"An epic story based on the theme of love..."

On startup, there's just a black screen, and music. Some names appear, a fade to black. A black and white render of a character or place from the game, a fade to black. The play experience of Final Fantasy VIII is defined by punctuation. When I told a friend of mine I was playing the game, he assumed I meant the remaster; when I clarified that I was playing the original PlayStation version, he replied "How are those load times?" It's consistently shocking to me how people assume that the load times in these old disc based games were just universally bad, when it usually has more to do with how the program itself is designed than the limitations of the hardware. In any case, the fading in and out between each screen transition is an important part of the game's feel. Each seam is an opportunity for a shift in scale, a shift in mood, a new song to set the stage, a new perspective when the visuals do present themselves.

At the beginning of the game, the player is able to name the main character, Squall, whatever they like. Afterwards as Squall talks with Dr. Kadowaki, she ponders the name of Squall's instructor, there's a heavy pause. It's as if the game is about to bring up a second menu, where the player will name this character as well, but it doesn't happen. Kadowaki says the character's name outright, Quistis.

The first choice you're really given in the game, aside from your character's name, is whether or not you want to use your desk terminal in the classroom. It contains quite a bit of background on the world, including things I would have otherwise considered "twists", and even things I didn't really absorb in my first several playthroughs. It has the student guidelines for the Garden, information on what SeeDs are, and a somber announcement that the school festival is almost certainly not going to happen. Throughout my life I played through this opening section of the game at least half a dozen times without looking at this terminal at all, and I imagine I'm not the only one who ignored it. On Disc 3, probably more than 20 hours into the game for most players, someone says "Of course monsters live on the moon, didn't you learn that in school?"

There's an idea I've had for a game for a long while, a setting inspired by Fullmetal Alchemist, gameplay inspired by what I imagined Shin Megami Tensei would be like when it was first described to me, an RPG with absurd customizability where the only way to win was to indulge in a high risk-high reward gamble inspired by Battle Network's dark chips. A world where magic exists, but almost nobody is any good at it, a game where even the best party setups would be cyclically robbing Peter to pay Paul. If I had been a better student, if I had actually read the terminal at my desk, if I had actually learned how to play the game a few playthroughs earlier, I could have realized that Final Fantasy VIII is the closest any game I'm familiar with has come to being my dream JRPG.

Final Fantasy VIII isn't a game where you grind enemies for experience points, and it definitely isn't a game where you repeatedly draw the same spell from the same enemy until you can't anymore. Final Fantasy VIII is a game where you play card games and answer quizzes and spec into certain skills so that you can buy a stock of easily obtainable items and turn them into high level magic and quadruple every party member's HP by the end of Disc 1 without leveling up at all. The worst part of every JRPG is the grind, the amount of time it takes to improve your characters, the amount of time you spend waiting for your turn. The interesting part of a JRPG is rarely the fight, it's the preparation, and Final Fantasy VIII knows this. It's a JRPG that asks you to work smarter, not harder. It's a game where turning every boss fight into a coin toss that ends on the first turn is a strategy that is not only possible, it's completely valid.

Final Fantasy VIII is cinematic in a way that few games have been able to be. By the time I first played the game, nearly a decade after its original release, its graphics were still not so deprecated to be distracting. My first experience with game environments made predominantly of prerendered background was Universal Theme Parks Adventure on the Gamecube, and the Wii wasn't much more visually impressive than that, so to me this likely didn't feel as antiquated as someone more accustomed to the 7th generation consoles or high end PC's from the time might have thought. Sometimes there are transitions between scenes with 3D characters on a static background, to 3D characters over an animated prerendered scene complete with shifting perspective, to a prerendered cutscene.

While these moments are impressive, they are also some of the moments where the issue with the remaster become most glaring. The versions of Final Fantasy VIII available on modern platforms are apparently based on the original PC version of the game, which has no support for analog control, nor rumble. Using a D-pad was a bit more acceptable in Final Fantasy VII, with its city blocks and industrial catwalks; however, in Final Fantasy VIII even the manmade locations have a swooping curved Y2K futurist aesthetic that makes navigating them at straight angles just plain cumbersome, and it's even worse when the camera is given an opportunity to move around. The lack of rumble in these modern versions makes it more difficult for the player to discern whether they have successfully timed their Paper Mario-esque gunblade critical hits when doing basic combat. I'd recommend either playing the game from the original discs (which aren't particularly expensive because apparently Square Enix still prints new ones from time to time), or perhaps there's a mod for the PC version that can fix these issues.

Balamb Garden is initially presented with this light, airy music, like the music Haruomi Hosono apparently made for convenience stores in the 80's. Beneath the uniforms and the combat exercises, Garden is home. A bit later in the game the team visits another Garden in Galbadia; defamiliarized, the same elements of Garden are now characterized as sterile, as cold as a waiting room, its fascistic character laid bare. The apparent death of Seifer lets the banal reality of the world set in. When the player is finally able to return to Balamb Garden hours later, they find it has erupted into chaos, students splintering into separate factions and killing each other over a conflict that many of them barely understand. Balamb Garden becomes this games equivalent of the boat in other Final Fantasy games, Trabia Garden is destroyed, and the party collectively remembers the orphanage on a coast in the middle of nowhere, the place where they all grew up together. Homes destroyed, homes we take with us, homes we leave behind, homes that aren't ours, that aren't safe anymore. Balamb Garden too is eventually left behind, most players likely leaving it docked at Fisherman's Horizon from Disc 3 onward.

Where do I even start with Squall and Rinoa.

Aside from Squall and Rinoa, most of the party members take a backseat for a good portion of the game. Aside from Squall, Rinoa is the only character in the game that the player is able to name. You name her because she isn't just another party member, she's the other player character. Her goal of Timber's independence is what actually gets the plot of the game moving, while Squall merely settles into his role as acting leader of Balamb's SeeD. She has agency, and the worst thing that can happen, the lowest point of the story's arc, is for her to lose that, to be forcibly closed off from the rest of the world by a force beyond control or comprehension. And here, Squall realizes that this is exactly what he has done to himself. This is why the other party members don't have this sort of role in the story, why they can't be named, because they don't have this connection to Squall, to the player, they know not to try.

When I play RPG's old and new alike, I often think about a moment in Chris Davis' review of the original Fallout wherein he says that the dialogue in a game like that couldn't work in a modern game, it couldn't be fully voice acted, it couldn't be delivered with a straight face, it couldn't be taken seriously. Consider the moment in the game where Edea, free from Ultimecia's control, explains the villain's plan. To progress, the player has to talk to Edea several times, and attempt to leave the room. The screen goes black, Squall's thoughts appear in transparent text boxes in the center of the screen while solid text boxes pop up around them. He catches bits and pieces of the science fantasy technobabble but all he can really think about is Rinoa. If they had tried to communicate this with facial expressions, motion capture gesticulating, voice over, I genuinely think that the game would have suffered for it. The way that the user interface elements typical of a JRPG are used here communicates the emotion in such a tangible, potent way, just trying to semi-realistically animate Squall with a pensive face wouldn't be able to capture it.

