Tyke
90 Reviews liked by Tyke
Tales of the Abyss
2005
Tales of the Abyss was my the best game I played last year, borderline my favorite game of all time. I’ve never been interested in playing a game from this franchise before, I started this entirely on impulse.
The one thing that did interest me was that I had a trusted friend tell me it was almost guaranteed to be my thing, even comparing it to my actual favorite game of all time, FFVII.
This game had a very excellent English dub. There is something lost in the process, I don’t know why but I imagine probably because JRPG’s like this weren’t the biggest sell at the end of the PS2 era, but in-game party chat isn’t voiced like in the Japanese version.
While for me personally this wasn’t a huge deal I didn’t very much appreciate that the localization removed Bump of Chicken’s song as the theme in the opening cinematic, literally my favorite J-Pop band. Karma is one of the greatest songs ever and its lyrics especially convey the main philosophical conflict of the story so well. It’s melody is referenced in like 5 different leitmotifs throughout the game.
All that said, the combination of Yuri Lowenthall as the leading man with Johnny Yong Bosch in the main cast was an immediate hard sell. A duo I’m not so unfamiliar with. Yuri’s performance for Luke is scarily perfect.
His two big roles in my mind have always been Yosuke and Sasuke, characters who have this very selfish core that can come across as downright entitlement. Luke’s egotism was something I felt immediately endeared too cause it was something I was familiar with.
He’s such an insecure prick at the start and it’s pathetic and he’s my baby girl.
Abyss’s cast as a whole is so compelling flawed, and flawed ways that aren’t meant to be inherently likable, which I greatly appreciated. It’s just overall a very all-star cast too, it never feels like a character shines at the expense of another.
There’s a symbiosis between the character writing/development and the way the setting of the game itself evolves throughout. Forces outside of the control of any one person shapes them in visible ways and informs their goals and mindsets, while at the same time the specific choices these people make prompts meaningful change to the systems in place.
Speaking of the setting I found it to be so cool. I wouldn’t say it’s absolute peak work building but it got me invested in it a decent bit more than the average JRPG world. I loved the infusion of various sci-fi elements and concepts that blends well with its mysticism and other stock fantasy RPG tropes.
As I’ve said I had virtually no pre-conceptions about what Tales was or could be so it was only a bit ago I learned that Tales having bad gameplay is something of a common opinion. And I understood why that would be a take almost immediately as a I heard it but I’ll try and explain why it works for me, at least in this entry.
The way Abyss builds on its combat/mechanics is, fairly piece meal. It’s a system that doesn’t give you all its tools right away, early game combat can feel boring with how limited you are. For me this worked because progressively unlocking new mechanics was part of what kept me engaged and enticed throughout.
It’s something more akin to an action game, and influenced in more ways than a few by fighting games. Getting the hang of it mostly comes down to learning proper spacing, memorizing patterns, executing strings, and because it’s so basic at the beginning I can see why it would turn off so many people.
To me a lot standard JRPG battle systems like Final Fantasy’s ATB aren’t so different because it’s a waiting game but the edge is taken off cause execution isn’t one of the main skills. Abyss is still and RPG, but one where mechanical mastery is expected.
I don’t blame anyone who feels intimidated by this but I’d also say, it’s a system where you get out of it what you put in, it’s about patience and learning, learning in the truest sense. So I’d implore, do your best to give it a chance and find if it ends up clicking with you.
Being an RPG where you fight countless enemies, at times those enemies will be actual people. Abyss is one of the only games I’ve seen where it directly acknowledges how you as the player end up killing so many people. It’s a point of conflict for Luke early on that he actually has an incredibly hard time killing enemy soldiers, being sheltered his whole life.
The whole thing is given the proper nuance and discussion it deserves. It’s hardly a game about “killing people is bad,” but it directly acknowledges these things, and contends with them. Not as a point of praise but just as a descriptor, it feels very “mature” in how it grapples with this problem.
There can be times where characters have to do something distasteful but which is still the right thing, but there can be times where you make the wrong choice, do something you can’t take back, and there are real consequences for that. It’s the prompt for Luke’s entire redemption arc in the game.
Luke’s actions and lack of consideration end up causing a number of people to suffer. Though it’s entirely his fault, and at times indirect, they’re the consequences that resulted because of how he is all the same. And it ends up damaging the relationships he has with the people around him.
I love so much how even if it feels unfair, Luke has to deal with the fact that he lost the respect and trust of the people he was with and at a certain point they’re not just going to uncritically put up with his behavior, and he has to live with their judgment of that.
The way the writing in Abyss unfold is really quite unpredictable in the best of ways. Amazing twists, reveals, red herrings, etc. The game even has this entire second act ending that feels like it should be the final part of the story, but continues even beyond that in a way that feels completely organic and it’s another way that Abyss was able to just hold my attention and never once lose it.
The environment design is gorgeous. Fixed camera angles lets this game put as much detail into the levels as it can. Some of the best looking stuff on the PS2, undoubtedly. Not held back presentationally by its age in any way.
The soundtrack does its job extremely well. It’s not among the absolute peaks of JRPG composition overall but there definitely isn’t a bad song or mid track. And it still manages to produce some of the absolute greatest pieces of music I’ve heard in a game. Meaning of Birth, especially, I might say is just my favorite piece of video game music ever.
I’ll be getting into story spoilers now, with some light analysis to convey why this story really means so much to me. So now is the time for if you haven't been spoiled or don’t know how the story plays out, to be advised against reading further.
Lots of Japanese media has the cutting off of hair as a significant symbolic action. In a way it’s meaningful for being about letting go of a burden that had been weighing down on you, or signaling a fresh start and new beginning in life. Luke is able to look past the person he was, and the loss of his old life, in order to progress and become his own person.
And obviously, Luke’s thematic foil for the whole game, Asch, never loses his long hair. Asch in the end was never able to move past having the life he feels should have been his taken from him. Asch can only ever think, only ever agonize, over his past that he can never take back.
As Luke says, while Asch has something he lost and can’t take back, Luke never even had a past to begin with. Though that’s something else about Luke Asch can’t accept. Even though the two of them are supposed to be mirrors, and should be so so similar to each other, Asch can’t accept how the person who he sees as having everything he wanted could find so little worth in himself.
Asch is an unbelievably proud person, and someone who’s so much like him shouldn’t feel worthless are undeserving of having been born. It’s not an entirely rational feeling, but that’s what makes Asch’s resentment compelling.
Likewise, Luke his entire life craved the acknowledgment of Van, while Asch had already long ago been acknowledged by Van as a powerful ally, but still stood against him on his own. In their final fight to decide who will destroy Van, Luke says that him & Asch are pretty much the same strength wise.
Which is the impetus for Asch to challenge him to decide which of the two is stronger once and for all. While Asch can’t stand that Luke put himself down as the inferior, now that he says he’s not inferior but that they’re actually equal, is an affront to Asch’s pride.
It’s only now that Luke actually believes in himself and his own strength though, that Asch can finally prove himself in the way he wanted to, in a definitive sense. Defeating Luke at the height of his mental strength means that he was right to always feel that the life Luke had should have been his.
Because as it is, Luke & Asch don’t have any kind of future after the final battle with Van, they’re going to disappear. So, living in the moment as they are, they decide to give everything to this fight and decide the significance of what their lives meant.
The Meaning of Birth is an orchestral rendition of Karma, with two competing sounds making up the significance of what it means for it to play during this fight. The flute represents Luke, light, maybe in a way weak, but even being subdued its strength is present in a more subtle way. The loud percussion and horns are Asch. Loud, almost violently so, outwardly a very powerful sound. And in the middle of the song it comes together.
Asch loses this fight, but while he said this would decide who between them was the real Like fon Fabre, in his final stand to buy Luke time, at last reclaims his name. For Luke, going against Asch was the final mental block he needed to overcome in order to finally be able to defeat Van.
The task of eliminating Vandesdelca and saving the world is no longer something he can hope to just pass off to Asch. He can no longer rely on him like he has so many times to this point. He’s emerged as the stronger and this time his need to win over Van matters more than ever. He finds his determination.
In Asch’s death scene, you can see two statues carved onto the door of the room they fought in. One has short hair, the other long, with their hands coming together. It’s an incredibly sad moment to see Asch’s life come to an end, being the one who had to stay behind, but it also shows how, Luke & Asch were finally able to come together for the sake of achieving something.
Luke is one of my top 10 characters of all time, across all mediums and stories. Obviously I think so much about his writing is excellent and it’s apparent to anyone that he’s an amazing character, but I don’t think it has much to do with any super wide appeal he has that made him a favorite.
It’s just everything about this character came together to affect me so deeply. His voice performance which I’ve talked about, his general personality early on as being kind of whiny, kind of a bitch, insensitive, craving acknowledgment, but growing so much as a person from there.
The most personal aspect to me, and it’s a bit embarrassing to talk about, but it was around the time I played Abyss last year that I started really questioning my gender. The hair cutting trope in anime is usually associated with girl characters and it’s not anything huge but it did something in me to see Luke also get to do that trope.
And then there are a lot of ways in which Luke is a fairly sensitive person, fairly emotional, thinks with his heart. I’m not saying it’s a very significant aspect of him to have certain more feminine traits but it was something I really liked. But Luke is also a character primarily associated with identity.
Abyss as the story of how Luke comes to be his own person after finding out that a significant portion of his life was a lie. And finding his own inner strength in that. I suppose any character that deals heavily a lot with identity is someone I could see this in, Cloud for example being my favorite character.
But Luke was the kind of character that just came at the right time, right place. And is a part of the reason I was able to eventually decide this huge thing about who I am.
The one thing that did interest me was that I had a trusted friend tell me it was almost guaranteed to be my thing, even comparing it to my actual favorite game of all time, FFVII.
This game had a very excellent English dub. There is something lost in the process, I don’t know why but I imagine probably because JRPG’s like this weren’t the biggest sell at the end of the PS2 era, but in-game party chat isn’t voiced like in the Japanese version.
While for me personally this wasn’t a huge deal I didn’t very much appreciate that the localization removed Bump of Chicken’s song as the theme in the opening cinematic, literally my favorite J-Pop band. Karma is one of the greatest songs ever and its lyrics especially convey the main philosophical conflict of the story so well. It’s melody is referenced in like 5 different leitmotifs throughout the game.
All that said, the combination of Yuri Lowenthall as the leading man with Johnny Yong Bosch in the main cast was an immediate hard sell. A duo I’m not so unfamiliar with. Yuri’s performance for Luke is scarily perfect.
His two big roles in my mind have always been Yosuke and Sasuke, characters who have this very selfish core that can come across as downright entitlement. Luke’s egotism was something I felt immediately endeared too cause it was something I was familiar with.
He’s such an insecure prick at the start and it’s pathetic and he’s my baby girl.
Abyss’s cast as a whole is so compelling flawed, and flawed ways that aren’t meant to be inherently likable, which I greatly appreciated. It’s just overall a very all-star cast too, it never feels like a character shines at the expense of another.
There’s a symbiosis between the character writing/development and the way the setting of the game itself evolves throughout. Forces outside of the control of any one person shapes them in visible ways and informs their goals and mindsets, while at the same time the specific choices these people make prompts meaningful change to the systems in place.
