ThruLidlessEye
1999
"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.
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.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the sixteenth best-selling video game of all time, the world's collective digital retreat from The Event. The Nintendo Switch is currently the fifth best-selling video game system of all time, and very well may overtake the Game Boy by the time it's discontinued. This game, and the Nintendo Switch, are each their own sort of Cultural Moment. A Social Phenomenon for millions of people.
I do not believe I have ever seen a Nintendo Switch, physically, in person, that was not my Nintendo Switch. That's all.
I do not believe I have ever seen a Nintendo Switch, physically, in person, that was not my Nintendo Switch. That's all.
2020
The most fun I had in Cyberpunk 2077 was sitting in the passenger's seat of a car, looking out the window, an activity that the game loudly informs you that you are able to skip at any time.
Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I'm part of the problem. I bought the game during this ongoing surge of popularity that seems to be going on due to the anime and the DLC announcement or whatever. I waited almost 2 years until the game was supposedly fixed up, I waited until the game's initial moment had passed enough that it did not so viscerally feel like an obvious laughing stock, until the game's defenders had quieted down enough that I no longer felt compelled towards contrarianism. There probably simply is not a better time for someone like me to get into Cyberpunk 2077. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a good time to get into this game at all.
To be clear, I was never hyped for this game, for a number of reasons. I played The Witcher 2 and I didn't like the characters, I didn't like the world, and I hated the combat, so I didn't play the sequel, and I had no reason to keep up with CDPR. However, I'm the kind of dweeb who watches all the big press conferences and sees all the new trailers and stuff, so naturally I had the game's title put in front of my face a handful of times over the course of about half a decade. Everyone falls prey to hype once or twice; maybe it's just a generational thing, whether it's each literal generation of humans born has their own ultimate zeitgeist letdown, or each generation of new hardware having its big new title that promises the world and never delivers. In any case, CDPR was putting up a lot of red flags from the start.
The thing about press releases, vertical slices, trailers, any pre-release coverage of a video game, is that you absolutely need to be skeptical of anything that isn't crystal clear. You should never assume that the game will contain anything you haven't seen. I like to think I'm pretty savvy when it comes to video games, and even in the last year or so leading up to the release of CP77 I had absolutely no idea what kind of game it even was, let alone the scope that they were aiming for. Everything was pure suggestion, nothing but talk, and the only explanations I can possibly think of for why so many people bought into it wholesale is because of the good will that CDPR had previously built up, or because many of the people on the hype train were either young or naive enough to not immediately be able to sniff out bullshots.
So what kind of game is Cyberpunk anyway? It's the same kind of game as Donkey Kong 64, or Haven: Call of the King. Haven: Call of the King really is one of the most eye-opening experiences I've had with a game in a while, like looking at the Rosetta stone of the modern AAA language. Calling Cyberpunk a game feels kind of silly; what are its core mechanics? There is shooting, yes, but you could go hours without doing it. Like those two other games I mentioned, Cyberpunk 2077 is mostly a game where stuff just happens.
You talk, you drive, you walk, you get into the passenger's side of your car for the first time and if you have half a brain in your head you think, "hmm, I wonder if the game is going to do something that will require my character to have their hands free to do something that isn't steering", and sure enough you do set-piece car chase rail shooting section. You do some cover shooting, and it's kind of like if every cover shooter you played 10 years ago was more clunky. You finally get let out into a part of the city that seems like something resembling an open world, and you find that it's still an empty façade, a more geometrically complex equivalent to the seemingly endless fields outside the main play areas of Overgrowth.
Something genuinely frustrating to me is that in both the opening desert area where the Nomad path begins and in the aforementioned initial city area, the game limits how far you can go with a Battlefield-esque warning that you've gone too far. Cyberpunk is far from the only game to do this, but even a game like Recore at least tries to contextualize this mechanic by putting little signposts up and saying anything beyond that point is radioactive. In Cyberpunk, you literally just get a message on your screen saying not to go that way until you get further in the game, and you get warped back if you keep going.
