I was left with way more complicated feelings on this thing than I was expecting. It's a fun game to play, with a tweaked battle system taken far past the clumsy feel of the PSP version and a nice, compact structure that makes it a super easy game to open up when you decide you got some time to kill. Those side-missions rock and they have the same sort of goofy yakuza-adjacent tone that Final Fantasy VII Remake happens to strike as well, probably mostly due to this version's HD facelift.

The story and presentation and just... everything to do with that though, that's a different story. Zack Fair is a hilariously stupid dickhead and I like him a lot for that but I don't necessarily love him. The returning cast is kind of a mixed bag with Cloud and Sephiroth's parts being great and Aerith... well, I'll circle back to that. The new additions to the cast are genuinely baffling. Just the most bizarre personalities that never crack past a surface reading, given absolutely ridiculous importance in the story. It's really stupid in both the good and the bad way.

A lot of the character relationships don't really hold together very well. Angeal is too weird and hilarious to take seriously, Genesis basically never makes sense at all, and Aerith's friendship/hamfisted will they won't they with Zack swings back and forth between being kinda cute and incredibly forced. That forced feeling does kinda start to work on me though, as I started to read Aerith as less someone in puppy love and more as someone being a friend that everyone in her immediate circle just assumes needs to be paired up with the guy that fell through her ceiling. It's goofy but when I look at the character that way it starts to sit better with me.

Zack starts the game as a boot boy through and through, totally bought into the culture of war and capital that Shinra peddles off to its working class. He admires literal psychopaths and broken weirdos and starts off the game committing war crimes in Wutai under the vague goal of being a hero. This literally always comes off as weird and even if the game's creators dont necessarily line up with that reading, this angle keeps being supported by the game's events... so I think deep inside there really was an intent to make a sort of weird ironic hero story like this. The way everyone talks past each other. Zack barely comprehends whats going on in the first half and then suddenly his idol dies and boom, he's broken too and thus a hero to the lower ranking soldiers.

He makes friends with Cloud, in which case suddenly the dialogue is really well acted and endearing. In Nibelheim the game just ascends to a new level where the bizarre inclusions of the new characters start to bring a newfound psychosis into focus for the characters. The world is being ruined by a corporation, it's breaking all the "heroes" and now they're sick and dying with nowhere to go, and this whole time those broken people they admired continue to be a north star. It's actually unsettling stuff as the game crawls to its conclusion, a funeral rite that starts well before the heart stops beating. Zack asks if you think he became a hero. The game fucking ends! It's kind of fucking amazing, man I dunno!

This is one of the messiest, most uneven games I've played in a long time but I'll be god damned if it gets dismissed as something fans of FF7 should skip over. More people gotta learn that Final Fantasy Is Real Good, Even When It Isn't. This is a series that has been steadfast in staying interesting no matter what, and that includes this fuckin weird thing. This failed little J-Drama of a video game. Never before have I seen a game go from laugh-a-minute kusoge to actual compelling drama before, at least not on this level. I know I'm giving the game and its creators a lot of credit here but dammit this game made me feel stuff. Hats off.

once, we all lived inside the bottle. but without us noticing, without us hearing, little by little, crack by crack, the bottle broke. and all worlds became one world. the inside became the outside.

--#006: PLASTIC --

playing this game and reminding myself that it came out in 2005 and not in 2018 is wildly difficult because this feels like a game so perfectly aligned with the current Moment that it's absolutely surreal that it was originally beamed to Japanese flip phones a decade before we heard the word "hypernormalisation".

if the original Silver Case explored the anxieties and changing face of a world slowly becoming digitized, then The 25th Ward is a true sequel, exploring a world where there is no difference, no boundary, between the digital world and the physical world, between the person we present and the person we are, and whether it even matters enough to make a distinction. tokio plugging his eye into a computer through an enormous analog cable is one of the most evocative images of the game, but it goes so far beyond that.

in the 25th ward, people have become pieces of data moving through a system filtered out by antivirus software made of the opinions and thoughts the system breeds them to have. the cast of the 25th Ward are far less distinct than the original's more eclectic cast, a deliberate contrast made clear by the points at which the original cast show up, and that more muted palette for these people is the result of the planning of this city turning each person within it into a piece of a wider machine, circuits in a system, receivers for the Word of Kamui.