Speaking of the setting I found it to be so cool. I wouldn’t say it’s absolute peak work building but it got me invested in it a decent bit more than the average JRPG world. I loved the infusion of various sci-fi elements and concepts that blends well with its mysticism and other stock fantasy RPG tropes.
As I’ve said I had virtually no pre-conceptions about what Tales was or could be so it was only a bit ago I learned that Tales having bad gameplay is something of a common opinion. And I understood why that would be a take almost immediately as a I heard it but I’ll try and explain why it works for me, at least in this entry.
The way Abyss builds on its combat/mechanics is, fairly piece meal. It’s a system that doesn’t give you all its tools right away, early game combat can feel boring with how limited you are. For me this worked because progressively unlocking new mechanics was part of what kept me engaged and enticed throughout.
It’s something more akin to an action game, and influenced in more ways than a few by fighting games. Getting the hang of it mostly comes down to learning proper spacing, memorizing patterns, executing strings, and because it’s so basic at the beginning I can see why it would turn off so many people.
To me a lot standard JRPG battle systems like Final Fantasy’s ATB aren’t so different because it’s a waiting game but the edge is taken off cause execution isn’t one of the main skills. Abyss is still and RPG, but one where mechanical mastery is expected.
I don’t blame anyone who feels intimidated by this but I’d also say, it’s a system where you get out of it what you put in, it’s about patience and learning, learning in the truest sense. So I’d implore, do your best to give it a chance and find if it ends up clicking with you.
Being an RPG where you fight countless enemies, at times those enemies will be actual people. Abyss is one of the only games I’ve seen where it directly acknowledges how you as the player end up killing so many people. It’s a point of conflict for Luke early on that he actually has an incredibly hard time killing enemy soldiers, being sheltered his whole life.
The whole thing is given the proper nuance and discussion it deserves. It’s hardly a game about “killing people is bad,” but it directly acknowledges these things, and contends with them. Not as a point of praise but just as a descriptor, it feels very “mature” in how it grapples with this problem.
There can be times where characters have to do something distasteful but which is still the right thing, but there can be times where you make the wrong choice, do something you can’t take back, and there are real consequences for that. It’s the prompt for Luke’s entire redemption arc in the game.
Luke’s actions and lack of consideration end up causing a number of people to suffer. Though it’s entirely his fault, and at times indirect, they’re the consequences that resulted because of how he is all the same. And it ends up damaging the relationships he has with the people around him.
I love so much how even if it feels unfair, Luke has to deal with the fact that he lost the respect and trust of the people he was with and at a certain point they’re not just going to uncritically put up with his behavior, and he has to live with their judgment of that.
The way the writing in Abyss unfold is really quite unpredictable in the best of ways. Amazing twists, reveals, red herrings, etc. The game even has this entire second act ending that feels like it should be the final part of the story, but continues even beyond that in a way that feels completely organic and it’s another way that Abyss was able to just hold my attention and never once lose it.
The environment design is gorgeous. Fixed camera angles lets this game put as much detail into the levels as it can. Some of the best looking stuff on the PS2, undoubtedly. Not held back presentationally by its age in any way.
The soundtrack does its job extremely well. It’s not among the absolute peaks of JRPG composition overall but there definitely isn’t a bad song or mid track. And it still manages to produce some of the absolute greatest pieces of music I’ve heard in a game. Meaning of Birth, especially, I might say is just my favorite piece of video game music ever.
I’ll be getting into story spoilers now, with some light analysis to convey why this story really means so much to me. So now is the time for if you haven't been spoiled or don’t know how the story plays out, to be advised against reading further.
Lots of Japanese media has the cutting off of hair as a significant symbolic action. In a way it’s meaningful for being about letting go of a burden that had been weighing down on you, or signaling a fresh start and new beginning in life. Luke is able to look past the person he was, and the loss of his old life, in order to progress and become his own person.
And obviously, Luke’s thematic foil for the whole game, Asch, never loses his long hair. Asch in the end was never able to move past having the life he feels should have been his taken from him. Asch can only ever think, only ever agonize, over his past that he can never take back.
As Luke says, while Asch has something he lost and can’t take back, Luke never even had a past to begin with. Though that’s something else about Luke Asch can’t accept. Even though the two of them are supposed to be mirrors, and should be so so similar to each other, Asch can’t accept how the person who he sees as having everything he wanted could find so little worth in himself.
Asch is an unbelievably proud person, and someone who’s so much like him shouldn’t feel worthless are undeserving of having been born. It’s not an entirely rational feeling, but that’s what makes Asch’s resentment compelling.
Likewise, Luke his entire life craved the acknowledgment of Van, while Asch had already long ago been acknowledged by Van as a powerful ally, but still stood against him on his own. In their final fight to decide who will destroy Van, Luke says that him & Asch are pretty much the same strength wise.
Which is the impetus for Asch to challenge him to decide which of the two is stronger once and for all. While Asch can’t stand that Luke put himself down as the inferior, now that he says he’s not inferior but that they’re actually equal, is an affront to Asch’s pride.
It’s only now that Luke actually believes in himself and his own strength though, that Asch can finally prove himself in the way he wanted to, in a definitive sense. Defeating Luke at the height of his mental strength means that he was right to always feel that the life Luke had should have been his.
Because as it is, Luke & Asch don’t have any kind of future after the final battle with Van, they’re going to disappear. So, living in the moment as they are, they decide to give everything to this fight and decide the significance of what their lives meant.
The Meaning of Birth is an orchestral rendition of Karma, with two competing sounds making up the significance of what it means for it to play during this fight. The flute represents Luke, light, maybe in a way weak, but even being subdued its strength is present in a more subtle way. The loud percussion and horns are Asch. Loud, almost violently so, outwardly a very powerful sound. And in the middle of the song it comes together.
Asch loses this fight, but while he said this would decide who between them was the real Like fon Fabre, in his final stand to buy Luke time, at last reclaims his name. For Luke, going against Asch was the final mental block he needed to overcome in order to finally be able to defeat Van.
The task of eliminating Vandesdelca and saving the world is no longer something he can hope to just pass off to Asch. He can no longer rely on him like he has so many times to this point. He’s emerged as the stronger and this time his need to win over Van matters more than ever. He finds his determination.
In Asch’s death scene, you can see two statues carved onto the door of the room they fought in. One has short hair, the other long, with their hands coming together. It’s an incredibly sad moment to see Asch’s life come to an end, being the one who had to stay behind, but it also shows how, Luke & Asch were finally able to come together for the sake of achieving something.
Luke is one of my top 10 characters of all time, across all mediums and stories. Obviously I think so much about his writing is excellent and it’s apparent to anyone that he’s an amazing character, but I don’t think it has much to do with any super wide appeal he has that made him a favorite.
It’s just everything about this character came together to affect me so deeply. His voice performance which I’ve talked about, his general personality early on as being kind of whiny, kind of a bitch, insensitive, craving acknowledgment, but growing so much as a person from there.
The most personal aspect to me, and it’s a bit embarrassing to talk about, but it was around the time I played Abyss last year that I started really questioning my gender. The hair cutting trope in anime is usually associated with girl characters and it’s not anything huge but it did something in me to see Luke also get to do that trope.
And then there are a lot of ways in which Luke is a fairly sensitive person, fairly emotional, thinks with his heart. I’m not saying it’s a very significant aspect of him to have certain more feminine traits but it was something I really liked. But Luke is also a character primarily associated with identity.
Abyss as the story of how Luke comes to be his own person after finding out that a significant portion of his life was a lie. And finding his own inner strength in that. I suppose any character that deals heavily a lot with identity is someone I could see this in, Cloud for example being my favorite character.
But Luke was the kind of character that just came at the right time, right place. And is a part of the reason I was able to eventually decide this huge thing about who I am.
Godammit I love this game now. This game has creeped into my subconscious for the longest time so I decided to give it another (another another lol) go and man. Everything about it hits me in such a beautiful, almost indescribable way. I still think the story has some weak points but the good stuff is sooooo, so good.
Balan Wonderworld
2021
I haven't dropped a game in a long time. Balan Wonderworld changed that.
As a longtime fan of Sonic Team's work, I was absolutely stoked to hear that Sonic series creators Yuji Naka and Naoto Oshima were returning to collaborate again after years of separation. That optimism turned to skepticism the moment I saw this game in motion, and skepticism to disappointment when the reviews started rolling in. This game quickly became the biggest joke on the block, and after all this time I wondered, "could it truly have been that bad?" After all, I still enjoyed many of Naka's other projects despite their shortcomings. I decided to give Balan Wonderworld an honest shot. Big mistake.
This game forgoes so many 3D platformer game design hallmarks and traditions to the point where I have to wonder if the team persued feedback on certain things. The first and possibly largest offense - mapping everything to one button. Everything. Jumping, attacking, menu navigation - every button does the same thing, even the triggers. This proves to be incredibly tedious and frustrating as time goes on.
The second worst thing this game does just so happens to be its central mechanic, the outfit/powerup system. Powerups are incredibly situational and specific, and there are far too many for the game's own good. Half of them could have been meshed into singular, more versatile powerups - not only to mitigate the tedium of using them, but to lend themselves to more interesting stage mechanics and puzzles. Combine their one-note gimmicky nature with the fact that every button has one function, and that's where this game's faults peek through in plain sight. Have a powerup that focuses on attack? You can no longer jump until you find a powerup that allows for it.
Balan also likes to hide its secrets behind these powerups. Stages often hide their collectibles in plain sight, but require the use of an ability that you haven't encountered yet. This makes completing stages nigh unbearable. Other games hide their secrets similarly, but newfound abilities are typically integrated of into player's move set. Balan decides to take a decidedly more complicated approach, requiring the use of a changing room to swap outfits. On paper this isn't too bad an idea - but the fact that outfits are based on stock and must be individually collected from other stages is where Balan's progression becomes a lot more grating.
Music and visuals are nothing to write home about at all. Stage themes are uninteresting and cluttered, the general visual style is flat and uninteresting, and every tune went in one ear and out the other. Sadly ironic, considering that music and visuals were consistently some of the best parts of Naka and Oshima's previous works. The character designs are a treat to look at, but without appealing environments to stage them in I just find myself wishing they were in a better game.
All in all, this game drained me like few things have before and I only managed to get halfway. I need a palette cleanser. Time to start Spyro 2.
As a longtime fan of Sonic Team's work, I was absolutely stoked to hear that Sonic series creators Yuji Naka and Naoto Oshima were returning to collaborate again after years of separation. That optimism turned to skepticism the moment I saw this game in motion, and skepticism to disappointment when the reviews started rolling in. This game quickly became the biggest joke on the block, and after all this time I wondered, "could it truly have been that bad?" After all, I still enjoyed many of Naka's other projects despite their shortcomings. I decided to give Balan Wonderworld an honest shot. Big mistake.
This game forgoes so many 3D platformer game design hallmarks and traditions to the point where I have to wonder if the team persued feedback on certain things. The first and possibly largest offense - mapping everything to one button. Everything. Jumping, attacking, menu navigation - every button does the same thing, even the triggers. This proves to be incredibly tedious and frustrating as time goes on.
