the game's themes about the weight of history.
Meeting the Paledriver, lost in sweet memories that aren't hers, blissfully high on the loss of her own sense of self and identity. It made me wonder what that could even be like. If it's something else Harrier would've tried.
If it's something I would like to try, were it possible.
I think back to the corpse of Lely, how I managed to find a bullet lodged into his skull by passing a near-unwinnable 3% skill check while holding the rotting remains inside a polar bear-shaped refrigerator, and how that immediately set off such a chain of realizations about who was telling the truth and what really happened.
The murder is only a tool, let's even call it a convenient, unplanned event that two parties are using in a political game of displays of power, between a union of workers demanding more rights, and the megacompany that depends on the docks they operate.
Neither one of the parties is really interested in the truth, as long as they get what they need out of the narrative they can build around it.
But we are committed to finding this truth, as it's really all that's left of our previous self, the final obligation of Harrier DuBois, before disappearing forever from his own brain.
More important yet, this incredibly lucky event is what finally convinced my partner, lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, I was really worth his trust.
The payoff I felt during the shootout with the mercenaries, near the end of the game, when life-or-death skill checks displayed the bonuses:
+1 Kim trusts you
+2 Kim really trusts you
almost moved me to tears during those brief moments of incredible violence.
Kim is such a well-realized sidekick. He plays the straight man to all of our embarrassing shenanigans, and is a large part of why the humor in this game works so well.
But there are also the moments where you sit back. You talk, about the policeman life, about the inner politics of the districts you come from, stuck in a pissing contest, about your past cases and the ranks you refused.
Kim isn't just the talking cricket embodying your conscience, he's a genuinely loving human being, who's along for the ride no matter what.
And why not, this performance of "The Smallest Church in Saint-Saëns", I dedicate to him.
That's a song that still sticks with me, months after finishing and putting down this game.
Sang with an old, raspy voice, the voice of the man we used to be, a genuine expression of sadness, as deep as can be mustered.
Memories of a dilapidated, abandoned place, yet a comforting home.
Moments of loneliness spent among the ruins of the past.
Facing inward and wondering what could've been, looking forward to the past there.
Maybe it's because I already do that a lot myself, but I really like this song.
One final thing I need to touch on, before I end this review for the sake of not writing a full essay about this game in a 3cm high text box, is that the history of the city of Revachol is endlessly compelling.
Part of a kingdom once dominated by a royal dynasty, so close in the past for sympathizers of the crown to still be around and kicking, hanging out at the bay for you to talk with.
The old kingdom overthrown by a communist revolution, snatching power from the ruling nobles, only for war to break out with the rest of the nations threatened by a revolution, and for the communists to be ended in bloodshed.
This game was made by Estonian people, and in a much larger sense feels like a direct product of current Europe.
Being born and raised in the Old continent myself, hearing all the words and accents heavily reminiscent of all the countries in and around here, and witnessing how Revachol carries scars from its past history just like the people who live in it, reminded me of the places I grew up around.
My hometown's biggest landmark bears a permanent mark of neglect before it became a relevant historical site, and a breach speculated to have come from cannon fire during the Napoleonic age. Not too far north from there, in Bassano, bullet holes on the walls of the houses at the opposite ends of the Old Bridge are still there from the Great War.
It's not just these kind of details that Disco Elysium gets right about historical cities, but the general politics and alignments presented by the inhabitants reflect a lot of our last 300 or so years of history.
I obviously love this game, its art style, storytelling, writing, music and mechanics. It's so distinctive, there really isn't anything else like it around.
It's a piece made with a clear respect for the past, and also a deep fear of the power the past still has over us.
I would have more to say, about cryptozoology, reality-collapsing points inside abandoned churches, deathly uncomfortable chairs, light-bending people and the likes, but I'll stop here and just leave you with my favorite quote:
"[The Pale] is a nervous shadow cast into the world by you, eating away at reality. A great, unnatural territory. Its advent coincides with the arrival of the human mind.
You are a violent and irrepressible miracle. The vacuum of cosmos and the stars burning in it are afraid of you. Given enough time you would wipe us all out and replace us with nothing -- just by accident."
Harrier DuBois knows this, he's clearly haunted by his personal history, and so tries to escape. He must forget. There has to be a way.
You can bury the past, drink to forget, intoxicate yourself until your neural pathways twist and contort into a tangled mess, resembling nothing of the person that was there before.
It's worth a shot.
Yet nothing can erase the scars and the wear brought upon by the past.
You wake, reborn a broken mess of a man, barely able to comprehend your surroundings. All that's left to do, is to investigate.
The world of Elysium is familiar, yet is pervaded by mysterious allure, be it some retrofuturistic elements like radiocomputers and motor carriages, or a general feeling of unease around all these unknown names of locations and people you've never heard of.
Digging a little deeper reveals unsettling truths like the Pale, or the alleged powers of Dolores Dei, and it all creates this unnaturally mundane impossible world.
The prose in this game is simply astounding, each sentence impressively worded in just the right way to elicit a feeling, a thought or a deep existential crisis.
Writing like this is more than unique in the medium of videogames, at times beautifully poetic and at others horrifyingly blunt, but always a notch above the rest with its choice of words, sentence structure and their sequential delivery.
The narration also does a lot to elevate the writing, each character embodied by a voice that matches their demeanor perfectly, with rich, crisp and textured performances for nearly every utterance the characters, or our thoughts, make.
An incredible number of different accents of the English language are used here, to underline just how different the backgrounds of each of the poor souls that wound up in Revachol are.