work. consume. report suspicious activity. die. and when the experiment has run its course, they switch it all off. and the 25th ward crumbles into the sea. planned obsolescence. make sure to buy the Next Ward.

that machine takes the shape of the game itself. The 25th Ward is positioned as part of the "kill the past" universe, but I honestly believe that any attempt to view it as part of some wider universe where the characters exist in any way other than how we interact with them here will fail to derive anything meaningful from that read. when The Interface Itself is a character that the people inside these windows framed inside abstract void spaces can interact with and respond to, you have to abandon any attempt to apply verisimilitude as we traditionally understand it in order to survive. the style is the substance. everything is real. everything is virtual. everything is the same, all at once. is there a difference? does it matter?

as people become part of this machine, their selves become digital, and spread outwards, into and throughout the net. people become fictional characters. Kamui Uehara manifesting in the Matchmaker chapters in the form of Tsuki, a generic Ex-Yakuza man with a generic Dark And Troubled Past, navigating around his partner slolely being transformed into another Kamui by the Powers That Be.

people become other selves. Placebo has been cited as the highlight of the game by numerous people and while I don't know if I'd entirely agree, I can't deny the tremendous impact the story contained within had on me. Milu's existence hit hard for me, a fragmented individual spread across multiple real and unreal versions of herself each one shaped by the perceptions of others beyond the control of the original/format Milu, a wholly digital existence that is still tethered to a weak, dying, incorrect body that causes her pain on many levels.

even before The Unprecedented Times shifted even more of it onto digital spaces, I lived a life that I would have struggled to call my own outside of the internet. not just because I've never felt truly safe enough in the world outside my window to express myself fully within it, but also because the explorations of my self and my gender take up fragmented, distinct, and often contradictory forms that I try not to let intersect for fear of the friction that their ill-fitting will create. which of these forms is the real me? what makes the me that types these words with physical hands more real than the me created when the words are read? am i the name the structures of my 25th ward place on me, or am I the name I choose and have people online say? i don't feel like me outside. i don't feel like me when I look in the mirror. i feel like me when draping myself in images, when hiding myself behind makeup and voice training and cameras and filters. i feel more like me prancing around as a gay catboy in an online game than when I go out to buy milk. am I ignoring reality, or is this just another part of it?

i don't know. maybe there is a true me, out there, with a true name and a true face. maybe the real me is out there somewhere. or maybe this is all the real me, and every single contradiction and lie and false assumption is truth.

all i know for sure is that I believe these words I say, these things I feel, and these people i know are real.

i choose to believe in the net. what else is there to believe in?

this is an uneven work. despite being better paced than most VNs and certainly featuring less mandatory timewasting than its predecessor, the pacing still feels drawn out past the point of purposefulness. much like this review, it often feels...meandering.

i also feel compelled to bring up a part of the game that has gone largely unremarked upon on this site: Correctness 3, boys don't cry, which is where the game goes too far in my opinion and plays with the sensitive subject of rape in a way that feels extremely ill-advised, crass, and exploitative. when criticism of content in such a way is brought up in critical spaces like this there is a tendency by some to dismiss it out of hand as being unable to handle sensitive content and wishing everything to be sanitized of such frictions, so let me clarify that I do not think games should never discuss rape and I don't inherently want to avoid a game where it is discussed and to underline that point i want to stress that i think suda has been better about this subject in other works, but in this instance, he fucked up. this bit isn't bad because it's a rape scene, it's bad because it is a badly done scene. the vibes are rancid in that chapter, folks.

despite that, however, and other minor complaints, it's hard not to be blown away by the 25th ward. it's such a thematically dense and stylish work, with so much to say and so many ways to say it. if Umurangi is the macro experience of life today, then The 25th Ward is the micro, the day to day life of living inside and outside a screen at the same time, of being a different person to different people, of existing in a thousand spaces at once and not really knowing who I am in any of them.

sorry about this review. it's a bit of a mess. i'm a bit of a mess, after finishing this game. but it's ok. it's all right. I can fix it.

I just need 50,000 yen.

KAMUI UEHARA WILL
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KILL THE PAST
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KILL THE LIFE
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JOIN HOLOLIVE

TO BE CONTINUED -- ?