The second worst thing this game does just so happens to be its central mechanic, the outfit/powerup system. Powerups are incredibly situational and specific, and there are far too many for the game's own good. Half of them could have been meshed into singular, more versatile powerups - not only to mitigate the tedium of using them, but to lend themselves to more interesting stage mechanics and puzzles. Combine their one-note gimmicky nature with the fact that every button has one function, and that's where this game's faults peek through in plain sight. Have a powerup that focuses on attack? You can no longer jump until you find a powerup that allows for it.
Balan also likes to hide its secrets behind these powerups. Stages often hide their collectibles in plain sight, but require the use of an ability that you haven't encountered yet. This makes completing stages nigh unbearable. Other games hide their secrets similarly, but newfound abilities are typically integrated of into player's move set. Balan decides to take a decidedly more complicated approach, requiring the use of a changing room to swap outfits. On paper this isn't too bad an idea - but the fact that outfits are based on stock and must be individually collected from other stages is where Balan's progression becomes a lot more grating.
Music and visuals are nothing to write home about at all. Stage themes are uninteresting and cluttered, the general visual style is flat and uninteresting, and every tune went in one ear and out the other. Sadly ironic, considering that music and visuals were consistently some of the best parts of Naka and Oshima's previous works. The character designs are a treat to look at, but without appealing environments to stage them in I just find myself wishing they were in a better game.
All in all, this game drained me like few things have before and I only managed to get halfway. I need a palette cleanser. Time to start Spyro 2.
This review contains spoilers
There is something to be said about the inevitability of the human spirit. Through many trials and much toil, humanity continues to persist against all odds, always finding a way to forge a new destiny and strive to maintain continuous progress. But what happens when humanity goes too far? How will we know that we’ve gone astray? And when will it finally be time to stop pretending that we’re certain of our path forward regardless of all that we’ve done?
Those were some of the questions I sought to answer upon my replay of Shadow of the Colossus. Six months after finishing it last Christmas day, I still couldn’t get my experience out of my head; it felt like a product of its time and yet simultaneously felt so ahead of its time. I suppose there’s a part of me that’s drawn towards the quirky, the interesting, and the compelling, and for some reason I remember Shadow of the Colossus checking off all three boxes. Thus, I decided to give the old classic another go, and hopefully do it justice this time expressing my sentiments with more than one word.
It goes something like this; a hawk soars into a dark canyon while a lone young man and his horse companion trod onto a long, lonely bridge, slowly making their way through a quiet yet dignified tower. There in the shrine, he puts the body of his loved one to rest, and hears the voice of a foreign entity, offering him a deal; in exchange for taking down sixteen colossi across the land, his lover shall be revived and brought back to him. So, the young man (aptly named Wander), makes his way through this still yet sprawling land in hopes of fulfilling his duty, wherever it shall take him.
Most action-adventure games present themselves as this glorious epic where the young, up and coming hero strives against his inexperience and fears to conquer the unknown, slay hordes of monsters and tear down obstacles in his way, and upon having slew the scheming and conniving big bad bringing despair to all, returns home triumphantly to confetti and fanfare as a hero’s welcome. Shadow of the Colossus stands starkly to this idea; as I made my way across this foreboding territory, I was greeted with… nothing. There are ruins of a once glorious civilization scattered throughout this forsaken land where the wild has reclaimed its bounty, with no other visible records to be found. Aside from fruit trees and blue tailed salamanders to collect at shrines serving as save points, there is virtually no other interaction to be found in this world. There’s no triumphant and exciting overworld music to be found, just the stillness of the wind and the echoes of the forest. Forget what you know about emptiness regarding other video game worlds; aside from the aforementioned salamanders and a few turtles and fish here and there, I and my horse companion (Agro) were genuinely alone. The bare walls and isolated plains of the forbidden wild perhaps have millennia of stories to be told, but they were not for me; I don’t belong in this place, and I never would. Yet, here I was, a boy on his horse aiming to change the course of history by eliminating the other sixteen dignified inhabitants of this lonely land. And who exactly decided I was to be the arbiter of this sealed off earth?
I slowly make my way up the cliffs across from the shrine to come across this magnificent and imposing creature, just sauntering its way across the empty landscape. There’s this subtle yet growing sensation that I’ve stumbled upon something that will change my life forever. I creep behind what I refer to as “the hulking beast” and find its weakness; close to the beast’s ankle, a crack glows blue. I latch onto the fur and stab the crack for all it’s worth. By now it’s noticed me, but it’s too late. The beast falters, and I take this time to scale its back; as it stands back up, I clutch onto the top of its head and repeatedly plunge my sword into its temple as it writhes in fear and agony. A sense of finality looms in the air as the beast takes its final blow, leans back slowly, and collapses upon the earth, never to rise again. I am almost immediately injected with these black-blue ribbons spewing out of the fallen colossus, with no time to admire my handiwork or ponder the consequences of my actions, and black out.
I’m not sure if I would say the going got harder from there, but it most certainly got rougher. I and Agro would make our way through endless placid landscapes to finally encounter once tranquil, dignified colossi that for all I know were just living day by day in this abandoned universe. I would need every advantage I could get; I was but an ant with a stick and a sling against these glorious beasts that were the size of a small building. Many of these colossi are capable of taking me out with a few fell blows, and my equipment much less my physique could not hope to win in one on one open combat; I needed every advantage I could get, and the designers did a magnificent job sneaking in subtle hints of how to manipulate both the colossi and their surrounding environments to target and exploit their weaknesses, whether it be from their visible characteristics, the glowing blue cracks and sigils revealed with the sword, or from the colossi’s behavior themselves and clues given via descriptions from the echoing voice. There’s this constant sense of fragility as I ascended the features of each colossi; I was limited by my stamina which gets sapped every time I clung, jumped, and climbed to find the vitals and avoid being toppled by sudden movements. I’ll also mention that while it took some time to get used to the camera and seemingly strange controls, I ultimately did not mind them in the scope of the overall experience; fighting the colossi is meant to be this untamed, frenzied experience meant to instill apprehension into the player, as this fight between the lives of strangers, much less life and death.
And that’s where Shadow of the Colossus really excels: bringing this complex emotional rush to the player as they discover, slay, and exit the lives of the colossi scattered across the land. Every colossus has their own approaches, their own quirks, and their own story to tell as you seek to justify the means with your ends. I had never felt so small and insignificant as Gaius loomed over me, sauntering their way and pulling back the sword to slam upon my intrusive presence. I had never felt so desperate and powerless as when I was clasping onto Avion’s wings, soaring through the skies with the currents rushing around me as I tensed up trying not to fall off for the fifth time as Avion barreled its way over the lake. And I had never felt such primal fear as Dirge tunneled at me with those unmoving eyes, seeking to devour my very soul as Agro & I galloped away, doing whatever we could to avoid a fate in the belly of the beast. Every fight felt completely different in both the actions taken and the emotions spilled across; I am not sure if there is glory to be found in battle, but there are certainly moments that I will never forget.
I’ve referenced the soundtrack numerous times at this point but I don’t think I see it talked about enough here, so I’ll talk about the soundtrack as a microcosm in the context of the overall scope for a bit. Kow Otani and the orchestra do an incredible job intensifying moods with its shifts in the background tracks, allowing you to associate each track with different moments. I’ve already spoken about the quietude that comes with traversing the forbidden land and its many artifacts; there’s no epic adventure theme to be found here, because you’re not supposed to be here in the first place conducting this taboo ritual. As a result, there’s this break between your moments of reflection whenever you do stumble upon the resting places of colossi that the beams of light from your sword have brought you towards. These foreboding ambient themes that begin playing, such as the curiously named “Silence”, seem to highlight this feeling of anticipation and tension that begins to build upon your discovery. Once this short lived peace is broken down, the soundtrack transitions into full blown battle tracks, often with shifts in the track selection themselves as you progress to another “phase” by exposing or gaining access to a colossi’s weakness. I could go on and on about how I got this exhilarating rush when Dirge’s chase theme transitioned right into “Counterattack” as Dirge, suddenly blinded by my arrow, crashed into a wall, giving me the chance to leap from Agro onto its exposed back, or how my initial intimidation upon stumbling into Quadratus suddenly tearing down the cliff cave walls transformed into the rising orchestral melody of “Revived Power”, pushing me forward with this feeling that I couldn’t fail now when I had come so far. The songs perfectly emphasize and capture the moods that I felt fighting these complex creatures of habit, and only served to further accentuate their struggles and personalities. Truly, it was one for the books, this song & dance between an unwilling participant and an uncertain instigator.
I think it’s also interesting how the songs on the soundtrack also reflect this paradigm shift as you continue to fell colossus after colossus in your quest. “In Awe of the Power” begins perhaps as this frame to signify how the looming Gaius, with its thundering steps as it slowly approaches you, towers and threatens to snuff out your very existence. You can’t even attack any weaknesses off the bat compared to the last two colossi; you have to wait until Gaius attempts to slam its sword upon you and crack its own armor upon the solid pedestal in the middle of the arena. Compare this to the last time that "In Awe of the Power" plays, during the late game fight versus Phalanx. Phalanx is notable in that it never attempts to directly harm the player; it’s just this majestic snake-like creature flying in the desert sky that happened to become the player’s next bounty. Even when the player ascends onto Phalanx’s body, all Phalanx can do is attempt to slowly barrel roll to try and throw off the player and bury itself back into the sand to regain the use of its air sacs. Thus, my interpretation here is that somewhere along the lines, the prey has become the predator and the predator has become the prey; you’ve transformed from this greenhorn to this grizzled and weary veteran monster hunter, and it is in fact the colossi themselves that shudder in fear as you ascend their bodies, seeking to terminate their once peaceful and storied lives. Similarly, “The Opened Way” is considered to be one of the most emblematic themes of the game in that it is the first “success” theme that plays as you topple the first colossus, Valus, and climb onto its head. There’s this feeling of anxiety yet triumph as you taste your first morsels of progress as the beginning of what will be a long and memorable journey to revive your loved one; maybe all of this will be possible and worth it after all. It’s also one of the last battle themes to play, as you disarm the fifteenth colossus, Argus, of its glove after stabbing the vital on the back of its right arm. By the time you’ve gotten this far, there’s little left for you to finish off in this much emptier world as Argus desperately tries to fend you off with what little energy it has remaining. You’ve long decided your fate and the fate of the colossi by now; in a sense, the opened way has closed.
This paradigm shift becomes even more evident as you approach the final colossus, Malus. Agro is gone, having sacrificed herself leaping over a canyon bridge to bring Wander to his final destination. The air around you tingles with gloom as storm clouds blacken the sky and torrents pour upon the lonely earth. There’s no uplifting, upbeat final boss music to be found here; "Demise of the Ritual" is a lament for all that has happened and all that could have been as I trudged my way through tunnels and barriers, dodging the desperate energy shots of Malus in a last ditch attempt to avenge its family. And as I scaled Malus, all Malus could do was give me this curious and troubled stare after I stabbed its hand to ascend to its vital on top of its head like it was just another day at the office. The colossi can’t speak of course, but I’ve wondered for a while what it would say if it had a voice. “What brought you this far, little man? How and why did you take down all fifteen of my siblings and make it here in one piece? What will become of you, and what will become of me?”