Think about a game like Ocarina of Time, the opening area is surrounding by walls of earth, in a lot of those old games even outdoor areas are sort of boxed in, always conveniently in some kind of canyon or ravine. There are two paths out of the town, both of them are blocked until some kind of progress is made. The blockage is in this case a character who stops you and provides some narrative justification for why you can't go that way, and moves once that reason is rendered null. Now, blocking a path with an NPC, ultimately a game object, feels sort of "game-ey". It's the kind of thing that we might avoid today unless the game is being made with some kind of limitation or there is some kind of unique narrative reason where having a person block a door makes immediate real-world sense. But isn't it still better than reminding the player not just that they are experiencing fiction, or making them recognize the mechanical layer of the game, but perhaps even worse making them directly confront the fact that this is a piece of software? There's probably some moron thinking "well, yeah, software is pretty cyberpunk right? It's part of the theme!"
Why even have such a big city if I'm just going to look at the mini map the whole time? Why animation facial expressions and motion capture gestures on everyone if I'm going to have to keep my eyes glued to the subtitles, or rather, to the area of the screen where my dialogue options will appear, so that I have time to read them before the other character snarkily asks if a cat's got my tongue.
There's so many weird things about choice. The character creator has quite a number of fields which contain options, but none of those fields actually has that many options. It's less of a character creator and more of a character tasting, it exists just to give you a sense of what a person in this world is. It doesn't have the haircuts that it has so that you can choose what best suits how you might imagine yourself in a hypothetical cyberpunk story, it presents a limited number of options to prepare you for the specific mold that you will have to fit for this cyberpunk story. It would be almost admirable if it didn't feel like the same obvious "Choices Matter" trick that every faux RPG for the past decade and a half has been pulling our legs with.
Something that still drives me nuts about Haven: Call of the King is that I really don't know how impressed I should be with it; it's a genuinely kind of terrible game that's mostly only made interesting within the framework of its world being a technical marvel for the time, but you spend so much of the game not really interacting with the world in any meaningful way that you have to wonder how much of it is a trick, because regardless of whether this impressive fractally generated world around you is "real" does not meaningfully impact the actual play experience in any way. Cyberpunk is, ironically much like the Deus Ex reboots, mostly just a linear cinematic AAA action game that is only made interesting by the idea that it's actually a role playing game. Though, like with Haven's massive multi-planet game world, this RPG element is mostly just a framing device, something to periodically gesture towards in order to try and remind the player how impressed they should be.
I'm playing the game on a machine lugging around more tera-FLOPS than even a person who actually knows what that means can really comprehend, and I'm still constantly shocked by how poor the texture quality is. I tried playing a bit of the game with ray-tracing enabled, and just as with literally every other game I have ever played with a ray-tracing option I am not only unimpressed by the visual changes, I genuinely cannot believe that anyone chooses to play games with this level of performance.
When I got to the braindance part I was reminded of Remember Me, and decided to look up a gameplay video on youtube. After a feature film's worth of Cyberpunk's sleep-deprived drivel I was completely blown away by how more emotive Remember Me's voice performances were by comparison. Everyone in Cyberpunk talks like the kid in high school who chews tobacco in class. Some of the most annoying dialogue I've ever heard delivered in a tone most reminiscent of a distant relative that you don't really know dismissively telling you "that's just how life is, man..."
It is just genuinely depressing to think of how much work went into something this cold and stale.
Fun fact I actually didn't experience many obvious bugs, mostly just general jank, like the game generally just feels terrible, characters' pathing is just constantly breaking, etc. However, the very first time that I booted the game up, instead of seeing the splash screen that's supposed to appear, I found myself staring at a completely solid white screen, so that was a good first impression.
Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I'm part of the problem. I bought the game during this ongoing surge of popularity that seems to be going on due to the anime and the DLC announcement or whatever. I waited almost 2 years until the game was supposedly fixed up, I waited until the game's initial moment had passed enough that it did not so viscerally feel like an obvious laughing stock, until the game's defenders had quieted down enough that I no longer felt compelled towards contrarianism. There probably simply is not a better time for someone like me to get into Cyberpunk 2077. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a good time to get into this game at all.
