Trance
2023
Played: January 2024
Why so much serious-minded affect when the follow-through has no backbone? An adult romance reduced to puppy dog eyes and sexless nudity. A depiction of slavery so liberalized it walks into conservatism. Any semblance of meaningful commentary on economic or environmental violence marred by contradictions and lack of imagination in worldbuilding. Some imagery, presentation, and occasional sense of place round out the highlights, but Final Fantasy XVI betrays the promise of a challenging narrative by instead delivering the frictionless experience of a hot knife through butter.
Misogyny is a hit-and-run job throughout. Sure, the camera doesn't leer, and the clothing is sensible, but in every woman's story the initial signs of interesting motivations and machinations turn out to be false. Benedikta is presented as having a dangerous shadowy agency until she's revealed to be a mess of trauma-fueled narrative confusion. Annabella could've been a window into the fascist obsession with eugenics, but she's given no interiority to carry out a real idea. Jill amounts to a fair maiden awaiting her knight despite a rich backstory rife with corrosive revenge and tough responsibility that is hardly allowed to play out. There's a prominent presence of off-screen sex work in the game, but FFXVI's answer to the Madonna-whore complex is to just make all the "whores" into "Madonnas" out of shame. This speaks to how underwritten the men are as well, but the frameworks the female characters are placed into are uniquely sexist. Trust me, I'd rather not have to harp on representation, but when a work has taken so many steps back, how can I not?
"And then there's the slavery" is not how I wanted to start this sentence, but here we are. FFXVI wants to take human bondage seriously and does just enough to signal so. But it's foundational understanding is either so misguided, or it chose so many incongruous plates to spin, that anything it has to say about subjugation and dehumanization wanes from toothless to reactionary by default. Like the characters, its politics initially intrigued me. Was this going to be an entire game about blowing up mako reactors? Are we really going to contend with the morality of violent liberation and what it may wreak on the intended beneficiaries? Is everyone so institutionally conditioned to accept slavery that I'm going to have to sit with genuine unease about potential allies? The answer to all of these range from "not really…" to "lol no". In the early going the depictions of oppression coupled with disorienting aesthetic choices put me in an exciting discomfort that I could not wait to see pay off. Even if the final statements or questions to come could be exploitative or nasty, something interesting was bound for me. And then… nothing. Or nothing but sliding further into shonen iconography, and with it, an easy morality. Morality so easy, that the resolution of certain injustices slide into conservatism not out of any actively destructive worldview (that could still be interesting) but a lazy passive decline into status quo. FFXVI just walks away. I spent a while wondering if I prefer Tales of Arise's failure that simply picked a topic that was always out of its depth or this one that makes an earnest attempt and then sidelines it for nothing. Honestly, I don't know. Maybe I'm just letting the presentation fool me into believing it's taking it seriously?
Because it's a pretty presentation. I'm not someone who was bothered by the cursing or the purple verbiage. The voice acting felt correctly theatrical. The kaiju Eikon fights were mostly thrilling but also too sparkly with little consideration for depth of field. I have felt similarly confused about where to focus my eyes during Final Fantasy XIII's gorgeous spectacles. The vistas are picturesque and traversal was a pleasure. Clive's jump sucks, but the actual footfalls through the land felt tactile, and I honestly had no trouble with the timing of his sprints or riding the Chocobo. On a purely arcade level, I'm of two minds on the combat. It's filled with beats of cathartic power fantasy, but the rhythm of nearly all fights are boringly similar. On a thematic level, it's a shame that anything about a world so complicit in injustice could feel so frictionless. There are times to have your cake and eat it too, but you can't position yourself above pastry only to fall flat with pie on your face.
I've read thoughtful defenses of Final Fantasy XVI, and, man, I wish I played the same game. If we went point for spoilerous point on my issues, I'm sure its champions could highlight answers squirreled away somewhere in the game. Show me a way to look at how each bug is a secret feature. But that's the forest for the trees. It just doesn't add up to a whole that conveys a clear eyed approach to slavery, environmental justice, the definition of freedom, and the discomfort of fighting for it. All topics that the story openly declares war on, and all explorations that I have to squint hard to make sense of. Previously, I met Final Fantasy XV beyond halfway and fell in absolute love with it, but the difference is that I didn't have to be talked into it.
Let's end on a good note. What are those 2 stars worth? A sense of place, time, and people. Whatever their politics, I took 70+ hours to play this game because I was always invested in listening to its denizens wherever I set foot. Every new town or settlement, every NPC on the road, every trip to the Hideaway, I was eavesdropping. Even the bad sidequests flesh out the world as being full of real-ish people. I actually believe the game is doing something interesting with its models by not designing the Hollywood handsome main characters to stand out too far from the masses as most RPGs do. Intentional or not, this creates an equalizing effect in aesthetics regardless of what the narrative undercuts. Similarly, I quite like the music because, while there are few earworms, the soundtrack creates an ambiance of melancholy and malaise that uniformly blankets Valisthea. I'm also a sucker for a good home base with all your pals, and the Hideaway is delightful and ripe with endearing sidequests to pick from. A game where I have the patience to walk the farthest reaches of the central hub between each mission just to hear what the gardener has to say about recent events is doing something right.
What Final Fantasy XVI lacks in substance it makes up partly in texture. Too bad that's not nearly enough.
Why so much serious-minded affect when the follow-through has no backbone? An adult romance reduced to puppy dog eyes and sexless nudity. A depiction of slavery so liberalized it walks into conservatism. Any semblance of meaningful commentary on economic or environmental violence marred by contradictions and lack of imagination in worldbuilding. Some imagery, presentation, and occasional sense of place round out the highlights, but Final Fantasy XVI betrays the promise of a challenging narrative by instead delivering the frictionless experience of a hot knife through butter.
Misogyny is a hit-and-run job throughout. Sure, the camera doesn't leer, and the clothing is sensible, but in every woman's story the initial signs of interesting motivations and machinations turn out to be false. Benedikta is presented as having a dangerous shadowy agency until she's revealed to be a mess of trauma-fueled narrative confusion. Annabella could've been a window into the fascist obsession with eugenics, but she's given no interiority to carry out a real idea. Jill amounts to a fair maiden awaiting her knight despite a rich backstory rife with corrosive revenge and tough responsibility that is hardly allowed to play out. There's a prominent presence of off-screen sex work in the game, but FFXVI's answer to the Madonna-whore complex is to just make all the "whores" into "Madonnas" out of shame. This speaks to how underwritten the men are as well, but the frameworks the female characters are placed into are uniquely sexist. Trust me, I'd rather not have to harp on representation, but when a work has taken so many steps back, how can I not?
"And then there's the slavery" is not how I wanted to start this sentence, but here we are. FFXVI wants to take human bondage seriously and does just enough to signal so. But it's foundational understanding is either so misguided, or it chose so many incongruous plates to spin, that anything it has to say about subjugation and dehumanization wanes from toothless to reactionary by default. Like the characters, its politics initially intrigued me. Was this going to be an entire game about blowing up mako reactors? Are we really going to contend with the morality of violent liberation and what it may wreak on the intended beneficiaries? Is everyone so institutionally conditioned to accept slavery that I'm going to have to sit with genuine unease about potential allies? The answer to all of these range from "not really…" to "lol no". In the early going the depictions of oppression coupled with disorienting aesthetic choices put me in an exciting discomfort that I could not wait to see pay off. Even if the final statements or questions to come could be exploitative or nasty, something interesting was bound for me. And then… nothing. Or nothing but sliding further into shonen iconography, and with it, an easy morality. Morality so easy, that the resolution of certain injustices slide into conservatism not out of any actively destructive worldview (that could still be interesting) but a lazy passive decline into status quo. FFXVI just walks away. I spent a while wondering if I prefer Tales of Arise's failure that simply picked a topic that was always out of its depth or this one that makes an earnest attempt and then sidelines it for nothing. Honestly, I don't know. Maybe I'm just letting the presentation fool me into believing it's taking it seriously?
Because it's a pretty presentation. I'm not someone who was bothered by the cursing or the purple verbiage. The voice acting felt correctly theatrical. The kaiju Eikon fights were mostly thrilling but also too sparkly with little consideration for depth of field. I have felt similarly confused about where to focus my eyes during Final Fantasy XIII's gorgeous spectacles. The vistas are picturesque and traversal was a pleasure. Clive's jump sucks, but the actual footfalls through the land felt tactile, and I honestly had no trouble with the timing of his sprints or riding the Chocobo. On a purely arcade level, I'm of two minds on the combat. It's filled with beats of cathartic power fantasy, but the rhythm of nearly all fights are boringly similar. On a thematic level, it's a shame that anything about a world so complicit in injustice could feel so frictionless. There are times to have your cake and eat it too, but you can't position yourself above pastry only to fall flat with pie on your face.
I've read thoughtful defenses of Final Fantasy XVI, and, man, I wish I played the same game. If we went point for spoilerous point on my issues, I'm sure its champions could highlight answers squirreled away somewhere in the game. Show me a way to look at how each bug is a secret feature. But that's the forest for the trees. It just doesn't add up to a whole that conveys a clear eyed approach to slavery, environmental justice, the definition of freedom, and the discomfort of fighting for it. All topics that the story openly declares war on, and all explorations that I have to squint hard to make sense of. Previously, I met Final Fantasy XV beyond halfway and fell in absolute love with it, but the difference is that I didn't have to be talked into it.
Let's end on a good note. What are those 2 stars worth? A sense of place, time, and people. Whatever their politics, I took 70+ hours to play this game because I was always invested in listening to its denizens wherever I set foot. Every new town or settlement, every NPC on the road, every trip to the Hideaway, I was eavesdropping. Even the bad sidequests flesh out the world as being full of real-ish people. I actually believe the game is doing something interesting with its models by not designing the Hollywood handsome main characters to stand out too far from the masses as most RPGs do. Intentional or not, this creates an equalizing effect in aesthetics regardless of what the narrative undercuts. Similarly, I quite like the music because, while there are few earworms, the soundtrack creates an ambiance of melancholy and malaise that uniformly blankets Valisthea. I'm also a sucker for a good home base with all your pals, and the Hideaway is delightful and ripe with endearing sidequests to pick from. A game where I have the patience to walk the farthest reaches of the central hub between each mission just to hear what the gardener has to say about recent events is doing something right.
What Final Fantasy XVI lacks in substance it makes up partly in texture. Too bad that's not nearly enough.
Played: November 2023
Miles Morales apparently raised this franchise into the category of "buy at full price" because I needed my web-swinging fix to continue immediately after finishing it, and Spider-Man 2 was there to give it in spades. How well Insomniac has mastered traversal is truly remarkable. I love flipping through new suits, gliding through New York City (now up to 3 boroughs), and punch-swing-kicking bad guys like it's Saturday morning, and I'm 10 years old. As suspected, Peter really does hit stronger protagonist notes than Miles. I could actually feel how the symbiote was affecting him through combat. And while moment-to-moment story beats do little for me, the sum of the parts add up to more than enough by the endgame. Like the first game, the emotional investment creeps up on you, even if individual scenes or character chemistries waver throughout. Still, it never reaches those Doc-Ock highs.