There's quite a bit of Oedipal stuff here, isn't there? The concept of the sorceress as a sort of interdimensional primal mother, Squall's apparent estranged father cloistered away, leader of an invisible isolationist nation, not to mention Cid's role as adoptive father. The whole world have contorted into some kind of grand familial conspiracy to keep the mother and father a secret. There's an a sort of half-implied pseudo-incest, the ambiguity of which characters are whose children; Rinoa is most likely simply the daughter of Squall's father's first true love, but for much of the game there's a nagging question.

In Disc 3, we drop everything and leave our post, leave the planet itself, in the pursuit of restoring Rinoa's will. Squall calls out to her, she can't hear, and under control of the sorceress she is thrown into the vacuum of space, utterly alone. Ellone brings Squall into her memories, into her mind, eventually into the closest past to the future, the present. He joins her in the endless void, and they stow away together on a derelict spaceship. Once outside of their spacesuits, Rinoa asks for a hug; despite the risk he took to save her life, despite perhaps knowing her thoughts more intimately now than any other person, he refuses. The encounter with the xenomorph-like aliens on this ship is so distracting and so on-the-nose that I feel like it can't possibly be anything other than intentional. That surely this is representative of how even now Rinoa is still terrifying to Squall, the alien, the other. How do you share your self with someone?

The first time I played this game, I was aware that there would be a needle drop of a pop song complete with vocals, but I didn't know when or what the context would be. I was kind of taken aback, confused as to why it played here. As Rinoa completely opens up and tells Squall that he provides her the kind of comfort she previously only associated with family, he ignores her, the heightened emotions of his heroism deflate as the two literally descend back down to earth. This song, "Eyes On Me", in the context of the game is written by Rinoa's mother, about Squall's father. This song doesn't play here because it's the grand happy ending, it plays here because it's the climax of Squall's inner conflict. Are you really going to make the same mistake your father did? Are you really going to refuse to open up? Are you really going to keep lying to yourself, to everyone else, and keep that stupid stoic look on your face and pretend you don't care because it's "cool"?

I just hate hearing people talk about this game. Nobody gets it. It's as if Squall is just some whiny brat who won't get in the robot, or he's an incel and Rinoa is his manic pixie dream girl. Or the whole game is just reddit fedora child soldier badass mall-ninja military aesthetic. With all the dumbass Channel Awesome-tier takes I see people spouting about this game I could hardly believe any of the people saying that shit have even played it, or at least not beyond the first few hours, if it weren't for the fact that it took me like 4 playthroughs to really get it myself. I can hardly believe how few views on youtube some of the songs from this game have, how it's actually kind of hard to find recordings of the version of Eyes On Me that can play during the Garden Festival in Fisherman's Horizon, that one of the few recordings I can find has only a few hundred views and is interrupted multiple times by screenshot sound effects.

How could you think so low of the game when the song at the core of it all, the song whose phrases echo through at least half a dozen of the game's background tracks, is contextualized as the other half of the player crying out "Don't you know I'm a person? Don't you know I'm just like you? That I have my own thoughts and dreams and desires?" I genuinely believe Final Fantasy VIII is one of, if not simply the best written narrative ever told in a video game, and one of the best coming of age stories of the past few decades. I don't understand how someone who has actually experienced it in full could walk away from it and so totally ignore the obvious character development that occurs, that Squall is more than the brick wall we see in the games opening chapters, that Rinoa is more than just a wish fulfillment "romance option".

Still, Squall's indecision means that their ship touches down, Rinoa turns herself in to the Esthar soldiers to be sealed away in the sorceress memorial for the safety of the world. At virtually the last possible moment, Squall chooses honesty. It is at this moment that the player gets this game's airship, the spaceship Ragnarok. The music that plays during flight, the freedom it offers, the uniquely satisfying way that it handles compared to all other movement in the game, this is the ultimate mechanical and emotional payoff.

I said in a previous review of this game on this site that this is the only video game I own which features its narrative theme as a bullet point on the back of the box, and that says it all, doesn't it? Final Fantasy VII touts its size, its audiovisual spectacle, but it gets no more specific than a vague gesture towards "a good story". Final Fantasy IX, as good as it is, is Square admitting defeat; in its appeal to nostalgia it reveals an internal sense that this format is already as archaic as the SNES games which came before. Final Fantasy X was the real future, with its voice acting, facial expressions, and full 3D environments rendered in real time. Final Fantasy X was the point where these games just utterly lost something, they stopped feeling like Final Fantasy. From the first to the ninth each game in this series truly felt like a world, as though even with its tricky sense of scale and perspective the player could truly feel as though they had explored every nook and cranny of a massive place. Final Fantasy VII was sort of properly primitive, abstract through necessity, struggling to convey itself through multiple discontinuous styles. Final Fantasy VIII was perhaps the absolute pinnacle of a kind of game that we simply don't see anymore and may never again, and it was all in the name of love.

Anyway, this is where I reveal that I'm actually a fake fan, I've never beaten this game. I've gotten to the final disc at least 4 times, I have never beaten the final boss, I have never seen the credits. The entire first three discs of this game are actually just the tutorial, they're baby mode, once you have literally the slightest idea of how to build a decent party the entire game up until the final dungeon is a complete cakewalk. Then, the final dungeon, the entire 4th Disc, is a Resident Evil mansion full of super-bosses, each of which basically requires you to completely reconfigure your party to meet some hyper-specific criteria. I haven't touched my current save file in months, maybe I'll beat it next playthrough, maybe the payoff will feel so great that I'll add that last half star to my rating, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Mega Man Zero is not the best Mega Man game, but it was probably the most ambitious.

The mission Protect the Factory is probably my favorite moment in the game. The player enters the level, and immediately encounters the boss. The boss, Hidden Phantom, is the only one of the game's main Reploid bosses which has no elemental weakness. When he is defeated, he tips the player off to the fact that the factory is rigged to blow in 3 minutes. The player is told to evacuate. If the player enters the factory instead, they are told how to defuse the bombs, but are reassured that they aren't expected to do this.

It has always surprised me that people consider the Zero series to be particularly difficult, and not just because Mega Man is generally a hard series of games to begin with. Mega Man Zero is a game that gives you the option to abort most of the game's missions, even encouraging it at times. The punishment for skipping levels, failing objectives, dying, or using upgrades is a decrease in rank, but the ranking system in this game amounts to little more than bragging rights. There is no punishment for a low rank, and the only "reward" is that some of the bosses' patterns become more difficult; in short, the ranking system is there for people who care to master the game, it can easily be ignored.

The game's most immediately glaring fault is a lack of visual polish in certain specific regards, in particular the character portraits by the dialogue boxes, which mostly look like scanned concept art that was never cleaned up. The screen shake in one of the boss fights reveals weird artifacts on the top edge of the screen.

It does seem though that they tried to polish the game wherever they thought it counted. If a boss is defeated by a regular sword slash they get cut in half. Most bosses have clear audio cues for each of their attacks.

I love the connected levels and world. I love rescuing NPCs in missions and watching them populate the resistance base. I love that the interlude stages feature the base under attack, and because the enemies path towards the base goes through areas the player will have previously traversed for other missions, there's a real intensity as the player has an awareness of how close the enemy is getting.