To be clear, I was never hyped for this game, for a number of reasons. I played The Witcher 2 and I didn't like the characters, I didn't like the world, and I hated the combat, so I didn't play the sequel, and I had no reason to keep up with CDPR. However, I'm the kind of dweeb who watches all the big press conferences and sees all the new trailers and stuff, so naturally I had the game's title put in front of my face a handful of times over the course of about half a decade. Everyone falls prey to hype once or twice; maybe it's just a generational thing, whether it's each literal generation of humans born has their own ultimate zeitgeist letdown, or each generation of new hardware having its big new title that promises the world and never delivers. In any case, CDPR was putting up a lot of red flags from the start.
The thing about press releases, vertical slices, trailers, any pre-release coverage of a video game, is that you absolutely need to be skeptical of anything that isn't crystal clear. You should never assume that the game will contain anything you haven't seen. I like to think I'm pretty savvy when it comes to video games, and even in the last year or so leading up to the release of CP77 I had absolutely no idea what kind of game it even was, let alone the scope that they were aiming for. Everything was pure suggestion, nothing but talk, and the only explanations I can possibly think of for why so many people bought into it wholesale is because of the good will that CDPR had previously built up, or because many of the people on the hype train were either young or naive enough to not immediately be able to sniff out bullshots.
So what kind of game is Cyberpunk anyway? It's the same kind of game as Donkey Kong 64, or Haven: Call of the King. Haven: Call of the King really is one of the most eye-opening experiences I've had with a game in a while, like looking at the Rosetta stone of the modern AAA language. Calling Cyberpunk a game feels kind of silly; what are its core mechanics? There is shooting, yes, but you could go hours without doing it. Like those two other games I mentioned, Cyberpunk 2077 is mostly a game where stuff just happens.
You talk, you drive, you walk, you get into the passenger's side of your car for the first time and if you have half a brain in your head you think, "hmm, I wonder if the game is going to do something that will require my character to have their hands free to do something that isn't steering", and sure enough you do set-piece car chase rail shooting section. You do some cover shooting, and it's kind of like if every cover shooter you played 10 years ago was more clunky. You finally get let out into a part of the city that seems like something resembling an open world, and you find that it's still an empty façade, a more geometrically complex equivalent to the seemingly endless fields outside the main play areas of Overgrowth.
Something genuinely frustrating to me is that in both the opening desert area where the Nomad path begins and in the aforementioned initial city area, the game limits how far you can go with a Battlefield-esque warning that you've gone too far. Cyberpunk is far from the only game to do this, but even a game like Recore at least tries to contextualize this mechanic by putting little signposts up and saying anything beyond that point is radioactive. In Cyberpunk, you literally just get a message on your screen saying not to go that way until you get further in the game, and you get warped back if you keep going.
Think about a game like Ocarina of Time, the opening area is surrounding by walls of earth, in a lot of those old games even outdoor areas are sort of boxed in, always conveniently in some kind of canyon or ravine. There are two paths out of the town, both of them are blocked until some kind of progress is made. The blockage is in this case a character who stops you and provides some narrative justification for why you can't go that way, and moves once that reason is rendered null. Now, blocking a path with an NPC, ultimately a game object, feels sort of "game-ey". It's the kind of thing that we might avoid today unless the game is being made with some kind of limitation or there is some kind of unique narrative reason where having a person block a door makes immediate real-world sense. But isn't it still better than reminding the player not just that they are experiencing fiction, or making them recognize the mechanical layer of the game, but perhaps even worse making them directly confront the fact that this is a piece of software? There's probably some moron thinking "well, yeah, software is pretty cyberpunk right? It's part of the theme!"
Why even have such a big city if I'm just going to look at the mini map the whole time? Why animation facial expressions and motion capture gestures on everyone if I'm going to have to keep my eyes glued to the subtitles, or rather, to the area of the screen where my dialogue options will appear, so that I have time to read them before the other character snarkily asks if a cat's got my tongue.
There's so many weird things about choice. The character creator has quite a number of fields which contain options, but none of those fields actually has that many options. It's less of a character creator and more of a character tasting, it exists just to give you a sense of what a person in this world is. It doesn't have the haircuts that it has so that you can choose what best suits how you might imagine yourself in a hypothetical cyberpunk story, it presents a limited number of options to prepare you for the specific mold that you will have to fit for this cyberpunk story. It would be almost admirable if it didn't feel like the same obvious "Choices Matter" trick that every faux RPG for the past decade and a half has been pulling our legs with.