At the end of the day, I’m left uncertain as to if there really was a big bad to be found in all of this. The colossi certainly didn’t do anything wrong, simply choosing to exist as peaceful beings in a forbidden land, left undisturbed for perhaps eons. Dormin kept their end of the bargain and revived Mono as promised even after Dormin no longer needed Wander. Emon was right that Dormin presented a threat having done something so sacrilegious as to disturb the natural order of the land practically overnight, even as rueful as he was that Wander would remain embedded in the forsaken land for eternity. And Wander… perhaps he was misguided from the start, trying to alter the game of fate as is, but I suppose grief and desperation drive us to consider the unfathomable, going as far to defy human nature itself. Or perhaps it is simply inherent in human nature to begin with to defy our limitations, simply because we can and because we believe in doing what we think is right even if we may not truly be sure of what lies ahead of us as the light at the end of the tunnel.
So as Emon takes his departure and Dormin is exorcised once again, we are left with those who remain. Wander’s lover, Mono, finally awakens and finds only a limping Agro and an infant child with horns as a reminder of the events of the game. The bridge connecting the shrine with the outside world has collapsed as Emon takes his final glance at the ruins, and our heroes’ fate is uncertain. And yet, there is a glimpse of hope; as Mono makes her way to the courtyard, she encounters the rays of the sun for the first time in perhaps many years, and sights a curious deer admiring the newborn infant. And as the hawk ascends once more into the skies beyond the forsaken land, bookending this tragic and thoughtful tale while the credits wrap up, I’m reminded once again why I admired this game so much to begin with as I lean back in my chair, contemplative and stupefied that such an intricate work was ever conceived in the first place.
I don't think my questions were ever answered really, nor if they ever will be. But I’d like to quote Anton Chekhov here, as presumptuous as that may sound comparing a video game to one of the most storied authors in history: “The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.” Perhaps that is why I continue to play video games, to immerse myself with more stories and pass those stories along, to feel something different, to genuinely believe in the power of this medium. I spoke with my mom about my thoughts and feelings regarding Shadow of the Colossus last night, and she advised that I search for more games that inspired me the same way that this did. I’m not sure if I’ve found any that even come close to achieving Fumito Ueda’s vision all those years ago, but I’ll keep searching, and I’ll certainly be back next year.
I don’t think Shadow of the Colossus is a game for everyone. But I do think that everyone should experience Shadow of the Colossus in their lifetime.
Those were some of the questions I sought to answer upon my replay of Shadow of the Colossus. Six months after finishing it last Christmas day, I still couldn’t get my experience out of my head; it felt like a product of its time and yet simultaneously felt so ahead of its time. I suppose there’s a part of me that’s drawn towards the quirky, the interesting, and the compelling, and for some reason I remember Shadow of the Colossus checking off all three boxes. Thus, I decided to give the old classic another go, and hopefully do it justice this time expressing my sentiments with more than one word.
It goes something like this; a hawk soars into a dark canyon while a lone young man and his horse companion trod onto a long, lonely bridge, slowly making their way through a quiet yet dignified tower. There in the shrine, he puts the body of his loved one to rest, and hears the voice of a foreign entity, offering him a deal; in exchange for taking down sixteen colossi across the land, his lover shall be revived and brought back to him. So, the young man (aptly named Wander), makes his way through this still yet sprawling land in hopes of fulfilling his duty, wherever it shall take him.
Most action-adventure games present themselves as this glorious epic where the young, up and coming hero strives against his inexperience and fears to conquer the unknown, slay hordes of monsters and tear down obstacles in his way, and upon having slew the scheming and conniving big bad bringing despair to all, returns home triumphantly to confetti and fanfare as a hero’s welcome. Shadow of the Colossus stands starkly to this idea; as I made my way across this foreboding territory, I was greeted with… nothing. There are ruins of a once glorious civilization scattered throughout this forsaken land where the wild has reclaimed its bounty, with no other visible records to be found. Aside from fruit trees and blue tailed salamanders to collect at shrines serving as save points, there is virtually no other interaction to be found in this world. There’s no triumphant and exciting overworld music to be found, just the stillness of the wind and the echoes of the forest. Forget what you know about emptiness regarding other video game worlds; aside from the aforementioned salamanders and a few turtles and fish here and there, I and my horse companion (Agro) were genuinely alone. The bare walls and isolated plains of the forbidden wild perhaps have millennia of stories to be told, but they were not for me; I don’t belong in this place, and I never would. Yet, here I was, a boy on his horse aiming to change the course of history by eliminating the other sixteen dignified inhabitants of this lonely land. And who exactly decided I was to be the arbiter of this sealed off earth?
I slowly make my way up the cliffs across from the shrine to come across this magnificent and imposing creature, just sauntering its way across the empty landscape. There’s this subtle yet growing sensation that I’ve stumbled upon something that will change my life forever. I creep behind what I refer to as “the hulking beast” and find its weakness; close to the beast’s ankle, a crack glows blue. I latch onto the fur and stab the crack for all it’s worth. By now it’s noticed me, but it’s too late. The beast falters, and I take this time to scale its back; as it stands back up, I clutch onto the top of its head and repeatedly plunge my sword into its temple as it writhes in fear and agony. A sense of finality looms in the air as the beast takes its final blow, leans back slowly, and collapses upon the earth, never to rise again. I am almost immediately injected with these black-blue ribbons spewing out of the fallen colossus, with no time to admire my handiwork or ponder the consequences of my actions, and black out.
I’m not sure if I would say the going got harder from there, but it most certainly got rougher. I and Agro would make our way through endless placid landscapes to finally encounter once tranquil, dignified colossi that for all I know were just living day by day in this abandoned universe. I would need every advantage I could get; I was but an ant with a stick and a sling against these glorious beasts that were the size of a small building. Many of these colossi are capable of taking me out with a few fell blows, and my equipment much less my physique could not hope to win in one on one open combat; I needed every advantage I could get, and the designers did a magnificent job sneaking in subtle hints of how to manipulate both the colossi and their surrounding environments to target and exploit their weaknesses, whether it be from their visible characteristics, the glowing blue cracks and sigils revealed with the sword, or from the colossi’s behavior themselves and clues given via descriptions from the echoing voice. There’s this constant sense of fragility as I ascended the features of each colossi; I was limited by my stamina which gets sapped every time I clung, jumped, and climbed to find the vitals and avoid being toppled by sudden movements. I’ll also mention that while it took some time to get used to the camera and seemingly strange controls, I ultimately did not mind them in the scope of the overall experience; fighting the colossi is meant to be this untamed, frenzied experience meant to instill apprehension into the player, as this fight between the lives of strangers, much less life and death.
And that’s where Shadow of the Colossus really excels: bringing this complex emotional rush to the player as they discover, slay, and exit the lives of the colossi scattered across the land. Every colossus has their own approaches, their own quirks, and their own story to tell as you seek to justify the means with your ends. I had never felt so small and insignificant as Gaius loomed over me, sauntering their way and pulling back the sword to slam upon my intrusive presence. I had never felt so desperate and powerless as when I was clasping onto Avion’s wings, soaring through the skies with the currents rushing around me as I tensed up trying not to fall off for the fifth time as Avion barreled its way over the lake. And I had never felt such primal fear as Dirge tunneled at me with those unmoving eyes, seeking to devour my very soul as Agro & I galloped away, doing whatever we could to avoid a fate in the belly of the beast. Every fight felt completely different in both the actions taken and the emotions spilled across; I am not sure if there is glory to be found in battle, but there are certainly moments that I will never forget.
I’ve referenced the soundtrack numerous times at this point but I don’t think I see it talked about enough here, so I’ll talk about the soundtrack as a microcosm in the context of the overall scope for a bit. Kow Otani and the orchestra do an incredible job intensifying moods with its shifts in the background tracks, allowing you to associate each track with different moments. I’ve already spoken about the quietude that comes with traversing the forbidden land and its many artifacts; there’s no epic adventure theme to be found here, because you’re not supposed to be here in the first place conducting this taboo ritual. As a result, there’s this break between your moments of reflection whenever you do stumble upon the resting places of colossi that the beams of light from your sword have brought you towards. These foreboding ambient themes that begin playing, such as the curiously named “Silence”, seem to highlight this feeling of anticipation and tension that begins to build upon your discovery. Once this short lived peace is broken down, the soundtrack transitions into full blown battle tracks, often with shifts in the track selection themselves as you progress to another “phase” by exposing or gaining access to a colossi’s weakness. I could go on and on about how I got this exhilarating rush when Dirge’s chase theme transitioned right into “Counterattack” as Dirge, suddenly blinded by my arrow, crashed into a wall, giving me the chance to leap from Agro onto its exposed back, or how my initial intimidation upon stumbling into Quadratus suddenly tearing down the cliff cave walls transformed into the rising orchestral melody of “Revived Power”, pushing me forward with this feeling that I couldn’t fail now when I had come so far. The songs perfectly emphasize and capture the moods that I felt fighting these complex creatures of habit, and only served to further accentuate their struggles and personalities. Truly, it was one for the books, this song & dance between an unwilling participant and an uncertain instigator.
I think it’s also interesting how the songs on the soundtrack also reflect this paradigm shift as you continue to fell colossus after colossus in your quest. “In Awe of the Power” begins perhaps as this frame to signify how the looming Gaius, with its thundering steps as it slowly approaches you, towers and threatens to snuff out your very existence. You can’t even attack any weaknesses off the bat compared to the last two colossi; you have to wait until Gaius attempts to slam its sword upon you and crack its own armor upon the solid pedestal in the middle of the arena. Compare this to the last time that "In Awe of the Power" plays, during the late game fight versus Phalanx. Phalanx is notable in that it never attempts to directly harm the player; it’s just this majestic snake-like creature flying in the desert sky that happened to become the player’s next bounty. Even when the player ascends onto Phalanx’s body, all Phalanx can do is attempt to slowly barrel roll to try and throw off the player and bury itself back into the sand to regain the use of its air sacs. Thus, my interpretation here is that somewhere along the lines, the prey has become the predator and the predator has become the prey; you’ve transformed from this greenhorn to this grizzled and weary veteran monster hunter, and it is in fact the colossi themselves that shudder in fear as you ascend their bodies, seeking to terminate their once peaceful and storied lives. Similarly, “The Opened Way” is considered to be one of the most emblematic themes of the game in that it is the first “success” theme that plays as you topple the first colossus, Valus, and climb onto its head. There’s this feeling of anxiety yet triumph as you taste your first morsels of progress as the beginning of what will be a long and memorable journey to revive your loved one; maybe all of this will be possible and worth it after all. It’s also one of the last battle themes to play, as you disarm the fifteenth colossus, Argus, of its glove after stabbing the vital on the back of its right arm. By the time you’ve gotten this far, there’s little left for you to finish off in this much emptier world as Argus desperately tries to fend you off with what little energy it has remaining. You’ve long decided your fate and the fate of the colossi by now; in a sense, the opened way has closed.
This paradigm shift becomes even more evident as you approach the final colossus, Malus. Agro is gone, having sacrificed herself leaping over a canyon bridge to bring Wander to his final destination. The air around you tingles with gloom as storm clouds blacken the sky and torrents pour upon the lonely earth. There’s no uplifting, upbeat final boss music to be found here; "Demise of the Ritual" is a lament for all that has happened and all that could have been as I trudged my way through tunnels and barriers, dodging the desperate energy shots of Malus in a last ditch attempt to avenge its family. And as I scaled Malus, all Malus could do was give me this curious and troubled stare after I stabbed its hand to ascend to its vital on top of its head like it was just another day at the office. The colossi can’t speak of course, but I’ve wondered for a while what it would say if it had a voice. “What brought you this far, little man? How and why did you take down all fifteen of my siblings and make it here in one piece? What will become of you, and what will become of me?”