You're just a tiny part of this social puzzle, yet your thoughts make up a staggeringly large portion of the script.
Your inner world is almost as frighteningly complex as what's out there, and the voices in your head will constantly chime in to advise, react or argue with each other about every little thing.
Your stats will determine when and how much each of these individual facets of yourself will take the stage, alongside the dice rolls used to actively engage with the world around you.
There's a mystery to solve, a well-crafted one at that, which will take you all over the bay of Martinaise, and will see you participate in some of the tensest moments this medium has to offer.
Whether it's interrogations or a mercenary tribunal, the rolling of the dice will always feed the uncertainty in your heart, anticipating the result of each action with bated breath.
Even if it's possible to savescum these moments, I never felt the need to do so, as regardless of what happens, the game will move on and adjust to your failures and successes (for the most part at least).
I've had the game hang on me a couple times and softlock in the occasions where you get Measurehead to bring down the corpse from the tree, and when you let Ruby go after the interrogation. Not ideal, and I was forced to reload my savefile and have things play out differently, but it didn't impact my enjoyment too much.
Instead, I want to talk about what DID leave a profound impact on me.
Right off the bat, the first thing that made me realize this game was going to be special, was talking to Joyce Messier and accidentally stumbling into the concept of the Pale.
I was immediately enamoured with it, a thick, featureless mist that dulls the senses, carrying the memories of all that has been, contaminating the minds of those who enter it.
There's this existential dread derived from its ever-expanding nature, the perfect metaphor of the game's themes about the weight of history.
Meeting the Paledriver, lost in sweet memories that aren't hers, blissfully high on the loss of her own sense of self and identity. It made me wonder what that could even be like. If it's something else Harrier would've tried.
If it's something I would like to try, were it possible.
I think back to the corpse of Lely, how I managed to find a bullet lodged into his skull by passing a near-unwinnable 3% skill check while holding the rotting remains inside a polar bear-shaped refrigerator, and how that immediately set off such a chain of realizations about who was telling the truth and what really happened.
The murder is only a tool, let's even call it a convenient, unplanned event that two parties are using in a political game of displays of power, between a union of workers demanding more rights, and the megacompany that depends on the docks they operate.
Neither one of the parties is really interested in the truth, as long as they get what they need out of the narrative they can build around it.
But we are committed to finding this truth, as it's really all that's left of our previous self, the final obligation of Harrier DuBois, before disappearing forever from his own brain.
More important yet, this incredibly lucky event is what finally convinced my partner, lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, I was really worth his trust.
The payoff I felt during the shootout with the mercenaries, near the end of the game, when life-or-death skill checks displayed the bonuses:
+1 Kim trusts you
+2 Kim really trusts you
almost moved me to tears during those brief moments of incredible violence.
Kim is such a well-realized sidekick. He plays the straight man to all of our embarrassing shenanigans, and is a large part of why the humor in this game works so well.
But there are also the moments where you sit back. You talk, about the policeman life, about the inner politics of the districts you come from, stuck in a pissing contest, about your past cases and the ranks you refused.
Kim isn't just the talking cricket embodying your conscience, he's a genuinely loving human being, who's along for the ride no matter what.
And why not, this performance of "The Smallest Church in Saint-Saëns", I dedicate to him.
That's a song that still sticks with me, months after finishing and putting down this game.
Sang with an old, raspy voice, the voice of the man we used to be, a genuine expression of sadness, as deep as can be mustered.
Memories of a dilapidated, abandoned place, yet a comforting home.
Moments of loneliness spent among the ruins of the past.
Facing inward and wondering what could've been, looking forward to the past there.
Maybe it's because I already do that a lot myself, but I really like this song.
One final thing I need to touch on, before I end this review for the sake of not writing a full essay about this game in a 3cm high text box, is that the history of the city of Revachol is endlessly compelling.
Part of a kingdom once dominated by a royal dynasty, so close in the past for sympathizers of the crown to still be around and kicking, hanging out at the bay for you to talk with.
The old kingdom overthrown by a communist revolution, snatching power from the ruling nobles, only for war to break out with the rest of the nations threatened by a revolution, and for the communists to be ended in bloodshed.
This game was made by Estonian people, and in a much larger sense feels like a direct product of current Europe.
Being born and raised in the Old continent myself, hearing all the words and accents heavily reminiscent of all the countries in and around here, and witnessing how Revachol carries scars from its past history just like the people who live in it, reminded me of the places I grew up around.
My hometown's biggest landmark bears a permanent mark of neglect before it became a relevant historical site, and a breach speculated to have come from cannon fire during the Napoleonic age. Not too far north from there, in Bassano, bullet holes on the walls of the houses at the opposite ends of the Old Bridge are still there from the Great War.
It's not just these kind of details that Disco Elysium gets right about historical cities, but the general politics and alignments presented by the inhabitants reflect a lot of our last 300 or so years of history.
I obviously love this game, its art style, storytelling, writing, music and mechanics. It's so distinctive, there really isn't anything else like it around.
It's a piece made with a clear respect for the past, and also a deep fear of the power the past still has over us.
I would have more to say, about cryptozoology, reality-collapsing points inside abandoned churches, deathly uncomfortable chairs, light-bending people and the likes, but I'll stop here and just leave you with my favorite quote:
"[The Pale] is a nervous shadow cast into the world by you, eating away at reality. A great, unnatural territory. Its advent coincides with the arrival of the human mind.
You are a violent and irrepressible miracle. The vacuum of cosmos and the stars burning in it are afraid of you. Given enough time you would wipe us all out and replace us with nothing -- just by accident."