I wouldn't be interested in this story outside of the context of a game, but when you're in their shoes, the Spider-Men are good at making you care. These games are too slight to reach my all-timers, but coupled with the extremely feel-good gameplay over a tough Thanksgiving, Spider-Man 2 was worth the full $70 USD.
Miles Morales apparently raised this franchise into the category of "buy at full price" because I needed my web-swinging fix to continue immediately after finishing it, and Spider-Man 2 was there to give it in spades. How well Insomniac has mastered traversal is truly remarkable. I love flipping through new suits, gliding through New York City (now up to 3 boroughs), and punch-swing-kicking bad guys like it's Saturday morning, and I'm 10 years old. As suspected, Peter really does hit stronger protagonist notes than Miles. I could actually feel how the symbiote was affecting him through combat. And while moment-to-moment story beats do little for me, the sum of the parts add up to more than enough by the endgame. Like the first game, the emotional investment creeps up on you, even if individual scenes or character chemistries waver throughout. Still, it never reaches those Doc-Ock highs.
I wouldn't be interested in this story outside of the context of a game, but when you're in their shoes, the Spider-Men are good at making you care. These games are too slight to reach my all-timers, but coupled with the extremely feel-good gameplay over a tough Thanksgiving, Spider-Man 2 was worth the full $70 USD.
Played: August 2023
Higher highs than Great Ace Attorney: Adventures and lower lows.
On pure drama, it's through the roof. I'm obsessed with the decision to split up "Pursuit" as two separate tracks in the score. What a surge of amplitude. When you get on that dog-on-a-bone thread with a penultimate line of questioning, and then the track shifts from Prelude to the main Pursuit theme, you will feel as if you're marshaling all the forces of truth in the world to rain down justice on a corrupt influence. A single katana slash in music form.
The characters remained endearing, and Ryunosuke Naruhodo is cemented as a protagonist for the Ace Attorney history books. 90% of the core mystery was a thrill to seek through and resolve.
Yet, I also can't hide some disappointment. The difficulty couldn't make up its mind if I should be thinking only a half step or a whole 2 steps ahead, often within the same case, which is all around a step back from the intuition honed in the previous game. Iris as a character never clicked with me. A couple of the secondary narrative resolutions also weren't as satisfying as could be.
THEMATIC SPOILER (no plot details): The biggest letdown, however, was the story's choice to pull back on indicting the structural forces of Western hegemony that these two games spent so many combined trials and tribulations to pursue. In the end, the villainry is reduced to powerful individuals. And while it doesn't negate the critical eye that came before, the status quo is unjustly glorified. I had such high hopes as this duology bared its fangs for 90% of the way only to sand things down at the end. Your tolerance may vary at certain gimmicky plot copouts, but the heart of my issue lies with the story poising itself to be something sharper than its gift-wrapped ending turned out to be. END THEMATIC SPOILER.
Still, these are a pair of series high marks. No assistant quite hits like Susato, including her role in the killer opening case of the second game. All in all, extremely worth anyone's time, Ace Attorney veteran or not.
Higher highs than Great Ace Attorney: Adventures and lower lows.
On pure drama, it's through the roof. I'm obsessed with the decision to split up "Pursuit" as two separate tracks in the score. What a surge of amplitude. When you get on that dog-on-a-bone thread with a penultimate line of questioning, and then the track shifts from Prelude to the main Pursuit theme, you will feel as if you're marshaling all the forces of truth in the world to rain down justice on a corrupt influence. A single katana slash in music form.
The characters remained endearing, and Ryunosuke Naruhodo is cemented as a protagonist for the Ace Attorney history books. 90% of the core mystery was a thrill to seek through and resolve.
Yet, I also can't hide some disappointment. The difficulty couldn't make up its mind if I should be thinking only a half step or a whole 2 steps ahead, often within the same case, which is all around a step back from the intuition honed in the previous game. Iris as a character never clicked with me. A couple of the secondary narrative resolutions also weren't as satisfying as could be.
THEMATIC SPOILER (no plot details): The biggest letdown, however, was the story's choice to pull back on indicting the structural forces of Western hegemony that these two games spent so many combined trials and tribulations to pursue. In the end, the villainry is reduced to powerful individuals. And while it doesn't negate the critical eye that came before, the status quo is unjustly glorified. I had such high hopes as this duology bared its fangs for 90% of the way only to sand things down at the end. Your tolerance may vary at certain gimmicky plot copouts, but the heart of my issue lies with the story poising itself to be something sharper than its gift-wrapped ending turned out to be. END THEMATIC SPOILER.
Still, these are a pair of series high marks. No assistant quite hits like Susato, including her role in the killer opening case of the second game. All in all, extremely worth anyone's time, Ace Attorney veteran or not.
Played: November 2023
Gita Jackson's Vice piece lived fondly in my head for quite some time before I ever played Miles Morales. In particular the bit about being able to virtually step through the spaces that they physically couldn't during COVID. While the game lives up to that hominess, it also lives up the rest of Gita's points on rudderless politics.
The current run of Spider-Man games have min-maxed my tolerance for rinse-and-repeat gameplay to perfection. They barely outstay their welcome. Swinging is a thrill every time. Combat puts up only as much challenge as your brain is indecisive about when to switch things up, but it's always comfortable. Traversal is frictionless.
Also frictionless is Miles Morales' style, identity, and character chemistry. It's so hard not to compare to the Spider-Verse movies in this regard. Game Miles is aggressively bland compared to movie Miles. It's comical how plain bread Rio is against her feature film counterpart. This lack of identity lends itself to muddled politics and a flaky point-of-view because there's no specificity to these characters' outlooks beyond a general sense of do-goodery. No real sense of conflict between how the world is vs how they see themselves in it. And as much as they try and even succeed at pulling some heart strings, The Tinkerer made a weak villain thanks to a severe eschewing of meaningful chemistry. The Hailey stuff fares much better, at least.
Miles Morales is a refined version of the very good 2018 Spider-Man, especially when it comes to combat and Marvel New York vibes, but it lacks juice when it comes to its sense of self. I wish the earnestness behind Miles' character clicked as well as Peter's. I love the idea of defining a person more around their community, but in order to do that, said community has to be made up of more than a handful of gestures towards the semiotics of home and fellowship.
Gita Jackson's Vice piece lived fondly in my head for quite some time before I ever played Miles Morales. In particular the bit about being able to virtually step through the spaces that they physically couldn't during COVID. While the game lives up to that hominess, it also lives up the rest of Gita's points on rudderless politics.
The current run of Spider-Man games have min-maxed my tolerance for rinse-and-repeat gameplay to perfection. They barely outstay their welcome. Swinging is a thrill every time. Combat puts up only as much challenge as your brain is indecisive about when to switch things up, but it's always comfortable. Traversal is frictionless.
Also frictionless is Miles Morales' style, identity, and character chemistry. It's so hard not to compare to the Spider-Verse movies in this regard. Game Miles is aggressively bland compared to movie Miles. It's comical how plain bread Rio is against her feature film counterpart. This lack of identity lends itself to muddled politics and a flaky point-of-view because there's no specificity to these characters' outlooks beyond a general sense of do-goodery. No real sense of conflict between how the world is vs how they see themselves in it. And as much as they try and even succeed at pulling some heart strings, The Tinkerer made a weak villain thanks to a severe eschewing of meaningful chemistry. The Hailey stuff fares much better, at least.
Miles Morales is a refined version of the very good 2018 Spider-Man, especially when it comes to combat and Marvel New York vibes, but it lacks juice when it comes to its sense of self. I wish the earnestness behind Miles' character clicked as well as Peter's. I love the idea of defining a person more around their community, but in order to do that, said community has to be made up of more than a handful of gestures towards the semiotics of home and fellowship.
2023
Played: September 2023
A masterwork in its singularity, I'm giving it 4.5 stars despite itself. I'm openly allowing the way my brain has romanticized this game since the nearly 4 months I've played it to influence my thoughts now.
Rhythm binds the experience of Wanted: Dead together, but only if you can dance with it. There are times jank is a proper, if charming, obstacle, and there are times when it's another way to refer to an unorthodox tempo. This is 10% the former, and 90% the latter. I loved mastering the offbeat sword and gunplay. The repetitions rarely got old. The arcade syncopation was funky. And while it's not as inviting a cadence as something like Metal Gear Rising, it became almost equally worth my time.
Likewise, the wildly out of sync storytelling added up towards a game that wants to do its own thing, my comprehension be damned. The off-kilter voice acting rules. The abruptness of the plotting managed to draw my attention further in. And I find it all to be effective for one simple reason: it's so confident about all these choices. I never felt this was "funny ha ha" bizarre but actually strange. And it's fine if I never fully figure out why I'm surely making excuses for it. Sometimes a person is just attractive because they are who they are unashamedly and fun to be around. Wanted: Dead is her.
Maybe my hypnosis towards it can be explained by the fact that while the game purports to have a karaoke minigame, it actually only has a "99 Luftballons" minigame. And the only song I can karaoke in real life just so happens to be "99 Red Balloons".
The three 2023 games I played in full are this, Spider-Man 2 (a nice game), and Final Fantasy XVI (a genuinely frustrating game). That makes Wanded: Dead... my GOTY 2023?
A masterwork in its singularity, I'm giving it 4.5 stars despite itself. I'm openly allowing the way my brain has romanticized this game since the nearly 4 months I've played it to influence my thoughts now.
Rhythm binds the experience of Wanted: Dead together, but only if you can dance with it. There are times jank is a proper, if charming, obstacle, and there are times when it's another way to refer to an unorthodox tempo. This is 10% the former, and 90% the latter. I loved mastering the offbeat sword and gunplay. The repetitions rarely got old. The arcade syncopation was funky. And while it's not as inviting a cadence as something like Metal Gear Rising, it became almost equally worth my time.
Likewise, the wildly out of sync storytelling added up towards a game that wants to do its own thing, my comprehension be damned. The off-kilter voice acting rules. The abruptness of the plotting managed to draw my attention further in. And I find it all to be effective for one simple reason: it's so confident about all these choices. I never felt this was "funny ha ha" bizarre but actually strange. And it's fine if I never fully figure out why I'm surely making excuses for it. Sometimes a person is just attractive because they are who they are unashamedly and fun to be around. Wanted: Dead is her.
Maybe my hypnosis towards it can be explained by the fact that while the game purports to have a karaoke minigame, it actually only has a "99 Luftballons" minigame. And the only song I can karaoke in real life just so happens to be "99 Red Balloons".