At the end of the day, I’m left uncertain as to if there really was a big bad to be found in all of this. The colossi certainly didn’t do anything wrong, simply choosing to exist as peaceful beings in a forbidden land, left undisturbed for perhaps eons. Dormin kept their end of the bargain and revived Mono as promised even after Dormin no longer needed Wander. Emon was right that Dormin presented a threat having done something so sacrilegious as to disturb the natural order of the land practically overnight, even as rueful as he was that Wander would remain embedded in the forsaken land for eternity. And Wander… perhaps he was misguided from the start, trying to alter the game of fate as is, but I suppose grief and desperation drive us to consider the unfathomable, going as far to defy human nature itself. Or perhaps it is simply inherent in human nature to begin with to defy our limitations, simply because we can and because we believe in doing what we think is right even if we may not truly be sure of what lies ahead of us as the light at the end of the tunnel.
So as Emon takes his departure and Dormin is exorcised once again, we are left with those who remain. Wander’s lover, Mono, finally awakens and finds only a limping Agro and an infant child with horns as a reminder of the events of the game. The bridge connecting the shrine with the outside world has collapsed as Emon takes his final glance at the ruins, and our heroes’ fate is uncertain. And yet, there is a glimpse of hope; as Mono makes her way to the courtyard, she encounters the rays of the sun for the first time in perhaps many years, and sights a curious deer admiring the newborn infant. And as the hawk ascends once more into the skies beyond the forsaken land, bookending this tragic and thoughtful tale while the credits wrap up, I’m reminded once again why I admired this game so much to begin with as I lean back in my chair, contemplative and stupefied that such an intricate work was ever conceived in the first place.
I don't think my questions were ever answered really, nor if they ever will be. But I’d like to quote Anton Chekhov here, as presumptuous as that may sound comparing a video game to one of the most storied authors in history: “The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.” Perhaps that is why I continue to play video games, to immerse myself with more stories and pass those stories along, to feel something different, to genuinely believe in the power of this medium. I spoke with my mom about my thoughts and feelings regarding Shadow of the Colossus last night, and she advised that I search for more games that inspired me the same way that this did. I’m not sure if I’ve found any that even come close to achieving Fumito Ueda’s vision all those years ago, but I’ll keep searching, and I’ll certainly be back next year.
I don’t think Shadow of the Colossus is a game for everyone. But I do think that everyone should experience Shadow of the Colossus in their lifetime.
Resident Evil
2014
For all the survival horror that I've dabbled with over the past few years, this is the title that made me the most cognizant of the "survival" aspect. It’s this elaborate balancing act of juggling every limited resource at your disposal: ammo for bosses and enemies, kerosene to burn necessary corpses after downing zombies to secure routes, health items as fail safes, ink ribbons to save when deemed necessary, and most importantly, inventory space to minimize backtracking with the bare minimum (knowing what you’re likely to use up as you progress so you have enough room to forage). What’s key to all of this is that it’s often worthwhile not downing zombies at all to not only conserve ammo, but also prevent the possibility of a more dangerous Crimson Head when kerosene is not only limited but requires further planning for refueling and additional inventory slots (lighter + flask). It’s punishing, but in the best way possible; damage and death become instruments of observation to properly plan out backtracking and understanding exactly what goes where. Perhaps my favorite example of this in action was abusing the various doors in a room connecting the shed corridor with a safe room; by quickly going in and out of the entrances, I could not only reset a Hunter’s awareness and spawn, but also place myself in a position where I could immediately run at the Hunter to proc an attack and slip past every time. It certainly helps, regardless, that there’s plenty of leeway for careful experimentation, thanks to all of the scattered health items about the mansion (granted, often requiring careful planning to optimize grounded herbs in rooms and keeping enough inventory space open for trips). It’s also fairly firm at setting its boundaries by telegraphing enemy placement far in advance with rattling doors/windows to signify enemy shifts, background moaning when a zombie is present in the room, and even environmental noises like crunching fallen glass to make up for the lack of vision with fixed camera angles.
That doesn’t mean, however, that the horror has been neglected. If anything, I found this game far more unsettling beyond sudden surprises. It’s not so much the fear of the unexpected, but rather, the lingering fear of waiting for the other shoe to drop while you’re expecting the unexpected. They're scripted events, sure, but they're well disguised thanks to every room often acting as its own isolated microcosm without the presence of the protagonist (not to mention that it's pretty easy to get caught up in the middle of things and forget about each individual room, which makes it all the more viscerally shocking) and there's still a feeling of player control with careful planning and routing. This fits perfectly alongside its core philosophy of risk versus reward, the existential dread of having to backtrack through several zombie infested corridors when you realize you forgot an inventory key and having to constantly and deliberately throw yourself into tight situations just to save another trip across the map. It’s what makes this such an ideal speedrunning game: not necessarily because of satisfying movement or combat, but because Resident Evil is really a game about time management. Every second wasted tromping through another passageway is time that could contribute to a zombie reviving as a Crimson Head or another second spent replaying if you’re not willing to use that extra ink ribbon. The primal fear arising from guaranteed safety as a fleeting resource lends perfectly to the need for optimization; in that sense, pressuring players into constantly checking the map to avoid confrontations and getting lost goes hand in hand with spending as little time as possible, for nothing is more terrifying than having to rewind the simulations in your head for another go.
I can’t help but feel that every detail of this game was thought down to the bone, even the original tank control scheme. That’s right, I’m actually defending tank controls for once in my life… how the turns have tabled. Dodging enemies can seem tougher, but most are conveniently placed near corners and more open areas to give you the room necessary to dodge with a backstep/quick burst to the side if you’re willing to wait and bait committal attacks. More importantly, using tank controls lets you maintain your direction and momentum while running through different camera angles of a room. With alternate controls, you most likely have to hold down the joystick to maintain velocity and upon a new camera angle, will have to quickly retap to keep the intended direction with each new angle. This becomes paramount in tighter chase sequences, where even slight moments of stagnation can lead to damage/death, as well as one timed puzzle where I had to press a button and then quickly run through several fixed angles to get into position to push a statue. In addition, I found it rather difficult to reliably walk (as opposed to running full-time) with alternate controls over tank controls, which can absolutely backfire during an end-game sequence where running for a prolonged period can trigger an explosion during nitro delivery. Therefore, the circumstances created by the environment not only are doable with tank controls, but in fact necessitate the usage of such controls.
Everything just comes together as this tightly designed package. Puzzles have fairly evident tells and can be figured out with careful observation of the surroundings while facilitating the inventory scramble that plays so heavily to the game’s survival elements. The lore never feels overbearing or excessive, and does a great job weaving in hints for crafting approaches and figuring out exactly what has to be accomplished. There’s never an explicit timer on screen outside of the final ending segment, yet the game is great at creating circumstances where you’re forced to make decisions on the fly from environmental stressors and considering the mansion not just on a per room basis, but as a sum of its parts. I genuinely don’t think I have any gripes; it was more than happy to beat me down, but understanding its parameters to scale up against its challenges was an incredibly fulfilling experience. I’d damn well say that REmake is the most focused and cohesive survival horror experience I’ve ever played. Not just a perfect remake, but perhaps a practically perfect game.
That doesn’t mean, however, that the horror has been neglected. If anything, I found this game far more unsettling beyond sudden surprises. It’s not so much the fear of the unexpected, but rather, the lingering fear of waiting for the other shoe to drop while you’re expecting the unexpected. They're scripted events, sure, but they're well disguised thanks to every room often acting as its own isolated microcosm without the presence of the protagonist (not to mention that it's pretty easy to get caught up in the middle of things and forget about each individual room, which makes it all the more viscerally shocking) and there's still a feeling of player control with careful planning and routing. This fits perfectly alongside its core philosophy of risk versus reward, the existential dread of having to backtrack through several zombie infested corridors when you realize you forgot an inventory key and having to constantly and deliberately throw yourself into tight situations just to save another trip across the map. It’s what makes this such an ideal speedrunning game: not necessarily because of satisfying movement or combat, but because Resident Evil is really a game about time management. Every second wasted tromping through another passageway is time that could contribute to a zombie reviving as a Crimson Head or another second spent replaying if you’re not willing to use that extra ink ribbon. The primal fear arising from guaranteed safety as a fleeting resource lends perfectly to the need for optimization; in that sense, pressuring players into constantly checking the map to avoid confrontations and getting lost goes hand in hand with spending as little time as possible, for nothing is more terrifying than having to rewind the simulations in your head for another go.
I can’t help but feel that every detail of this game was thought down to the bone, even the original tank control scheme. That’s right, I’m actually defending tank controls for once in my life… how the turns have tabled. Dodging enemies can seem tougher, but most are conveniently placed near corners and more open areas to give you the room necessary to dodge with a backstep/quick burst to the side if you’re willing to wait and bait committal attacks. More importantly, using tank controls lets you maintain your direction and momentum while running through different camera angles of a room. With alternate controls, you most likely have to hold down the joystick to maintain velocity and upon a new camera angle, will have to quickly retap to keep the intended direction with each new angle. This becomes paramount in tighter chase sequences, where even slight moments of stagnation can lead to damage/death, as well as one timed puzzle where I had to press a button and then quickly run through several fixed angles to get into position to push a statue. In addition, I found it rather difficult to reliably walk (as opposed to running full-time) with alternate controls over tank controls, which can absolutely backfire during an end-game sequence where running for a prolonged period can trigger an explosion during nitro delivery. Therefore, the circumstances created by the environment not only are doable with tank controls, but in fact necessitate the usage of such controls.
Everything just comes together as this tightly designed package. Puzzles have fairly evident tells and can be figured out with careful observation of the surroundings while facilitating the inventory scramble that plays so heavily to the game’s survival elements. The lore never feels overbearing or excessive, and does a great job weaving in hints for crafting approaches and figuring out exactly what has to be accomplished. There’s never an explicit timer on screen outside of the final ending segment, yet the game is great at creating circumstances where you’re forced to make decisions on the fly from environmental stressors and considering the mansion not just on a per room basis, but as a sum of its parts. I genuinely don’t think I have any gripes; it was more than happy to beat me down, but understanding its parameters to scale up against its challenges was an incredibly fulfilling experience. I’d damn well say that REmake is the most focused and cohesive survival horror experience I’ve ever played. Not just a perfect remake, but perhaps a practically perfect game.
Journey
2012
At this point, I feel like I’ve been playing Journey for half of my life. I’ve played through underwater Journey, forest Journey, air Journey, space Journey, cat Journey, and even boring Journey. Yet upon my yearly ascent in the original Journey on New Year’s Day, I find myself just as floored as when I first picked it up years ago, in spite of clone after clone exhausting my goodwill. What exactly then, is present in the original’s realized game design philosophy that every other spiritual successor has found themselves bereft of?