Something that still drives me nuts about Haven: Call of the King is that I really don't know how impressed I should be with it; it's a genuinely kind of terrible game that's mostly only made interesting within the framework of its world being a technical marvel for the time, but you spend so much of the game not really interacting with the world in any meaningful way that you have to wonder how much of it is a trick, because regardless of whether this impressive fractally generated world around you is "real" does not meaningfully impact the actual play experience in any way. Cyberpunk is, ironically much like the Deus Ex reboots, mostly just a linear cinematic AAA action game that is only made interesting by the idea that it's actually a role playing game. Though, like with Haven's massive multi-planet game world, this RPG element is mostly just a framing device, something to periodically gesture towards in order to try and remind the player how impressed they should be.
I'm playing the game on a machine lugging around more tera-FLOPS than even a person who actually knows what that means can really comprehend, and I'm still constantly shocked by how poor the texture quality is. I tried playing a bit of the game with ray-tracing enabled, and just as with literally every other game I have ever played with a ray-tracing option I am not only unimpressed by the visual changes, I genuinely cannot believe that anyone chooses to play games with this level of performance.
When I got to the braindance part I was reminded of Remember Me, and decided to look up a gameplay video on youtube. After a feature film's worth of Cyberpunk's sleep-deprived drivel I was completely blown away by how more emotive Remember Me's voice performances were by comparison. Everyone in Cyberpunk talks like the kid in high school who chews tobacco in class. Some of the most annoying dialogue I've ever heard delivered in a tone most reminiscent of a distant relative that you don't really know dismissively telling you "that's just how life is, man..."
It is just genuinely depressing to think of how much work went into something this cold and stale.
Fun fact I actually didn't experience many obvious bugs, mostly just general jank, like the game generally just feels terrible, characters' pathing is just constantly breaking, etc. However, the very first time that I booted the game up, instead of seeing the splash screen that's supposed to appear, I found myself staring at a completely solid white screen, so that was a good first impression.
1982
Every single driving game that has ever mattered is just this game with better or worse graphics.
2015
"girls" are not real and i have never seen one in real ife
Some games feel like they were made by an artist, some games feel like they were made by a storyteller, some games feel like they were made a game designer, some games feel like they were made by a corporation, some games feel like they were made a programmer.
Mercury Meltdown is the kind of game that I feel like even an indie dev might not make today, certainly not with any expectation of commercial viability. Maybe something like this might be made in the smallest scale possible for a game jam or something. Its relatively narrow focus on soft-body physics and color theory combined with its unabashed use of what feels like surely must be "programmer art" makes it feel completely alien to today's video game industry paradigm. It opens with a reference to a C64 loading screen, it has autosave but it's quite slow; you might spend as much time in the menus between levels as you do in gameplay, even if you always select the "go to next level" option after finishing each stage. The ability to save ghost players and replays, it's a feature set we might consider rather unusual for a console game, especially for the time.
This is the version of the game that I played when it was new, so this is the version that I sought out. It is somewhat surprising to me that this is a port of a PSP game given that its liquid physics seemed kind of crazy at the time, but today it is not surprising at all that the original version of the game was the kind of game that had a person's full name in the title. It's just that sort of old fashioned piece of software, like an Atari 2600 game just showed up more than 20 years later.
It's like Monkey Ball meets Marble Blast injected with a variety of its own weird game-ey concepts, the kinds of things that feel like they could only exist in obscure PC shovelware, 100,000 game in 1 type stuff. I want to be clear: I am absolutely delighted that there is a major release for the best-selling console of all time that plays like this and is available on a physical disc. A decade and a half or so ago, this is just what a video game was still allowed to be, and I think there is something genuinely beautiful about that.
Mercury Meltdown is the kind of game that I feel like even an indie dev might not make today, certainly not with any expectation of commercial viability. Maybe something like this might be made in the smallest scale possible for a game jam or something. Its relatively narrow focus on soft-body physics and color theory combined with its unabashed use of what feels like surely must be "programmer art" makes it feel completely alien to today's video game industry paradigm. It opens with a reference to a C64 loading screen, it has autosave but it's quite slow; you might spend as much time in the menus between levels as you do in gameplay, even if you always select the "go to next level" option after finishing each stage. The ability to save ghost players and replays, it's a feature set we might consider rather unusual for a console game, especially for the time.