The three 2023 games I played in full are this, Spider-Man 2 (a nice game), and Final Fantasy XVI (a genuinely frustrating game). That makes Wanded: Dead... my GOTY 2023?
Played: July - August 2023
Ace Attorney is my most reliable game series. Even during Case 2-3 Turnabout Big Top -- perhaps the franchise nadir -- I'm still pixel hunting for clues, and I'm still trying to convince a goofy detective to share investigation details, and I'm still snatching victory in court from the jaws of defeat. I'm still playing Phoenix Wright. Apollo, Athena, Edgeworth, Phoenix himself, and now Ryunosuke Naruhodo. We're all Phoenix Wright, baby.
In its pacing and intrigue, the highs and lows of Great Ace Attorney: Adventures rank right next to the highs and lows of the rest. What really sets it apart, however, is its comfort with the unease. As a prequel, the narrative takes place at the end of the 19th century with Japan broadening its legal horizons to the West. Thanks to surprisingly tragic circumstances, you find yourself as the first young lawyer from the East stranded by choice in Great Britain. Ready to learn and take home all that the allegedly greatest legal system of the world has to offer. In a series first move, not only is the concept of race recognized, but racism is pointedly overt and inevitable. You are talked down to at every turn. Treated as a curiosity. And even the more spineless of the Japanese characters are shown to internalize insecurities and worship whiteness. The reality of orientalism looms from the word go.
That said, the game never forgets to be funny. Because this is also Ace Attorney's adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, reimagined as Herlock Sholmes. "Emotionally intelligent, but logically stupid" is a class-A take on the character, and it's downright hilarious at times.
Beyond contending with race, I loved how much the story mucks up everyone's scruples. You are placed in gray areas that remain so til the end. There are accidents, not just calculated murder. The "infallibility" of Great Britain's court system is immediately challenged and always seems to be in air quotes. There's an ever-present air of compromise not just around high society, or even the police, but the justice system itself. And even our new equally-clever-and-hapless protagonist Ryunosuke comes to have his morals unintentionally jeopardized. Since Adventures is just a part one, I don't know yet where the ambiguity will take us.
There are some relative lowlights. Turning Sherlock Holme's Watson equivalent into a genius ten year old girl inventor is just not for me. I hate thinking in tropes, but she comes off to me as an anime prerequisite. A couple witnesses threaten to outstay their welcome. I also have to admit that the occasional downside of eschewing easy answers is that some of the big moments can come off unsatisfying. Still, I would not trade what this game is ultimately doing to avoid a minor blemish here or there. Susato is an all-timer assistant. For maybe the first time ever, I only got frustrated enough to consult a walkthrough once. The creatives behind AA have gotten very good at predicting the player's intuition, or at least mine. The Jury system is refreshing. The first time I realized what the Dance of Deduction was, I was straight up giddy.
Having now played the 2nd one and aware of how the story both improves and declines, Adventures remains a worthwhile first half.
Ace Attorney is my most reliable game series. Even during Case 2-3 Turnabout Big Top -- perhaps the franchise nadir -- I'm still pixel hunting for clues, and I'm still trying to convince a goofy detective to share investigation details, and I'm still snatching victory in court from the jaws of defeat. I'm still playing Phoenix Wright. Apollo, Athena, Edgeworth, Phoenix himself, and now Ryunosuke Naruhodo. We're all Phoenix Wright, baby.
In its pacing and intrigue, the highs and lows of Great Ace Attorney: Adventures rank right next to the highs and lows of the rest. What really sets it apart, however, is its comfort with the unease. As a prequel, the narrative takes place at the end of the 19th century with Japan broadening its legal horizons to the West. Thanks to surprisingly tragic circumstances, you find yourself as the first young lawyer from the East stranded by choice in Great Britain. Ready to learn and take home all that the allegedly greatest legal system of the world has to offer. In a series first move, not only is the concept of race recognized, but racism is pointedly overt and inevitable. You are talked down to at every turn. Treated as a curiosity. And even the more spineless of the Japanese characters are shown to internalize insecurities and worship whiteness. The reality of orientalism looms from the word go.
That said, the game never forgets to be funny. Because this is also Ace Attorney's adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, reimagined as Herlock Sholmes. "Emotionally intelligent, but logically stupid" is a class-A take on the character, and it's downright hilarious at times.
Beyond contending with race, I loved how much the story mucks up everyone's scruples. You are placed in gray areas that remain so til the end. There are accidents, not just calculated murder. The "infallibility" of Great Britain's court system is immediately challenged and always seems to be in air quotes. There's an ever-present air of compromise not just around high society, or even the police, but the justice system itself. And even our new equally-clever-and-hapless protagonist Ryunosuke comes to have his morals unintentionally jeopardized. Since Adventures is just a part one, I don't know yet where the ambiguity will take us.
There are some relative lowlights. Turning Sherlock Holme's Watson equivalent into a genius ten year old girl inventor is just not for me. I hate thinking in tropes, but she comes off to me as an anime prerequisite. A couple witnesses threaten to outstay their welcome. I also have to admit that the occasional downside of eschewing easy answers is that some of the big moments can come off unsatisfying. Still, I would not trade what this game is ultimately doing to avoid a minor blemish here or there. Susato is an all-timer assistant. For maybe the first time ever, I only got frustrated enough to consult a walkthrough once. The creatives behind AA have gotten very good at predicting the player's intuition, or at least mine. The Jury system is refreshing. The first time I realized what the Dance of Deduction was, I was straight up giddy.
Having now played the 2nd one and aware of how the story both improves and declines, Adventures remains a worthwhile first half.
2018
Played: Since 2019 | Reviewed: February 2023
Akane fucking rules. Pure high-score-grubbing arcade rush.
Remember when we all learned the term Skinner Box to describe empty feedback loops? Once I set down my cynicism and stopped over-intellectualizing my experience with this game, I realized how good it's been to have in my life.
There's nothing more to Akane than being thrown into an arena and mowing down enemies. All life is subject to a one-hit kill, including yours. You're armed with a katana that you can swing to your stamina's content, your choice of 1 of 6 unlockable guns, and a couple of special moves. However you wish to play, every single press of the button and its corresponding animation and sound effect is satisfying to the gut. The WHOOSH of the sword slicing a rando in half. The BOOM of the laser gun one-shotting an enemy heavy after blasting through 10 guys in a row. The SHING-SHING-SHING of parrying a set of 3 enemy bullets as you run towards the shooter. Goddamn, it all feels good. The story is just a quick table set to let you know you're on a revenge mission, and after you get your ass kicked the 12th time, you'll very much be on one yourself. It works. The missing half-star is reserved for only the most special of perfect experiences, but don't hold that against Akane.
Having such a reliable test of concentration at the ready on my Switch has been an improvement to my recent days. I never fail to slip past the cartoonish bloodshed and right into a zen flow state every session. Akane is a treat that is equal parts serotonin hit and sense of accomplishment to pick me up throughout the day.
Akane fucking rules. Pure high-score-grubbing arcade rush.
Remember when we all learned the term Skinner Box to describe empty feedback loops? Once I set down my cynicism and stopped over-intellectualizing my experience with this game, I realized how good it's been to have in my life.
There's nothing more to Akane than being thrown into an arena and mowing down enemies. All life is subject to a one-hit kill, including yours. You're armed with a katana that you can swing to your stamina's content, your choice of 1 of 6 unlockable guns, and a couple of special moves. However you wish to play, every single press of the button and its corresponding animation and sound effect is satisfying to the gut. The WHOOSH of the sword slicing a rando in half. The BOOM of the laser gun one-shotting an enemy heavy after blasting through 10 guys in a row. The SHING-SHING-SHING of parrying a set of 3 enemy bullets as you run towards the shooter. Goddamn, it all feels good. The story is just a quick table set to let you know you're on a revenge mission, and after you get your ass kicked the 12th time, you'll very much be on one yourself. It works. The missing half-star is reserved for only the most special of perfect experiences, but don't hold that against Akane.
Having such a reliable test of concentration at the ready on my Switch has been an improvement to my recent days. I never fail to slip past the cartoonish bloodshed and right into a zen flow state every session. Akane is a treat that is equal parts serotonin hit and sense of accomplishment to pick me up throughout the day.
Played: September - October 2022
The "But, C'mon" Update (February 2023):
I'm bumping this up from 2.5 to 3 stars, because... c'mon. It's THE Xenoblade Chronicles. 2 months after my initial review, and 4 months since I finally beat it, I just keep thinking back on it too fondly. The feeling of entering the majesty of Gaur Plains for the first time as the music sweeps in. The good cheer of the party's dialogue, however repetitive. The smooth flow of the battle that was already at a good start even before future games would refine it. Makna Bridge! Eryth Sea! Fallen Arm! To play this game is to be transported into a postcard filled with a sensation of perilous adventure. I stand by all that I wrote before, but once I net all the math together, I'm left with a real delight. XC is just more than the sum of its parts. Maybe some games are just better lensed through a Good Vibes Gaming than a Waypoint.
Original Write-Up (December 2022):
What Xenoblade Chronicles wants above all else is the horizon. I think.
I chewed through it in 2 weeks, took 2 months to gather my thoughts, and still my take feels disjointed. The characters are colorful but somehow plain. The English voice acting is fun and filled with earworms. The combat is a good-yet-incomplete iteration of this style. The music is magnificent. The story has lots of food-for-thought but is paced unevenly. The world design is as creative as it is stunning to stare up at. Generally more good than bad.
But. Finding my POV was made difficult by the game obfuscating its own.
The tale is set on the body of two titans frozen in mid-combat, and the adventure guides you from limb to limb, which was a killer setup since the first concept art. The plot begins as a revenge quest and is set against a dire one-sided forever-war. Disparate factions have to come together. A major ally will heel-turn. Mysteries will be teased through shadowy cutscenes and cryptic visions. Then the final fifth of the game will push you out from open fields and on to an elevator ride up through a building of plot developments that reveal the true nature of the world. And then up through five more secret floors of the REAL true nature of the world.
Many interesting ideas are touched on through all of that, but the only thing I can latch on to is the image of my party rushing towards whatever is next. Hence, horizon.
Against the voice acting's best efforts, the main party isn't compelling enough to drive the emotional stakes in all the way. My curiosity for why the people of this world are trapped in such a calamitous situation was answered by at least three unsatisfying explanations. The last of those reveals had much promise, but so little time is spent so late, I lost interest in parsing it. The big ally betrayal, while well-performed, is undercooked. There are hints of something to say around the fear of losing human connection, but it reads vague and defaults to the usual triumph of the human spirit stuff. That would be fine if the waters leading up to it weren't so muddied with promise.
Unequivocally, the best part of Xenoblade Chronicles is the world traversal. This is a fantastic game to just hang out and do rote sidequests in. That's legit and well worth the money. There are spaces that are like vacations I will never forget. All timer postcard settings.