I like that the level select menu gives an idea of the practical goal of what the player is doing; the game doesn't often directly tell you what boss you will fight, but that information should really only matter to a repeat player, who should probably already know these things anyway. The boss order doesn't really matter, there aren't boss weapons in this game. That's not to say that beating a particular level doesn't grant the player some particular reward. Some levels give the player cyber elves, some levels give the player an element chip (which serves as the actual weakness of the bosses), some allow the NPC Cerveau to develop a new weapon. If the player occupies the factory, they can visit the area outside of missions to gather energy crystals. Depending on an individual player's skill level and priorities, selecting a level is a much more meaningful decision than just picking whichever robot master happens to be weak to the weapon you most recently obtained.

I love how expressive Zero's sprite is. His posture is terrible. His idle animation sees him hunched forward, his standing pose has his head tilted down and his hips well in front of his shoulders; I've seen people stand like that in real life, it's not healthy! But Zero is a robot, so it's whatever.

It's syntax is particular enough that it won't recognize "hq" (lowercase) as "Headquarters", but will recognize "HQ" (uppercase). I have no idea how to make progress. I ask what seem like obvious, natural questions, with correct grammar and punctuation, and nothing happens; I type in blunt, old-school adventure game inputs, and get some results, but hit a wall shortly afterwards. Maybe this is moreso an issue with the English language version (I believe this is, afterall, the first official release of Portopia outside of Japan, and is a small, free, tech demo that likely didn't get much QA), but I have some doubts. Maybe it's significantly easier if you're already familiar with the original game and know what sorts of questions you should be asking, which I feel safe assuming most English speakers won't be. Maybe this is an intentionally botched "AI tech demo" so that Squeenix doesn't get swept up in the prospects of automating parts of their development process, or maybe, just maybe, AI isn't actually all that impressive yet.

Haven: Call of the King: technically, it is marvelously ahead of its time; aesthetically, it is painfully of its time; mechanically, it is dreadfully behind its contemporaries.

Stuff just happens in this game. You platform, you shoot in third and first person, you do rail shooting, jey pack flying, speedboating, driving, and so on. Most of it feels fine, it feels much better than literal shovelware would. Despite the connected environments and lack of loading screens, pretty much everything you do feels completely out of context. After the opening cutscene there is no dialogue for two full levels. You have a narrative goal, but if it weren't for the fact that your current objective is always displayed on the pause screen, you would have no idea what your next logical step for achieving that goal could possibly be.

There's too much mechanical variety introduced too early on, and while you are initially given some space to play with them your objective quickly becomes so narrowly focused that the range of abilities you have and stimuli you're expected to react to is overwhelming. You have a double jump, a shield, a slide, and a melee attack, and all of these moves can be combined in some way (and that's just the core platforming gameplay!), but few of these more advanced maneuvers are ever useful or satisfying. If you pick up a power-up like a gun or a flashlight, your melee attack becomes unusable until the power-up's time limit runs out.

There are roughly a dozen different types of barrel in the game, most of them are introduced within the first level or two. Some have items, some are covered in spikes and will damage you, some cannot be destroyed and will give you a weapon each time you hit them, some turn into turrets (all of these barrels are the same color). Some will explode when you hit them, some will explode when you get close to them, some contain a dragon that will follow you (but only when your shield is active!) and destroy the otherwise indestructible flaming barrels (all of these barrels are the same color).

Voice acting is shockingly sparse, with many characters' reactions to important events being limited to mugging the camera. Important story scenes have dialogue that is spoken so fast that I wonder how badly the different assets of the game were fighting for disc space. You'll walk into a new area and have a short cutscene that introduces a new character, and the next time you see that character (assuming they reappear at all!) you won't even have the option of talking to them. There is no text based dialogue in the entire game; the only text you will ever read is tutorials and hints. Half of the characters in the game talk in terrible overacted voices clearly imitating various racial stereotypes. Between the silly voices, the fast-talking, and the fact that the game has no subtitles, the story as told in game is almost incomprehensible.

The main collectable, like Mario's coins or Sonic's rings, are these little orbs that make a weird monkey noise when you touch them. I got several levels into them game without understanding what they are, and had to check the manual. Basically, you're poisoned, all the time. These items are an antidote that you need to constantly replenish to stay alive. You basically have two health bars, one that only goes down when you get hit, and one that you need to constantly fill with these orbs.

There's a car section where you're in this map, it's a desert area with some small trenches and two towers connected by a bridge. To progress, you need to destroy five tanks. To destroy the tanks, you need to chase and run over these little blue things that are running around in the sand; when you hit these blue things your car gets a blue aura, and you need to hit the tanks while you have this aura. There's other cars in the area that chase you around, and if they hit you, you lose the blue aura.

The second turrent section is, until that point, the absolute low point of the game. You're on a boat with two guns, one at the back, one at the front. At the very least, you don't actually need to manage the two guns at all, as enemies will only ever spawn on one side of the boat, and you only need to move to the other gun once the area is clear. You can't hold down the fire button for very long, for some reason this is seemingly the only area where your gun has a cooldown. To keep firing without overheating, you need to tap the fire button the entire time. The enemies constantly shoot projectiles, you have to shoot the projectiles in order to destroy them. These projectiles exist for the sole purpose of making sure that you spend most of the fight shooting at something that isn't the enemy, making the fight drag on and on, likely for more than a half an hour. If you die, you start over. You probably will die, and you probably won't even know why. Maybe you were walking between the guns and a stray missile hit the boat and made a massive hitbox, maybe you didn't realize that the shield meter acts as the boat's health meter for this segment. More than likely, this is the first time in the game that the player is stuck in the same place doing the same thing for so long that the poison meter actually starts to be a problem. The boss of the level has so much health that it's basically guaranteed that you will need to abandon your post in order to restock your antidote, and in the meantime your boat will be left defenseless. It's a delicate balancing act that goes on for way longer than it has any right to.

I don't know if it comes across in text, but it's almost impossible to talk about this game's mechanics in plain terms without slipping into a James Rolfe impression. That's what I mean when I say this game already would have felt dated in 2002. Mechanically, it operates on logic so obtuse that each individual part of this game's whole could have been an Atari 2600 game. Even so, even in its mechanics, it still almost feels ahead of its time simply because the "Freeformer" (TM) is basically the blueprint for the modern AAA game. Between Tim Rogers' idea of GTA as an "argument solver" or Nakey Jakey's justification of Naughty Dog's prestige titles, the critical glorification of games that are a jack of all trades and a master of none, I had to wonder if the ideal video game for the average gamer is anything more special than a high gloss Action 52. Here it is. Haven: Call of the King is that game.

However, Haven: Call of the King feels ahead of its time primarily because it is simply a technical marvel. This is a PlayStation 2 game, it has no load times. None. You load once when you boot the game up, it lasts barely 5 seconds. You will never see another loading screen again for the entire play session. It has seamless auto-save, it typically runs at 60 frames per second, it has so many particle effects on the screen that I would think even today's particles (which exist primarily to showcase the fine detail offered by 4K) would blush! It has an enormous consistent world consisting of multiple planets.

There are two problems with this. The first is that the game is so linear that there is simply no opportunity to appreciate it. The second is that as a result the most positive impression that the game can leave on someone can be reached just by looking at the title screen for a few minutes; the title screen shows a zoom into the main planet from space, then soaring through various landscapes. Apparently, if you go through the tedious trial of collecting every optional collectable in the game, at the very end, you gain the ability to freely fly through the galaxy and find a handful of hidden levels throughout all the game's planets. Getting to that point (hell, even just getting to the end of the game without the collectables) is so tedious that I can't imagine any significant portion of the people who bothered to play this game at all have experienced it, nor should they feel obligated to.