To answer this question, I want you to imagine a world where Journey doesn’t exist. A world where the formula to indie developers meant something more than just mindlessly tilting up on the left joystick to walk towards the next checkpoint while some narrator waxed poetic in the background. Before Journey, before Flower even, the closest ancestor we had was Ico. Fumito Ueda described his game as an execution of “boy meets girl,” and what it boiled down to was a minimalist adventure game with some puzzles cleverly disguised as platforming and timing segments. Occasionally, you also whack a few shadows while protecting and pulling your female companion Yorda through vast and still castle ruins. It wasn’t a perfect game by any means; the combat was frankly tedious, Yorda lacked much of an identity outside of pointing at objects of interest/opening doors/getting kidnapped, and at the end of the day, there really wasn’t much in the way of a balanced and developed relationship when the player was calling all the shots, but it was still the start of something beautiful. It wasn’t mechanically complex or esoteric in any fashion, but it was different. It was different, and it felt dangerous.
This write-up is not intended to be a critique of Ico, nor is it meant to imply that games proceeding Team Ico's philosophy of “design by subtraction” have since been inferior. Rather, I bring up Ico in particular, because there seems to be this general perception that minimalism results in a crippling lack of mechanical depth. That is, many seem to believe that discarding and minimizing a game’s various elements results in a dearth of tangible mechanics or imagery to cling onto, and thus appears to result in an empty and vacuous experience with little to justify further replays or deeper dives. To me though, this line of thought fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of addition by subtraction. It was never about creating mechanically deep systems with limitless possibilities like an immersive sim or a sandbox. Rather, the philosophy aimed to remove excess layers that distracted from the game’s “more realistic feeling of presence”, such as removing optional bosses and landmarks in Shadow of the Colossus or reducing enemy types in Ico to just a single design. In fairness, the goal wasn't just to remove extraneous elements that made something feel overly “gamey,” but also to marry mechanics in a way where the invisible layer of intended design never made itself too apparent (i.e. hiding the user interface in Shadow of the Colossus outside of fights). It was not just addition by subtraction; it was also addition through illusion.
To that end, I firmly believe that Journey is the best Team Ico game that Fumito Ueda never directed. Journey’s design philosophy was not necessarily revolutionary for its time, considering its predecessors in the forms of Flower and Ico, nor was its ultimate goal of reaching a final destination via walking/jumping/flying mechanics particularly exemplary. What was exemplary was its level of care and precision in how it implemented said minimalist design philosophy. Every time I play through Journey, I pick up more subtle details through its fusion of audio-visual presentation and gameplay that seemed so clear and intuitive that I had taken their presence for granted. There are the obvious strengths, like how Journey wordlessly conveys your path forward by keeping the shining peak of the mountain visible at all times while outside, or how it uses consistent visual language through cloth creatures and strips to demarcate safe zones where the player can recharge their scarf. But there’s more beneath the surface; what about the game's sneaky introduction to the sand-sliding mechanic from the introductory dune so it’s no longer unfamiliar during the exhilarating and committal descent, or how there’s a section of the underground that’s filled with these scarf jellyfish tinted in blue allowing you to remain in flight that evokes the feeling of being underwater, foreshadowing the next section as a tower ascension where the player must continually breach the surface to “swim” and escape? Sure, everyone knows about how the bitter cold disempowers the player by slowing their movement and lowering the scarf’s energy gauge, but I usually don’t hear about how strong winds can chip away at the scarf’s capacity itself or how it reduces the volume and area of effect of your shouts, making it far more difficult to restore your energy gauge from the growing frostbite.
There’s also the overlooked audio aspect of Journey. Granted, everyone loves to discuss the soundtrack’s thematics, like how the final chord of Journey’s motif never resolves a single time in any track until the end of Apotheosis or for that matter, how all the instruments are never fully present until that final ascent, when the entire orchestra finally comes together as one only to slowly fall away as the player and the world fade away. Yet, the sound design regarding Journey’s implementation of said soundtrack often goes underappreciated. Again, there are plenty of clear strengths that have been widely discussed, such as the punctuated stillness of the desert dunes providing room for the piddle paddle of the player’s footsteps amongst the vast desert winds and eventually swelling into triumphant bursts of adventure. But again, there are little subtleties that speak to the soundtrack’s interactivity, like how the backing drum during the aforementioned underwater section gives the track the impression of being muted and seamlessly drops this filter once the player breaches the surface, or how the player’s shouts are always in the key of the backing track’s scale, meaning that the introduced notes remain within the game’s tonality. It’s these little things that further round out Journey’s experience; the music is so seamlessly woven in that it takes a discerning ear to pick out every specific detail, in such a way where it feels like the soundtrack is organically supplementing every memorable moment of the game.
Of course, it’s not enough to just handle the basics well, even if there’s a master’s touch present to carefully disguise these additions so silently. As I mentioned before, popular works need compelling hooks to draw in an audience, but they also need an element of danger to keep that audience engaged. In the case of Journey, Thatgamecompany tackles this through their stealth multiplayer. This is where Journey easily outclasses its successors and may in fact, even have one-upped Ico. If Ico’s main limitation was a lack of autonomy for any non-player characters, then Journey circumvents this problem entirely by replacing the AI with real players instead. The loose implementation adds a catch: nothing in the game aside from the final completion screen listing your companion(s)’ name(s) ever hints on this, and not once is the player given instructions or suggestions on how to interact with said players. The only obvious mechanical incentive from cooperating with other players is the ability to recharge one another’s scarves via proximity/shouts, and there’s no consequence to merely abandoning random players or quitting in the middle of a session. It’s what makes this multiplayer so compelling; many times you’ll find other players just wandering about by themselves, despawning, or quickly rushing ahead without care towards your presence. There’s no guarantee that they’ll cooperate… which makes that one instance where they do that much more memorable. In this sense, I think Jenova Chen and his team solved two problems at once: the aforementioned challenge of granting outside elements a degree of realism, and his own personal challenge of creating a minimalist environment where players had no incentives to act in bad faith despite never having any major incentives to cooperate either, resulting in seemingly organic interactions.
Perhaps it is cheating to state that this spontaneous element is what gives Journey a step-up over its peers, but I also can’t deny that this same feature is exactly what lends the game its identity. It’s hard to provide drastically different experiences for focused single player games after all; no matter how much Fumito Ueda may have insisted that he was inspired by emergent gameplay mechanics and player autonomy to allow for more diverse experiences, there remains an upper limit upon how far those experiences can unravel. However, Thatgamecompany’s take upon the “single-player odyssey” alongside the game’s cyclical nature and short runtime means that Journey is a far more replayable experience while remaining every bit as compelling as its competition. Even after multiple trips up the summit, I continue to be amazed by the thoughtfulness shown to me by other players. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fallen down the temple from being blown away by the wind, only for my companion to jump down with me, or how many trips through the blizzard were spent slowly trudging together mashing my shout, just like strangers on a cold winter’s night huddling together for warmth while shouting cries of encouragement to take one more step forward. In essence, Journey didn't need an intricate or elaborate story told with fanciful cutscenes and voice-acting; it simply needed to provide a backbone with no other contradicting elements, allowing players to form their own stories by experiencing the game on their own terms.
Journey isn’t mechanically rich or wildly innovative in terms of its scope, but it doesn’t have to be. Rather, it’s a deceptively simple yet meticulous and thoughtfully different approach upon a respected design philosophy, which aimed to further refine said formula by whittling down any elements that detracted from the game’s constructed sense of reality. Similarly, it doesn't feel the need to present a grandiose narrative, instead stripping away any specific contextual layers as to allow players to create memorable experiences with no conflicting moments in-between. I should be sick of this formula after tackling so many misguided copycats, and I can't deny that I was afraid to label yet another old favorite as propped up by nostalgia. Thankfully, my fears have been assuaged. I keep waiting for the day where I’ll finally be content putting this down forever… but that day has yet to come. I was not the first adventurer to embark upon this pilgrimage, nor will I be the last. Maybe I just need to get over my cynicism and accept that there was never anything to be cynical of to begin with. I’m sure more developers will continue to lazily carbon copy one of my favorites until the end of time, but that doesn’t mean the good times have to end.
Thanks for reading, everyone. Happy new year, and here’s to another journey around the sun.
To answer this question, I want you to imagine a world where Journey doesn’t exist. A world where the formula to indie developers meant something more than just mindlessly tilting up on the left joystick to walk towards the next checkpoint while some narrator waxed poetic in the background. Before Journey, before Flower even, the closest ancestor we had was Ico. Fumito Ueda described his game as an execution of “boy meets girl,” and what it boiled down to was a minimalist adventure game with some puzzles cleverly disguised as platforming and timing segments. Occasionally, you also whack a few shadows while protecting and pulling your female companion Yorda through vast and still castle ruins. It wasn’t a perfect game by any means; the combat was frankly tedious, Yorda lacked much of an identity outside of pointing at objects of interest/opening doors/getting kidnapped, and at the end of the day, there really wasn’t much in the way of a balanced and developed relationship when the player was calling all the shots, but it was still the start of something beautiful. It wasn’t mechanically complex or esoteric in any fashion, but it was different. It was different, and it felt dangerous.
This write-up is not intended to be a critique of Ico, nor is it meant to imply that games proceeding Team Ico's philosophy of “design by subtraction” have since been inferior. Rather, I bring up Ico in particular, because there seems to be this general perception that minimalism results in a crippling lack of mechanical depth. That is, many seem to believe that discarding and minimizing a game’s various elements results in a dearth of tangible mechanics or imagery to cling onto, and thus appears to result in an empty and vacuous experience with little to justify further replays or deeper dives. To me though, this line of thought fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of addition by subtraction. It was never about creating mechanically deep systems with limitless possibilities like an immersive sim or a sandbox. Rather, the philosophy aimed to remove excess layers that distracted from the game’s “more realistic feeling of presence”, such as removing optional bosses and landmarks in Shadow of the Colossus or reducing enemy types in Ico to just a single design. In fairness, the goal wasn't just to remove extraneous elements that made something feel overly “gamey,” but also to marry mechanics in a way where the invisible layer of intended design never made itself too apparent (i.e. hiding the user interface in Shadow of the Colossus outside of fights). It was not just addition by subtraction; it was also addition through illusion.
To that end, I firmly believe that Journey is the best Team Ico game that Fumito Ueda never directed. Journey’s design philosophy was not necessarily revolutionary for its time, considering its predecessors in the forms of Flower and Ico, nor was its ultimate goal of reaching a final destination via walking/jumping/flying mechanics particularly exemplary. What was exemplary was its level of care and precision in how it implemented said minimalist design philosophy. Every time I play through Journey, I pick up more subtle details through its fusion of audio-visual presentation and gameplay that seemed so clear and intuitive that I had taken their presence for granted. There are the obvious strengths, like how Journey wordlessly conveys your path forward by keeping the shining peak of the mountain visible at all times while outside, or how it uses consistent visual language through cloth creatures and strips to demarcate safe zones where the player can recharge their scarf. But there’s more beneath the surface; what about the game's sneaky introduction to the sand-sliding mechanic from the introductory dune so it’s no longer unfamiliar during the exhilarating and committal descent, or how there’s a section of the underground that’s filled with these scarf jellyfish tinted in blue allowing you to remain in flight that evokes the feeling of being underwater, foreshadowing the next section as a tower ascension where the player must continually breach the surface to “swim” and escape? Sure, everyone knows about how the bitter cold disempowers the player by slowing their movement and lowering the scarf’s energy gauge, but I usually don’t hear about how strong winds can chip away at the scarf’s capacity itself or how it reduces the volume and area of effect of your shouts, making it far more difficult to restore your energy gauge from the growing frostbite.