Cool boss battles, exciting bits of lore reveal, picturesque overlooks, goofy tangents, and the promise of a gratifying payoff kept me interested the whole way, but it doesn't feel like enough. Xenoblade Chronicles X, my first stop on the Xeno train, used as many of its parts as it could to express something specific. By contrast, this one is a series of interesting half-ideas you're pushed through in search of a cohesion that's never found.
Not my most confident review, but I wanted to lay down where I'm at.
---
On a personal note, I first started this game on my modded Wii in 2011 back before Operation Rainfall (and European success) brought it to the U.S. I only got halfway before life got busy, picked it up on the New 3DS in 2015, and hit the 4/5ths mark before life got busy again. At long last, here in 2022 on the Switch with all the Definitive Edition quality-of-life goodies, I finished it! This game has been in my life for 30 to 60 hours at a time from the beginning of my 20s to the beginning of my 30s. I gotta say, I'm going to miss it no longer nagging me from a corner shelf.
Maybe I have more fondness for my relationship with this game than the game itself, but I think that counts for something.
Next stop: Future Connected.
The "But, C'mon" Update (February 2023):
I'm bumping this up from 2.5 to 3 stars, because... c'mon. It's THE Xenoblade Chronicles. 2 months after my initial review, and 4 months since I finally beat it, I just keep thinking back on it too fondly. The feeling of entering the majesty of Gaur Plains for the first time as the music sweeps in. The good cheer of the party's dialogue, however repetitive. The smooth flow of the battle that was already at a good start even before future games would refine it. Makna Bridge! Eryth Sea! Fallen Arm! To play this game is to be transported into a postcard filled with a sensation of perilous adventure. I stand by all that I wrote before, but once I net all the math together, I'm left with a real delight. XC is just more than the sum of its parts. Maybe some games are just better lensed through a Good Vibes Gaming than a Waypoint.
Original Write-Up (December 2022):
What Xenoblade Chronicles wants above all else is the horizon. I think.
I chewed through it in 2 weeks, took 2 months to gather my thoughts, and still my take feels disjointed. The characters are colorful but somehow plain. The English voice acting is fun and filled with earworms. The combat is a good-yet-incomplete iteration of this style. The music is magnificent. The story has lots of food-for-thought but is paced unevenly. The world design is as creative as it is stunning to stare up at. Generally more good than bad.
But. Finding my POV was made difficult by the game obfuscating its own.
The tale is set on the body of two titans frozen in mid-combat, and the adventure guides you from limb to limb, which was a killer setup since the first concept art. The plot begins as a revenge quest and is set against a dire one-sided forever-war. Disparate factions have to come together. A major ally will heel-turn. Mysteries will be teased through shadowy cutscenes and cryptic visions. Then the final fifth of the game will push you out from open fields and on to an elevator ride up through a building of plot developments that reveal the true nature of the world. And then up through five more secret floors of the REAL true nature of the world.
Many interesting ideas are touched on through all of that, but the only thing I can latch on to is the image of my party rushing towards whatever is next. Hence, horizon.
Against the voice acting's best efforts, the main party isn't compelling enough to drive the emotional stakes in all the way. My curiosity for why the people of this world are trapped in such a calamitous situation was answered by at least three unsatisfying explanations. The last of those reveals had much promise, but so little time is spent so late, I lost interest in parsing it. The big ally betrayal, while well-performed, is undercooked. There are hints of something to say around the fear of losing human connection, but it reads vague and defaults to the usual triumph of the human spirit stuff. That would be fine if the waters leading up to it weren't so muddied with promise.
Unequivocally, the best part of Xenoblade Chronicles is the world traversal. This is a fantastic game to just hang out and do rote sidequests in. That's legit and well worth the money. There are spaces that are like vacations I will never forget. All timer postcard settings.
Cool boss battles, exciting bits of lore reveal, picturesque overlooks, goofy tangents, and the promise of a gratifying payoff kept me interested the whole way, but it doesn't feel like enough. Xenoblade Chronicles X, my first stop on the Xeno train, used as many of its parts as it could to express something specific. By contrast, this one is a series of interesting half-ideas you're pushed through in search of a cohesion that's never found.
Not my most confident review, but I wanted to lay down where I'm at.
---
On a personal note, I first started this game on my modded Wii in 2011 back before Operation Rainfall (and European success) brought it to the U.S. I only got halfway before life got busy, picked it up on the New 3DS in 2015, and hit the 4/5ths mark before life got busy again. At long last, here in 2022 on the Switch with all the Definitive Edition quality-of-life goodies, I finished it! This game has been in my life for 30 to 60 hours at a time from the beginning of my 20s to the beginning of my 30s. I gotta say, I'm going to miss it no longer nagging me from a corner shelf.
Maybe I have more fondness for my relationship with this game than the game itself, but I think that counts for something.
Next stop: Future Connected.
Played: January - March, September 2022
Last holiday, after my disappointment in Tales of Arise, I insisted to myself that I still deserved a worthwhile grand adventure JRPG, and that led me to Dragon Quest 11S on my PC Game Pass. The "holiday" stretched into months because this game is a whole ass pilgrimage, but when you're stepping through a world as living and breathing and united as Erdrea, it's also a breezy delight.
They aren't at the forefront of my mind, but the combat and exploration are quite good, if basic. The fighting is turn-based via menus. You can freely move around the battlefield for added flavor despite having zero gameplay impact. Most of the time, I only controlled the protagonist and left everyone at the mercy of a "Fight Wisely" AI setting with little worry. If anything, allowing my companions to behave with a mind of their own enhanced their personhood, which is already a strong suit of the game.
Your silent protagonist starts off in the small village of Cobblestone on the first day of his adulthood. You learn of your true noble origin and set off towards the nearby metropolitan kingdom of Heliodor. The plot twists and suddenly you're on the run. You encounter enemies, allies, and span the globe via land, ocean, and sky many times over to uncover the true nature of evil and attempt to defeat it. You can read the rest in the spoiler section down below. The narrative is largely old hat, but I can't deny that every major story beat was pretty good at making me feel what I was supposed to. It's just an engaging world-saving adventure!
Between this and Xenoblade, I've found lately that individual characters in an RPG don't have to charm my pants off as long as they work well together to highlight the plight of their world as a whole. Now, DQ11S does have a pretty memorable cast, but it's smart to pull away from the solipsism that's inherent to a chosen hero plot and instead show you why this is a place worth fighting for. Each major character is representative of a different kind of plight in Erdrea. Some are royalty. Some are commoners. Some are religious. Most of them hail from different places, and in some ways, different times. A lot of RPGs believe that they're doing this kind of effective world building, but very few have been quite as elegant in putting the pieces together.
The key is that DQ11S isn't so much about its cast as it is about its people. Other than the extra helping of twists, none of the actual narrative beats are terribly original. It's the context. The nations and cities and the roads between them feel like one interconnected world. The role that the village of Cobblestone takes on later in the game, as your hometown comes together to face off against forces it can't hope to defeat, was genuinely touching. The dark nature of why the mountain city of Phnom Nonh is such a tourist trap is effective not because the revelation itself is particularly shocking, but because of the collective personalities of the tourists themselves. Running around the arid Gallopolis as a life threatening meteor hangs over the kingdom and listening to each townsfolk's reaction filled me with a melancholy and even a mild panic that very few games have instilled before. None of these beats are trying to blow your mind as astounding story choices, but their potency lies in how much time the game encourages you to spend with its people.
The NPCs are the MVPs. Many of them are anonymous, but they don't feel less real than your heroes. Some take you on fully voiced lengthy side quests that link an entire hemisphere together, like the fisherman from Lonolulu, an island village, whose grandfather had a tragic affair with a mermaid in his youth. Some are just regular townspeople with no quests attached whose stories evolve over time, like the tumultuous relationship between a haughty painter and his put-upon maid in Gondolia, the game's rendition of Venice. Speaking of Venice, each place is as varied as it is beautifully painted and rendered. They play out like the greatest hits of RPG locations -- grassy village, hot springs town, sprawling kingdom, snow fields, volcanoes, swamps, etc. -- but just about each one is one of the best of its kind that I've seen. I don't enjoy talking about tropes, but credit where it's due, DQ11S figured out a way to lean more into them for the better.
I'll leave this off with one more example. In the warrior city of Octagonia, there's this couple that always made me laugh because when the city is initially all about a martial arts tournament, the wife laments that her husband is too busy with betting on fights to come home. Then later when the city becomes a casino, it's the husband who laments all the time his wife spends gambling. You can encounter them separately in each part of the story but never together, yet the connection is undeniably there. That's how Erdrea is tethered. Whether it's through a main story beat that has you play one of the elderly main character's tragic past or whether it's a side quest that has you bring a soldier and a baker back together with their estranged father, everybody has something to lose here. The fact that that was more than just one example says all you need to know about what a meaningful impression this cute and colorful place made on me. Major props to the lively Toriyama character design, the art direction of the environment, and the lovely (if frequently repeated) soundtrack for making all of this possible. However, enjoying anything by composer Koichi Sugiyama, now dead, is a fraught experience given his bigotry (I'll let you Google the rest).
About the only thing I disliked from beginning to end is the protagonist's haircut. It's so hideous I helmeted him at every opportunity. Apologies to anyone who looks like him in real life.
Back to the positive, there are two things I want to shout out. The first is the crafting mechanic, which passes the vibe check that all button-timing mini-games have to pass: be soothing and satisfying. The second is the European accents, which I am convinced always make for better English video game voice acting. They just do.
One more NPC story because I can't help myself. From time to time I catch myself thinking about my return to Lonolulu after a catastrophic world event only to find that a previously doting couple have been reduced to just one after the other perished. They were a pair of unnamed NPCs, but I had gotten so used to them just being around, I had to put down my controller to breathe a sigh of sadness. That's the real deal, man.
SPOILER ZONE:
A full JRPG later you defeat evil and save the world. The credits roll. Then you find out there is an entire third half, making what you thought was the end actually just the two-thirds mark. After the victory celebration, our heroes learn that they can turn back time to just before things really went to shit and bring the people they lost along the way back to life. It'll reset things for everybody except the hero, but they deem it's worth it. Once you go back and diverge the timeline, things careen towards a different villain, and you fight the true final battle, this time with no casualties.
I'm not sure how I feel about the time reset. A more impactful story would be one that causes a different set of casualties altogether, making the case that there's no clean ending. On the other hand, this is a bright and colorful children's fantasy that believes in the existence of singularly brave heroes who stand above all, so I never really expected that. And I did appreciate the gravity and gloom that came with the choice to leave your friends behind as you go back to times where people wouldn't remember you the same way.
Still, when it's all said and done, the final arc felt like a way to redo everything with a nice bow on it. Every time I've read a story where time travel works just so neatly, I've wondered if that victory wasn't somehow hollow and tragic in its own way? Seeing that Lonolulu couple back together, while nice, put an asterisk on the sadness I originally felt. Oh, well. At least a cheap win didn't make Erdrea any less worth saving.