On the other hand, the fact that the game is technically so well crafted makes it so uniquely playable. There are so many egregious instances of bullshit in this game that if dying carried the penalty of a 20 second reload, I would have dropped it so much earlier. But because there's so little downtime, because the loop of feedback and retrial is so fast, flaws that would usually be inexcusable become more tolerable. It's damn good thing you don't need to worry about lives either; most of the time when you respawn the actual game-state hasn't even changed, you just get moved back to the checkpoint, and sometimes you can even still see the thing that killed you in the exact same place it was before.

One of the other reviews on this site calls Haven a "Jak and Daxter rip-off" (and from various other sites this seems to be a common observation) and while the game isn't good enough to necessarily call this a "disservice", I do think it's inaccurate. Haven is very much of its time, but in a more complex way than ripping off a single game. The aesthetic is a combination of tacky 00's fashion and post-late-90's gross-out cartoon humor that could have easily manifested on its own. There are hints of Lord of the Rings, there's a lot of the Star Wars prequels, and C.S. Lewis (Narnia) was explicitly cited as an inspiration in interviews. It's a piece of media that very obviously comes from the perspective of contemporaneous Christianity; like a video game adaptation of Angel Wars.

The reason for this is that this, perhaps more than any other Traveler's Tales game, seems to be Jon Burton's baby; going by his credits, this appears to be one of the last games that he had a direct hand in programming. It has both a weird sort of heart and an off-putting uncanniness that I would usually only expect to see from outsider art, from random eccentric individuals online. Again, narratively inspired by C.S. Lewis, which "has a clear gospel allegory while still featuring proactive characters". Aesthetically, the concept art was done by one of the artists who did album covers for the supergroup Asia. Mechanically, it was inspired by ambitious Amiga games like Mercenary. The game was meant to be sort of deceptive about its own scope, to slowly open up and surprise the player.

Well, congratulations, we were deceived. Players were so utterly deceived that everyone thinks the game is a boring, linear, lifeless, empty action game, and frankly, they aren't even really wrong.

That final optional space-faring completionist journey is so interesting, because if that had been the game's core loop this could have been something truly groundbreaking. Haven was so damn close. Even if the game opening up had been a more gradual process, it would have made all the difference; for example, there's a moment where the player escapes a prison satellite and crash lands on an unfamiliar planet. If the player landed in a wilderness and had to organically search for civilization, that could have been interesting. Instead, Haven conveniently lands in the only place on the planet where he can find a ship to get back up into outer space.

The popular comparison is to No Man's Sky, another overly ambitious game about going to different planets, but in the actual playing of the game, this is not the experience I think most people will have. Here are a few comparisons that I think are more appropriate:

Imagine if all of Sonic Adventure's mechanics, the platforming, the flying, the pinball, the fishing. Imagine they were all just a little more polished. Imagine that the tradeoff is that half of the game's voice lines, most of your favorite songs, and ALL of the game's flavor text and NPC dialogue were completely removed.

Imagine if Bethesda made a game as big as Daggerfall, but literally every area that wasn't directly relevant to the main quest was completely empty. Imagine that if you managed to replay the entire game without taking damage, you could unlock half a dozen sidequests, and none of them were anything special.

Imagine if The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was ugly, and you didn't get a single new piece of equipment after Windfall Island.

Haven: Call of the King is not good, but it is interesting. Apparently, this game's failure is one of the main reasons that Traveler's Tales is where they are today; with this game flopping so hard, the team that would have worked on a sequel got assigned to a Lego: Knights Kingdom game that the studio would have otherwise turned down, a game that never materialized because Lego would quickly request a Star Wars tie-in in its stead.

Fun fact, if you do a bit of googling you can find out all kinds of things. I'm like 90% certain that the only reason Burton is making a Funko Pop game with his newly formed studio 10.10 Games is because Steve Jobs' widow wants his mansion, and if he's gonna have to move into a new one he'll probably need a few more million for his house-hunting budget. Not to mention Funko probably has about as much access to different IP's as Lego does, Funko is bigger right now than ever, and Burton's favorite game to work on was apparently that Lego Dimensions crossover game. Video games are stupid and I hate them. Our entire hobby really does just mutate to suit the whims of distant multi-millionaires. Very cool.

The story is so flimsy and skeletal that it's hard to truly glean any thematic substance from it at all, but if I were to try, I would focus mostly in the juxtaposition between the Golden Voice and whatever the hell that magic rock was called. Basically, they are functionally identical objects, each made to facilitate a cry for help. One exists to summon the fictional world's Messiah figure, the other for asking Haven to aid Chess, the game's damsel in distress who ultimately betrays him. If only Haven had simply done what all true Christians do, ignore a friend in need. Only then could Athellion have saved humanity.

Anyway, Haven is so out of touch, out of time, that I'm not sure if it's a wicked artifact of a darker alternate timeline, a shining example of what video games could be if developers cared more about optimization and minimizing bloat, or a caricature of exactly what the AAA industry aspires to at this very moment. Whatever.

In the 1983 film A Christmas Story, the main character's father receives a large package in the mail as a prize for solving crossword puzzles. The giant crate contains a lamp in the shape of a larger-than-life-size leg wearing a fishnet stocking. His wife hates it, eventually destroying it. He tries to put it back together. It might seem obvious but it's important to emphasize that while the film's narrator sees it as a primal signifier of sex, the father surely must know how tacky and shameful it is to display it in the window for all to see. He doesn't like it because it's good, he likes it because it's his, because he won it, because it's a symbol of his accomplishment. It's a matter of pride.

"It is the first American-produced visual novel"

For the first several years of my adulthood, I worked in a retail store. Christmas came and went, and every year we stocked a variety of holiday novelties and trinkets, including cheap reproductions of recognizable objects from a number of Christmas movies. Every year we got the leg lamp. We got it in different sizes. They sold, they sold out, and once it was sold out people would still come in asking if we had it.

"They sold this. To people. For money."

Plumbers Don't Wear Ties has no redeeming qualities. It isn't a good game, it isn't a good piece of software, it isn't a good video or PowerPoint presentation or whatever. James Rolfe could have told you that, and he did, and that's the only reason anyone knows what this is, and the people publishing the remaster know this. The original is a piece of shit from top to bottom, beginning to end, from concept to production to release, and it is a piece of shit in earnest. There is no reason to go back to it, it deserves no legacy.

Yet it's being re-released for purchase and play on modern systems, under the pretense of historical significance or preservation. It will be bought out of irony, to share in some arms-length observation, a gross curiosity. From tip to tail the cultural object that is Plumbers Don't Wear Ties has been transformed from something honestly and irredeemably bad, to a completely disingenuous empty spectacle.

I haven't played it. You haven't played it. Nobody should play it. Nobody can play it, because it isn't a game. It shouldn't be here, it shouldn't be on the Switch or the PlayStation or the Xbox, it shouldn't be in your library, it shouldn't be in your thoughts. Let it fade away.