This is the version of the game that I played when it was new, so this is the version that I sought out. It is somewhat surprising to me that this is a port of a PSP game given that its liquid physics seemed kind of crazy at the time, but today it is not surprising at all that the original version of the game was the kind of game that had a person's full name in the title. It's just that sort of old fashioned piece of software, like an Atari 2600 game just showed up more than 20 years later.
It's like Monkey Ball meets Marble Blast injected with a variety of its own weird game-ey concepts, the kinds of things that feel like they could only exist in obscure PC shovelware, 100,000 game in 1 type stuff. I want to be clear: I am absolutely delighted that there is a major release for the best-selling console of all time that plays like this and is available on a physical disc. A decade and a half or so ago, this is just what a video game was still allowed to be, and I think there is something genuinely beautiful about that.
2010
This was one of my favorite games back in the early days of the app store, maybe my favorite game that wasn't just a port of an old computer game. Believe it or not this game has a small but vocal fanbase that seems to have basically been begging the developer for a remake for years. Supposedly it's somewhere in the pipeline, but unfortunately (like with many other things these days) up-to-date information on the developer's games seems to reside primarily in a Discord server.
2013
Probably still the best Don’t Nod game.
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.
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.
When I was in high school there was literally nothing in the world funnier than the title of this game.
This was one of my favorite online games when I was in high school. I mostly played during the beta, when it was still just called Ghost Recon Online. I used to make videos going over balance changes; back when youtube still had the video replies feature, there were other fans of the game that I would have back-and-forth discussions with that way. I would post on the game's forum and contributed a terrible mspaint achievement icon for a contest or something. This game was originally going to come out on the Wii U as well, and it was one of the games I was most excited for because my laptop didn't run the game very well. By the time I had a Wii U, the game was out, the Wii U version was abandoned, and I had pretty much entirely stopped playing. At present the game has been shut down long enough that even if you wrote a review on this website as early as you could, you would be going off years old memories.
I guess, what I'm getting at is that this is just part of growing up, part of time passing. Friends, online and in person, that you don't talk to anymore, places you can't go. The stream behind the house of a family friend is now the property of a stranger, and "Ghost Recon Online" is a game for which The Moment has so totally passed that it practically does not exist.
Tevis Thompson's review of Fortnite is a great read, but has had a frustrating impact on the way some people talk about the game. It's an excellent account of one person's experience, but that's just it, it's one person's experience. The passage of time is not a thematically important element of Fortnite anymore than changes to the map generation are thematically important to Minecraft. Not being able to easily make a new "Glacier" seed on the current patch did leave my teenage self with a kind of somber longing, and those emotions are real, but you can't expect them to communicate this feeling effectively to another person, and this is rather important because I would argue, and I think many would agree or at least relate, that the entire point of art is to create objects which can communicate in that way. Thompson's review spends a portion of its word count responding to Dan Olson's critique, the idea that Fortnite is ultimately just a store, but even more ardent defenders of Fortnite as more than just "the game where Goku kills Darth Vader" will lovingly compare the game's impermanence to a corner-store under new management.
An online game, dead or completely warped, no longer the same object or anything at all, can be sad. It can be disappointing, it can make you truly feel a real emotion, but that doesn't make it art. Ghost Recon Online is not an abstract painting representing the loss of innocence, it isn't even the school where you learned your first instrument, it is the laser-tag place you went to for your girlfriend's birthday when you were a teenager. It's the sandwich place that used to be your favorite restaurant in the mall food court; the sandwich is nothing special, you can get it anywhere, there are other restaurants in the same chain other places in town, you could probably even make a better one yourself if you bought the ingredients at the grocery. The sandwich was never the important part, it's the time of your life you spent eating it, and the people you shared it with.
I guess, what I'm getting at is that this is just part of growing up, part of time passing. Friends, online and in person, that you don't talk to anymore, places you can't go. The stream behind the house of a family friend is now the property of a stranger, and "Ghost Recon Online" is a game for which The Moment has so totally passed that it practically does not exist.