Last holiday, after my disappointment in Tales of Arise, I insisted to myself that I still deserved a worthwhile grand adventure JRPG, and that led me to Dragon Quest 11S on my PC Game Pass. The "holiday" stretched into months because this game is a whole ass pilgrimage, but when you're stepping through a world as living and breathing and united as Erdrea, it's also a breezy delight.
They aren't at the forefront of my mind, but the combat and exploration are quite good, if basic. The fighting is turn-based via menus. You can freely move around the battlefield for added flavor despite having zero gameplay impact. Most of the time, I only controlled the protagonist and left everyone at the mercy of a "Fight Wisely" AI setting with little worry. If anything, allowing my companions to behave with a mind of their own enhanced their personhood, which is already a strong suit of the game.
Your silent protagonist starts off in the small village of Cobblestone on the first day of his adulthood. You learn of your true noble origin and set off towards the nearby metropolitan kingdom of Heliodor. The plot twists and suddenly you're on the run. You encounter enemies, allies, and span the globe via land, ocean, and sky many times over to uncover the true nature of evil and attempt to defeat it. You can read the rest in the spoiler section down below. The narrative is largely old hat, but I can't deny that every major story beat was pretty good at making me feel what I was supposed to. It's just an engaging world-saving adventure!
Between this and Xenoblade, I've found lately that individual characters in an RPG don't have to charm my pants off as long as they work well together to highlight the plight of their world as a whole. Now, DQ11S does have a pretty memorable cast, but it's smart to pull away from the solipsism that's inherent to a chosen hero plot and instead show you why this is a place worth fighting for. Each major character is representative of a different kind of plight in Erdrea. Some are royalty. Some are commoners. Some are religious. Most of them hail from different places, and in some ways, different times. A lot of RPGs believe that they're doing this kind of effective world building, but very few have been quite as elegant in putting the pieces together.
The key is that DQ11S isn't so much about its cast as it is about its people. Other than the extra helping of twists, none of the actual narrative beats are terribly original. It's the context. The nations and cities and the roads between them feel like one interconnected world. The role that the village of Cobblestone takes on later in the game, as your hometown comes together to face off against forces it can't hope to defeat, was genuinely touching. The dark nature of why the mountain city of Phnom Nonh is such a tourist trap is effective not because the revelation itself is particularly shocking, but because of the collective personalities of the tourists themselves. Running around the arid Gallopolis as a life threatening meteor hangs over the kingdom and listening to each townsfolk's reaction filled me with a melancholy and even a mild panic that very few games have instilled before. None of these beats are trying to blow your mind as astounding story choices, but their potency lies in how much time the game encourages you to spend with its people.
The NPCs are the MVPs. Many of them are anonymous, but they don't feel less real than your heroes. Some take you on fully voiced lengthy side quests that link an entire hemisphere together, like the fisherman from Lonolulu, an island village, whose grandfather had a tragic affair with a mermaid in his youth. Some are just regular townspeople with no quests attached whose stories evolve over time, like the tumultuous relationship between a haughty painter and his put-upon maid in Gondolia, the game's rendition of Venice. Speaking of Venice, each place is as varied as it is beautifully painted and rendered. They play out like the greatest hits of RPG locations -- grassy village, hot springs town, sprawling kingdom, snow fields, volcanoes, swamps, etc. -- but just about each one is one of the best of its kind that I've seen. I don't enjoy talking about tropes, but credit where it's due, DQ11S figured out a way to lean more into them for the better.
I'll leave this off with one more example. In the warrior city of Octagonia, there's this couple that always made me laugh because when the city is initially all about a martial arts tournament, the wife laments that her husband is too busy with betting on fights to come home. Then later when the city becomes a casino, it's the husband who laments all the time his wife spends gambling. You can encounter them separately in each part of the story but never together, yet the connection is undeniably there. That's how Erdrea is tethered. Whether it's through a main story beat that has you play one of the elderly main character's tragic past or whether it's a side quest that has you bring a soldier and a baker back together with their estranged father, everybody has something to lose here. The fact that that was more than just one example says all you need to know about what a meaningful impression this cute and colorful place made on me. Major props to the lively Toriyama character design, the art direction of the environment, and the lovely (if frequently repeated) soundtrack for making all of this possible. However, enjoying anything by composer Koichi Sugiyama, now dead, is a fraught experience given his bigotry (I'll let you Google the rest).
About the only thing I disliked from beginning to end is the protagonist's haircut. It's so hideous I helmeted him at every opportunity. Apologies to anyone who looks like him in real life.
Back to the positive, there are two things I want to shout out. The first is the crafting mechanic, which passes the vibe check that all button-timing mini-games have to pass: be soothing and satisfying. The second is the European accents, which I am convinced always make for better English video game voice acting. They just do.
One more NPC story because I can't help myself. From time to time I catch myself thinking about my return to Lonolulu after a catastrophic world event only to find that a previously doting couple have been reduced to just one after the other perished. They were a pair of unnamed NPCs, but I had gotten so used to them just being around, I had to put down my controller to breathe a sigh of sadness. That's the real deal, man.
SPOILER ZONE:
A full JRPG later you defeat evil and save the world. The credits roll. Then you find out there is an entire third half, making what you thought was the end actually just the two-thirds mark. After the victory celebration, our heroes learn that they can turn back time to just before things really went to shit and bring the people they lost along the way back to life. It'll reset things for everybody except the hero, but they deem it's worth it. Once you go back and diverge the timeline, things careen towards a different villain, and you fight the true final battle, this time with no casualties.
I'm not sure how I feel about the time reset. A more impactful story would be one that causes a different set of casualties altogether, making the case that there's no clean ending. On the other hand, this is a bright and colorful children's fantasy that believes in the existence of singularly brave heroes who stand above all, so I never really expected that. And I did appreciate the gravity and gloom that came with the choice to leave your friends behind as you go back to times where people wouldn't remember you the same way.
Still, when it's all said and done, the final arc felt like a way to redo everything with a nice bow on it. Every time I've read a story where time travel works just so neatly, I've wondered if that victory wasn't somehow hollow and tragic in its own way? Seeing that Lonolulu couple back together, while nice, put an asterisk on the sadness I originally felt. Oh, well. At least a cheap win didn't make Erdrea any less worth saving.
Played: May 2021
Everything in this write-up is wrapped around the MASSIVE SPOILER. Skip if you want to experience it for yourself.
To date, this is the only Star Ocean I've played. I picked it up in high school, made it up through The Twist™, and then fell off through no fault of the game's own. If you need a reminder, the big reveal is that your characters find out they are… in a video game. It's vague on the mechanics, but essentially you are a computer program, and your creators, "4D beings", want to wipe you out with anti-virus software. Silly, bizarre, and mind blowing to a teenager. The twist lingered with me for so long that 15 years later, I forced some free time into my life to see how it ended. My big question was "how does everyone in the story contend with having their reality so thoroughly upended"?
And in asking that question, I put in stark contrast the things that mattered to me in storytelling as a teenager vs now as an adult.
Because, unfortunately, the answer turned out to be "they treat it like any other JRPG existential threat". 4D beings are just a different form of the world-ending antagonist. I didn't expect the game to completely change its battle system or mode of play once you interact with your creators (although, how neat would that have been!?), but even in the story as-told-through-cutscenes, it's a dud. As a teen, the twist alone was enough to get me excited and call it a day. Now, while I still find the idea fun, the lack of real psychological impact on the characters really drops the ceiling. Our heroes are just so steadfast that they "believe in themselves" through the whole ordeal with no scars to show for it. I give some credit to the melancholy nature of the endings that I got (there are multiple), but I wanted a more thoughtful reaction than just a loud proclamation of "No! Our lives do matter!". Not asking for Satoshi Kon levels of psychic collapse, but this was just so underwhelming.
This is a symptom of the larger character writing in the game, particularly the dialogue. The way they speak in this game conjures the image of an inexperienced writer trying to recall the way characters in their favorite sci-fi fantasy stories talk. Video games and JRPGs everywhere bristle with clunky dialogue and awkward turns of phrases, but there's a lack of personality to Till The End of Time that stuck out. There's little sense of interiority to anyone as human beings. Rather, the words put into their mouths serve to either force out a conflict, or neatly summarize a theme, or deliver exposition, or inject a clumsy attempt at personality. I describe it as being top-down, where you know what a scene needs to do, you have the general adjectives to describe your characters, and you know where an arc needs to go -- but you stumble your way through connecting all those dots. You're backing into what you're going for, instead of organically giving your characters life to get there. Also, a lot of the lines are just woefully clumsy and redundant -- fresh on my mind is Fayt waking up after a catastrophic event surrounded by his comrades, with 4 of them saying different variations of "took you long enough!", despite not having established that sort of playful relationship with him and despite the gravity of their circumstance. I'm sure much of that had to do with voice acting production, but it still hit the ear all wrong.
It's always fun to think about what mattered to me as a kid vs now. Back then, it was all about plot, lore, design, cool factor, and the broad strokes of character. Those things can still matter, but now I firmly prioritize characterization, texture, specificity, and point of view. I love a lot of JRPGs and shonen anime, but the ones that speak to me sing with personality, while the ones like Star Ocean 3 come off as joyless. For example, there was so much fun to be had when Nel, a ninja from a medieval planet, learns about the existence of more advanced civilizations -- and then the rug gets pulled out again when she learns that she's just an artificial intelligence program! Can you imagine how interesting it could've been to really delve into someone having their reality overturned 2 to 3 times in such a short span? Instead we get some snippets and grumbles of "Hmm, I don't understand what's going on, but I'll stick with the main character because I am a Loyal Warrior™". To go back to the twist again, all the characters' reactions are collectively the same. There's no meaningful distinction between how Maria vs Fayt vs Cliff react to this existentially devastating revelation. The game had such a cool kaleidoscope in its hands to view everyone's thoughts on free will and the human soul. Would've loved to see everyone splitting apart, dealing with it differently, maybe a time skip, and then coming back together. Or any number of variations. Man, this could've been a wild ride.
Still glad I went back to it. It was worth comparing and contrasting my high school and current selves' wants and needs from art. I didn't touch on much of the gameplay, which I think is so-so? It would be unfair to critique, because that wasn't what I was here to engage with. I'll give narrative props for choosing to make the enemies significantly more tough once 4D beings are introduced, but in execution that led to other frustrations. Lots of neat things on paper, and lots of stumbling on the actual trail. I enjoyed the beginnings of many story beats and the prospect of every new world, but I wished to see a lot more planets, too. All in all, the game had a lower ceiling than the boundless promise of a great subtitle like "Till The End Of Time".
Everything in this write-up is wrapped around the MASSIVE SPOILER. Skip if you want to experience it for yourself.