Ufouria/Hebereke 2 was developed by a small team from a new development studio called Tasto Alpha, the heads appear to mostly be Grasshopper Manufacture alumni. From what I can tell this is only their second game, the first being a card-based RPG from last year. The sound director for Ufouria 2 was one of the composers on Godhand, the director was one of several planners on Rule of Rose. The game has a charming aesthetic, great new remixes of tunes from the original game, and a good sense of humor. It's structured less like the "search action" style of the original, and more like a scaled down Amazing Mirror with extremely lite Rogue elements. The game is about 3 hours long and the last chunk is mostly mirrored versions of previous levels.

2 months into 2024, this is the most fun I've had with a new game this year. In fairness, there are a lot of games that I would be unsurprised if I had more fun with them when I eventually play them, and some of those games are already out. Maybe I'll like Infinite Wealth more than this, but I want to play other games in the series first. Maybe I'll like Relink more than this, but when that game launched it wasn't on my radar.

A couple weeks ago Penny's Big Breakaway "shadow dropped". I don't want to be too hard on it, because it's definitely an interesting game, because I think I could reasonably speculate on what could possibly be going on in the games industry climate for them to want to rush a sellable product out the door as soon as possible, and because some of the issues I have with it could be patched. One of the main things I've found myself thinking as I try to make more progress through the game is whether or not I would care about the game's collision issues, audio problems, and general "jank" if it were a PS2 game. Next to the latest Nintendo platformers Breakaway falls a little short, but it's clear sense of style and sheer amount of content for a game of its type would have made it a must-buy a couple decades ago. It's the exact kind of game you could imagine Treasure making if they were still around today, but the standards a lot of players have today are likely part of the reason Treasure's future exists mostly in rumors.

Ufouria 2 is a much easier game than the original, but could a game with those kinds of expectations still appeal to the intended audience of the IP? We're stuck with a classic problem of bringing back a piece of media like this, is it hard enough for returning adult fans while being easy enough for the possible new generation? A longplay of the original NES game is about half the length of my playthrough of the new one; even if the game's semi-random level layouts offer a bit of padding, it's definitely of comparable length, probably just a bit bigger. If Ufouria 2 was an NES game, or a SNES game like the many Japan-only spin-offs, would we remember it? Does Ufouria: The Saga already give us the answer to that question?

Would I recommend Ufouria 2? Do I think you should wait for a sale? These are absurd questions. If enough small teams existed around the world making games of this exact scope that one game like this released every week, I know exactly how I would spend Friday night every weekend. I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less. I hope these guys were paid well.

A few years ago I bought my dad a Super Nintendo Classic for Christmas. I knew he had played Master System as a kid and had played Nintendo 64 when I was young, so I figured he probably had some memory of the 16-bit period in between. I showed him several of the games on it, but only one caught his eye enough for him to play it on his own time. Donkey Kong Country is still a genuinely captivating game even more than 25 years after its original release.

In some ways I genuinely consider Donkey Kong Country to be a more true successor to Super Mario Bros. than any of the actual Mario sequels (perhaps excluding one or two of the New Super Mario Bros. games). Super Mario World, for example, is absurd: there are powerups that will allow you to completely bypass certain levels, and many levels present little interesting mechanical challenge. In many ways Super Mario World is more of a playground than an obstacle course, which works both against it and in its favor. For the mostpart, Donkey Kong Country continues the original Super Mario Bros.' trend of having a character with a simple, clear moveset, and building courses which thoroughly explore and test those capabilities. The secrets are also very well placed, with the presence or absence of certain in-game objects effectively communicating to an astute player that there's more than meets the eye.

It's a shame though that there are still a number of levels which instead rely on some gimmick or a fairly lazy type of challenge. Clam City features wide rectangular spaces full of haphazardly placed swarms of enemies, punctuated by thin corridors lines with projectile spewing turrets. The barrel-focused levels are unbearably tedious when lining up the cycles of your aim and the enemy positions, and the actual required timing of the button press is so precise that it's borderline unplayable with any degree of input latency. I probably wasted about 30 lives on Snow Barrel Blast before I found the shortcut that skips the most difficult section.

The subtle differences between the two playable characters are interesting, and usually without interrupting normal gameplay. Diddy's barrel holding hitbox is generally favorable to Donkey's, who holds them above his head rather than in front. However, being without Donkey Kong in later levels can be frustrating, as the game starts to employ more of the larger enemies that Diddy can't jump on. As odd as it may seem that Donkey Kong isn't playable in the sequels, I think it makes sense: Rare redesigned Donkey Kong with the goal of making him more compact, as you generally want a platformer character to be as round as possible, but during certain animations he still sprawls out across nearly a quarter of the screen.

I'm not terribly interested in Game Theory-tier readings of this game which declare it to be allegorical for western imperialism or literal banana republics. However, I do find it interesting that one of the first games where every object in game was rendered in 3D, creating such an aesthetically realized sense of place, presents itself as a struggle between nature and industry, apes against lizards, the animal against the alien.

I think this particular contrast is the most singular defining element of the game's surface. We see these detailed characters and environments, but all of it is mediated by the limitations of much weaker hardware than that which was used to create it. We can barely perceive what Donkey Kong Country was to the people who made it, and that makes it all the more beautiful. I think that's why fan "remasters" of these games seem hokey to me, and why I think the newer Retro Studios games have a kind of cartoonish crass feeling. They are simple, open, and truthful about what they are, in a way that isn't as poetic as the SNES games' decrepit ambiguity.

The soundtrack needs no introduction, though I think there are some interesting choices to note. The overworld theme is pleasant, bouncy; despite K. Rool's presence, this place is still Donkey Kong Country, it's home. Bonus rooms have a light-hearted tone, unlike the frenetic music found in the later games. This is probably because there aren't collectables here as there are in the sequels, so there's less pressure, nothing to miss. The palette swapped water levels in World 5, which alter the textures of the environment to look like a toxic waste dump, recontextualize the more electronic sounds and industrial percussion of the soundtrack. The song takes on a feeling both of wonderment in the early levels, of the magnificence of undersea life, and of crushing melancholy at its pollution.

Compared to the later games this one does lack some polish. Early levels themes like the jungle and water stages feature a lot of impressive effects, with both several parallax layers and line-scrolling to simulate a great sense of space. By World 3 most of the new themes that are introduced are rather static by comparison. Sometimes the visuals don't seem to line up particularly well with the actual hitboxes, the frog animal buddy sticks out as particularly odd.

King K. Rool is not a character I have as much fascination with as others, I was rather nonplussed by his addition to Super Smash Bros. That said, he has a kind of Rankin/Bass sort of charm to his visual design. His final boss fight isn't very fun; there's a lot of delay between his attacks, in particular the one that reveals his weak point, which makes the battle primarily a test of patience.

And I guess that's how I would sum up the game as a whole. It has a lot of charm, and has fun moments throughout, but its most interesting moments are a bit frontloaded, becoming more and more of an endurance test as it goes on. Even using the BARRAL cheat code to start with 50 lives, I ran out right after the final save point. Probably more than half of the lives I lost were depleted across only a few particularly egregious levels. If you can put up with these occasional roadblocks, Donkey Kong Country is a genuinely good game with a unique sense of real artistry behind it.

Sonic Adventure is not the best game of all time, but it might be the coolest, and I can't stop smiling when I play it.