There’s also the overlooked audio aspect of Journey. Granted, everyone loves to discuss the soundtrack’s thematics, like how the final chord of Journey’s motif never resolves a single time in any track until the end of Apotheosis or for that matter, how all the instruments are never fully present until that final ascent, when the entire orchestra finally comes together as one only to slowly fall away as the player and the world fade away. Yet, the sound design regarding Journey’s implementation of said soundtrack often goes underappreciated. Again, there are plenty of clear strengths that have been widely discussed, such as the punctuated stillness of the desert dunes providing room for the piddle paddle of the player’s footsteps amongst the vast desert winds and eventually swelling into triumphant bursts of adventure. But again, there are little subtleties that speak to the soundtrack’s interactivity, like how the backing drum during the aforementioned underwater section gives the track the impression of being muted and seamlessly drops this filter once the player breaches the surface, or how the player’s shouts are always in the key of the backing track’s scale, meaning that the introduced notes remain within the game’s tonality. It’s these little things that further round out Journey’s experience; the music is so seamlessly woven in that it takes a discerning ear to pick out every specific detail, in such a way where it feels like the soundtrack is organically supplementing every memorable moment of the game.
Of course, it’s not enough to just handle the basics well, even if there’s a master’s touch present to carefully disguise these additions so silently. As I mentioned before, popular works need compelling hooks to draw in an audience, but they also need an element of danger to keep that audience engaged. In the case of Journey, Thatgamecompany tackles this through their stealth multiplayer. This is where Journey easily outclasses its successors and may in fact, even have one-upped Ico. If Ico’s main limitation was a lack of autonomy for any non-player characters, then Journey circumvents this problem entirely by replacing the AI with real players instead. The loose implementation adds a catch: nothing in the game aside from the final completion screen listing your companion(s)’ name(s) ever hints on this, and not once is the player given instructions or suggestions on how to interact with said players. The only obvious mechanical incentive from cooperating with other players is the ability to recharge one another’s scarves via proximity/shouts, and there’s no consequence to merely abandoning random players or quitting in the middle of a session. It’s what makes this multiplayer so compelling; many times you’ll find other players just wandering about by themselves, despawning, or quickly rushing ahead without care towards your presence. There’s no guarantee that they’ll cooperate… which makes that one instance where they do that much more memorable. In this sense, I think Jenova Chen and his team solved two problems at once: the aforementioned challenge of granting outside elements a degree of realism, and his own personal challenge of creating a minimalist environment where players had no incentives to act in bad faith despite never having any major incentives to cooperate either, resulting in seemingly organic interactions.
Perhaps it is cheating to state that this spontaneous element is what gives Journey a step-up over its peers, but I also can’t deny that this same feature is exactly what lends the game its identity. It’s hard to provide drastically different experiences for focused single player games after all; no matter how much Fumito Ueda may have insisted that he was inspired by emergent gameplay mechanics and player autonomy to allow for more diverse experiences, there remains an upper limit upon how far those experiences can unravel. However, Thatgamecompany’s take upon the “single-player odyssey” alongside the game’s cyclical nature and short runtime means that Journey is a far more replayable experience while remaining every bit as compelling as its competition. Even after multiple trips up the summit, I continue to be amazed by the thoughtfulness shown to me by other players. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fallen down the temple from being blown away by the wind, only for my companion to jump down with me, or how many trips through the blizzard were spent slowly trudging together mashing my shout, just like strangers on a cold winter’s night huddling together for warmth while shouting cries of encouragement to take one more step forward. In essence, Journey didn't need an intricate or elaborate story told with fanciful cutscenes and voice-acting; it simply needed to provide a backbone with no other contradicting elements, allowing players to form their own stories by experiencing the game on their own terms.
Journey isn’t mechanically rich or wildly innovative in terms of its scope, but it doesn’t have to be. Rather, it’s a deceptively simple yet meticulous and thoughtfully different approach upon a respected design philosophy, which aimed to further refine said formula by whittling down any elements that detracted from the game’s constructed sense of reality. Similarly, it doesn't feel the need to present a grandiose narrative, instead stripping away any specific contextual layers as to allow players to create memorable experiences with no conflicting moments in-between. I should be sick of this formula after tackling so many misguided copycats, and I can't deny that I was afraid to label yet another old favorite as propped up by nostalgia. Thankfully, my fears have been assuaged. I keep waiting for the day where I’ll finally be content putting this down forever… but that day has yet to come. I was not the first adventurer to embark upon this pilgrimage, nor will I be the last. Maybe I just need to get over my cynicism and accept that there was never anything to be cynical of to begin with. I’m sure more developers will continue to lazily carbon copy one of my favorites until the end of time, but that doesn’t mean the good times have to end.
Thanks for reading, everyone. Happy new year, and here’s to another journey around the sun.
I could spend my time here talking about the many misgivings I have with the storytelling, but it really does not matter, cause no matter what criticism I had about it’s “redundancy” or how “amateur” it is, I would still always find myself at the sidelines cheering them on. Hoping and praying that these two characters who needed each other more than anyone else would be able to communicate their feelings to one another. A desire to see these two find a speck of happiness, a moment of catharsis for all the frustration I felt in watching them awkwardly try to navigate their blossoming emotions in spite of their trauma and responsibilities.
You could call this ever present desire of mine my weakness, and it’s this weakness that Echo of Starsong exploits to hurt me in ways fiction never has before.
I’ve spent multiple hours just constantly replaying the final moments over and over in my head, looking for a silver lining, a recognition that my catharsis wasn’t stolen for nothing, but there’s no light at the end of this tunnel, just a field of regrets.
You could call this ever present desire of mine my weakness, and it’s this weakness that Echo of Starsong exploits to hurt me in ways fiction never has before.
I’ve spent multiple hours just constantly replaying the final moments over and over in my head, looking for a silver lining, a recognition that my catharsis wasn’t stolen for nothing, but there’s no light at the end of this tunnel, just a field of regrets.
Pikmin 3
2013
Definition of a fun, cozy game. It balances the day mechanic so well - I never feel stressed out, yet am able to utilize my time well and given enough leeway for error. The Pikmin are cute as hell and the combat/gameplay works well. One of the highlights of the WIIU era
Final Fantasy VII
1997
''Everyone knew that. I'm...Cloud. The master of my own illusionary world. But I can't remain trapped in an illusion anymore... I'm going to live my life without pretending''
FF7 was a unique experience, one that I'm still trying to wrap my head around & my thoughts & feelings on it are still scattered throughout, disconnected & lost in the endless cosmos of my mind, but maybe it's because of that disjointed state of mind that I connected with Cloud's identity crisis on such a sacred level. It almost felt eerie but to put it into words, the part of Cloud that I saw myself in the most was his inability to face the truth in his identity, strive to discover who he is, & was comfortable with indulging in the idea that he is someone he isn't at all to escape his conflicts & abandoned the effort to uncover the truth since it maybe too painful. The idea that maybe if I was someone else, maybe if I started anew as an entirely different person who's less pathetic and less weaker with more to offer & was strong enough to help others by any means, I'd get the love and the warmth of acceptance by everyone that I yearn for, and I wouldn't feel so alien & disconnected. Such a faulty, twisted desire has been immortalized in my mind, and living in an environment where I'm always put down to praise someone else only strengthened it more. But it's exactly because of that that I was able to wholeheartedly relate to FF7's usage of the concept of memories as a backdrop for Cloud's character conclusion. Memories are the proof that we exist in both the real world and in people's eyes. No matter how fiercely we struggle to believe that our existence isn't worthless, they are the proof that we existed somewhere, & have impacted someone in someway. But it's exactly because of that that we need connections with others & loved ones to make memories with. It's a simple message, but the idea that as long as there are people with you, who have fond memories of you and vice versa, you'll always be able to exist & achieve self discovery, strikes a deep chord in my soul since I always dread the truth of my identity and how much it can crush me. It's why Cloud inspires me so much, because if someone who had a large portion of his life be artificially made & live his life as a fake puppet for so long, can achieve solace and make fond memories with people he loves and is loved by after a cruel journey of self discovery, then maybe I can find something fond & genuine too
FF7 was a unique experience, one that I'm still trying to wrap my head around & my thoughts & feelings on it are still scattered throughout, disconnected & lost in the endless cosmos of my mind, but maybe it's because of that disjointed state of mind that I connected with Cloud's identity crisis on such a sacred level. It almost felt eerie but to put it into words, the part of Cloud that I saw myself in the most was his inability to face the truth in his identity, strive to discover who he is, & was comfortable with indulging in the idea that he is someone he isn't at all to escape his conflicts & abandoned the effort to uncover the truth since it maybe too painful. The idea that maybe if I was someone else, maybe if I started anew as an entirely different person who's less pathetic and less weaker with more to offer & was strong enough to help others by any means, I'd get the love and the warmth of acceptance by everyone that I yearn for, and I wouldn't feel so alien & disconnected. Such a faulty, twisted desire has been immortalized in my mind, and living in an environment where I'm always put down to praise someone else only strengthened it more. But it's exactly because of that that I was able to wholeheartedly relate to FF7's usage of the concept of memories as a backdrop for Cloud's character conclusion. Memories are the proof that we exist in both the real world and in people's eyes. No matter how fiercely we struggle to believe that our existence isn't worthless, they are the proof that we existed somewhere, & have impacted someone in someway. But it's exactly because of that that we need connections with others & loved ones to make memories with. It's a simple message, but the idea that as long as there are people with you, who have fond memories of you and vice versa, you'll always be able to exist & achieve self discovery, strikes a deep chord in my soul since I always dread the truth of my identity and how much it can crush me. It's why Cloud inspires me so much, because if someone who had a large portion of his life be artificially made & live his life as a fake puppet for so long, can achieve solace and make fond memories with people he loves and is loved by after a cruel journey of self discovery, then maybe I can find something fond & genuine too
The Evil Within
2014
There's a lot I love and a lot I really couldn't stand about this game but I kept playing till the end and played it all night to finish so I can hardly say I regret playing it
Biggest takeaway from it is that I'm real excited to play the DLCs and 2 to see how they polish this formula
Biggest takeaway from it is that I'm real excited to play the DLCs and 2 to see how they polish this formula
Fate/Hollow Ataraxia
2014
This review contains spoilers
I love Fate/Stay Night for being a very active story. In every route, there is always a fight around pushing the corner pushing the story forward, and they’re very cool to read, yes—but they’re also where the characters are at their best when it comes to expressing their emotions. When characters like Saber and Gilgamesh, Shirou and Archer, and Rin and Sakura clash, there is a lot of pent-up energy, emotion, and history that comes out in full force. It makes for a very powerful story full of cathartic bursts of character drama.
Fate/Hollow Ataraxia brings all that to a halt. Everything and everyone is static.
Seeing the characters of FSN live out happy, daily SoL activities is really fun. I love this cast and I already loved the downtime they got in the original VN, so seeing everyone at peace and developing through silly little skits is fantastic. I wanted to see all these characters happy, and that’s what the VN gives you.