To date, this is the only Star Ocean I've played. I picked it up in high school, made it up through The Twist™, and then fell off through no fault of the game's own. If you need a reminder, the big reveal is that your characters find out they are… in a video game. It's vague on the mechanics, but essentially you are a computer program, and your creators, "4D beings", want to wipe you out with anti-virus software. Silly, bizarre, and mind blowing to a teenager. The twist lingered with me for so long that 15 years later, I forced some free time into my life to see how it ended. My big question was "how does everyone in the story contend with having their reality so thoroughly upended"?
And in asking that question, I put in stark contrast the things that mattered to me in storytelling as a teenager vs now as an adult.
Because, unfortunately, the answer turned out to be "they treat it like any other JRPG existential threat". 4D beings are just a different form of the world-ending antagonist. I didn't expect the game to completely change its battle system or mode of play once you interact with your creators (although, how neat would that have been!?), but even in the story as-told-through-cutscenes, it's a dud. As a teen, the twist alone was enough to get me excited and call it a day. Now, while I still find the idea fun, the lack of real psychological impact on the characters really drops the ceiling. Our heroes are just so steadfast that they "believe in themselves" through the whole ordeal with no scars to show for it. I give some credit to the melancholy nature of the endings that I got (there are multiple), but I wanted a more thoughtful reaction than just a loud proclamation of "No! Our lives do matter!". Not asking for Satoshi Kon levels of psychic collapse, but this was just so underwhelming.
This is a symptom of the larger character writing in the game, particularly the dialogue. The way they speak in this game conjures the image of an inexperienced writer trying to recall the way characters in their favorite sci-fi fantasy stories talk. Video games and JRPGs everywhere bristle with clunky dialogue and awkward turns of phrases, but there's a lack of personality to Till The End of Time that stuck out. There's little sense of interiority to anyone as human beings. Rather, the words put into their mouths serve to either force out a conflict, or neatly summarize a theme, or deliver exposition, or inject a clumsy attempt at personality. I describe it as being top-down, where you know what a scene needs to do, you have the general adjectives to describe your characters, and you know where an arc needs to go -- but you stumble your way through connecting all those dots. You're backing into what you're going for, instead of organically giving your characters life to get there. Also, a lot of the lines are just woefully clumsy and redundant -- fresh on my mind is Fayt waking up after a catastrophic event surrounded by his comrades, with 4 of them saying different variations of "took you long enough!", despite not having established that sort of playful relationship with him and despite the gravity of their circumstance. I'm sure much of that had to do with voice acting production, but it still hit the ear all wrong.
It's always fun to think about what mattered to me as a kid vs now. Back then, it was all about plot, lore, design, cool factor, and the broad strokes of character. Those things can still matter, but now I firmly prioritize characterization, texture, specificity, and point of view. I love a lot of JRPGs and shonen anime, but the ones that speak to me sing with personality, while the ones like Star Ocean 3 come off as joyless. For example, there was so much fun to be had when Nel, a ninja from a medieval planet, learns about the existence of more advanced civilizations -- and then the rug gets pulled out again when she learns that she's just an artificial intelligence program! Can you imagine how interesting it could've been to really delve into someone having their reality overturned 2 to 3 times in such a short span? Instead we get some snippets and grumbles of "Hmm, I don't understand what's going on, but I'll stick with the main character because I am a Loyal Warrior™". To go back to the twist again, all the characters' reactions are collectively the same. There's no meaningful distinction between how Maria vs Fayt vs Cliff react to this existentially devastating revelation. The game had such a cool kaleidoscope in its hands to view everyone's thoughts on free will and the human soul. Would've loved to see everyone splitting apart, dealing with it differently, maybe a time skip, and then coming back together. Or any number of variations. Man, this could've been a wild ride.
Still glad I went back to it. It was worth comparing and contrasting my high school and current selves' wants and needs from art. I didn't touch on much of the gameplay, which I think is so-so? It would be unfair to critique, because that wasn't what I was here to engage with. I'll give narrative props for choosing to make the enemies significantly more tough once 4D beings are introduced, but in execution that led to other frustrations. Lots of neat things on paper, and lots of stumbling on the actual trail. I enjoyed the beginnings of many story beats and the prospect of every new world, but I wished to see a lot more planets, too. All in all, the game had a lower ceiling than the boundless promise of a great subtitle like "Till The End Of Time".
Played: July - September 2022
It's incredible how far a game can be sustained by a strong enough foundational premise. You are the last of humanity crash landed on a foreign planet, and you must seek out your fellow survivors scattered across the wilderness while learning to live in this hostile new environment. Xenoblade Chronicles X has obvious weaknesses, but I put 138 hours into it, and the reason I was invested the whole time came down to two pillars:
1. Mira, the planet, is realized with a level of wonder that's not only gorgeous to look at, but a thrill to explore.
2. Every part of the gameplay loop reinforces how far from home you are and how dire the existential status of your species is.
The more I think about humanity as a collective character, the more I appreciate XCX's story. Individual personalities don't get to shine here. This is the type of science fiction where each character is a semiotic piece on a board standing in for ideas and experiences. There are some lackluster attempts at character-driven plot, but XCX, broadly as a work, isn't cut out for it. There's an alien race out to get ya, you're stuck in a world you don't know, and there's a literal clock on your existence. Not much room for personal drama in all that, and the player character being a silent custom creation tells me that the game embraces that aggregate view.
New Los Angeles is your spaceship-turned-city hub, and the game does a good enough job of making it feel like a fully-functioning society. It's a piece of Earth complete with houses and tennis courts, and there's a nostalgia to seeing "United States" emblazoned in massive letters every time you head home from the field. Sometimes for fun, while walking by pizza shops or cafés, I'd tilt the camera down and watch how deceptively the environment looked like a regular American neighborhood before tilting back up to reveal the massive double moons in the otherworldly sky. It's also funny that even in this most dire circumstance humans maintain a capitalist system of commerce, but I’ll allow that as an extension of people clinging to what they know and trying to homestead in an alien world. The time horizon of XCX is pretty short, and the story begins very recently after the initial crash landing. There isn't much here to meaningfully glean any troubling colonial attitudes from because the whole run of the plot is about basic survival. Whether that's just plausible deniability remains to be seen in a sequel.
Select mission > Carry it out in Mira > Return to NLA. That's the play cycle of XCX. Main missions expand depth, and side missions, which come in several tiers, expand breadth. While your player character serves a supporting role, you're also not a total nobody. The team you hook up with is the tip of the search party spear. You're all members of BLADE, an organization split into 8 divisions specializing in a different necessity, whether it's resource hunting or creature subjugation or scouting new territory. That's how the gameplay structure deepens the sense of "we're all in this together". Every mission felt like I was improving lives. Even when I went on the occasional lost cat side quest there was a sense that I was doing it while the analysts back in the Admin district were still figuring out the next coordinates to look for survivors at. I really want to shoutout this accomplishment because at this point "stopping to help an NPC propose to his girlfriend while a great evil is out conquering the world" is so common in RPGs, it's become a silly feature not a bug. The way XCX gets around it is by NOT making you the most important person on the planet.
And what a planet Mira is. Goddamn. I'll criticize Marvel movie visual design for recreating HD Wallpapers, but I'll use that as a compliment here because being able to walk around in it is something else. Aesthetically, the horizon is perfect in every direction. Hats off to Monolith Soft for finding a unique art style that can maintain strong graphical fidelity and still give us a world that runs so smoothly on the Wii U. There are five continents, and they circumvent RPG biome clichés by actually existing as natural habitats first. Mira's wildlife feel as if they have existed, migrated, and evolved here on their own terms, and it is you that is the invasive species. Between dangerous creatures, the diversity of landscape terrain, mission objectives, and a general sense of awe, I didn't have much time to notice repetitive animation cycles or other flaws in the detail. Go look up some screenshots of the Giant Ring of Oblivia or literally any part of Noctilum. Floating islands are abound in fantasy fiction, and I'll never get tired of them, but I've also seen so many it takes a lot to truly wow me. Trust that Mira is a treasure.
That has as much to do with traversal as it does biodiversity. The devs have pulled off the illusion of an environment that exists for its own sake while structuring it with excellent level design. You start off with no vehicle, and although you can go anywhere, the story guides you to where it feels best to travel on foot, helped by an excellent jump mechanic. Then you get your first Skell -- the tall mechs prominently featured in XCX's marketing -- and now you can jump higher and fight bigger creatures blocking new territories. Finally, when you get the flight module, verticality is introduced, and all bets are off. Flying a Skell around Mira, a world designed to be explored as much by air as by land, is one of the most specific video game pleasures I have ever experienced, and that is all I will say about that.
The game has a couple of other pleasures. You use the Wii U game pad touch screen for fast travel, navigation, and some resource management. I played primarily with a Pro Controller, and having to put it down to pick up the game pad actually strengthened my sense of immersion. The soundtrack by Hiroyuki Sawano is very enjoyable, and I'm a fan of the vocal tracks, especially when they get goofy. The Skell flight song is particularly dope. You can also play dress-up with a pretty solid range of gear. The game lets you put on "Fashion Gear" over your actual armor so you can wear what you want while wearing what you need.
Then there's a wide assortment of weaknesses and stuff not worth writing home about. Calling the wildlife "indigens" (short for indigenous) leaves a bad taste in my mouth because it feels gross to keep hearing "we have to kill these indigens!". There are attempts at getting to know characters more personally through an affinity system and tons of side quests, but they fall flat from weak character design and mostly bland dialogue. As much as I praise NLA for feeling like a functioning city overall, the illusion here isn't as strong as the wildlife of Mira. Between the MMO camera angle and the under-cooked 3D modeling, the urban environments have an artificial cardboard presence. I felt as if I wasn't walking amongst people but gliding over them. The story introduces you to other sentient species, but hardly places any of them in your party so you're stuck getting to know them via side missions. My guess is most folks will get more out these quests than I did. I enjoyed the act of playing them and how they conceptually expanded the world, but I was never as emotionally invested as I wanted to be.
My interest in the antagonist species hell-bent on exterminating humans waned after awhile. I didn't mind that the high-minded sci-fi themes of human soul and consciousness were mostly gestures, but it bums me out that the mystery behind Mira's more preternatural qualities are left as sequel bait. And, finally, the sound mix of the music often overpowered the dialogue.
The fighting is fine. I'm a fan of battle chatter, but I cared so little about the characters, it was mostly noise. I'm sure I tapped into less than 50% of the combat strategies available, but I'm fine with having mostly boarded my Skell to spam the most powerful attacks. Though, I do recommend watching a YouTube tutorial on Overdrives. The signposting for missions is great, and my internet consultation was pretty minimal. With a game this big, you're gonna do some walkthrough Googling.