Virtually every gripe I have with this game is technical. Every character besides Sonic has terrible camera angles in the Adventure Fields, and I think the developers knew this because by the time you reach Amy's story the game isn't even letting you explore anymore, it's just transporting you directly to wherever you need to be. Character animation in cutscenes is often hilariously exaggerated. Tons of Eggman's lines are reused, as if they had to strategically give him few enough sound bites to fit on the disc, though many conversations that occur in multiple characters' stories use different voice clips in each one, so I doubt this was the actual reason. Collision can be shaky at times, but it isn't anywhere near as bad as it's sometimes made out to be. The general themes and events of the story are great, though it sometimes seems to lack structure: every time I was teleported to the Echidna city I had no idea what I was there for or where to go.

Other than a certain obvious outlier, I honestly think I enjoyed Sonic's story the least out of any of the characters (I did enjoy it though, don't get me wrong). It seems clear to me that his segment of the game was meant more as a showcase. His story is the longest, it has the most levels, and it probably has the most varied content. Nearly every level is throwing in a new gimmick, gameplay styles change so often to the point where I feel like it's hard to find time to appreciate Sonic on his own merits. Pinball, kart racing, snowboarding, rail shooting...

The draw of the gameplay, for me, is that each of the characters (again, there is an obvious exception) is uniquely satisfying to move. Sonic has the homing attack, spin dash, and light speed dash, all enabling him to move as fast as one would expect. Tails can fly upward slightly, followed by a controlled descent, which give his sections a bit of lenience that I think is appropriate for Sonic's first truly 3D outing; I honestly think his levels, with their unique alternate paths, were my favorite part of the game, and I wish his story was longer. Knuckles can glide for long horizontal distance. Amy is slow but attacking while running will fling her into the air. Gamma has a slight hover and rolls around when at top speed.

The outlier, of course, is Big the Cat. Many adventure-themed video games from around this time had a fishing mini-game. These were usually optional distractions built for pure amusement in case the player wanted to take a break from the main game. Sonic Adventure breaks the mold by making its fishing mini-game both devoid of fun, and necessary to reach the end of the narrative. By the time I finished Sonic's story I had 30 lives, I never had a game over with any character until I reached Big's first stage. I had to google how to catch Froggy: you just wait until he bites, then hold down on the analog stick and mash A and B. If you know what you're doing it's a complete waste of time, and if you don't, well, good luck.

Everything about the game's presentation is just endearing. The soundtrack, whether its just background music or the character songs, is pretty much perfect. The visuals, while sometimes rough around the edges, are just as often stunning, especially for the time (note: I played with the better SADX mod, using Dreamcast graphics for pretty much everything besides the water textures). The intro FMV is still straight up pretty much the most hype shit of all time.

Most of the character's stories are pretty good, though again it is lacking structure. Sonic's story, as far as the plot is concerned, is kind of a mess, genuinely falling apart in the second half; if you aren't already aware of the events of the other characters' arcs, it feels really random. Tails and Amy have nice stories that are largely self-contained, while Knuckles' story largely serves to develop the setting and mechanics of the world. E 102-Gamma's story is probably the most interesting thing Sega has ever done with the basic concepts of the original Sonic games. Big's story is pretty much pointless.

Sonic Adventure is kind of a situation of high highs, and low lows. It goes back and forth constantly between being a really engaging platformer with unparalleled vibes, and a bizarre mini-game collection barely held together with duct tape.

I didn't even know Crazy Taxi had sequels until a few months ago. If you look for the game on any current digital games distributor you're only going to find the original, and I never saw any of the others in arcades, so I assumed that Crazy Taxi was just... Crazy Taxi, that's it.

For some reason, Crazy Taxi 2 is only on Dreamcast and PSP, and this game is only available either as a shitty 2004 abandonware PC port that was never released outside of Japan and Europe, or on the original Xbox. Neither game has been re-released in about 15 years. I didn't want to bother with the apparently awful controller setup for PC, or modding in the original soundtrack, and I already had an original Xbox, so I figured I'd go with that version.

My Xbox had been sitting in an attic for at least 2 years at this point, and it had some issues. For one thing, it had a disc stuck in it; it wouldn't eject, and it wouldn't read either. It had been owned by a smoker at some point and though it was pretty clean (all things considered), what little debris was inside the drive had settled and clung tight to the optic, and it was stuck in place. After some cleaning the disc would read, but it still wouldn't come out without manually hitting the lever inside, so it also needed a new drive belt for the eject mechanism. The component video also had a bad Pr cable, though I'd wanted an S-video cable to use it on my CRT anyway so that wasn't a huge loss.

It didn't really impact the ability to play games, so I didn't think much of it at first, but the system also immediately powered on as soon as it was plugged in, and the power button didn't do anything at all; the only way to turn it off was to remove the plug. What this indicates is likely that a trace in the corner of the board has been broken by corrosion, and the source of that corrosion is the capacitor for the system's clock. Almost every original Xbox has this issue.

So the only way to play what is arguably the definitive version of one of the most iconic late arcade releases from one of the biggest video game publishers can only be played by either settling for a bad version that you'll have to fix yourself, or by using a machine that's basically shitting itself to death, which you will also have to fix yourself.

I say "definitive version" because the Crazy Taxi sequels aren't really "different" games, they don't have alternative content, they have new content. Each new game still contained the maps and drivers from the old games, while adding new mechanics. Crazy Taxi 3 has Crazy Taxi 1 and 2 in it, it should have rendered previous games obsolete, it should have become the standard, and yet it's been almost completely forgotten outside of a tiny number of hardcore fans.

The main additions that the sequels made in terms of gameplay, aside from the new levels, is the ability to jump and the option to pick up groups instead of just single passengers. Jumping naturally allows for both more movement altogether as well as some crafty shortcuts. Picking up groups introduces a greater deal of risk/reward: groups offer much higher fares, but you won't get any of the money unless you make it to every stop. If you fail, you not only lose out on the money, you've also lost a lot more time than if you had picked up a single person.

Why hasn't this game had a modern release? Maybe it's because of its nature as an Xbox exclusive. Maybe it's because of the licensed music from major rock acts. Maybe it's all of the product placement. Maybe it's because after three different versions of Crazy Taxi, critics at the time had gotten bored of it. Checking Metacritic, Craxy Taxi 2 and the PS2 port of the original were the only versions that were received particularly well around the time this game released.

Whatever the case, it's bizarre that a genuinely good installment from a major series has been relegated to more or less the same fate as shovelware.

This is some strong, distilled, pure Video Game in a way that I didn't think Sonic Team had in them.

At first glance the abstract platforms and rails floating above each hub level feel odd, almost like a test level. I found this feeling subsided rather quickly, the abstraction instead serving to give the game a much more consistent visual language than other recent entries, and the wide spaces giving the player much more opportunity to anticipate hazards. Very few obstacles feel cheap in the way that many sections did in previous "boost" games, not only due to the differences in level design, in structure (small sections, quick reloads), but because Sonic's moveset allows for so much more correction. Not only does Sonic have a double jump (with the homing attack moved to a separate button), but boosting in midair will also give him some extra height instead of propelling him directly forward. Levels feel like actual spaces instead of completely automated rollercoasters, you can just reverse direction to pick up an item you missed, even when rail grinding if you're careful.

Comparisons to Breath of the Wild or Unreal "hire this man" demos feel sort of disingenuous even if the resemblance is undeniable; the game is borrowing so many elements from so many sources that it seems kind of telling to fixate on this particular most surface level aspect. Eiji Aonuma didn't invent grassland, but Shigeru Miyamoto did invent purple coins though, and Hideaki Anno invented big robots with teeth (these are true facts, no need to verify).