But there’s a sense of wrongness about it all.
Shirou feels it. Certain servants who should be very dead feel it. I feel it as a reader. Even as a story that doesn’t try to tie itself to any “canon” FSN route, you know that not everyone here is supposed to be happy. It’s what they deserve, but the trauma of the Fifth Holy Grail War is not something that’s going away. Nor are the problems that the VN’s new protagonist, Bazett, is facing.
Everyone is living without anything changing. For Shirou and friends, that makes life fun, if strange. For Bazett, there’s no worse fate. She’s someone who’s never been able to change herself, but as long as she doesn’t do anything too new or scary, things won’t get worse for her. But they won’t get better, either. That’s the one, simple point that Hollow Ataraxia drives home from beginning to end. Things need to end, because you won’t grow or change if they stay the same forever. You have to let things go in order to find new ways to learn about yourself.
Expressed through Bazett and her partner Avenger, this is a perfectly succinct message delivered in a very cathartic finale, but it’s just as much a meta-story for fans of the FSN cast. It’s fun to see what these characters would be like if they’re at their happiest. It makes you feel good to see them discuss the memories of the best moments of FSN. But they’re characters whose stories are complete. It’s okay to keep appreciating them and your memories of them, but bit by bit you have to let them just exist as they are. There won’t be an infinite amount of new things to do with them, and that’s okay. That’s life. It’s the same way your relationships with friends don’t always stay the same, or why you start doing new things when life as it is gets stale. It’s something I’ve internalized a lot in the past few years as once-familiar things changed with the pandemic and going away to college, and I think it’s wonderfully represented here. It’s fun to have memories, and it’s fun to keep doing new things, and those things should exist together in harmony.
Fate/Hollow Ataraxia brings all that to a halt. Everything and everyone is static.
Seeing the characters of FSN live out happy, daily SoL activities is really fun. I love this cast and I already loved the downtime they got in the original VN, so seeing everyone at peace and developing through silly little skits is fantastic. I wanted to see all these characters happy, and that’s what the VN gives you.
But there’s a sense of wrongness about it all.
Shirou feels it. Certain servants who should be very dead feel it. I feel it as a reader. Even as a story that doesn’t try to tie itself to any “canon” FSN route, you know that not everyone here is supposed to be happy. It’s what they deserve, but the trauma of the Fifth Holy Grail War is not something that’s going away. Nor are the problems that the VN’s new protagonist, Bazett, is facing.
Everyone is living without anything changing. For Shirou and friends, that makes life fun, if strange. For Bazett, there’s no worse fate. She’s someone who’s never been able to change herself, but as long as she doesn’t do anything too new or scary, things won’t get worse for her. But they won’t get better, either. That’s the one, simple point that Hollow Ataraxia drives home from beginning to end. Things need to end, because you won’t grow or change if they stay the same forever. You have to let things go in order to find new ways to learn about yourself.
Expressed through Bazett and her partner Avenger, this is a perfectly succinct message delivered in a very cathartic finale, but it’s just as much a meta-story for fans of the FSN cast. It’s fun to see what these characters would be like if they’re at their happiest. It makes you feel good to see them discuss the memories of the best moments of FSN. But they’re characters whose stories are complete. It’s okay to keep appreciating them and your memories of them, but bit by bit you have to let them just exist as they are. There won’t be an infinite amount of new things to do with them, and that’s okay. That’s life. It’s the same way your relationships with friends don’t always stay the same, or why you start doing new things when life as it is gets stale. It’s something I’ve internalized a lot in the past few years as once-familiar things changed with the pandemic and going away to college, and I think it’s wonderfully represented here. It’s fun to have memories, and it’s fun to keep doing new things, and those things should exist together in harmony.
Elden Ring
2022
With a rich and vibrant world with something to do everywhere you go, Elden Ring's open world is the best gaming has to offer. The scale of the overworld itself is mindblowing and finding out about the underworld that's seemingly just as large blew my mind even more. The world-building through storytelling makes the game's world feel extremely real and alive. There are 0 bad areas in this game. This game features what I would consider a strong lineup of high quality and fun bosses. The Godskin Duo and the Elden Beast were the only fights I disliked but everything else was peak. I also did not mind the few reoccurring bosses at all. The combat system is peak action RPG combat. Even after beating the game I still feel like I haven't even scratched the surface of this game's combat.
I really appreciate how hands-off this game was with the storytelling. I love how it just drops you into the world with no tutorial and nearly no directions. I already feel kinda nostalgic for the beginning of the game when I was just trying to get out of limgrave. There weren't many cutscenes to mess with the immersion. Every cutscene came at a completely appropriate and relevant time.
This game is without a doubt a masterpiece. I will never forget my first playthrough experience. I look forward to continuing to explore the world of Elden Ring. This is a game I would recommend it to anyone.
I really appreciate how hands-off this game was with the storytelling. I love how it just drops you into the world with no tutorial and nearly no directions. I already feel kinda nostalgic for the beginning of the game when I was just trying to get out of limgrave. There weren't many cutscenes to mess with the immersion. Every cutscene came at a completely appropriate and relevant time.
This game is without a doubt a masterpiece. I will never forget my first playthrough experience. I look forward to continuing to explore the world of Elden Ring. This is a game I would recommend it to anyone.
Portal
2007
Portal is the definition of a gaming classic. I impulse started this as soon as I got my steam deck and I couldn’t put it down. It shocked me how great this game was. The puzzles were extremely fun and the game was unexpectedly charming/funny. Wish it was longer but it sounds like the sequel solves that issue. Would recommend this game to everyone
if Kaine has million number of fans i am one of them. if Kaine has ten fans i am one of them. if Kaine has no fans. that means i am no more on the earth. if world against Kaine, i am against the world. i love Kaine till my last breath... die hard fan of Kaine.
Elden Ring
2022
Usually when I complete a game I let my thoughts sit for a bit in order to come to a full, unbiased conclusion. But for Elden Ring, my thoughts have been concrete since the second I entered the Altus Plateau - so I can safely say that that this is not only the best souls game I’ve ever played, but the best game I’ve ever played period.
After 95 hours, I became the Elden Lord and concluded the best gaming journey I have ever been through. Sure I still have a few bosses to go and DLC (that’ll only reaffirm the top 1 spot) to look forward to, but the experience from the start of the game all the way to the credits will never be matched.
Elden Ring feels like a culmination of every idea and mechanic put into the Souls series from what I’ve seen so far - topped off with the freedom and exploration of Breath of The Wild. All of this is able to create the best, most alive, and most realistic world in gaming. Elden Rings world is so vibrant and full of life; there is never an empty area or place that feels lacking from the rest. Even the smallest areas will be full of things to do, mini dungeons to complete, and bosses to fight. So much care and effort was put into this world and it really shows when compared to most of the lackluster AAA open world games that are releasing today. It’s a breath of fresh air, one I haven’t gotten since BOTW - it feels really nice to play an open world game to completion without ever feeling tired of repetitive side objectives and exploration that feels auto generated. The world is easily the highlight, but I can’t praise it without mentioning the story and lore written by the humble George R. R Martin. I’m not gonna act like I fully understand the story, but what I do know and gathering from the stuff I don’t even understand, it’s pretty easy to say that the world building here is immaculate and really furthers my take that this is the best world in gaming - and possibly ever. Side quests do not feel like side quests; optional activities that feel restrained and separate from the main story, but instead feel like branches of a much larger story and path. So many memorable characters brought to fruition with stellar voice performances really brings these quests home.
I’ve said my praises about the world and story which are already enough to showcase my love for the game, but I can’t leave out the gameplay. I’ve only beaten Sekiro and Dark Souls 3 + played a bit of Bloodborne, Dark Souls 1, and Demon Souls so I think I have quite the understanding of how the souls series functions from a gameplay standpoint. And because of this understanding, I can gather that Elden Ring is the best rendition of the Souls formula yet. The combat is so unique, so creative, and filled to the brim with possibilities when it comes to builds and how you tackle the game. The difficulty plays a big role in this as well - with Elden Ring being the hardest game I have ever beaten. It’s challenging but fair, and sometimes a little tedious but not very often, so the overall difficulty is super consistent and fun. There were so many bosses in the game that took me what felt like ages, but even then I had a blast learning their patterns and beating them (even if I pussied out a lot and used summons). The sense of accomplishment that comes from the bosses is really something that drives the entire series home for me - it is what makes the games so fun yet in the end is such a small piece of this vast series.
Elden Ring is nothing short of a masterpiece - it is everything you could ever ask for in a game and more. It will easily go down as one of gamings greats and I cannot fathom how far the inevitable DLC will push this agenda.
After 95 hours, I became the Elden Lord and concluded the best gaming journey I have ever been through. Sure I still have a few bosses to go and DLC (that’ll only reaffirm the top 1 spot) to look forward to, but the experience from the start of the game all the way to the credits will never be matched.
Elden Ring feels like a culmination of every idea and mechanic put into the Souls series from what I’ve seen so far - topped off with the freedom and exploration of Breath of The Wild. All of this is able to create the best, most alive, and most realistic world in gaming. Elden Rings world is so vibrant and full of life; there is never an empty area or place that feels lacking from the rest. Even the smallest areas will be full of things to do, mini dungeons to complete, and bosses to fight. So much care and effort was put into this world and it really shows when compared to most of the lackluster AAA open world games that are releasing today. It’s a breath of fresh air, one I haven’t gotten since BOTW - it feels really nice to play an open world game to completion without ever feeling tired of repetitive side objectives and exploration that feels auto generated. The world is easily the highlight, but I can’t praise it without mentioning the story and lore written by the humble George R. R Martin. I’m not gonna act like I fully understand the story, but what I do know and gathering from the stuff I don’t even understand, it’s pretty easy to say that the world building here is immaculate and really furthers my take that this is the best world in gaming - and possibly ever. Side quests do not feel like side quests; optional activities that feel restrained and separate from the main story, but instead feel like branches of a much larger story and path. So many memorable characters brought to fruition with stellar voice performances really brings these quests home.
I’ve said my praises about the world and story which are already enough to showcase my love for the game, but I can’t leave out the gameplay. I’ve only beaten Sekiro and Dark Souls 3 + played a bit of Bloodborne, Dark Souls 1, and Demon Souls so I think I have quite the understanding of how the souls series functions from a gameplay standpoint. And because of this understanding, I can gather that Elden Ring is the best rendition of the Souls formula yet. The combat is so unique, so creative, and filled to the brim with possibilities when it comes to builds and how you tackle the game. The difficulty plays a big role in this as well - with Elden Ring being the hardest game I have ever beaten. It’s challenging but fair, and sometimes a little tedious but not very often, so the overall difficulty is super consistent and fun. There were so many bosses in the game that took me what felt like ages, but even then I had a blast learning their patterns and beating them (even if I pussied out a lot and used summons). The sense of accomplishment that comes from the bosses is really something that drives the entire series home for me - it is what makes the games so fun yet in the end is such a small piece of this vast series.
Elden Ring is nothing short of a masterpiece - it is everything you could ever ask for in a game and more. It will easily go down as one of gamings greats and I cannot fathom how far the inevitable DLC will push this agenda.