To end on a personal note, I played this game while on a bit of a mental vacation. This was an ideal companion to a relaxing summer. Despite the high stakes setup, Xenoblade Chronicles X can be a pretty chill experience that encourages you to spend time with gorgeous vistas like something of a safari. Back in 2015 before it came out, I worked up quite a drumroll for it. I couldn't afford the special edition I bought, and I've decorated every place I've lived in since with the little art card it came with. Life had other plans then, but I'm very happy I took the time to play it 7 years later. Just check out how much this announcement trailer rules! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APWTJMyM4qg
I like to protect my sense of wonder, and when something comes along that earnestly rewards it, I feel grateful enough to meet it halfway. A friend mentioned how he wishes he had his Wii U with him so he could hop on a Skell and take joy rides around the skies of Mira. And, well, I guess that's the cue to keep mine around.
It's incredible how far a game can be sustained by a strong enough foundational premise. You are the last of humanity crash landed on a foreign planet, and you must seek out your fellow survivors scattered across the wilderness while learning to live in this hostile new environment. Xenoblade Chronicles X has obvious weaknesses, but I put 138 hours into it, and the reason I was invested the whole time came down to two pillars:
1. Mira, the planet, is realized with a level of wonder that's not only gorgeous to look at, but a thrill to explore.
2. Every part of the gameplay loop reinforces how far from home you are and how dire the existential status of your species is.
The more I think about humanity as a collective character, the more I appreciate XCX's story. Individual personalities don't get to shine here. This is the type of science fiction where each character is a semiotic piece on a board standing in for ideas and experiences. There are some lackluster attempts at character-driven plot, but XCX, broadly as a work, isn't cut out for it. There's an alien race out to get ya, you're stuck in a world you don't know, and there's a literal clock on your existence. Not much room for personal drama in all that, and the player character being a silent custom creation tells me that the game embraces that aggregate view.
New Los Angeles is your spaceship-turned-city hub, and the game does a good enough job of making it feel like a fully-functioning society. It's a piece of Earth complete with houses and tennis courts, and there's a nostalgia to seeing "United States" emblazoned in massive letters every time you head home from the field. Sometimes for fun, while walking by pizza shops or cafés, I'd tilt the camera down and watch how deceptively the environment looked like a regular American neighborhood before tilting back up to reveal the massive double moons in the otherworldly sky. It's also funny that even in this most dire circumstance humans maintain a capitalist system of commerce, but I’ll allow that as an extension of people clinging to what they know and trying to homestead in an alien world. The time horizon of XCX is pretty short, and the story begins very recently after the initial crash landing. There isn't much here to meaningfully glean any troubling colonial attitudes from because the whole run of the plot is about basic survival. Whether that's just plausible deniability remains to be seen in a sequel.
Select mission > Carry it out in Mira > Return to NLA. That's the play cycle of XCX. Main missions expand depth, and side missions, which come in several tiers, expand breadth. While your player character serves a supporting role, you're also not a total nobody. The team you hook up with is the tip of the search party spear. You're all members of BLADE, an organization split into 8 divisions specializing in a different necessity, whether it's resource hunting or creature subjugation or scouting new territory. That's how the gameplay structure deepens the sense of "we're all in this together". Every mission felt like I was improving lives. Even when I went on the occasional lost cat side quest there was a sense that I was doing it while the analysts back in the Admin district were still figuring out the next coordinates to look for survivors at. I really want to shoutout this accomplishment because at this point "stopping to help an NPC propose to his girlfriend while a great evil is out conquering the world" is so common in RPGs, it's become a silly feature not a bug. The way XCX gets around it is by NOT making you the most important person on the planet.
And what a planet Mira is. Goddamn. I'll criticize Marvel movie visual design for recreating HD Wallpapers, but I'll use that as a compliment here because being able to walk around in it is something else. Aesthetically, the horizon is perfect in every direction. Hats off to Monolith Soft for finding a unique art style that can maintain strong graphical fidelity and still give us a world that runs so smoothly on the Wii U. There are five continents, and they circumvent RPG biome clichés by actually existing as natural habitats first. Mira's wildlife feel as if they have existed, migrated, and evolved here on their own terms, and it is you that is the invasive species. Between dangerous creatures, the diversity of landscape terrain, mission objectives, and a general sense of awe, I didn't have much time to notice repetitive animation cycles or other flaws in the detail. Go look up some screenshots of the Giant Ring of Oblivia or literally any part of Noctilum. Floating islands are abound in fantasy fiction, and I'll never get tired of them, but I've also seen so many it takes a lot to truly wow me. Trust that Mira is a treasure.
That has as much to do with traversal as it does biodiversity. The devs have pulled off the illusion of an environment that exists for its own sake while structuring it with excellent level design. You start off with no vehicle, and although you can go anywhere, the story guides you to where it feels best to travel on foot, helped by an excellent jump mechanic. Then you get your first Skell -- the tall mechs prominently featured in XCX's marketing -- and now you can jump higher and fight bigger creatures blocking new territories. Finally, when you get the flight module, verticality is introduced, and all bets are off. Flying a Skell around Mira, a world designed to be explored as much by air as by land, is one of the most specific video game pleasures I have ever experienced, and that is all I will say about that.
The game has a couple of other pleasures. You use the Wii U game pad touch screen for fast travel, navigation, and some resource management. I played primarily with a Pro Controller, and having to put it down to pick up the game pad actually strengthened my sense of immersion. The soundtrack by Hiroyuki Sawano is very enjoyable, and I'm a fan of the vocal tracks, especially when they get goofy. The Skell flight song is particularly dope. You can also play dress-up with a pretty solid range of gear. The game lets you put on "Fashion Gear" over your actual armor so you can wear what you want while wearing what you need.
Then there's a wide assortment of weaknesses and stuff not worth writing home about. Calling the wildlife "indigens" (short for indigenous) leaves a bad taste in my mouth because it feels gross to keep hearing "we have to kill these indigens!". There are attempts at getting to know characters more personally through an affinity system and tons of side quests, but they fall flat from weak character design and mostly bland dialogue. As much as I praise NLA for feeling like a functioning city overall, the illusion here isn't as strong as the wildlife of Mira. Between the MMO camera angle and the under-cooked 3D modeling, the urban environments have an artificial cardboard presence. I felt as if I wasn't walking amongst people but gliding over them. The story introduces you to other sentient species, but hardly places any of them in your party so you're stuck getting to know them via side missions. My guess is most folks will get more out these quests than I did. I enjoyed the act of playing them and how they conceptually expanded the world, but I was never as emotionally invested as I wanted to be.
My interest in the antagonist species hell-bent on exterminating humans waned after awhile. I didn't mind that the high-minded sci-fi themes of human soul and consciousness were mostly gestures, but it bums me out that the mystery behind Mira's more preternatural qualities are left as sequel bait. And, finally, the sound mix of the music often overpowered the dialogue.
The fighting is fine. I'm a fan of battle chatter, but I cared so little about the characters, it was mostly noise. I'm sure I tapped into less than 50% of the combat strategies available, but I'm fine with having mostly boarded my Skell to spam the most powerful attacks. Though, I do recommend watching a YouTube tutorial on Overdrives. The signposting for missions is great, and my internet consultation was pretty minimal. With a game this big, you're gonna do some walkthrough Googling.
To end on a personal note, I played this game while on a bit of a mental vacation. This was an ideal companion to a relaxing summer. Despite the high stakes setup, Xenoblade Chronicles X can be a pretty chill experience that encourages you to spend time with gorgeous vistas like something of a safari. Back in 2015 before it came out, I worked up quite a drumroll for it. I couldn't afford the special edition I bought, and I've decorated every place I've lived in since with the little art card it came with. Life had other plans then, but I'm very happy I took the time to play it 7 years later. Just check out how much this announcement trailer rules! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APWTJMyM4qg
I like to protect my sense of wonder, and when something comes along that earnestly rewards it, I feel grateful enough to meet it halfway. A friend mentioned how he wishes he had his Wii U with him so he could hop on a Skell and take joy rides around the skies of Mira. And, well, I guess that's the cue to keep mine around.
2018
Played: April 2022
The promise of wayfaring out into a withered world and shepherding weary souls back to a village that's always expanding is what drew me to Ashen.
It's a concept I've loved in games like Dark Cloud 2 and Ys 8, and I enjoy it most when I don't have to do any of the base-building or resource management of growing that village. In this soulslike you simply find people out in the wilderness, and every time you return home to Vagrant's Rest after a new main or side quest, you'll find that a pile of rocks has become a scaffolding and eventually a whole new house. I get "dungeon anxiety" pretty easily -- it's part of the fun -- but the relief that comes with the safety of reaching a new town after a treacherous dungeon feels more profound when it's the warmth of a familiar home that has welcomed new life.
This is my third soulslike after Nioh and Sekiro (I haven't played an actual Dark Souls), and while it's much easier than both of those games, it's still harder than a typical action adventure or action RPG. Enemies lash out from any and all corners, and I spent every run learning the nuances of an area until my next inevitable death. This one lets you recharge your health at ritual stones (its bonfires) without having to reset the area, which makes it more approachable than other games in this genre. The world is both dour and lively, but every bit of life out there is marked for death by your hands unless they're a story character or trader. Two repeat character models (villager and trader) also find their way back to Vagrant's Rest without you having to explicitly recruit them. They make things much more lived-in than if it were just named characters, but they were a little too nondescript for my taste even with well-written flavor text. It's funny that the villager is also a common enemy type out in the world. As if the only thing separating them between blindly attacking you and sharing a roof with you is the village border. Home is a line of sanity, I guess.
Desaturated clay is a good look for Ashen. Much of the world is gray, true to its name, but much of it's also sun-kissed and golden red. Much more of it, still, is pitch black and requires a lantern to explore. The lack of details on the environmental textures and the lack of features on characters' faces invited me to appreciate the aesthetic more holistically. It's less about individual leaves in the wind and more about the collective people in a storm. I enjoyed how anonymous the player character is. You're made to go everywhere with a companion, but which one depends on the selected quest, and the emptiness of my own character led me to latch on more to these supporters. It also eased that dungeon anxiety to have a companion -- a piece of my safe haven -- with me at all times. They make the wilderness easier to overcome, both in combat and traversal. I'm pretty sure main story exploration outright requires a companion to progress, and while skilled players can defeat enemies in combat alone, a companion goes a long way. I don't have PlayStation Plus, so mine was never another player but an AI, to which I'd give a grade of B+. There were a couple of glitchy moments (I once lost, like, 60k of in-game currency to my companion being unable to revive me by getting stuck in a doorway), and they don't always fight strategically, but for the most part they do what they're supposed to. One of the boss fight strategies was to lure them towards me and just let my companion strike from behind the whole time. I still haven't decided if that was smart characterization for that particular boss or poor game design. Maybe it's one sacrificed for the other? It was at the end of a dungeon that was a total son of a bitch, so I didn't mind.