The pop-in issues mostly affect the small platforming challenges scattered around each hub area. I didn't really find the pop-in detracting from the moment-to-moment platforming, though there is another issue. Many of the "islands" are more like archipelagos, which is to say they aren't a single continuous landmass. A lot of the time, in order to reach another area of the game world, you'll need to use one of these discrete platforming challenges as a bridge. Sometimes it's difficult to tell if a far off area is inaccessible, or if you just haven't gotten close enough for the rail that will take you there to load in.

Many of these short platforming sections will lock the camera into a set angle, often effectively turning the game 2.5D for a time. This can leave the player unable to freely move through the level until they complete the challenge; this wasn't a serious issue for most of the game, but the third hub world in particular began to test my patience. I found myself getting looped back into the same handful of challenges in order to move between certain parts of the island, and the more jagged, unnatural environment compared to the other zones made these moments feel rather awkward. At points it honestly reminded me of the Getting Over It easter egg in Just Cause 4.

Starfall, this game's equivalent of Breath of the Wild's bloodmoon, is genius. In the dark of night, led by pillars of light, the player is encouraged to mindlessly chase these sparkles. It's not just plain good base fun, a complete sugar rush, it encourages the player to stop really paying attention to their surrounding and get lost. Lose your sense of direction in this game where both traversal itself is intrinsically fun and where transit time from one place to another is so short that getting yourself a bit turned around and disoriented is nothing but a plus. Not to mention it completely distracts the player from the (disappointing, in my opinion) fact that the "real" reason this is happening is to respawn all the enemies you killed. And this is before we consider the actual reward for taking part.

Every time starfall happens is an opportunity to potentially get hundreds upon hundreds of the coins required to play the fishing mini-game. Spend the coins to catch fish, trade fish for a different kind of coin, spend those coins in a shop. You can buy small experience boosts or upgrade items, you can buy short audio-logs for a little extra lore, or you can buy any major collectable in the game. I was excited for an open world Sonic game, I was not excited to play more boost levels, and it turns out I didn't really have to. I didn't play a single cyberspace stage in the final hub world, I fished my way to the end, and had a great time.

The story is fun, the characters are great, the soundtrack is fantastic. I don't even mind that it takes literal years to upgrade your speed and ring capacity, one level at a time, because the song that plays when you talk to the relevant NPC is so good. Pop-in aside the game is gorgeous, the last couple of islands being just plain jaw dropping.

I'll be honest, while Sonic's moveset is improved here, this is still not my favorite collection of platform mechanics, and with however many hundreds of wallruns and railgrinds and puzzle minigames you're going to be asked to do there's sure to be some duds. If you want all killer, no filler, pure platforming action, you're better off checking out Spark the Electric Jester if you haven't. But this is the best big budget scrimblo bimblo collectathon from a company not called "Nintendo" in the past decade, not that that's a category with a terrible lot of competition.

Balan Wonderworld is a unique disappointment.

The character designer and lead programmer behind Sonic the Hedgehog unite once more, and while Arzest doesn't have the best track record they do have some number of former Sega staff. While its initial reveal didn't have much of an effect on me, as the months went by I began to wonder if this could be a kind of return to form, a rebirth of that classic Sega ethos that was largely lost not too long after they started releasing games on hardware that was not their own. The release of the game's demo, of course, quelled whatever hopes I had.

Discourse on the game around the time of its launch followed a clear pattern:

"The game is mediocre at best."

"It's for kids, of course an adult would find it dull."

"A game being for kids doesn't excuse its flaws."

Frankly, even if this game wasn't meant to be anything more than an ultra-accessible spectacle for toddlers (which I don't think is particularly unlikely), I think it trips over itself to get there.

Much has been said about the "1 button" philosophy, and at the very least I do think there is something interesting going on here. The sticks and buttons on the face of the controller, the part of the controller visible to the player, are manipulated with the thumbs and control the character; the shoulder buttons, atop the edge of the controller and pressed with the index fingers, control the more indirect and abstract costume switching. There is a very clear sort of psychological separation between these two elements of the game's control, and at first it could seem almost clever, that this is something which a person unfamiliar with games could find intuitive.

But there's one glaring issue with trying to interpret the controls this way: why do the triggers, which are also obscured by the face of the controller, act like face buttons when it would make more sense in this framework for them to have the same effect as the shoulder buttons? Is it because the game expects you to control the camera yourself, meaning that if you couldn't use your index finger to jump you would be stuck using the claw grip if you wanted to play with any degree of finesse? Is it because the game released not too long after the launch of two new consoles, each boasting their own form of Adaptive Haptic HD Rumble trigger vibration?

Whatever the case is, it's just one aspect of how this particular manifestation of the "1 button" mandate fails. Sonic the Hedgehog was a game that aimed to take the Mario platforming format, and lower the skill floor while raising the skill ceiling. It made the character control as simple as possible: get rid of the run button, and make acceleration a standard feature of movement. Jumping is then the only remaining action, but the complexity comes from how the player's basic abilities interact with the slopes and hazards of the environment, this is what makes the game hard to master.

What made Sonic easy to learn was not so simple as "all the buttons do the same thing", or even that the player could always jump. The most vital piece of the puzzle is that pressing a button always consistently performed a single action.

Balan Wonderworld is not a "1 button" game. That one button can perform so many possible actions that this simply isn't a worthwhile way to think about the game. It's an entire modular keyboard, but you only have 3 key caps, and you can only press one down at a time. The player's capabilities lie in such a tangled web of conditions that the simplicity of a single button is completely undermined, yet the limitations of each of those abilities are so rigid that there's no room for growth. Balan Wonderworld is a game that is hard to really grasp, and this knowledge has no reward.

Balan Wonderworld is a game with beautiful cinematics (that look so good in fact that they make the in-game graphics somewhat pitiable), a memorable soundtrack (though a certain amount of this is definitely due to how heavily it leans into tropes and borrows from its contemporaries), and lovable character designs (that are made mostly forgettable by the fact that this game has no dialogue and the story is instead buried in supplementary material). It even has some well-structured levels that would probably be a lot more fun to explore in a game that wasn't so scared of letting you interact with them. Even the mere conceit of the sort of "Sonic Team Reunion" that put this game into motion has since been revealed to be a begrudging one.

There are things to like about it, but each comes with some obvious contradiction nested within. I can't bring myself to truly hate Balan Wonderworld, but it is one of the most hollow and rote platformers I've played in years, possibly ever.

I would like to apologize for all the times I said "Dark Souls II is bad for a Souls game, which is still pretty good."

It's truly incredible that a game which so obviously prioritizes quantity over quality still manages to feel so small. Every level is little more than a series of hallways connected by elevators, tunnels, trenches, and canyons. There is never any sense of place. When I played Bloodborne again recently, I constantly felt tricked by the sheer amount of detail outside of the play area, that the game was compensating for something; it's incredible that Dark Souls II came out only one year earlier and tries to cover the same tracks with little more than JPEGs of mountains. It's a PS3/360 game, sure, but it's still the most ugly and empty Souls game of its generation.