Tevis Thompson's review of Fortnite is a great read, but has had a frustrating impact on the way some people talk about the game. It's an excellent account of one person's experience, but that's just it, it's one person's experience. The passage of time is not a thematically important element of Fortnite anymore than changes to the map generation are thematically important to Minecraft. Not being able to easily make a new "Glacier" seed on the current patch did leave my teenage self with a kind of somber longing, and those emotions are real, but you can't expect them to communicate this feeling effectively to another person, and this is rather important because I would argue, and I think many would agree or at least relate, that the entire point of art is to create objects which can communicate in that way. Thompson's review spends a portion of its word count responding to Dan Olson's critique, the idea that Fortnite is ultimately just a store, but even more ardent defenders of Fortnite as more than just "the game where Goku kills Darth Vader" will lovingly compare the game's impermanence to a corner-store under new management.
An online game, dead or completely warped, no longer the same object or anything at all, can be sad. It can be disappointing, it can make you truly feel a real emotion, but that doesn't make it art. Ghost Recon Online is not an abstract painting representing the loss of innocence, it isn't even the school where you learned your first instrument, it is the laser-tag place you went to for your girlfriend's birthday when you were a teenager. It's the sandwich place that used to be your favorite restaurant in the mall food court; the sandwich is nothing special, you can get it anywhere, there are other restaurants in the same chain other places in town, you could probably even make a better one yourself if you bought the ingredients at the grocery. The sandwich was never the important part, it's the time of your life you spent eating it, and the people you shared it with.
I didn't really have a great deal of interest in this in the first place, but it was on Game Pass and I was curious what lessons the Western AAA Game Industry was taking from that new Zelda.
When you boot up the game, the health warnings, the splash screens, the main menu, the checking for add-ons, the initial setup options, every single thing about this is literally the same as in games like Assassin's Creed, and I have to wonder if literally every Ubisoft game has this homogenous user experience now. Anyway, the final step before you're allowed into the game is to log into your Ubisoft Connect account. It offered to just use my Xbox information, which I would have done, but it noticed that there was already a Ubisoft account associated with my email, so I tried making an account with an alternate email only to realize that I already had made an account with that one as well.
I can't be bothered to log into an account that I haven't used in almost a decade (I probably made these accounts for Ghost Recon Online which later became Ghost Recon Phantoms) just to play a game I wasn't interested in to begin with. As a game, I don't care, and I don't care about anything else Ubisoft is doing either. As a piece of software, this is just shit.
When you boot up the game, the health warnings, the splash screens, the main menu, the checking for add-ons, the initial setup options, every single thing about this is literally the same as in games like Assassin's Creed, and I have to wonder if literally every Ubisoft game has this homogenous user experience now. Anyway, the final step before you're allowed into the game is to log into your Ubisoft Connect account. It offered to just use my Xbox information, which I would have done, but it noticed that there was already a Ubisoft account associated with my email, so I tried making an account with an alternate email only to realize that I already had made an account with that one as well.
I can't be bothered to log into an account that I haven't used in almost a decade (I probably made these accounts for Ghost Recon Online which later became Ghost Recon Phantoms) just to play a game I wasn't interested in to begin with. As a game, I don't care, and I don't care about anything else Ubisoft is doing either. As a piece of software, this is just shit.
Turn of the millenium Lego just hits so different.
I feel bad for not playing this until I got it for free. I feel worse for not finishing it until I got it for free a second time.
Update: I have now purchased a copy of the game.
Update: I have now purchased a copy of the game.
90% of what I would way about this game I already said in my review of the second one. In some ways I prefer how concise the previous game is, but this is just plain unreal. It's more polished, encourages more varied styles of platform gameplay, has a more coherent story that's genuinely gripping by the end. I could nitpick about minor gripes I have with small changes made from the previous one, the same way I could with a 3D Mario game, but at the end of the day 3D Spark has some of the best 3D platforming mechanics that exist, and this is more of it.
I'm usually pretty cynical but a few games this year have made me feel ways that games haven't made me feel in quite a while. A very exciting time. You absolutely cannot miss this.
I'm usually pretty cynical but a few games this year have made me feel ways that games haven't made me feel in quite a while. A very exciting time. You absolutely cannot miss this.