Admittedly, I didn't grab on to the central narrative or lore much. You're trying to revive some being of light called the Ashen that will guide this world from out of darkness. I think. Everything lives in the ruins of a once-great empire, which made for a pretty cool level design. I did generally latch on to most of the main and side characters. Peg-legged guy looking for his tools and eventually his younger sister. The woman hellbent on curing a disease that another main character has by sending you out to fight stronger and stranger creatures she can study. Another woman whose quests involve bringing back each of her five senses until she's whole again. A couple of godlike beings whose stature against your tiny character is breathtaking. What they lack in facial features is more than made up by height, color, shape, and costume design. Even the fact that swords aren't a thing in this world and you're stuck with variations of axes and clubs gives it a distinct primitive personality. While the combat is pretty basic with light and heavy attack combos and dodge rolls, individual weapons have such nuance to their playstyle, you could stick with early-game weapons the entire time if it suits you -- as long as you keep them leveled up via crafting. I do advise swapping out for newer shields, though.
All told, Ashen is pleasing to the eye, fairly short, and it understands that home is other people. Check it out!
The promise of wayfaring out into a withered world and shepherding weary souls back to a village that's always expanding is what drew me to Ashen.
It's a concept I've loved in games like Dark Cloud 2 and Ys 8, and I enjoy it most when I don't have to do any of the base-building or resource management of growing that village. In this soulslike you simply find people out in the wilderness, and every time you return home to Vagrant's Rest after a new main or side quest, you'll find that a pile of rocks has become a scaffolding and eventually a whole new house. I get "dungeon anxiety" pretty easily -- it's part of the fun -- but the relief that comes with the safety of reaching a new town after a treacherous dungeon feels more profound when it's the warmth of a familiar home that has welcomed new life.
This is my third soulslike after Nioh and Sekiro (I haven't played an actual Dark Souls), and while it's much easier than both of those games, it's still harder than a typical action adventure or action RPG. Enemies lash out from any and all corners, and I spent every run learning the nuances of an area until my next inevitable death. This one lets you recharge your health at ritual stones (its bonfires) without having to reset the area, which makes it more approachable than other games in this genre. The world is both dour and lively, but every bit of life out there is marked for death by your hands unless they're a story character or trader. Two repeat character models (villager and trader) also find their way back to Vagrant's Rest without you having to explicitly recruit them. They make things much more lived-in than if it were just named characters, but they were a little too nondescript for my taste even with well-written flavor text. It's funny that the villager is also a common enemy type out in the world. As if the only thing separating them between blindly attacking you and sharing a roof with you is the village border. Home is a line of sanity, I guess.
Desaturated clay is a good look for Ashen. Much of the world is gray, true to its name, but much of it's also sun-kissed and golden red. Much more of it, still, is pitch black and requires a lantern to explore. The lack of details on the environmental textures and the lack of features on characters' faces invited me to appreciate the aesthetic more holistically. It's less about individual leaves in the wind and more about the collective people in a storm. I enjoyed how anonymous the player character is. You're made to go everywhere with a companion, but which one depends on the selected quest, and the emptiness of my own character led me to latch on more to these supporters. It also eased that dungeon anxiety to have a companion -- a piece of my safe haven -- with me at all times. They make the wilderness easier to overcome, both in combat and traversal. I'm pretty sure main story exploration outright requires a companion to progress, and while skilled players can defeat enemies in combat alone, a companion goes a long way. I don't have PlayStation Plus, so mine was never another player but an AI, to which I'd give a grade of B+. There were a couple of glitchy moments (I once lost, like, 60k of in-game currency to my companion being unable to revive me by getting stuck in a doorway), and they don't always fight strategically, but for the most part they do what they're supposed to. One of the boss fight strategies was to lure them towards me and just let my companion strike from behind the whole time. I still haven't decided if that was smart characterization for that particular boss or poor game design. Maybe it's one sacrificed for the other? It was at the end of a dungeon that was a total son of a bitch, so I didn't mind.
Admittedly, I didn't grab on to the central narrative or lore much. You're trying to revive some being of light called the Ashen that will guide this world from out of darkness. I think. Everything lives in the ruins of a once-great empire, which made for a pretty cool level design. I did generally latch on to most of the main and side characters. Peg-legged guy looking for his tools and eventually his younger sister. The woman hellbent on curing a disease that another main character has by sending you out to fight stronger and stranger creatures she can study. Another woman whose quests involve bringing back each of her five senses until she's whole again. A couple of godlike beings whose stature against your tiny character is breathtaking. What they lack in facial features is more than made up by height, color, shape, and costume design. Even the fact that swords aren't a thing in this world and you're stuck with variations of axes and clubs gives it a distinct primitive personality. While the combat is pretty basic with light and heavy attack combos and dodge rolls, individual weapons have such nuance to their playstyle, you could stick with early-game weapons the entire time if it suits you -- as long as you keep them leveled up via crafting. I do advise swapping out for newer shields, though.
All told, Ashen is pleasing to the eye, fairly short, and it understands that home is other people. Check it out!
2021
Played: December 2021
Tales of Arise makes interesting choices then repeatedly cuts itself off at the knees, which makes a generally fun game also a bummer. Actually, story-wise, it's kind of a catastrophic bummer.
The art direction is gorgeous, and the environments shine, but the lack of aesthetic and dialogue personality across NPCs makes the world feel hollow. A small touch like giving them first names instead of "Dahnan Woman" could've gone a long way. I'm playing Dragon Quest 11S for the first time, and while they are also anonymous, the NPCs are given flavorful mini-narratives that make them at-home in their surroundings.
The franchise-famous skits do a lot to make even the blandest of the cast affable after 70 hours, but that ceiling is only as high as the characters are compelling. The voice acting is charming enough, but only Dohalim and Kisara's story gave me something to chew on. Our leading man Alphen does fine as a straight arrow but suffers from "main character syndrome". Our leading lady Shionne promises a mystery that under-delivers and leads to some of the biggest characterization inconsistencies between main cutscenes and skits. Rinwell and Law might actually fit the tone of this story most accurately, but they're also constant reminders of how much of this game's worldview is just not for me. Hootle, though, is very very cute!
Here's the thing. Arise's narrative commits the cardinal sin of trying to tell a story about something it cannot handle. You cannot power-of-love your way through contending with 300 years of slavery. The occassional skit or line that attempts nuance just feels like plausible deniability, and the narrative ultimately places systemic oppression at the feet of individual grievances even when explicitly saying it isn't. I'm trying to keep this spoiler-free, but here's a broad sketch of an oft-repeated cycle: The party will stumble across a grey situation, ponder its complexities and conclude there's no easy answer, then end with our hero speechifying an easy answer. The didactic tendency to just conclude "there's good and bad on both sides" betrays an adolescent understanding of humanity. And I don't mind simplicity! But if you're playing with the fire of slavery -- an evil that's as scarring and institutional as anything any world has ever seen -- then you gotta bring your A-game.
I'd also add that when the narrative veers into other-worldly territory in classic Tales fashion, the lack of grace with which it marries the human politics and the cosmic conflict really de-legitimizes whatever it's trying to say about oppression. I get that JRPGs and Tales games have this vestigial genre need to tie the at-present story to their universe's creation myth, but I just lost complete interest by the time we got to the big true-nature-of-the-world revelations.
There's a 15-hour version of this game that's just a two-hander following Dohalim and Kisara dealing with shit that I could love.
Honestly, the gameplay is a good time. The day-to-day minutiae of adventuring and world-traversing is fun, the combat is a riot (I'm a sucker for repetitive battle dialogue), and it's even got some of my favorite fishing in recent memory. Soaking in the wonder and landscapes of a new region never lost its luster. I want all the quality of life upgrades to stick with the franchise forever, and I really would love to see this art style continue.
Our main man starts off with amnesia, which actually made the core beat to beat mystery of the plot interesting despite how glaring the thematic stuff got. It's just too bad the writing's reach extends so far past its imagination's grasp.
Tales of Arise makes interesting choices then repeatedly cuts itself off at the knees, which makes a generally fun game also a bummer. Actually, story-wise, it's kind of a catastrophic bummer.
The art direction is gorgeous, and the environments shine, but the lack of aesthetic and dialogue personality across NPCs makes the world feel hollow. A small touch like giving them first names instead of "Dahnan Woman" could've gone a long way. I'm playing Dragon Quest 11S for the first time, and while they are also anonymous, the NPCs are given flavorful mini-narratives that make them at-home in their surroundings.
The franchise-famous skits do a lot to make even the blandest of the cast affable after 70 hours, but that ceiling is only as high as the characters are compelling. The voice acting is charming enough, but only Dohalim and Kisara's story gave me something to chew on. Our leading man Alphen does fine as a straight arrow but suffers from "main character syndrome". Our leading lady Shionne promises a mystery that under-delivers and leads to some of the biggest characterization inconsistencies between main cutscenes and skits. Rinwell and Law might actually fit the tone of this story most accurately, but they're also constant reminders of how much of this game's worldview is just not for me. Hootle, though, is very very cute!
Here's the thing. Arise's narrative commits the cardinal sin of trying to tell a story about something it cannot handle. You cannot power-of-love your way through contending with 300 years of slavery. The occassional skit or line that attempts nuance just feels like plausible deniability, and the narrative ultimately places systemic oppression at the feet of individual grievances even when explicitly saying it isn't. I'm trying to keep this spoiler-free, but here's a broad sketch of an oft-repeated cycle: The party will stumble across a grey situation, ponder its complexities and conclude there's no easy answer, then end with our hero speechifying an easy answer. The didactic tendency to just conclude "there's good and bad on both sides" betrays an adolescent understanding of humanity. And I don't mind simplicity! But if you're playing with the fire of slavery -- an evil that's as scarring and institutional as anything any world has ever seen -- then you gotta bring your A-game.
I'd also add that when the narrative veers into other-worldly territory in classic Tales fashion, the lack of grace with which it marries the human politics and the cosmic conflict really de-legitimizes whatever it's trying to say about oppression. I get that JRPGs and Tales games have this vestigial genre need to tie the at-present story to their universe's creation myth, but I just lost complete interest by the time we got to the big true-nature-of-the-world revelations.
There's a 15-hour version of this game that's just a two-hander following Dohalim and Kisara dealing with shit that I could love.
Honestly, the gameplay is a good time. The day-to-day minutiae of adventuring and world-traversing is fun, the combat is a riot (I'm a sucker for repetitive battle dialogue), and it's even got some of my favorite fishing in recent memory. Soaking in the wonder and landscapes of a new region never lost its luster. I want all the quality of life upgrades to stick with the franchise forever, and I really would love to see this art style continue.
Our main man starts off with amnesia, which actually made the core beat to beat mystery of the plot interesting despite how glaring the thematic stuff got. It's just too bad the writing's reach extends so far past its imagination's grasp.