Combat is basically ruined. Positioning-focused playstyles are virtually useless because of how strong the enemies' rotational tracking is, not to mention many enemies have a slam attack that limits your walking speed even if it doesn’t make contact. Parrying has been slowed down to the point where it can't really be used reactively to most attacks. Dodging has had its effectiveness tied to a stat that most players won't understand the significance of unless they read a wiki or otherwise engage with a community outside of the game itself (undermining both the combat and the game's own integrated social features), and the hitboxes are sloppy enough that it doesn’t feel right anyway. Every aspect of Dark Souls II's combat design discourages active play; the shield is more central to the game's "conditioning" than in any other From Software game simply because it’s the only effective defensive option left.

Dark Souls II's ending is the same as the first, the player's character is given a choice; unlike the original however, the player does not actually choose, the choice is only implied. The fact that there is a Dark Souls sequel at all in the first place has already invalidated the player’s decision at the end of the prior game. Link the fire or let it die, the curse will return all the same. The entire game seems dreadfully aware of how pointless the endeavor of making another Dark Souls was in the first place. Its world has no believable structure, its characters have no memories and only sparse motivation. The gameplay has changed form not to try to be interesting on its own merits, but to induce the same feeling as the first game to the detriment of all else.

Dark Souls’ bloodstain system was an effective way of encouraging the player to learn the game; your souls are left wherever you died, and surely since you got there once before you can do it again, and probably have an easier time of it with newfound experience. Dark Souls II does everything it can to reproduce this effect not on the player-end, but within the level design. The game is full of dark areas, but if the player lights a torch it stays lit forever. Some areas have as many as four NPC invasions, but a defeated invader stays dead. Even regular enemies will stop respawning if the player kills them enough times. Dark Souls might have felt like a wall that you were chipping away at, but the change wasn’t happening in the game, it was happening in your head, in your hands. Here, the gameplay absolutely is just an obstacle to whittle away at.

Towards the end of the game, the player travels into the memories of dead giants. Their tree-like corpses give off some strange glow, like the insects in the game’s intro cinematic. To some extent I wonder whether this is meant to imply that the entire game takes place within a mere memory, that the lack of insight into the characters and the fragmented geography is meant to represent things not remembered. Perhaps too, the only value of the game is its intellectual property, the memory of Dark Souls.

People have always speculated about or wished for a sequel to Demon’s Souls or Bloodborne, but the conflict of those games is over, the threats which drove their premises are out of the picture. Dark Souls was itself the same, a total work, and making a sequel was always a fool’s errand. Some complain that the diegetic emphasis on dying and losing you souls is some kind of cheap marketing ploy, leaning into the games’ reputation for difficulty, but the very use of the Dark Souls brand was in the first place a cynical decision. What else was there for them to do?

Quelaag was a spider lady because the first flame was fading, and the witch of Izalith tried to conjur a new one; this artificial flame became chaos, a cursed lava that transformed people into insectoid demons.

Najka is a scorpion lady because Dark Souls had a bug lady too, and they want to do another one like that.

Sure, in the beginning Quelaag also probably started out as “just a cool idea for a boss”, but what made Dark Souls truly special was that everything, even silly video game bullshit like the monsters you fight, had its place in the world. Why was Blighttown poisonous, and why did the people in Blighttown look the way they did? Because Blighttown was in the runoff of the Lordran sewer system. Why are the Gutter and Black Gulch poisonous? Because it’s Dark Souls! There has to be a dark and difficult poison level! Why do the people of the Gutter look all sickly and green? There is no particular reason, every hollow in Drangleic looks like that. It’s interesting that Hidetaka Miyazaki has said that he tries to make sure that even the monsters in his games have a sort of nobility, and that the only game in the series that he did not direct immediately took the sharp left turn of making the undead look like stupid green zombies.

Dark Souls II makes a lot of great quality of life adjustments that would carry over into future entries, but virtually all of them feel like bandages on mortal wounds dealt to Dark Souls’ design. You can re-spec your character, likely because by the time you realize how important adaptability is you’ll be so far into the game that you’ll need to kill multiple bosses to add a single frame of invincibility to your dodge roll. Changing or removing weapon infusions no longer requires lowering your weapon level, and it better not since they got rid of the actually useful scaling infusions and replaced them with the brilliantly useless “mundane” weapon.

The environmental design and aesthetic of the DLC areas is absolutely the highest point of the game, but it isn’t enough to save it. It’s the same game, with the same combat system, and the same types of encounters seen in the base game.

You could do worse, and many trying to ape the Souls style certainly have, but this one is really only recommended as a curiosity.

Really great score, John Williams-esque. Great sound design, love the release of tension when a room is clear. The characters have a surprising amount of charm given their appearance and the kind of game it is, and while the immediate experience of the world is largely ugly hallways, the larger concepts are intriguing. The core combat has an interesting rhythm and I definitely prefer it to, for example, Halo. The game is paced pretty well, never letting the player go too long without acquiring a new weapon or meeting a new enemy.

Encounter design is hit or miss, and going off-script is gravely punished even on the easiest difficulty. The game itself though has absolutely no problem going-off script; the AI partners' pathing is terrible, and on multiple occasions scripted events (doors opening, cutscenes starting after fights, etc) simply wouldn't happen until long after they were clearly supposed to. Certain artistic elements of the game's visual design are interesting, but the classic idiosyncrasies of the Unreal 3 shooter aesthetic are just technically atrocious.

I dunno, I think this game kinda rocks? At least a little bit?

The soundtrack is phenomenal, swinging effortlessly between the bombastic freneticism of classic Sonic the Hedgehog styled tunes and more thoughtful pieces reminiscent of early synthesizer music.

I love the way the game controls, the way Sonic moves, I love the split second of tension as you approach an enemy and with just a tap of the spindash button reduce it to dust.

I like that the game makes deciding when to turn in your flickies to their ring shaped receptacle into a meaningful decision; do you send them home early so that you don't have to worry about losing one? Or do you hang onto all five of them for a points bonus, and to be able to use them to collect powerups that Sonic can't reach on his own?

I love the game's lively animation and cutscenes. I love that each level has a new element to keep things fresh (even if some of the levels are rather visually busy).

I love how Panic Puppet Zone throws you for a loop; up until that point, every area of the game is split into zones, each with only 5 enemies each, one for each flicky. In Panic Puppet Zone, enemies don't drop flickies anymore; the first Act has only 5 total (the fewest of any stage in the game) and all of them are in a kind of bespoke container, and the second Act has none at all! With flickies and enemies completely mechanically separated, the final Zone of the game is able to throw way more enemies at the player, but because of how few flickies their are, rushing to the end as fast as possible is more viable than ever.

The game is not perfect. It's a little long, I was a bit surprised that Gene Gadget Zone was not the final level. The Final Fight, which I believe is only accessible if you collect all of the chaos emeralds, is pretty much unfair and I will openly admit to using the Steam version's Rewind feature to get through it. Outside of the two final bosses, I only died twice. Once was right after leaving a bonus area, and spawning back into the main level with no rings, and immediately dying to a spike trap. The other time was when I lost my fire shield power up in Volcano Valley Zone, which is about as disastrous as losing all of your power ups in a Gradius game.

I like that at the end of the game's final level, the entrance to the final boss arena is a tube that goes up a giant Eggman statue's enormous nostril.

Personally, I think it truly is... a blast 😏